L.A. Women: Didion, Eve, and Me
L.A. Women: Didion, Eve, and Me
The summation to my Bachelor’s Degree, about thirty six pages of independent work and research looks at how Joan Didion and Eve Babitz captured a city with their words. Their observations led me to then write four original essays cataloging the Los Angeles I have come to experience.
L.A. Women: Didion, Eve, and Me
Joan Taught me how to understand L.A. & Eve taught me how to love it
Introduction: Staking the Claim
“I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again.” - Joan Didion
“I’ve been in love with people and ideas in several cities and learned that the lovers I’ve loved and the ideas I’ve embraced depended on where I was, how cold it was and what I had to do to be able to stand it. It’s very easy to stand L.A… I love L.A.”- Eve Babitz
I suppose we find ourselves attracted to things that in some sense we feel a claim to. The attraction towards something marked by an ineffable personal resonance that is between art and spectator, song and listener, novel and reader–or more correctly author and reader. Eve Babitz gets it, “Sometimes, though you are not connected with a song or person, they assume an importance which is almost impossible to tell anyone else”(126, Babitz). Maybe I am stubborn and believe the things I get pulled towards were made for me and accordingly then belong to me in some capacity. Something along the lines of when Joan Didion wrote, “A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image.” (146, Didion) What I am attempting to explain is the way I found myself relating to two women I never met: Joan Didion and Eve Babitz. Whose words I came across perhaps at the right age, but wrong era. The names, faces, voices, and women belonging to a certain Los Angeles; the California Dreamin’ Los Angeles where you can be safe and warm and all's well that ends well. Didion and Eve told me about a place in a way I am forever indebted to both.
Their voices spoke to me in different tones, yet similar forms, the essay. Joan Didion told me things straight up and with a twist. I learned to love lane merging on freeways and being an outsider when it came to art eccentrics. Didion helped me understand the idiosyncrasies that otherwise would have made me think of L.A. as the dreadful wasteland those East Coast counterparts imagine it as.
As for Eve Babitz, her words acted as the pink sunsets and jacaranda blossoms, often celebrating everything that makes L.A. seem like a “wasteland.” Her stories and secrets painted the city as this place that is fantastic for those that chose to love it. And loving Los Angeles is a gift you give yourself if you choose to buy it.
Both women were in a city at the same time. Both of whom crossed paths, but I found myself overlapping with them in my own way almost fifty years later. Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, both shared with me stories that have made my time in Los Angeles follow a narrative path. It is worthwhile. Yet, Babitz reminded me, “You can’t write a story about L.A. that doesn’t turn around in the middle and get lost”(3, Babitz). So here are as follows my own stories about Los Angeles, which have taken direction from the two women who showed me how to write about Los Angeles in the first place.
Overlaps, Coincidence, and Synchronicity
Eve Babitz passed away at the age of 78 on December 17th, 2021. A week later Joan Didion passed at the age of 87 on December 23rd, 2021. I could not help but trip over the fact they left within a week of each other, on opposite coasts, and a swap of a number order: seven and eight. As I began this project I found myself drawn to each writer with this inexplicable relation to their work. My adoration of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz’s writing is not so simple. I love their words, but there were so many other things at play. It was Los Angeles, an era, and how their voices were saying it.
There have been things that have pulled me towards Joan and Eve. I don’t know if it is because of coincidence or synchronicity or just a lucky fluke. It makes sense in the way I was telling my father about Eve’s essay “The Art of Balance.” She was reporting on what it was like to see the surf film premier Five Summer Stories. My father was there. So on March 24th nineteen seventy something at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium Eve Babitz and my father, Al Lavayen, watched the same movie. Another point to brag about is that I myself have been responsible for an album cover. Enough that my name is credited on the back. In true Eve fashion it was because of a boy, yet the band is no Buffalo Springfield. Eve immersed herself into Los Angeles’ art and music and fun times. All of which I am attempting to arrive at within due time. Eve did it in the 1970s, so I can now. Except I do tend to act like a square sometimes and enjoy a drive on the freeway.
Where Eve and I drift apart, Joan Didion fills the gaps. I am Californian, so is Joan. Both of us at one point at another came to the city of angels. I would not care to ‘get’ Los Angeles if it was not for Joan deciphering the idiosyncrasies. I became so hypnotized by how she wrote about the city. It was beautiful and harsh. And it was sentence by sentence. My connection to Joan is not that tangible; it is a feeling that if I say loud enough nobody can refute it. I was marooned on the North Shore of Oahu when a global pandemic was born. Joan visited Oahu quite a bit, enough to write about it. There is something about being so far away in what feels like its own microcosm and thinking about places you know so well. I have said it once and will say it until I forget to, but Joan Didion is the key to my understanding of Los Angeles.
When I think of my senior Capstone as my final fanfare to undergraduate years, it becomes so sentimental. This is a project of my own making and I cannot think that I will be done with this in fifteen weeks. It was a whole process that led me here. Assigned reading inspired what I read outside the confines of a syllabus. I figured out that writing and reading great writing is personal, rich, and does not need to be so serious all the time. Little noticeables are worth writing down. Everything is a part of the creative process. Even if the party was a bust you are still going to tell someone. Where I drift away from Joan Didion, Eve Babitz guides the way and vice versa. Regardless of coincidence, I will choose to believe I was supposed to read both Joan and Eve’s writing and do something about it.
On Joan Didion
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live…We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
-Joan Didion, The White Album (11, Didion)
In my copy of Play It As It Lays I wrote on the inside cover page where I was when I finished it: At a hair salon in Laguna Beach. Once I closed the novel for the last time, I opened Slouching Towards Bethlehem for the first time. I said my first goodbye to Slouching sometime in late May. I was in the Yosemite Valley and comprehended what the native daughter, Didion, had to say about the true California. Leaving granite mountain faces for the familiar Pacific by way of the Southbound HWY-99 was different from the northbound lane perspective. Bakersfield was no longer the place Buck Owens sang about. I was moving at a seventy mile an hour pace through an agricultural capital. Grapes, almonds, and citrus. All Californian, but even more so now. It was a hot day in my apartment when I opened The White Album. It was an even hotter one when I finished it, getting sunburned in Malibu over hearing aloof parents discuss “re-designing a new waterfall kitchen island.” Didion made periods out of the question marks I had. She did so one piece at a time. Her essays and articles told me how a city operates and how those within the landscape move throughout it. Thus, Joan Didion made a comfortable place for me in Los Angeles. I found myself tripping over Freeways, Music People, and Malibu, but Didion had the explanation for it all. It was in her essay collections “The White Album” and “Los Angeles Notebook” that she gave me the figurative key to the city.
My social life in Los Angeles has revolved around the art and music world. Dive bars with a sad stage, but the best company. Didion reassured me, “The oral history of Los Angeles is written in piano bars”(489, Didion). Every bar or venue I learned operates according to a secret language of success. One place may deem a band as a bunch of sellouts, another place means that the band are nobodies(in the fashionable sense). Time spent with or around Music People is “confusing, and required a more fluid and ultimately a more passive approach than I ever acquired”(26, Didion). Didion explains how this social sect within Los Angeles moves in the third and fourth sections of her essay “The White Album.” Whether her observations of The Doors in a recording studio or her recounting of socializing with “music people”, Didion depicted these artists as a free flowing and odd population. Didion gave me the secret to the people in the orbit around music. Doors open promptly, but no band with self-respect is ontime to their set.
In “The White Album” Didion’s position as a proper journalist is obvious. She studied what was presented in front of her, yet inserted herself within the subject. She employs the New Journalism style of writing. The genre that was ushered in by other writers of the 1960s and 1970s, like Tom Wolfe and Truman Capote. The kind of writing that comes out of this genre is vivid. Yet, the debate over this style was the question of truth. Is it all that objective? In response New Journalists argue, “objectivity does not guarantee truth and that so-called “objective” stories can be more misleading than stories told from a clearly presented personal point of view.”(2013, Fakazis). That personal view available in Joan Didion’s “The White Album” is what draws me in. It feels like I too am sitting on the floor of the recording studio waiting for Jim Morrison to show up. The affinity towards this piece I think could be because I agree with Didion’s depiction. I would be thinking the same things. Her observations are relatable and ultimately personal. In a way, is New Journalism the most objective kind of writing. Admitting to the reader that the writer is right there in the thick of their subject.
Another prime example of Didion’s New Journalism writing is in her essay “Los Angeles Notebook.” Similar to “The White Album”, this piece is divided into sections. Didion focuses on the weather of Los Angeles and how it tends to cast a spell on Angelenos. Didion opens the piece:
“There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the Northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sandstorms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to the flash point” (484, Didion)
This excerpt shows Didion carefully placing herself in Los Angeles. It brings up an important piece of Los Angeles lore; the power of the Santa Ana winds. Didion describes how it feels to her, and references a reputable source, Raymond Chandler. I thought I knew knew the Santa Anas, but never really experienced them until I came to Los Angeles. Something always seems to come undone because of the winds. They are another part of the city’s idiosyncrasies that Didion defines.
Joan Didion was the first writer who helped me realize. I realized I can write the way I think about noticeables. As did she. She knew how to include lines that were perfectly deadpan, but explained how I, the reader, always felt, “I have always wanted a swimming pool, and never had one”(63, Didion). Her words took me to the time I feel robbed of, “We put ‘Lay Lady Lay’ on the record player, and ‘Suzanne.’ We went down to Melrose Avenue to see the Flying Burritos”(41, Didion). Didion made me realize I am Californian and that being so is my frame of reference. Being from California and residing in Los Angeles is not exactly conducive. I think Didion would concur. Los Angeles is everything at once. Getting caught in traffic makes missing the right exit too easy. Didion makes the madness explainable. I had trouble navigating myself as a woman in Los Angeles, but Didion gave the roadmap. Freeways are a pathway, one that is exhilarating, fast paced, and grants a kind of freedom. The artist types in Los Angeles are people marching along to their own drum beat. They dress, eat, and operate according to their rules. Whether they look like a background character in some movie taking place in the 60s or not, the alterity they present remains. Maybe it is the space Los Angeles gives, there is room for everyone and then some.
Cheers to Eve
“So sometimes, though you are not connected with a song or person, they assume an importance which is almost impossible to tell anyone else, especially if they live where seasons make a difference.”
- Eve Babitz, “Rosewood Casket”, Eve’s Hollywood (126, Babitz)
I find when explaining who Eve Babitz is, it is far too easy to reduce her to a right place right time cultural figure. Those that speak of her emphasizing her colorful social life credit her only with streaks of genius, perhaps genius on the verge of a comedown. The stubborn naive believer in me that reveres the past tense of anything as the golden age feels a duty to understand Eve in her entirety. I think it is because writers, the good ones, are able to point out the things that float around in the back of our minds in the simplest terms. Eve did that. It is all in her pieces that ended right before I was ready to flip to the next page. Always leaving me wanting more. Wanting so badly to have gone to Hollywood High with her and wishing I went to LACC only for that to be the path to the Ferus Gallery and so on and so forth.
