Michael Garfield - Imagination Is Our Greatest Natural Resource.

First Live Painting of 2012, New Apparel, Waxing Philosophical

2012-01-21T12:55:00.000-06:00

"New maps for new realities! Reality is a verb!"
– Richard Doyle

2012 is off like a rocket! I hope it's treating you all as well as it's been treating me...

Here is the second video in a series of "performance philosophy" rants I've made to marry my ongoing studies in evolutionary biology and ecology with my passion for understanding the great transformation we're going through together...

We Are Growing A Remix Economy

Watch/Share in HD on Youtube

You can watch the first video, "We Are Something The Planet Is Doing," at two of my favorite blogs: LostInSound.org and SpiritOfSpider.com. Both of them are highly browse-worthy...

In related news (evolution, art, and economy), I just wrote this article for Reality Sandwich on my friend Dadara's awesome "Art As Money" project, The Exchanghibition Bank, and their new 2012 banknote. From the article:

I met Dadara in person at Burning Man this year, where Exchanghibition Bank set up on the dusty expanse offering people their suspiciously money-esque art notes in exchange for signing a "Karma Laundering" statement that claims you will never again compromise artistic freedom for money. It's an idea whose time has come – a time when drastic government cutbacks on the arts are exceeded by scarcely-imaginable subsidies afforded the failing banks (largely because art itself has become a commodity, with worth measured in auction price). If you can't beat 'em, join 'em! What is money, exactly, if not an agreement – the ritual magical performance of a consensual values-reality? (read more)

Clear on Direction

2012 01 12 The Parish (Heyoka, Sugarpill, Starlynx)

2012 01 13 Ruta Maya (Voice Mau, El John, Matthew Ian Blagg,
DJ Hobo D, Boombaptist, King Art, OT23, Ruler Why)
24"x30" – paint markers on masonite
11"x17" signed poster prints: $25 (incl. s/h) – email me to order
Original painting – check availability and asking price on FB

My first live painting of 2012, courtesy of two fine evenings produced by my friends at Art Seen Alliance and Collective Perspectives. True to the intensity of this year (so far, and I imagine it's only ramping up), I wanted to paint something that captured in one image my microbiological leanings, the vacuoles and cilia of some pond water protist; an explosive collision like Zeus' thunderbolt; and the jeweled geometries of of the divine mind of time. This is, in the words of my badass painter friend Chaeli Cardenas, "some intense masculine energy." Yes! Directedness. Focus. Follow through. All good things for a year when everyone seems to be talking about manifestation. I had to laugh at myself halfway through the show when someone pointed out to me it was pointing straight at my book of prints!

You can click on the pictures above and below to get a super-close look at the detail and its various stages of completion:

"Imagination Is Our Greatest Natural Resource"

Ladies' Tees!

Courtesy of my merchandise shop at ArtsProjekt, new print-on-demand tees for the ladies, to join the existing men's tees and a horde of other options. These are only available through their website – I'm making a small commission on sales, but most of that price goes to the company for their printing services. If you make shirts and think we can offer people a better deal, let me know!

Some Of My Best Hats Yet

The scientific illustrator in me still loves doing commissioned work where I get to relish in the challenge of tackling new and specific subjects, like this Cessna hat and the Rasta Lion below that...although I still love making chrysanthemum mandalas, obviously:

~ Commissioned for Jason Taylor: Leave your comments on FB ~

~ Commissioned for Leigh DeBor: Leave your comments on FB ~

~ Available for purchase: See details & leave your comments on FB ~

Much love to all of you. Thanks for reading and have a beautiful day!

Next week: triumphant new live music video, transhumanism essays, and more as-glorious-as-possible hand-painted designs.

Godhood Is Boring

2012-01-20T11:50:00.000-06:00

Image by Michael Garfield, 2011 04 23

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead.”

– Albert Einstein, physicist

"We live on an island of knowledge surrounded by a shore of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance."

– John A. Wheeler, physicist

'All scientifically possible technology and social change predicted in science fiction will come to pass, but none of it will work properly.'

– Neil Gaiman's Second Law

“Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.”

– Jellaludin Rumi

Perhaps within our lifetimes, humankind's coevolutionary dance with biomedical technology will extend the lifespan of our bodies to currently inconceivable lengths. There are a lot of brilliant minds today waxing poetic about such a future, in which our newfound immortality makes existence an ongoing act of creative bliss where the medium is reality itself.

But these Singularity pundits almost entirely neglect the obvious psychological effects of such radical life extension, imagining that we would continue to trundle on as a species with similar needs and desires. This is about as sophisticated as 19th Century lithographs of the year 2000, when everyone rides to their formal affairs in sleek dirigibles and flies masted ships to the Moon.

It also forgets the initial rush of power we all felt when taking our first steps, or shaking a rattle. The thrill of control is the seed of the self, the earliest and most primitive emotional response to discovering our participation in reality. This rush sustained the growth of modernity as it magnified and became dams, skyscrapers, and space shuttles. But what sustains our awe into adulthood is not the continued magnification of the control thrill – for which we quickly develop a tolerance and require even more bombastic displays of control – but the deepening recognition of a world finally and utterly beyond our ability to rule.

Science is, in the final count, not about the increase of knowledge, but the increase of ignorance – if every question answered means two more questions asked, what we don't know is growing faster than what we do. And so a mature science, grounded in the same wonder at mystery that impelled natural inquiry in the first place, welcomes this mystery. It is not a program of rapturous domination, or prideful power en route to ultimate mastery of the matter, but the cultivation of wisdom through the exploration of nature as macrocosm and the self as microcosm, of the ego embedded in a world defined by interbeing.

This is the curve ignored by graph-happy Singulitarians when they give the hockey stick chart argument for our impending divinity. We're spiraling increasingly out of control, not into it – evermore aware that control is actually the delusion of a not-actually-separate self, woven dynamically with uncountable feedback loops into the rest of the world. We are participants, not lords – not creators, but co-creators. We will learn to work with, not upon.

But even if we don't end up as the Lactobacillus in Google's intestinal tract, even if we become the genie we let out of this bottle, it'll undoubtedly disappoint us. "Turning into gods" may seem exciting now, but eventually every new plateau becomes the norm, every age's fancy new garb goes out of fashion – and it seems pretty likely that one day, moving planets will be as prosaic as moving chairs is to us today. When that age comes, will we still seek the awesome creative power of even greater deities? Or will we finally accept the horizon of our knowledge and ability as an ever-receding target and, humbled to the transcendental mystery of life, find the transhuman here and now, deeper in the present?

After all, it only takes a cursory study of world mythology to realize that the gods are BORED. Omnipotence is a dead-end street. Once you have it all, the only way forward is to imagine yourself as a lesser and lesser being, like Alan Watts' lucid dreamer who eventually hides himself so deep he forgets he is dreaming...and here we are, imagining in a distinctly un-Copernican fashion that meaning and purpose exist only in the head, and ours is the first and un-simulated world.

2011 11 22, Orlando FL

Post-script:

"'Transhumanist' comes from 'transhuman,' a word that seems to have received its modern meaning in correspondence between Julian Huxley and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit paleontologist and theologian. Teilhard distinguished the 'transhuman' from the 'ultrahuman,' with the latter meaning a kind of souped-up version of the human, and the former indicating an actual transformation – evolution – of who we are. The challenge of the transhuman is to actualize our unique individuality within the much larger planetary collective he saw emerging...he insisted that planetary 'communion' could only come about through the difficult work of individuation: In order to evolve, we each must become who we are, together.

"Now most recent usages of 'transhuman,' it seems to me, have forgotten most of this, and mistaken the 'transhuman' for the 'ultrahuman' – a kind of upgrade to the same basic model, still denying our connection to each other and the environment. Huxley, a biologist, very much intended 'transhumanism' to indicate a change in who and how we are, and this change centered on a recognize of our radical interconnection with the cosmos, a perception of unity. Now 'transhuman' etymologically suggests 'beyond the human,' and in my view much of what we call 'transhuman' these days – the technological enhancement of our already existing nature to cling to life and deny the role of death, for example – is, as Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, 'human, all too human.' It is an individual ego’s vision of evolution."

– Richard Doyle, information scientist

We Are Something The Planet Is Doing

2012-01-06T13:24:00.000-06:00

"To increase awareness of one's scientific universe is to face unpredictable increases in one's awareness of the self."

– Gregory Bateson

“I don’t believe in anything that doesn’t choose everybody.”

– Sara Bates

~ Watch on Vimeo ~
Music: "Eschatons" (featuring Andrew McNew) – Free Download

I believe that the definitive image of the early 21st Century will be of a sphere – of the Earth from space – of the cosmic plenitude and wholeness of a full belly and breast and basket, and a recognition of the archetypal as-above-so-below-ness that we are embedded in, that we can take a perspective on by zooming out into orbit and recognizing the common unity of all live on Earth.

By going back four billion years and examining the Last Universal Common Ancestor of all of the major kingdoms of life, we see a foreshadowing, a precursor, of contemporary impetus to build this internet, to destroy national boundaries. The earliest life on Earth was a globe-encircling bioplasm of individual cells that were exchanging, freely, their genetic code -- their selfhood -- and there's an obvious parallel between that and the contemporary obsessive sharing of blogs and video and personal narratives.

There's something going on that we are feeding, this greater self, this inevitability, this project that is continuing to fractally diversify within the ionospheric envelope of our planet, inside of the dreaming noosphere that has been present since the beginning of life on this planet. We're not building this thing, we are participating in it, we are the idea that it is having, we are a fashionable new trend in the creative, ongoing, purposive unfolding of the Gaian mind.

Teilhard de Chardin recognized that collectivization leads to hyperpersonalization and somehow, by recognizing our embeddedness in and our precipitation through and from, as an expression of, this planetary archetype, that each of us is able to align ourselves with the higher purpose of evolution -- not as a mechanism of control, not as a way of escaping our mortality, but as a way of exemplifying and exalting this process that is living through us, that we are just a transitional stage in. And to the degree that we are able to do this -- to the degree that we are able to recognize our own egoic purpose as the fulfillment of the life on this planet -- then we can heal ourselves of the alienation of the separate self of the modern world.

There's always been this one creature. Everything we're doing is something the Earth is doing.

More in this format soon. In other news...

News & Discussions

I love starting conversations, which turned out to be one of my favorite things about live painting – the ability to capture people, to draw them into a discourse that could change both of our lives.

Here are a few highlights from my Facebook wall of recent news items that triggered fantastic conversations – feel free to join in!

• German Village Achieves Energy Independence – And Then Some

• U.S.-Funded Internet Liberation Project Finds Perfect Test Site: Occupy D.C.

• Why It Is Wise To Worship A Woman

• Silence & Ecstasy in the Sensory Deprivation Tank

• To Know But Not Understand: David Weinberger on Big Data

...And then there's THIS silly thing, which I dug up from the misty recesses of 2009:

MG Applies For A Painting Reality Show

~ Watch & Comment on FB ~

My 28th Birthday Concert

If you can make it, awesome! If you can't, let's talk about getting me out to your city to play this summer. If you know of any conscious festivals that would enjoy having me around to paint, play music, and speak about the marriage of creativity, science, and spirituality...please let me know, or better, let them know. Personal recommendations go a lot further. Thank you!

8 January, Austin TX - Whip In

• 8 - 10pm: cyberballadry & guitar tapping BIRTHDAY CONCERT! Michael turns 28 and rocks out with special guests Kristin Astourian & Heidi Nadine

13 January, Austin TX - Ruta Maya

• 9 - 9:45pm: instrumental cyberacoustic guitar

• 10pm - 2am: live painting for El John (Thievery Corporation), Matthew Ian Blagg, Applied Pressure, & more (w/ Karina Thome, Chance Roberts, & Molly Gardner)

20 January, Austin TX - Flipnotics

• 9 - 10pm: cyberballadry & guitar tapping supporting Sam Hammerman & Shawn Madden

~ Full concert calendar at MichaelGarfield.blogspot.com ~

Where's The Art??

It's coming, I promise. I've been working on some epic, super time-intensive live paintings, a score of new hats, and even a couple of graffiti pieces – Austin offers up a lot of places where public art contributions are actually appreciated, so I'm going to start taking advantage of that. I'll have more to show in the next newsletter!

In the meantime, there is still plenty of original artwork to browse (and purchase, if you're interested) on my Facebook Visual Art Page. Enjoy, and thank you from the top of my heart – where love spills over and the birds drink from its open petals.

Halcyon Days: A Winter Solstice Mix [FREE DL] & Dolphin Fedora

2011-12-25T00:21:00.000-06:00

“The higher he ascendsthe less he understands,because the cloud is darkwhich lit up the night;whoever knows thisremains always in unknowingtranscending all knowledge.”

– St. John of the Cross

Welcome to the dark middle of the year, everyone – the trough into which our Sun dips before rising to summer zenith, a moment of brooding introspection ironically thrust into holiday parties and social responsibility. Enjoy the tension and take a few deep breaths for yourselves...these are precious, beautiful days, days we will remember taking for granted.

Halcyon Days: A Winter Solstice Mix

For the last three years I've released free instrumental albums in celebration of the winter solstice. Here is the latest – my last live album while I get ready to mount a studio release.

It's a "best of" collection from improvised cyberguitar instrumentals performed in listening symbiosis with venues across Colorado and Texas: magnificent, cathedral-esque dripping underground caves and fire-crackling, snowboots-and-horse-art mountain lodges...backyard BYOBs and rain-drenched last-day-of-festival refugee parties...

This is the grooviest, spaciest, most compelling instrumental release I've assembled so far, animated by the self-sacrificing love of Halcyon and the characteristic veil-piercing dive of the bird that took her name. Download it for free as a soundtrack to your new commitments for the new year, given strength by the recent New Moon in Capricorn:

(listen to it here)

"The kingfisher is a long-time symbol of peace and prosperity. It is often seen flying along ponds, streams, and rivers [and] will dive headlong into the water for small fish. If a kingfisher has come to you, prepare yourself to dive into something new. Have you been afraid to take the plunge? Are you needing new warmth? Don't worry. If a kingfisher is around, you won't drown. In fact, you will find that, as a result, you will have new sunshine and prosperity unfolding within your life."

– Ted Andrews, Animal Speak

When I went looking for halcyon pictures to include in album cover art, I found Wildlife Kate's gorgeous kingfisher photography and decided to make two covers instead of one. So every download includes both:

(listen to it here)

Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, Blessed Solstice...however you honor the sacredness of this time of year, may these days be clear sailing for you. Thanks for listening!

