Today at the Editor’s glance: It’s going to be a relatively quiet week in Flagler: no government meetings to speak of, for the most part, no school, though family and county courts are busy, as are state agencies: The Revenue Estimating Conference discusses the outlook for the State School Trust Fund this morning at 8:45 at the Capitol. Other than that, you can return to the 88th screening of “It’s a Wonderful Life” this week which, incidentally, premiered on this day in 1946 at the Globe movie theater in New York (the same day that author John Monte LeNoir published Your Daughter and Mine: A Novel of Sorority Life, a novel that hasn’t had quite the same success. Bosley Crowther, reviewing the James Stewart-Frank Capra vehicle in The Times that day, was not too enthused. “Indeed, the weakness of this picture,” he wrote, “is the sentimentality of it–its illusory concept of life. Mr. Capra’s nice people are charming, his small town is a quite beguiling place and his pattern for solving problems is most optimistic and facile. But somehow they all resemble theatrical attitudes rather than average realities. And Mr. Capra’s ‘turkey dinners’ philosophy, while emotionally gratifying, doesn’t fill the hungry paunch.” Or as Wendell Jamieson put it just weeks after the election of Barack Obama in 2008, “It’s a Wonderful Life” is a terrifying, asphyxiating story about growing up and relinquishing your dreams, of seeing your father driven to the grave before his time, of living among bitter, small-minded people. It is a story of being trapped, of compromising, of watching others move ahead and away, of becoming so filled with rage that you verbally abuse your children, their teacher and your oppressively perfect wife. It is also a nightmare account of an endless home renovation.” Now this:
The Live Calendar is a compendium of local and regional political, civic and cultural events. You can input your own calendar events directly onto the site as you wish them to appear (pending approval of course). To include your event in the Live Calendar, please fill out this form.
July 2025
Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy
Tourist Development Council Meeting
Separation Chat: Open Discussion
The Circle of Light A Course in Miracles Study Group
Weekly Chess Club for Teens, Ages 9-18, at the Flagler County Public Library
For the full calendar, go here.
“Conservative critics attack of the media easily and comfortably. But do they acknowledge any culpability for allowing pop-culture and consumerism to become such an overwhelming force in our country’s habits of child rearing? Conservatives would like to believe that capitalism and its extraordinary executive tool, the marketplace, are not only productive and efficient but good. Thus they may criticize the excesses of a company like Time Warner; they may even criticize ‘greed,’ as if greed or some bizarre aberration normally unknown to capitalism. But they can rarely bring themselves to admit that capitalism in its routine, healthy, rejuvenating rampage through our towns, cities, and farmlands forces parents to work at multiple jobs, substitutes malls for small-city commercial streets and neighborhoods, and dumps formally employed groups (like blacks in the inner cities) onto the street or into dead-end jobs. Or that these developments loosen parental control, and help create the very nihilism and anomie–the ruthlessness of nowhere men–that finds release in junk movies, rap, pornography, and the rest.”
–David Denby, from “Buried Alive: Our children and the avalanche of crud,” The New Yorker, July 15, 1996.
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