Category: General

My First Book

The Woeful Lay of the Happy Day is now available wherever fine volumes of narrative poetry are sold.

Set in a world adapting to rising seas and multiplying wildfires, it’s the story of an Air Force cadet who is violently diverted from her career path.

Leaving behind a boyfriend who loves her in spite of himself, she winds up captaining a ferry and plying the pirate-plagued waterways of Gotham.

Until – well, you’ll have to read it to find out.

This little glossy hardback, with beautiful cover art by Stacey Posnett, is now available at your online bookshop of choice for your splurging pleasure.
Powell’s Barnes and Noble Amazon

Entrepreneur

In today’s business news:

My co-editor Barbara Barnett and I have incorporated as Critical Lens Media Ltd. and acquired the web magazine Blogcritics, for which we have been freelance editors for some years.

Congratulations and/or sympathy gladly accepted.

Park Odyssey Press Release

Jon Sobel, a Manhattan-based writer and musician and Co-Executive Editor of Blogcritics Magazine, has embarked on an unprecedented adventure: visiting and blogging every New York City park.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 27, 2010

Jon Sobel, a Manhattan-based writer and musician and Co-Executive Editor of Blogcritics Magazine, has embarked on an unprecedented adventure: visiting and blogging every New York City park. He plans to document all 1,300 green spaces within the five boroughs.

“I already spend a lot of my spare time walking around the city, especially the parks,” Sobel says. “It’s astounding how many parks there are within the city limits. So this project combines my life as a writer, with my life as a lover of the outdoors. And nobody has ever done it before.”

Why 1,300? The roster of NYC Parks goes far beyond the famous ones like Central Park, Prospect Park, and Battery Park. The five boroughs are festooned with hundreds of parks of every shape, size, design, and purpose. Looking over the Parks Department’s website and other resources, Jon identified about 1,300 properties that seem to rank as actual parks (as opposed to pure playgrounds or mere grassy strips). He’ll visit, photograph, and blog about every park that’s at least partially laid out for passive enjoyment of the outdoors.

The more than 30 parks already featured on the blog, with text and photos, include:

-> Manhattan’s oldest park, Bowling Green, where it all began…
-> Brooklyn’s cannon-decked John Paul Jones park in the shadow of the Verrazano Bridge…
-> The city’s most celebrated green space, Central Park, captured in the winter snow…
-> Chinatown’s Seward Park, named for Lincoln’s Secretary of State (whose statue can be found much farther uptown in Madison Square Park)…
-> The fast-developing landscape of Governor’s Island, where preserved military housing stands side by side with cutting-edge art exhibits…
-> Gantry Plaza State Park on the Queens waterfront, where you can take in some of New York’s storied industrial history along with the sun’s rays…
-> And quite a few more.

“When I first conceived the project last year, I imagined that I could cover all the parks in one long summer season,” Sobel says. “Then I started to look into it more seriously—and upped my estimate to two years. And now that I’ve actually begun, it’s looking more and more like a multi-year exploration. But so is life, and what could be better than spending as much of life as possible outdoors, while still being right here in the greatest city in the world?”

Read the Park Odyssey blog here:
http://parkodyssey.blogspot.com/
Read the introductory post here:
http://tinyurl.com/3ypw677

Contact Jon Sobel at: [email protected]

The Unbeliever’s Dilemma

atheism, beliefs, religion

A new atheist ad campaign hits the New York City subways this week. A group called the Coalition of Reason is sponsoring posters declaring that "A million New Yorkers are good without God. Are you?" The campaign aims to give non-believing New Yorkers assurance that they're not alone. This seems unnecessary in New York; the anonymous donor might have spent his or her money better in some Bible Belt city, someplace where nonbelievers really do feel marginalized. But it did get me thinking.

The "million" figure comes from the famous 2008 American Religious Identification Survey, which found 15 percent of respondents claimed to have no religious affiliation. In terms of New York's population, that points to roughly a million people. While the numbers may lack precision, there are certainly millions of Americans who don't believe in God. President Obama's acknowledgment of nonbelievers in his Inaugural Address was a small but significant gesture towards recognition of this population.

But awareness campaigns can go only so far. Nonbelievers in a country dominated by religious people will always labor under the near-impossibility of being able to prove a negative.

The term "atheist" and the question "Do you believe in God?" pose an oppositional conundrum similar to what occurs when I ask, "Have you stopped beating your wife?" In asking the question that way, I'm stipulating that you have beaten your wife at some time in the past, regardless of whether you have since stopped. Similarly, if I say "I am an atheist" or "I don't believe in God," the very phrasing puts me in opposition to something I don't recognize as existing – theos, a god, a supernatural being.

Hence the term "atheist" defines me according to a belief system I don't accept; it places me in a world in which there may be an entity people refer to as "God," and in which I am something like a scientist who doesn't accept a certain theory because he believes the evidence is inadequate or has a rival theory. But that picture does not accurately describe a naturalistic worldview. In my conception, a naturalistic worldview by definition does not stand in opposition to some competing worldview. It isn't one of a number of possible theories posited to explain some phenomenon; rather it has defined a supernatural worldview out of existence. "Naturalistic" means "with reference to what is." In nature, in the world, in the universe, there are things that are. Of course, there is much that is unobservable to us, and perhaps some things that we will never observe. Still, these things are. Anything else is speculative or imaginary.

Saying "I don't believe in God" is somewhat better than using the term "atheist," because it at least refutes the superstition implied in the term "belief." But it suggests that the alternative, "believing in God," is somehow of equal logical weight. The oppositional conundrum still applies. The term "belief" itself is weighted. In its religious sense, "belief" means trusting in the existence of supernatural beings and events that one has not personally observed (and which, since they are supernatural, are also, to a naturalist, nonexistent, hence unobservable). To a pure naturalist, this kind of "belief" is an almost meaningless concept. Opposing it is like arguing with the wind.

Miracles are a prime example. These are fictional phenomena that, by definition, defy natural law, or else real phenomena that witnesses could not explain because the necessary scientific knowledge is or was not yet available. "Believing in" miracles means accepting a supernatural origin for (currently or formerly) unexplained phenomena. This was understandable in pre-scientific cultures. It is far less understandable today. Angels are another example – fictional characters firmly "believed in" by some of the same adults who are just as sure Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are made up. As with miracles, there is no logical explanation for such beliefs. Logic isn't relevant – people believe these things on faith. Thoughtful theologians often have no problem admitting as much.

Ideally, there should be (philosophically speaking) no conflict between science and religion. They operate on different mental planes. Unfortunately our terminology too often doesn't let us – believers and nonbelievers – see that. Instead we see things in terms of opposition and conflict. We "atheists" and naturalistic thinkers continue to struggle to find accurate and acceptable terms with which to describe ourselves, using a language whose very terms deny the reality we perceive.

To follow a lively discussion on this post or leave a comment, please click over to where it is posted at Blogcritics.

The Time Traveler’s Life

Over the summer I traveled back in time.

To my brother’s place, to be exact.

He lives in a college town, but we weren’t there to teach or learn; we were there to make an album. The recording studio was pretty state-of-the-art. My brother isn’t.

He doesn’t have a digital recording device or MP3 player.  Or a computer at home. Or cable or satellite TV (though he does have an idiot box on which he can watch rented movies).

He doesn’t want these things.

He reads books he borrows from the library. I went with him to the creaky, homey old library a couple of times, to take advantage of its free wireless internet. I don’t live in the past (unless you count the fact that I don’t have a smartphone yet). I’d brought my laptop. I’m a freelancer and I have to stay in touch even when I’m away from home, in case any work comes up. And I have to be able to do the work, if it does. Managing your time effectively as a freelancer can be difficult (although there is helpful advice on peggywester.com) but it becomes even more difficult when you can’t work when you need to.

More amazingly, for someone who lives in a small town in Vermont, my brother doesn’t have a car. He walks to the school where he teaches. He takes commuter buses up and down the state when he wants to go somewhere. He rents a car now and then when a big trip is necessary.

On reflection, though, that doesn’t conform to the theme of living in the past. It feels more like living in the future. But that’s a story for another – a future – day.

After our studio sessions, back at his house, we went even further back in time: to our childhood, when we read books about dinosaurs. Only in those days there were maybe ten or twenty dinosaurs pictured in the books. Paleontologists have since discovered many, many more dinosaurs. I realized with amazement, paging through my brother’s thick, heavy new dinosaur book, that every dinosaur we knew of as kids – tyrannosaurus rex, trachodon, triceratops, allosaurus, ankylosaurus, what used to be called a brontosaurus – is now known to be a whole family of sauropods, dozens or hundreds in each group.

Makes sense when you think about it, with evolution working on these creatures for tens of millions of years.

So there we were, two guys in our 40s, reading books about dinosaurs. Just like when we were six, seven, eight years old. Traveling back in time.

After our second and final studio session it was Friday night, time to celebrate having completed the basic tracks. I wondered if the brewery in town had a Friday night tasting. My brother had never been to the brewery at all, though it was practically in his back yard. It was about time. Sure enough: Friday night tasting! Complete with a cask ale. So there we were, standing at the counter in the brewery, drinking cask ale. Traveling back in time alcoholically too.

