Confessional Hijinx: Eve Babitz, Baker 3, and Hollywood High

Presented at Slow Impact, a conference about skateboarding, 02.19.2024

Characters in order of appearance:

Andrew Reynolds: Pro skater featured in the 2005 video, Baker 3 , founded of Baker Skateboards in 2000, Thrasher Magazine Skater of The Year 1998.

Eve Babitz: Writer and artist, class of Hollywood High 1961, her novel Eve’s Hollywood was published in 1974.

Atiba Jefferson: Prolific skate photographer, documented much of Andrew Reynolds’ career. 

Erik Ellington: Pro skater featured in Baker 3, founder of Deathwish Skateboards, Baker’s sister company. 

Jamie Foy: Pro skater for Deathwish Skateboards, Thrasher Magazine Skater of The Year 2017. 

Antwuan Dixon: Pro skater featured in Baker 3 with his debut video part. 

French Fred: Skate filmer and photographer who developed a very unique filming technique involving tracking and zoom that has been referred to as the “frangle”.  

Patrick O’Dell: Skate photographer and creator of the Epicly Later’d documentary series.

Joan Didion: Writer who worked in fiction, journalism, and screenplay, her novel Play It As It Lays was published in 1970.  

Tony Cervantes: Pro skater featured in Zero Skateboards’ 2005 video New Blood.

Chris Cole: Pro skater featured in New Blood, Thrasher Magazine Skater of The Year 2005 and 2009.

Jamie Thomas: Pro skater featured in New Blood, founded of Zero Skateboards in 1996.

Beagle: Filmer for Baker Skateboards.

Terry Kennedy: Pro skater featured in Baker 3. 

Lou Reed: Musician and Poet, his song “Street Hassle” is part of Baker 3’s soundtrack.

Kevin “Spanky” Long: Pro skater featured in Baker 3, currently works as Baker’s art director.

Ali Boulala: Pro skater featured in Baker 3, though he was actually sponsored by Flip Skateboards he was a close friend of the crew. The name, Baker, was inspired by his nickname, “Baker Boy”, a reference to his weed habit. 

I. 16, ‘61, 12

The first trick popped is an attempted frontside flip over the rail at Hollywood 16. The board lands upside down in a loud VX1000 crack and Reynolds tumbles out of a feet first landing. A woman with a camcorder films from the sidewalk, outside of the high black gates that separate the high school from the general public. She laughs as he falls. Maybe she’s a sadist, or maybe her seeing him get up and try again communicates to her that the fall was not as painful as it looked. Baker 3 is about a minute and a half into its runtime and the onlooking woman’s footage is, unfortunately, not shown in the video.

“...if you drive by Hollywood High these days it looks pretty rough, it doesn’t look like paradise, but at the time it was kind of full of starlets,” explains biographer Lili Anolik, of the school Eve Babitz graduated from in 1961. The school cannot be detached from its social geography; Hollywood High’s mascot, the sheik, is taken from the 1921 film of the same name with Rudolph Valentino as the title character. Babitz was a sheik, she was an artist, a child of artists, a “daughter of the wasteland”. She made collages and shot photographs that would end up on the covers of albums by Laurel Canyon folkies. She socialized at the Chateau Marmont and the Beverly Hills Hotel: she never associated creativity with seriousness or despair with depth. Her lifestyle was an art action and there was profundity in the lightness of how she lived.

At 14, Eve began writing her memoirs, with the title, I Wouldn’t Raise My Kid in Hollywood, and in her book, Eve’s Hollywood, published in 1974 when she was 30, she warns that aside from, “death and moving, there was the additional danger of growing up in Hollywood of having your schoolmate be ‘discovered’.” Eve was not a starlet, but she did not resent fame or Hollywood. What she resented was being told what to do. After her early graduation from Hollywood High, she declared the profession of, “adventuress”, and fully lived up to that title.  

Discovery via Hollywood High is not unique to movie stars. As Atiba puts it, “If you’re a pro skater and you need to stop the world of skateboarding, you go there and do something. You want to get noticed? You go there and do something.” For two and a half decades now the stairs at Hollywood High have shaped big street skating. An elevated platform with a steep set of 12 stairs on one side, a set of 16 on the opposite with a mellower descent, and a decently long run-up in between. Both sets have an unkinked round rail running down the center with no evidence of any knobs or skate stoppers having ever been fixed onto or pried off of.