Custom Star Dolphin Fedora

A custom hat for my friend, astrologer Adam Sommer (subscribe to his work here):

(click to enlarge – like & comment on facebook)

"What does it mean to communicate with an 'alien' when we barely have the first idea of how to understand the intricacies of rain forest plant communications, nuclei-trading mycelial networks, and ultraviolet light-detecting superorganisms of bees, let alone the conscious or unconscious minds of a humpback, great blue or white whale – whose mathematical, philosophical, aesthetic and perceptual abilities may – for all we know – far outstrip those of our greatest geniuses?"

– Dorion Sagan, "Of Whales & Aliens: The Search for Intelligent Life on Earth"

The Sacred Geography of 21st Century Renaissance Civilization

2011-11-29T18:10:00.001-06:00

(If you got this by email, read it as a web page for full rich media splendor...)

Reading Music:

<p>&amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://michaelgarfield.bandcamp.com/track/meridians"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Meridians by Michael Garfield&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;gt;</p>

"Meridians" – improvised at Art Outside Festival 2011
(download this track for free)

“As viewed by astronauts from the moon, the earth lacks those lines of sociopolitical division that are so prominent on maps. And as recognized here below, the web of interlacing socioeconomic interdependencies that now enfold the planet is of one life. All that is required is a general change of vision to accord with those contemporary facts.”
– Joseph Campbell, comparative mythologist

“It’s not science to me unless it’s integrated, in such a way that it makes a story. I have this holistic view. If symbiosis is simply the living together of organisms in the same place and the same time, in physical contact with each other…then Gaia, which is the whole Earth living system, is symbiosis as seen from space. You can’t talk about cost-benefit and cooperation/competition because those words are proper for the banks and the basketball courts, but they’re not proper for a scientific explanation.“

– Lynn Margulis, evolutionary biologist

This month marks the maiden voyage of a most exciting collaboration as lead blogger for The Renaissance Project – an international team of writers and film-makers chronicling the emergence of a new planetary culture, performing a new evolutionary mythos through the personal stories of genre-breaking creative innovators.

As part of our launch, I just published what I think might be my finest piece of writing so far – a jazzy, poetic romp inspired in equal parts by Google Earth, media theory, archeoastronomy, and ayahuasca.

If my calling is indeed to inspire by sharing what inspires me, then it's time for me to take up the sacred sword and devote myself to the illuminated word – to give a voice to this swirling nexus of culture and consciousness, art and science, religion and everyday life in which all of us find ourselves as we cross the threshold into a new way of being. Out of the clamor of interconnected perspectives, we can hear a new tune playing – the angelic choir of seven billion people unified in a blooming ecology of mind, our flesh quickened in exaltation of the transcendental living mystery in which all of us are woven – the song of the human condition as it awakens ever more deeply to itself through a re-animated sacred and sentient cosmos.

So please, enjoy this declarative first step down the pilgrimage road of my newly-inhabited role as the muezzin for this post-historical call to prayer – I welcome your comments, your sharing, and your reflections as I gear up to expand this work into a regular flow of philosophical performances and, perhaps, finally, a book:

"We Get Around: The Sacred Geography of 21st Century Renaissance Civilization"

"This all starts right here by recognizing that you live on a spherical creature spiraling around the Sun’s own helical trajectory through the dynamic interstellar medium, through cosmic dust and lightning storms, and whichever way you point we can go no deeper into 'space' than we already are. And as the feeling of humanity as a layer stretching out in every direction on the surface of this sphere increases, as you can almost sense those people in their houses, watching tv or making love or crying about work, the children wondering what adulthood is like, the adults wondering about God…this is you, this is your body, and everyone’s successes are your successes. Every new idea is as yours as your heartbeat – out of your control but part of what defines your being in this time and place." (read more)

This is an open-ended project and we welcome collaborators. If you feel inspired to contribute to this with your own celebration of world creative culture in an accelerating age, you can fill out an application on the website...here's the video I made as part of that process, to state my interest and intentions. It's the closest thing I have right now to a mission statement:

Yeah, that pretty much sums it up. :)

EarthKidzUSA's 2012 Visionary Art Calendar

While we're on the topic of awesome creative projects in which I am honored to participate, here's the coolest wall calendar you've ever seen (Long Now Foundation clocks that measure time in the passing of seasonal flowers don't count). "FutureEarth" is both a solar and lunar 13-month calendar that gives not only the standard weeks and months but also the Dreamspell dates some people use to feel a closer connection to the harmonic currents of time reimagined as art...and with contributions from an all-star line-up of visionary artists (including Martina Hoffmann, Android Jones, Amanda Sage, Adam Scott Miller, Autumn Skye, Jessica Perlstein, and almost the entire Colorado live painting crew), it's easy to see time as art.

AND the $20 you spend on this calendar funds a FREE Youth Art Workshop Series for 2012! So you're empowering the next generation of creative brilliance by picking up some of these for your family and friends.

Here's my page – big thanks to Justin Maynes for organizing this, and for making me May:

Buy the FutureEarth 2012 Wall Calendar

So Many Hats

I've been on a roll with the hand-painted hats, of late, and here's your proof. Most of these are still available for purchase, if you see something you like:

"Fireworks" – check price/availability on fb

"Heart Display" – check price/availability on fb

"Tesla" – check price/availability on fb

"Neon Streamers" – check price/availability on fb

"Nightscape" – check price/availability on fb

"Desert Flower" – custom design for Whomp Austin

"Lite Brite" – custom design for Paul Rush

Stay Healthy For The Holidays!

It's out of form for me to publish a bunch of health links in this blog, but I am after all addicted to sharing, and just found some helpful short articles about psychosocial health and nutrition I think it would be a crime not to spread around. Here you go – a few easy tips for staying sane and in top form during one of the most stressful times of year:

• Smiling Makes You Smarter

• The Health Benefits of Gratitude

• 29 of the Healthiest Foods on the Planet

• How to Build A Good Work Environment

From the above article:

"Avoid openly trying to reform people. Every man knows he is imperfect, but he doesn't want someone else trying to correct his faults. If you want to improve a person, help him to embrace a higher working goal — a standard, an ideal — and he will do his own 'making over' far more effectively than you can do it for him."

Forthcoming:

Austin is treating me better than I could have imagined. Not only do I get to celebrate my 28th birthday and Saturn Return with a free concert at Austin's utterly delectable Whip In on January 8th, but – dude! – I just landed an opening slot for two of my favorite bands in Texas, at one of my favorite venues in Texas. Click the flyer for more info...I hope to see you there!

...and, lastly, if you've made it this far then you probably have the attention span and dorkitude required to reap full satisfaction from the two-hour interview I just did with poet, former MIT cultural historian, and planetary culture pioneer William Irwin Thompson. It was an incredible conversation that took us from the religious underpinnings of the singularity movement, to the emergence of new multimodal electronic art forms, to comparisons between the current economic crisis and the critical emergence of photosynthesis on primordial Earth. And I've never met anyone with betteradvice for a future-shocked planet on how to surf accelerating change. I can't wait to share it with you.

In the meantime, much love and many thanks to each and every one of you for giving me your time and support! Lord knows I don't get to book shows at amazing conscious festivals, publish on thoughtful and inspiring websites, and create art that adds lustre to a viewer's soul without this amazing network of friends and co-conspirators turning me onto amazing opportunities and making resonant introductions. Anything I can do to repay you for your help, please let me know.

New Paintings from Art Outside, Sonic Blossom, & The Parish | Denver Live Art on the Cover of Kush Magazine!

2011-11-17T02:29:00.001-06:00

“Purpose is the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s needs.”

- Frederick Buechner

"Whatever I do is done out of sheer joy; I drop my fruits like a ripe tree."

- Henry Miller

I want to start by expressing my enormous gratitude to everyone reading this newsletter. You've given me a voice – a way to satisfy my urge to share and maybe kindle some creative purpose in others at the same time. I subscribe to marketing guru Seth Godin's blog, and he had this to say about Thanksgiving:

‎"A great way to give thanks for the privileges we've got is to do important work.Your job, your internet access, your education, your role in a civilized society...all of them are a platform, a chance to do art, a way for you to give back and to honor those that enabled you to get to this point.For every person reading this there are a thousand people (literally a thousand) in underprivileged nations and situations that would love to have your slot. Don't waste it."

Thank you for helping me not waste it. (I'm always open to suggestions for how to waste this opportunity even less by helping more people. Let me know if you have some...)

"Introducing Denver: Live Art Capitol of America"

on the cover of Kush Magazine

One thing I love is using my work as a writer to applaud, exalt, and promote my artist friends and the venues that support us – and I'm lucky enough to do this as the new Colorado Arts Correspondent for national cannabis culture journal Kush Magazine. You can read my first feature with them, an ode to the special magic that makes Colorado's Front Range such a uniquely excellent place for the emerging live art community, right here in their sleek e-reader on pages 74-75.

If you've been looking for a way to explain what live art is all about, here's a good place to start:

Here on the edge of the Midwest, perched on high ground where the crisp air and mountain view gives everything a sense of adventure, a growing cadre of live artists is working to liberate three generations of suburbanites from their alienation. Live art isn't just a symptom of the internet's new society of transparency, or a gimmick; it's a spiritual guerrilla movement to help everyone recognize their personal calling and collaboratively create a new positive vision for society. It's leadership by example, telling people, "You can do this too. Don't deny your creative spirit. Get out there. Take the initiative and shine." (read more)

I'll continue to report on the Colorado scene in the months to come. Stay tuned!

Mobius Brain

2011 10 07, 08, 09 Art Outside Festival

(Psymbionic, David Starfire, Bird of Prey, Riders Against The Storm, Sorne, Ricochet, Dolomites, Soundfounder, Butcher Bear, Kinder Lo Phi, Ntropy, Nicoluminous, Happy Happy James)

2011 10 14, 15 Sonic Blossom at Cervantes Masterpiece Ballroom

(Ott, Kraddy, Random Rab, Octopus Nebula, Kaminanda, The Human Experience, Karsh Kale & Jamie Janover)

2011 10 16 Fusion Gallery (Bird of Prey, Kaminanda, The Gaia Experiment)

24"x30" - paint markers on canvas panel (click image to enlarge)

visit facebook for info on prints / original painting

Possibly my most time-intensive painting yet, and certainly my most deconstructed, this one rides the divide between my lives in Colorado and Texas. (I don't know if you can tell, but all of this music was super inspiring, beautiful sounds for the creative process.) In response to my friend Jonathan Zap's suggestion that I "rupture the plane" more frequently, it marks a deliberate attempt to break as many of my own rules and inject as many visual paradoxes as I can...a kind of glossy, cortical Devil's Fork. Painting myself into and then back out of a problem is delicious, and of course I have high esteem for plane-rupturing geniuses like Oliver Vernon, whose work helped to inspire this piece. Here it is in stages:

Homeward

Commissioned Studio Painting for Thomas & Ruth Carter

16"x24" - paint markers on masonite (click image to enlarge)

visit facebook for info on prints

As above, so below. Trying to imagine the world through animal eyes, to feel it as they do. My first attempt at moonlight on the water. (Can you find the lady bug?)

Sunny With Pteranodons

2011 11 18 The Parish (Paper Diamond, Run DMT, One4All, White Noise)

18"x24" - paint markers on stretched canvas (click image to enlarge)

visit facebook for info on prints / original painting

Ah, my first gig as an Austinite, painting at the legendary 6th Street venue for none other than Boulder's own Alex Botwin (DJ'ing as his alter ego, Paper Diamond). This is how I feel in my new home – easy, lucky, and free, like I caught a tall thermal and have a belly full of fresh fish under the warm prehistoric sun. It was a pleasure to work alongside fellow live art mainstays Tourmaline Todd and Chance Roberts, and much love goes out to the guys at Polaris Presents for welcoming me on such short notice. My friend Jonathan Garza took great pictures of this show, which you can find on his Austin arts/music/culture blog, Collective Perspectives.

Painted Hats Galore

I've found some awesome allies in Austin with Whomp, a new art and fashion store now selling my hats and paintings as well as a tremendous amount of other cool stuff. Here are the latest adventures in headwear I've cooked up:

...and for those of you who missed them, here are my most recent live albums. Together, they represent the full spectrum of my work, from passionate jazz-pop through guitar-tapping instrumentals and into improvised psychedelic loopscapes. Until I get my next studio album together, these are the definitive recordings. And like all of my music, you can download them free:

I've started booking my spring and summer festival circuit, so if you know of events that'd like conscious, intelligent acoustic-electronic music to put a star in people's eyes, please refer me to the organizers! Few things in my life are sweeter than creating sacred space with an audience and feeling into it together. I'm nourished by the opportunity to play for you, and deeply appreciate your support as I start to weave a year of pilgrimage to creative, genuine communities where I can put my work to the greatest good.

That's it for now. Have a spectacular day and don't hesitate to write!

New Digital Art & Live Album, "Rites of Passage" – and Custom Furniture

2011-11-11T11:11:00.000-06:00

“Die while you’re aliveand be absolutely dead.Then you can do whatever you want; it’s all good.”
– Bunan

We live in a culture that has forgotten its rites of passage – criminalized the psychedelic initiations we inherited from our ancestors, denying the scientific validity of adult psychological development and mocking the elderly rather than soliciting their wisdom. But everywhere I look, I see people reconnecting to lost traditions and honoring life's transitions with newly created rituals. It seems to be a basic and instinctual human need, to sacralize big changes – both to commemorate them and to give them meaning.

This week I'm writing from my new home in Austin, Texas – on the other end of a big and scary move away from a comfortable and familiar world full of friends and natural beauty, leaping straight into a hunch. And I'm here to tell you, as the saying goes, that "death is absolutely safe." Take the leap – because it'll never get any easier, you have people who love and support you, and the sky will hold your feet.

It is in this spirit that I present Rites of Passage, an hour of live recordings from my performances at Burning Man 2011, as a gift to encourage your own difficult transitions – a friendly poke on the arm to let you know that everyone goes through it, and these changes only free the light we have inside us. Download it for free now:

Rites of Passage: Live at Burning Man

"Let your fears be the catalyst for change in your life, the motivator to go after what you want, not the barrier you build around yourself to stay safe."
– Morgan Spurlock

"Remember, the water's always going to be cold. You might as well jump now."
– Yehuda Berg

Enjoy! And thank you. Your sharing, reposting, and reviewing of this music is what allows me to keep it coming, and to find time for even more inclusive and ambitious collaborative multimedia projects. A couple times a week I get a letter from someone I've never met about how I touched their life in some way. It's because you help me get out there and into the ears and hearts of people who want depth, soul, and drive in their music...because it's time for songs that marry sincerity and smarts, heads and hearts.

Rites of Passage is a gift, in Burning Man spirit. Please feel welcome to pass it on (or the live videos, available as a youtube playlist) to anyone you feel would stand to benefit.

