“A distressingly large portion of the world doesn’t do you any good whatsoever. In fact, it does you bad. Casts static between your ears, drowns out who you truly are.” — Charles Frazier, Nightwoods Something changed in me recently. Perhaps it’s being north of 50, but gratuitous inconveniences have become unbearable: traffic, message board vitriol, pollution, loveless marriages, political absurdity. I’m over it. So over it that I left the room … and by room I mean country … a

More precisely, as reminded by our local friends, we left the United States. We still live in America, Central America. Playa Grande, Costa Rica, to be exact. Our home sits atop a mist shrouded mountain in a dense jungle above the Pacific. We wake with the sun to a symphony of Congo monkey roars and birdsong madness. Sip our coffee gazing out over dense green into endless blue beyond which nothing exists. At dusk, the sky drops its golden pebble into the sea to the west. Ours

In the Emmy-winning series, Friday Night Lights, actress Connie Britton slays as a smart woman in a dumb town. In Dillon, TX, where high school football is religion, she’s the sexy school principal working to be seen as more than the coach’s wife. The been-there-done-that parent managing a hormone-charged teen girl. The rock of her family. In other words, she’s the person we all hope to be. We’ve been binge-watching for weeks. Fighting breast cancer w Connie Britton, DJ Shiss

“How does a lie come to be widely taken as the truth? The answer is disturbingly simple: Repeat it over and over again. When faced with facts that contradict the lie, repeat it louder.” This NYT editorial from earlier this week discussed the remarkable success of the voter fraud myth. Despite being statistically non-existent (31 cases in over a billion ballots), this false narrative has convinced nearly half of registered voters that voter fraud is a problem that justifies ma

Best Books Ever Written – Vortices of Genius, acrylic, book covers, paper, oil crayon on canvas, 60″x136″, 2015 Why did the Miami Herald select The Best Books Ever Written as a PICK OF THE WEEK during Art Basel 2014? Probably because this labor-intensive work finds the sweet spot where visual and literary sensibilities lie together … and make sweet, chaotic love. Best Books Ever Written – San Francisco Is A Writer’s Grotto, acrylic, book covers of Bay Area Writers, paper, oil

If you can walk you can dance. If you can talk you can sing. African Proverb The Class-5 hurricane called Art Basel just made land in Miami once again. Tap That!, above, is my latest addition to this whirled-wide party, a double entendre of cut scraps culled from the last 10 years of drawings, sketches and paintings. Trash into treasure. Speaking of which, artist Agustina Woodgate wows with her monumental sewn assemblage of previously-owned toy stuffed animal pelts. If you’re

A fellow painter invited me last week to be one of four artists at a South Beach corporate event. Live painting feels a bit like being a monkey with a brush, but there are worse ways to earn $500 in 3 hours. Each artist was asked to create a 5’x3′ S. Beach themed canvas which convention guests could enhance as their hearts desired. My cocktail glass filled with ice had the working title $20 With a Straight Face, which is what the shameless bastards charge around here for a vo

Okaaaay, Chad. That’s certainly a measurable goal. For me, the goal wasn’t quite so dramatic. Coming on fifty, it’s about time to add more try to my tricep. And return the six-pack that’s inside my stomach to the outside. The only thing I’ve been lifting regularly the past few years is my young kids and forks filled with meatballs, both of which I very much love. Thing is, my kids keep getting heavier while my gluttony regimen does not seem to be making me any stronger. Which

Gore Vidal died this week. Google him and 35,400 results appear. Because he was the greatest essayist of his age. Yet, he failed at the two greatest ambitions of his life: to hold high political office and be considered the  pre-eminent writer of his time. He lost 2 runs for office and was judged by most literary measures to fall behind rivals such as John Updike, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. Was he a failure in his own mind? This all got me thinking about my own greatest asp

A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person.                                                                                             Dave Barry I enjoyed my time in jail. I was the only guy in tennis whites of the 50 burly thugs in my cell. Clearly not the best jail look. I’d been arrested with my brother Eric for scalping tickets at a tennis match we were about to attend with my mother on Key Biscayne. When we didn’t show up, she thought we