los angeles fiction eve babitz interview by EVIANA HARTMAN photography by JULIAN WASSER “Culturally, LA has always been a humid jungle alive with seething LA projects that I guess people from other places just can’t see. It takes a certain kind of innocence to like LA, anyway. It requires a certain plain happiness inside to be happy in LA, to choose it and be happy here. When people are not happy, they fight against LA and say it’s a ‘wasteland’ and other helpful descriptions.” — Eve’s Hollywood [1974] Eve Babitz has insisted she’s not an “LA writer”: she simply wrote books about people who live there. But as a radiographer of human nature, she was in the right place at the right time — the city’s heyday of late-20th-century decadence: she portrayed benders at the Chateau Marmont in her 1977 magnum opus Slow Days, Fast Company; Beverly Hills baby showers…