Florida Agenda

For some time now, two movie musicals gave me comfort and, simultaneously, a sense of horror. The musicals are “Gigi” and “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.” What gives me comfort is obvious— the creativity, the beautiful melodies, etc. What horrified me were the plots and lyrics in a modern world context. I mean, if an […]

I recently watched Ken Burns’ incomparable 1990 documentary series, “The Civil War.” I won’t spend a lot of time extolling its many virtues—as documentary, as American history, as unparalleled storytelling, as explanation for the causes-and-consequences of many societal issues with which we still wrestle, more than 150 years after that violent struggle began—other than to […]

“No man can logically say he [doesn’t] care whether a wrong is voted up or voted down. He may say he [doesn’t] care whether an indifferent thing is voted up or down, but he must logically have a choice between a right thing and a wrong thing.” Abraham Lincoln “I know now that, even worse […]

This Saturday, join thousands of your friends and neighbors  for the 5K Florida AIDS Walk and Music Festival, a heritage event created to raise awareness about the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic which remains at crisis proportions in Florida. The Walk and Music Festival raise money to support those Floridians—your friends and neighbors—who are living with HIV/AIDS. […]

“May you live in interesting times.” Chinese curse I was reading a story last night, a pastiche of superhero tales that spans the era from the “Golden Age” of comics (roughly from the 1930s through the early 1950s), the “Silver Age” (the post-atomic 1960s and 70s), and more modern comic book fare. In the story, […]

I’ve always found it curious that for someone who considers himself a true Anglophile, I have never really been able to get my arms around British television. I don’t know what it is, but it must have something to do with George Bernard Shaw’s cute observation that Americans and Brits are separated by a common […]

Last night, as I was cleaning my mother’s ashes out of the living room carpet—don’t ask—my mind turned to the very ephemeral nature of most things. Like fashion, nothing lasts forever. We have the very real luxury of getting to take for granted living in what is, for the most part, a safe place in […]

This morning, I was subjected to an ass-chewing—and not the good kind—from one of my neighbors, concerning a news story I wrote last week. It was an experience that reminded me how important are the words we use to tell the stories of people’s lives, and that, no matter how well-meant a reporting, the possibility […]

In the interest of privacy and maintaining the anonymity of an otherwise “innocent party,” I will try to paint in broad brushstrokes here, but if you spend anytime walking, driving, or otherwise “cruising” the streets and byways of the Gayborhood, you may have had occasion to encounter a fairly regular sight, that of an attractive […]

Having spent some time living out west (I’m talking Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid west here, rather than BankAtlantic Center west), I had a sociologist’s—or maybe it was anthropologist’s—view of what it was like to have lived in the Old West. Part of living here in the sissified east is that many of us are […]