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La vida intermitente
La Vida Intermitente de Baza Ruth. B., Mondadori, 1999.
Paperback
Published January 1, 1999
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 of 1 review
April 23, 2026
La Vida Intermitente unfolds like a reel of lost footage discovered in the back room of a record store — grainy, intimate, and vibrating with the kind of truth people usually hide. The entire novel orbits around a single location: the Labyrinth Motel, a place that feels stitched together from memory, dream logic, and the residue of too many nights lived too intensely.
Inside that room, Boris and Margo sit before an interviewer who thinks she’s there to document a story. What she doesn’t realize is that she’s stepping into a closed circuit of love, pain, and shared mythology.
Boris carries the aura of someone who has lived inside music — not the polished kind, but the raw, sweat‑stained lineage of punk, surf, and rockabilly. He speaks like a man who has survived his own soundtrack. Margo, meanwhile, is all atmosphere: a woman who seems to flicker between timelines, as if she’s both here and somewhere else entirely. Together, they form a bond that feels less like romance and more like alchemy.
One of the most striking elements is their ritual of swapping clothes and shoes. It’s tender, strange, and deeply symbolic — a way of dissolving the borders between them. A gesture of love that feels almost sacred.
The interviewer becomes the unexpected third point in this triangle. She tries to remain neutral, but the room has its own gravitational pull. The more Boris and Margo unravel, the more she becomes entangled in their emotional circuitry. Her presence adds a quiet tension, a reminder that witnessing someone’s truth is never passive.
Music is the novel’s bloodstream. The spirit of The Cramps pulses through the pages — not as nostalgia, but as philosophy. Ruth Baza writes from the same place where Lux Interior and Poison Ivy created: that wild intersection of desire, death, humor, and metaphysics. You can feel the echo of real encounters, real conversations, real sparks that left a mark.
The whole book has a Lynchian glow: dreamy, unsettling, tender, and slightly off‑axis. It’s indie in the best sense — unpolished, fearless, emotionally precise. A story about two people who love each other with a kind of beautiful recklessness, and a third who tries to capture their truth without losing herself in the process.
La Vida Intermitente is a novel about memory, music, and the strange ways people save each other.
Inside that room, Boris and Margo sit before an interviewer who thinks she’s there to document a story. What she doesn’t realize is that she’s stepping into a closed circuit of love, pain, and shared mythology.
Boris carries the aura of someone who has lived inside music — not the polished kind, but the raw, sweat‑stained lineage of punk, surf, and rockabilly. He speaks like a man who has survived his own soundtrack. Margo, meanwhile, is all atmosphere: a woman who seems to flicker between timelines, as if she’s both here and somewhere else entirely. Together, they form a bond that feels less like romance and more like alchemy.
One of the most striking elements is their ritual of swapping clothes and shoes. It’s tender, strange, and deeply symbolic — a way of dissolving the borders between them. A gesture of love that feels almost sacred.
The interviewer becomes the unexpected third point in this triangle. She tries to remain neutral, but the room has its own gravitational pull. The more Boris and Margo unravel, the more she becomes entangled in their emotional circuitry. Her presence adds a quiet tension, a reminder that witnessing someone’s truth is never passive.
Music is the novel’s bloodstream. The spirit of The Cramps pulses through the pages — not as nostalgia, but as philosophy. Ruth Baza writes from the same place where Lux Interior and Poison Ivy created: that wild intersection of desire, death, humor, and metaphysics. You can feel the echo of real encounters, real conversations, real sparks that left a mark.
The whole book has a Lynchian glow: dreamy, unsettling, tender, and slightly off‑axis. It’s indie in the best sense — unpolished, fearless, emotionally precise. A story about two people who love each other with a kind of beautiful recklessness, and a third who tries to capture their truth without losing herself in the process.
La Vida Intermitente is a novel about memory, music, and the strange ways people save each other.
Displaying 1 of 1 review