Knocking At The Gate

For state regulators (a) to commission a study which showed that Florida insurers were shoveling billions of dollars in excess payments to their parent companies then claiming to be unable to cover claims without hiking rates or closing up shop, (b) to then keep that study from state lawmakers seeking to calm Florida's hurricane-drenched insurance market, and (c) to then take two years to release the study in a public records request might be one of the most Florida things ever. In this article, Tampa Bay Times staff writer Lawrence Mower explains how this happened and provides a link to the "draft" report.

  I would like to review RaMell Ross' "Nickel Boys" now that I'm done sobbing, but I hesitate because explaining a major part of why the film is so powerful might spoil it a bit. Let me just say that: 1. This is a film about Black struggle, about Jim Crow, about institutional abuse, about corruption, and about child slavery in 1960s Florida. 2. This is a film about selfless love, about sacrificial love, about friendship, about family, about trust, about truth, about identity, about agency. 3. This is a immensely confident film that asks a lot of its audiences, in that it is told in first person, that faces are often not shown, that it treats Florida's infamous Dozier School for Boys in a fictionalized and sometimes dreamlike manner, that many critical narrative sequences — including one at the heart of the story — are not performed at all but instead are described by still shots of exhumed artifacts and clips of documentary films, and that its one of those movies...

It is my honor to have three paintings in "The Road To Florida," a new juried show at The Sidney & Berne Davis Art Center on First Street in Fort Myers. The shows asks of the artist and the audience to consider what brought us to Florida, and what keeps us here.    The show opens Friday, June 3rd at 6:00 p.m. and runs through Friday, June 24th at 10:00 p.m. Dona and I will there in the Grand Atrium on opening night and it would be great to see you!   Regular gallery hours are Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. with extended hours on Wednesdays and Fridays 10 a.m to 10 p.m. Admission is one dollar.

Zander Moricz, the Pine View School Class President is also a plaintiff in a suit challenging Florida's "Don't Say Gay" law. School officials forbade him to discuss it during his commencement speech, so he did not. At least not directly.

Writing in Current Affairs , novelist and noted Floridian Jeff VanderMeer connects a great many dots (with links and footnotes) regarding how and why Florida leaders and developers have repeatedly worked together to destroy the state's unique ecosystem, what's wrong with the toll roads projects, why the wildlife corridor will fail, and why most Floridians sleep each night on the suffocated corpes of gopher tortoises. It's detailed, vigorously-argued, and must-read treatise on why we need to care for this onetime Eden.  You can tell many stories about Florida, but one of the most tragic and with the worst long-term consequences is this: since development in Florida began in earnest in the 20th century, state leaders and developers have chosen a cruel, unsustainable legacy involving the nonstop slaughter of wildlife and the destruction of habitat, eliminating some of the most unique flora and fauna in the world.   Full article here.

Nick Paumgarten writes in The New Yorker about a Florida retirement community built around the Jimmy Buffett mythos: More than twenty million people a year pass through the doors of a Margaritaville-branded establishment. The company, with annual system-wide sales of $1.7 billion, licenses the name to restaurants, hotels, casinos, and resorts, and sells a wide array of branded merchandise: umbrellas, towels, beach furniture, bicycles, blenders, frozen shrimp, and Key-lime-pie mix. It recently announced plans to launch a cruise line. (Before that, Buffett himself had never been on a cruise ship.) Given the age of Buffett’s fan base, and the life style he’s hawking—as well as baby-boomer demographics—the move into active living was a natural one. “Who knew people wanted to live in Margaritaville?” Buffett told me. “I thought for a while it was a myth.” Full article here.

Groundhog Day has always baffled me in that it seems to be a holiday without any social purpose whatsoever. There is nothing to say or buy or do, nothing to decorate, nothing to give or sing, no one in whose honor one could hold a storewide clearance sale. It follows then, that of even less usefulness is today, February 1, which was described to me by my children in a pre-dawn encounter this morning as "Groundhog Day Eve." Apart perhaps from this specious distinction, this Groundhog Day Eve was fairly unremarkable-following the festive Groundhog Day Eve greeting from my kids, I awoke, annoying at having to do so, but somehow finding fortitude in a shower and some fierce coffee; I drove to work, annoyed at having to survive the deadly inattention of drivers putting on eye makeup at ninety miles an hour in a dense fog, but somehow finding my balance in the mellow and modulated voices of those oh-so-calm commentators on National Public Radio; I did my job for the prescribed ...