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Weather: Sunny, with a high near 63. Friday Night: Mostly clear, with a low around 44.
- Daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
- Drought conditions here. (What is the Keetch-Byram drought index?).
- Check today’s tides in Daytona Beach (a few minutes off from Flagler Beach) here.
- Tropical cyclone activity here, and even more details here.
Today at a Glance:
Free For All Fridays with Host David Ayres, an hour-long public affairs radio show featuring local newsmakers, personalities, public health updates and the occasional surprise guest, starts a little after 9 a.m. after FlaglerLive Editor Pierre Tristam’s Reality Check. See previous podcasts here. On WNZF at 94.9 FM, 1550 AM, and live at Flagler Broadcasting’s YouTube channel.
The Friday Blue Forum, a discussion group organized by local Democrats, meets at 12:15 p.m. at the Flagler Democratic Office at 160 Cypress Point Parkway, Suite C214 (above Cue Note) at City Marketplace. Come and add your voice to local, state and national political issues.
‘Violet’ at City Repertory Theatre,160 Cypress Point Parkway (City Marketplace, Suite B207), Palm Coast, $30 for adults, $15 for students, Friday and Saturday at 7:30 p.m., Sunday at 3 p.m. Book here. Violet is a young disfigured woman on a transformative bus journey from her farm in Spruce Pine, North Carolina, to Tulsa, Oklahoma, seeking healing. Winner of Off Broadway’s most prestigious Best Musical award, this compelling narrative with great songs promises an unforgettable theatrical experience.
Notably: Bach is 340 years old today. As always, there’s a spate of new recordings to mark the occasion, including this interesting recording of The Art of Fugue, Bach’s last work (he never finished it) and one of his more sublimely complex, written for organ, but performed here by Phantasm, a quartet of viols, plus organ. From he liner notes: “Singing – playing lyrically – is exactly what a consort of viols can offer to the Art of Fugue. For here is an ensemble used to ‘singing’ its parts while engaging with other voices within a constantly shifting polyphonic web. […] On this recording four viols play in all the fugues (apart from only three in Contrapunctus 8). The wizardry of the four canons, on the other hand, falls into a different musical genre: as complex interrogations of pure contrapuntal technique and, as works that refrain from dialogue, they are better heard on the organ. The core of the work – the first eleven fugues – progresses through the three classic types of fugues: simple fugues (Contrapunctus 1 to 4) which avoid invertible counterpoint, counterfugues (Contrapunctus 5 to 7) which feature melodic inversion and thematic augmentation, and double fugues (Contrapunctus 8 – 11) which highlight countersubjects and invertible counterpoint. […] So why didn’t Bach finish the Art of Fugue? Many explanations are possible, but I suspect the composer had second thoughts about sending a work that proclaimed – with a rather atypical vanity – his boldly embroidered family emblem, no matter how well-deserved this proclamation. That is, even if he could easily have worked out the remainder of the final fugue whose the three themes he had already combined with one another, Bach chose through his inaction to leave it unfinished at his death. Perhaps he was alarmed at a published display of personal pride, a mortal sin, after all. To flaunt his own name as an explicit theme in the Art of Fugue was a rather different matter from merely recounting to friends, as we know he did, how the Bach family could boast of their devotion to music because their name formed a melody. More likely, Bach realized that the prominent appearance of B-A-C-H was no mere trifle or witticism, but rather an unacceptably immodest pronouncement that may have compromised how he wished his legacy to be seen.
—P.T.
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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.
April 2025
Contractor Review Board Meeting
Flagler County’s Technical Review Committee Meeting
In Court: Michael Jennelle Sentencing
In Court: Jayden Jackson Sentencing
Flagler Tiger Bay Club Guest Speaker: Brian London
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
Palm Coast Planning and Land Development Board
Flagler County Drug Court Convenes
Story Time for Preschoolers at Flagler Beach Public Library
Model Yacht Club Races at the Pond in Palm Coast’s Town Center
Town of Marineland Commission Meeting
Town of Marineland Commission Meeting
‘Sense and Sensibility’ at St. Augustine’s Limelight Theatre
For the full calendar, go here.
