Setting Times stories to music: From the Kinks to Sugarhill Gang
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Would you do a double-take if I said that that words were a recurring theme in this week’s Great Reads?
Yes, beautiful language is a mainstay in these stories, but this week, two standouts focused on words.
Exhibit A: The words “Los Feliz.” I pronounce it Los FEE-lus. I know it’s not correct, but it’s “right” (marks me as an old-timer, I know).
Exhibit B: The word “delight.” Silicon Valley types have been tripping all over themselves to use the word. At least it’s better than another buzzword that makes me go urghhh: freemium.
And the language thing carried over to the week’s music. First of all, Ray Davies of the Kinks is one of the best lyricists on the planet. And I have a fondness for a lyric from another one of this week’s bands, the Sugarhill Gang. Sing with me: “Hotel, Motel, Holiday Inn.”
Anyway, in these roundups of the week gone by, I’d like to offer the first paragraphs of each Great Read -- 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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Smashed U.S. cars get a second chance in Afghanistan
They sit in the sun harboring their lost histories, their forgotten dreams, their traces of funerals, graduations and stolen kisses. On dusty windshields, insurance stickers from Travelers and State Farm bear witness to wrecks in “Metro DC,” “Hardin, Texas,” and “North Hollywood,” some with bright orange “total loss” decals.
For their former owners, that was it, nothing left but a story to recount of a corner rounded too quickly, a red light run, one too many drinks for the road.
But here on the highway to Iran, thousands of used cars from America and Western Europe begin a second life.
Afghanistan doesn’t manufacture its own cars, or much else, so most vehicles sold here are “pre-owned” (and many pre-crashed — but with barely a dent thanks to deft repair work by local body shops).
Most begin their journey by ship to a new world of unpaved roads, kidnappers and Islamist militants after being auctioned to middlemen by U.S. or European insurers. The vehicles land in Dubai or other ports and are then transferred onto other ships bound for Pakistan or — after being resold to circumvent U.S. and European sanctions — Iran.
The final leg of their trip to this “graveyard of empires” (and Toyota Corollas) is via transport truck.
American brands don’t sell as well as Japanese and are hard to find parts for, said Abdullah, a salesman with Herat’s Tamin Ansar Autos who, like many Afghans, uses only one name. “I know one guy who sells Fords,” he said. “He sold them very cheap. They use too much gas.”
#storysongs combo: “Used Cars,” by Bruce Springsteen. The first two paragraphs of this story remind me of a Springsteen song (and I guess now I can say that this song reminds me of a Magnier story.) Two lines alone summon a life: “Now, my ma, she fingers her wedding band/ And watches the salesman stare at my old man’s hands.”
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‘Los Feliz’: How you say it tells about you and L.A.
The phone jangles in the bright white-walled computer shop off Hillhurst Avenue, and Ariel Belkin picks it up.
“Los FEE-lus Hi-Tech,” he says. “This is Ariel.”
After the call comes his confession. The 30-year-old tech whiz, who also plays guitar in a band, moved to Los Feliz from the Valley a year and a half ago. Back then, he resolved to pronounce his new neighborhood as Los Fey-LEASE. The Spanish pronunciation, he says, is the “the right way.”
But pretty soon he caved to the weird stares and smug corrections from locals and switched to the more common anglicized pronunciation.
“It’s kind of sad,” he said. “Like I gave in to the Man.”
But Belkin isn’t the only one in a pronunciation quandary, and neither is Los Feliz. Many of the names that dot the maps of Southern California originate with the Spanish settlers of the 17th and 18th centuries and the Native Americans before them.
The English-speaking people who eventually developed the region loved the romantic feel of the Spanish place names but brought a decidedly Midwestern way of pronouncing them.
Rancho Los Feliz became Los FEE-lus. La bahía de San Pedro, San PEE-dro. El Segundo, Elsie Gunndo. And when left to Sam Yorty, a Nebraska native who served as L.A. mayor four decades ago, “Los An-gel-lus” — already a big jump from el pueblo de los Ángeles — got a sort-of nasal pronunciation with a hard-g “Law SANG-lus.”
#storysongs combo: “You Say Tomato, I Say Tomato,” by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong.
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After fleeing polygamist sect, boys face a new world
Zach Bowers’ cultural education included a battle of wills over a simple task: how to mop the kitchen floor.
Just when the teenager thought he was done with the weekly chore, Debbie Hofhines would loom like a drill sergeant, demanding to know whether he’d used enough cleaner.
In response, Zach grumbled, slammed drawers and disappeared with friends.
“At first, she was so aggressive she scared me,” he said. “She’d say, ‘I want this done and I want it done now.’ I’d never seen anything like it. I was like, ‘Whoa.’“
This was no typical parent-teen faceoff. Zach, who grew up in a polygamist compound, had always been taught that women served men. Debbie, 51, a veteran foster parent, was determined to show him housework was not just women’s work.
“This is my house,” he says Debbie told him. “And nobody tells me what to do here.”
It took months for Zach to accept that women can be strong and assertive — one of many lessons he would learn about life in the outside world.
Now 18, Zach is a defector from the secretive Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, a breakaway sect of the Mormon Church that practices polygamy, dictates almost all aspects of people’s lives and casts women into subservience.
#storysongs combo: “Better Things,” by the Kinks. Two of rock’s most famous brothers give us this sweet song about a better future. It could have been written about these brothers and their new life.
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Antoine’s is her family legacy, but is she ready?
She grew up crawling around the dining room of her family’s French Quarter restaurant, lost under crisp white tablecloths stamped with fleurs-de-lis and smoke drifting from gentlemen’s cigars, a towheaded child nicknamed “The Wildness.”
As a girl she had little interest in the family business, which counted presidents (Kennedy, Nixon and both Roosevelts, to name a few) and a pope (John Paul II) among its clientele.
Then one day when she was 14, Casie Blount’s father dragged her to work, mainly because her mother had to take her little brother to the doctor. Bored and fussing, Blount finally sat at the front desk. That’s when Joan Rivers called.
“I’m leaving the Beau Rivage in Biloxi, and I just have to eat at Antoine’s,” Rivers said. “Will you be open in an hour?”
Blount didn’t miss a beat. “We will see you in an hour, Ms. Rivers,” she said. And when the comedian showed up, Blount carried her purse and got an autograph. “That was my first day,” she said.
It was in keeping with the history and mystique of the 173-year-old Antoine’s Restaurant, which bills itself as the longest continuously family-run restaurant in the nation.
There was a little bit of glamour, as well as the kind of attention to detail that has seen families dining at Antoine’s for generations, often with the same waiter, passing down favorite tables in their wills.
But is Blount, now 22, prepared to inherit the restaurant she has grown up with?
#storysongs combo: “Bonjour Cousin,” by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band.
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Cold, hard data meets squishy delight
Ask Joshua Reeves about his online payroll service, and the last thing he’ll want to discuss are its features and algorithms and software code and all that other cold jargon that usually comes pouring out of the mouths of Silicon Valley engineers.
No, what Reeves really cares about is what he hopes you will feel when you use ZenPayroll Inc.:
Delight.
“That’s the effect we’re trying to achieve,” said Reeves, whose company has applied to trademark “delightful payroll.”
“We talk about how to create that ‘aha moment,’ that feeling the first time you use it where you just stop and say, ‘This is amazing. Why weren’t you here 10 years ago?’“
Yes, delight. A squishy, subjective, hard-to-pin-down term. So daringly unquantifiable, so proudly immeasurable. And now, suddenly, all the rage in data-driven Silicon Valley.
#storysongs combo: Although the story mentions a regrettable song as its final words (“Afternoon Delight”), banish that from your mind and listen instead to “Rapper’s Delight,” by the Sugarhill Gang. Yes, misogynistic. But who doesn’t love the “Good Times” groove and lyrics about Lois Lane and Superman? The bonus of this video: Soul Train!
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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.
[email protected] / @karihow
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