You Hear About Sarkisian? Zocola Public Square

DEC. 9, 2013

“Sarkisian” is one of the most common Armenian last names. But when my cousin Greg called this week and opened with “You hear about Sarkisian?” I knew he wasn’t talking about Serge Sarkisian, president of the Republic of Armenia.

He was calling to tell me about Steve Sarkisian, who had been named the head football coach of the USC Trojans. Sarkisian’s hiring may be the single most brilliant move in the history of the 133-year-old South Los Angeles institution—at least, to Armenians living in Southern California.

Henry Sahakian, a salesman from Glendale, told me, “I hope this inspires the Armenian community to follow and play more football.” His wife, Margaret, chimed in, “We are all so proud.”

Growing up in Los Angeles, an Armenian-American and member of the second generation of my family to be born here (in 1954, in my case), I often heard the words “Armenian” and “proud.” I learned to be proud that Alexander the Great only “partially” conquered my ancestral land. Proud that Armenia was the first country on earth to proclaim Christianity its national religion (in 301 A.D.). Proud that TV detective “Mannix”—Mike Connors, né Krikor Ohanian—was Armenian. Proud that four-time Formula One champion Alain Prost, the main rival of Ayrton Senna, was half-Armenian.

I was also proud of singer Charles Aznavour, artist Arshile Gorky, astrophysicist Viktor Hambartsumian, chess champion Garry Kasparov, financier Kirk Kerkorian, singer Cher (Cherilyn Sarkisian), composer Aram Khachaturian, Russian MiG fighter plane designer Artem Mikoyan, writer William Saroyan, and World War II pilot Anthony Krikorian, my dad. Heck, I was even proud of the creator of The Chipmunks, Ross Bagdasarian.

And, decades before Steve Sarkisian walked a college football sideline, my Uncle Aram revered Notre Dame football coach Ara Parseghian, who led the Fighting Irish to national championships in 1966 and 1973.

Sadly, over the past decade, the image of Los Angeles Armenians has been marred by an increase in criminal activity. In the 1940s, a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputy told my Uncle Harry that no Armenian was ever in the county jail. Today, there are scores in Men’s Central. (For the record, I was there myself three times.) The Armenian Power street gang is known for credit card fraud and auto thefts.

But it is that hit to our reputation that makes this USC news so welcome.

I’m one of those Armenians who remember Sarkisian from a golden period of Trojan football. In the early 2000s, when USC was dominating college football and its head coach Pete Carroll was showered with praise, my cousin Dave and I knew the real reason. The offensive coach was Armenian. To us, Carroll was a figurehead. The real star of the sidelines was his assistant, Sarkisian.

Of course, not all Armenians see this the same way. Shant Ohanian, a lawyer and UCLA alumnus, points out some chinks in Sarkisian’s Armenian armor. “It’s funny, as soon as Sarkisian’s hire was announced, you saw all over Facebook Armenians, especially USC students and fans, celebrating the hire—not necessarily as a USC fan, but more as a ‘fellow’ Armenian,” said the self-described “die-hard UCLA fan” as he started slinging Bruin-tipped arrows. “Many, however, don’t know Sarkisian’s Armenian background; it’s mostly his Armenian last name that matters. I don’t think Steve Sarkisian himself speaks a word of Armenian; his father is an Iranian-Armenian who immigrated to the USA when he was 18. He married his wife, Steve’s mother, who is Irish-American. Steve was born in Torrance.”

Ohanian went on, “Nevertheless, as soon as he has some success with USC, you will see more and more Armenians claiming him as one of their own.”

Ohanian was married just five weeks ago to Silva Sevlian. I went to their wedding at the St. Leon Armenian Cathedral in Burbank. For their honeymoon, I gave them my list of places they should see in Paris. They had a lovely time. A fairytale wedding followed by a dream of a honeymoon. But this week, with the announcement of Sarkisian as the new Trojan head coach, that honeymoon seemed over.

Silva went to USC and didn’t like Shant’s even slight criticisms of the new coach.

“My husband’s opinion doesn’t matter. He is nothing but a Bruin,” said Silva. “Sarkisian becoming coach is second only to an Armenian becoming the mayor of Los Angeles.”

