From Portishead to Neneh Cherry: Setting Times stories to music
By Kari Howard
I was introduced to one of this week’s bands, Balmorhea, in a video for a song called “Pyrakantha.” If I needed an excuse, the short film made me fall in love with Los Angeles again.
Showing a skateboarder making his way through the city as darkness falls and streetlights and neon signs flicker on, it doesn’t romanticize Los Angeles. You see the incongruity of geese honking in the concrete of the L.A. River. Children eating ice cream cones outside Ray’s Market & Liquor. One red lantern unlit in a string over Chinatown. The striped pole spinning outside Vinny’s Barber Shop. People lined up at food truck next to a graffitied tree.
But oh, the glow of those lights over the city (especially the dreamy Silver Lake chandelier tree).
It’s our everyday life, made beautiful.
And sometimes that’s what the best Great Reads do. You pass by that corner every day, but you never knew about its secret, dazzling life. These stories illuminate the real world.
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!
#
Ensuring the Tenderloin’s departed are not forgotten
Arnold Stringfellow lived alone in a single-room-occupancy hotel in the Tenderloin. He died alone in the county hospital. He was 64.
On a chilly morning not long after, the Rev. Glenda Hope stood before a small crowd in the community room of the Camelot Hotel. On a folding table behind the Presbyterian minister was a color copier image of Stringfellow, a big plate of cake in hand, smiling.
Hope adjusted her hearing aids and issued the greeting she had spoken many times before.
“Good morning, friends,” the minister began, solemn and gentle. “None of us wants to think that when we die, no notice will be taken and no respect given. So thank you for being here to take notice and give this final respect to Arnold.”
Since founding San Francisco Network Ministries more than 40 years ago, Hope has helped thousands of the city’s most anonymous residents leave the world with grace. She has performed memorials on the streets of the Tenderloin and in its SRO hotels. She has arranged for obituaries to be placed in a neighborhood newspaper, which dubbed her the “Tenderloin closer.”
#storysongs combo: “Remembrance,” by Balmorhea. This might be the first combo song I’ve offered that’s instrumental. Lyrics are a tic of mine, I know. The music is spare, yet powerfull.
#
Women in India ‘just aren’t safe’
When she was a girl growing up in India’s mountainous northeast, Sobhana Gazmer used to rough up boys who gave her lip. These days in the big city of New Delhi, she’s scared to walk the streets, take public transportation, even sleep in her one-room apartment, with its single bed covered in stuffed animals.
Her apartment is a few hundred feet from the stop where a commuter bus picked up a young woman whose fate haunts Gazmer: She was raped repeatedly, allegedly by the driver and his friends, and then assaulted along with her male friend with metal rods. She died of her injuries two weeks later.
Rape cases have been a fixture in India’s headlines for years, but the brutal attack in December hit a deep nerve. Many young women saw themselves in the victim, a 23-year-old physiotherapy student of modest means who moved to New Delhi to chase the Indian dream — and gain independence in the process.
“No matter how strong we want to be, how bold, with women power, if there are two or three guys, you just have to turn and run,” said Gazmer, 29. “Since December, I hardly go out, even with friends. That could’ve been me. Every woman thinks that way.”
#storysongs combo: “Buffalo Stance,” by Neneh Cherry. The young woman in the story has some of Cherry’s great girl-power attitude, but it’s almost been frightened out of her.
#
Clergy abuse case filled with silent bystanders
They stared at each other, the detective and the priest. Kelli McIlvain found interrogating him somewhat surreal. She had been raised Catholic and taught that a man in a black clerical shirt and white collar was nothing less than an emissary of God.
Father Donald Patrick Roemer was 5 feet 5, maybe 150 pounds. Hazel eyes. Blondish hair. A Ventura County Sheriff’s Office report described him that night as “cooperative, seems stable,” though McIlvain remembered how he repeatedly buried his head on the desk and wept.
To her surprise, his confession came easily. Yes, he said, he molested the 7-year-old boy.
