Setting Times stories to music: Partridge Family to Paul Weller
One of this week’s stories is particularly dear to me: the Great Read about two men taking a months-long road trip as the last of the iconic VW buses were being built in Brazil.
Although I’ve never owned one (I’m a stick-shift-phobe), the VW bus has always been one of my favorites. Last year, some friends and I rented one for a weekend, and even in that short time we felt the VW love from just about everyone we passed.
The buses are so feel-good, I make a wish whenever I see one — they’re a personal good-luck talisman.
My neighborhood has two of them. One is beat up and rarely moves, so it’s almost a guaranteed wish each day. The other is all restored and bright green, and can disappear for months on end. Sometimes it’s gone so long I fear the owners have sold it. But then it reappears and I imagine all the great roads it’s been traveling and start daydreaming with my road atlas.
Anyway, in these roundups of the week gone by, I’d like to offer the first paragraphs of each Great Read (or, as they’re known in print, 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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On safari for San Pedro’s invasive lizards
Greg Pauly grabs a 12-foot pole out of the back of his truck and checks to make sure the little green noose at the end is still in working order.
It’s easier to noose a lizard than pounce on it, he explains.
Pauly, the curator of herpetology at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, has caught snakes in the mountains of Venezuela and studied frogs in the Panamanian rain forest. Today, however, he’ll be collecting specimens a little closer to home — scouring backyards and telephone poles in the not-so-wilds of San Pedro for bright green Italian wall lizards.
Joining Pauly on the lizard hunt are high school sophomore Hayden Kirschbaum and Hayden’s dad, Kenneth.
Hayden got a small grant from the Southern California Academy of Sciences to work with Pauly on the wall lizard project, and so one Sunday a month the Kirschbaums make the drive from their home in Santa Monica for this urban safari.
“Some fathers play ball with their sons,” Kenneth says. “We noose lizards. It’s still father-son time.”
#storysongs combo: “Reptile,” by the Church. Haven’t listened to this band in ages. They hold up!
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On Latin American road trip, VW bus is charming, disarming
The 1971 Volkswagen bus, painted in the green, yellow and white of Brazil’s flag, picked a good place to break down.
Emilio Zagaia and Felipe Luis da Costa had just arrived in the small Guatemalan city of Coban. They were two Brazilians in a strange town, but they received some unexpected help right away.
“The city’s local Volkswagen club is looking for you,” their mechanic told them. “They saw your car and took a picture of it.”
The “club” turned out to be Francisco and Karla Archila, owners of two Bugs — one pink, one white — and one bus. They stayed in the couple’s house, its walls covered by photos of Volkswagens, for a week.
They heard about more than 20 other VW travelers whom the Archilas, both 27, had taken in and had a “caipirinha night,” in which the travelers taught the locals how to make Brazil’s national drink.
As the last generation of the iconic vans was being cranked out before Volkswagen finally ends production in Brazil next month, Zagaia and Da Costa were driving one from Mexico to their homeland on a modern, Latin American version of the VW hippie road trip.
Over the course of their eight-month, 13,500-mile journey, VW enthusiasts and hard-core travelers sought out the Kombi, as it’s known in Brazil. (And that spot of bother in Guatemala? It was — amazingly — the only bit of car trouble in all those miles.)
The minimalist classic acted as a kind of goodwill ambassador.
The bus “completely changed the journey,” Da Costa says. “If we were in any other car, people wouldn’t have treated us with such warmth.”
#storysongs combo: “Come On, Get Happy,” by the Partridge Family. “We had a dream we’d go trav’lin’ together / We’d spread a little lovin’ then we’d keep movin’ on.” Admit it, it makes you happy.
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Wednesday’s Great Read:
With room for only three stories on the front page, the Great Read of the day held. You’ll get to read it next week.
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Mexican bakery tries to adjust to a gentrifying Highland Park
A small woman with grocery bags dangling from both forearms peeks through the glass door at Elsa’s Bakery in Highland Park. She sees a sign that says “¡Celebrate Pan Dulce!” and a man waving at her from inside.
Edmundo Rodriguez, the bakery’s new owner, greets her in Spanish. She squints at a tray of Mexican sweet bread and hums along to Enrique Iglesias’ new hit, “Loco.” Another song comes on — a popular one by Maná — and she keeps humming.
The bakery’s soundtrack is subtle, but it’s specific. Spanish only.
Many newcomers to the area even make nods to the boulevard that once was. The menu at Donut Friend, for example, touts a Gruyere-filled doughnut but also Mexican Coke and Jarritos, a popular Mexican brand of soda. A boutique called Mi Vida sells wood benches that read: “Hecho en Highland Parque.” And the neon sign of a scantily clad woman outside craft beer-and-wine bar the Hermosillo is a relic from its cantina days.
But perhaps no place has done more to keep its old customer base than Elsa’s.
#storysongs combo: “Into Tomorrow,” by Paul Weller. As always, Mr. Weller is looking stylish as he sings about tomorrow.
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Afghanistan center is her monument to a great love
It was an extramarital affair that scandalized Kabul. It would also fuel a lifelong adventure and help create a legacy for Afghanistan.
Author Nancy Hatch Dupree, 80-something, recently opened the Afghanistan Center at Kabul University to commemorate her great love, archaeologist Louis Dupree, and return something to the country that brought them together.
Little did she know in 1962 when she arrived in Afghanistan what a twist her life would take. Her husband at the time, Alan Wolfe, was a diplomat assigned to the American Embassy in Kabul, the capital. The U.S. ambassador invited Nancy along as trip historian to Bamian, the site of two ancient Buddhist statues, because she’d studied Buddhist art.
On their return to Kabul, she mentioned to an Afghan tourism official how scandalous it was that no guidebook to the site existed. Write one yourself, he replied.
She jumped in, researching over several months information drawn from academic tomes that she then rendered in her characteristic witty, accessible English. As she neared completion, she had a couple of points to clarify and was directed to Louis Dupree.
“Who the hell is Louis Dupree?” she recalls thinking.
The ex-paratrooper and Harvard-trained archaeologist would later be described by historian and writer William Dalrymple as an adventurer who “made Indiana Jones seem positively suburban.”
She tracked down Dupree and left the manuscript, returning a few days later to find he’d trashed it, noting, “Adequate but nothing original.” She thanked him, and as she stormed out, she turned around and said, “This is for tourists, not academics.”
“Wait, come back,” he called after her.
“I did and never left,” she said recently. “Who knew why he called me back, although I was not too unshapely at the time. I think he liked my spirit.”
#storysongs combo: “Big Love,” by Matthew E. White. I love this song, and the album it’s on, “Big Inner,” might be my favorite discovery this year. It blew me away.
If you have a suggestion for a #storysongs combo, email me or throw it out on Twitter. I’m competitive musically, but always happy to be bested.
Twitter: @karihow
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