In recent years, the Sarasota Chalk Festival has become a draw for professional street artists from all over the world, and has grown to be the biggest festival of its kind in the country. Yet we all know that chalk has a deep association with childhood. Whether it’s drawing hopscotch on the street or learning everything from your ABCs to algebra on a chalkboard, we all have a certain nostalgia for the medium. In fact, when the festival began in 2007, the Children’s Chalk Playground was the most popular part [...]

This week gave me the chance to make the fourth stop on my local tour of the Open Mic scene abuzz in our fair town.   This journey began four months ago as a personal exploration of the questions: What kind of function do open mics play in our local community for its economy, musicians and music-lovers?   What is the unique flavor of each open mic happening across Sarasota?   So far, I’ve checked out the scenes brewing on the North Trail on Tuesdays at Growler’s Pub; out east at [...]

I value citizenship—the ability we each have to make a difference through our actions around something we care about, in the company of others. Yet, from over at least a decade of witnessing people trying to make the world a better place in one form or another, I find the thing that seems to plague most “do-ers” is that ugly phenomenon called “burnout”: A person who’s passionate about something takes on more and more responsibility, becoming isolated in and consumed by that responsibility. Eventually, they give up, heartbroken and alone in [...]

Superman can fly, X-Men’s Storm can control the weather, Wonder Woman can pull off an over-the-top patriotic leotard in literally any setting and Aqua Man can … uh … Aqua Man can talk to seahorses. And that makes his super power almost as cool as mine. Getting lost is my super power. Okay, so perhaps it isn’t exactly a super power, but it is something I’m super good at doing, and thanks to TWIS Travel, I get to put my super power to use by helping you plan a truly [...]

Who lives around me? What makes them amazing? How could knowing that be useful? This is what I’ll be exploring in a new series of blogs called “Amazing Neighbors.” My first interview is with someone I’ve admired since we first talked years ago: Don Hall, founder and Executive Director of Transition Sarasota, who lives about five blocks from my house off the edge of beautiful Gillespie Park. Don is a friendly guy about my age with bright blue eyes, sandy hair, and a wide smile. We met several years ago [...]

So we found a new site we LOVE and it’s called Chart Porn. It’s not porn, technically speaking, but seductive in a brainy-XXX kind of way. Indeed, Chart Porn is about information and data and graphs and charts and posters. Since we are in the era of “big data,” there are really only two ways to go about it: bore people to death with spreadsheets or make it into cartoons. Creative nerds stepped up, and cartoon it is. The explosion in art+data is mind-blowing. There are a couple of terms [...]