But the music is just one part of what goes into an album, and making the cover art is always something I cherish. This image in particular was such a treat to compose that I decided to make it available as a 1280 x 800 desktop graphic – just right click and "save as" or "set desktop background" for some new wallpaper:

Something to contemplate while looking at this image, and listening to my own modest human attempts at transcendence through music:

"If you draw a circle and you move to a second dimension of a sphere, it's possible to move out of that circle without crossing a boundary. If you have a sphere and you go from the three-dimensional to the four-dimensional you can also do that without crossing a boundary. So at three dimensions you can say I'm Euclideanly located here, but in the multi-dimensionality of my subtle bodies I'm involved with Andromeda. The whole notion of what is location and what is the body gets really dicey. What I break with in American culture is the notion that things are located in elementary particles, or in genes or in brains, and that by manipulating them through elite minds at Harvard or MIT, you can control everything. I'm much more involved in a diversity and an ecology of consciousness where an individual flame can't exist if there's not an atmosphere, that we can't exist if there weren't bacteria in our guts taking care of the poisons. The new theory about bacteria is that they're actually a planetary bioplasm and that we're inside them, they're not inside us – it's like a sheath around the earth. So the whole notion of location is becoming much more complicated – and much more interesting."

– William Irwin Thompson

In other news, I got some totally cool commissions and spent my last few days in Colorado working up this custom end-table...and painting some new hats (full gallery here):

If these are giving you any ideas and you'd like me to ornament, decorate, illustrate, or embellish anything, drop me a line and we can get down to scheming...

Meanwhile, my rites of passage continue. Nobody is ever completely "arrived," and now that I'm in Austin, I'm working to establish new collaborations – both visual and musical, intellectual and spiritual. Here's to losing myself in something bigger...always a wonderful feeling.

For now, nothing really solid to report, but I'm going to hold myself accountable to you with the public promise that there will be full band and studio recordings. I just have to find the band.

Next newsletter, more paintings. Promise.

A Grip of New Hats & Burning Man Music Videos

2011-10-29T18:42:00.000-05:00

"Sometimes, as a result of people leaving their original intended career and going into something else where their creativity could make a difference, depressions and all kinds of other unfortunate events can have a paradoxically stimulating effect. We are living in a time of unexpected possibilities...many important creative things can happen when people learn from disasters."

– Historian Edward Tenner

"Not worrying about rent allowed me to spend my time doing what I love. Living a nomadic existence has been hard at times, but it's allowed me to live in beautiful places and keep a balance in my life that I'm happy with."
– Physicist Garret Lisi

Life's most creative moments seem to have something in common: they all involve taking an old idea and putting it in a new context (eg, genre crossovers, biomimicry, invasive species, and doing something you never expected with your education). It's a formula heavy on my mind as I say farewell (for now) to the gorgeous Colorado Front Range and get ready to make my way down to Austin, Texas to find a new angle and hopefully a new grasp of my usefulness to this age of transition...

In the meantime, I encourage you to take these riotous autumn energies and use them to fuel some checkpoint life inquiry. I recognize that my life so far is a comedy of errors and that none of my dearest friends, proudest achievements, and awe-inspiring experiences would have happened if everything had gone as planned...and that I also need to kick myself off the rails every once in a while to keep my life challenging and fresh, infused with new perspectives. Can't be an example to anyone else without first taking the leap of faith, myself. Maybe I can use this momentum to encourage the same in you.

If I'm doing this right, all of this is subliminally encoded in these trippy hats and guitar music...

~ Custom Hats ~

There is something so appealing about hand-painting custom hats for people – a combination of the affordability of small-scale original artwork, the notion of wearable paintings, and the opportunity for soul-reading I get to do when coming up with something that'll really suit someone. If you'd like one, take a gander at the gallery on my facebook art page, where you can find the info on how to order your own unique and memorable lid.

Here are the latest – both custom designs and a few I have available for sale. Click on the images to view them in full detail:

Custom design for Whomp, Austin TX

Custom design for Ricky Elm

Consigned design for Whomp, Austin TX

Custom design for The420Spot, Austin TX

~ New Music Videos ~

One of the most memorable shows of my musical life so far was at this year's Burning Man Festival, where I helped test-run The Music Box, a new portable music stage and studio in a shipping container, designed to be dropped into disaster areas as a way for survivors to enjoy and share their musical culture. Burning Man is often discussed as a kind of test bed for post-apocalyptic society, and it was a real honor to contribute in my small way to this wonderful project.

Rites of Passage: Live at Burning Man – recorded at The Music Box, as well as Saraswati Tea House and the legendary Center Camp Café, will be available for free on 11/11/11 at michaelgarfield.net. In the meantime, I invite you to enjoy these videos from an exceptionally raw, vulnerable, and energetic performance:

"Underground River" (passionate loop-based electro-ballad)

"You Don't Have To Move" (extended guitar technique showcase anthem)

"Die Before Dying" (improvised thematic loopscape with nylon brushes)

More art, music, and philosophy from the other side of the Boulder/Austin divide very soon. In the meantime, please go get connected with my facebook art and music pages, enjoy the numerous free talks and live albums I have up online, introduce me to your friends...and don't despair, because we are all stepping forward into an era of celebratory collaborative culture, and each of us has something special to give. If there's any way we can help each other, please let me know.

Two Paintings-In-Progress, Going Away Concerts, & More Cyborg Philosophy

2011-10-14T16:35:00.000-05:00

"As if snapping out of a trance, I found myself not out of my mind, in the sense that I was crazy, but rather, inside of my mind, which was now discovered to be everywhere, in that I was beginning to realize that I was dreaming."

- Paul Levy

"Everything is funny as long as it is happening to Somebody Else."

- Will Rogers

As summer turns to autumn and my impending move from Boulder to Austin looms ever-nearer, change is in the air. Appropriate to the season, it's a time of closing accounts and kisses goodbye. But I won't wear black to my own funeral – so the next couple of weeks are going to be full of parties!

Beyond hosting a flexible-price sale on all of my original paintings to raise money for the move, here is how I'm celebrating the end of four years in Colorado and the leap into a new adventure:

• 14, 15 October, Denver CO - Cervantes Masterpiece Ballroom

8 pm - 2 am: live painting & body art by donation at SONIC BLOSSOM

with Ott, Random Rab, Kraddy, Janover & Karsh Kale, Octopus Nebula, Project Aspect,

Phadroid, Govinda, The Human Experience, Bird of Prey, and more

- last scheduled live art gig in CO -

• 21 October, Denver CO - Jake's Denver

8 - 11 pm: three full songbird & cyberacoustic guitar sets (FREE)

• 25 October, Denver CO - Cervantes' Other Side

9 - 10 pm: cyberacoustic songbird set w/ Three-Legged Fox ($7)

• 28 October, Estes Park CO - Aspen Lodge

6:30 - 9 pm: balladry & cyberacoustic guitar sets (FREE)

- last scheduled concert in CO -

...and now on to the juice. We got new artwork, new writing, and new music in this one. But first, here are pictures from last weekend's live painting fiesta at Art Outside – an absolute gem of a festival, positively overflowing with amazing undiscovered artists and musicians. Click through to the gallery, and feel free to comment!

Photos: Art Outside 2011

As part of my emphasis on process, I've always tried to find ways to make this blog more immediate and immersive – to bring the people who can't be at every show into the experience of live art and music. (Hence the photo album above.)

But I'm spending more time on each piece these days, which means a longer lag between when you saw me at the show working on the painting and when it finally spreads its feathers and does a mating dance for your brain. So here are snapshots of two paintings-in-progress that I started over the last month, caught in their awkward pimply adolescence. Click to view full-size:

Many Worlds (tentative)

2011 09 01, 02 Burning Man Festival - Fractal Nation Village

(Left Coast, Heyoka, Mimosa, Dov, FreQ Nasty, Ill Gates, An-Ten-Nae)

& 2011 09 10 Red Rocks Amphitheatre (STS9, Savoy)

paint markers on stretched canvas - 24"x36"

A minor homage to the worlds-within-worlds paintings of my friend Melissa Leigh...minus the worlds, of course! So that's where this piece is headed: a unique terrarium ecology for each of those floating orbs. If something goes horribly wrong, I might just paint a big Brontosaurus on top.

Mobius Brain (tentative)

2011 10 07, 08, 09 Art Outside Festival

(Psymbionic, David Starfire, Bird of Prey, Riders Against The Storm, Sorne, Ricochet, Dolomites, Soundfounder, Butcher Bear, Kinder Lo Phi, Ntropy, Nicoluminous, Happy Happy James)

paint markers on canvas panel - 24"x30"

As many paradoxes as I can fit into a single painting...it's like the Impossible Fork times a million. Painted myself into a corner with this one, and eager to see how I paint myself out of it.

Recent Philosophy Riffs

For those of you who enjoy heady ideas (and that's hopefully all of you), here are two recent articles I wrote for transhumanism website Acceler8or about 1) our evolving relationship with emotional machines, and 2) the implications of CERN's recent superluminal neutrino research...some of the more interesting topics, I think, here at the edge of the future:

"Coevolution & The Technology of Desire"
A few years ago, the first emotional robot pet hit the market. Designed by the co-inventor of Furby, Pleo the Dinosaur is an adorable little beast, big eyes and feet, curious and playful and a little awkward...just like a baby dinosaur, except it comes in a box and is full of electronic innards. Pleo — as well as earlier incarnations like Furby, Teddy Ruxpin, and even the Pet Rock — speak to a deep-seated human desire to relate with the world around us. It only makes sense that as the machine world becomes more and more a part of daily life, our technology’s rocket trajectory out of the spirited and sentient world of our ancestors would plunge right back into an age of cute computers. (read more)

"And Now, Faster-Than-Light Culture"
Last week’s discovery at CERN of neutrinos traveling faster than light has physics forums buzzing about the possibility that this is “solid” evidence of long-hypothesized additional dimensions. This is big news. For the first time in the modern world, the existence of invisible spatial dimensions is in the public discourse. Science is the closest thing much of the literate planet has to religion these days, and this is far closer to the otherworldly transcendent mythos of early cities than the heady, highly existential relativity physics delivered to us from on high by Einstein. (read more)

New Cyber-Acoustic Guitar Videos From Burning Man

I was honored to play the Center Camp 2011 Aerial Dance Showcase at this year's Burning Man. Unfortunately, dust got into my digital audio recorder and the only surviving record of that performance is here, captured in these two short videos...a glimpse of dust and light, love and survival:

Much more music video on its way as I gear up for the 11/11/11 release of Rites of Passage: Live At Burning Man – in the meantime, all of my music is (as always) free or pay-what-you-like at MichaelGarfield.net. If you haven't already, take my latest live album, Alive in the Zone of the Rose, for a spin...it's a transporting hour of my signature blend between acoustic songwriter fare and electronic guitar looping psychedelia, the musical version of my visual art.

HUGE thanks to everyone for supporting my tireless efforts by buying music, introducing your friends to my work, offering your thoughtful feedback, and inspiring people with your own creative lives. Don't hesitate to write if you have something to say, and have a beautiful day!

My Burning Man Talk, "Evolutionary Transitions In Individuality"

2011-10-06T12:48:00.000-05:00

"The challenge of the transhuman is to actualize our unique individuality within the much larger planetary collective...most recent usages of 'transhuman,' it seems to me, have forgotten most of this, and mistaken the 'transhuman' for the 'ultrahuman' – a kind of upgrade to the same basic model, still denying our connection to each other and the environment. In my view much of what we call 'transhuman' these days – the technological enhancement of our already existing nature to cling to life and deny the role of death, for example – is, as Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, 'human, all too human.' It is an individual ego’s vision of evolution."

– Prof. Richard Doyle

A temporary break from visual art while I run off to Austin's Art Outside Festival this weekend and paint up a storm...in the meantime, enjoy some food for your brain and heart with my definitive rant on the evolution of our species beyond our current notions of selfhood and into a new planetary unity:

Evolutionary Transitions In Individuality

From the download page:

As electronic media and ecological catastrophe converge to unify individuals in a new planetary culture and identity, we can look back to the emergence of multicellularity, the advent of social behavior, and the appearance of syntactic language (all of which have occurred numerous times in separate groups of organisms) for insight on how humankind will make it through our own apocalyptic era.

This talk, given at Burning Man 2011's Red Lightning Camp, explores how converging crises catalyze organizational transformations biologists have come to call "evolutionary transitions in individuality" – and how this all applies to humankind's current global rite of passage. Don't worry, we've been through this before...

(In the spirit of the gift economy, all of my recordings are available for free. If you are inspired by this talk, please carry on the spirit of giving by making a donation, or paying it forward with random kindness.)

For the more visually-oriented, you can watch the first ten minutes of this talk on Youtube:

A Philosophical Disagreement

If you resonate with and would like to join the discussion about the future of the human species, let me suggest jumping in on the comments thread for Jason Silva's recent blog at Huffington Post, "The Beginning of Infinity."

I don't ordinarily invite people to participate in philosophical disputes, but this is a special case: on the one hand, I'm honored to have been quoted by Silva alongside Timothy Leary, Buckminster Fuller, and Paul Stamets; on the other hand, I am horrified that my words were used to support his manic, uncritical techno-utopianism. Silva completely ignores the reality that new technological power requires an equal evolution in human consciousness, if we are to survive these changes. It's the exact naïve, power-enchanted hysteria that Disney criticized in The Sorceror's Apprentice seventy years ago.

Of course, I might be over-reacting, or just plain wrong. Let me know what you think...

For those of you who feel like participating in the debate (or at least watching from the sidelines), I left my response in the comments to the article, permalinked here.

New Cyber-Guitar Video

And in music news, you can now watch me improvise "Mamma Gaia," closing track from my album A Million Anniversaries: CyberAcoustic Guitar For Lovemaking – which, by the way, recently topped 2,000 "likes" and is still completely free to download...

You can watch all six videos from the album in my new Youtube playlist for A Million Anniversaries while I'm getting the next series of live music videos from Burning Man ready to go. Starting next week, I'll post a new video every week until the free release of Rites of Passage: Live at Burning Man on 11/11/11. Lots of great footage I'm excited to share!

As always, don't hesitate to reach out to me for any reason. Thanks for reading and have a wonderful week.

What do acoustic guitar, hand-painted hats, and the science of fractals have in common?

2011-09-25T22:55:00.000-05:00

"There will come a day when music and its philosophy will become the religion of humanity."
– Hazrat Inayat Khan

“Music is everybody's possession; it's only the publishers who think that people own it.”
– John Lennon

After three years of talking about it, I'm taking a leap of faith to more completely dedicate myself to a life of art, music, and performance philosophy...and finally moving from Boulder to Austin at the end of October. If music is my religion, then Austin is Mecca, and this pilgrimage is the natural fulfillment of my faith. Just maybe, it'll also be the next stage of my development as an artist in service to the planetization of human culture.

