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Weather: Sunny. Highs in the lower 60s. Friday Night: Partly cloudy. Lows in the mid 40s. Highs in the lower 70s.
- 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:
Acoustic Jam Circle At The Community Center In The Hammock, 2 to 5 p.m., Picnic Shelter behind the Hammock Community Center at 79 Mala Compra Road, Palm Coast. It’s a free event. Bring your Acoustic stringed Instrument (no amplifiers), and a folding chair and join other local amateur musicians for a jam session. Audiences and singers are also welcome. A “Jam Circle” format is where musicians sit around the circle. Each musician in turn gets to call out a song and musical key, and then lead the rest in singing/playing. Then it’s on to the next person in the circle. Depending upon the song, the musicians may take turns playing/improvising a verse and a chorus. It’s lots of Fun! Folks who just want to watch or sing generally sit on the periphery or next to their musician partner. This is a monthly event on the 4th Friday of every month. (Make sure it’s on today before you go.)
Irving Berlin’s Holiday Inn, at Athens Theatre, 124 North Florida Avenue, DeLand. 386/736-1500. Tickets, Adult $37 – Senior $33 Student/Child $17. Book here. Celebrate the magic of Christmas with Irving Berlin’s Holiday Inn—a heartwarming holiday treat packed with show-stopping dance numbers, dazzling costumes, and a treasure trove of timeless tunes. When Broadway performer Jim leaves the bright lights behind for a quiet Connecticut farmhouse, he ends up transforming his home into a seasonal inn, open only on the holidays. But with love in the air, rivalries heating up, and performances for every festivity, the holidays get a lot more exciting than he ever imagined. Featuring 20 beloved Irving Berlin classics—including “White Christmas,” “Happy Holiday,” “Blue Skies,” and “Cheek to Cheek”—this delightful musical delivers all the laughter, romance, and seasonal sparkle of a Christmas card come to life. Presented through special arrangement with Concord Theatricals.
Flagler Cares is in the midst of its Second Annual “Keep the Holiday Lights On” campaign. The health and social care coordinating organization is inviting residents and businesses to support local families in need of a modest financial bridge to keep their power on this holiday season. This initiative encourages neighbors to help neighbors by sponsoring homes to ensure struggling families can keep their lights on through December. The goal is to sponsor 100 homes at $100 per home, covering one month’s electric bill for families who might otherwise face utility cut-offs during the holidays. Supporters are welcome to contribute any amount to help brighten the season for their fellow residents. Donations can be made now through the end of the year on the “Keep the Holiday Lights On” webpage at www.flaglercares.org/holiday. Check donations may also be mailed or dropped off at Flagler Cares, 160 Cypress Point Parkway, Suite B302, Palm Coast, FL 32164. As homes are sponsored, donors can watch the campaign’s progress online as homes on the page light up — a symbol of the community’s shared compassion and care.
