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Red Is the Magic Number

April 3, 2023 in Age Matters, City Matters, Essays, Feminist Matters, Past Matters, Style Matters

I’m doing Suleika Jaouad’s 30-Day Journaling Challenge and so liked the results of today’s assignment that I’m copying it here. The instructions: randomly open up a book, write down the quote your finger lands upon, and write 20 minutes using that prompt. (If you know any of the people in this piece, I duly apologize.)

“The red she pointed to was this sort of proper maroon. I didn’t want proper maroon. I wanted bloodcurdling scarlet.”—Eve Babitz, I Used to Be Charming

I used to be a conscientious red objector. In the 90s I was certain it was a color I couldn’t pull off but I think that’s because I only knew ugly reds. Ones with too much blue and brown in them—dead colors, dried blood colors. New England colors. Then a friend who was destined to only be a friend while I was at my vainest and most superficial (age 29, peak Saturn return) asked me to be her token bridesmaid. She didn’t say “token” but the implication was clear. I was to be the one wacky bridesmaid whose presence proved she’d been doing something interesting in her NYC years. (She hailed from Virginia, was practicing law in NYC, but was destined to raise four blond children back in Virginia, where’d she pretend her law degree and non-Ann Taylor wardrobe had been a folly of her misspent youth.)

So by token I mean the only Northerner. The only Jew. The only girl who hadn’t been a high school bestie or a sorority sister or something equally perfunctory and tribal. I was the only oddball yoga teacher travel writer flaneuzy. Like I said: token. Continue Reading →

Rest in Pleasure, Eve Babitz: 1943-2021

December 18, 2021 in Book Matters, Cat Lady Matters, Essays, Feminist Matters, Ruby Intuition, Style Matters

Just found out essayist Eve Babitz died yesterday. Her singular, obstinate sensuality formed me like no other. I’m beyond bereft.

To people in the know, Eve Babitz was the West Coast It Girl of the 1960s and ’70s. Born in May 1943, she marshaled Taurus’ practical magic from the start: Igor Stravinsky was her godfather and Greta Garbo, Bertrand Russell, and Charlie Chaplin, her family friends. A self-proclaimed “groupie-adventuress,” she designed album covers for Linda Ronstadt, the Byrds, and Buffalo Springfield, befriended everyone from Frank Zappa to Salvador Dali, and counted Steve Martin, Jim Morrison, Harrison Ford, and Annie Lebowitz among her many lovers. She was the nude girl in that famous photograph of Marcel DuChamp playing chess, and an extra in Godfather II because, well–why not? But it was as a writer that she shined brightest.

Babitz was living proof that muses could be the sharpest tacks in the room. Her writing was so lush and lean that she made us believe lush and lean were not mutually exclusive. Only Eve could inspire you to buy seven caftans and all the ingredients of a tequila sunrise after reading 10 pages of her book. The cocaine and caviar were optional.

I first discovered Babitz at age 9. Prowling a yard sale, I found a dog-eared copy of her Slow Days Fast Company, and devoured it without grasping a quarter of the references. (Poppers? Ménage à trois? It all sounded delicious.) Her well-read, half-bred, doggedly unwed perceptions imprinted on me, though. Like me, she had a gorgeous shiksa mother and a brainy Jewish dad and like me she rejected “niceness” on the grounds that it precluded too much pleasure and too many good points.

She was my kind of Eve.

Babitz’s languid self-enchantment and self-reckoning taught me to value my own delight. It’s not that she didn’t value beauty–she worshipped it–but she had no patience for arranging herself to satisfy another’s gaze. In recent years, she’d become more of a recluse but her stubborn magic continued to find self-proclaimed goddaughters like myself. Girls who didn’t want to be chicks so much as broads, girls who wanted to befriend the people they bedded, not wed them. Her words will forever evoke a paradise found, and her faith in authentic pleasure will endure as a treasure map to our own.

Please yourself today in the name of Lady Eve.

Red Is the Color of My Bloody, Bloody Heart

October 14, 2021 in Age Matters, Essays, Sabboytical, Style Matters

The last time I had sex, I lost my red glasses though I didn’t know it at the time. If I did, I doubt I would have lingered too long on the symbolism. It would have been too bald.

What aren’t you seeing? Everything you don’t want to see.

I did not realize the glasses were missing until three days after the sexual interlude. I rotate through many pairs depending on how I want to look as I look upon the world.

On the day I lost this pair, I was wearing all red. Not the dark, dried-blood shade that feels like a waste of a good thing, but the orange-inflected tomato that enlivens the Sioux and Semitic strains of my DNA. The red that makes my hair and skin glow.

I wear it when I wish to activate myself and everyone around me.

I have many, many tubes of lipstick in this color. I wear it even when I am wearing a mask. This red exudes a power not merely visual. An energy frequency that’s maybe even a microwave ray. Havana Syndrome: the lipstick edition. Continue Reading →

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