Eve reassured me that my preferences for things that erred on the side of incorrect were absolutely fine. Like Eve said in her “Dear Reader” note prefacing Eve’s Hollywood, “I like the way Arabic numbers look un-written out on a page… I like the way 9 million looks and I hate the way nine million looks. 9 seems like more of a number to me”(xvii, Babitz). I remember taking my first Narrative Writing class, my first piece was annotated in red pen all over because I did not spell out 27. I think twenty seven does not look like 27. It is Eve’s attainable decadence that attracts me to her. Eve was an adventuress who has “ridden a white horse, clutching its mane, into blue heaven and tasted the sins of the Green Death”(166, Babitz). Eve’s writing, in “Rosewood Casket” and “Emerald Bay”, have this cool girl anecdotal quality at a surface level, but if you actually read it, the genius adventuress is telling you something worth remembering.
A lesson and advice. “Rosewood Casket” is about death being an absence from the fun, musicians declining into drugs only to be fat and alive(rather than dead and thin), and this gesture towards private histories. This piece, like many others of Babitz’s work, is successful because Eve was in the right place at the right time. Like a cultural weathervane. In “Rosewood Casket” Eve explains this idea that I have never been able to articulate, putting descriptives to moments in life that feel magical. I think this piece is heavily overlooked in the canon of Babitz, it is so her. It is all about right place, right time, and the joy of living life. It is about appreciating music, art, parties, friends, and the memories that come out of that. She writes:
“Like scents, certain songs just throw me. And I wanted to be thrown into that moment of perfume when everything was gone except for the dazzle. It doesn’t last long, but in order to have everything you must have those moments of such unrelated importance that time ripples away like a frame of water.”
These lines hook me. Eve’s genius is revealed and while she explains the magic of a moment in time. The kind you never want to forget and try to immortalize any chance you get. This piece is part of her first book Eve’s Hollywood(1974). It is a perfect freshman book. It has the bones for what is great Eve Babitz writing, and a few exceptional pieces. As Lili Anolik puts it in her biography Hollywood’s Eve, “Eve’s Hollywood, good as it is, however, was still in the promising category. That promise would be fulfilled with her next book”(110, Anolik). That next book being Slow Days Fast Company(1977).
In Babitz’s second book she has the essay, “Emerald Bay.” It takes place out of L.A. As the writer Matthew Spektor explains, “Like any good Angeleno, Babitz is forever in flight from the city; like any strong writer, she is endlessly kicking against her region’s bitter complexities.” The piece suggests the relief of exiting the city and missing it all at once. Eve Babitz’s writing does not chase one topic and beat it down. It is effortless and smart and full bodied. Just like her. She begins the piece by writing, “No matter how many times they tell you that leaving the city makes you feel better, you never believe it because while you’re in the city it doesn’t seem that bad.” This is an unspoken truth about living in Los Angeles. It is a city full of space and sunshine, almost paradise. Yet, the essay is about Babitz escaping the city for a town in South Orange County, Laguna Beach. She finds herself amongst affluent strict people at the beach. Where Eve lacks formality, she makes up for it by knowing how to have a good time and to dress a salad. The piece takes Eve out of her stomping grounds, but shows that while the girl can leave the city, the city won’t escape the girl. Again in Anolik’s biography she explains about Babitz, “The tone of “Emerald Bay” is casual, hard, yet the piece is also drenched in emotion. Here is Eve showing herself a master of the juxtaposition of mood and action”(135, Anolik). At a surface level this essay is simply about Eve going out of town and visiting conservative people in a beach town. However, in Eve’s descriptions personality quirks are analyzed, but her love of Los Angeles prevails. Emerald Bay is beautiful enough for Eve to visit, but not enough to stay.
Having myself chosen Los Angeles as the place I want to exist in for some time is easier said than done. A lot of people find the idiosyncratic-ness, the smog, and the obvious lack of classic city silhouettes(whatever they are) as detriments to a place. I find them to be a litmus test: Can you stand it here? In “Slow Days” an essay, part of the whole that is Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh and L.A., Eve explains, “It’s very easy to stand L.A., which is why it’s almost inevitable that all sorts of ideas get entertained”(7, Babitz). Perhaps that is why music, art, and film have all found room to remain in this city. Eve explained to me the things I never admitted to myself. Through Eve’s work I acknowledge the chip I carry on my shoulder about opposing coasts and towns up North. I unapologetically love Los Angeles as did Eve.
Eve understands how to move throughout the city. Whether it be my previous personal dread of freeways, she explains why taking a route that is 5 minutes longer makes sense. She writes, “I mean, taking the freeway when you’re on your way to get a taquito for 45 cents is like taking a jet to visit your cat, the texture’s wrong”(278, Babitz). Simply put and easily applied, Eve gets the blueprint of Los Angeles. She knows where to be and how to get there. Eve understands rituals that bring forth opportunity, “The way to make it rain is to wash your car…The way to get invited to a fancy French restaurant is to have rustled yourself up a nice, cozy omelette…If you wanted to get invited to something not quite dinner, you could make scrambled eggs”(41, Babitz). Los Angeles operates with invitations to events, dinners turned into early mornings, and conversations that end up being something worth writing down.
The words of Eve Babitz in the form of her essays and anecdotes, while short, work as bends on the narrative path towards examining Los Angeles. Eve knows when to appreciate smog for the sunsets and the Santa Ana’s for having something to run against. Eve led me to a place where I began to fall in love with a city.
