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La Vida Intermitente
The novel narrates the filming of a documentary interview with a 16 mm camera. about life and professional career of two musicians, Boris and Margo, a couple of extravagant, cosmopolitan, lonely, unorthodox artists and intellectuals, unleashed by conventions, modes and fashions. Throughout the interview, which takes place in an unusual setting: the decaying and somewhat chaotic room of the Labyrinth Motel, not only a long and intimate conversation takes place, but an existential nude in which the characters, including the interviewer, introduces the reader into their complex and personal world full of rockabilly, images of the past, memories of happy and sour times, discoveries, revelations and a bunch of scenarios, philias and phobias in the form of fetishes, idols and art in all its forms. Elvis Presley, grunge poems and cult fiction, punk, sex, depression, the universe of the golden age of the real pin-ups, mysticism and realism, vintage, their fascination for shoes, film noir and series B movies, Henry Miller and other literary popes, a life full of intermittences that beats fast and at the rhythm of memories and sensations.
The story has neither time nor length. Each character plays his own role, without masks or disguises. Flashbacks intermingle like slides between each other's words.
Margo is considered a special woman to ordinary people, the press and her fans, and an interesting creature to her psychoanalyst. She is a rocker, punk and a fashion victim of everything prior to the 70s. She had a stormy love affair with a bisexual poet and pornographer, before meeting Boris, a suicidal romantic, a slim and handsome man, an incorruptible and non-conformist artist, who always wears women's shoes and dresses in permanent mourning black like Johnny Cash. She loves the aesthetics of the 50s but also fantasizes about the French bohemian of the first two decades of the 20th century. He writes fatal poems and likes to travel by road. The two complement each other because they are misfits with a talent for ripping music and raw poetry from their soul. They love each other more than a lot and that´s something the reader feels from ht beginning. The intermittences of their life are lights of hope in times of crisis, because everything passes and everything leaves a residue in the depths of life.
Ruth Baza, writer, journalist, former correspondent, photographer, antiques and art collector and an expert in antique fashion and textiles from Central Asia, traveler, foodie, specialized in the American counterculture, the beat movement, music, cinema, art and architecture, is widely recognized for her tailor-made interviews and her black and white portraits of personalities from around the world.
In this book she shed light on the aesthetics and meaning of the most alternative rock and arthouse cinema. This surprising and original story was born and published in 1999, and it is widely mentioned and cited by several authors as one of the most celebrated spanish book framed within the Generation X.
The intermittent life could be called a docubook written to be savored with all senses. A documentary narration, which combines the conventional novel with the interview and the architecture of a film script. It is a delusional and dogmatic story, a treatise on the best bad customs of art and culture.
The story has neither time nor length. Each character plays his own role, without masks or disguises. Flashbacks intermingle like slides between each other's words.
Margo is considered a special woman to ordinary people, the press and her fans, and an interesting creature to her psychoanalyst. She is a rocker, punk and a fashion victim of everything prior to the 70s. She had a stormy love affair with a bisexual poet and pornographer, before meeting Boris, a suicidal romantic, a slim and handsome man, an incorruptible and non-conformist artist, who always wears women's shoes and dresses in permanent mourning black like Johnny Cash. She loves the aesthetics of the 50s but also fantasizes about the French bohemian of the first two decades of the 20th century. He writes fatal poems and likes to travel by road. The two complement each other because they are misfits with a talent for ripping music and raw poetry from their soul. They love each other more than a lot and that´s something the reader feels from ht beginning. The intermittences of their life are lights of hope in times of crisis, because everything passes and everything leaves a residue in the depths of life.
Ruth Baza, writer, journalist, former correspondent, photographer, antiques and art collector and an expert in antique fashion and textiles from Central Asia, traveler, foodie, specialized in the American counterculture, the beat movement, music, cinema, art and architecture, is widely recognized for her tailor-made interviews and her black and white portraits of personalities from around the world.
In this book she shed light on the aesthetics and meaning of the most alternative rock and arthouse cinema. This surprising and original story was born and published in 1999, and it is widely mentioned and cited by several authors as one of the most celebrated spanish book framed within the Generation X.
The intermittent life could be called a docubook written to be savored with all senses. A documentary narration, which combines the conventional novel with the interview and the architecture of a film script. It is a delusional and dogmatic story, a treatise on the best bad customs of art and culture.