So here’s to both kinds of dinosaurs – the ancient beasts who once roamed the planet, and the humans who stay just a little bit behind the curve, taking things a little more slowly, leaving time to contemplate.

The Re-Education of a Road Trip Nation

I’ve been driving a lot this summer, but getting behind the wheel is feeling more and more like a Last Days scenario.

I don’t mean the end of the world, although of course that’s possible. I mean the end of an automobile-centric way of life. No one has come up with a convincing solution to the dual problems of finite fuel and climate change. One way or another, it seems likely that we’re going to be giving up our cars – if not this generation, then next.

Being a city dweller, I have a car mostly for weekends and vacation trips. I also need it for work, but only sort of; if I weren’t a part-time working musician, with heavy equipment to lug around to gigs, I’d probably be like most Manhattanites and not own a car at all.

And so, despite being a car owner, I’m a public transportation snob. I think that if you are a patriotic American, or (more important) a patriotic citizen of Earth, and you are not a farmer, you should be living in or near a city and taking public transportation to work. If that’s not practical now, you should be actively planning for it. And the governments of the world should be using carrots, then (eventually) sticks where needed, to aim societies in that direction.

Yet there’s this nice house in the country, see…

Since my mother retired a couple of years ago to her house in Vermont, I find myself imagining retiring there too someday, assuming the house stays in the family. This actually takes quite an effort of imagination, because the prospects of my actually retiring, at any age, seem quite dim. But still. These dreams and pleasures lie deep in our natures. Retiring has to be planned, it may seem like a permanent vacation to some, but it does need to be planned so you know what’s going on and where you’re at! Retirement age people may use the roth ira calculator to help with finding the best plan for them, just because it seems far off doesn’t mean you shouldn’t prepare.

Having a spread of land that’s our own, whether real or just an aspiration, appeals deeply to our territorial side. Having access, and means, to hit the open road and go where we please when we please, whether it’s to visit distant friends or relatives, spend time with nature, or just get away from something – that goes very deep as well. Perhaps it’s a manifestation of our essential internal conflict. You know the one: between our earthbound reality and our mental capacity to dream to infinity.

Wherever we get them from, these ideas are not easy to give up, especially for Americans. Our foundational frontier tradition and our Eisenhower Interstate Highway System make sure of that.

So if these kinds of dreams have to die, they will die hard. The white picket fence, the second home in the country, the family road trip… whenever I turn the key in the ignition and roll off this once-Dutch island into the vastness of the mainland United States, I can’t help thinking of these hopes and dreams grinding to a halt.

This View of Life… Or That One

Dotting the fields by the road around the Caribbean island of St. Kitts are hundreds of white birds. Marveling at the beauty of these graceful, long-necked animals, we asked Solomon, our hotel's driver, what they were.

"Egrets," he replied. "They look pretty, but they're damn nuisances. They shit all over my pool."

It's all relative. Here in New York we've got open-air double-decker tourist buses all over the place. When I'm walking, I like to see the buses. It's fun to watch the tourists gawking at the skyscrapers and famous sights that to me are just part of the everyday scenery. It's useful, and enjoyable, to be made aware of different points of view.

When I'm trying to drive downtown, though, the buses are a nuisance, clogging up the intersections like mis-oriented vitamin pills in your throat. So: another point-of-view shift, this time all within one person, pedestrian vs. driver. Every conceivable point in space or time is (theoretically) somebody's point of view, and all those points of view are out there criss-crossing and opposing, separating us from one another and dividing us internally too.

Somewhere, terrain-wise, between a small, underdeveloped Caribbean island and the heart of Manhattan is the suburb I grew up in. It was a good place to be a kid. A few years later, it was a boring place to be a teenager. It hadn't changed; I had. Now I've shifted yet again, looking down my nose at suburbs altogether.

Yet even though I haven't lived in one in decades, when I visit suburbs in other areas I feel superior and defensive about my own home town: we had sidewalks, why don't you have sidewalks? What if someone wants to go for a walk? Who planned this town? Meanwhile someone from that sidewalkless community is probably driving through my old town thinking: how can people live in a place that doesn't have any hills?

It's amazing, when you think about it, that we function and get along as well as we do. Sure, there are always wars going on, and people stereotyping, despising, and oppressing other people, countries, races… suburbs. But countries survive for centuries. And we have not blown up the planet, nor wiped ourselves back to the Bronze Age, despite well over half a century of capability.

