Setting Times stories to music: Donna Summer to Foo Fighters
I’m one of those music fans who never really gave their hearts to CDs. Sure, I bought a million of them, but their chilly perfection always left me cold, and I quietly mourned the warmth of vinyl.
So it was particularly satisfying that when MP3s came along, not only did CDs fall by the wayside, but a new generation of listeners got turned on to vinyl. Of course, I had never given up my turntable, but it got a little less lonely in the album fan club.
Then I saw something that’s been making waves at SXSW this week: a wayback machine that turns MP3s into vinyl. Be still my heart.
Sure, it’s $4,000. But I love that it exists.
I think of the Great Reads as the vinyl of journalism. Narrative writing is old school, but it’s warm, isn’t it? And I think that, like vinyl, it will survive and even thrive in this go-go digital age.
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 soundtrack!
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An oasis from crime: Meet Chesterfield Square’s peacekeeper
Los Angeles police Officer Andre Dixon lowered the passenger-side window and aimed his flashlight at a darkened living room window guarded by white bars.
Click-click … click-click … click-click. Dixon’s light snapped on and off.
The porch light flicked on and a woman in a dress and slippers stepped out from behind the security screen door and peered at the black-and-white cruiser.
“How you doin’, Miss Rita?” Officer Owen Mills shouted across her manicured lawn.
“Who you got in there?” she hollered back. “That Dixon?”
“Hey, how you doin’?” Dixon answered.
Rita Banks pulled her dress in snug, shuffled across the driveway and rested her forearms on the cruiser’s passenger-side window.
“It’s quiet,” she replied with a raspy giggle.
On a street with a lot of eyes and ears, Banks is the lead sentry. The 55-year-old grandmother writes down the license plates of cars that pass one too many times and hollers a greeting at anyone who passes her porch. She organizes monthly block meetings and cleanups and is the ear for neighbors who want to talk about graffiti, suspicious activity and wayward children.
#soundtrack: “Safe From Harm,” by Massive Attack. Like the video. Love the song. Love the album even more.
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South Sudan ponders the road ahead after ethnic killings
Concealed in the Nile River reeds, mothers and their children crouched underwater, holding their breath as long as possible, as South Sudanese militias on the bank argued whether to hunt down and kill dozens of people hiding there.
One elderly man was spotted by a fighter onshore and ordered out, said Mabior Nyuon Bior, a doctor who was among the terrified civilians.
As the man hobbled out of the Nile, the militiaman shot him.
“Why did you do that?” Bior heard another fighter say.
“Because I can,” came the response.
Two hours later, after the fighters had left, it was finally safe for Bior and other survivors to come out of the water. But by that time, he said, eight children had drowned in their mothers’ arms.
When the fighters with the Lou Nuer tribe attacked his city of Bor in December, “friends were killing friends, just because it was another tribe,” said Bior, a member of the Dinka tribe.
At first, he stayed at his post in Bor’s hospital, operating on a badly wounded soldier and a woman facing complications in childbirth. But he had to flee into the bush when Lou Nuer fighters came, firing at him with machine guns as he ran. Some of the patients ran too, but he had to leave the woman and the soldier.
“I was fearing to die. The noise they made with their guns, boom-boom.”
#soundtrack: “Unforgiven,” by Beck. It took me a while to come around to Beck, but I’m liking the new album.
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In Ukraine, the jobless and aimless replace the revolutionaries
Jackbooted young men in World War I helmets patrol the muddy sidewalk in front of the parliament building, their chapped hands wrapped around clubs and ax handles, their black-and-crimson armbands telling of allegiances to the far right.
Camouflage-clad men armed with hunting rifles control traffic a few hundred yards away, their faces hidden by black balaclavas no longer needed for warmth in the early spring thaw. The self-appointed sentries eye drivers and pedestrians funneling into a single-lane gap in the walls of bricks, firewood and sandbags that barricade Ukraine’s once-elegant capital city.
At Independence Square, the baroque, monument-filled plaza known here as Maidan, the jobless and aimless have taken the place of the victorious political activists who have gone on to parliament or gone home. The stragglers sit hunched around barrel fires, dull eyes peering out from soot-stained faces, rolled-up sleeves baring the tattooed insignia of ex-cons and forgotten military veterans.
The women in floral kerchiefs who tended bubbling pots of borscht or boiling vareniki to feed those demanding a better future have mostly drifted away, leaving the holdouts to shake down workers at the handful of coffee shops and bakeries in business for “donations.” Stray dogs forage for scraps among the piles of garbage around camps clustered beneath signs heralding the origins of their inhabitants: Kharkiv, Ternopol, Yalta.
Banks of portable toilets flank the grubby tent clusters, their doors torn off for makeshift shields during the deadly heat of the confrontation last month, their users in plain sight of those who now mill about the revolutionary detritus.
#soundtrack: “The Day After the Revolution,” by Pulp. “You will wake up to find that your whole life has changed, though nothing looks different.” From a pretty brilliant album, “This Is Hardcore.”
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Bangladesh women find liberty in hard labor
Mukhta Mollah deftly smooths the red fabric and guides it through a whirling sewing machine. She sews side seams on women’s blouses bound for America. Eight hours a day or longer in this hot and sweaty factory. Six days a week.
On this day, like every workday, she will try to reach a target of 1,000 blouses.
Seamstresses sit all around her in rows that stretch across this factory floor crowded with 350 workers. Fluorescent lights buzz and blink overhead. Enormous fans nosily push around the stagnant air, which carries the familiar scent of new clothes.
It takes Mollah less than 30 seconds to complete her part of the blouse. A helper snips the thread ends and piles the garments into a bin to take to the next station. Mollah has long grown accustomed to the mind-numbing repetition, the unrelenting din, the glare, the heat.
She knows that she won’t get rich; she sends nearly half of her $20-a-week wages home to her family. But she’s grateful that the salary, no matter how small, gave her the means to escape her home village and the fate of her schoolgirl friends.
All of them were married before age 16. All have children of their own. All have moved in with their husbands’ families and must get permission from their mothers-in-law to leave the house.
“For them, it’s a cage,” said Mollah, 19. “My life is much better than theirs because they have no freedom. When I go back to my village and see my friends, they ask me, ‘Can you take us with you?’“
#soundtrack: “She Works Hard for the Money,” by Donna Summer. So you better treat her right.
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A Medal of Honor, long delayed
Using an ammo crate as a chair and an Army tent as his office, Pfc. John “Mac” MacFarland set up his typewriter and began to write.
It was the sweltering summer of 1969, about a month after the fierce battle of Tam Ky in South Vietnam. MacFarland had been ordered to write a recommendation nominating Spc. 4 Santiago Jesse Erevia for the Medal of Honor, and he tried to put into words how Erevia’s “conspicuous gallantry” had saved so many fellow soldiers.
“Although Erevia could have taken cover with the rest of the group,” MacFarland wrote, “he realized that action must be taken immediately if they were able to be relieved from the precarious situation they were now in.”
MacFarland, a 23-year-old college student who had been drafted, spent weeks working on the nomination, sure that Erevia, a 23-year-old high school dropout who had enlisted, would be awarded the medal. MacFarland sent the recommendation up the chain of command.
“And then I never heard another thing,” MacFarland recalled decades later.
Erevia knew that he had been nominated, and though admitting initial disappointment that he did not receive the Medal of Honor, he went home to Texas and never dwelt on it.
MacFarland did.
Over the decades, he searched lists of Medal of Honor recipients, looking for Erevia’s name. Again and again, he dug out his mimeographed copy of the recommendation, fearing he had failed to capture Erevia’s extraordinary heroism.
“I found myself … wondering how I could have done a better job,” MacFarland said.
#soundtrack: “My Hero,” by Foo Fighters. Classic power pop, emphasis on the power.
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If you have ideas for story soundtracks of your own, tweet the title and artist to @karihow or @LATgreatreads with the hashtag #soundtrack.
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