Dedication
To my parents, Al and Cathy Lavayen for making me Californian
And to my siblings Stephanie, Alex, and Nick
To my dog Buckley
To Artists who like to talk about lulls in creativity and when inspiration strikes
To Books I never wanted to finish
To Joan Didion and Eve Babitz for getting to be what I could not be
To Jim Morrison’s great hair
To the Pacific Ocean for making me feel small
To jacaranda blossoms and skinny tall palm trees and star jasmine
To the phrase “found to be lost”
To the corner of 29th street and Hoover
To the colors pink, orange, and green
To all my friends that I owe thank you notes
To English classes which disciplined me
To Writing classes that made me think of what I want to say
To sunburns and tan lines
To ripe avocados and citrus year round
To empty freeways and green lights
To Lotus Land, the City of Angels, and/or Los Angeles(whatever you want to call it)
To Christopher Freeman
To my fellow Narrative Studies majors who have to explain what it is they study
To The Gun Club, The Doors, X, The Byrds, The Beach Boys, Neil Young’s bowl cut, and anything else that goes along with that
And to the Griffith Observatory and the Hollywood Sign
City Cowboys
“Music people never wanted ordinary drinks. They wanted sake, or champagne cocktails, or tequila neat. Spending time with music people was confusing, and required a more fluid and ultimately a more passive approach than I ever acquired. In the first place time was never of the essence: we would have dinner at nine unless we had it at eleven-thirty, or we could order in later.”
-Joan Didion, The White Album
I have always loved spending time in Chinatown. It feels older and there is something about those scrubby hills being within reach. Those hills married with the sight of train tracks give Chinatown this untouched feeling: It still is what it once was. An entrance to the furthest point west. So, when I went to a bar called the Oracle that was curated to make me think of an older Los Angeles I could not help but think of all the nights had that I will never get to call my own. The decor of this beer and wine only establishment was trying to prove to all patrons that people like Kerouac and Ginsberg would have come here. The lame posters in ornate frames. Dinge-y rococo light fixtures. A small stage and bar to match. Plenty of lounge furniture surrounding a most likely out of tune piano. The Oracle imagined Beats exhaling smoke in between lines of stream of conscious poetry, something that should be there.
I went to see this new Folk music pair called Will&Haylie. In true 1960s musical fashion they are involved with each other romantically. Will greeted me with too long of a hello hug, while his acoustic guitar was strapped diagonally across his denim clad body. His haircut was a Neil Young type bowl cut. He had a mustache to go along with it. Haylie on the other hand was soft spoken and petite. Her clothes easily could have been a costume on any other person. A beige embroidered tunic and wide leg brown pants. Their look matched what they were singing about.
The crowd barely filling the bar were all there with an agenda. Some attempting to drink from the Will&Haylie Fountain of Folk, others were the entourage trying to convince the thirsty crowd that this was something worth gulping. I could not help but be skeptical. Most of the crowd looked like the horses they parked outside ran away, leaving behind Priuses instead.
Cyclically speaking music like fashion and all other art for that matter does tend to operate according to a cycle. So now in music, yes there is Folk, but I learned there is Folk Revival. The difference? I do not know, maybe it is recorded digitally and not in an analog format.
When Will and Halyie took to the short stage they were accompanied by a man they introduced as Catfish. He strummed an acoustic guitar some, but mostly he was plucking a mandolin or a slide guitar. He did not say much. He would nod after Will or Haylie would introduce what song they were about to play as a way to concur that he was ready.
Catfish sat on the end, Will was in the middle, and Haylie was the other bookend. Will attempted to have a rapport with the tiny audience. I had to divert my eyes to my drink or break the unspoken rule and check the time on my phone. It seemed to be that cellular phones do not exist in Chinatown afterdark when a Folk band is playing.
As much as I wanted to be contrarian and not give in to the mellow strums or the lyrics about colors and swaying grain, I failed. Something was going on and it was Will and Haylie’s fault. These songs were familiar. Their voices, especially Haylie’s, were voices of some other time I romanticize as being simpler and covered in linen. The more they sang, the more I bought into it. I wanted to trade my Levis for Wranglers and get some bad feathered layers in my hair. By the end of their set, it seemed like their voices should be echoing in Laurel Canyon.
I found out later when I was questioning Will’s southern sounding singing voice, that he is originally from Texas. Maybe he is a cowboy afterall? Rumor has it that Will came to California because he heard the surf drony sounds of a band no longer called Tomorrows Tulips. The band, like most great ones, broke up because of lovers and heroin. Will told a friend of a friend who then told me(like most Los Angeles rumors) that he made a good sum of money for refurbishing his van he was living out of. He also was selling magic mushrooms. The van and fungus let Will profit enough money to strongly consider buying some land in Topanga Canyon. He wants a ranch. Probably something to do with acoustics. Nobody however knows how old Will is.
Haylie is not spoken about except for the fact that she seems to be a hot commodity among other male musicians. She does have her own album coming out featuring original Folk songs. She played one song from the record and it was too perfect. She sang about a girl flocking to the west coast to find her lover. During the journey she saw him in all the natural beauty: cliff faces, meadows, lakes, rivers, et cetera. I found out later she too is not from California. I hope that song is about Will.
***
Most concerts, regardless of genre, follow the same pattern of events. You arrive. Get a drink. Run into that person you see everywhere and always forget to grab lunch with. Then you see the person that is your reason for attendance. The band plays. The band finishes playing. Everybody goes to the smoking patio, non-smokers and smokers alike. The band arrives and mingles with their friends. Band members shake hands with the friends of friends. The true fans usually get snuffed because no one knows them. Finally, a post concert gathering place gets announced and everybody who is somebody goes.
Seeing Will&Haylie play reminded me of this one night some months ago in Hollywood. I happened upon this bar that tricked me into thinking it was a hole in the wall. Bartenders ignored me with grace. The band that played looked like they should be strolling Sunset in the 70s. Except there they were playing proper Rock n’ Roll to a packed bar. There was one girl who looked remarkably tall gripping a film video camera to her shoulder. She was wearing the most obnoxious platform heels and remained upright the entire night regardless of pushes and shoves that came her way. She looked great. She looked like she was born in the wrong era. Yet, so did everyone else packing the bar. It was bizarre. Somehow seeing this group of twenty somethings looking like the caricatures of late 1960s made their curated outfits err on the edge of costume. I blame it on the poorly executed shag haircuts on the majority, but I could not unsee this.