In Baker 3, Erik Ellington frontside noseslides the 12 in his unique, lazy style. In Ellington’s words, “the architecture of [Hollywood High] symbolizes what I envisioned a Los Angeles high school to look like. There’s something beautiful about it even without knowing what the history of skateboarding is. You’re just gonna look at the two sets of stairs or sit and look at the mural. It’s kind of like an altar.”

Before we see Ellington on the 12, he strings together a beautifully symmetrical line on an asphalt schoolyard beginning with a switch flip front tail to regular on a bench, into a kickflip front nose to fakie on the top of a picnic table. What I will call modern skateboarding, Dogtown to present, was formed in California schoolyards. Before the table-skating demonstrated by Ellington, skaters mimicked the motions of surfing by carving asphalt banks and eventually brought those movements to empty pools. This setting is secluded, taking place with no students on campus and far enough away from the street to go unnoticed by pedestrians. Ellington’s “altar”, by comparison, is spectacular. 

A scrapbook photo in Eve’s Hollywood shows her classmates picnicking on a lawn surrounded by palm and banana trees, significantly more inviting than blacktop and benches. Eve remembers Hollywood High as always being, “unshaded by the banana trees that grew in profusion near the buildings.” The school, as a physical space, is in the spotlight and this means that it’s more than just the homies on the session when one skates there.

“Even when nothing would happen, it was still fun because it’s super active right there,” remarks Andrew Reynolds, “When you drive by, it’s fun to pull over and watch and yell out ‘get it!’” Jamie Foy echoes this experience, saying that at Hollywood High there is always a, “big squad and it accumulates even more, because people walking down the side of the street just start watching and start talking. Like, ‘Whoa, what are you doing?’” The skater jumping down the stairs is in the spotlight. Hollywood High forces skaters into performance, which is why it is often described as a “proving ground” for hopeful skate starlets.    

Eve was able to skip the tenth grade and then took summer classes to shorten her overall time at Hollywood High. Her freshman year was spent at the more suburban and modest, Marshall High, where she enrolled using a fake address. She did this to avoid, “cunty peers who whispered and squealed and giggled and screamed about who was being rushed by what sorority.”

Eve found the social hierarchy of Hollywood High unappealing. More so than any subject matter she “learned irrevocably that beauty is power and the usual bastions of power are powerless when confronted by beauty.” 

“A blonde girl with Estonian slanting green eyes and high, wide cheekbones made an English teacher apologize in front of an entire class for telling her to be quiet during a test–her pout was devastating and tragic and universally personal.” Eve referred to this elite group of girls wielding this special power by the depth of their rank, ‘The 20’. Hollywood High’s administration recognized that The 20’s sororities were an exclusionary distraction, but when the administration attempted to dismantle the sororities, the rest of the school revolted in a student-led assembly. The students of Hollywood High were captivated by the gossip generated by The 20 and would not go without the entertainment it provided. The principal was convinced to let the sororities exist as they had.

Though Eve was beautiful, she chose to watch The 20 from the sidelines. Eve was beautiful in a way that had not yet hit Hollywood, a hipper beauty. Recalling her 18-year-old style, she says, “Nobody was looking like Brigitte Bardot yet but me…a tall, clean, California Bardot with too much brown eyeliner [and] too messy hair…” Eve was too cool for school. 

In my highschool, I was pretty and smart and scornful and impatient. I scorned American history, which I thought was capitalist propaganda. I despised art class because it had nothing to do with adventure; I hated gym because I hated lines. I was usually triumphant and had fun being wide-eyed and sarcastic in class.  

For students who would not be “discovered”, Hollywood High was a pipeline to UCLA. It was the route her teachers expected her to take. She went to Los Angeles City College, a higher-ed experience that would not interfere with her career as an adventuress.