We may have point-of-view problems, but we did evolve as social animals. That gave us the smarts we constantly use to both help and hurt ourselves individually and collectively. The fact that people can live in small groups or large ones, in every kind of terrain, and within a wide variety of social institutions, tells us something important:

There's hope for humanity. There's hope for the Earth. There's even hope for some of the beautiful creatures we share the planet with.

Just as long as they don't shit in my pool.*

—
*Metaphorical. I don’t have a pool.

Top Six Reasons I’m Resisting Twitter

If Twitter is the new way people are finding out about things, I guess I’m going to have to start doing it eventually. But so far I’m resisting, and here’s why.

6. I already have to “hide” three quarters of my Facebook friends because I don’t have time to read their announcements of “I’m off to the Post Office” and “I’m making lentil soup tonight.”

5. Speaking of food, I don’t know if I can afford another mouth to feed. With Facebook, two Myspace pages, a professional website, professional blog, personal blog, band websites, rehearsals, hustling for work, etc., etc. — not to mention those holdovers from a primitive era, actually working and having a social life — it’s hard to swallow the idea of hooking up yet another needy pipeline I must pump full of something on a regular basis.

4. Unless I’m talking about birds, I refuse to do anything requiring me to use the word “tweet.”

3. I like to maintain an inflated sense of my own importance, so I’m worried that no matter how many (or few) people might follow me on Twitter, it will never be enough.

2. Just to be plain ornery.

And the Number One reason I’m resisting Twitter…

1. Look outside — it’s a beautiful day!

Music Review: Indie Round-Up – Mosher, Cleaves, Terry

Manda Mosher, Everything You Need

Manda Mosher's airy but sultry alto is a refreshing change from the little-girl voices that dominate pop music, and crop up a lot in today's rootsy music too. Mosher's sun-baked pop-rock doesn't fall easily into a genre either, though decades ago we could safely have simply called it "rock."

Mosher's dobro plucking and Dylanesque harmonica playing nod to the front porch, but her songs, especially in these keyboard-heavy arrangements, hark back more to 1970s arena rock (especially Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers) than to anything current. The sole cover, however, is a lovely acoustic rendition of Pete Townshend's sweet, slightly precious "Blue, Red, and Grey."

Though reasonably well-crafted, Mosher's songs are a little pallid, lacking in excitement. As if trying to make up for this, producer Guy Erez has overproduced the tracks, and they are recorded on the CD crazily loud. These choices don't serve Mosher's subtle vocals well. She's not a brash Kelly Clarkson or a squeaky Taylor Swift, she's more of a smoky Christine McVie or Joni Mitchell. But this CD tries to hit you over the head with her. I suspect I'd enjoy her music more if it were in a more intimate setting.

Slaid Cleaves, Everything You Love Will Be Taken Away

Slaid Cleaves is one of those consummate songwriters whose stuff would sound great coming from almost any singer you can think of. But like Kim Richey (of whom he reminds me), his own voice, though not a powerhouse instrument, wraps perfectly around his words and melodies.

Cleaves' first new CD of original material in five years is the kind of album it's hard to write about because the music doesn't invite much analysis. It's like trying to grab hold of an object so smooth and frictionless you can't get a grip on it. Gurf Morlix, one of Americana music's great unsung producers, keeps things spare and simple, as befits the literate but straight-arrow songs.

Cleaves' stories and vignettes range from workingman's plaints, like "Tumbleweed Stew" and the Springsteen-esque "Hard to Believe," to grim ditties of war and death like "Green Mountains and Me" and the relentless, Townes-sad "Twistin'." Although there's a lot of negative imagery in the lyrics, the music has an unprepossessing, almost dancing quality even when it's slow. This makes you lean into the lyrics to see the vivid pictures. Good-looking music, this.

Jesse Terry, The Runner

Here's an expertly crafted, beautifully produced CD of poppy country-rock from a singer-songwriter with an open, engaging, emotionally powerful voice and a knack for melodies. But the lyrics take it down a peg. Cliches and sentimental storytelling are OK in songs up to a point, of course, but only if they're put together in original ways, or if they sit perfectly with the melodies in that indescribable, magical way that turns a competent song into a really good one.

These lyrics too often disappoint in that sense, even edging into cheesiness at times, as with the title track. In other songs, like "Edges" and "Ghost Town," good setups with well-conceived tunes and imagery don't lead to strong musical payoffs.

Where Terry does connect, for me, is in his acoustic ballads, where rather than forcing his way to attempted big choruses, he seems to be simply saying what he wants to say. "Noise," "A Refuge," and the exquisite "Africa" flow with complete naturalness, like songs by the Beatles, Don Henley, or Kevin So.