Eliyahu and McLuhan

                                        YC Torah Library

My favorite part of the Passover seder -- we had a wonderful seder last night at our in-laws in Manhattan -- is when we welcome Eliyahu HaNavi (Elijah the Prophet) to our gathering.  He was a real person in 9th-century BCE Israel, but over time he's become a mythical, magical figure who manages to visit every table across the world where a seder is being conducted.  We appreciate his visit, leave a glass of wine out for him -- but he's a gentleman, and drinks so little that it seems to remain filled after his visit -- but my favorite part of this event is singing harmony to welcome him, for as long as I can remember.

Eliyahu also appeals to my taste for science fiction, or at least fantasy.  And my wife mentioned that Santa Claus also picks up on this power to be in so many, innumerable places almost at once.  Marshall McLuhan's co-explorer of media Edmund Carpenter -- they co-edited the journal Explorations in the 1950s-- also channeled Eliyahu and his omni-presence, noting in Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me (p. 3) in 1973 that "Electricity has made angels of us all." Not, alas, that it made us all good, but incorporeal images of us human beings everywhere at once, back then on national television, soon on global TV like CNN, and now on the Internet and social media.

McLuhan thought this point was so important, he even made it posthumously, noting with his co-author Bruce Powers in The Global Village (1989, p. 70) how "Lowell Thomas [the radio broadcaster] used to say, 'On the air, you're everywhere'".  The global village, of course, is a centerpiece of McLuhan's work, his second most famous probe "The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village" (p. 31), in his second most famous book, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), exceeded only by "the medium is the message" in Understanding Media (1964, p. 7).  My Digital McLuhan (1998) was devoted to showing how the Internet was turning the global village from a metaphor into reality.

And social media continues doing this every day.  A few days before the seder, I talked to my classes at Fordham University about something new I had just discovered on X (formerly Twitter).  A new feed, "Japanese Twitter" that had showed up on my page, likely because I have a number of colleagues and fans  in the Land of the Rising Sun.  For the first time I've seen, we here in America can read, in English, what the Japanese are saying about everything, including us, in their Tweets.  And we don't need to wait for the translation, because AI does it almost instantly. With every step forward, everyone on this planet is becoming more like Eliyahu, everywhere at once.

Cafe du Lievre and Twice Upon a Rhyme

I think my favorite cafe in the world is the Cafe du Lievre, in Inokashira Forest, in Tokyo.  I've never had the pleasure of dining there - though I hope to some day - but...

Well, the cafe has been playing my songs - hey, baby, they're playing our song - from my Twice Upon a Rhyme album, and, come to think of it, from my Spun Dreams album, too, for more than a year.   So far, as far as can tell, patrons haven't been running out of the cafe in horror, so I take that as a good sign.

But it brings me pleasure no end to think that all of those songs, written for the most part in the late 1960s and recorded just a few years later, are now enjoying a life of the ear in this cafe on the other side of world.   Japan has already played a crucial role in my musical re-discovery, with the review of Twice Upon a Rhyme by Taro Miyasugi in Record Collectors Magazine at the turn of the 21st century - "human mystical pop music ... wonderful songs" - really jumpstarting this resurgence of interest (though I'm not sure how much there was in the first place) which is still going on.

Thanks Cafe du Lievre - having seen your taste in music, you can count on me one of these showing up and sampling your taste in food!




with original Twice Upon a Rhyme guitarist Peter Rosenthal, August 2015

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"Sunshine's Mine" on Songs of Love for Japan compilation

Delighted to announce that my "Sunshine's Mine," recorded way back in 1966 at Associated Sound Studies in New York City, is on the Songs of Love for Japan compilation album, which went on sale today at 10am Eastern time, and will continue for 72 hours. All money from sales of the compilation will go to help Japan. Details over here.

Other artists include Tori Amos, Sara Bareilles, and Josh Ritter ... I'm thrilled to be in such good company ... a total of 100 tracks by 100 artists, all to help with Japanese relief efforts. (You can hear "Sunshine's Mine" over here.)



"Sunshine's Mine" is not only on the full 100-track compilation, but on the special 20-track compilation available just for today. You can see the complete list of 100 tracks and the special 20-track artist and song list over here.

Time to Say Goodbye to Nuclear Energy

I tend to be an outspoken optimist about technology.  I love almost everything about the Internet, want faster trains and planes, and think genetic engineering could be the greatest boon to human nutrition since we started planting vegetables.    I think we will never understand our role in the cosmos until a substantial part of our civilization gets off this planet and out into the solar system and planets around other stars.

But after Three Mile Island in 1979, I concluded that nuclear power was just too dangerous to warrant using as a mainstream energy source.  I was struck back then by a headline in the New York Daily News - "Thousands Flee N-Zone".   I love science fiction, but that was one movie I did not want to be in.

Chernobyl in 1986 only confirmed this.  It doesn't matter what the reasons for the accidents are.   Accidents will happen.  We're fallible and so are our technologies.  And the consequences of accidents with nuclear energy are just too high.   Radiation released and its destructive consequences stay around for a very long time.

And now the same may be happening at a nuclear plant in Japan.   It was damaged by the earthquake and tsunami.   Its cooling system was broken.  Current reports say the ceiling of the plant has collapsed, which could lead to a complete meltdown, in turn releasing large amounts of dangerous radiation.

With prices of oil soaring all over, it's especially difficult to give up an alternate source.  But it's time to give up on nuclear energy.    The world should do everything it can to help Japan in its awful time of need, and then see to it that its own energy sources no longer include nuclear.


8-min podcast discussion of this blog post

Barack Obama Gets High Marks for Speeches in Japan

Obama's Speeches Get High Grades in Japan
by PaulLev

Well, last week was a good week for Barack Obama around the world - and I've been happy to do what I can to help.

Yesterday, I posted a clip from the CBC's "Cell Phone: The Ring Heard Around the World," aired on April 3, in which I and the documentary praise the Obama campaign's savvy use of cell phones.

Turns out I was also on the air in Japan last Friday - April 4 - giving Obama and his speech writer Ron Favreau very high marks (I also grade Hillary Clinton). The above clip with me, from NNN-TV News in Japan, was recorded in January (same week as the CBC clip). You can see the entire report in Japanese - with a comparison of Obama and Martin Luther King - on the NNN-TV News 24 website.