Setting Times stories to music: From Nirvana to Yo La Tengo
By Kari Howard
The stories I read spark musical connections every day. It’s a bit more rare when the walk to work does.
But one of my favorite moments this week came when I was strolling down Broadway past Grand Park in downtown LA, a section that used to be a parking lot for the criminal courts building. A woman was walking in the other direction talking on the phone, vexation in your voice. And I overheard her say this:
“They turned it into a damn park!”
It made me laugh – it was a bizarro-world Joni Mitchell lyric in reverse: “They paved paradise/And put up a parking lot.”
Months ago, I had watched the parking lot being unpaved so paradise could be put up, so another of the song’s lyrics had resonance: “They took all the trees/Put ‘em in a tree museum.” The first thing the construction workers did? Uproot the trees that had somehow managed to survive for years in their concrete jungle—and replaced them later with baby trees.
I felt so bad for the old ones, but maybe they’re in a tree museum now.
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 soak in good writing. 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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Bieber vs. Beethoven; a new twist on battle rap
Comedian Lloyd Ahlquist steps onto the stage, girded for battle. Wearing the uniform of a Soviet officer, with medals dripping from his chest, he channels dictator Joseph Stalin and prepares to deliver a rhyming smackdown on Russia’s mad monk, Grigori Rasputin.
The cameras roll, the music playback reverberates through the Culver City studio — then an unexpected glitch halts production on “Epic Rap Battles of History’s” second-season finale. Ahlquist’s thick mustache is obscuring his mouth, making it difficult to see him snarl such insults as “All your wizard friends: shot! Anyone who sold you pirogi: shot!”
Ahlquist, director Dave McCary and a makeup artist consult: Should they compromise authenticity and give Stalin’s mustache a trim? After a 10-minute discussion, co-creator Peter Shukoff enters the studio wearing Rasputin’s flowing black garment and a long, scraggly beard. He says the mustache “looks great” — it’s the overcompensation that’s the problem.
“I’ve been trying to keep my mouth open a little bit, and jut my jaw out,” Ahlquist explains. “I just don’t want to look too much like Wario.”
The mustache would retain its Nintendo antihero glory.
#storysongs combo: “Conjunction Junction,” Schoolhouse Rock. You probably have to be a certain age, but these guys made me think of those old Saturday morning attempts to make learning fun with music. It’s how I learned the preamble to the Constitution. And I’ll never forget that little slumped bill sitting on Capitol Hill. But this is my favorite.
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‘Go destroy them,’ artist says of his paintings
On the second floor of a nursery school in a Turkish border town, artist Nader Haj Kadour preferred talking about painting butterflies than painting Syrian President Bashar Assad.
The classically trained Syrian artist pointed to a recently completed yellow and purple cartoon, part of the growing acrylic garden along the walls of the school in this town crowded with refugees. Then he delved into the finer points of painting for a young audience.
“See this butterfly? If you paint it in a classical style, you haven’t done anything for the child,” he said.
Haj Kadour was less eager to speak about his main subject for the last four decades: the late President Hafez Assad and, later, his son Bashar.
Their faces have dominated walls, storefronts and car windows all over Syria, a visual declaration of loyalty to the dictators. Their images — sometimes partially hidden behind sunglasses, other times in military uniform but always stern and slightly foreboding — were the ubiquitous reminders that Big Brother was watching.
Haj Kadour painted hundreds of the portraits.
“We don’t need to dwell on that,” he said.
#storysongs combo: “Written on the Forehead,” by PJ Harvey. This is from her brilliant album on the disastrous wars of the 2000s, “Let England Shake.”
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Angelina Jolie’s choice is clear to one who faced it
Fear of cancer is a horrible thing. It stays with you all day long, and it wakes you up at night.
I didn’t want to live with that, especially when I knew I could do something about it.
Like Angelina Jolie, I have a genetic mutation that increased my odds of getting breast cancer to nearly 90%. Also like Jolie, I chose to get my healthy breasts removed to reduce that risk to less than 5%.
Today, nearly five years after my preventive double mastectomy, my scars have faded and I don’t often think about what I went through. Most people aren’t aware I had the surgery — I look the same, even in a swimsuit. And my fear has all but disappeared.
Jolie and I took this drastic step for the same reasons: Both of us lost a parent to cancer brought on by this horrible mutation, and neither of us wanted our children to suffer the same loss.
“I can tell my children that they don’t need to fear they will lose me to breast cancer,” she wrote Tuesday in a newspaper op-ed piece.
#storysongs combo: “I’ll Be Around,” by Yo La Tengo. Does any other band do grown-up love better? And this video is my favorite in recent memory.
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An early terrorist in U.S. condemns today’s jihad
Long before Sept. 11, the war on terrorism and two pressure-cooker bombs at the Boston Marathon, a young Muslim from Egypt walked into the ballroom of a New York City hotel and shot to death an outspoken Jewish rabbi.
El Sayyid A. Nosair, authorities say, was the first Islamic jihadist to commit murder in the United States. He later helped plot the first World Trade Center bombing from behind bars in 1993 and conspired to target the bridges and tunnels leading in and out of Manhattan.
Now serving life in prison, he has been out of the public eye for years. But last fall, Nosair emailed me after reading a story I wrote about government secrecy in the prosecution of the Sept. 11 plotters. He wanted to talk about his religious beliefs, the crimes of his past and his attempts to win his freedom.
He said he condemns jihad as it is practiced today. Young men are throwing their lives away, killing innocents, he said. The families of the jihadists suffer for years, he said, something he has learned after more than two decades in prison.
In more than 60 emails, letters and phone interviews, he offered no regrets for the murder of Rabbi Meir Kahane in 1990. That killing, he said, was justified because the rabbi had called for war against Muslims. Kahane, founder of the ultranationalist Jewish Defense League, “openly advocated genocide and ethnic cleansing,” he said.
But he warned some of the young men who have followed in his footsteps that killing bystanders, whether in New York or Boston, does nothing to further the cause.
#storysongs combo: “All Apologies,” by Nirvana. I didn’t feel the music in this story. Perhaps because it’s so ambiguous – changed man, or man trying to gain sympathy? So was slightly sarcastic in my choice. Here’s the wonderful MTV Unplugged version (Kurt in his cardigan).
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Brazil, Japan, sumo and food all intertwine deliciously
Fernando Kuroda didn’t like eating chankonabe at first, because he was forced to eat so much of the thick stew that he would get sick and could barely walk.
“They would just fill me up and fill me up with food, or I wasn’t allowed to leave the table.”
But that was the life of a (relatively) small 15-year-old who had moved into sumo wrestler training quarters in Tokyo to study with a master.
So was learning to cook. As part of the strict disciplinary tradition of his training, he spent years washing floors and dishes before being allowed to cut vegetables and, eventually, prepare full meals.
“I always liked cooking,” he says, grinning, “and soon I learned to like to eat too.”
But much of the rigidly hierarchical sumo life was foreign to Fernando, who was different from the other boys: He was born and raised in Sao Paulo, 11,000 miles from Tokyo.
Even growing up in the world’s largest Japanese diaspora community, whose traditional neighborhood near Sao Paulo’s center is lighted by Japanese street lamps, didn’t help much.
“I didn’t know the correct way to speak to the elders in Japan. I would break all kinds of rules on accident,” says Kuroda, 36. “And that meant they would smack me in the head with a stick.”
#storysongs combo: “Big in Japan,” Alphaville. No comment on the quality of the song – or the haircuts.
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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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