Setting Times stories to music: From Goldfrapp to the National
You know how once in a great while when you meet someone for the first time, there’s this moment of recognition? Like, I get you and you get me. (Compulsive song accompaniment: “Strange,” by Pains of Being Pure of Heart.)
This week, I found a website, largeheartedboy, that’s been doing story-song combos on a grand scale for years now. In the feature called Book Notes, writers offer the soundtracks to their books, with some wonderful commentary.
Sometimes it’s the songs actually in the books (the latest entry has 50 of them—a novelist after my heart). Sometimes it’s the songs the authors listened to while writing the books. Sometimes it’s the songs that inspired the book. Any way, I’m thrilled to discover all these soul mates who see the connection between music and literary creativity.
The only drawback: With eight years of entries to get through, I’ll have time for nothing else for the foreseeable future. (“You’re My Favorite Waste of Time,” by Marshall Crenshaw.)
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!
Civic-minded hackers code well for the future
On a recent day at work in a San Francisco loft, Moncef Belyamani was sporting a hipster “LOVE” T-shirt and riffing, with obsessive detail, on the evolution of vinyl record production.
The Android coder and sometime dance-club DJ wrapped up by explaining how Google’s language translator could be rigged to produce an excellent beat-box.
Belyamani isn’t exactly the kind of guy you expect to bump into in a government building. But if you happen to be hanging out in San Mateo County offices, that’s exactly where you’ll find him many days.
The 38-year-old is part of an experiment in municipal government driven by hackers like him who want to help make the public sector as responsive as the Yelp app on a smartphone.
From their buzzy loft, these 28 tech wizards spend their days tapping on laptops, scribbling formulas into spiral notebooks and “ideating” — hacker-speak for tossing ideas around. Then they fan out across the country, embedding themselves within the beige conference rooms, dense procedure manuals and maddeningly slow pace of the machinery of municipal government.
They call themselves the Peace Corps for Geeks.
Code for America, as the nonprofit they work for is called, condensed its improbable mission down to a few words in its recent annual report: use technology to make government “simple, beautiful, easy to use.”
#storysongs combo: “Modern Technology,” by the Daktaris. A little bit of Afrobeat for a Monday morning. Love how he pronounces technology.
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A strong voice in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley
The police asked the right question.
“Can you think of anyone who would want to do you harm?” investigators asked Wilma Subra, trying to understand who might have fired a gun at the diminutive grandmother.
Enemies?
Subra could arrange them alphabetically, or geographically, or in descending order according to how much her work as an environmental chemist had cost them in money or public embarrassment.
She had gone after so many corporate polluters over the decades, the question had just too many possible responses.
Authorities never found the person who shot at her while she was working at her desk by the front window. The soft-spoken crusader’s response to the threat was to put bars on her windows, move her desk to the back of the house — and keep going.
Seven years later, at 69, Subra is still working to rein in environmental degradation along Cancer Alley, an eye-watering corridor of more than 150 industrial facilities along the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge that produce a quarter of the nation’s petrochemicals.
She’s a winner of a MacArthur “Genius grant” who totes her grandchildren to public hearings, giving them crayons to scribble on the back of scientific papers. She’s a fighter who has taken on refineries, chemical manufacturers and oil and gas companies, including BP over its cleanup of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill in 2010.
Most important, admirers say, she’s a dedicated enabler, teaching people in some of the nation’s poorest communities to help themselves by using the latest technology to track air and water quality in their own backyards.
“What separates Wilma from other scientists is she’s taking it to the next step, allowing communities to have a voice,” said Robert Bullard, author of “Dumping in Dixie,” a book about the South’s toxic environmental legacy. “She makes real change on the ground.”
#storysongs combo: “Fall on Me,” by REM. I was torn, because the song next to it on the album is also environmentally tinged: “Cuyahoga,” named after the polluted river in Ohio that burned.
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Brazilian sees museum as ‘the Disney of the future’
His hands in constant motion, twiddling alternately with a cigarette, a metal hair clip and the straw for his coconut water, the mining millionaire some call Brazil’s Willy Wonka walks through a tropical forest to a tiny geodesic dome guarded by a smiling girl.