No matter how many versions and adaptations of Bach’s The Art of Fugue there may be, one of the most enthralling questions is how performers approach the great fugue that is normally played at the end of the work. Bach was unable to complete it because of his failing eyesight and sudden death, but for this very reason the piece is regarded as the composer’s musical testament since it is explicitly signed with his name: the notes B-flat–A–C–B (in German
nomenclature B–A–C–H) constitute one of its four themes and appear here in an exceptionally prominent position. This movement is already the longest in Bach’s original, but Reinhard Febel expands it in his Study 18 until it lasts some fifteen minutes. In doing so, he takes up all of the compositional procedures of expansion and alienation that he had previously used, before breaking off at the very point where the fugue ends in Bach’s autograph score. What follows is an atmospherically otherworldly echo like a distant reminiscence of the monumental original. It is only logical that Febel weaves into it the theme that Bach intended to use but never got round to realizing, the archetypal and striking D minor theme that underpins the entire collection, heard here in a variant in A flat minor that appears lost in a world of dreams. Study 18 and, with it, the cycle as a whole ends with a long bar of silence.
–From the liner notes by Michaela Fridrich to Reinhard Febel’s “18 Studies on ‘The Art of Fugue,‘” Sony, 2020.
Pogo says
@Did Bach’s ghost “decorate” the oval for trump?
Just wonderin.
https://www.google.com/search?q=bach's+toccata+in+horror+movies
A vision of trump sitting on musk’s knee while musk, in a frenzy of passion, plays a pipe organ on the scale of his Starship — and the music suffocates the world…
Sherry says
Good morning Pogo! You “vision” gave me my morning laugh. . . Thanks!
I am noticing a pattern among Maga Cult Members. One by one, they are all joining the “Defend Trump No Matter What Chorus Supreme”. While the playbook of songs varies slightly according to the unconstitutional/criminal/ethical behavior of the hour. . . Fox’s lyrics are intentionally simple and similar for the simple minded. Because, there is ZERO legitimate justification for said behavior, every song’s refrain/chorus is always the same.
Let’s sing it all together now . . . “TDS! TDS!. . . How we love that TDS”!
Ray W, says
Here is yet another story, not editorial, published by the Wall Street Journal reflecting its confusion and difficulty in understanding Trump’s energy policy agenda.
This one is titled: “Fracker’s Once Jubilant, Are Unnerved by Trump’s First Weeks in Office”
Here are a few bullet points from the article:
– OPEC announced earlier in March that it will begin increasing production. (OPEC initially announced plans to increase production about a year ago, but it since has been announcing delay after delay to its production plans).
– “As Trump touted his plans during his campaign to expand drilling, oil executives stressed they wouldn’t increase production, which would lower prices, stress their inventories and displease their investors. Still, administration officials have kept pushing this agenda item, with senior advisor Peter Navarro say on Fox News earlier this month that prices falling to $50 per barrel would help tame inflation.”
– “Scott Sheffield, the former CEO of Pioneer Natural Resources — now part of Exxon Mobil — said that American crude production could decline is U.S. oil prices plummet to $50 per barrel. The industry would likely adapt by consolidating and doing mass layoffs, he said. … ‘What project in the Gulf of Mexico is gonna be drilled at $50 oil? None.'”
– U.S. crude oil prices, down 6% in the last month, are now at $68 per barrel (U.S. crude – WTI – was at $67 per barrel last year when Congress declined Biden’s request for funds to buy oil to restock our petroleum strategic reserves).
– “Companies would likely slow drilling if prices were to fall below $60 (per barrel).”
(At this point, it is important to remind FlaglerLive readers that pumping oil out of large, pooled reserves is less costly to producers than is fracking for oil trapped in shale rock formations and then pumping out the released shale oil. Saudi Arabia sits on huge reserves of pooled oil. Its estimated cost to extract the pooled oil is roughly $8 per barrel. American shale oil companies, by intense effort, have brought the average cost of extracting crude oil down to about $25-30 per barrel. Saudi oil is highly profitable at $60 per barrel. American oil companies eke out a small profit at $60 per barrel, because the costs of crude oil extraction are but a part of the overall cost of running an energy company.)
– When oil executives were donating millions of dollars to Trump’s campaign, they also were encouraging him to repeal environmental rules and to help them construct additional pipelines. Imposing 25% tariffs on imported steel directly impacts pipeline projects, including fracking efforts, as horizontal drilling involves the use of thousands of miles of steel each year. Devon Energy, among other energy companies, told investors that it expects “to see at least a minor impact from the tariffs.”