The mural Ellington mentions was painted in 2002 by Eloy Torrez and is titled “Portrait of Hollywood”. It features 13 famous actors, eight of whom were graduates of Hollywood High. Eve is not in this portrait. She was not in Hollywood, in terms of a career in the film industry, but she, unapologetically, was Hollywood. Eve’s Hollywood was verdant and audacious and dangerous, the kind of danger that was still fun. The outlaw Hollywood of Brando in Viva Zapata and One-Eyed Jacks. “...Marlon Brando it was. UCLA didn’t stand a chance.”

A true California girl, the summer Eve was 14 she spent every day at Roadside Beach.

...a lot of kids from West LA went there–tough kids with knives and razors, tire irons, and lowered cars. No kids from my school or any of the schools nearby went to Roadside, they went to Sorrento where there were never any fights and where most of the kids from Hollywood High, Fairfax, and Beverly spent their summers listening to “Venus” on the radio or playing volleyball. If I had only known about Sorrento, I never would have gone to the beach so passionately, since Sorrento was a dispassionate beach involved mainly in the junior high and high school ramifications of polite society, sororities, Seventeen Magazine, football players and not getting your hair wet.

Roadside was, in spirit, the beach of Dogtown, of Black Flag, of Suicidal Tendencies. The beach of Marlon Brando. Eve discovered Roadside through a friend's cousin named Carol. Carol “...could have been one of those perky types with the ponytail and the rolled-up jeans and called ‘adorable’ because she was small and had large blue eyes. But there was something luxuriously corrupt about here…” Carol showed Eve how to body surf, it was the surf that got Eve hooked on Roadside. The violence and gangs seemed to excite Eve more than frighten her, but even if the danger did put her off, the surf was too good. She got her hair wet, well worth it for the rush of riding a wave.     

Antwuan Dixon had no tricks at Hollywood High in his Baker 3 part. There was nothing performative about his style, he was composed even when skating big shit. In the backgrounds of his clips there are no squads, just filmers and photographers, sometimes a homie or two. The nollie bigspin down 11 stairs, popping, catching, and landing the trick as though his feet were magnetically connected to the bolts. Flying backwards down 14 stairs with a fakie ollie, maintaining control with a slight shifty and his arms at his sides, completely stabilizing himself through the core of his body. His part breaks from the fast editing we see in most of the video. A backside noseslide down a mellow seven stair rail transitions into slow motion as he spins a backside 270 out. The camera zooms in and out and tracks away from Antwuan as he slides, a shot heavily inspired by French Fred’s work in Menikmati. 

Skating Hollywood High is a way to contribute to the geographic history of skateboarding, for a skater to prove that they are at the same caliber as those who have skated it before. There are other ways to bring skateboarding to a halt though, Antwuan was unknown until Baker 3 but his part got the kids HYPED. Patrick O’Dell recalls that at the premier, “people were yelling at the screen, standing on their seats, it was a really triumphant entrance into skating.” Antwuan could have put down NBD’s at Hollywood High, Eve could have too. They both knew they were special talents and didn’t need a crowd to motivate them. Eve was not afraid of the 16 stairs and not afraid of the 12, not afraid of the crowded session or the woman filming from beyond the gate, not afraid of Hollywood High and certainly not of Hollywood, but the moment that Reynolds would park his car and yell “get it!”, she would lose interest.     

II. Lady Dana Wreaths, Maria Wyeth, ‘Cobra’ Cole

Joan Didion and Eve Babitz were both photographed by Julian Wasser. For Didion, it was her author photo, she is standing and smoking, arms crossed, with a curious half smile. The photograph feels obligatory, something she just needed to do for her publisher. In Wasser’s photo of Eve, she is naked playing chess with Marcel Duchamp.

Didion showed interest in Eve’s work early on; she helped Eve get published in Rolling Stone with her piece, The Sheik. The Sheik would find its way into Eve’s Hollywood and is its darkest chapter. This is where Eve defines The 20 and sharpens her focus on a girl named Carolyn, the most beautiful of the most beautiful. “If I told you what she looked like, you’d say I was too extravagant,” says Eve. 