Michael Krikorian is a writer in Los Angeles. His first novel is Southside, and he’s on Twitter@makmak47.

http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2013/12/09/you-hear-about-sarkisian/ideas/nexus/

Winston Agrees With BookLoons, Reads Into the Night

Reviewed by Mary Ann Smyth    Michael Lyons is a Los Angeles gang reporter. He can walk freely in the gang controlled parts of LA. He is welcomed to conduct interviews with gang members. Why then is he shot and wounded, dropped to the sidewalk just two blocks from City Hall?

After the first shock sets in, his fellow reporters start a betting pool and wonder why it hadn't happened before. Who shot him? Lyons does live on the edge. Then Lyons is accused of organizing the shooting for the publicity it would bring him. Because of this, he is fired as an embarrassment to the paper.

Can he leave it there? Of course not. When three murders occur in LA, Lyons realizes all are tied into his shooting. He suspects a notorious, imprisoned gang leader, Big Evil, as the instigator of the shootings, his own included. Big Evil's younger brother is one of those murdered.

Southside by Michael Krikorian sports a tightly written plot that will keep you reading long into the night. Michael Lyons is invincible. Much like his author. Krikorian has reported extensively on Los Angeles' notorious street gangs 'and receives more letters from inmates in California state prisons than he does bills and junk mail combined!' He must pull extensively from his career to write such convincing dialogue. This is a book worth your time.

http://www.bookloons.com/cgi-bin/Review.asp?bookid=16599

Winston does NOT like to be interrupted when reading "Southside"

Richard Fausset on the Morning after Robert Blake's Wife Was Killed

Richard Fausset near Mexico City, Mexico   

An old but telling anecdote about the novelist Michael Krikorian: On the morning of May 5, 2001, I was cold-calling police stations from the old LAT Valley newsroom when some random desk jockey at LAPD North Hollywood--trying for cop-cool but coming off half-hysterical--mentions that Robert Blake's wife had been shot to death in her car around the corner from Vitello's Restaurant in Studio City. I had to let Google remind me who Robert Blake was: "Baretta" had been off the air for nearly a quarter century. Oh shit: *that* Robert Blake. 

I flew to the crime scene, all cub reporter elbows and knees, tongue hanging from mouth, and soon joined in the LA sunshine by a thousand vultures and buzzards and hacks and hyenas in Clarks comfort shoes who smelled a classic hunk of bloody LA noir: the scrupulous and unscrupulous were there, the NY Times and the National Enquirer, local cop-shop dorks with coffee stains on Arrow shirts, nearsighted police-scanner junkies, and, this time, hordes of well-moussed national TV hacks, salivating as they imagined the animated graphic and the whoosh and the theme music that would soon accompany this particular loss of human life, the weeks of whodunnit Hollywood scandal coverage that would allow their viewers a break from the complicated and depressing reality of places like Afghanistan, and characters like Mullah Mohammad Omar, whose followers had just dynamited the Bamiyan Buddhas: in retrospect, our generation's Bad Moon Rising. 

So anyway, anyway... eventually Krikorian gets there, fire-red eyeballs hanging out of his head and looking like he'd gone to sleep in his blazer. I worked, and as I worked, I watched Krikorian work, dancing from place to place, recreating the scene, imagining motive, footsteps, angles, collecting scraps of dialog from witnesses and neighbors. And I distinctly recall--as the scrum of reporters reached peak mayhem, as the deadline clock ticked, as assistant city editors, following orders from editors from other tax brackets, jangled our cell phones every 25 seconds for scraps of updates-- I remember how Krikorian randomly picks out this floral-print dress from a rack outside of a curio shop on Tujunga Blvd. and holds it in front of a pretty blonde. "You know, you'd look fantastic in this," he says, with that charming, napalm-strafed wreck of a voice. The blonde looks back, pauses for a second, and decides, after brief internal deliberation, to smile generously. Because he was right: The dress would have looked great on her. He noticed that it matched her eyes.

So that, for me, is the genius of Michael Krikorian: elegance amid the ugliness, an eye for beauty and detail, love and blood, sunshine and death. And now he has a crime novel out that's been well-reviewed and blurbed by the likes of Michael Connelly. I'm looking forward to reading it. You can order it on Amazon:

Suspense Magazine Calls Southside "A Good Story"

"Southside is a solid debut novel from Los Angeles Times crime reporter Michael Krikorian. Krikorian writes what he knows, spinning a tale about a Los Angeles Times crime reporter, Michael Lyons, who covers the many gangs of the City of Angels. As an editor, I would have counseled Krikorian to not give the character-clearly a fictionalized version of himself-his own first name, which gets a bit too on the nose, but that's a minor nitpick.