The music people of Los Angeles are their own breed. Those who take to the stage have plenty friends of friends who cling to a promise of a claim to fame. The young starving musical acts in Los Angeles have their apartments furnished with sidewalk banished couches and they take home glasses from bars. They tend to operate according to their music. The Punk people are always complaining. The Pop music crew know how to appeal to almost anyone. The Rock N’ Rollers keep to themselves and their wardrobe. The Folk artists are in their own world.
The Folk music makers make a point to enunciate the “L” in Folk. Most of them, the men in particular, take on the costume that makes them an urban cowboy. Bell cut wranglers, leather heeled boots, and an obnoxious belt buckle. Some even embrace a soft southern accent. I guess they are in Southern California. A lot I imagine are from the west coast not the wild west.
Music in Los Angeles always seems to respond to something. X’s song “I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts” wondered loudly, what the hell was going on in the city. It seems now, Los Angeles music is swinging back towards something familiar and sweet–like Folk. I have found most music sounds better when it is playing featuring Los Angeles in the background. Whether you are cruising down the I-10 or parked on Sunset, the city requires some soundtrack. It makes it make sense. A city with too many characters and not enough parking spots. Maybe that is why everyone else at music shows seem to be in costumes?
The Surfer Dialectic
The best surfers in L.A. are from Orange County. This population decides to interrupt a perfect setup of living in their parents’ homes rent free. They decide to abandon the ideal. The lifestyle that is California Core: Beach, waves, babes, and cerveza. Not to mention permanent sun kissed skin. They are not chasing mediocre surf breaks in Malibu or the South Bay, but something aspirational. They give up the dream to live in a place like East Hollywood and try to “make it”. Usually by way of a band. The better bands made up of surfer transplants make music that requires attention. Lyrics that reveal there can be trouble in paradise and that paradise is easily lost in Los Angeles.
When telling people parked at Los Angeles bar counters that I am from Orange County I am usually met with snide remarks regarding something called the orange curtain or cliché surf aphorisms no one really says. If I am fortunate enough to meet someone that is of the beach variety they express a whole lot of love for a certain surf spot. Most people think the best place to surf in Orange County, although folks from San Diego attempt to claim it due to it falling right under their county line, is San Onofre(San O for short). San O is good, better some days, but the sand is dusty and there are too many trust fund burnouts smoking in their converted ambulance surf mobiles talking about how the waves will get good when the tide comes up (even though high tide was at six am). San Onofre used to be private. You had to be someone with a reason to be there. The waves were good then, and are fine now, but there are other breaks that are a lot more worthwhile.
The key to understanding surf culture, and surfers in general, is that there is a language of codes. “Surf spots” are for the select few and have arbitrary names. All for the sake of keeping it a secret for as long as anyone can. San Onofre is not where you want to surf. The line to access the beach is clogged and the line up gets too crowded. The spot where you want to go is past San Onofre. South of the Nuclear Plant that looks like a massive pair of concrete breasts. It is called Trails. A strand of beach accessed via loosely paved trails(its namesake). The cliffs you walk down are rugged and prehistoric. I have never been to Baja, but I imagine it is something like this. Unkempt and sunburnt. Old California. There are six trails and the parking lot/campground runs alongside the I-5 southbound. Back in the day Trail six was a nude beach. Some allegedly still uphold the tradition, I however have yet to really see anything substantial other than a sign that claims clothing is optional beyond a certain point. As far as I have heard the tradition is only perpetuated by old men nobody wants to see naked. I guess it always is up to the elders to uphold tradition.
Back to the spot. It is in between trail four and five. The access point is behind bathrooms and requires a step over a guard rail and a little hike down an old footpath. It reminds me a bit of Los Angeles. There is a will required to come to this beach. Not just anyone is coming here. The beginning part of the path is not promising, except for the feeling that you will fall because you are wearing the wrong shoes. A few yards down a steady decline gives explanation as to why you are going all this way for a southern sliver of the Pacific Ocean. You see the wall of blue framed by rugged orange cliffs. It takes your breath away(especially when you are walking back up to the car.)
Once finally on the beach, soft sandy spots require a little hunting. Most of this stretch of beach is rocky, thorny, and covered in ice plant invasions. There is a hut made out of what furniture shops want to call reclaimed wood that is sunburnt and piled in a way that provides a roof and three walls. If you’re lucky you can claim the hut and become king of the beach. I have spent more time at the spot in the off season( any time that is not summer). I like it better that way.
***
“Look at that left! I’m gonna chug a beer and paddle out”, said Sepe (pronounced see pee). He is only drinking lite beers now or ones made out of rice. Something about how these kinds of beers don’t hurt his stomach. A man of his word, he chugged and then paddled out. Sepe and Finn met Riley(my boyfriend) and I at the spot. Soon enough the three of them were carving paths in the faces of waves. It was almost too Californian to be sitting on a sand patch watching set after set of glassy lefts peel and crash, meanwhile it is February and 88 degrees.
Once enough waves were ridden I gained company on the sand. For the best surfers in Los Angeles, life is not about a singular thing. It is about seeing friends fall into drugs, then into something else. Sobriety either is a route towards religion or an extended trip somewhere on the central coast. My company explains how they try to meet other people who do not have it so easy so there is something interesting to talk about. They question how some people got signed to record labels and how a no name is playing the right venues. They might not go to college, but they read and write and notice more than my neighbors in a University classroom. In a day they migrate from Los Angeles traffic and smog, to beach town U.S.A, and then to a ramen house a friend owns so they can make music.
