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Interstellar Eve Babitz

May 13, 2019 in Astro Matters, Book Matters, Cat Lady Matters, City Matters, Country Matters, Etiquette Matters, Feminist Matters

Eve in her 50s.

Happy Eve Babitz Day! As a Gen Xer forced to spend hundreds of dollars I didn’t have in the 90s to track down Eve Babitz’s out-of-print books, there’s a part of me that’s irritated the millennial girls think they’ve discovered the brilliant writer, groupie-adventuress, and auto-muse. Just a tiny part, though, because everyone should have an Eve who gives Lilith a run for her money. Every female-identified person in particular should have a star-fucking, bridge-burning, convention-flouting, binary-busting, sexy and smart, lush and arch, totally mean and totally kind, self-identified-spinster role model like Evie. So I’m glad she is finally back in print and translated into billions of tongues. (She always was good with tongues.) Continue Reading →

‘Homecoming’: Venus in Virgo

April 29, 2019 in Astro Matters, Feminist Matters, Film Matters, Music Matters, Spirit Matters, Style Matters, TV Matters

I’ve watched the brilliant Netflix concert film Homecoming three times now and all I can say is that Beyoncé is such a Virgo goddess that she makes the late James Brown look like a slacker. Also please note that Virgos don’t get credit for being the healer of the zodiac, but my o my does Lady B heal hearts ancestral lines cultural wounds with her gorgeous tapestries of music and dance and storytelling and costuming. She makes me cry with her womanly curves and womanly courage and womanly creativity, and she makes me hopeful too. For her triple-entendre love of labor and labor of love reminds us that we can change everything so long as we roll up our sleeves and open our hearts. Like I said: a Virgo goddess.

Edie Sedgwick, Signs and Sirens Superstar

April 20, 2019 in Age Matters, Essays, Feminist Matters, Style Matters

A beautiful birdie reminded me today is the birthday of Edie Sedgwick, she of the ermine hair, silvery limbs, eyes like a Day of the Dead painting. Edie’s glamour was rooted in the visibility of her exoskeleton, and the most iconic photographs taken of her caress those cheekbones, clavicle, hipbones, the tiny exposed infrastructure of her wrists and upper arms. I still admire the effect though her eating disorder helped launch my own. I even had a name for it: Glamourosa nervosa.

Dying the year I was born, she would have been 76 today, but Edie never was going to live that long. Hers was the last-hurrah glow of a star shooting into oblivion, her no-holds-barred radiance the original heroin chic. Yet even at her most junked-up, goth was as far from her aesthetic as from a Swedish nun. Now that I’m twenty years older than she ever became, I grok her poor-little-rich-girl limitations—namely, being the art rather than making the art. Not even today can you live into your 30s without learning to live without an audience. Still, I’m so grateful for how she lit our path with striped shirts and chandelier earrings. To those of us bridging the mid-20th century and the new millennium (aka we Gen Xers looking backward to find our future), Edie was all the 1960s at once and we loved her for it.

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy