Slow Days, Fast Company by Babitz, Eve, and Specktor, Matthew \\\\(Introduction by\\\\)

The New York Review of Books, Inc. New.. New New York: New No one burned hotter than Eve Babitz Possessing skin that radiated "its own kind of moral laws," spectacular teeth, and a figure that was the stuff of legend, she seduced seemingly everyone who was anyone in Los Angeles for a long stretch of the 1960s and '70s

One man proved elusive, however, and so Babitz did what she did best, she wrote him a book Slow Days, Fast Company is a full-fledged and full-bodied evocation of a bygone Southern California that far exceeds its mash-note premise

In ten sun-baked, Santa Ana wind-swept sketches, Babitz re-creates a Los Angeles of movie stars distraught over their success, socialites on three-day drug binges holed up in the Chateau Marmont, soap-opera actors worried that tomorrow's script will kill them off, Italian femmes fatales even more fatal than Babitz And she even leaves LA now and then, spending an afternoon at the house of flawless Orange County suburbanites, a day among the grape pickers of the Central Valley, a weekend in Palm Springs where her dreams of romance fizzle and her only solace is Virginia Woolf In the end it doesn't matter if Babitz ever gets the guy-she seduces us