The ramen house is in Oceanside. A place I think all those confused Los Angeles barstool experts make fun of. Oceanside is a beach town to the nth degree. Sepe’s band is called Semi Trucks and his lyrics wish “Hope your heart sings a song that only skips the sad parts.” Those lyrics floated over the heads of the bedhead barefoot locals of Oceanside. The permanently tan and sun bleached hair characters that are motivated by salt water and hoping to make it to a house party. The kind of party featuring party favors taking the form of psilocybin fungi. They seem to never want to leave the picture perfect town by the sea. The entertainment is from those who sought to live against harsh realities of moderate air quality and no free parking. Sepe’s lyrics rang in my head, “She hates vans and the Grateful Dead, cause surfer boys make her sad.” I wonder if the beach rats got it.
As soon as Riley pulled onto the freeway in his van decorated with a bed in the back and surf racks on top I read a green sign: San Clemente 12 mi Los Angeles 73 mi. 73 miles later, passing the nuclear boobs and the Commerce Casino I ended up on Edgemont Street staring at the Griffith Observatory.
When I have a wondering about Los Angeles the answer is revealed once I escape the city. If the weather is nice and the smog is bad I head south. The weather was nice in the middle of February, so nice in fact that I had to get out of dodge. I got perspective from a hill or more correctly from a beach. A blue horizon. Los Angeles is not easy. The payoff is usually received after the first of a month. It takes certain people to want to give up the ideal and chase the aspiration somewhere concrete and hopeless. But, the city is not a bleak soul sucker, it is just a demanding teacher. It arrests attention and tells you it is okay to not be happy all the time. Pain means growth and is dull in the background. Until it stops. You eventually are tall enough for the ride. Drives down Sunset where you cannot see the sun drop, instead the casita shadows tell you the blue sky will come again in about twelve hours. I left on an abnormal February day to realize I miss the close toed shoe wearing cigarette smokers that are always on the cusp. After all, they have more to talk about than a new swell coming and maybe care to understand what lyrics are suggesting.
“No matter how many times they tell you that leaving the city makes you feel better, you never believe it because while you’re in the city it doesn’t seem that bad.”
-Eve Babitz, “Emerald Bay”, Slow Days, Fast Company
Hollywind
“There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the Northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sandstorms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to the flash point”
-Joan Didion, “Los Angeles Notebook”
My Mother would always say certain words when the air would change. Like a tradition of sorts. The descriptive phrase that always stuck out in my head was “Indian Summer.” It occurs in Autumn, when the air stays hot and dry and the ocean won’t cool down. It is a disorienting pleasure. There is even a song that sounds like how it feels. Jim Morrison mumbles his love for something and about meeting the object of his affection in the Indian Summer. It is the forgotten season of legend that is the closest thing to mirages on the coast.
***
The tendency to celebrate and make traditions appear out of nowhere is something I like to make happen. I have been lucky enough to live with the closest of my friends, Carly. She, more so than me, can take off at any given moment–like a gust of wind. She has taught me to say yes to things. Saying yes grants something in return. Good or bad. The newest tradition we have been taking for a spin is having a fun Tuesday afternoon. These Tuesdays are all for the sake to remind us we are young in a city and have open Tuesday afternoons just for fun. And fun is always fleeting.
A recent Tuesday was a trip to a thrift shop on Hollywood Boulevard. It was too hot of a day in March and the sky was white and the air felt dirty. Or at least Hollywood proper always has a way to make me feel that way. I think it is because souvenir shops rub me the wrong way. A place full of objects for sale. All about a place, but not from the place. It is phony.
The heat does make people irritable. So do unprotected left turns on busy streets. All of it can make people boil over. When Carly fumbled with the parking meter, she let Hollywood know how she felt about it.
“I hate Hollywood.”
I believe Carly meant those words. Straight and to the point. All said as we were walking over famous people’s names I had never heard of.
What is the appeal to become so famous that a bunch of nobodies get to walk all over you?
We walked into the thrift shop and perused. Apparently all the other people with a size 27 waist decided to take everything except the most atrocious capris. I left with a slip dress and Carly got a long denim skirt. Soon enough we were back on the street.
Being a girl on Hollywood Boulevard just guarantees eyes looking at you. Some passersby are too close for comfort. There is always a family of tourists who all look lost and tired. They think Los Angeles is only Hollywood. Thank God it isn’t.
Back in the passenger seat feeling grimier than before, the sun seemed to really be exercising its dominance. It was really getting on my nerves, but I think it was just because I was hungry. Carly steered her car and we were on Vine and then crossed through the intersection of Hollywood and Vine. It was relatively unremarkable. I don’t think she noticed, but I darted my eyes up toward the street signs, away from the naked homeless person dancing in the heat. At least someone is enjoying it.
One way or another we ended up in Hancock Park. The blue sky was full of white light and white heat. Carly parked the car in a neighborhood and everything seemed too in place. Maybe it was the heat and the glaring light and the fact that the air started to get gusty. We walked into a deli full of people on the edge. About to lose it, but reigning it in. The store was about to close, just in time.
I never believed that weather could have any more power than closing a road via flood or snow. The hot windiness of Los Angeles gets to the psyches. You get mad and confused. Pleasantries of shopping and eating and dilly dallying become excruciating. It all makes you want to scream and run away. Sometimes I have wanted the wind to blow me away from the city. Somewhere quiet and clean.
I think the heat and wind push you towards something. You get irrationally irritable. I thought I was hungry, turns out it was the weather. It makes everything else seem so loathsome. Traffic is somehow thicker. Red brake lights are hideous. The strange people Jim Morrison sang about seem to creep out of nowhere. Los Angeles becomes a lot harder to exist in.