Between now and my official first gig there on 11/11/11, I'll be down in Austin for Art Outside Festival, and playing a few going-away shows in Denver on the 14th and 25th. I've met a lot of wonderful people over my four years in Colorado. Hope I'll see some of you out there!

~ Moving Sale ~

While I'm getting ready to make the move, it's a good time pick up some of my original artwork at cut rates we can decide together. I'm holding another art sale to help me fund this transition, and you can read all about it and browse the available paintings on my facebook art page. Please share with anyone you know who's looking for some art to tie the room together...

In other, more gift-related news, editing the talk and concerts I gave at Burning Man is taking longer than I expected. But while all of that slow-cooks to tender, delicious completion, I'm excited to share my latest live recordings, digital artwork, philosophy talk, live art video, and custom-painted hat. Enjoy!

Alive in the Zone of the Rose

These latest live recordings strike a new balance between my jazz-inflected folk roots and more recent forays into improvised cyber-acoustic psychedelia...alternately tender and apocalyptic, it's a showcase for both sides of me: the performing songwriter and the hyperspace engineer.

Performed live at the extremely ironic Buddha Asian Bistro in Kansas City, Alive in the Zone of the Rose is a record of my attempt to transform the restaurant's hipster-chic spirituality into a genuine experience of the transcendent for a roomful of distracted weekend diners. Did it work? I don't know...but I got some good tracks out of it. And an excuse to conjure up some intense new digital artwork for the album cover!

In the spirit of the gift economy, I make all of my music available for free. Anything you can offer to support my work is greatly appreciated – even if that means simply sharing it with your friends. Thanks for listening!

The Science of Shifting Ages

"If you ask three questions – 'Who are we?' 'Where do we come from?' 'Where are we going?' – any answer to those will give you a myth. You can give a Marxist answer, you can give a sociobiological answer, you can give a Christian fundamentalist or Moslem answer. So myth is basically macro thinking. Technical thinking is micro. It's saying, 'I'm a neuroscientist, I'm a geneticist and I'm not interested in answering the big questions.' If you step back and ask the big questions then you're beginning to think mythopoeically. Science is inherently mythic."

- William Irwin Thompson

In this talk I gave at Tribal Convergence 2011, I examine the changing paradigm in modern science – articulating an emerging worldview that sees a fractal self-similarity between cells, organisms, and planets, and a correlation between the complexity of mind and matter – a worldview that highlights our participation in a cosmic superconsciousness which might eventually become a part of the everyday experience for humankind.

Inspired by poet and cultural historian William Irwin Thompson's "intellectual free jazz," this talk roams through chaos theory, developmental psychology, philosophy of science, and personal narrative to suggest a vaster world than any one domain provides...

"The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as to seem not worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it."

– Bertrand Russell

"As a poet, of course, I have a highly developed imagination, so I ask no one to believe in anything I write here."

– William Irwin Thompson

~ Sonic Bloom Live Art 2011 Video ~

My apologies for taking so freakishly long to publish this in our instantaneous culture, but here it is! Working as live art director for Sonic Bloom Festival again this summer was so fulfilling – three days, two domes, and over a dozen artists made this one of the real standout live painting events of my summer. Visit the video page for full information on the artists...

~ New Custom Hat ~

...lastly, here's the latest to show from this enjoyable new pastime. Click on the picture to take a closer look at the layered design:

for Kyle Dietrich

If you'd like one of these, email me with your budget, hat size, and any stylistic preferences you have. You can check out my full gallery of custom hats for inspiration...

~ In The Next Newsletter ~

• Full audio from my talk at Burning Man, "Evolutionary Transitions In Individuality;"

• Video from my forthcoming live album of Burning Man musical highlights, Rites of Passage;

• More hand-painted and digital artwork from the highest branches I can reach!

New Paintings from Papadosio, Burning Man, STS9 – and Vinyl Stickers!

2011-09-16T13:50:00.000-05:00

"One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time."

- André Gide

"In their daily life, all are braver than they know."

- Henry David Thoreau

My adventure at Burning Man 2011 was a success. I played five concerts in an inhospitable desert environment, including one as "opening act" for living legend John Perry Barlow and one improvising the score for an aerial dance showcase; spoke to a packed house at Red Lightning Camp and sat in on a now-annual panel discussion with my friends Daniel Pinchbeck and Mitch Mignano; and helped hold it down at the kick-ass new visionary art camp, Fractal Nation Village in my own modest way. More importantly, however, I helped friends new and old navigate their own rites of passage, and they helped me through my own. I wrote a short note about it you can read here, if you like.

The music and talks will all be ready to share in time for the next newsletter...

In the meantime, here are the latest offerings from my visual universe. Click any image to enlarge:

New Vinyl Stickers!

2"x6" die-cut vinyl indoor/outdoor stickers

$3 each or $10 for five (shipping included)

(to order, use the "donate" link at my blog – leave your address

and the name of the prints in a note when you check out)

This is the closest thing I have to a slogan – I came up with it in 2008 as a retort to the argument that capitalism could not continue to grow unchecked, because obviously if we trade in ideas we can have a closed-loop material infrastructure and continue to expand exponentially into the imagination. Or maybe I'm wrong. But insofar as the invisible environment of one age becomes the conscious canvas of the next, I do think it's time we took a lead from Terence McKenna and Bucky Fuller, and started treating our planetary problems as shortages of imagination. There's always an overlooked perspective that solves even the most impossible paradoxes...and now you can share that insight with anyone who sees the back of your laptop. Maybe – just maybe – this will help us reach critical mass.

River Dragon

2011 08 24 Hodi's Half Note & 2011 08 26 The Fox

(Papadosio, Damn Right)

24"x36" - paint markers on stretched canvas

signed 11"x17" poster prints $20/1 $30/2 plus $5 s/h

(to order, use the "donate" link at my blog – leave your address

and the name of the prints in a note when you check out)

original painting negotiable – serious inquiries, email me

I just finished reading David Wade's excellent Crystal and Dragon: The Cosmic Dance of Symmetry and Chaos in Art, Nature, and Consciousness – basically, a thorough overview of the ways that crystalline and fluid patterns have alternately dominated human art, religion, and philosophy. Wade contrasts the intensely crystalline tradition of Islam, with its emphasis on extraordinarily precise geometries as a way of pointing to the ultimate reality of divine perfection, and the chaotic tradition of Taoism, with its emphasis on the light and motion of water, gnarled pines, and other ephemeral natural phenomena as a way of pointing to the ultimate reality of the ever-changing Tao.

He turned me on to an an awesome new term: "shang shui," or "mountain-water," the name for an entire school of Chinese painting that praises the fluid forms of nature. To the shang shui tradition of painters, it's less important that you capture the exact shape of a thing than its motion, life, and essence...and by that criterion, I identify with this tradition. "River Dragons" is an attempt to connect with the vitality of this lineage and their higher truth.

Fiestaraptor

2011 09 01 Burning Man - Fractal Nation Village

(Imagika Om, Janover, Ganga Giri, Future Simple Project, Sub Swara, FreQ Nasty, Opiuo, LowRIDERz, PussyMonster, Heyoka)

24"x36" - paint markers on stretched canvas

signed 11"x17" poster prints $20/1 $30/2 plus $5 s/h

(to order, use the "donate" link at my blog – leave your address

and the name of the prints in a note when you check out)

original painting negotiable – serious inquiries, email me

Most of y'all know I was trained as a paleontologist and scientific illustrator, and every once in a while I try to bring my old life into my new life. I get the feeling, after working on paintings like this one, that I'm not doing it frequently enough. Somewhere between festival culture and museum culture lives "Fiestaraptor," the painting I made during Fractal Nation's opening night of all-star programming at Burning Man.

(For the record, I'm still kind of ambivalent about the idea of a big-budget production theme camp at what is supposed to be a radically-participatory event...putting on huge concerts out there seems to support spectator culture and ends up being a weird badge of pride for the producers, when what I really love about Burning Man is the emergent, collaborative, collective, personal, intimate, and weird experiences everyone creates together that cannot be reproduced anywhere else. That said, this was basically a party put on by my friends, and it was an honor to contribute to it.)

While I was working on this piece, I was also responsible for keeping people out of the backstage area – so there was a lot of "bouncer" energy that went into it. Sometimes I had to use my longer-than-Tyrannosaurus arms and actually grab people and pull them while they were jumping over the gate. I can't help but think it influenced this intense, roaring, guardian vibe this one radiates. Maybe, also, the fact that Tribe 13's unprecedentedly awesome sixty-foot dome visionary art gallery was just two hundred feet away had something to do with it. I didn't see any ayahuasca-sauruses when I was down in Peru last March, but Lord knows Tyrannosaurus is one of my spirit animals...

STS9 Red Rocks 2011 (Guerrilla Poster)

signed 11"x17" poster prints $20/1 $30/2 plus $5 s/h

(to order, use the "donate" link at my blog – leave your address

and the name of the prints in a note when you check out)

My latest foray into hybridizing the hand-painted work with basic digital layering techniques to create something that shines with the best of both worlds, this piece alloys work from The Manifestation Celebration, Bear Creek Festival, and Electric Forest Festival. It wasn't quite a full moon when STS9 showed up to rock Colorado's most legendary sandstone slabs, but close...so I worked to make something that conveyed what a lot of people were probably feeling (maybe even seeing) that weekend, crowded between the rocks and gazing into the extraordinary fullness of theater and the sky beyond.

This is a signed and numbered series of 75 prints and I have a few left, if anyone would like one.

Press

First, here's an entertaining short interview with me about my crazy path from biologist to vagabond-artist by precocious and inspirational video blogger Kevin May (aka Phil Osophical). I had the pleasure of meeting Kevin last month at Papadosio's Rootwire Festival and was happy to talk while we ran to the bathrooms in the crescendo of anticipation right before they burned the Man...the excitement is palpable all around us as Kevin and I run from my panel discussion to the bathrooms:

In music news, taste-making electronic dance music site TheUntz.com just gave my latest album, A Million Anniversaries, a sterling review – especially cool, given it's not really EDM:

"It takes creativity to make the next step in a newer, more shocking direction, but it takes a visionary to go beyond the breaking point and meet music on the other end of the spectrum. That’s what Michael Garfield does."

(read the whole review here)

Musician and blogger Skinny Hendrix also gave me a feature on his site and had some kind things to say about that same album. It's always a special pleasure to find approval from a fellow artist:

"Beautiful soundscapes....Garfield has a dynamic ability to express himself on the acoustic guitar and to allow the listener to climb inside of his head and connect with him on a deep level."

(read the whole review here)

...and while it's not exactly a review, this lovely poem by my friend Sofia was inspired by the album and is a kind of tribute: "The Dripping Place"

Enjoy! Thanks to everyone for your time, attention, and support. It takes a planetary village to raise the emergent starchild of the human "superorganism." We're all in this together.

Inducing Synaesthesia, My First Mural, Burning Man Schedule, & More Hats

2011-08-25T16:38:00.000-05:00

"Remember to ask the phrase, 'What do you need?' It's a powerful phrase that will allow you to find out what someone else needs and start figuring out who you know that can help this person. And of course, don't be shy in sharing what you need. You never know who that person is connected to, who could help you!"

- Taylor Ellwood

"Ask not what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive…then go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive."

- Howard Thurman

In this recent article, techno-optimist and singularity-surfer Jason Silva succinctly outlines my job description: "the creating and sharing of awe" via novel and evocative media recombination; "performance philosophy" in an age of collapsing boundaries and exponential creativity. (You have to be in a state of wonder to share it...but luckily, the world provides more than enough wonder.)

This manifests in my work as electronic music for acoustic guitar, scientific illustration of psychedelic realities, and using science to challenge materialism...playing hopscotch across illusory divides in the intertidal zone between technology and spirituality, science and art, self and other, individual and collective. It's how evolution works! And it is the finest way to illuminate otherwise invisible connections, opening the mind to the lush poetry of existence.

Every once in a while I'll attempt this through the time-honored medium of the music video. The brain automatically attempts to align what it sees with what it hears (Ever watch muted kung fu movies to techno?), and using music to accentuate the emotional undercurrents of the small moments in my life (the reflection of light on water, a flock of birds in flight) allows these moments to unfold and evoke the true mystery and grandeur of everything – what William Blake called "the world in a grain of sand."

So here you are...a tour of some small wonders I've witnessed on my journey, scored to apocalyptic solo guitar from this summer's festival bedlam:

watch/like/share this on youtube ~ download this track for free!

• The Road To Burning Man •

My first trip to Burning Man Festival back in 2008 changed my life. It inspired me to live outside the rules I had inherited...to find better rules, and to treat the world as a playground, lover, adventure. I wrote "Giving In To Astonishment," one of my most epic essays, there – and during the weeks after, while I was vagabonding around the luminous grit of San Francisco.

THIS year, I'm hitting the playa hard all week with music, live art, and talks on this year's theme, "Rites of Passage." I'll be camped with an epic all-star line-up of event producers and visionaries at FractalNation Village (Android Jones' camp!), where I'll be heading up a live art team and managing the stage for some truly epic parties. I'll be playing interlude music for an amazing speaker series featuring cultural icons and personal heroes John Perry Barlow and Cory Doctorow. I'll be test piloting a new "cultural first responder" emergency music studio designed to be dropped into disaster areas. I'll be participating in what is now an annual panel discussion with author Daniel Pinchbeck on the subject of art and artists in rites of passage. And I'll be improvising a cyberacoustic score for this year's aerial fabric dance showcase at the magnificent Center Camp Café...basically, creative potentiation beyond my own wild fantasies, and I'm incredibly humbled and honored to be a part of it all.

If you won't be at Burning Man this year, don't sweat it. I'll be recording everything to share with you soon. If you are going to be there, let's meet up!

~ view my full Burning Man music, art, and speaking schedule ~

Whether you make it out or not, audio excerpts from my "Giving In To Astonishment" have been reworked into a Burning Man-themed musical podcast by DiscoPup that you can listen to right here:

"Assenza," by DiscoPup presents: Danceteria (featuring Michael Garfield)

• Ladies & Gentlemen, My First Mural •

Yeah, it finally went there. I am delighted to share with you "Subterranean Windows," my first commissioned mural project for a friend's basement jam room and recording studio. This was a rite of passage in its own respect: it was an initiation into working VERY LARGE. Relating to a work of art is completely different when you can stand in front of it and it fills the entire space before you...I was going to go rainbow all over, but after laying down the first white layer I realized that it looked like light splashing on the walls and chose lacey detail over vivid chromatics.