Carolyn drifted, indifferent to seemingly everything, the care of her sorority was required for her to function academically and socially, they picked her class schedule for her and arranged her weekend plans. “It wasn’t that she was retarded; it was just that she couldn’t scrape up a sliver of interest in the proceedings and couldn’t see why she should…” Carolyn’s beauty gave her power and the way she wielded it was in the form of apathy. She didn’t need to be anything other than beautiful, she let others pick up the slack and they did so gladly, amplifying her disinterest. She did suffer though, “violent” menstrual cramps would keep, “her on the nurse’s cot every month for three days.” The medical profession has a long history of ignoring pain that is specific to womens’ biology. Carolyn’s physical wounds made her mentally numb.      

Didion’s novel, Play It As It Lays, is set in Hollywood in the same time period as Eve’s Hollywood. Maria Wyeth, the protagonist of Play It As It Lays, shares Carolyn’s numbness. Maria is an actress and is cornered by her abusive husband, Carter, a director. Carter directs Maria in Angel Beach, a feature where her character is raped by a biker gang. “Carter’s original cut ended with a shot of the motorcycle gang, as if they represented some reality not fully apprehended by the girl Maria played…” After seeing this cut, BZ, an industry friend, critiques Carter’s direction, “‘The rough cut looked fantastic except you're missing the story… how did Maria feel about the gangbang, the twelve cocks, did she get the sense that they’re not doing it to her but to each other, does that interest her, you don’t get that…’” Carter takes a moment to respond, but his only defense is that, “‘It’s a commercial picture…’”

Maria, in her own life and on screen, knows she does not deserve to be treated as she is, but is so burdened with the abuse that she can’t muster the energy to fight back. “The notion of general devastation had for Maria, a certain sedative effect…”

At 25, Carolyn had a fatal overdose. Her cramps persisted and she was not relieved by painkillers. The day she died, “she took three times as many pills as she was supposed to, and some amphetamine because she had an appointment. She had been unhappy…she was on her second divorce.”

Maria is able to divorce Carter on the uncontested charge of “mental cruelty”. She is tortured throughout the novel and her torturers make up the entirety of her social circle. She is victim of date-rape. After her rapist does a hit of poppers and passes out, she steals his car and drives from LA to the Nevada Desert, where she grew up. She ends up pulled over for speeding and then thrown in jail because the car had been reported missing and there was cannabis in her possession. Maria’s agent, Freddy Chaiken, is able to pull strings and get her out. They fly back to LA on a private jet and Freddy says to her: “‘I don’t understand girls like you…I would almost go so far as to call it…a very self destructive personality structure.’” Maria is blamed for her escape attempt and told that she is destroying herself. She receives no empathy and no one in her life tries to understand why she is miserable, they see her self-defense as acting out.      

Pro skaters make incredible physical sacrifices. In 2005, big stair and rail skating was rapidly progressing. This was the year Baker 3 came out, as well as Zero’s New Blood. Blood has been a part of Zero’s visual language since the brand’s inception. The animated titles in New Blood that introduce each skater, spell their name in a bloody typeface and after Tony Cervantes’ blood stain flashes on the screen we see a clip of him nollie flipping the Hollywood 12 (aside: Andrew Reynolds also does this trick in Baker 3, New Blood was released first). His board snaps on the landing, his front foot keeps rolling forward with the board while his back foot is planted on the ground. As his legs spread his back knee twists in a way that would make any skater wince, for a split second it looks like he may have torn a ligament, but he thankfully bounces back up.       

Slams are a significant portion of the footage in New Blood. In the ‘ender ender’, the last trick of the last part, Chris Cole is punished in a rapid montage that ends with a tre flip down Wallenberg. In 17 seconds of the edit he tries the trick seven times, each landing with his body scraping against rough asphalt. Joan Jett’s version of “Do You Want to Touch Me (Oh Yeah!)” has faded out, we only hear the sounds of the board rolling up and crashing to the ground, snapping in one of the clips. The most unsettling part is that Cole does not make a sound when he falls, no groans of agony or exclamations of “FUCK!”, he takes the beating, accepting that it would be a part of getting the trick.  

