In this collection of nine essays, Eve Babitz chronicles the shifting landscape of Los Angeles during the 1980s and early 1990s. She tracks the transition from the drug-fueled, celebratory excess of the previous decade to a period marked by the arrival of the AIDS crisis and the 1992 riots. Babitz uses her social circle of aging rock stars, studio executives, and bohemian socialites to map the city’s geography, from the Chateau Marmont to the beaches of Santa Monica. She documents personal encounters with tango obsession, shifting beauty standards, and the pervasive anxiety of a local culture suddenly forced to confront sobriety and mortality.
Readers who value sharp social observation and unofficial local histories will gravitate toward this work. It serves those interested in the specific intersection of Hollywood industry culture and the evolving social mores of Southern California. Instead of an academic analysis, the reader gains a sensory record of how a specific urban environment reacted to the end of the twentieth century. They walk away with a granular understanding of how private lives in Los Angeles were rearranged by external cultural shocks and the natural process of growing older in a city obsessed with youth.
Balanced in tone; a moderate read.
Best for readers like The Escapist Adventurer. Which reader are you?
- Published
- 1993
- Language
- EN
