East Coast authors and screenwriters give LA a bad rap - you’re stuck on the 405 all day, the people are all self-obsessed wannabes, secretly there’s a rotten core under all the sunshine, and the entire California dream is one big, giant phony scam. In Eve’s Hollywood, Eve Babitz is here to say that those people are all wrong, and LA’s great. And, man, does she make a compelling case for LA being great! I first found out about this book when Babitz died shortly after her more-noted and often-compared Joan Didion. Even though she’s very different from Didion, I’m glad I read this, because it was a charming read. Eve Babitz makes ‘50s and ‘60s LA seem like the most fun city on Earth as she races down Sunset first thing in the morning to get taquitos from Olvera Street, watches her mother draw the old Victorians of Bunker Hill, sees Westside teenagers almost break out into a riot at the premiere of a surfer movie, and meets a lot of men.
Even though it’s a world away and a time long past now, she makes you believe that all of LA’s boosters were right. Hollywood seems like a haven of cool, eccentric artists and not the sketchy-feeling tourist trap that it is today. Downtown seems like a fun meeting place of classes and cultures with cool old mansions instead of being kind of stinky. Westwood is …well, she hates Westwood and writes that it's “so insanely crappy that you could throw up.” But Eve Babitz’s LA is a fun place that can’t be brought down even by such minor calamities like earthquakes and the Watts Riots. (One small criticism of this book: her LA is quite white.) A lot of works about LA can just be outsiders trying to break the myth by writing about how much it sucks and its secret awfulness. This book is not that, and it’s what makes it worthwhile.
Meanwhile Mike Davis’ City of Quartz is a Southland native telling us that LA sucks, it is deeply problematic, and that pitch-black negativity is why it’s worth reading. Reading Eve’s Hollywood and City of Quartz back-to-back was interesting. The pure contrast in style between the aspiring literary It Girl essayist and the Marxist geograper’s onetime doctoral thesis is the obvious one, but what makes this interesting is that you have two children of Los Angeles with very different perspectives. If Babitz is fulfilling the dreams of Southern California real estate boosters and the myths of Hollywood by trying to push back against the East Coast intellectuals who are haters that just don’t understand Los Angeles, Davis is tearing down that idealized booster vision of LA sold by the Hollywood and the real estate industry, initially financed in large part by East Coast capital. And, if nothing else, Davis really tears down that vision, attacking many of LA’s major institutions - Hollywood, the police, the developers, the church, the homeowners, and of course, the politicians. Even if the book can feel like one long Marxist broadside that doesn’t always hold up well to 2020s LA, his critique is effective, with the chapter on the homeowners’ movement being both my favorite and the one most relevant to contemporary California. Davis the Marxist looks at homeowners’ associations of West LA and the San Fernando Valley with a horrified admiration, viewing them as the one class in the Southland to successfully organize into a class-based mass politics against the cabal of real estate and corporate elites that run the region. For Davis, this is the organized proletariat that socialists dream of, but instead of them fighting for equal Los Angeles that uplifts all, they’re instead fighting for their God-given right to a tract home with a yard, car, and away from poor minorities and are quite successful at it.
While Davis’s disappointment is evident in that it ended up being these people - the ones who were fighting for - who succeeded in bending the city to their wills as. While time has shown that the suburban LA homeowner didn’t succeed in all of their goals - the efforts to ban apartments in hope that it would prevent demographic change in the Valleys and Orange County being the best example of their inability to stop demographic change - Davis does a great job in illustrating the movement that made California housing the mess it is today. These were the people who succeeded in bending to the city their collective will as they managed to get referendums passed to limit residential density, increase the power of neighborhood councils at the expense of the mayor’s office, and most notably, pass Proposition 13. And I think that’s the strength of this book overall. If you’re familiar with contemporary LA, then this book gives you the origin story of why a lot of things are the way they are, even if you need to fill in the gaps of the last 30 years in a lot of places.
That being said, I don’t want to portray Davis as an all-knowing seer, as his crystal ball was off in some place. For me, one of his bigger misses was not getting what modern gentrification in LA ended up looking like. For Davis, the exemplar of gentrification was the new office towers of Bunker Hill giving professional workers a feeling of safety away from the rest of Downtown, mis-forecasting the trend of real, increased interest by college-educated yuppies in actually living Downtown (and in areas closer to the center of the city, like Silver Lake, Echo Park, and Boyle Heights). There’s also been more interest in Downtown public spaces that are much less fortress-like than Davis anticipated, with the tearing down of Broadway Plaza for The Bloc at the 7th Street/Metro Center station being a prime example of where he was wrong.
But more than admonishing him for misses, it’s sad that we won’t be able to read about Davis’ thoughts on contemporary LA. He wrote intelligently on issues ranging from the Catholic Church to LAPD, and almost every institution he touched has changed dramatically in the last 30 years, oftentimes for the worse. LA is as interesting as ever, and it’s a loss that he isn’t here to observe it.