There is no dialogue from the skaters in New Blood. The editing goes from song to blood stain, to song to bloodstain, to song to bloodstain until Cole’s tre flip. The video’s tone is cold and stunted, much like Didion’s in Play It As It Lays where character’s speak to each other in fragmented dialogue, rarely going beyond a full sentence per exchange. There are chapters that play out an entire scene in one paragraph. This builds upon the lack of empathy shown toward Maria, everyone is too selfish to give her needs a complete thought. 

Didion does not shy away from blood either. Carter forces Maria to abort a child of whom he would not be the father. In this scene the word “scraping” is used many times. The abortion was performed illegally. In the weeks following Maria is bleeding heavily and eventually a piece of placenta is released from her body. She also begins having nightmares after the abortion, one recurring, that involves the plumbing of her home being backed up with, “...gray water bubbling up in every sink. Of course she could not call a plumber, because she had known all along what would be found in the pipes, what hacked pieces of human flesh.” Again women’s reproductive health is ignored and Maria feels shame both from the social stigma around the operation and her wish to carry out the pregnancy. The abortion happened to protect Carter’s reputation with no regard for Maria’s safety, free will, or right to her own body.     

In addition to the blood, Zero has a morbid iconography, with their skull being the most recognizable. Jamie Thomas used a Christian cross on many of his pro-models that feels more relative to a gravestone than to a church and as Chris Cole’s personal brand developed, the cobra became his signature graphic. Snakes appear throughout Play It As It Lays, including on the cover of the book. 

As Maria’s mental wellbeing declines she has to stop reading the newspaper, she is chilled by stories of disaster and can’t let them go. The most sinister of these articles, which she finds after the abortion and comes back to repeatedly, is about a rattlesnake in a child’s playpen. Her fixation is “punitive.” Didion’s symbology of the snake references Original Sin, the persecution and scapegoating of women who do not follow orders, even when those orders are as trivial as which fruits are acceptable to eat. Maria’s fight for her own survival is used by the others to justify their abuse of her.    

(Aside: I would like to state that I’m not making an equivalence between a skater getting beat up after jumping down a set of stairs and rape, domestic abuse or 2000+ years of biblical misogyny, but simply between the tone of ‘New Blood’ and of ‘Play It As It Lays’.)

The dedication of Eve’s Hollywood thanks, “the Didion-Dunnes for having to be who I’m not.” Didion is a character in Eve’s Hollywood, though her name is replaced with “Lady Dana Wreaths”. Eve was grateful for Didion’s help, they were friends and respected each other as artists, but Didion’s Hollywood was not Eve’s. Of Lady Dana Wreaths, Eve had “always kind of shrugged off her New Yorky quality, a kind of serious professionalism that didn’t allow for any fun. Her books were so brutally depressing, that the only way you could be happy about them was to appreciate the style.” Didion’s Hollywood is harrowing, the people are shallow and willing to tear each other down for miniature gains, Southern California’s sunshine and greenery are not worth mentioning, and no pleasure can come from sex or socializing or substances. 

Eve’s Hollywood is lightness and warmth and beauty and fun. She tells the story of Carolyn’s tragedy, but also tells us about her eyes. “Her eyes were the brazen blue–the same color–as the sky in back of the palm trees on the palisades in the summer–the blue that burned away at her pupils as the sky would have done to the palisades palms–the color blue that was so bright sometimes you had to squint.” Eve makes the reader fall in love not just with Carolyn or her eyes, but with the color blue. 

Eve had an immense appreciation for Hollywood and Los Angeles and its connection to nature. In the opening chapter of Eve’s Hollywood, titled “Daughters of the Wasteland”, Eve confronts the notion of LA being a patchwork of urban sprawl rather than a proper city. “‘Wasteland’ is a word I don’t understand anyway because physically, surely, they couldn’t have thought it was a wasteland–it has all these citrus trees and flowers growing everywhere.” She felt this connection not just in the hills and canyons, but in the gritty outskirts as well. In the onset of springtime she writes that she, “...was comforted because even in the flats of Hollywood which have come to be overlaid by strange hookers and other things I don’t even want to find out, it is still spring when it is spring.” 

