Setting Times stories to music: From Springsteen to Nada Surf
The Great Reads had a lovely arc this week: Two were by reporters at the opposite ends of their careers, both having their first-ever Column Ones (the retro print name for the feature).
Kate Mather is one of the Times’ young talents, and she proved she has a great eye for an offbeat story with Monday’s Great Read about Southern California’s “celebrity bears.”
And Paul West tweeted this about his profile of politician Cory Booker, which ran Wednesday: “my 1st-ever Column One in LAT and end of my daily journo run since 1973.”
Bookends like that make me happy, because they honor our richness of experience -- and also give us hope for the future.
And because my mind inevitably veers to music, I started trying to figure out the youngest singer I listened to this week, and the oldest.
Youngest: the freakishly gifted Jake Bugg, who was 18 when his first album was released. (Now he’s an old man of 19. I always laugh at the lyric on one of his songs: “I’m an old dog/But I learned some new tricks yeah.”)
Oldest: the incomparable Johnny Cash, who was 64 when “Spiritual,” the song for Tuesday’s Great Read, was released.
They were born 62 years and two days apart, and I love them both.
Anyway, in these roundups of the week gone by, I’d like to offer the first paragraphs of each Great Read/Column One -- maybe they’ll buy your eye and you can settle in for a good weekend read. And you’ll also get the songs that inspired me while editing the stories, or reading them later if my fellow editor Millie Quan ushered them through. A story-song combo!
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Bad news bears
On a mid-November day in 1933, seven men and a woman crowded around a pickup parked near Big Bear Lake, wooden crates stacked high in the bed.
The cargo came from Yosemite National Park, part of a pilot program that officials hoped would flourish in the forests of Southern California. The containers were opened and the group waited, a camera at the ready.
Then came the bears.
“One bear leaped from the open door of its cage, charged at the camera and when within a dozen feet of it, suddenly sat down and quietly studied the strange contraption,” a Los Angeles Times article reported, “allowing plenty of time for a picture before it scampered off into the woods.”
The six black bears that tumbled out of the crates and into the wild that day weren’t just any animals. Along with 21 others sent south from Yosemite, they were the forefathers of the bears that roam the San Bernardino and San Gabriel mountains today.
Everyone knows Southern California’s celebrity bears: Glen Bearian, whose appetite for frozen Costco meatballs helped him earn 10,000 Twitter followers, and Samson, who fancied avocados and splashing in Monrovia’s Jacuzzis.
But these bears might just have mischief in their DNA: Their ancestors earned a one-way ticket south with high jinks of their own that exasperated wildlife officials — and entertained tourists.
#storysongs combo: “Just Like Honey,” by Jesus and Mary Chain. Are they under-appreciated because they were too shoegazing onstage? Unfair!
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Argentina’s ‘slum priests’ focus on helping over converting
They call the slums villas miserias, or little cities of misery. Instead of names, most have been assigned numbers by the Argentine government. Father Carlos Olivero lives in a small concrete church in the middle of Villa 21-24.
On a recent gray afternoon, he sat sipping yerba mate in a cold meeting room at the drug rehabilitation center he runs nearby. He was in a contemplative mood. A young addict he knew had died the day before.
“He was 24 years old,” Olivero said. “We all loved him. Things like this happen all the time here.”
Olivero is part of a line of “slum priests” who have worked for decades in the sprawling shantytowns worlds away from the tango salons and Parisian cafe culture of the other Buenos Aires.
He has scuffed work boots and dirty nails and hears confession from dealers and hit men. When residents spot his trashed 4x4 bumping down dirt roads, they call out his nickname: “Charly!”
He spends most of his time addressing practical rather than spiritual problems. That means navigating governmental bureaucracy, helping immigrants obtain state identification cards and finding beds to get addicts off the street.
“If we don’t get people a home, it’s insane to think about other kinds of lives for them,” Olivero said.
#storysongs combo: “Spiritual,” by Johnny Cash.
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Cory Booker: Just the kind of politician Jersey likes
Under a tent on a vacant block in one of Newark’s poorest neighborhoods, Cory Booker is riffing on the carbon footprint of vegetables.
Booker, the heavy favorite to become New Jersey’s next senator, is here to dedicate a community garden. But the mayor of this long-suffering city can see a lot more than peppers sprouting from the patch of reclaimed urban ground.
“From this plot of land, we are growing hope. We are growing change,” he says in a voice that booms. “Listen to me now!”