Here is a micro-tour of the work...you can click on any of these images for a better look:

Subterranean Windows

• Custom Hats All Day Long! •

The custom hat thing is rolling right along, with two new designs that will likely become production hats by festival-scene mainstays Grassroots California (again, click for a better look):

for Ryan Connelly of Grassroots California

like, share, comment on my facebook art page

for Ryan Connelly of Grassroots California

like, share, comment on my facebook art page

for Sarah Hollington

like, share, comment on my facebook art page

for Ryan Sandman

like, share, comment on my facebook art page

If you want a hat like one of these, you know how to get ahold of me. :)

The last thing I have to share with you before I bounce for the Black Rock Desert is "Atavism: Old is the New 'New'," my new article for trickster/genius/tastemaker RU Sirius' new technology and philosophy magazine, Acceler8or. I'm a big fan of The Singularity and Transhumanism in general, but I have to poke fun at "nerd rapturists" who think that technological progress is a one-way street to total transcendence. If you think time is a cyclical (or helical) affair, then you'll get a kick out of this...because sometimes, going forward means going backward.

Enjoy the read, and thanks again so deeply for your time and support! I'll see you on the other side...

New Tour Video, Rootwire Paintings, & Four More Hats

2011-08-15T18:55:00.000-05:00

“Buy stout shoes, climb the mountains, search the valleys, the deserts, the sea shores, and the deep recesses of the earth…for in this way and in no other will you arrive at a knowledge of the nature and the properties of things.”

– Severinus

"And so it was I entered the broken world / To trace the visionary company of love."

– Hart Crane

In this few quiet weeks of respite between the bulk of summer festival season and my whirlwind adventure with FractalNation Village at Burning Man (our camp's last all-star fundraiser party is this Friday at Temple Nightclub in San Francisco), I've been musing on why it is I keep throwing myself into these things. Living on the road on some fool's crusade to inspire the world is definitely not thankless work – in fact, I am deeply nourished by everyone's appreciation and heartfelt criticism – but sometimes I'm almost overwhelmed with the appeal of getting a weekly gig playing music in some hotel and just laying low. Getting a studio somewhere and letting my car rust in the parking lot.

Then I remember the travel. The sacred and secret openness that comes from the chronic shock of constant exposure to new places. The incredible blessing it is to share these journeys with a global web of friends whose lives don't throw them quite so far as mine does...

Made from highway footage taken on last year's Love Without End Tour, this latest video from A Million Anniversaries is an homage to the sense of wonder that simply moving can instill in you. Life in fast forward is a lot like death in slow motion, incidentally – as my friend David Titterington puts it, we're moving through tunnels of gates:

Watch this in HD

Download this entire album for free!

While you're listening, here's a recap of the art explosion on my end of Papadosio's Rootwire Music & Arts Festival in Logan, Ohio. Definitely click on each painting to get a full sense of the detail:

Patience

2011 07 03 Electric Forest (Papadosio, SCI, Pretty Lights)

& 2011 08 04, 05 Rootwire Festival

(Govinda, Papadosio Live PA, Octopus Nebula, The Werks, RoeVy, Emancipator)

24"x36" – paint markers on stretched canvas

check price/availability of original – and leave your comments!

11"x17" prints – $20/1, $30/2 + $5 s/h – email me to order

Starting with the first layer of improvised (some might say channeled) script during Papadosio's set at Electric Forest Festival, this painting just drilled deeper and deeper into scaly, flowing detail until looking at it made my head twist. Look closely and you can see the reticello pupil and doily iris; look long enough, and it might actually move. After completing this piece I started wondering how the rest of this entity's face must look...expect richer, more intricate scapes in this style.

Symbiotes

2011 07 22 Jazzhaus (Future Shock)

& 2011 08 06, 07 Rootwire Festival

(Third Nature, Papadosio, The Malah, Damn Right, Invisible Allies, Bluetech, Kilowatts)

18"x24" – paint markers on stretched canvas

check price / availability of original – and leave your comments!

11"x17" prints – $20/1, $30/2 + $5 s/h – email me to order

Something about this one just screams microscopy to me. Maybe it's the vaguely photosynthetic critters living in the middle of each larger object, or the way everything drifts into each other...an attempt to combine the sensation of earth, fire, air, and water in a single nonrepresentational piece. A haiku about the elements as they combine in living systems. Unlike Patience with its strong central locus, Symbiotes doesn't give the eye any obvious place to rest. Angular, electrical energy leads to the same quivering vitality you get looking into a slide of pond water.

So yeah, Rootwire was a barnstormer...amazing art, music, and presentations all around. Huge thanks to Papadosio for inviting me back out there. In addition to completing those paintings, giving a talk on the future of science, and jamming out a boiler of an afternoon cyber-acoustic set, I somehow found the time to tag a few people and nail out some more custom caps:

Body Art @ Rootwire Festival 2011 (and more)

For Robbie

For Nate

For Jason & Emma

I have some exciting updates aging in an sherry cask for next week's newsletter...in the meantime, here's an in-depth interview I gave to international design collective Arts Projekt a while back. They ask me how my training as a scientific illustrator informs my live art; about the evolutionary themes I'm expressing through my work; and about my five year plan (hint: solar-flare induced telepathy).

Many thanks for your continued interest and support. Have a wonderful day!

My Talk From The Dallas Museum, Plus A New Guitar Video & Custom Hat

2011-07-28T17:19:00.000-05:00

"The world is not to be put in order; the world is order, incarnate. It is for us to harmonize with this order."

– Henry Miller

"Darwinians make the fuss they do about the 'randomness' of mutation only in order to contrast it to the non-randomness of selection. It is not necessary that mutation should be random for natural selection to work. Selection can still do its work whether mutation is directed or not."

– Richard Dawkins

“We are part of the mysterious. Rationality is only a thin veneer with us.”

– Carlos Casteneda

Flashback to May and it's The Manifestation Celebration – where I am somehow giving the most freewheeling, speculative, and controversial talk of my life so far to a packed presentation hall in the Dallas Museum of Nature & Science. If the museum only knew what went on under their roof...well, it'd be because they found my recording of the talk, which you can finally download for free:

It's a real roamer of a presentation, taking us through biology, astrophysics, psychology, and philosophy to arrive at the suggestion that our solar system's passage through galactic space might trigger cascading changes in the Sun's magnetic fields, Earth's geological activity, the evolution of life, and ultimately human consciousness. (It stirred up quite a conversation on my facebook wall...feel free to chime in!)

In other news, here's my latest in a growing series of custom hats! I'm taking orders, so if you're in the mood for a new lid, just email me with your specs (address, budget, and hat size/color – unless you have your own for me to paint). I suggest clicking on the picture to appreciate it in its full blooming detail...

Lastly, here is the live video of "The Made & The Born," an ultra-spacey adventure in guitar looping at Tribal Convergence 2011. Recorded deep in the Oregon rain forest, the damp cold air stretching off into endless midnight, this haunted piece exemplifies my efforts to adapt each improvised piece to the place and time. You can download this track (and now the entire ninety-minute album) for free...

Watch this in HD!

Many more beautiful things to come when I get back from next week's Rootwire Music & Arts Festival (where I'll be not only playing an afternoon set and a sunrise set, but giving a workshop and painting live all weekend). Hopefully I'll see you out there...it's going to be the best boutique small festival of the summer.

In the meantime, I'm gearing up to take my music touring to the next level and could use your help!

I have spent the last three years working hard to reshape my life (quitting jobs, living out of my car) so I can re-dedicate my life as a creative offering...and now my career is moving too fast for me to keep up. If any of you are interested in helping me find a booking agent so I can keep giving my music and painting the time they need – or if you know event promoters or venues that would enjoy my special brand of heartfelt virtuosity – please make the introduction! I'm looking for audiences ready to listen and be inspired (bar gigs are generally a failure), and am open to playing in all kinds of unique settings.

The opportunity to make music for you is a gift I cherish. I know a lot of you signed on for this newsletter because of my paintings, but if you like the music please tell your friends. I run this circus on zero marketing budget and every success I have had so far is because of the support of enthusiastic people like you.

You know where to find me...

Paintings from an Electric Forest; Music from an Acoustic Jungle

2011-07-20T15:21:00.000-05:00

"Lend your ears to music, open your eyes to painting, and...stop thinking! Just ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to walk about into a hitherto unknown world.
If the answer is yes, what more do you want?"

– Wassily Kandinsky (possibly the first live painter)

"The waking mind is the least serviceable in the arts."

– Henry Miller (reinvented the novel; also a painter)

This is how I started 2011: playing and painting in the mountainous rain forest village of Sinai, Costa Rica; watchless, clockless, countdownless, uncertain of when consensus time made the New Year official; enchanted by strange bugs and the quiet depth of its isolated village culture. New Year's Day, I played a concert outside the village kitchen to a receptive lawn-full of international appreciators, deep in the dreamy mystery of our strange little festival.

That show is now my latest free live recording, Vive En Costa Rica. I released this album in secret back in March – made it available for people who paid for a copy of The Body Electric – and then figured it might as well just be out there for everyone to enjoy:

Vive En Costa Rica (2011)

The spacey, kinda spooky improvised first track (named in honor of a genuine faerie sighting) scores this reel of the travel clips I took down there. Looking through my eyes:

Watch it in HD on Youtube

And here are the paintings from my Fourth of July weekend up in Michigan at Electric Forest Festival. Click on each picture to see it in terrifying full detail:

Looking At The Blue Flame

2011 06 30 & 07 01 Electric Forest Festival

(Toubab Krewe & String Cheese Incident, Tiesto)

18"x24" – opaque pens on stretched canvas

$20/1 or $30/2 for 11"x17" signed posters – email me

check availability/price of original painting

My original plan was to have a blue-and-gold series of sculpted pieces based on themes I'd started at Sonic Bloom...but original plans don't count for much in an improvisational sport like live painting. Especially when the skies open up and drop a huge "welcome to the festival" storm on everyone...which is perhaps why the design ended up with so many little blue dots:

Rainbow Tunnel

2011 07 02 Electric Forest Festival (String Cheese Incident)
18"x24" – opaque pens on stretched canvas
$20/1 or $30/2 for 11"x17" signed posters – email me
check availability/price of original painting

The festival's official documentary team caught a delicious HD timelapse of me (and Christian Jaxtheimer, and Rae Vena) working on this piece, start to finish – check 1:48 of this video to watch the whole Saturday Night String Cheese Incident concert breeze by. It was a return to older themes, dating all the way back to my idle classroom sketches in college...but in a lively, tribal style that capitalized on my chisel-tip bold markers and completely ignored the patient layer upon layer of outlining I developed in my own pen-specific voice. Working in the ghost sunlight of my awesome new powerful battery-powered LED lamp, this painting came together like the holographic tunnels in some private realm of sylvan dreaming...I've never felt so eerily transported while working on any other piece.

Lesage's Wall

2011 07 02 & 07 03 Electric Forest Festival
(REO Speedwagon, Big Gigantic, Shpongletron & Railroad Earth)
18"x24" – opaque pens on stretched canvas
$20/1 or $30/2 for 11"x17" signed posters – email me
check availability/price of original painting

In honor of Augustin Lesage, coal-miner turned compulsive visionary artist whose enormous early 20th Century paintings evoked the transcendental architectures of Ancient Egypt as if transcribed onto even greater scale into grandiose heavenly landscapes. I don't even know where to start in describing how hypnotized I am by Lesage's work, but maybe you'll see it in this Navajo-inflected homage:

...and I painted on a lot of beautiful people while I was there. Check out the full gallery on my facebook art page:

Body Art at Electric Forest Festival 2011

New Paintings From Sonic Bloom & Custom Hat Frenzy

2011-07-09T13:43:00.001-05:00

"I have been possessed by a great yearning to go and find, far from men and far from toil the place where dwell the vast forces that cradle us and possess us, where my overtense activity might indefinitely become more relaxed...To me in turn, as to all the sons of man, it was speaking as every generation hears it speak; it was begging me to surrender myself unreservedly to it,

and to worship it."

– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

(paleontologist-theologian & my patron saint)

While you're browsing my recent live paintings from my now-annual stint as Sonic Bloom Festival's live art gallery coordinator, enjoy this dinosaur-skeleton-inspired number from my recent gig at the Dallas Natural History Museum. It's free track on my new album, A Million Anniversaries: CyberAcoustic Guitar For Lovemaking – a 94-minute voyage through America's sacred landscapes and the hyperspace of improvised acoustic-electronic music...

Watch it in HD on Youtube / Vimeo!

Next week, I'll have the memory reel from this year's awesome twelve-person live art lineup at Sonic Bloom (because I had so much fun making the video for the Wakarusa live art team). But for now, here is the latest harvest of psychedelic art – you can click on each image to view it full-size:

Sigil Egg

2011 06 10, 11 Tribal Convergence (SunDragon, Manoj, Mazeguider, Solus, Cohen)

& 2011 06 26 Sonic Bloom Festival (Tipper, Signal Path, Future Simple, An-Ten-Nae)

opaque pens on tempered hardboard – 24"x24"

signed 11"x17" posters – $20/each or two for $30 (plus $5 s/h) – email me to order

check availability of the original painting

Starting with the automatic writing (aka "channeled text," aka "light language"): The first layer of seemingly meaningless symbols, the closest I've ever come to direct translation of the grooves and melodic strains of live music, are constantly re-identified by friendly strangers as some kind of angelic script. To me it's free jazz – honing the razor edge of my intuitive spontaneity until I can move with the music like one wing in flight.

And yeah, ongoing pine cone obsession. (And yeah, there were pine cones everywhere at TideWater Falls during Tribal Convergence – a remarkable congregation of intentional creatives from across the Western U.S. and a weekend of potent practical idea-sharing as well as celebration...) And the seven-sided star ties this piece back to my pine cone painting from Wakarusa through the archetype of the Virgin Mother (the number seven is historically associated with indivisibility/purity/virginity).

As cloud chamber tracings of a different kind of wild pure energy laps like waves around the protective sigil, the prayer of the scribbled glossolalia blanket and illumine the sleeping cone/egg...

Erosion

2011 06 24 Sonic Bloom Festival (Zilla, MartyParty, Break Science, Prophet Massive)

opaque pens on stretched canvas – 24"30"

signed 11"x17" posters – $20/each or two for $30 (plus $5 s/h) – email me to order

check availability of the original painting

The latest in my ongoing exploration of incompleteness – letting each new layer cover a smaller and smaller area and thus leaving the entire process out in the open. Must be a holdover from my paleontology years, my fascination with fossilization and sedimentology: how the dead dinosaur is covered by mud layer by layer, then its bones replaced by minerals layer by layer, then the fossil bones eroding back out with wind and time after millions of years...