She guides visitors inside, where senses are assaulted by brilliant lights flashing at shifting speeds as a tiny column of water rises and falls. It’s a permanent installation by an Icelandic artist here at what may be the world’s largest open-air modern art museum.
Bernardo Paz likes to call his 5,000-acre creation, Inhotim, a transformative place.
“When you enter this dream, you are transformed, and you start to imagine the life you’d really like you have,” he says. “You don’t want to go back to your life in the city and you can’t leave here.”
Paz has won admiration from lovers of art and nature alike for his fantastically reworked utopian landmass, even if he sometimes leaves others bemused by the grandiose goals he hopes to achieve with the project, which he says will last 1,000 years.
Inhotim, he says, will help the young and poor of the world imagine and prepare for “post-contemporary society.”
“We will have 15 to 20 years of revolts and much violence, since those who were never informed are now being informed, on the Internet. The poor are learning about the lives of the rich,” he says, wearing Louis Vuitton slippers and mud-caked athletic trousers.
He adds that the wave of protests that took hold of Brazil in June are just the beginning of a long and painful process. The Vatican, for example, will fall. “We will have a period of fatigue, and finally, a process of maturation.”
#storysongs combo: “Utopia,” by Goldfrapp. “I forget who I am/I forget fascist baby/Utopia, utopia.”
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Fear of crime shades New Orleans response to teen’s shooting
Merritt Landry’s fence delivers a message with its steel bars, running from the ground to almost 7 feet tall. A pneumatic ram, larger than a man’s arm, keeps the gate shut. The top of the fence makes a final dissuasive argument with a row of steel spikes. Landry’s friends call it his cage.
In late July, a 14-year-old named Marshall Coulter climbed into the cage. The human collision inside lasted only a moment: Landry shot Marshall in the head. But the man and boy were brought to that moment by social forces so long-standing and powerful that, once understood, they make the collision seem less shocking than inevitable.
At first people compared the case to the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin in Florida. An armed man, an unarmed black teen. The city’s reaction, though, has been muted, with none of the violent, mass clashes that followed Martin’s death. There have been only minor protestations, as Marshall lies in a hospital and the district attorney ponders how to handle his case.
Tourists call New Orleans the Big Easy, and it’s true that people here have always lived intermingled lives, eating together, dancing together. As the song says: Basin Street is the street where all the white and the black folk meet.
A romance of food and music.
But the commonality that so far binds New Orleanians together in the aftermath of Marshall’s shooting is darker; it’s not displayed on horse-drawn tours, or in hotel brochures.
Neighborhoods are shifting. Crime is spreading. Many people share a quiet sympathy with the shooter in this case, because New Orleans is unified now by a third element, a new trinity: food, music and fear.
#storysongs combo: “Afraid of Everyone,” by the National. Here they are performing it at Glastonbury. (Got to get there someday. Or is it too late--is Glastonbury so 1999?)
An adopted son discovers more than he expected in return to South Korea
Two knocks. I swallowed hard. A middle-aged Korean woman with dimpled cheeks, her hair held back by a tiny blue butterfly clip, peeked around the door.
“Annyeonghaseyo,” I said softly, timidly — my awful Korean accent worse than normal.
“Annyeonghasey…” Her voice cracked. She couldn’t finish the word for hello. She began to cry, her sobs almost a moan, and locked her arms around me. She repeated something faintly.
“She’s saying she’s sorry,” the social worker who was with us translated. “She said she’s really, really sorry.”
As I listened to 25 years of shame spill from somewhere deep inside her, it was impossible not to break down with her.
“I missed you,” she said. “I’ve never forgotten you.”
I would not cry again during my 3 1/2-hour meeting with my biological mother.
But in those moments I cried because I understood the depth of her pain — and I knew I was helping to relieve it.
#storysongs combo: “Just Say I Love Him,” by Nina Simone. She transcends the song’s subject, romantic love, and makes it about love, period.
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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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