McIlvain lit a cigarette. She hushed her voice, slowed her cadence to match his. Were there others, she asked. Yes, he said, according to court papers, and offered name after name.
“Where do I go from here?” he asked as midnight neared.
“Well,” she said, “I’m going to have to arrest you.”
What McIlvain uncovered in the weeks that followed seared the case into her memory, so much that she can recall its details more than three decades later, long after she retired: A number of people inside and outside the Catholic Church had been alerted to Roemer’s misdeeds, or had strong suspicions of them, she learned.
They did nothing.
#storysongs combo: “Over,” by Portishead. The spooky music and Beth Gibbons’ otherwordly vocals conjure the creeping dread of the story.
#
For Michael Jackson fan, covering trial is her duty
She takes two buses to get to the courthouse each day and depends on donations from fans to run her website.
She has no formal training as a journalist but for tens of thousands — maybe multitudes more — she is the oracle for all things Michael.
Inside the cramped downtown Los Angeles courtroom each weekday, Taaj Malik furiously taps away at her iPad as the Michael Jackson wrongful-death case unfolds, taking notes for a transcript she will later post on a website crammed with court documents, autopsy reports, links to court exhibits, salutes to Jackson and an occasional plea for money. Thousands visit the website daily.
With nearly 40,000 following her “Team Michael Jackson” Twitter account, the 52-year-old Malik blasts out tweets during breaks and keeps up a running dialogue with followers.
“It was a great day to watch that roach squirm on the stand, Hes adapting many personalities, none r working cause ever1 can see he’s a #LIAR,” she writes as one witness is grilled.
“What a pair of MUPPETS,” she snaps after two ranking music executives testify.
When a follower thanks her for the stream of information from the courtroom, Malik deflects it quickly. “No, dear... Its my duty with Michael and the truth! Dont say thank you! :).”
The Orange County resident, who ran a housekeeping business until she was injured in a car accident in January, climbs out of bed at 4 a.m. to begin her trek downtown. She is part of a worldwide fan community consumed with the minute details about the King of Pop, fully primed to feast on the latest legal entanglement to invoke his memory.
#storysongs combo: “I’ll Be There,” by the Jackson Five. Forget the freak show that Jackson’s life became and listen to a boy with a huge talent as it all began. I’ll never get tired of him saying, “Just look over your shoulders, honey.”
#
Oscar Grant shooting death: Film delivers a vital message
After putting in a full day at UPS, Wanda Johnson rushed to change from her work clothes into a sapphire blue gown.
When she arrived at the Grand Lake Theater, she looked red-carpet ready -- her dress flowing, not a hair out of place -- but her heart was pounding. So she sat down in the lobby, placed her hands delicately on her lap and surveyed the chaos: cameras flashing, popcorn spilling, movie fans standing tiptoe trying to glimpse Hollywood stars on hand for the Northern California premiere of “Fruitvale Station.”
It was a film about her son, Oscar Grant III. Soon, she was going to watch him die on screen -- for the third time.
Four and a half years ago, Grant, 22, was shot by a Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer on the Fruitvale station platform, only five miles from the theater.
The African American father was returning with friends from New Year’s Eve celebrations in San Francisco when a fight broke out on his train. At the Fruitvale stop, authorities pulled the unarmed Grant aside, forcibly restrained him and pinned him to the ground as onlookers captured the scene with cellphones.
The 2009 footage -- ending with a single gunshot -- quickly went viral, inciting protests and riots in Oakland.
“I’m the one who told him to take BART, thinking he would be safe,” said Johnson, tears threatening to ruin the makeup she had put on for the premiere. “I didn’t want them to be out there drinking and driving.... And he said, ‘OK, Mama, I’ll take BART for you.’”
#storysongs combo: “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair,” by Nina Simone. Although this is about romantic love, I thought the mood fit this mother who lost her son. Prepare to cry. (In the video, I love how Nina has the stagehand adjust the height of her piano bench while she keeps playing.)
#
If you have ideas for story-song pairings of your own, tweet the title and artist to @karihow or @LATimesColumn1 with the hashtag #storysongs.
Start your day right
Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