– Newly imposed tariffs on China triggered a retaliatory 15% tariff on imports of U.S. LNG. Freeport LNG’s CEO says “he’s concerned the tariffs will affect long-term sales of American gas into China. … That’s just only a portion of the market, but it will have an effect.”
– Energy executives have concerns about the firing of federal workers from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which issues permits to build interstate natural gas pipelines, from the Energy Department, which issues licenses to export liquified natural gas, and from the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management, which issues permits to drill on federal land.
– Among the thousands of probationary employees who have been fired are 250 Bureau of Land Management employees.
– Oil and gas firms have long described permitting agencies as being understaffed, which slows the permitting and licensing process. Per the WSJ reporter: “Some lobbyists said they are worried the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency’s cost-cutting efforts will exacerbate the issues, and that they have communicated their concerns to administration officials.”
– LNG exporter, NextDecade, through its CEO, Matt Schatzman, opined: “If those people leave, we can’t just hire a bunch of folks out of college and think they can do this overnight.” If the goal of the Trump administration, the reporter inferred, is to quickly start new energy projects, then permitting and licensing agencies should be hiring workers and cutting red tape, not cutting employees from already understaffed agencies.
– “… [I]n private meetings, some executives have said Trump’s rapid policy changes and desire for cheap crude are blurring the line of sight they say they need to make long-term investments”, per sources familiar with the discussions.
Make of this what you will.
Me?
Crude oil is an international commodity. Some FlaglerLive commenters act as if crude oil is a domestic commodity and that there is a direct relationship between America producing more oil and oil prices dropping. Just drill for more oil, they say. It doesn’t work that way.
If a refinery in India can purchase future deliveries of the oil it expects to need from deepwater rigs in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Guyana at a landed price lower than the landed price for oil scraped from the surface of Canadian tar sands fields, which oil do you think the refinery owner will buy?
When Chinese manufacturing output drops, its manufacturers might buy less oil. Saudi oil producers would than seek to replace lost Chinese sales by trying to grab market share from American oil exporters.
OPEC is expected to begin ramping up overall production in April. This will impact international crude oil prices. Guyana is ramping up production from its newly developed fields in the Gulf of Mexico. Brazil is ramping up its own oil production from fields off its Atlantic Coast. Canada recently opened a pipeline to a port on its west coast, and it is ramping up oil production. Kazakhstan is ramping up oil production from its fields near Baku. Egypt just announced that a number of 0ff-shore pilot drillings were successful, albeit in small quantities. Each new foreign source of crude oil will impact international crude oil prices.
Numerous industry publications explain that the growth in American shale production took place because of technological breakthrough is 3D-seismic imaging that allows drillers to change direction of drill points to ensure that they find the most lucrative oil-bearing shale rock sites. Does anyone think that the imaging technology will not be used all over the world to more economically find and gain access to oil?
American shale oil energy producers are at an economic disadvantage compared to foreign energy producers who can locate pooled oil reserves. We long ago depleted most of our pooled oil reserves, i.e., we have picked our low-hanging fruit. And numerous industry observers believe that we are close to picking the most low-hanging fruit (Tier-1 oil) in the shale oil fields.
$60 dollar oil may be profitable to Saudi energy companies, but it isn’t as profitable for American shale oil producers in Texas or North Dakota. Numerous industry observers say American drilling effectively stops when oil drops to $60 per barrel. Who could blame the companies. They answer to shareholders, not to the American public.
Pogo says
@Sherry
It is better to tickle one funny bone than to do nothing.
— Pogo Person Proverb
The trump zombies are indeed marching straight into the inferno; musk is openly bribing voters, and candidates; criminals like trump, work hand in glove, for and with, musk and its ilk. They are carving up the world and killing the witnesses — literally.
FWIW, that didn’t take 1500 to 2000 words to say. What word, or part, is false?
Burn it down says
Commander treason is doing the best job at committing treason and destroying everything we stood for. Let’s go Russia!
Sherry says
@Pogo. . . I learned many years ago that even the attention span of the educated has its limits. For example, when preparing a resume make sure the really important “stuff” is at the top of the first page. When writing a story. . . set the hook in the first page or you’ve lost the reader. Loving your brevity!