Although, when you walk amongst the wind it either pulls you along or is pushing you to get back inside and wait out the possible prickling of your thumbs. When I have followed the wind it tries to blow my skirt up and rip off my clothes. Exposing me to the city in a way I never wanted. It is disorienting and energizing.
The magic mysticism of a hot Santa Ana wind I have come to notice is that once it subsides. The smog has cleared and the San Gabriel Mountains seem more in focus. Dead leaves are off the trees. Everything gets wiped one way or another and then another day rolls around and you forget how you got to Wednesday.
To The Last Dharma Bum: Kerry Fahey
“Like scents, certain songs just throw me. And I wanted to be thrown into that moment of perfume when everything was gone except for the dazzle. It doesn’t last long, but in order to have everything you must have those moments of such unrelated importance that time ripples away like a frame of water. Without those moments, your own heaven party can die of thirst. They’re like booster shots, they make you stronger. You know it’s worth the twinge of envy when you’ve recovered from the dazzle because the mystery of life fades when death, people having fun without you, is forgotten. Time escapes unnoticed and time is all you get.”
-Eve Babitz, “Rosewood Casket”
I tried to read On The Road. I failed. So I picked up Dharma Bums. I began to see things as Dharma Bummers. Most things nowadays are. Everything old seems faded to black or the credits have started to roll. Especially in L.A. Somehow everything is new, yet it already happened. You can only listen to so much Bob Dylan before any marriage between a harmonica and acoustic guitar in the twenty-first century makes you crazy. You used to be able to get a nineteen eighty something turbo diesel Mercedes for around four grand just a few years ago. Now it is near impossible to find anything that fits the bill. Some of the relics are still out there, they have to be.
***
February 14th probably breaks more hearts than any other day in the whole year. It is a dharma bummer for sure. It was a day that started to hack away at the hearts of a bunch of artists who started their own gallery in Downtown. I was told by an older leather clad gay couple that gallery space itself used to be a bath house. They walked in one night on their way home from the bar. They were happy it was an art gallery full of young faces and bright colors. They left. I wished Kerry was there.
My first time at this gallery was because of an older brother of mine who goes by any of the following: Alex, Peter Pan(on occasion), or Richard. He helped start the gallery with his friends because they wanted to find their space for their art. He explains “[Shit Art Club] began with the disintegration and abandonment of the small idea that emerging artists who aren't sitting around painting pretty pictures on canvas would be allowed to enter the commercial art world. We knew that there was no room for us in an industry that deemed anything not accepted into the commercial canon as ‘shit.’ So we created our own universe.’ And they did. A house party in Mar Vista that was splattered with paint eventually found home at 130 E Fourth Street. My brother’s partners in paint were Zac(Loser Angeles) and Sean(Mac)--whose parentheticals are their artist names. A group of young artists with the aura of something like the Ferus Gallery opened the dutifully named Shit Art Club Gallery. It only makes sense the space used to be for bathers and fleeting romantic flings. Metrics of formality that run the quote unquote art world were thrown out the window. I knew the boys knew they were up to something, but I think they underestimated how communities seem to thrive when worship centers arrive unprovoked. It is where the Bastards of Young Could Hardly Wait to get to. The gallery’s mission statement sums it up, “We foster anarchy and surrender to the natural order. In doing so, we learned that while you can’t find harmony in discord - you can still find a beautiful melody. We are like a symphony made up entirely of conductors - or a ballet full of prima donnas.” It is about marching to the beat of your own dream. And then some.
I remember the first show. It was just before Halloween of 2019 which means that at the inaugural gallery show costumes were strongly encouraged. That translated to beautiful men in short dresses. And gorgeous girls also in short dresses. The opening show was a surf film premier called “Beach Head.” Yet the most remarkable thing about the night was the excess of merrymaking. The gallery’s recap of the night says it like it was, “There was DEVO, dancing, makin’ out, dancing, sweating, drinking, dancing, Uncle Denny, more makin’ out, people getting naked, art everywhere and a healthy balance of mosh pits, destruction, disco and sing-alongs.” I still think back to showing up with two of my best friends and leaving that night feeling like I was going to explode because I was so happy. It was euphoric.. It was the kind of night that you wish every night on the town should be.
At that “Beach Head” premier was the first time I met Kerry Fahey. A seventy-one year old who found friends 50 years younger than him. Kerry was a small man with a big heart and loved to talk. People always like to say there are people who exude and glow, but I don’t think they met Kerry. He was the Hurdy Gurdy man who came singing songs of love and life. The best part was that he did not look out of place. He was a part of it. His shoes most often matched his hat or shirt. He only smoked these cigars that looked like cigarettes because they were only two dollars. He lived in Downtown Los Angeles. And he came here to die. Except in the last year of his life he found a second wind of life. All because of some twenty-something artists with a zest for life, art, and a good time. Everyone who was at that first show became the faces that showed up time and time again.
The first thing I remember talking about with Kerry was that his tie was given to him by an artist. It was this beautiful dark blue with a hand painted squiggle of light blue. That first night in the gallery we danced. Everyone did. And it was one song in particular when everything slowed down. Anytime I hear the song I cannot help but remember jumping up and down, spinning, smiling, laughing, sweating and reveling in the fantasy promises of life. It was dazzle, waterloo sunsets, rolling stones, and everything was let loose. The soundtrack to all of that of “Can’t Seem To Make You Mine” by The Seeds. It was this moment precisely when the misses had and dance moves and destruction and singing along happened. It was the big bang for everything to come. And Kerry was there.