158 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 2000
2 people want to read
About the author
Ruth Baza
3 booksRuth Baza is a polymath artist whose work moves fluidly between literature, photography, visual arts, and the lifelong practice of documenting existence through diaries, correspondence, and thousands of unseen pages. Born into a life of movement and bohemia, she lived across half the globe from childhood and later settled in New York and Tokyo during the 1990s — two cities that shaped her voice, her gaze, and her instinct for blending cultures, aesthetics, and emotional truth.
Recognized early for her singular way of approaching people and stories, Baza pioneered a literary, intimate mode of dialogue that rejected formulaic structures. She has always been a storyteller first — someone who listens for pulse, fracture, silence, and the human truth beneath performance. This narrative instinct later became the foundation of her books, including La Vida Intermitente (1999), her most celebrated work, adapted for the stage by Portuguese playwright and director Pedro Penim.
Her parallel life as a photographer emerged from the same ethos. Between the late ’80s and 1999, while others documented, Baza revealed. She sought the humanity behind the façade, capturing artists in unguarded moments of vulnerability, motion, and grace. Her lens crossed paths with cultural figures who defined an era — Paul McCartney, Iggy Pop, Anjelica Huston, Hundertwasser, Slash, Kurt Cobain, Adam Ant, Tori Amos, Blur, KD Lang, Billy Idol, Yoko Ono — a constellation of icons seen not as celebrities but as human beings caught between myth and truth.
In 2026, her photographic legacy received major institutional recognition with the donation of two previously unseen portraits of Friedensreich Hundertwasser to the Hundertwasser Foundation in Vienna. Taken in 1997 at Café KunstHausWien, the images were incorporated into the foundation’s permanent archive and highlighted by the Spanish Embassy in Austria and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for their historical and artistic significance.
Baza’s visual work has been exhibited internationally, including La Femme en Construction — her most intimate and daring self‑portrait project — shown at MA‑EC Gallery in Milan, and her participation in From Her to Eternity: The Women Who Photograph Music, curated by Courtney Love in Chicago. Her images have appeared in cultural, fashion, and artistic contexts, from Mercedes‑Benz Fashion Week to the Levi’s On the Road project.
A lifelong collector and recycler of beauty, she has gathered textiles, objects, and fragments from all eras — a practice that mirrors her creative philosophy: nothing is ever static, everything can be transformed. This sensibility led her to found Time for Tea Studio in 2004 and, later, the Ruth Baza Archive in 2016, a living organism dedicated to preserving the emotional, artistic, and cultural evidence of a life lived inside the pulse of art, rebellion, and radical honesty.
Across all mediums, Baza’s work explores the porous borders between reality and distortion, body and myth, fracture and resilience. Her universe is guided by blur, instinct, heartbeat, and the belief that art is not a discipline but a way of inhabiting the world — a true ars vivendi translated into every form she touches.
Recognized early for her singular way of approaching people and stories, Baza pioneered a literary, intimate mode of dialogue that rejected formulaic structures. She has always been a storyteller first — someone who listens for pulse, fracture, silence, and the human truth beneath performance. This narrative instinct later became the foundation of her books, including La Vida Intermitente (1999), her most celebrated work, adapted for the stage by Portuguese playwright and director Pedro Penim.
Her parallel life as a photographer emerged from the same ethos. Between the late ’80s and 1999, while others documented, Baza revealed. She sought the humanity behind the façade, capturing artists in unguarded moments of vulnerability, motion, and grace. Her lens crossed paths with cultural figures who defined an era — Paul McCartney, Iggy Pop, Anjelica Huston, Hundertwasser, Slash, Kurt Cobain, Adam Ant, Tori Amos, Blur, KD Lang, Billy Idol, Yoko Ono — a constellation of icons seen not as celebrities but as human beings caught between myth and truth.
In 2026, her photographic legacy received major institutional recognition with the donation of two previously unseen portraits of Friedensreich Hundertwasser to the Hundertwasser Foundation in Vienna. Taken in 1997 at Café KunstHausWien, the images were incorporated into the foundation’s permanent archive and highlighted by the Spanish Embassy in Austria and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for their historical and artistic significance.