Expect more of these:

Sound Pond

2011 06 25 Sonic Bloom Festival (Octopus Nebula, David Starfire, Tipper, EOTO, Vibesquad)

opaque pens on tempered hardboard – 24"x32"

signed 11"x17" posters – $20/each or two for $30 (plus $5 s/h) – email me to order

check availability of the original painting

Keywords: topographic map, sound waves, interstitial, canyons, corduroy, myosin, rain, onions, cross-section, terraces.

Special notice to the white highlights on white banding that gives the whole thing a much more sculptural feel:

Custom Hats!

Hand-painted and waterproofed, each hat completed in a state of sensitivity to the buyer's natural energy and personal disposition. Like with body painting, these hats create a savored opportunity for me to connect with people on a kind of profound and mysterious level.

If you'd like one, write me with your specifications: budget, colors and patterns, and whether you have a hat already or need me to find you a particular size and style. Got a couple of relatively mellow weeks ahead of me – plenty of time to make you something beautiful.

for Allison

for Caleb

for Sarah

uncommissioned – check availability & details

And that's not even touching on the beautiful work from last week's Electric Forest Festival – where the vivid, swirling nightscape of color-shifting LEDs and blacklights on endless branches seeped into me for some of my most otherworldly art to date. More on that next week. :)

- "A Million Anniversaries," My Sleek New CyberAcoustic Guitar LP -

2011-06-22T15:21:00.000-05:00

"Fortunately, most people still believe in love, and love, after all, is God's secret name.

The inevitable consequence of love is the building of temples."

– Alex Grey

“When we win it’s with small things, and the triumph itself makes us small. If only we would let ourselves be dominated as things do by some immense storm, we would become strong too, and not need names.”

– Rainier Maria Rilke

This spring, I was blessed enough to perform my evolving "cyberacoustic" guitar music for audiences across Colorado, Texas, Oregon, Arkansas, and New Mexico. These improvised instrumental pieces soaked up the energies of each location – places with history and holiness that I can't even describe, except through music. From the sacred deserts of the Southwest to the rain forests of the Northwest...playing along with aerial fabric dancers in Denver and to dinosaur skeletons in Dallas...I gathered the most evocative and inspiring numbers into a new double-disc LP that takes my experiments in acoustic-electronic integration to a whole new level.

An all-terrain album if there ever were one, A Million Anniversaries: CyberAcoustic Guitar for Lovemaking journeys through anthemic electro-grooves into hypnotic tribal ambience, cinematic instrumental rock and tender romantic interludes. It's a testament to the orchestra hidden in an acoustic guitar, pushing the envelope of this traditional instrument into an age of digital angels and mycelial technology – and after months of preparation it's finally available:

A Million Anniversaries: CyberAcoustic Guitar for Lovemaking

The entire ninety-four minute, two-disc album (along with liner notes and exclusive high-resolution fractal zoom poster art) is yours for supporting my tireless tour schedule with your donations.

I'm also offering six of my favorite tracks together as a free EP for people who dig this music but can't purchase the whole album...just head over to the download page and turn yourself on to the freshest, deepest, grooviest, most intelligent music I have to offer!

Please blog about this, share it on Facebook and Twitter, and turn on your friends in the live music scene. Word of mouth is really important and anything you do to spread the word about this work makes an incalculable difference. Playing for you is my passion and I deeply appreciate your support!

Beyond the music itself, this album is a milestone in another important way: it marks my first physical release and a new style of hybrid freehand/digital illustration. The music is free when you buy a package of the ayahuasca-inspired fractal zoom stickers I designed while on retreat at Shimbre Shamanic Center with Papadosio & Kurt Redeker back in March:

A Million Anniversaries stickers!

Two each of all three fractal zoom designs

3.5" across, printed on die-cut glossy sticker paper

$15 for the set - free shipping & digital download of A Million Anniversaries with purchase

The first video showing how I layer all of these tracks live is now online – a romantic clip from The Manifestation Celebration with Alex & Allyson Grey, The Nadis Warriors, Govinda, Phutureprimitive, D.V.S*, and many other amazing talents at the Dallas Natural History Museum (!):

Watch it in full HD!

"Extinct" is one of the six free tracks from A Million Anniversaries. Go grab it and join the celebration – the new era of cybernetic instrumental folk music is here!

For anyone curious to learn more about the story behind this new work, Matthew Warnock of Guitar International Magazine recently interviewed me about making a career out of improvisation:

GI: Improvising that much on an album seems to offer up a lot of freedom...but there is also a lot of other pressure due to the fact that no one, including you, knows what’s coming next. Do you think that this is why more artists don’t attempt this sort of thing, that they’ve weighed the options and the risks outweigh the rewards?

MG: I think it’s a more common thing these days. I’m basically following the lead of live electronic acts like EOTO, who are very vocal in their publicity about how they improvise everything. On the other hand, you find out very quickly the result is that you end up flying in small tight circles, improvising similar patterns over and over, precisely because you don’t want to explode in flaming wreckage by taking it too far out of your zone. At some point I started wondering just how adventurous it really is, if you’re not writing anything but you’re not really putting yourself out on a limb, either.

(Read the whole interview here.)

...And while we're on the topic of interviews, I just published a fabulously far-ranging interview with Shannon Clay of Evergreen State College on SolPurpose.com. It's my most articulate attempt yet to explain how I see art & science as two wings on the same bird, and to offer a unifying paradigm in which everything can be seen as both art & science:

SC: What are the benefits of reconnecting the two and how can we combine them? Talk about how we can do this in the scientific world…a lot of people in academia are very sincere about keeping science and the metaphysical separate.

MG: It’s like having two separate personae and you can’t show your friends one, and you can’t show your parents the other. You know you’re both, but those two lives can’t meet. It’s an awful place to be. Science and art are interwoven so profoundly that to speak of them as NEEDING to be bridged belies a horrible rift in the modern mind. [We are] getting to a place where there isn’t “a dialogue between art and science,” but rather both are recognized as specific strategies that we may choose to adopt in order to frame our experience in a particular fashion appropriate to the place and time.

It’s not about building a bridge between art and science, any more than we can build a bridge between your left and right arm. That’s ridiculous. It’s about recognizing the larger context in which both of these methodologies emerge to answer specific needs in human culture and psychology. It’s about moving into an “integral” perspective, within which all of our various methods of inquiry – art and science being only two of many – precipitate as adaptive responses.

(Read the whole interview here.)

Last but not least, I just edited the HD video I took of our amazing live art team at Wakarusa Festival. I am so incredibly proud of everyone involved and look forward to doing it again in just a few days at Sonic Bloom!

(If you happen to be in Colorado this weekend, you'd be silly to miss this one – in addition to 78 of the world's finest electronic acts on three stages, workshops, aerial and fire dancers, and gorgeous installations, I'm also coordinating an eleven-person live painting team and our new Unified Field Gallery in Grassroots California's 30-foot dome! More info here.)

Watch it in full HD!

Next Week: tasty new custom fedoras, another live music video from A Million Anniversaries, and the recording of my talk at The Manifestation Celebration on "Evolution, Astrology, & The Science of 2012"...

- Four New Live Paintings From Wakarusa 2011 -

2011-06-14T22:40:00.000-05:00

"Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself."

– Henry Miller

"It is the function of art to carry us beyond speech to experience."
– Joseph Campbell

(I apologize in advance for the seasonal shift from a biweekly to a weekly newsletter in order to keep up with the flow of new work – I know we're all feeling the acceleration by now (whether you consider it technological, spiritual, or both) and as the evermore rapid influx of information and energy builds toward a local climax over the Summer Solstice, it's all I can do to get the art, music, and talks I've given over the last couple of weeks online before they start to ferment. For a little while here, we'll be in full-bore festival season mode...hold on tight and open wide!)

This week chronicles my third annual stint as the Wakarusa Festival's resident live artist – and this was the year of fruition. The festival granted me permission to coordinate their first-ever Live Art Team & Gallery, and I was blessed to invite eight of my favorite emerging artists to join me in a forty-foot tent poised directly center of the 50,000 person festival's vending area. With the help of Ehren and Renee Cruz of SolPurpose.com and installation artist Nate "Nature" Hogen, we turned it into a glorious, altar-filled chill spot – a sanctuary from the blazing heat, and a non sequitur sacred space in the midst of the event's commercial bustle. It was the fullest realization yet of my efforts to transmute the raw energy of the festival environment into an opportunity for growth, empowerment, and change, as I mentioned in my popular manifesto, "The Problem – & Promise – of Festivals" back in March.

Huge thanks to all of the live artists and friends who contributed to the space, and to Tia Christiansen at Moving Parts Productions and Ami Heinrich at Tsunami Publicity for helping us make this a reality!

Very soon, I'll have much more to share about that – including video of all of us set up en force at the Main Stage painting to acts including STS9, Thievery Corporation, Shpongletron, & Umphrey's McGee – but until that's ready I want to show you my own work from the weekend. For the first time ever, I had every painting sold before they even started:

(Click on any image to enlarge it for a better look!)

Love Bites

2011 05 28 3SidedWhole (Banu Noor, Kobiana and Friends, Faracet and Autumn)

& 2011 06 02 Wakarusa Festival (Papadosio, Umphrey's McGee)

24"x24" - paint markers on masonite

11"x17" prints available, $25 for 1 / $35 for 2 (s/h included - email me)

I think this one is pretty self-explanatory. And no, it's not about my mommy issues...more about the dual nature of creation and destruction with a cheeky nod to the Cheshire Cat and other slippery archetypes. Plus, I like vampire romance – not teeny-bopper fang fiction, but the gothic profundity of what love means when you live forever and recognize that you subsist on violence (and we all do).

I'm surprised that there aren't more stories out there with enlightened ancient vampires...after thousands of years of satiating your every carnal desire, don't you think you'd long for something more and eventually grow into a deeper wisdom than one human life can hold?

Tree of Eyes

2011 06 04 Wakarusa Festival

(Shpongletron, Ott, Hallucinogen, STS9, My Morning Jacket)

24"x24" - paint markers on masonite

11"x17" prints available, $25 for 1 / $35 for 2 (s/h included - email me)

I just finished reading Catherynne M. Valente's immensely lush and sensuous fantasy, The Habitation of the Blessed, about a lost Oriental kingdom ruled by the legendary Christian king Prester John. In this magical land, anything planted in the ground will return as the fruit of a tree that grows in its place – so the dead are never really dead, only transformed. In a passage I found especially moving, one character brings another to the grave of his wife, whose eyes gaze out from the leaves and branches. He laments how the whim of nature gave back only her eyes and how, even though he is blessed to look upon her still, he misses being able to hear her voice. In line with my mention of vampire love above, I'm increasingly possessed by a fascination with how eternal life shifts our values and experience. What it is to be Forever.

This painting alludes to the sentience of the vegetable world, to the voiceless reaching of our own planet's living skin to the touch of other distant worlds...the drama of cosmic communion in the fathomless depth of space. "I know you're out there somewhere..."

Paradigm Shift

2011 06 04 Wakarusa Festival

(Emancipator, Nadis Warriors, Thievery Corporation, STS9, Big Gigantic)

24"x30" - paint markers on masonite

11"x17" prints available, $25 for 1 / $35 for 2 (s/h included - email me)

Regarding the interplay of one reality emerging from another – of recognizable from crystallizing from the hyper-order of chaotic flow – of layers upon layers shining diaphanous emergence. This piece is a more well-considered continuation of the themes I established last year, in which one painting is interrupted and dominated by another (see "Let It Go" from last year's Rootwire Festival, here). The best stories start in medias res – and the changes we're going through now are no exception. I don't know if I buy into the whole "Ascension" mythos, but I definitely agree that radical change and black swan events in general demand that we surf the change with as much grace as we can muster.

Maria

2011 06 05 Wakarusa Festival

(EOTO with Beats Antique, Jamie Janover, & Karsh Kale)

16"x24" - paint markers on masonite

11"x17" prints available, $25 for 1 / $35 for 2 (s/h included - email me)

My first live painting started and finished for a trade – in this case, the beautiful jewelry by Carl Weiseth of Third-Eye Pinecones. Like Carl, I see more than just a reminder of our own human pineal organ in these natural wonders...I see a potent lesson in the wisdom and intelligence of the natural world. A pinecone is an advertisement for sex, a testament to selfless progeneration, and a window into the timeless now. No wonder this painting ended up with the same mandorla that graces portraits of the Virgin Mary. They both speak to our wonder at the same enduring archetype of creation...

More soon! In the meantime, I've posted a few new summer dates on my calendar – including appearances at Electric Forest Festival (Michigan), Rootwire Festival (Ohio), and Burning Man (Nevada) – and am always available to answer your questions. Have a wonderful week and thanks for reading!

...in which I organize a benefit for Sasha Shulgin, paint with Alex Grey, talk to NASA, and rock the Nelson Ledges

2011-06-08T22:21:00.000-05:00

"We are all completely dependent on everyone else. The point is to live freely, in the present, freely giving and freely taking, which is the way of nature. The idea is to give up control of credit and debt, and just trust the cycle of nature."

- David Suelo

"We have been hypnotized into this scarcity-based thinking. At every corner of our society, there is a conversation revolving around how much there is not enough to go around. If you can, not in a cheesy and unauthentic way, but in a truly heartfelt way embrace the world, and engage the world with that faith, and that conviction of the ultimate abundance of life, you will change the world. You will, and you will not be trying to change it, and you'll be having fun."

- John Marshall Roberts

Hi everyone. ♥ I am still love-drunk from organizing Wakarusa Festival's first-ever Live Art Team & Gallery, but it'll be a little while before I can get all of that online. Besides, there's still a lot to catch up on! Firstly, and most proudly, I coordinated this:

L.A.B. Tracks: A Benefit Compilation For Sasha Shulgin

In Partnership With MAPS, Reality Sandwich, SSDP, & The Chapel of Sacred Mirrors...

Alexander "Sasha" Shulgin is probably the most important chemist alive. In addition to rediscovering MDMA and popularizing its therapeutic use, he also synthesized hundreds of new psychoactive chemicals and – with his wife and companion Ann – chronicled their effects in the extraordinary detail of two legendary volumes, PIKHAL & TIKHAL.

At the age of 85, Sasha recently suffered a stroke and now requires full-time medical care. This benefit compilation is the response from an international network of musicians whose work and lives have been enriched and inspired by the work of these two pioneers and their courageous exploration of nonordinary consciousness.

The L.A.B., or "Large Animal Bioassay," was the pet name given to visionary chemist Sasha Shulgin's small group of friend-volunteers who spent years exploring the effects of his newly-discovered molecules on their consciousness. This heroic team of psychonauts were the first to experience hundreds of novel states of consciousness, and it is in their honor that we name this compilation of eclectic tracks.

