Two Nine Four: Masks

I've been thinking about desire and enticements, about what we see in what we desire.

I've been reading about the Los Angeles club scene in the 1960s, reading books by Eve Babitz, who was the chronicler of that world. I've liked Babitz's stories and memoirs for a long time. Her "Slow Days, Fast Company", "L.A. Woman", and "Sex & Rage" have been favorites of mine since my days in grad school. She was always a better It Girl than any of the Manhattan scenesters. The Warhol girls may have been cool, but none of them got naked to play chess with Marcel Duchamp.

I suppose it was a combination of things that made me want to re-read Babitz. I'd seen the new documentary about Joan Didion and I'd just read Taylor Jenkins Reid's "Daisy Jones and the Six". And I'd seen "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood". All of that made me want to go back and re-read Eve Babitz, especially "Slow Days, Fast Company". Lovely short pieces, a lovely invocation of a Los Angeles I'll never see. Please call this a recommendation. Let me know what you think of Ms. Babitz.

A couple of weeks ago, I was fantasizing about the young Jane Birkin and the young Francoise Hardy-- two of my key Sixties Girls. I suppose reading "Slow Days, Fast Company" and "Daisy Jones and the Six" has made me fantasize about mid-Sixties California girls. I don't know what that means, and of course I haven't given up my dreams of being in Paris and London 1965 with Ms. Birkin and Mlle. Hardy. But I am going through a phase of L.A. girls in miniskirts and big sunglasses as images for desire.

How do desires and fetishes change? There are underlying points in all my fantasies; that much is always true. A certain age, long legs, a disdain for underwear, dark tans. a certain height and angular slender build. Those things are part of the definition of desire for me. But if some things are necessary for me to feel desire, periods and costumes and styles do change. Ms. Birkin and Mlle. Hardy are leggy Sixties girls, but they're not quite girls you can imagine partying with Eve Babitz at a party in Malibu. The trick, I suppose, is to find out what's behind the shifts in the precise forms of desire. And let's be  clear--- it's all as much about sets and settings as it is about the girls themselves.

Yesterday I walked from my office to a small burger joint to lunch. While I was waiting for my order I noticed a girl standing on line to pick up a take-away. I was struck very much coup de foudre with her.

Probably nineteen or twenty, tallish, slender. Streaked light-brown hair to her shoulders, light eyes, a seriously dark tan, perfect legs. A very tiny khaki miniskirt--- a look I haven't seen much of this spring and summer ---and cute sandals. And...a mask. She had on a black face mask. Somehow the mask made it all work. Somehow the mask made her desperately desirable. It is the season of the Red Death, and we're still in the midst of the pandemic. The mask may be the new normal for the rest of the year. After all, I was wearing one myself. But the mask and the miniskirt were a trigger for serious desire. I may have imagined her in the mask, those long legs over my shoulders. I may have imagined her gasping in orgasm through the mask.  I may have imagined those things, but I have no idea why they came to mind.  I'll certainly never know who she was, but it was the combination of mask and miniskirt that instantly made her a fantasy girl. So I suppose that Red Death face masks will become a fetish for me, the same way that ankle bracelets on lovely girls once did.

I've always needed the idea of sets and settings--- places, architecture, lighting, fashion ---for any fantasies to work. Right now it seems that I need the image of a certain kind of Sixties scene...and I may need lovely girls to wear face masks and tiny skirts. Or just the face mask.

But in any case, I have no idea where these images and fetishes come from.  I have no idea when and how they'll mutate or shift.  I'd still love to take the girl in the mask to a party at Ms. Babitz's house in the Canyons in some imaginary 1967, though.