The novel gets off to a somewhat disjointed start, with frequent shifting of narrative viewpoint from third person to first person, but the reader settles into the format and eventually the loose ends come together. The story really gets rolling when Lyons is gunned down in the street but survives. He has made many enemies through his reporting, but none of the possible suspects really seems to make sense. As the police investigation stalls, Lyons himself digs deeper into the case.

This classic set-up takes a nice twist about a third of the way in, setting the police department against Lyons and the paper, and the paper against Lyons, ratcheting up tensions and complicating the investigation. Other victims, who don't survive, may be connected, but the evidence is slim. Overall, these plot threads are handled well. "Southside" is a thriller rather than a whodunit, since the reader is introduced to the killer fairly early, and Krikorian builds the tension effectively as you wonder if the police or Lyons are going to catch up with the murderer before there's another victim.

The good guys occasionally make some rather large intuitive leaps from thin evidence, and sometimes the narrative tries a little too hard for its gritty street atmosphere, but despite being a little rough around the edges, "Southside" is a good story populated with colorful characters. Most of those characters, on either side of the law, are not simple stereotypes, but are complex, real people, which makes for engaging reading. It's definitely worth a try and provides firm footing for additional adventures for Michael Lyons."

Reviewed by Scott Pearson, author of "Star Trek: Honor in the Night" and cohost of the Generations Geek podcast, for Suspense Magazine

Nathan ignoring the grizzly bear at the San Diego Zoo

LA. Observed

Writing what you know: crime reporter Michael Krikorian

By Kevin Roderick | November 20, 2013 11:58 PM

When we last heard about journalist Michael Krikorian, he had written a colorful and revealing op-ed piece about the night he shot some guy in a brawl near Compton. [Technically, the last mention at LA Observed was when Krikorian blogged about his annual trip to Italy with girlfriend Nancy Silverton, the Pizzeria Mozza chef. But that was just a Morning Buzz brief.] That night outside a bar near Compton, Krikorian pulled an AK-47 from his car trunk and fired off 17 rounds. Not your average LA Times crime reporter.

Now he's out with his first crime novel, Southside, in which a main character is an LA Times gang reporter in South LA. Writing about what you know and all that.

Los Angeles Times gang reporter Michael Lyons has just left his favorite downtown saloon when he is shot and wounded on the sidewalk two blocks from City Hall. After the initial shock, fellow reporters put together a betting pool. The bet? "Who Shot Mike?" There are a lot of contenders. When the LAPD's investigation stalls, the Times runs editorials critical of the police. Then, when detectives uncover an audio tape of Lyons talking to a gang member about the benefits of getting shot, they release the tape. The embarrassed newspaper editor fires Lyons, who then sets out on the streets of Southside Los Angeles with a vengeance to find the shooter. When three seemingly unrelated people are murdered on the streets of L.A., Lyons connects them to his own shooting. The tie-in? An imprisoned, notorious gang shot-caller known as Big Evil, who Lyons made famous in a gang profile and whose younger brother is among the victims. But who is doing the killing?

Bestselling author Michael Connelly, himself an ex-Times crime reporter who sets his crime novels on the streets of Los Angeles, says of "Southside:" “In a place as well traveled by storytellers as Los Angeles, Michael Krikorian blazes a unique path with this powerful first novel.Southside has muscle, insight and all the right stuff."

Pizzeria Mozza's Hot Chocolate Under Investigation

After receiving a formal complaint from the American Hot Chocolate Society, a federal investigation has been launched into the "hot chocolate" served at Pizzeria Mozza to determine if the fabled dessert is what it claims to be, or actually a chocolate sauce.

If the inquiry finds the dessert, which bills itself as "Cioccolato Calda", is, in fact,  a sauce, it could be stripped of its many awards, including Best Hot Chocolate in the World, as well as America's Most Titillating Hot Chocolate.  

"It's not fair to other hot chocolates to be compared to Mozza's, not only because it's so much better, but because it's not even the same thing," said Wilhelm Von Smithers of the Hot Chocolate Institute based in Vienna, Austria. 