Baker 3 does not shy away from grit, but between skate footage we don’t see bone-crunching slams, instead, beautiful montages of “hijinx” as termed and captured by Beagle. The hijinx are the absurdities of everyday life. They may seem random, but they fit seamlessly into the weave of the overall project. We see skaters falling down drunk , Beagle running from a man trying to steal his camera, a woman screaming at Antwuan in a thick caribbean patois, and and an unknown or unnamed skater atop the platform of the Hollywood High stairs using his board to stab downward at a pedestrian standing on the opposite side of the gates. We also see goofy rollerbladers and longboarders, and Terry Kennedy’s delivery of endlessly quotable lines. “Put the B in the Boss!”, “Y'all know it’s about to bang you over the head!”, and, pointing at the rims of his car, “When you fuck with Baker, that’s what you get!” 

A great skate video tells a story without telling you there is a story. Baker 3 shares Eve’s Hollywood’s embrace of life and the characters are rich and full of personality. Jumping down big shit is dangerous, but Baker 3 doesn’t make it look torturous. Eve rode the waves at Roadside Beach out of pure joy, and I can’t imagine Bryan Herman stalefish nose grinding Hollywood 12 for any other reason.      

This trick from Herman is the ender-ender of Baker 3. It is a bookend, on the opposite side of Hollywood High from where Reynolds is laughed at after bailing a frontside flip, it’s a celebration. David Bowie’s “Width of a Circle” closes out with a rumbling tympany and lush harmony. Beagle proves his artistry as a filmer with another rolling angle, this time following Herman as he rides towards the take-off then veering to the left as he descends down the rail, a slight zoom on the landing, ending with a pan to the brick wall below the mural. The screen fades to black and a closing montage of hijinx cools the engine.        

III. Talent, New York, Neuropsychiatric 

As Erik Ellington is introduced, a quick shot of the Hollywood sign flashes and a string arrangement begins to play. The strings are from Lou Reed’s, “Street Hassle” and they are replayed throughout the video–the hijinx’ soundtrack. I was fourteen when Baker 3 came out and didn’t know who Lou Reed was. Hannah, the owner of Talent Skatepark, warned my mom about the video’s flaunting of drugs and alcohol when I bought the DVD. I was into hardcore and considered myself straight edge. The drinking and drugs didn’t entice me or turn me off, but they were a device in telling a story I fell in love with, with characters I fell in love with.

The strings are there when Spanky focuses his board with a rock, sessions a garage door with Ali Boulala, stumbles drunk off of a flatbed truck, when he balances on the rear legs of a chair with a drink in hand and doesn’t spill a drop as the chair tips over, when he boardslides a sloping ledge with his knee tucked and hands pointed forward in a karate-kid-esque pose, and when he is face down on a couch, nearly passed out but still pressing the buttons of a video game controller. I thought Spanky was the coolest when I saw a photo of him winning Tampa Am in a chore coat and RVCA cap, but this showed me his personality. I didn’t want to get drunk with him, but I felt like I knew him, knew his genuine enthusiasm for life, knew what it was like to laugh with him.

How I felt watching Spanky at 14, is the same way I feel reading Eve Babitz for the first time at 32. I know Eve. I know her vitality. I know her beauty, her humor, and her confidence. And I know she loved colors. “...red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple and magenta and chartreuse and neon pink and brown and turquoise and cerise.”

The colors were what got Eve interested in psychedelics. She read Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception, a chronicle of an experience using mescaline, the writing did not inspire her, but she was jealous of his description of the way he saw colors. “...it sounded like he saw them better.” She was not able to find mescaline, but LSD was readily available in LA in the 60s. She needed to circumvent the hippies though, who “...were always begging for money from regular people and propounding that they ‘had’ The Answer.”

When Eve first used acid, she was in her hometown and,  

...things took on a shine. They became so completely beautiful and shiny that I kept being afraid that they would stop. Soon I could stand up in ENOUGH colors. Oh, at last, the childhood pain of color entered effortlessly and filled me with colors, all the ones I loved. Green, especially, stole the show. 

The fear of beauty walked the plank. Beauty was all there was.

