The History of Sound (2025)

This is a quiet movie, muted in both tone and cinematography, and while that sometimes drives me crazy, the slow lazy pace of it is suited to the material. The one thing that is not restrained is when they are going on about the music. And then it bursts with passion and pure emotion. The folk songs that provide the film’s spine spring from a deeply authentic place, infused with a love of storytelling and a yearning for connection with the past. It is is about the romance that forms between two men who find each other through their shared love of the timeless tunes from country people. One is from Kentucky and the other has visited the villages of England and they are deeply drawn to these often sad ballads. Because of the period when the story takes place, World War I, theirs is a love that cannot be. These two men who couldn’t be more different outside their mutual obsession with music. His story begins in 1910 Kentucky, where, in an opening voiceover (the wise, gravelly tones of Chris Cooper), we learn that young Lionel is a musical prodigy. He has perfect pitch; his mother sneezes, and he can name that note. His ability lifts him out of rural poverty and carries him to the elite Boston Conservatory to study vocal performance. After a brief separation when David goes off to fight in the war—“Don’t die,” Lionel orders as he leaves—they eventually reunite to travel throughout rural Maine, knocking on doors and recording the folk songs that families have passed down from one generation to the next. This section is the heart of the film and gives it real spark--the power behind the vocal performances is undeniable. From front porches and kitchen tables, the ability of music to transform and transcend is evident. Afterwards they head their seperate ways, with this time leaving a shadow across Lionel's life that he eventually needs to unpack, and what is revealed to him is sad and inevitable. The one thing that has stuck with me is that the story is told at a time when this music was under appreciated and catalogued, but that changed in my life time, thank goodness.

The Call of the Honeyguide: What Science Tells Us about How to Live Well with the Rest of Life by Rob Dunn

I enjoyed this book, and there are a lot of engaging stories told in it, but it is not ground breaking when read by someone with a life long interest and participation in science. It opens with a couple of interesting stories about inter species cooperation. The first is the one that the title of the book is derived from. In parts of sub-Saharan Africa, birds known as honeyguides once used a specific call to lead humans to beehives so they could split the spoils of wax and honey. The other takes place in southeastern Australia, wild orcas partnered with Thaua people to hunt baleen whales. The Inca empire banned the killing of cormorants and pelicans whose droppings fertilized their crops. These relationships are known as “mutualisms,” and the author suggests such dynamics were once common and could be again in this thought-provoking and wide-ranging exploration of how different species interact in cooperative ways. This is particularly important to think about at a time when so many people are trying to break things rather than fix them. The United States in particular has become a pugilistic bully with a fascist leader bent on getting his way and trampling everything and everybody in his way--instead, diplomacy and cooperation have gotten us so much further and benefitted the greatest number of people. May we go the way of the Honeyguide.

Gradients in Quilting

Johanna Masko talked to our guild about how to think about, design, and operationalize gradients in our quilting. Use of gradation is a prominent part of modern quilting, and there are a lot of ways to think about it. One is the paint chip aisle at the hardware store. There each individual chip shows a particular starting color, and then what happens when you add more and more white to it, or conversely more and more black. This is a familiar and maybe one could say conventional way to look at gradation. Masko advocates thinking about it more broadly--she uses gradents in the background of this quilt, which moves across a large area, and then in each of the dresden plates, she uses it more subtly. I really like the details of her design process, and what she thought about as she was designing this and other quilts that she has made. A couple of take aways from her lecture for me was to use the color apps that are available in order to better train my eye to correctly identify the gradient--so if I want to incorporate it that I can do it right. The other was that when developing a quilt, to think about if this will be a part of the design or not, to think more intentionally about design, and to figure out not only where you are going, but where you want to go. Once again, I feel like the more I learn the less I know--that I figure out more of what I didn't know but am also more aware of the vastness of what there is to know.

All That Life Can Afford by Emily Everett

I have spent some time during my recovery from shoulder surgery getting further along in one of my long term reading goals, which is to read most of the Reese Witherspoon Book Club selections. This is a pretty classic rags to riches romance--sort of. Anna first fell in love with London at her hometown library—its Jane Austen balls a far cry from her life of food stamps and hand-me-downs. She has an absent father and her mother recently died, so she is running on a mixture of adventure and grief. Her father is unsupportive of her plan to do a master's degree in British Literature in London. When she finally arrives after college, the real London is a moldy flat and the same paycheck-to-paycheck grind—that fairy-tale life still out of reach. Then Anna meets the Wilders, who fly her to Saint-Tropez to tutor their teenage daughter. Anna is sependent on tutoring for income, and she has happened upon a sweet gig, which is preparing students who want to study in the US for the SAT. Swept up by the sphinxlike elder sister, Anna soon finds herself plunged into a heady whirlpool of parties and excess, a place where confidence is a birthright. There she meets two handsome young men—one who wants to whisk her into his world in a chauffeured car, the other who sees through Anna's struggle to outrun her past. As any experienced reader of this genre could predict, there are some obvious pitfalls, but never fear, there are people in Anna's court who aren't put off by her impoverished past and who will help her.

The Devil Wears Prada (2006)

There was so much hype about the second installation in this coming 20 years after the first, and while I remembered liking this when I first saw it, I couldn't remember why, or really much about it, so while recovering from surgery and largely bed bound, I watched it again. Initially when I saw this it reminded me of a college friend who had interned for a year at Women's Wear Daily--which is down the fashion magazine rungs quite a ways from Runway (the magazine featured here) but the lifestyle, where you are on call 24/7, that your life is not your own, and that you are essentially enslaved for a year to an editor in exchange for an entree into a job in publishing that is more about your skill as a writer than as a personal assistant. Her stories and the story that unfolds here share a lot of the same qualities. The selling your soul aspect is the part I did not remember. Since the first time I saw this I have seen all the major characters (Tucchi, Blunt, Streep, and Hathaway) many times over, and have a lot of respect for their work, so fun to see this earlier work again, which was more at the beginning of a couple of their careers. Their work here couldn't have hurt. Overall, not having seen the second one yet, I would recommend a rewatch. It holds up well.

What We Can Know by Ian McEwan

This is a multi-layered story, where on the one hand it is about dinner parties and petty rivalries, men and their bright resentments and wars against misfortune. It’s about affairs and empty wine bottles and quail with mushrooms and A.I. and animals and how the best poets read their work aloud. Underneath, it is much much darker. This is a world that hasn’t ended, exactly, but has outlived itself. Civilization persists, thinner and more tentative. The seas have risen, archives have vanished and England has splintered into an archipelago. Yet the survivors remain civil--ignoring the roving gangs that are not the least bit lawful. They read poetry, debate the nuances of a long-ago dinner conversation and stroll through their ruined but beautiful world. It’s a very British dystopia—measured, melancholy and devastatingly polite. Set in 2120, the novel unfolds in the aftermath of climate and nuclear disasters that reshaped the planet. Civilization has retreated inland; knowledge is fragmentary; universities now study “the literature of the inundation.” The protagonist, Thomas Metcalfe, is a professor of literature—not a soldier or revolutionary—who becomes obsessed with reconstructing a lost poem. In the end, you have to choose what to save, and for him, this is it. It is a puzzling and unsettling read.

Robert Bosscher: Pushing Boundaries

I am a bottomless pit when it comes to watching lectures on quilting in general and modern quilting specifically. This speaker is a frequent flyer at QuiltCon and several of my guild mates recommended him--I saw him in conjunction with Libs Elliot's Sew Squad. There were two main points that he covered--the first is what is modern quilting. You have to have a working definition of it before you can talk about pushing the boundaries of it. As you might imagine, there are a lot of ways to look at it, going all the way from close to traditional quilting, with some modification in pattern and fabric, all the way to pure are quilts. Then he launched into some of the artists that he enjoys following. My favorite amongst them that I know was Bisa Butler, which he calls an artist working in fiber rather than a quilter, which I agree with, and the favorite that I was unfamiliar with was Kaitlim Rim, who does exploded blocks in a whimsical manner. He is well worth checking out if you get the chance, and he talks about a lot of different things in the modern quilting realm.

Rich People Problems by Kevin Kwan

This is the third instalment of the series, and I have to say that I am sorry to see the whole thing end, I have gotten to know this extended family, and am at the point where I feel like I can anticipate how each and everyone of them will react. The family comedy takes a more bittersweet tone, as the Shang-Young matriarch Shang Su Yi lies on her deathbed. Whereas the first two books lampooned the lifestyles of the rich and wealthy by presenting it through the perspective of an outsider thrust into that world, this installment discards the outsider’s surprise altogether and takes us into each character’s plans and motivations.  Whether it’s dealing with the potential loss of a loved one or fighting to keep the family’s legacy alive, and while their priorities are all messed up. It is a fun and relatable read.

The Royal We (2025)

There are, at this point, a seemingly infinite number of rom-coms about wayward princes and princesses from small made-up European countries that range from comfortingly mediocre to highly unwatchable. This one, which boasts not one but two fake fiefdoms, is both Hallmark Hammy and surprisingly self-aware and goofy, making it far more charming than expected. Plus, it has a whole plotline about its princess teaching girls leadership skills and kings conflict resolution, which really adds some oomph to its feminist fairytale kind of feel. I mean, please still keep your expectations entirely within check. In order to put to rest a 300-year-old feud between the kingdoms of Vostierrie and Androvia, Princess Coralina and Prince Desmond are set to get married, which will allow for the reunification of the Alsinian province and Castle Elora. Friends, that’s a LOT of silly names all squashed in together. Anyway, these two have basically been betrothed to each other since they were babes, so that when they wed the two countries can finally live in times of peace. Or that’s the plan until Princess Coralina ditches Prince Desmond and elopes with a plumber named Cody (Adam Woodward). As you can imagine, social media is all aflame about how you’ve “gotta love a man who can work with his hands.” You know who is not pleased by this? Well, both royal houses, obviously, but who is really peeved is Edwin, Prince Desmond’s butler/valet/main squeeze. The back up plan goes surprisingly well, and all in all it is a diversionary movie that was surprisingly fun.

We The People by Jill Lepore

This is it, the exhaustive look back at the US Constitution--well, not so exhaustive that it starts with the Magna Carta, and at no point does the author go back to what had happened in England that led up to England's colony rising up and breaking away--she really starts at the post war Constitutional Convention, and how we ended up with the mish mash that we got. The U.S. Constitution is among the oldest constitutions in the world—and one of the most difficult to amend. At what cost? In this landmark, lavishly illustrated book, Harvard professor of history and law Jill Lepore argues that the philosophy of amendment is foundational to American constitutionalism. Challenging both originalism and the Supreme Court’s monopoly on constitutional interpretation, Lepore argues that the framers never intended for the Constitution to be kept, like a butterfly, under glass, but instead expected that future generations would be forever tinkering with it, improving the machinery of government. The argument against "originalism" is the best part of the book, where she refers to to the writers of the constituion said about it at the time--and that the Federalist Papers were published in a newspaper well after the constitution, and were not even generally available until the last 20th century. These originalists just basically made that all up and nobody fact checked them. At the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding and in an account as radical as Charles Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the United States, Lepore offers a sweeping, lyrical, and democratic constitutional history, telling the stories of generations of Americans who have attempted everything from abolishing the Electoral College to guaranteeing environmental rights, hoping to mend America by amending its Constitution.