Byblos II: In Henry James’s “Traveling Companions” yesterday we left off with Brooks and Charlotte after Charlotte ordered him on a three-day sabbatical from her. He wanders the streets and museums, counting the hours, and they meet again. They are then inseparable companions, to the extent that conventions allow. Lounging in a grassy garden, he professes his love. She demurs: “It’s not with me you’re in love, but with that painted picture. All this Italian beauty and delight has thrown you into a romantic state of mind. You wish to make it perfect. I happen to be at hand, so you say, ‘Go to, I’ll fall in love.’ And you fancy me, for the purpose, a dozen fine things that I’m not.” He is politely crushed, and James’s next Station is a superb analysis of Tintoretto’s “Crucifixion,” where “There is no swooning Madonna, no consoling Magdalen, no mockery of contrast, no cruelty of an assembled host. We behold the silent summit of Calvary.” James’s heavy-handed symbolism is lightened by the moving homage to the painting, which leaves Charlotte in sobs. Do we not miss the centuries when paintings and musical works, for lack of commercial overuse and memed cheapening, could so shake us to our core as to leave us helpless to the emotions they evoke? Movies and TV can still do that, but it’s sentimentality, not sentiment, as Charlotte would say. She tells Brooks, after he laments their not having the good fortune of being like a young couple they see together in church: “we ought to learn from all this to be real; real even as Giotto is real; to discriminate between genuine and factitious sentiment; between the substantial and the trivial; between the essential and the superfluous; sentiment and sentimentality.” It’s a set-up to the final scene, when they are in front of Titian’s “Sacred and Profane Love,” which colors Charlotte’s very words. In between, they spend a day in Padua, miss the train back to Venice and have to contend with the ignominy of breaking convention even though they spend the night in separate rooms at a hotel and Charlotte really doesn’t much care for convention. (They are directed to the hotel by their “Murray,” what used to be the first British travel guide of the century and the equivalent to the better known Baedekers.) When he proposes to marry her, she rebuffs him, taking the proposal as motivated by the desire to correct the Padua misstep, not by love. “Don’t fancy that I think lightly of your offer. But we have been living, Mr. Brooke, in poetry. Marriage is stern prose.” She orders him to leave her. He does. He writes her and her father, gets no response. He wonders whether he truly loved her. Then he runs into her again in Rome as she stands in front of the bronze statue of St. Peter in the basilica as pilgrims walk by to kiss St. Peter’s foot. Charlotte watches what Brooks describes as “the grotesque deposition of kisses” before the two recognize each other. Later, in the last chance encounter of a story with more chance encounters in its 50 pages than in 10 of Dostoevsky, they are in front of the Titian, and we are to understand that Charlotte recognizes herself in the two women: “One may stand for the love I denied,” she said. And the other? Calvary over. Brooks is resurrected. They marry. I didn’t find the story as convincing as the museum tour, and James’s refractions of the paintings’ symbolism in the characters. I come away better remembering the paintings than either Charlotte or Brooks, who are really forgettable characters in the James universe, or like those distant figures Titian and Correggio and the rest of them painted in their canvases’ backgrounds the way they put fillers in seats at awards shows while the real stars are pissing or shooting coke. But it’s all right. Remember to live and let live/Best we can do is forgive/Riding around on the breeze/If you live the life you please…
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.
November 2025
Acoustic Jam Circle At The Community Center In The Hammock
Irving Berlin’s Holiday Inn
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Irving Berlin’s Holiday Inn
Tree-Lighting Ceremony in Central Park
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
Irving Berlin’s Holiday Inn
For the full calendar, go here.
The little boy arrived with the sacristan and his key, and we were ushered into the presence of Tintoretto’s Crucifixion. This great picture is one of the greatest of the Venetian school. Tintoretto, the travelled reader will remember, has painted two masterpieces on this tremendous theme. The larger and more complex work is at the Scuola di San Rocco; the one of which I speak is small, simple, and sublime. It occupies the left side of the narrow choir of the shabby little church which we had entered, and is remarkable as being, with two or three exceptions, the best preserved work of its incomparable author. Never, in the whole range of art, I imagine, has so powerful an effect been produced by means so simple and select; never has the intelligent choice of means to an effect been pursued with such a refinement of perception. The picture offers to our sight the very central essence of the great tragedy which it depicts. There is no swooning Madonna, no consoling Magdalen, no mockery of contrast, no cruelty of an assembled host. We behold the silent summit of Calvary. To the right are the three crosses, that of the Saviour foremost. A ladder pitched against it supports a turbaned executioner, who bends downward to receive the sponge offered him by a comrade. Above the crest of the hill the helmets and spears of a line of soldiery complete the grimness of the scene. The reality of the picture is beyond all words; it is hard to say which is more impressive, the naked horror of the fact represented, or the sensible power of the artist. You breathe a silent prayer of thanks that you, for your part, are without the terrible clairvoyance of genius. We sat and looked at the picture in silence.
–From Henry James’s “Traveling Companions” (1870).
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