Setting Times stories to music: From Yo La Tengo to Blur
By Kari Howard
The other day I started reading Nick Hornby’s “High Fidelity” for about the millionth time. And I realized: This is my favorite book. (I’d do a list of my top 5 books, but that would be too “High Fidelity.”)
Yes, the riffs on pop music are brilliant. Witness this bit, which opens the movie version – miraculously, almost as good as the book, perhaps because of John Cusack, the thinking women’s sex symbol (No. 2 or possibly 3 on my list, not that I’m necessarily a thinking woman):
“What came first, the music or the misery? ... Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?”
But the novel also has that magic combination of humor and heart -- its meditations on love are funny, but they ring absolutely true.
Kind of like NPR journalist Scott Simon’s live tweets of his mom’s last days (see Tuesday’s Great Read below).
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. A story-song combo!
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Old baseball scout tells of when play, not money, was the thing
The old baseball scout pulls his cap down over his face, peering through one of the eyelets sewn into the crown. It is a trick he learned in the 1940s.
“Like I’ve got a camera,” he says. “I can zero in on one player.”
Sitting in his usual spot overlooking the third-base line at Dodger Stadium, George Genovese focuses on the talented rookie, Yasiel Puig, in center field.
With everything else blocked from view, Genovese watches and waits, listening for the crack of the bat.
“The best fielders know how to anticipate where the ball is going,” he says. “They take a step before it’s hit.”
A hint of New York marks his accent, a remnant from his youth. And there’s an occasional boyish smile that belies the shock of white hair on his head. All his years in baseball — a lifetime of playing, managing and prowling for fresh talent — have not dampened the thrill of the ballpark.
“It’s in my blood,” he says. “You know?”
These days, Genovese considers himself retired. But the 91-year-old still serves as a consultant to the Dodgers, and the team leaves him a ticket at the gate for home games.
#storysongs combo: “Song 2,” by Blur. Why? Because it reminds me of one of my favorite Dodgers, Shawn Green—and I didn’t like him only because he chose a Britpop song as his walkup song. (Same era as the great “Welcome to the Jungle” intro for closer Eric Gagne.)
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NPR host Scott Simon tweets his mother’s dying days
Mother asks, “Will this go on forever?” She means pain, dread. “No.” She says, “But we’ll go on forever. You & me.” Yes.
These are the words of a son saying goodbye to his mother in the 21st century.
Mother called: “I can’t talk. I’m surrounded by handsome men.” Emergency surgery. If you can hold a thought for her now...
For Scott Simon’s 1.2 million Twitter followers, the end of his mother’s story began with that wisecrack sometime around July 16.
Mother cries Help Me at 2;30. Been holding her like a baby since. She’s asleep now. All I can do is hold on to her.
Most Americans know Simon by his voice: worn but fun, brightening up NPR’s “Weekend Edition Saturday.” But on this weekend he was telling his story in 140-character installments on a medium more commonly used for ephemera than for navigating the suffering of an aging parent.
I love holding my mother’s hand. Haven’t held it like this since I was 9. Why did I stop? I thought it unmanly? What crap.
For several days, in a hospital somewhere in Chicago, the end-of-life struggles of Patricia Lyons Simon Newman Gilband, 84, have been watched the world over. Many readers have been moved to tears, while others have had to look away, taken aback by the intimate view Scott has shared of his mother’s suffering, all the way to her last breath.
I don’t know how we’ll get through these next few days. And, I don’t want them to end.
#storysongs combo: “The Last Beat of My Heart,” by Devotchka. As to the question raised by “High Fidelity” above, I’d say that we listen to such songs when we’re already miserable, and they can make us feel more miserable – but they also make us feel less alone.
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Immigration reform predictions are mathematical and personal
Tom Wong sat in the parking lot of a San Diego McDonald’s, scarfing a double cheeseburger and listening to the Senate’s roll-call vote on immigration as it live-streamed over his iPhone.
Landrieu, aye. Leahy, aye. Lee, no.
Just as he had predicted.
Finally, the 100th name: Wyden, aye. Relieved and smiling broadly, he called his wife with the good news. Not only had the bill passed, but his statistical models had worked nearly perfectly. He was right about all but a few senators.
As the immigration battle shifts to the House, word has spread among activists that Wong might be the Nate Silver of immigration reform — the go-to data geek with the crystal ball.
But Wong doesn’t just want to predict the future. He also wants to change it, by giving immigrant-rights advocates the statistical ammunition they need to influence lawmakers.
#storysongs combo: “The Numbers Don’t Lie,” by the Mynabirds.
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Alaska offers hope for a stricken son
Kecia Weatherwax is convinced her son was healed not just by surgeons but also by this misty archipelago she sailed to all those years ago.
An Alaska village where a “mad Indian,” as she describes herself, would be entitled to demand help for her Native child, born with a rare genetic mutation that gave him a misshapen head and bulging eyes.
A place where her father, a Tlingit elder and member of the tribal council, commanded the respect that led others to accept his grandson.
A town that had seen enough trouble to know that it didn’t come in the shape of a small boy’s face.
James was snatched away minutes after he was born, flown to a bigger hospital while Weatherwax was still on the delivery table. The tiny boy looked shocking, she said, even to the doctors who regularly delivered babies from troubled pregnancies on Montana’s Blackfeet Indian Reservation.
“They hadn’t seen anything like it, they couldn’t even name it. His hands were tiny spatulas with no fingers, his feet were clubbed, he had a cleft palate. And his head, the whole top of it was bulging,” says Weatherwax, who learned her son had Apert syndrome, a condition that fuses bone in the wrong places and can leave patients struggling to eat, hear and even breathe.
The years of surgeries he would require to live any kind of a normal life would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“For me, it was like being skinned alive,” Weatherwax remembers feeling as she contemplated returning to the impoverished Montana reservation with a child who needed so much.
Then it struck her: She needed to go home — to the remote island in the southeastern Alaska rain forests where she grew up, a place where the natives had parlayed the state’s resource wealth into modern clinics and good hospitals.
#storysongs combo: “I Feel Like Going Home,” by Yo La Tengo. (A band that probably goes in my Top 10 list.)
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Next stop for disadvantaged kids: college
The young man with braces and close-cropped hair as precise as a geometry lesson steps onto the stage at Verbum Dei High School, grabs the microphone and introduces himself.
“My name is Ricardo Placensia,” he says, then lets out a nervous laugh. “I interned at Locke Lord law firm, and this fall I will be attending UC Riverside.”
The crowd at the all-male Catholic school in Watts erupts in applause.
Later in the ceremony, another teenager with precision-cut hair — but no braces — takes his moment in the spotlight.
“Hi. I’m Roberto Placensia,” he says. “I’ve been interning for four years at Keenan & Associates, and this fall, I will be attending the University of California, Riverside.”
The excitement in the room approaches that of the National Signing Day frenzy televised on ESPN, in which heavily recruited high school athletes announce which college they’ve picked to attend.
But Verbum Dei no longer churns out top football and basketball players. This commitment day ceremony recognizes another kind of achievement.
By the end of the hourlong event, the entire Class of 2013 has made the same rite of passage as the Placensia twins:
All 60 announce that they will be heading to college.
#storysongs combo: “Graduation Day,” by Math and Physics Club. If you like the idea of the Smiths crossed with Belle and Sebastian, this band is for you.
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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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