Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

by Eve Babitz

These adults used to sigh and say, “If he lived anywhere else . . . anywhere else, they would have done something about him. But not Los Angeles.” I think that the truth was that Stravinsky lived in L.A. because when you’re in your studio, you don’t have to be a finished product all the time or make formal pronouncements. Work and love—the two best things—flourish in studios. It’s when you have to go outside and define everything that they often disappear.

When the Ferus Gallery began exposing the rest of the country to Los Angeles art in the fifties, New York art people quickly observed that everyone seemed to be obsessed with perfection in L.A. The frames had to be perfect—the backs of the frames, even. “The Finish Fetish” it was called. Like the Beach Boys of that same mode when all that harmony fell out of the sky in seamless clouds. Rock and roll in L.A. tries even now not to be so gorgeous, to be raunchy and soulful, but it won’t work. Linda Ronstadt and The Eagles and Jackson Browne can’t scare anyone. Like the art from the old Ferus, L.A. rock and roll is just such perfection.