“Street Hassle” is a different expression of drug use. It was released in 1978 after Lou Reed had already written “Heroin”, “I’m Waiting for the Man”, “Perfect Day”, and the Berlin album; he was a veteran of the drug ballad and “Street Hassle” would be his mountain top. It’s dark, it’s not as stark as Didion, more conversational, but it professes a disturbing sentiment I’ve heard from those who get heavily involved in drug scenes, that death is an accepted consequence of getting high. 

By the way, that's really some bad shit

That you came to our place with

But you ought to be more careful around the little girls

It's either the best or it's the worst

And since I don't have to choose, I guess I won't

And I know this ain't no way to treat a guest

But why don't you grab your old lady by the feet

And just lay her out in the darkest street

And by morning, she's just another hit and run 

“Street Hassle” is a New York story by a New York person in a New York that was nearly burned to the ground. Eve used LSD in New York and did not see color. Acid in New York left her with the word, “‘anxiety’ wedged into [her] frontal cortex. Anxiety, [she] thought, anxiety, anxiety, anxiety…Things were as ugly as they had been beautiful.” 

Baker 3’s hijinx transform the context of “Street Hassle”. Lou Reed’s vocals are omitted. I learned about Johnny Thunders, Morrissey, and Roxy Music from Baker 3, but even after years of rewatches I didn’t know Lou Reed. I thought strings were exclusive to classical and Lou’s voice and lyrics are what make “Street Hassle” a rock and roll song. I assumed that shotgunning beers to classical music was an ironic contrast, it was goofy and fun, everything that the lyrics are not. Even at the one point when the lyrics are heard, it is almost like they are being made fun of. The credits are hand-written on lined paper that Andrew Reynolds turns while holding a camera above. “Street Hassle,” plays from an external source captured by the mic of the camera and before Lou Reed even finishes a full stanza, Reynolds answers a phone call. “Hello? What’s up Beagle? Ah, nothing, um…” A complete afterthought.

The hippies that Eve would not buy acid from believed that psychedelics lead them to “the answer.” The lightest moments of Play It As It Lays are in Maria’s journal entries from her existence in the psychiatric hospital that becomes her home in the denouement. Maria is finally safe, but completely exhausted. She writes, “I used to ask questions, and I got the answer: nothing. The answer is nothing.” Lou Reed’s New York also believes that the answer is nothing. Eve’s Hollywood does not entertain the question and Eve’s Hollywood is Baker’s Hollywood. Drugs did have negative consequences for many in the Baker roster, but in Baker 3 the drug use is not flaunted to show skating as a life or death pursuit in a hopeless wasteland of a city, it is to see colors.  

Epilogue

The headline of Eve Babitz’ New York Times obituary described her as a “hedonist with a notebook”. I don’t think Eve would disagree, but I also think she would describe the headline as “cunty”.

Culturally, L.A. has always been a humid jungle alive with seething L.A. projects that I guess people from other places just can’t see. It takes a certain kind of innocence to like L.A., anyway. It requires a certain plain happiness inside to be happy in L.A., to choose it and be happy here. When people are not happy they fight against L.A. and say it’s a “wasteland” and other helpful descriptions.   

Alexis Castro’s 2019 article, How ‘Baker 3’ Banged Us Over the Head, was published by Jenkem Mag, another New York outlet, with a subheadline that describes the video as, “the most straightforward skate video of the 2000’s.” 

It’s easy to take misery seriously, when art deals with heavy subject matter critiquing it feels unfair. For art to be truly fun, it needs to be well-made, and when it is well-made and fun we have too much fun experiencing it to slow down and approach it critically. Baker 3 and Eve’s Hollywood are both so incredibly fun that they make time faster. This is an elusive storytelling skill, if something comes and goes so quickly it must be simple, but Baker 3 and Eve’s Hollywood are so fun because they’re about so many things all at once, so many small details presented so tightly and effectively, characters that you fall in love with at first sight, a beautiful setting. Hollywood as the garden of Eden, with fruit salad and “...whipped cream in a silver gravy dish…” like how they served Irish Coffee at the polo lounge.

…I believe that places should be capitalized. North, South, East, and West are all places as far as I’m concerned I don’t care what anyone else thinks. When I think of North, it’s capitalized. West, especially, is a serious place that should ALWAYS be capitalized. It also sounds more adventurous to go West than to go west.