Baza’s visual work has been exhibited internationally, including La Femme en Construction — her most intimate and daring self‑portrait project — shown at MA‑EC Gallery in Milan, and her participation in From Her to Eternity: The Women Who Photograph Music, curated by Courtney Love in Chicago. Her images have appeared in cultural, fashion, and artistic contexts, from Mercedes‑Benz Fashion Week to the Levi’s On the Road project.
A lifelong collector and recycler of beauty, she has gathered textiles, objects, and fragments from all eras — a practice that mirrors her creative philosophy: nothing is ever static, everything can be transformed. This sensibility led her to found Time for Tea Studio in 2004 and, later, the Ruth Baza Archive in 2016, a living organism dedicated to preserving the emotional, artistic, and cultural evidence of a life lived inside the pulse of art, rebellion, and radical honesty.
Across all mediums, Baza’s work explores the porous borders between reality and distortion, body and myth, fracture and resilience. Her universe is guided by blur, instinct, heartbeat, and the belief that art is not a discipline but a way of inhabiting the world — a true ars vivendi translated into every form she touches.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 4, 2012
Es una novel escrita para los amantes del grunge, del 'rockabilly', los adolescentes incomprendidos y los nostálgicos de las épocas que no vivieron. Es una historia de amor que por sus propios personajes no permite que la cursilería los pudra, pero sí, en algunos momentos se torna dulce.
La historia de unos zapatos, de unos personajes para esos zapatos.
La historia de unos zapatos, de unos personajes para esos zapatos.
April 23, 2026
A Lynchian love‑knot of memory, music, and two souls who refuse to die quietly
La Vida Intermitente is the kind of novel that doesn’t just tell a story. It pulls you into a room and closes the door behind you. That room is the Labyrinth Motel, a place that feels half‑real, half‑dream, where the walls hum with old electricity and memories rise like steam from the carpet. It’s here that Boris and Margo sit in front of an interviewer’s camera, and everything they’ve tried to bury begins to surface.
Boris is all edges and tenderness, a musician who carries the entire punk‑surf‑rockabilly lineage in his bones. Margo is a flicker of black‑and‑white cinema, a woman who speaks like someone translating her own heartbeat. Together, they’re magnetic, not because they’re perfect, but because they’re raw, two people who love each other with the kind of devotion that feels almost dangerous.
One of the most beautiful threads in the book is their ritual of interchanging clothes and shoes. It’s not a gimmick or a kink; it’s a language. A way of saying I see you. I carry you. I am you for a moment. It’s pure love, stripped of performance.
The interviewer — the third presence in this triangle — tries to stay objective, but the room won’t let her. She becomes part of the emotional circuitry, drawn into the strange gravity between Boris and Margo. Her camera doesn’t just record; it absorbs.
Music runs through the novel like a pulse. Not background music — real music, the kind that scars you in the best way. The Cramps hover over the story like patron saints of beautiful chaos. Their influence isn’t decorative; it’s philosophical. Ruth Baza writes from the same place where Lux Interior and Poison Ivy created: that borderland where desire, death, humor, and metaphysics collide. You can feel the echo of real conversations, real encounters, real sparks.
The whole book has a Lynchian quality, not in the sense of imitation, but in the way it captures the uncanny tenderness of damaged people trying to tell the truth. It’s indie, it’s decadent, it’s intimate. It’s about love as survival, memory as a trapdoor, and music as the only honest language some people ever learn.
La Vida Intermitente is messy, gorgeous, and alive.
A novel that lingers like the last note of a song you don’t want to end.
La Vida Intermitente is the kind of novel that doesn’t just tell a story. It pulls you into a room and closes the door behind you. That room is the Labyrinth Motel, a place that feels half‑real, half‑dream, where the walls hum with old electricity and memories rise like steam from the carpet. It’s here that Boris and Margo sit in front of an interviewer’s camera, and everything they’ve tried to bury begins to surface.
Boris is all edges and tenderness, a musician who carries the entire punk‑surf‑rockabilly lineage in his bones. Margo is a flicker of black‑and‑white cinema, a woman who speaks like someone translating her own heartbeat. Together, they’re magnetic, not because they’re perfect, but because they’re raw, two people who love each other with the kind of devotion that feels almost dangerous.
One of the most beautiful threads in the book is their ritual of interchanging clothes and shoes. It’s not a gimmick or a kink; it’s a language. A way of saying I see you. I carry you. I am you for a moment. It’s pure love, stripped of performance.