Just as their own journeys took them into realms of both the profound and profane, pleasure and anxiety, these two hours of music – spread over two discs, one danceable and one ambient – are the perfect accompaniment for an adventure to the human mind's furthest horizons...

Support the Shulgins in their hour of need by purchasing this epic 27-track album for at least $5!

"Can't Shut Us Down" by McDonough, Garfield, Uzzardi

Watch this in full HD - Download this track for free

A couple of weeks ago Jeremy McDonough, Renee Uzzardi, and I burned across country from Denver to eastern Ohio to play at the legendary Nelson Ledges Quarry Park. We rocked the festival's closing set, facing an enormous lake made from a filled-in forest gravel quarry...beautiful red pebbles everywhere, bats flying around, the woods full of revelers... Visuals provided by my nearly completed painting (see below) and Jeremy's glow-in-the-dark laser-reactive shirt. This improvised number was the festival's final moment.

Simmer on that for a while until I'm done readying the next album of acoustic-electronic guitar loops...

River To The Source

2011 04 29, 30 Cervantes (Nadis Warriors, Octopus Nebula, ESKMO)

2011 05 20, 21 Nelson Ledges Quarry Park

(Elemental Groove Theory, Boogie Matrix Mechanism, UV Hippo, The Werks, Broccoli Samurai)

2011 05 22 The Church (Jazzam)

32"x24" - opaque pens on masonite

signed 11"x17" poster prints - $20 or two for $30 (plus $5 s/h)

(click to view in hi-res)

Well, I'm in it. You are too. I'm not always proposing we view time as linear and goal-oriented, but even in an endless field there are divots - in an endless ocean there are whirlpools - and we are rolling into one. And as we whip around the margin of this strange attractor, the feeling of inevitably increases, but it's important to remember that there's no such thing as capital The capital End...

I started this piece at the Denver Alex & Allyson Grey shows in April, but was so busy body painting that weekend I had to wait around until my trip to Ohio and Pennsylvania to complete it. The final touches were laid on during an overnight in Pittsburg when my bandmate, lunatic keyboardist Jeremy McDonough, lost his keys after a reunion gig with his old band Jazzam back home. (Turns out the keys accidentally made it home with someone else in order that the universe might keep him around an extra night with his friends. Sneaky freakin' universe!)

While at the Nelson Ledges (and big thanks to The Werks for throwing that one and inviting us!), I managed to body paint a few people...it turned out pretty well. Check out pictures in my ongoing gallery:

Body Art @ Mayflowers Springdance Festival 2011!

Also, lastly – until next week, when I'll share all of the awesomeness that came out of our art team's work at Wakarusa – here's a video made by NASA, interviewing me at Yuri's Night 2010 at Moffett Air Force Base during one of the more unlikely concerts I've ever painted. To this day, I'm still the only person ever allowed to paint in an Air Force hanger. I had just driven nineteen straight hours to make it there on time to set up and then painted for twelve straight hours, so please excuse my rambling for being slightly more incoherent than ordinary. This might be the most honest NASA video you ever see:

More soon, with love.

Two New Live Paintings, More Body Art, & A New Electronic Trio!

2011-05-17T02:25:00.000-05:00

“The greatest achievement was at first and for a time a dream. The oak sleeps in the acorn;

the bird waits in the egg; and in the highest vision of the soul a waking angel stirs.

Dreams are the seedlings of realities.”

- James Allen

"At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic...to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity."

- Thomas Wolfe

In the past few weeks I was blessed to participate in some rare and truly amazing convergences of visionary artists and great minds – Boulder shows with Martina Hoffmann and Amanda Sage; the Sonic Bloom Festival Pre-Party with Alex & Allyson Grey; and The Manifestation Celebration in Dallas (an era-defining, boundary-smashing event at the Dallas Museum of Nature & Science). Explosively creative shows lead to a profusion of intense new live paintings, body art galleries, and sketchbook pages, as you'll see below.

Somewhere in there I had the time to spark a so-new-it's-nameless live electronic trio with fellow Papadosio family friends Jeremy McDonough on keyboards and Renee Uzzardi on tablas. We captured one of our instudio performances on video...I'm on electric guitar for the first time ever (I bought it long ago from a gypsy in an ice canyon), and it's a beautiful sound.

It'll be a little while before I can release the new cyber-guitar recordings from Dallas (or my speech about the relationship between Earth's magnetic fields and human consciousness), but there's already a huge art harvest to share. You can listen to the new sound while you check it out:

"Space Migration" by McDonough, Garfield, Uzzardi

download this track free / watch on Youtube

If you happen to be in or around Ohio this weekend, come enjoy our first show at the Nelson Ledges Quarry Park's Mayflower Springdance Festival!

And now for the art:

- (Click any image to enlarge it for detail.) -

Under Another Sky

2011 04 20 The Root (Sacred Plants Visionary Art Panel) & Studio

24"x24" – opaque pens on masonite

original painting for sale – make an offer

signed poster prints for sale – 1/$20 or 2/$30 + s/h

4/20, Boulder CO – quite possibly the cannabis capital of the world. In the midst of this storm of heedless intoxication (once a campus display of civil disobedience, now an epic rager celebrating marijuana's medical legalization) we assembled a crew of respected "visionary" artists – Martina, Amanda, Krystle Smith, Mackenzie Page, Jumbie, and myself – and we had a nice long panel discussion about sacred plants and their role in the creative process. Kind of an antidote or counterbalance. Thoughtful and provocative, the discussion was well-received...and I went home loaded with the other artists' visionary mojo to finish the painting I'd started. Maybe you can see a hint of their flavor in this piece, another in a series of vegetable landscapes on other planets.

Moon Well

2011 05 06 The Kessler (Language Love, DVS*, Archnemesis)

2011 05 07 Dallas Museum (Bluetech)

2011 05 08 Ruta Maya (Polymyth, Dimitri's Ascent, Jamie Janover)

24"x24" – opaque pens on masonite

original painting for sale – make an offer

signed poster prints for sale – 1/$20 or 2/$30 + s/h

Still not getting tired of drawing golden spirals and moon portraits. What can I say? I have also been obsessed for years with creating gradients of complexity, leaving unelaborated sections, showing the weaving-into-being caught in action. Seems only appropriate for The Manifestation Celebration, which turned Dallas – if but for a moment – into one of the coolest places on the planet. Thanks to the hard work of the big-hearted people at Re:Evolution Media. Post script: I finished it up in Austin, during a few days of satiated lounging. Grounding that love, Texas...grounding that love.

Temporary flashback to April. While listening to Martina and Amanda give presentations on their artwork at Boulder's Shining Mountain Waldorf school last month, I regressed to "classroom doodling" mode and went to town on the paper plates they gave us for cheese and crackers:

The Love You Withhold Is The Pain That You Carry

I'm Too Wrapped Up In Not Being Wrapped Up

My extreme thanks to everyone who invited me to paint on them for Denver & Dallas's Alex & Allyson Grey shows. I take body painting seriously – a precious opportunity to see someone's soul and unfold it on them – and I got to work on some beautiful human beings. Here are links to body art galleries for both two-night events...as you browse, see if you can't absorb the ambience of each party:

Body Art at Unified Field - Denver

Body Art at The Manifestation Celebration - Dallas

Festival season is upon me (curious people: summer calendar on the blog), which means a lot more art and music, and less time to publish it. I already have a lot of work in store I'm honored-eager to share with you...in the meantime, take care and thanks for reading!

Live At Eight Thousand Feet & Two New Paintings

2011-04-29T14:37:00.000-05:00

"For a relationship to stay alive, love alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, boredom. Relationships fail not because we have stopped loving but because we first stopped imagining."
- James Hillman, archetypal psychologist

"Imagine it's 30 years from now. You're looking back at the history of your relationship with desire. There was a certain watershed moment when you clearly saw that some of your desires were mediocre, inferior, and wasteful, while others were pure, righteous, and invigorating. Beginning then, you made it a life goal to purge the former and cultivate the latter. Thereafter, you occasionally wandered down dead ends trying to gratify yearnings that weren't worthy of you, but usually you wielded your passions with discrimination, dedicating them to serve the highest and most interesting good."
- Rob Brezsny, pronoid astrologer

(Before we begin, let me suggest you view this on my website , the way it was intended...)

..:: MUSIC ::..

Live At Eight Thousand Feet (2011)

Back in March, I played at the Shumei International Institute, a spiritual center built on the holy mountain outside Crestone, Colorado. Not only did the magical energy of the land and venue infuse my playing and singing with a special clarity, but I had the rare blessing of guest musician Andy Skellenger adding cajon and tablas to half the set. And he kicked ass. From now on, whenever I play those tunes alone, there will be pieces missing!

Plus, I got some best-yet recordings of other tunes, like the slow-burning acoustic-electronic love song "Underground River." And I finally caught the lightning bug in the bottle: my three-minute rant on the co-evolution of LSD, DNA, the atomb bomb, and the internet is there for you all to agree or disagree with, as you see fit...

As usual, the whole album is free if you want it (although you have the option to pay me too, if you see fit); but unlike usual, I scored four lovely videos of Andy and I rocking out together and linked to them on the download page.

Check out the two of us tearing it up with the rowdy "Offering Hands" – an ode to the ego-obliterating intensity of revelation, if you're into that kind of thing:

Watch this full-size on Youtube / Vimeo

Like that? Go watch the other three, and help yourself to the whole album, at MichaelGarfield.net.

..:: VISUAL ART ::..

(Click on each image for a closer look.)

In Between Seasons

2011 04 08 Quixote's (Math Games, Absynth Quintet)

2011 04 13 Hodi's (That 1 Guy, Better Than Bacon)
24"x24" - paint markers on 1/4" masonite

- signed 11"x17" poster prints - $20 or two for $30 (plus $5 s/h) -
original painting for sale - make me an offer

This painting is as confused as Boulder's recent hailing-while-sunny "spring" weather. There are no such things as five-pointed snow flakes...so what are these? Cherry blossoms have five petals, not three...so what is going on here?

Well, as within, so without. Admittedly, I made this while Mercury was full flush Retrograde – confusing communication, technology, and insight, and driving us inward for integration. I don't feel quite as much like an ice-captured blooming than I did a few weeks ago, Thank God.

Endlessness

2011 04 15 The Other Side (That 1 Guy)

2010 09 02 Portal Patch (Lynx, Vibesquad, Future Simple Project)

18"x24" - paint marker on 1/8" masonite

- signed 11"x17" poster prints - $20 or two for $30 (plus $5 s/h) -

original painting for sale - make me an offer

Started at Burning Man 2010, but it was missing the really juicy detail that convinces me a painting is actually complete...so I got back in there with the fine-tipped markers and ripped it up with some tryptamine jewels. You might say this is an overhead map of one person "getting it" in a crowd of the oblivious...but you'll notice that we're all woven together and already that insight is starting to bleed over into everyone else.

..:: WRITING ::..

• Part Two of Ode To A Paradigm Shift, my rant on the evolving philosophy of science, is now up on Solpurpose.com. Here's a clip to whet your appetite:

We are at the end of one science and the beginning of a new science – one that dismisses the ancient but futile quest for total knowledge (and, not so implicitly, total control) and the narrow-minded insistence on the linear progression of cause and effect, for a celebration of the newer and more confounding questions introduced by each answer, for a playful exploration of co-causation’s latticework, which unifies all perspectives in a mutual creation and returns us each to center even as the dream of measuring our world’s boundaries recedes into nonsense.

And it is in nonsense that we rediscover ourselves – in the ceaseless irruption of the incompletely understood into our tidy matrices, a reminder (a co-conspiratorial one, if we are lucky) that the universe is bigger than our laws (even if we call them “universal”) and as its fruit, our lives are themselves a thin tiling of the familiar like verdigris/filigree/gold leaf over the faceless mind of tireless, revelatory, orgasmic creation.

• Taste-making music blog LostInSound.org just reviewed my cyber-acoustic guitar album The Body Electric and had some very cool things to say about it. Coming from another musician and trusted voice in the live electronic music scene – LiS's Pietro Bondi – these words are high praise:

Experimental and unique...this latest work shows great skill and potential as a guitarist and composer. Patient in their construction and determined to stay in melodic but unpredictable territory, [Garfield's] tracks glide through seamless changes, sometimes climaxing, sometimes spiraling off into quiet grooves or gurgling swamp sounds. The spacey, modern edge brings the simple pluckings and cleverly produced sounds into an envelope in which anything seems possible...

Right on! I hope you enjoy the reads...this weekend I'm off to paint at two more gigs in Denver with the esteemed visionary artists Alex & Allyson Grey, so expect some really inspired work from me in the next newsletter.

Thanks for your time, and have a beautiful day!

Three New Album Covers, New Time-Lapse, & Meeting The Self You Aren't

2011-04-15T14:45:00.000-05:00

"To understand ourselves, we must embrace the alien."

- PZ Meyers, octopus neuroscientist

..:: New Time-Lapse & Talks ::..

Last fall, journalist Charles Shaw and I embarked on The Light & Shadow Tour, a six-week, thirty-city journey across the United States that combined music, speaking, and documentary film-making into a profound voyage not only through the terrain of American culture but also into the depths of our nation's conflicted psyche.

A big part of it was gathering interviews for his amazing documentary Exile Nation, which is just about as thorough and moving a view into the issue of justice and prisons in the U.S. as I have ever encountered. But we also had a unique opportunity to speak with audiences all over the map about the role of "the shadow" – the repressed voices not only in our culture, but also in our individual minds:

The shadow is the part of ourselves so profoundly disowned that it shows up not as a quality of the self, but a trait of other people – not a choice that we are making, but a fate that imposes itself upon us. And to whatever degree we continue to refuse acknowledgment of our shadows, we remain the desperate victims of life instead of its joyous collaborators.

It isn't easy to write a new story of the self - and to constantly re-write that story, when new truths come to us in the form of disarming companions, rude awakenings, and other surprises. But it is the work set out before us, if we are to live as whole people and give the most of ourselves to the birthing of a new and better world.

Meeting The Self You Aren't is a free compilation of clips from my talks on that tour, a pastiche lecture on the stories we exclude from our own. I used excerpts to narrate this latest time-lapse live painting video for "Stun Flower" (which is, incidentally, also a music video for the title track from my latest cyber-acoustic guitar LP The Body Electric, and a kind of tutorial for anyone interested in how to draw near-perfect Golden Spirals freehand):

Watch this in HD on Youtube / Vimeo

..:: Album Art ::..

I've been heavy on the album art recently...