The hot chocolate served at Pizzeria Mozza. is a turbocharged version of what chef Nancy Silverton learned to make more than 30 years ago in Paris at Angelina on the Rue Rivoli. Silverton, gracious in crediting the originals, said she's added spices and a marshmallow topping to the Angelina version. 

Some Pizzeria Mozza loyalists felt the federal probe was just another waste of taxpayer's money. It was unclear at press time wither the Trump Administration would continue to fund the investigation after they begin to rot in hell.

"Who cares what it is?" said Sarah Culberon, a princess from the Southside of Sierra Leone. "The main and only thing is that it is absolutely delicious."

Princess of Sierra Leone savors Hot Chocolate

The Subject of a federal probe

Camel Defies San Diego Zoo Ban, Reads "Southside"

Openly defying an official order that banned the crime novel "Southside" from the San Diego Zoo, Mongo the Camel read the crime thriller at the tourist attraction Wednesday while thousands of visitors tried in vain to get his attention. 

Zoo officials, who had banned the critically acclaimed novel Monday in an effort to keep humans from reading  it - and therefore ignoring the animals -  were dumbfounded by Mongo's blatant ignoring of zoo rules as well as his apparent fascination with the Michael Krikorian book, 

Sources within the zoo quoted Mongo, a Bactrian or "Two Hump" camel from the Gobi Desert in the  Southside of Mongolia, as saying "Southside was the best book I've read since "Life of Pi'". 

Christi Carreno, a zoo events organizer, said that while the ban is still officially in effect,  zoo officials would meet in an emergency session today to consider all possibilities. "We want what's best for the animals and if they want to read Southside, then maybe the ban will be lifted for them. But, not for humans."

A Cape Buffalo, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said "We're gonna read Southside. That's not the question. The question is are we going to read legally or illegally. Me, I don't give a damn. I'm just waiting on my copy from Amazon. You feel me?"

Mongo reads the Krikorian thriller

San Diego Zoo Officials Ban "Southside"

"I didn't come all the way from Sumatra to be ignored for Southside" - Anthony the Tiger. ..

...Claiming the new crime novel by Michael Krikorian was inciting "gross animal ignoring", San Diego Zoo officials took extraordinary measures Tuesday and banned the crime writer's critical acclaimed "Southside" from the beloved tourist attraction.

"Too many people were reading the book and just walking right by the rhinos, hippos, tigers and others beasts and that's not fair to the animals," said Zoo official Christi Carreno. "Southside will no longer be allowed in the zoo. And, no, this is not a form of censorship It's simply pro-animal feelings."

Hailed as the best novel ever about a crime reporter covering street gangs, "Southside" chronicles the exploits of fictional journalist Michael Lyons as he explores Los Angeles' roughest neighborhoods. The book began showing up at the world famous San Diego Zoo last week and immediately caused problems.

"I took a bath, shampooed my coat, even used that Paul Mitchell conditioner one of the zebras gave me, but so many visitors walked right by with their snout in that damn Southside book," said Fatbiscuit, a hippopotamus from the Eastside of Uganda.

But, it was an Indian rhinoceros who lead the movement to ban Krikorian's novel by starting a hunger strike this past weekend. The rhino, Calcutta Slim, said he would refrain from any tandoori-based snacks until the book was banned. Other animals quickly joined the hunger strike, including the lions who said they would not eat humans until Southside is banished.

Monday their demands were met.

(Humans will be rerouted around the lion's den for at least one week.)

Zoo visitor ignores Calcutta Slim

Pastry Chef Narvaez Gave Russians Budino Secrets

Renowned American pastry chef Dahlia Navaez was arrested Monday in San Diego after FBI agents discovered she had supplied the Russians with top secret Mozza recipes including  the classified caramel-to-butterscotch ratio on the restaurant's trademark budino.

Navarez is being held without bail at the brig of the USS Midway aircraft carrier which is docked less than half a mile from Pizzeria Mozza San Diego which is set to open today in Seaport Village.

"National security does not just involve guns and bombs, it entails butter and salt also, " said U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.  "When a country has an advantage over an enemy, do not supply that enemy with  that advantage. But, that's what Narvaez has done. Allegedly."
Under the rules of the Geneva Convention's .Code of Prisoner Treatment, Narvaez was allowed to have one book. Without hesitation, Narvaez demanded - and received - the highly praised crime novel "Southside" by MIchael Krikorian .

Dahlia in the brig at the USS Midway