Category Archives: Features

A Mighty Pulse — Music and The History of Sound

There’s an irony about the way I connected with The History of Sound, the 2025 film by Oliver Hermanus. In other circumstances, regarding other films, I might have avoided watching this one. I am grateful I didn’t. Because the very elements the critics accused of making the film bland are precisely the elements I love.

I heard it said that the film is too sedate, like Brokeback Mountain on Xanax. Brokeback Mountain is among my favorite films, but for me, the critics got it wrong. The History of Sound is tranquil, not sedate. It has a similar, but subtler tone. Both films feature gay male protagonists, and each has an undercurrent of rage and despair, but Jake Twist’s anger and Ennis Del Mar’s longing in Ang Lee’s and Annie Proulx’s story are what Brokeback Mountain is about.  The History of Sound is not about its gay men’s love story or the tragedy of being “different” in the 19-aughts, though the men’s love for one another is at the foundation of the tale. The men are connected to one another by their devotion to sound,  which in turn connects them to the human race.  And the film explores the joy and the sorrow that each derives from both essential bonds.

The History of Sound elucidates two men’s common fervor for collecting folk songs, preserving the authentic voice of the American heartland, for chronicling history that would otherwise go unnoticed by future generations. One man is Lionel Worthing (Paul Mescal), a musical prodigy who rises out of his Kentucky poverty by earning a scholarship to a New England music conservatory.  The other is David White (Josh O’Connor), born into privilege, orphaned at a young age, a seeker of the truth that is the music. What draws Lionel to David in their initial encounter is David’s extensive knowledge of songs that Lionel thought were merely the sounds of his hillbilly home; their bond forms out of the shared knowledge that folk music is the heartbeat of a culture.  That knowledge is a passion that animates their relationship.

Which is a relationship without conventional commitment. 

Neither of the men defines himself as a gay man; each expresses interest in marriage, children, and neither pledges forever to the other. In every frame, each of the men exposes his unwillingness to disclose too much of his past or his secret self.  David knows that Lionel is a farm boy, and Lionel knows that after David’s parents died, an English uncle took him in; when the uncle died, David self-nurtured in his parents’ Newport estate.  When David is drafted and sent into the maws of WWI, he writes letters about the landscapes of Europe, not about his love for Lionel . . . or about what he might be suffering. And when he returns from the war, he controls the inevitable PTSD in such a way that both Lionel and the movie audience feel it vicariously, as a not-quite-palpable volcano in David’s belly. 

Such tension in a film is anything but sedate.   I was unnerved and riveted to each well-acted, beautifully crafted scene.

Still, I understand others’ complaint that “nothing happens.”  Neither man suffers a beating for being a homosexual.  In fact, no one so much as casts a negative aspersion their way.  No torrid sex scenes take us into their shared bed. When tragedy occurs, it occurs, as it would in the best Greek tragedies, behind the scenes, and there is no over-dramatic display of despair or mourning. This is a movie that invites us to witness the power of both sound and silence to create ties and to dash them to smithereens.  The viewer is never expected to be a voyeur.

At the same time, there is plenty happening on the screen.  There is not one awkward moment of inept acting; both O’Connor and Mescal are consistently convincing. Director Hermanus has created a very believable world, and Ben Shattuck’s screenplay has some dialogue that is downright poetic. To say that Alexander Dyan’s cinematography is stunning is an understatement. He has captured, with magical lighting, brilliant juxtapositions of forest, sea, sky, fields, nature, the visual glory of American landscapes – the city of Boston, the farmland of Kentucky, the forests of Maine, remarkably recreated in the state of New Jersey. There are also picture window vistas shot in Rome and the glorious UK Lake District.

My personal attachment to the film has another dimension.  It took me back to my own youth in a roundabout way.

Until I was 6, I fell asleep every night blanketed by the healing warmth of my mother’s cello.  As soon as my brother and I were in bed, she would hasten to its side, caress it for a moment, then begin to play.  I lived in a farmhouse not unlike the one in which we first see the child Lionel in this film, and in the smile that transforms his face when his father plays, I recognized the relief I felt the moment Mom’s cello began to hum. I found my mother in that music, and I was drawn to her because of it.  I learned to recognize her moods in the sound – joy when she played Bach, despair in Bruch’s Kol Nidrei. I could feel her story long before I knew it. The cello sang for her and to her, and I learned early that music burrows into the soul and fills in the holes wrought by suffering, sorrow, and loneliness.

The folk music in A History of Sound resonates as my mother’s cello did.  The film conveys music’s true weight, a weight that cannot be spoken.  It must be heard.

Memoir Moment — Holiday Sister Blues

]New Year’s Day 1951.  I am 3.  Daddy wakes me early.  He has dismantled the Christmas tree and tells me we are taking it to the country. . . We’ll leave it with food for the deer in the forest.

“Why can’t we keep it here Daddy?”

“Mommy wants to clean the house. You’ll be big sister soon.

Big sister.  Confusing. Dorothy is my big sister. She is 18, a grown-up,. She takes care of me when she comes home from college.  I’ll be big?

Later that day, Daddy comes into the apartment carrying a big basket with a hood over one end.

“What’s that?” I ask.

“It’s a bassinet. A bed. For the new baby.”

                                                                        ———————————

I did not understand. What was a “new baby?”

We had no television, and except for my cousin Johnny, who was nearly the same age as I, I had little contact with children.  We lived in a basement apartment in a bustling Flushing, Queens, neighborhood, and I am sure there were children all around, but our social life revolved around my mother’s parents and sisters, who, still reeling from their narrow escape from the terrors of Europe, had not begun to venture into the community. 

I had dolls.  Silent, inert, boring.  One drank from a small plastic bottle and expelled water from a hole between its legs.  Most uninteresting.  If that’s what a baby was, I wanted no part of it.

“Don’t worry,” Dorothy said.  “When they bring him home, you’ll love him.”

Perhaps.

 Early in the morning on January 9, Daddy woke me. “You have a baby brother, Carla,” he whispered. “His name is David.”

Baby brother.  David. 

They brought him home on January 13.

We were sitting in the little living room at the bottom of the entryway when the doorbell rang. Dorothy ran up the stairs to open the door; as the cold wind swept into the room, I saw my grandmother’s imposing silhouette blocking the sunlight, and I heard her muttering something to whatever she held in her arms.  Behind her, Daddy cautioned, “Watch your step, Mutti. It could be slippery, and. . . “

As she descended into the apartment,  I saw that she held a strange, bundle of squirming blankets, and she was scowling.

“This baby will wiggle out of my arms if I don’t put him down. Sit on the couch, Carla.”

I froze.  Why did they want me to sit?  Daddy had gone back to the car to get Mommy, and I wanted to see her not sit.

“I said, sit, young woman.”  When grandma became authoritative, she was imperious.

I sat.

“Straighten up,” she commanded. 

I did.

“Hold out your arms.”

I obeyed.

Then she placed her bundle into my lap. 

“This,” Grandma announced, “Is David. David Walter.”

“Oh,” I mumbled, genuinely disappointed. He was a round, red, wrinkly thing.  His skin was blotchy, and his eyes, buried in the deep folds of his face, squinted as he began to wail.

“Please take him back,” I begged.”  He’s ugly.”

I let him slide off my lap, and Grandma gave me the evil eye as she caught him. 

“He is yours, and you will take care of him.  From today on, for the rest of your life, this is your little brother.”

She put him back in my lap. Dorothy sat next to me and wrapped her arm around my shoulder. “You’ll see, sweetie,” she whispered. “You’ll grow to love him. The way I learned to love you.”

That soothed me.  I trusted Dorothy.  I felt her love, pure devotion, and I believed her unconditionally.  I understood the concept of being her little sister.

From then on every January was about David. He was often ill, nearly died of bronchitis and developed asthma before his 2nd birthday, but he was never sickly.  He was adventurous, excited by every new experience we could share, and even before he could talk, he seemed fearless and was confident that his big sister would be at his side.

David changed my identity, and though he was not the last to call me Big Sister, he was uniquely fused to me as I was to him.

When our sister Helen was born 3 years after David, he and I became the big sibling duo, cleaving tenaciously to a private language, to private rituals of play, to shared secrets that excluded Helen and each of the 5 babies who followed her into our lives.  Our parents changed; the soft sweetness of their marriage became increasingly hostile, and their way of dealing with issues became more unrecognizable with each passing year.  Helen was young enough to take them as they were, but David and I understood that the parents we knew resided in a pocket of memory to which only we two were privy.

Dorothy and I saw each other infrequently as I grew up – she married a Los Alamos scientist and built her life with him and their six beautiful children in the New Mexico mountains; my parents settled us in the northeast. When we visited on another, Dorothy and I had little to be nostalgic about. She told me stories of her life before I was born, stories of what little she remembered about her own mother, stories that included grandparents, aunts, and cousins whose lives ended long before mine began. She knew little of my childhood, as she was in college, then in motherhood before I started school. She existed in a universe I could never see except through her singularly focused lens, and she had less and less time to know mine.  We cherished one another, but we had little commonality.  

David’s and my pasts intersected and connected; we existed in the same time and space.

Over the years of marriages, divorces, and remarriages, births of children, parenthood, and grandchildren, we weathered the storms and celebrated the joys in tandem.  We would butt heads, and we might lose touch from time to time. But we always reinvigorated the bond, reinstated the closeness that was buoyed by our collective memories. If we felt wronged, we always forgave, always valued the revival of the relationship.

The other kids, whose births came in quick succession after Helen’s, established their own private bonds, which omitted us just as we had omitted them. I am now aware that there were things I didn’t know about that perhaps I should have seen, but I left home before David got to high school, and I was caught up in the maze of my own delayed adolescent awakenings. More than anything, we were terribly inept, quasi-parental units, not siblings to them. I was Big Sister to David alone.

Big Sister.  Little Brother. 

Grandma promised for the rest of my life. She could not have known.

In 1964, when David was 13, he was diagnosed with diabetes, which re-routed his trajectory.  The illness cheated David in all manner of ways, and likewise, he cheated death with multiple tricks for as long as he could. After endless surgeries – two kidney transplants, two amputations, quintuple bypass – and seemingly infinite catastrophic illnesses like pneumonia and sepsis, David died in 2023, at age 72. 

Now, nearly three years later, I am still grappling with my identity.

So long as David existed, I was a Big Sister. That role helped define my sense of self as a parent, as a teacher, as a human being. I was flawed, but I was tethered. 

All but one of our younger siblings have rejected me.  I am a mother and a grandmother, who has succeeded in many ways and failed in more. I am who I am. But I am no longer a big sister.

 Only David would understand what I mean.

Fanfare for a Most UNcommon Woman

The world has lost a source of light this week. My friend Eleanor Sweeney has left the planet, and with her goes the last non-family link to my mother, a link that gave me permission to see my other as the whole woman she was.

Eleanor and my mother Charlotte became friends the year my baby brother John began Kindergarten, the end of 1966.  In those days, it was a rare Kindergartner’s mother who was nearing 50, which my mother was, and she felt out of place. 

“I feel like I did when I was working as an RA at UVM,” she told me that October.  “I’m the experienced older woman, and they all look to me for wisdom, and I can’t admit that  I’m still just flailing like everyone else.”

Eleanor made her feel normal. Their fourteen-year age difference was never uncomfortable for either of them.

They met through their sons. Within weeks of beginning school, John and Eleanor’s oldest boy were best friends, and they began visiting one another’s homes. Mom and Eleanor began to talk. It was easy to talk with Eleanor. She listened intently and answered astutely.  They began to share details of their lives as mothers of multiple, active children. Eleanor had three small boys; Mom had three girls and three boys, ranging in age from 6-14, still at home.  I had left for college in September.

Before Eleanor entered the picture, I remember mom going to College Club and PTA meetings, but she did not socialize with her cohorts or get close to anyone in particular.  With Eleanor, friendship quickly blossomed into a personal attachment. They talked on the phone, commiserated about kids and husbands, shared driving responsibilities, and nurtured a kind of surrogate sisterhood. 

Eleanor was the perfect confidante for my mom, whose European upbringing and old-world sensibilities were often misunderstood.  She had been an expert cellist and loved music, was a reader of all manner of literature, and grew up in a house where art was the center of everything.  Eleanor was a reader, loved books, music, and culture in general; moreover, Eleanor was an artist, a free-thinking photographer, with a keen eye for what made the natural world seem otherworldly.  They were both linguists who could converse about art or literature or current events in English or Russian; each was the center of life in her home and could equally prepare meals, do the laundry, analyze great ideas, and, when necessary, fix minor plumbing issues.  They were heroic women.

By the time I got to know Eleanor, I was the mother of grown children, and she was divorced and a grandmother.  My mother had told me I should get to know her friend, but I had had little opportunity. I liked her on the few occasions I met her, but we were not friends until the 1990s.  My mother died in 1999, and friendship with Eleanor became a kind of imperative for me, a force for which I shall be forever grateful.

Soon after mom’s death, another friend from our hometown sighed, “I wish your mother had been mine. She was perfect.”  I could not respond.  My mother was certainly anything but perfect for me, and it took time for me to learn how to love her appropriately.  Before I could articulate any of that, Eleanor spoke up.  “Charlotte made me appreciate my mother precisely because she showed me how to love an IMperfect mother.” 

What an epiphany, I thought. That is just what Eleanor is doing for me!

Over the next 25 years, we saw each other through a number of life changes. I divorced, her grandchildren grew up, and mine were born; she suffered great losses, and then so did I, though never quite as great.  We didn’t talk all the time, but when we did, we connected deeply and spiritually.

 Eleanor and my mother taught me what an extraordinary gift an intergenerational friendship can be, and I have learned to nurture the same with younger women as I age.  I cherish the time I got to spend with Eleanor. I will miss her, but her presence is unextinguishable in my sense of self, my appreciation for life.  Perhaps someday a younger friend of mine will feel the same about me.  

I doubt Eleanor knew what a giant print she left on my heart. She was far too humble to have sought it out.

Eleanor was one of the founders of the Adirondack Artists Guild; she is pictured here in the Guild’s Gallery in downtown Saranac Lake, NY. The Guild will host a celebration of Eleanor’s life and work in January

Fanfare for the Common Woman

Audio podcasts are a wonderful innovation, especially for those of us with insomnia.  Nothing is more soothing for me than a gentle voice talking about interesting worlds.  I especially love science, history, and theater talk, film history podcasts, or literary discussions, and David Remnick.  It is comforting to feel myself relaxed out of anxiety into someone else’s knowledge and then to drift off to sleep.

I confess that there are many podcasts that irritate me.  The ones that make me sit up, desiring to scream into my device– though that is certainly not an option for a considerate apartment dweller in the middle of the night – those that frustrate me with their pontification or false modesty,  political rants or misinformation. 

The ones that most irritate me are the podcasts that pretend to offer hope and life modeling to women over 50. On podcasts such as unPaused, with Marie Claire Haver, or Wiser than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus.  These offer advice from the megastars like Isabella Rosselini, Nancy Pelosi, Gloria Steinham, Michele Obama, Jane Fonda, et high-falutin al.

Inevitably, these admittedly wonderful, rightfully revered role models are women who have achieved great fame and fortune. They are most certainly noteworthy, and I deeply admire them and their accomplishments.  But they are women who have been receiving attention for a long time already and are rarely in positions to which any of us groundlings can reasonably aspire. 

All the while, everyday women who achieve less than phenomenal but still noteworthy successes are overlooked. Despite the fact that we, too, are pundits. We, too, offer stories that could be truly inspirational.

I have many friends who have lived lives worth sharing.  Women – mothers and wives — who have written books that may not have been bestsellers but still had audiences and made a difference for their readers.  For example, my dear friend, who nursed her husband through harrowing bouts of PTSD, raised her family, took care of her brothers, ran a lovely small business, and managed to paint some lovely watercolors?  She knows about survival and rising above adversity and setting goals, and attaining happiness. Another brave woman I know writes songs that aim to forge peace and understanding while curating a huge cache of legacy art, and another creates phonics videos to promote literacy among disadvantaged children. They love their work, and they are proud of what they do, as many everyday women do. Some nurture student artists — those who may not be the Oscar or book award winners spewing gratitude for their mentors — and help them to nurture dreams that lead to meaningful careers that improve the world in multiple ways, Even while schlepping personal children from pillar to post, attending extracurricular activities, keeping husband’s clothes cleaned and pressed, etc., myriad ordinary heroines persevere.  Women who work as nurses, physicians’ assistants. dental hygienists, bus drivers, etc., while providing care for elderly parents.  Those who act in plays on, off, and way off Broadway,  direct educational and community theaters, sing in and direct choirs, play music, and lead small-town orchestras.

You can see my point, I am sure.  The accomplishments of women are incalculable. 

Surely the multitude of women who have built modest successes are no less interesting than those who have made millions?  Is it not exemplary that real people keep plugging away, writing, painting, acting, teaching, serving the sick, and providing goods and services?  Aren’t the common variety supermoms/daughters/aunts/sisters/grands apt role models for younger generations?

Come on, social influencers, podcasters, you who want to inspire women, find those of us who fuel the world with its real power. Look for our books, our drawings, our songs, our stories. Ask us what we know. Let us show you how fascinating we can be.

Book Review: The Weight of Ink, by Rachel Kadish

Despite the dark suggestion of her title, Rachel Kadish’s The Weight of Ink (Mariner Books, 2017) is pure illumination. 

I turned to Kadish’s book as I began cobbling the details and backdrops for a fiction I am working on about members of a 17th C New Netherlands Jewish community, refugees from the Portuguese Inquisition. Since Kadish’s book, set in the same time period, concerns the life of Portuguese Jewish refugees who have found their way to London by way of Amsterdam,  I was drawn in by a hope that her descriptions and depictions would give me a more vibrant, sensory experience of the world I hoped to create.  It did not take more than a few pages to know that I had made a wise choice, that I would find what I was looking for. And much more.

The life of Kadish’s characters, defined as much by ink as by history, is a seemly model for the ones I hope to bring to life. Mine too, will be defined by their stories, stories that bear the pressure of ink, which in the case of Kadish’s characters, is considerable . . . both physically and literally. 

Kadish’s book presents two heroines, each of whose existence attests to the ink’s sway.  One is a Ester Valasquez, a Jewish intellectual born into the wrong century, and the other is Helen Watts, a 21st C baby boomer academic intent on breathing warm life into the legacy of the woman whose work she has discovered in the carapace alcove of a house built in the aftermath of England’s Civil War.

Watts, a sexagenarian historian at a contemporary London university, finds herself wrestling with self-doubt and recrimination after she realizes that documents given to her by a former student are authentically written by a woman in the 1600s. Watts has never hoped for such a find, one that seemed unfathomable. That a female in that time period could have asserted herself strongly enough to have accomplished the work Helen has found seems incredibly miraculous.

The ancient writer Ester Valasquez is a true anomaly:  a brilliant Portuguese Jewess, trapped in but not stifled by the male-ordered strictures of 17th C society, both secular and religious. Ester, who speaks and writes fluently in Portuguese, Hebrew, Dutch, and English, is an orphan in the protection of the prestigious Sephardic Rabbi Ha-Mendes. Brutally blinded and disfigured by the Inquisition, Rabbi Mendes has made it his self-appointed mission to bring Judaism to the Jews of London, who have only recently been readmitted to Britain by Oliver Cromwell.  It is a community that lacks an educational center, and Rabbi Mendes engages Ester’s brother Isaac to be his scribe, to set his sermons and essays to paper.  Isaac dies, however, and Ester eagerly takes over as the rabbi’s scribe. Over time, as the rabbi ages, he writes less and less, leaving Ester to write letters in his name and others’, letters that are both heretical and dangerous.  That she gets away with her subterfuge has everything to do with the upheavals of the great Plague and then the Fire of London.  

The ink Ester uses is a heavy amalgam of iron salts thickened by tannin harvested from gallnuts, a bluish-black ink that mercilessly stains her fingers. Though the paper Ester uses is undoubtedly made of strong linen, the ink seeps through and leaves holes among her sentences.  By the time Helen Watts and her assistant Aaron Levy receive the documents, the ink has turned sepia-brown, and the weighted pages are difficult to read.

The words Ester writes are themselves more leaden than the ink itself.  Her letters, signed in names of men she deemed incapable of writing, are sent to the men with the best minds in Europe of her time, but the letters she writes to Baruch Spinoza, excommunicated apostate denounced by Jews and Christians alike, are the most dangerous. 

When Watts find proof that Spinoza actually responded to Ester’s letters, Watts realizes that the ink was even more ponderous for Ester and is a discovery she finds nearly intolerably heavy.

Ester has undertaken her intellectual pursuits with a full understanding of the consequences she will face.  She refuses the protection of marriage, the comfort of children, real love.  She has made a choice, and she is faithful to that choice throughout her life, though she finds an acceptable compromise that ensures she never has to worry about money, and her words will never betray her. Watts faces her discovery of the letters 400 years later with a similar conviction.  She, too, has made her work her life. She, too, has prized intellectual pursuit over the pursuit of conventional happiness.

Rachel Kadish has accomplished a miracle. She has given provocative life to a concept that few would deem important.  It may seem that the age has passed when a woman was not officially allowed to read and write, no longer are women prohibited from becoming actors, cannot wear men’s apparel. Women, some would argue, are no longer at the mercy of husbands and fathers for support, prohibited from inheriting the wealth of either.  In the absence of all such repression, Ester’s life might seem arcane. But the seemingly stark contrast of Helen Watts’ contemporary life points to a truth of most women’s reality, a truth that prevails today. 

Like Ester, Watts made her choices. She had all the academic and intellectual freedom she could ask for, but she, too, had to forego the pleasure of deep, committed love.  Even in her youth, when she was tempted by a handsome, commanding Israeli man, she could not commit her whole self to him.  Like Ester, she understood that belonging to a man, even to a man who offers deep, protective love, meant being swallowed by his life, his pursuits, his dreams.  Four hundred years later, Watts came to the same conclusion. Too easily women compromise themselves and disappear into their men. 

The Weight of ink is a deep dive into the minds and lives of two women widely separated by time and culture.  Both reside in a life colored by equal parts joy, satisfaction, and regret. Both are warrior women.