Hello,

Remember me? I’m Jeffrey Overstreet. And welcome to By My Lights, the new weekly (?!) surprise package from your host here at Give Me Some Light.

Okay, you can stop laughing now. “Weekly? Overstreet? At this Substack? Likely story! It’s been so quiet around here lately we’ve been poking it with sticks to see if it has any life left!”

Hey, I can dream, can’t I?

I’m writing this on January 1, and so I’m feeling ambitious. What’s more — I’m grateful for the support that my readers have shown me, even though my life in 2024 was a constant storm of disruptions and I was unable to produce what I’d hoped to produce. I want to make good on my promises. I’m about to begin the busiest, most demanding teaching term I’ve ever undertaken, so it may be hubris to believe that I can serve up something like this multi-faceted post every week going forward. But I’m going to make Substack updates an even higher priority than before. I’m tired of waiting for the rest of life to slow down and give me a break. I’m just going to have to be more aggressive.

In This Package…

Below, you’ll find a variety of updates:

• personal updates on a chaotic December;
• adventures in birdwatching;
• notes on new records by Sault and Jon Batiste;
• and,
• notes on my second viewing of Flow, my favorite animated film of 2024.

And then… bonus material! Even more music and movies, and a special invitation!

Free subscribers will get the first part of this post in their mailbox.

Paying subscribers will get much, much more, including initial notes on three more films: The Monk and the Gun; Bird; and, Tokyo Godfathers.

And I’ll wrap it up with three songs that have helped me find some stillness and some peace in a stormy month.

But before we’re done — they will also get a new kind of opportunity: an invitation to write with me!

My best writing almost always starts with free writing — opening a journal to a blank page, starting to write without any plan or expectations, and discovering things as I write that I never could have imagined. I've need to revive my discipline, and I’d love to invite you to the party.

Here’s how it works: Grab a pen and a journal. Start the video. You’ll find me there, sitting down with my journal somewhere — could be anywhere! — and opening it to a blank page. And then… we write! It’s that simple. I’ll write for at least ten minutes, and you can keep me company. When you’re finished with your own journal entry, let me know you’ve participated. I’d love to know if I have any company in this practice.

And sometime in the next year, we’ll take things a step further: I’ll post a day and a time where you can join me for a live free-writing session. We can keep each other company as we work, and then talk about what we discovered.

By making this a public commitment, I’m increasing the chances that I get more writing done in 2025.

Subscribe to Give Me Some Light and get posts like this one delivered straight to your email Inbox. Free subscriptions are fun, but paying subscribers get more than twice as much to read, explore, and participate in — including my first-impression film reviews.

Personal Updates: The Cruelest Month

I won’t lie: December was the cruelest month. (Sorry, Month of April — your claim to fame is in question.) Anne and I had so many plans. For example — after three years of work, I was going to finish my new book and deliver it to the publisher, finally meeting a deadline that had already been pushed out twice due to disruptions in my schedule. I was going to treat the month like a film festival, catching up with a dozen or more movies I missed earlier in the year. And we were going to have a restful, rejuvenating, and celebratory Christmas season, including a getaway to Vancouver B.C. Instead, one calamity after another befell us and our family.

Reaching the end of a year-long struggle with brain cancer, my father passed away. It was an excruciating sequence of events. It will take a long time to find peace for our hearts after the suffering that we witnessed. This, all by itself, has been more than enough to cause us to give up our expectations for “holiday break” from school.

Making matters worse, circumstances at the university have worsened considerably. Severe cutbacks have continued, with many programs being curtailed or closed. My once-flourishing team of more than a dozen colleagues in the English and Cultural Studies department shrank down to a team of only seven. Then, only six (with one beloved professor receiving a sudden and shocking cancer diagnosis). And then, only five (with another taking a job at another school). This makes the future for all of us in the department rather hard to imagine. At times, it feels like my dream of teaching there for the next decade or so is rapidly fading. It’s felt like a sort of vocational whiplash — receiving the university’s Undergraduate Professor of the Year award last March, which felt like a massive affirmation that I’m right where I should be, and now wondering I’ll still be employed in a year’s time. I am praying every day, seeking vocational guidance. If you are a person who prays, I would be grateful for your prayers that I will find a clear path forward. I want to invest what I’ve been given — as a creative writing professor, as a film teacher, and as a writer — wherever I can make a meaningful difference.

And then, as all of these waves crashed over us this month, COVID arrived with the worst possible timing, and Anne and I had to isolate to different parts of the house for the whole of Christmas week.

So, if you’ve been wondering why I’ve been posting less frequently… I hope that explanation is sufficient. Again, perhaps it is folly for me to aim for an increase in posts here, but I need my dreams right now. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Birds of My Neighborhood

We are enjoying a symphony of birds — a “pentecost,” if you will1 — at Overstreet Headquarters these days. Anne and I wake to find our windows visited by hummingbirds, juncos, chickadees, wrens, finches, Steller’s jays, and crows.

But on the morning of January 1, we were delighted to see that the towhees have returned to kick about in our leaves and to fascinate our cat. Anne also announced her first sighting of our favorite bird, which has made a home in our side yard for the past several winters: a varied thrush!

Here’s a glimpse of this beautiful thrush in our front yard just two winters ago:

I’m not sure what to call these little birds that have been swarming around the birdseed bricks we’ve been hanging in our front yard. Do you recognize them?

And speaking of birdsong…

Things I Listened to This Week

• Sault, Acts of Faith
  
  Christmas Day brought a surprise release from Sault — an album of prayers, funky guitars, deep grooves. Good medicine for weary hearts. Good dance music for end-of-year cool-downs, or for New Year’s housecleaning.
  This became available as a free download in July, but only got its streaming-platforms release here at the end of the year. As I completely missed the summer opportunity, I’m pleasantly surprised to have this here as the soundtrack for new things.
  Here’s the single, which serves as the finale for the album:

• Jon Batiste, Beethoven Blues
  
  Purists may cringe, but Jon Batiste is not here just to perform Beethoven’s classics as we know them. He’s here to celebrate them by bringing bursts of his own New Orleans inspiration to each one, and I find the results full of playfulness, joy, and suprise.
  Anne and I made a trip to Vancouver B.C. and back in December, and the journey home was a long one, rainy and monotone gray, with an hour’s delay at the border. But we didn’t mind, because Batiste’s take on Beethoven was giving us so much delight, painting the day with bright splashes of color.

Films I Saw This Week

Flow (second viewing)

Yes, I went back for more. Anne and I watched this in a freezing-cold AMC theater on the morning of December 31. I wanted to close the year with a movie that had really surprised me, really moved me this year, and I wanted to share it with someone I love.

This time — and I could feel them coming — four different moments in the film moved me to tears:

• a scene in which one character suffers violence for the good of another quite unlike herself;
• a scene involving a bright light in the heavens;
• a scene of new hope after a flood; and
• a scene that reminds us how any change, even those that might work in our favor, are probably coming at great cost to someone else.
  

This thing—a boldly animated film with no dialogue except for animals barking and meowing and chirping at each other—has a lot on its mind and heart. And they happen to be things that are heavily on my mind and heart. For me, 2024 was a year characterized by loss above all: the loss of my father; the loss of communities I love; the loss of a dream for my nation’s future; the departure from my university of many extraordinary colleagues and dear friends; and the postponement of my next book, which I’ve wanted to so badly to finish, but hardships and disruptions kept erasing my capacities to do so. Flow is a movie about losses, about desperation, about being lost without a compass in a crumbling world, about finding a community of outcasts and survivors and hoping to find a way to start again. It speaks to me where I am right here, right now.

It was the perfect movie to close 2024 with: Nothing is safe or secure. We're living through apocalypses — political, technological, religious, environmental. People are gathering into camps: they're prioritizing power; they're prioritizing sameness and aggression toward the Other; they're hoarding stuff; and some are missing out on what's in front of them because they're too distracted by their own reflections in shiny devices (like the lemur in this film, so obsessed with his vanity mirror).

We need one another. We need empathy toward one another. We need to serve one another, especially those who are different than us. And we need a vision that suggests there is a Grander Mystery at work, one who will call us home. Be not afraid.

As I said before: This may not do much for many moviegoers. But it's as if it was made for me and Anne. And I'm grateful for the occasions it gives me to marvel, to hope — and to grieve all we all we have lost, all we are in the process of losing, and all it seems that we are about to lose.

• Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (directed by Nick Park and Merlin Crossingham)
  Anne and I were delighted to have an opportunity to see this at the Landmark Crest Theater in our neighborhood, where we were part of a rowdy and enthusiastic crowd, many of whom were children who responded vocally to the madness playing out onscreen.
  
  To the parents who brought their kids to this instead of Mufasa this weekend — you have my admiration, and my gratitude! You made the best choice. I suspect I enjoyed Vengeance Most Fowl even more because we all had to suffer through bombastic, self-important trailers for those utterly unnecessary remakes of Snow White and How to Train Your Dragon. Wallace and Gromit embody more of the spirit of Walt Disney than any of these abominable "live-action" remakes.
  You don’t need much of a synopsis for this one. Just go see it and give in to its typically frantic high-speed antics. Suffice it to say that Wallace is back to his hobby of inventing unnecessarily complicated things that end up wreaking havoc. This time, he’s decided that his faithful dog Gromit, who also serves as their gardener, could use help with the trimming and mowing and planting. And so he created “Smart Gnomes,” artificial-intelligence garden gnomes that do elaborate, high-speed work without any evidence of critical thinking. Gromit is not impressed. Meanwhile, their old nemesis from the classic short film “The Wrong Trousers,” a malevolent penguin named Feathers McCoy, has spent his many years of incarceration (at the local zoo) plotting his revenge against those who foiled his past plans. And when he sees an opportunity to break free and strike back, it will be up to Gromit to save the day — and maybe the world — from Feathers’ plot.
  
  I found this not only as good or better than the preceding feature-length Aardman films — including Early Man, the Shaun the Sheep movies, and possibly even Curse of the Were-Rabbit, which came out [checks facts] 19 years ago! — but also strangely heart-warming for the love and attention to real-world materials that you can feel in every frame. I know it's a cliché to say that about Nick Park's animation at this point, but the world was quite different last time his genius lit up our big screens, and going back to 62 West Wallaby Street felt like time-travel to a world of possibility I thought we'd left behind. It's so rare anymore to see so much imagination meticulously hand-crafted, captured in real light, and nudged forward through every vibrant scene by human hands — and then have it wrap up in a perfectly modest 79 minutes so nobody checks their phones.
  I’m probably the only one who will suffer this particular distraction — but I spent the whole film thinking, "What a stroke of genius… to cast Jon Richardson as the voice of an Evil Gnome. He's perfect."
  
  Turns out… it’s not Jon Richardson.And speaking of Evil Gnomes: Vengeance Most Fowl would make a surreal double-feature with Hundreds of Beavers. If it had come out any later, I would wonder if it was inspired by Cheslik's looney-toons masterpiece.
  If Aardman wants to blow our minds, they could market their own version of lawn gnomes. They’d make great alarm clocks, if we could plug them in and watch them go through the jittery Norbot Re-charging Routine that Wallace’s Smart Gnomes require. That would give us the scariest, most perverse alarm clock we’ve ever seen. And I admit, I'd pre-order one in a heartbeat.

Bonus Material!

Paid Subscribers — keep scrolling! You’ll find my notes on two more recent films and a classic anime film that serves as a perfect Christmas movie. What’s more — you’ll find an invitation to start the year by joining me for a freewriting session.