Grocers should be required to list the energy cost of their produce, he suggests, “because we’re killing our globe by trying to import food that we could be growing right here.”
A teetotaling vegetarian with a shaved head, Booker has earned an almost cartoonish reputation for thinking globally and acting locally. Last year, he hauled a neighbor from a burning house; he’ll finish this day by helping rescue a pit bull from a cage on a vacant lot. He’ll then tweet word of the dog’s rescue to his 1.4 million Twitter followers.
Through a combination of high-profile actions and relentless self-promotion (he’s on pace to compose his 30,000th tweet this year), Booker has become one of the Democratic Party’s most celebrated politicians. He’s also an upbeat and often eloquent reformer who has brightened the image of a city plagued by decades of official corruption and economic decline.
#storysongs combo: “Working on a Dream,” by Bruce Springsteen. Had to go with New Jersey’s most famous export for this one (although I’m sure Sinatra fans might protest that designation).
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A fiesta fit for a princess — for those willing to pay
Seven teenage boys dance diagonally across the chandeliered Van Nuys banquet hall to Selena’s “Dreaming of You.”
They move in a series of slides and toe taps as her breathy voice tells them: “Late at night when all the world is sleeping, I stay up and think of you.”
By the second verse, a round-faced boy in a baggy T-shirt flubs the footwork, sighs loudly and stops dancing. Then a short boy wearing a backward cap breaks into the Batusi move, sweeping horizontal peace signs over his eyes as the others laugh.
But 15-year-old Jorge Reyes, the tallest of the group, with an innuendo of a mustache, continues until the choreographer stops the music and reminds them that it’s the last practice before their friend Elvia Renteria’s quinceañera. And they need to add some oomph.
“You guys want swag — like models,” he screams. “Like professionals.”
Some of them laugh. Jorge nods. The song begins again.
This time, when the boys start to lose track of the tempo, they glance over at Jorge and examine the precision of every foot tap, arm pretzel and hip jab. He’s their cheat sheet, their peek at a professional chambelán.
Used to be, a Latina celebrating her coming of age chose a group of relatives, buddies and, sometimes, a boyfriend to be the tuxedo-clad escorts — chambelánes — at her 15th-birthday party. These young men would follow her father in a waltz and, later, a baile sorpresa (surprise dance).
Dance instructor Alberto Sanchez teaches Gabriela Ruiz, 14, some moves. More photos
But Elvia had chosen Jorge, a boy she had recently met in PE class, to be her chambelán de honor. And in an even bigger step away from tradition, she was paying him to dance with her.
#storysongs combo: “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon,” by Urge Overkill. Yes, it’s creepy—but not as creepy as the original, by Neil Diamond.
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Verse, and more, are for sale at the Poem Store
Jacqueline Suskin sits like an old-fashioned secretary between a lemonade stand and two guys selling hummus at the Hollywood Farmers Market. A sea-green typewriter rests on the tiny wooden table in front of her. Scotch-taped to the table is a letter-pressed sign that reads:
Poem Store.
Your Subject Your Price.
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Yes.
Kreigh Hampel, a regular Poem Store customer, stops by, weighed down with half a dozen canvas bags filled with vegetables and stone fruits. Sweating beneath his slate gray glasses on this warm Sunday, he disentangles himself from his produce and requests a poem titled “Since Wednesday.”
Suskin repeats the words and loads her typewriter — a vintage Hermes — with a sheet of stenograph paper no wider than a receipt. She bends her head and, without pausing to think, begins to type.
Time has moved along
slowly, inching with heat
and asking us to understand
what can happen in a single
day, in the rise of a week....
Less than three minutes and six lines later, the poem is complete. Suskin pulls it out of the typewriter and reads it out loud. She hands Hampel the paper and he gives it another read. Then he looks up with reddened eyes.
“So, Marta started chemo on Wednesday,” he says.
Suskin nods.
It is not the first time one of her poems has made someone cry that day.
#storysongs combo: “Paper Boats,” by Nada Surf. The song may have nothing to do with poetry, but the band’s lyrics seem like something Suskin might write. For this song, I imagine someone asking for a poem about the subway. “As the express train passes the local/It moves by just like a paper boat/Although it weighs a million pounds/I swear it almost seems to float/And as we pass by each other/Our heads all full of bother/We can’t look, we can’t stop/We can’t think, we can’t stop/Because we’re stuck in our own paths.”
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If you have ideas for story-song pairings of your own, tweet the title and artist to @karihow or @LATimesColumn1 with the hashtag #storysongs.
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