It’s a brand new day, friends!

At long last, I finally took the time to figure out how to change my appearance settings on this blog and I am pretty happy with myself. Likely this is a metaphor for something else: My slow, cautious, potentially lazy approach to selective change, perhaps? Maybe.

At any rate, I am grateful to have altered something that has unnecessarily dogged me since switching platforms. It’s also fair to acknowledge the fleeting nature of celebration. It’s OK to feel good about a small win even if the next gut punch is right around the bend. That’s what digesting news of the world feels like for me right now. Alarm, followed by disgust, frustration, and disorientation. Where can I help? How am I positioned to reduce harm or suffering? Are cash donations enough?

All of those thoughts in the same headspace as “Yay, I finally changed my newsletter font.” Weird times, to be sure. And yet, we show up at our posts, gather our students, rally our colleagues and do school. We prepare our lessons, develop upcoming projects, guide young people through a semester’s worth of material.

Recently a fourth grader offered me a pinky promise of no more misbehavior. On Halloween afternoon. And you know what? I took his promise for real and return to it again and again because the basis for a pinky promise is relationship. You don’t offer pinky promises to strangers. This student is telling me that we are connected, we are responsible to each other and I’m here for it.

If your headspace is feeling as crowded and jumbled as mine, please know that you are not alone. Many factors in the world seem to be conspiring to scramble what’s left of our digitally altered stores of attention. Things that have helped me cope recently: outdoor recess duty, dance rehearsals, crocheting and knitting, listening to old CDs. Spending time away from screens seems to be the common theme here. When I’m doing any of the above, it’s usually a great relief to let my mind truly wander.

I’ve struggled a bit to determine a theme for this month’s options and realized that a theme isn’t always necessary. Maybe you don’t have space for yet another resource. Instead, perhaps you’d just like to have a little check-in. A few words of encouragement, a deep breath in letter form. In one way or another, I’m pretty sure we all need a break.

*While I continue to rail against genAI hype, support its refusal among students and colleagues, and monitor the ticking bomb that is the financial bubble the tech sector is inflating, maybe that’s not what you need in this moment.

What about the Blues?

Oogie Boogie: "And now with your permission, I'm going to do my stuff."
Sandy Claws: "What are you going to do?"
OB: "I'm gonna do the best I can."
- from "Oogie Boogie's Song", Tim Burton's "Nightmare Before Christmas"

Last week I started listening to movie soundtracks, beginning with The Nightmare Before Christmas and ending with Sinners. Regardless of whether you’ve seen either or neither of these films, the music in both is especially well crafted and arranged. There’s one track in Nightmare which is our family favorite: Oogie Boogie’s Song. Bluesy and darkly funny, my sons and I always looked forward to this number when we watched the video over and over again.

The movie Sinners is a genuine vampire horror story centered around the Blues as release, revelation and healing. An unusual choice for this otherwise infrequent moviegoer, I’ve seen Sinners three times and would gladly watch it a fourth and fifth time to catch still more nuances in director Ryan Coogler’s storytelling. Listening to the soundtrack made me curious about the Blues generally and sent me down a rewarding rabbit hole to find out more. Like many times before, I had to recognize how much I did not know. Healthy and humbling.

• The Blues Journey: The Kennedy Center offers a series of 5-7min audio clips of Music professor, Kip Lornell, describing the origins and spread of Blues music. There are several original recordings included which make these overviews compelling and fairly digestible for younger folks.
• “The sacred and the secular: How gospel music grew from the Blues“: this conversation between two black scholar-musicians offers an excellent introduction to the overlapping histories of Black American music across generations. (just 10 min!)
• Right in the nick of time! A celebration of the “Father of the Blues,” W C Handy is featured in the Daily Kos. Background info accompanied by several video clips, including a performance on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1949.
• The National Museum of African American Music offers a playlist of blues songs which captures the range of styles and artists over time as well as this short video describing the connections to later forms of popular music.

As a kid exposed to blues music at home, I was not a fan. It felt old and strange to my young ears that prefered the Jackson 5 and The Ohio Players. With the benefit of years, I’ve been able to come back around to a style of music that puts my parents’ experiences in context, that explains where all the pop music I was consuming actually came from. I want to believe that age helps us appreciate history, even if only marginally. We see change. We can learn from what came before us.

My brief excursion to the house of Blues reminds me again of how the arts accompany us through history highlighting and underscoring our paths, both individually and collectively. There’s comfort and relief in finding music, films, poems, portraits or plays that speak to us and affirm that we are, in fact, human. Still.

So whether you get into some of these links or not, my wish is that you discover an art form that offers whatever you need at this moment – a loud laugh, a good cry, a fantastic escape. We deserve to rest our minds and step back from the world if needed. Art might provide the portal you are looking for.

Be well,

Sherri

*In case you need a little more fuel for your anti-genAI fire, I would be remiss not to point you to this captivating and poetic video essay, The 7 Trillion Dollar Séance by Serfie Wong.