The interviewer — the third presence in this triangle — tries to stay objective, but the room won’t let her. She becomes part of the emotional circuitry, drawn into the strange gravity between Boris and Margo. Her camera doesn’t just record; it absorbs.
Music runs through the novel like a pulse. Not background music — real music, the kind that scars you in the best way. The Cramps hover over the story like patron saints of beautiful chaos. Their influence isn’t decorative; it’s philosophical. Ruth Baza writes from the same place where Lux Interior and Poison Ivy created: that borderland where desire, death, humor, and metaphysics collide. You can feel the echo of real conversations, real encounters, real sparks.
The whole book has a Lynchian quality, not in the sense of imitation, but in the way it captures the uncanny tenderness of damaged people trying to tell the truth. It’s indie, it’s decadent, it’s intimate. It’s about love as survival, memory as a trapdoor, and music as the only honest language some people ever learn.
La Vida Intermitente is messy, gorgeous, and alive.
A novel that lingers like the last note of a song you don’t want to end.
April 21, 2026
“La Vida Intermitente” is the kind of book that doesn’t simply ask to be read — it asks to be inhabited. It flickers like a 16mm reel rescued from a basement, all grain and ghosts and sudden beauty. Ruth Baza writes with the pulse of someone who has lived inside music, photography, and the dangerous tenderness of real encounters.
The novel begins as a filmed interview and unravels into something far more intimate: a drifting, hypnotic confession between two misfits, Boris and Margo, whose voices feel as raw and unfiltered as a lost bootleg tape. The atmosphere is thick with rockabilly shadows, grunge‑era melancholy, fetish relics, and the kind of nocturnal poetry you only hear at 3 a.m. when the world is quiet enough for truth.
As a lifelong music lover, I felt the presence of The Cramps, Poison Ivy, and Lux Interior humming underneath every page — not as references, but as spirit guides. The book carries that same feral glamour, that mix of danger and tenderness, that sense of art made from the edges of life. It’s punk, but it’s also cinematic, lyrical, and unexpectedly vulnerable.
Baza’s prose is a rare thing: sharp but compassionate, stylish without pretension, intimate without exhibitionism. She writes like someone who understands the emotional archaeology of objects, gestures, silences. The narrative fractures and reforms like a mixtape — each fragment a track, each track a mood, each mood a revelation.
What moved me most is how the book refuses to domesticate memory. It keeps its wildness. It keeps its bruises. It keeps its beauty.
It’s a road‑movie of the soul, a docu‑novel that feels both meticulously crafted and gloriously uncontained.
For readers who crave literature that feels alive, atmospheric, and defiantly personal, La Vida Intermitente is a treasure.
For those of us who know Ruth —her eye, her archive, her courage— it’s something even more: a testament to a life lived with art as compass and witness.
I loved every page.
The novel begins as a filmed interview and unravels into something far more intimate: a drifting, hypnotic confession between two misfits, Boris and Margo, whose voices feel as raw and unfiltered as a lost bootleg tape. The atmosphere is thick with rockabilly shadows, grunge‑era melancholy, fetish relics, and the kind of nocturnal poetry you only hear at 3 a.m. when the world is quiet enough for truth.
As a lifelong music lover, I felt the presence of The Cramps, Poison Ivy, and Lux Interior humming underneath every page — not as references, but as spirit guides. The book carries that same feral glamour, that mix of danger and tenderness, that sense of art made from the edges of life. It’s punk, but it’s also cinematic, lyrical, and unexpectedly vulnerable.
Baza’s prose is a rare thing: sharp but compassionate, stylish without pretension, intimate without exhibitionism. She writes like someone who understands the emotional archaeology of objects, gestures, silences. The narrative fractures and reforms like a mixtape — each fragment a track, each track a mood, each mood a revelation.
What moved me most is how the book refuses to domesticate memory. It keeps its wildness. It keeps its bruises. It keeps its beauty.
It’s a road‑movie of the soul, a docu‑novel that feels both meticulously crafted and gloriously uncontained.
For readers who crave literature that feels alive, atmospheric, and defiantly personal, La Vida Intermitente is a treasure.
For those of us who know Ruth —her eye, her archive, her courage— it’s something even more: a testament to a life lived with art as compass and witness.
I loved every page.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews