Setting Times stories to music: From Radiohead to Regina Spektor
One of my desert island discs would be “Pet Sounds” by the Beach Boys. I could probably listen to the last 53 seconds of “God Only Knows” forever – those soaring harmonies piling on top of each other and that crazy clip-clopping percussion.
But my favorite track is the deceptively simple “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.” The song has a touching cameo in one of this week’s Great Reads, about gay and lesbian seniors finally getting the prom dates of their dreams.
In this sweet story of boy-meets-boy, girl-meets-girl, the Beach Boys song floats over the loudspeaker at the dance.
The lyrics are universal, but they have a special resonance for those at the prom, which came one day after gay marriage became legal again in California:
“Maybe if we think and wish and hope and pray it might come true
Baby then there wouldn’t be a single thing we couldn’t do
We could be married
And then we’d be happy
Wouldn’t it be nice.”
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!
Baseball’s little gestures mean a lot
It’s the fourth inning of a tight game at Angel Stadium and Chicago White Sox pitcher Jake Peavy is in a jam. The Angels are threatening to score with runners on first and third bases and one out.
As the right-hander backs off the mound to compose himself, Angels hitter Alberto Callaspo steps out of the batter’s box to adjust his helmet and batting gloves.
What looks like a break in the action is anything but. It’s part of a wordless game within the game.
In the Angels’ dugout, Manager Mike Scioscia taps his nose, the bill of his cap, then his chin in rapid succession. That says it all.
Third base coach Dino Ebel, who has been watching closely, decodes the movements and then starts his own conversation — again without a word. Touching parts of his body in three sequences, he relays directions from Scioscia to Callaspo, and then to each baserunner.
In the Chicago dugout, the White Sox are stealthily putting their own plot into action. Trying to stay a step ahead of what the Angels are doing, a coach shifts the defense by motioning with his hands. By the time the pitcher and catcher settle on a pitch, again communicated with signs, every player on the field will have been told where to go and what to do — all without a single instruction uttered aloud.
Baseball has its own sign language, and complex messages are exchanged in a matter of seconds.
#storysongs combo: “Looking for a Sign,” by Beck. Has a bit of a Neil Young vibe.
Prop shop gives used set pieces a second act
It was the dead of winter, and Eva Radke needed fresh mint.
Not just a few sprigs to garnish a leg of lamb. Radke, who was working as an art coordinator on a toothpaste commercial, needed piles of verdant mint to make the ad work, and she wasn’t going to get it in New York in January.
She found a Florida grower who flew the mint to New York in a private plane. She arranged for a heated truck to meet the mint at the airport and rush it to the production studio. Then she watched as the director rejected the lush herb, whose journey had cost about $8,000, in favor of plastic leaves. “They look more real,” he told her.
“My heart hurt. I was insulted for the mint plants,” said Radke, who had an idea that cold day in 2007.
Rather than toss the mint, she offered it to friends and colleagues. The mint was snapped up. If she could save the mint, she thought, she could save hundreds of thousands of props and set pieces: sagging sofas, fake Peking ducks and outmoded lie detector machines, to name a few, that would otherwise be trashed when productions wrapped.
Film Biz Recycling was born a year later, and today it occupies an 11,000-square-foot warehouse in Brooklyn, where the detritus of New York’s entertainment industry — from films and TV, music videos, advertisements and stage productions — has a home as it waits to be rented, recycled for charity or bought by people looking for that red Formica dining set, that faded pea-green couch, that bearskin rug with the head attached.
#storysongs combo: “Fake Plastic Trees,” by Radiohead. Thom Yorke’s vocals at the end are so fragile: “And if I could be who you wanted/If I could be who you wanted/All the time, all the time.” This is live at Glastonbury, and it might even be more vulnerable-sounding.
The science behind the anguish of a hunger strike
Hunger will change you. Just ask Thomas Mahany. The Michigan stonemason and veterans’ advocate has starved himself three times in the name of justice, living only on water spiked with lemon juice and salt for weeks at a time.
Mahany knows how hard your body struggles, how you eventually get used to the gnawing in your stomach, but grow so weary over time that breathing itself becomes a chore.
He knows too that food deprivation affects more than just the body.
“When there’s no food in your stomach, you get your energy from the emotions of others,” the 66-year-old Vietnam veteran said. “You get extra sensitive to what people are thinking. If they are against you, you get away from them. If they are negative, they will drain you.”
As about 100 prisoners at the U.S. military’s Guantanamo Bay detention center refuse food, Mahany’s journeys through self-imposed famine provide a close-up look at why someone would choose to starve himself — and what happens when he does.
An energetic man who complains that most people suffer from “a serious case of the ‘slows,’” Mahany has a compact, solid build and wears a graying goatee and glasses. He looks more like a typical baby boomer on the cusp of retirement than a serial hunger striker.
But there’s an intensity lurking below the surface that’s hard to miss, and he’s easily stirred by memories of the past, of episodes of cruelty and prejudice that he’s witnessed, either in the military or in the civilian world.
“We’re all born innocent, and it’s only later that we develop these discriminations, jealousies and alienations,” he said. “But deep down, everyone still has that innocence in them. That’s what the hunger strike is. It’s the most nonviolent, innocent form of protest there is.”
#storysongs combo: “Pound of Flesh,” by Regina Spektor. How many songs have a title inspired by William Shakespeare and a chorus featuring Ezra Pound? I’m thinking one.
Thursday’s Great Read:
Because of the coup in Egypt, the scheduled story didn’t run. Had to love the photos of fireworks exploding over Tahrir Square, just hours before they did across America.
#storysongs combo: No story to combo with on this day, but how about something for the Fourth of July? “Stardust,” by the great Hoagy Carmichael. I kind of like imagining fireworks as bursts of stardust making their way to Earth.
Gay couples finally get their prom night
For his high school prom in 1942, Robert Clement bought a white orchid corsage in a fancy plastic box.
He gave it to a female staff member who organized the dance. Others would think it was a kind gesture, that he was just a considerate young man. In truth, Clement didn’t have anyone else to give it to.
He liked boys. And he couldn’t take a boy to the prom. Especially not seven decades ago in a small town in Pennsylvania.
“Proms are a rite of passage,” Clement said. “A heterosexual rite of passage.... But it wasn’t mine.”
Last weekend, just one day after gay marriage became legal once more in California, Clement found himself getting dressed up for the prom again — the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center’s senior prom.
He’s 88 now. He has thinning gray hair and wrinkles around his blue eyes. And a party shirt.
An hour before the prom in Hollywood on Saturday, the soft-spoken World War II veteran changed into “a very fancy shirt — my fake Versace.” It was blue and silky, with a gold chariot on the back. A bit of a splurge, he admitted.
He looked forward to hugging old friends. Enjoying the music. He might dance a little, though he’s “never been quite a keen dancer.”
That would have been his partner of 44 years, whose waltzes were breathtaking. In September, John Darcy Noble will have been dead 10 years.
Clement lights up when he talks about Noble. He smiles, sadly and sweetly.
“I would have been with the most popular guy at the dance.”
#storysongs combo: “Same Love,” by Macklemore & Kevin Ryan. A quite wonderful video.
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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