By the next show the gallery hosted seat belts were fastened just barely more, but all the same faces were there again. This time the show was a “proper” art show. Meaning art was on the wall for sale, but it more or less had the same energy from the first show. It was sometime in early December of 2019. Some guy bumped into me and spilled red wine all over my favorite t-shirt. Kerry thought it looked cool–some new age tie-dye. I still have the shirt. I can’t get rid of it, but I won’t wear it. The washed red wine became this kind of brownish blob. But anytime I see it bunched in the back of my drawer I think about Kerry.
I think Kerry had to be the last dharma bum. He dodged the Vietnam Draft quite a few times and got away with it. He bummed train rides, knowing which trains were the ones to ride because he could tell by the train whistle. At seventy one he was ready. He came to Los Angeles alone and was expecting to leave it that way. I wonder if he chose to live in Downtown because it was so close to Union Station.
As Shit Art Club had more shows, there became “new” regulars, but Kerry was always there. Always there to talk or dance–most likely both. Once March 6th 2020 came around it was Kerry’s seventy second birthday. All the faces I danced with to Can’t Seem To Make You Mine” were there. Just like old times, but smaller. Someone made Kerry a cake with candles to wish on and somebody else got him a piñata. Everyone Kerry wanted there was there. His new family. The people he liked to tell that they gave him the most life. Most romances include some element of tragedy. Broken hearts mostly.
Valentine’s Day of 2021 came around. My brother knew something was going on. He always managed to call Kerry for a chat at least a few times a week. Sometimes I would say a hello if I was around, but most of the time my brother would tell me “Kerry always asks about you.” So on Valentine’s Day when Kerry never replied to my brother or any of the other artists from the gallery it was like everyone knew. Zac(Loser Angeles) eventually was able to get into Kerry’s apartment and found him.
Kerry did what he set out to do in L.A., yet he lived too. He will exist as legend and a name for dedication. As the gallery has continued to grow the roots of it all have remained. The same songs play. All of which remind me of Kerry. “Oh La La” by The Faces, “Can’t Hardly Wait” by The Replacements, and of course “Can’t Seem To Make You Mine” by The Seeds. All songs that ride the line of yearning, maturing, and heartbreak. All of which remind me of the times I felt most alive.
End Note
“It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.”- Joan Didion
“Time escapes unnoticed and time is all you get” - Eve Babitz
Time spent in college is prefaced by the many “Just You Waits” and “You’re Just Gonna Love Its.” Justifications that are really expectations which inadvertently are empty promises. Undergraduate years are full of coming of age embarrassments. Too many late nights. Half hearted theses. Careless conclusions. Explanations of academic pursuits(that do not necessarily guarantee a job). It is full of new faces, smells, and chances. A perpetual reminder that the brink’s end is on the horizon. It feels like it will continue, until it doesn’t. The purgatory full of pleasure and growing pain comes to a sobering halt.
I decided upon Narrative Studies because it had everything I thought I liked in one place. Four years later I am happy my hunch was correct. This choice of discipline has to be personal. It is marketed as a “build your own major.” Which really means the list from classes to choose from was as wide as it was tall. Art History, Literature, Film, Poetry, Classics Studies, Anthropology, et cetera. Every semester I seemed to be met with a list of classes I all wanted to take, but could not. I had to choose. Choices which aligned with major requirements, scheduling, and overall interest. All contingent in regards to fate, chance, and timing.
If I had not taken that class then, I would not have been enrolled in this class two semesters later.
I believe undergraduate years are truly a liminal space. I remember one class in particular from my junior year. It was a French Film class and my professor pointed out being an undergrad is just dipping into the pool of Academia. It was not until I am now running out of time being able to call myself a college student, I think I know what I want to learn. Yet, now I do not have any more syllabi to tell me what I will know, how I will know, and when I will know it all.
The breadth of classes I have taken remains in the realm of liberal arts, with the addition of a few film classes. I never planned anything out too much, but the random choices of classes sometimes all managed to link together. My moments of pulling my hair out and wishing I took the well traveled safe collegiate path only last long enough to remind me that I would rather be writing about the stuff I care about. Like my Capstone. I took a history of architecture class and it changed how I looked at buildings. When I was reading contemporary dramas I found out plays are so much more than Shakespeare. Then, when I took a class on Shakespeare I fully got the appeal. So on and so forth.
A class I took because it seemed interesting, Literature of California with David Ulin, informed this whole Capstone. I was introduced to a whole roster of Los Angeles writers and realized my favorite things to read are what people have to say about the city or the stories that take place in L.A. This class is where I first encountered Joan Didion’s Los Angeles and I never went back after. I had never before then been so inspired by a writer’s work that it consumed me. I only wanted to read Didion. For a while I did. Until I stumbled over Babitz and then I read her work obsessively. And it got me here.
These years were not about confirming what I knew. It was about how will I know what I want to know. A genuine love for knowledge. Like the different narrative structures I have studied, the good stories and how they are told are not linear. There are cliffhangers and something random happening at any given moment. It is about character and maintaining a wide world view.
The attempt to arrive at the summation of one’s four year academic journey is not so easy. It is the last growing pain. Finally being tall enough for the ride towards a diploma and a tassel toss.. Deadlines met become a title earned. The end is just the beginning.
Bibliography
Anolik, Lili.A Hollywood's Eve. SimonSchuster Ltd, 2020.
Babitz, Eve, and Tino Hanekamp. Eve's Hollywood. Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, 2018.
Babitz, Eve, and Matthew Specktor. Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A. New York Review Books (Nyrb), 2016.
Didion, Joan. White Album. Harpercollins Publishers, 2017.
Didion, Joan. Slouching towards Bethlehem: Essays. Picador Modern Classics, 2017.
Nelson, Steffie. Slouching towards Los Angeles. RARE BIRD Books, 2019.