Meeting The Self You Aren't features another example of the new hybrid freehand/digital style I'm working out – a tunnel into the unmapped I:

Michael Garfield - Meeting The Self You Aren't (2011)

But I've also had the delight of making album art for other people for the first time. Here's a link to Freddy Todd's new mix for Grassroots California, for which I modified my painting "Tunnel To The Moon" with the awesome digital kaleidoscope software Repper:

Freddy Todd - Neon Kaleidoscope Mix (2011)

As much fun as I had with those two covers, I'm proudest of my art for my friend Jay Jaramillo (aka ProJect Aspect)'s debut full-length LP, Put This World On Hold. This album doesn't officially drop for a couple of weeks, but in the meantime I encourage you to click through and get down to his other tracks. He and Freddy are two of the hottest rising star DJs on the scene right now and it's my honor to call them my peeps.

Jay's concept was of a planet of puzzle pieces caught midway through explosion:

ProJect Aspect – Put This World On Hold (2011)

Each of these images is available (with or without the type) as a signed, glossy 11"x17" poster print for $25 each, or $35 for two (shipping included – just email me and I can have prints to you within a week!).

..:: Music4Change Interview ::..

Last year I was interviewed by Music4Change, a Fort Collins event production company throwing shows to make a difference. They don't archive their interviews online, and they had mine up for such a flash that I even missed it...so here is the full text of our conversation, in which I discuss getting into the live painting scene, the myth and science of creativity, and the purpose of art as I understand it. It's held up pretty well over the last year:

After some time I came to really understand how important inspiration is to the well-being of a person or a culture. We NEED to be reminded of our place in a bigger context, a broader myth, a grander story in the same way we NEED to eat and sleep and breathe. Meaning is essential to human existence and in fact the search for meaning pretty much characterizes human nature, so artists are indispensable. Eventually, the guilt of “not contributing” as an artist and musician like my friend the chef or my friend the construction worker evaporated. I found my worth, and it’s intimately tied to helping other people find theirs, in age of fear-mongering media and alienating social infrastructure.

..:: Next Newsletter ::..

• video from my concert with Andy Skellenger in Crestone, Colorado;

• a new live painting from my shows with Fareed Haque's Math Games & That 1 Guy;

• another installment of my essay series, Ode To A Paradigm Shift;

• and more I haven't dreamed up yet.

Thanks for your time and have a wonderful day!

Entirely Too Many Updates!: New Videos, Essays, & Scientific Illustrations

2011-04-01T11:15:00.000-05:00

"As the medium through which a galactic order of evolutionary intelligence interacts with and ultimately transforms the material processes and organic expressions of the Earth, the noosphere is not restricted to a limited rationality or a linear either/or meaning. Instead, once we align with the noosphere, we will perceive and know radially. We will experience everything as multiple sets of correspondences that link everything to everything else in a synchronically harmonized multidimensional universe."
- Jose Arguelles

"Too Many Updates." This is the reason attached to about half of the notifications I get when someone unsubscribes from this newsletter...

It all started as an attempt to spread the updates more evenly, to mete them out week by week instead of dumping them all at once on rarer occasion. But some people don't seem to like that. In this age of accelerating future shock, it seems like frequency is more of a problem than depth; after all, it's not about volume or content, but the gross number of unread messages in your inbox.

So now I'm experimenting with a return to form. This monster newsletter is a brushfire clearing the undergrowth for new saplings. It is a binge of expression, months in the making...and in the spirit of our current Retrograde Mercury, it is a blessedly clumsy effort to tie up loose ends, learning from what I have left behind half-cooked and neglected.

It is entirely too much new media to digest in one sitting, and I'm sorry. I'm sorry! But I'm also freaking excited to share all of this with you...blessed to have so much worth sharing.

So enjoy the electronic tome before you...mark as "unread" and return to it later...let your intuition guide you through the overwhelm to those bits that will speak to you most clearly and offer you the most insightful reflections. Consider it a soul bonfire buffet: All You Can Eat, baby. Keep coming back until you've had your fill.

Just don't forget to chew.

..:: Music ::..

I have a special treat for you guys this week. My friend, long-time digital pioneer Ken Scott, just released Harmony – a delicious music visualization program that functions more as active instrument than passive translator.

Ken's goal is to put ridiculous creative control at the fingertips of every person on the planet, effectively toppling the media plutocracy...and as an early demonstration of his potent synaesthetic software, he's rendered the title track from my latest cyber-acoustic guitar album, The Body Electric, in vivid throbbing psychedelic detail:

Watch it in HD on Youtube / Download this track free

Just to be clear, this isn't another iTunes visualizer...every variable can be hand-tweaked to create a living, breathing work of visual art from the music itself as it's happening. You can learn how it works here. It's a perfect creative counterpart to my own boundary-mocking explorations of the acoustic guitar's full cyborg potential (...which are, by the way, still free as a bird at MichaelGarfield.net).

Watch it in HD on Youtube or Vimeo / Download this track free

My fingerstyle anthem "The Sun Setting," leading into improvised acoustic loopscape "Foyer," at Austin's Art Outside Festival (23 October 2010). It's a rebuke to "spiritual bypassing" – the belief that meditation, prayer, or other practices will allow you to escape from your self. On the contrary, they tend only to make a person's issues worse – cloaked under a guise of spiritual purity, where they are invisible and inaccessible to the only one who can do anything about them.

This is how I rock about that.

Watch it in HD on Youtube or Vimeo / Download this track free

My avant-guitar opus "You Don't Have To Move" at 11:11 Wellness in Boulder, Colorado (11 February, 2011). "You Don't Have To Move" is a taoist pop song written on a trampoline at Burning Man 2008 – a pronoiac reminder that when we get out of the way of ourselves, marvelous things occur. "8:33," the half-improvised coda that grew out of "Move" at Rootwire Festival 2010, is a programmatic journey through the apocalypse...and out the other side.

This song is, in eight short minutes, a compendium of every f*cking thing I have learned can be done with a guitar.

..:: Words ::..

"The Problem – & Promise – of Festivals"

In a fit of impassioned manifesto-channeling rapture over St. Patrick's Day weekend, I wrote the most popular essay I've ever published: "The Problem – & Promise – of Festivals." It immediately sprouted over 160 comments on the Facebook note where I let it loose, marshaling both bountiful praise and bilious criticism. Whatever else might be said about it, this essay definitely elicited powerful emotional responses.

It is the crystallization of my deeply held convictions about how exactly I am serving my own soul purpose by working within festival culture – why I don't see what I do as escapist or naïve, but a potent and directed attempt to participate in the co-creation of a saner world by leveraging the unique opportunities of entertainment media to inspire people into conscious engagement as agents of a truly transcendent collaborative evolutionary (ad)venture.

But no picture is complete without its shadows, and I also see the incredible potential of many festivals today squandered by exploitation and ravenous consumer culture...

Here are the opening strains. I highly encourage you to join the conversation and leave your own remarks on Facebook after reading. The best part of this has been the discussion:

Someone I had once called a friend, whose work I consider extremely important but whose attitude I find tiresome and counterproductive, recently wrote to me:

"You live in denial and a false reality, and I don't. I live in the real world and grapple with its problems every day; you spend your life running from reality, hiding inside little bubbles of like-minded escapists in festivals and secluded retreats, where there is 100% confirmation bias amongst the homogenous crowd."

This was my response:

"As for 'hiding in festivals,' I go where I feel like I'm needed. I don't see like minds; I see lost souls, a society with great potential that lacks the grasp of context and sense of purpose necessary to do something constructive with their lives. I am fighting as hard as I can to ensure that my generation isn't wasted on meaningless consumption and hollow drug experiences but is able to recognize and wield the positive and constructive potential of festivals - namely, to create a space where people can network, share worthwhile ideas, and assist one another in their potentiation, instead of just buying sh*t and getting f*cked up."

"In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete. That, in essence, is the higher service to which we are all being called."

- Buckminster Fuller

“Play is the answer to how anything new comes about.”

- Jean Piaget

Keep reading, and offer your own perspective...

~~~

In other news...I'm obviously a zealot, but sometimes I think I'm also a fool for releasing all of my music, writing, and presentations on a "pay-what-you-can" (aka "sleep-on-your-friend's-couch-cuz-you-can't-afford-your-own-room") model.

Then I remind myself that we don't own ideas; ideas own us. And I get on a rant like this one:

"Intellectual Property Is Bullsh*t"

Don't you agree? Then share away, my friend...

~~~

...And while you're busy sharing, you might take a moment to appreciate how you're helping build the emergent mind of a global superorganism in which each of us are as small and insentient – yet as vital and unified – as blood cells and neurons within a human body. This is one prevailing theme in my new essay series, "Ode To A Paradigm Shift," which launched this week on Ehren Cruz's luminous living library of spiritual resources, SolPurpose.com.

"Ode" is an ongoing immersion course in the kind of synchronistic, holonomic thinking espoused by Jose Arguelles in this newsletter's opening, above. And for that reason it is so timely, so urgent, that I have no choice but to publish it as fast as it streams out of me. This is my finest humble attempt at poeticizing the great shift in which all of us are taking part...

Here's a taste, from the first in a series of weekly installments:

Suddenly the hidden extent of my island reality came up crashing over the waters and showed itself as, actually, a continent, a common idea. The edge of that human superorganism swung like dawn from orbit into view and everywhere I looked people were having the same ideas. I could almost feel – I started to imagine as if – a thin web of us, like a slime mold connected by the sweet ectoplasm of wireless transfers...I saw myself looking from orbit – not from “my own” eyes, but through a gauzy layer of satellite sensors I operate embodiedly – and flipping through the views of every mind possessed of a certain idea: here first is the map of people who are currently thinking about sex/about money/about postmodernism, and here are the people who are having a hunch about something (you can see it in the glow of their threshold-passing enteric nervous activity, revealing some areas of the planet make people more sensitive in different nervous regions)…to view the body of a notion resonating through the Earth body into each of us, to varying degrees…to finally capture gods on camera.

Keep reading...

..:: Visual Art ::..

Oh right! The artwork. I wasn't gonna leave you hanging...

Well, once upon a time – long before I found my calling in the noise and color of festival culture – I worked every day in the quiet offices of the University of Kansas Natural History Museum Department of Herpetology. I took a scientific illustration course my senior year of college and was hired straight out of class to assist the new professor with his field guides and species descriptions of the reptiles and amphibians of the Philippines...and there I stayed for four years, stippling for four hours a day, drawing scale after gorgeous, tedious scale. I got to listen to whatever I wanted on my headphones – which ultimately gave me a second education – and I retrained myself to hunch for inhuman blocks of time over the microscope, tracing every contour of tiny creatures stiff and rank with formalin through the lens of a camera lucida.

It was the single biggest influence on what eventually blossomed into my precise and intricate pen-work as a live painter. It was, for a while, a kind of shelter for my vagabond heart – one of the few constants in my life as I went through the existential crisis that drove me out of academia and into my independent study of fractals, aliens, and the evolution of consciousness. And it gave me the credibility I needed to travel for paleontological illustration assignments in Wyoming and Arizona – some of the most beautiful and fulfilling work I have ever done, to this day.

After years of keeping my scientific illustration portfolio locked up on an auxiliary hard drive, I realized the error of my ways and made it available for everyone, so you can all appreciate a little more deeply both my own prequel-esque backstory and the profound beauty of nature to which I owe my ongoing inspiration:

Scientific Illustration Gallery

~~~

Lastly: Aside from my handful of time-lapse videos, there isn't much footage online of me in action as a live painter. So in order to bring balance to The Force, I just scrounged up this short clip on my Facebook art page – taken by my friend Jessica Perlstein while I'm in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park during last year's 4/20 celebration, trying (and failing) to paint in the rain. It's great in media res footage, if you want a brief dip in the vibrance and silliness of this calling's brighter moments.

~~~

So there you have it. Enjoy the tour... While you're sifting through all of this, I'm already hard at work on part two of this ludicrous pleroma-storm of gifting...a somewhat more manageable update with new lectures, digital artwork, rediscovered guitar loopscapes, and musings on the nature of time and mind.

Thank you, immensely, for staying with me on this journey.

Announcing "The Body Electric" & My Most Ambitious Painting Yet

2011-03-19T01:01:00.000-05:00

"If you're really listening, if you're awake to the poignant beauty of the world, your heart breaks regularly. In fact, your heart is made to break; its purpose is to burst open again and again so that it can hold evermore wonders."

- Andrew Harvey

"The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude."

- Friedrich Nietzsche

I'm immensely grateful for the nearly 3,900 people that have signed up for this newsletter over the last three years – for your time and attention, for your encouragement – but most of all, for being blessed with the chance to enrich your lives with my work, to give you something in which you can find meaning and inspiration.

But look, guys. I'm having a hard time balancing "listen" and "express." I don't know how to fill this void, this speakerbox, this opportunity to say – but only what you need to hear. So what do you need to hear? Tell me this and I will do my best.

I'm ready to put the days of unfocused explosive creativity behind me and start channeling this energy into something that will truly serve the needs of the people with whom I have connected. To find the sweet spot that will illuminate and exalt us all the most. To do what only I can do in a way that sets your life on fire like only you can burn.

Because it's time for that. From here on out, this newsletter isn't just my rant box; it's my platform for putting my understanding and ability to work for you in the most ambitious, crazy, brave-hearted way we can conspire to achieve.

And with that, I have some things to share with you that I hope will turn you on and get this started.

..:: Visual Art ::..

The first is the most ambitious live painting I have ever attempted...you'll want to click on this one for a full view so you can appreciate all of the detail:

Going Somewhere (Tree of Flowing Jewels)

2011 01 23 Quixote's (Praang)
2011 02 03 Hodi's Half Note (Invisible Allies, Bluetech, KiloWatts)
2011 02 15 The Aquarium (O Fo Sho, Heavy Is The Head)
2011 02 17 The Whole (William Within, Luke Redfield, Noah Earle)
2011 02 26 Cervantes (Papadosio, Heyoka, Larva Ink)
24"x48" – opaque pens, acrylic, & spray paint on masonite
original painting for sale – email me to inquire
11"x17" poster prints $25 each (two for $35) – order by email
full-size stretched canvas giclée poster prints (series of ten):

$400 – order by email

This painting came with me from Denver to Fort Collins, out to Fargo and Minneapolis, and then back to Denver over the course of a month in which I worked on nothing else (artwise). It's the largest piece I've ever done, and because my markers have three-millimeter tips that set a boundary on detail, it's the first live painting in which I've managed to actually accomplish the multiple levels of fractal self-similarity that I allude to in the rest of my work. There's a quality to it that I've only experienced in states when even solid objects seem fluid and selfhood streams like tattering clouds through the gusty sky of the Great Imagination. I can almost hear this painting. It whines and whirs, whispering insect secrets into auroral night. Everything else, every zipping thought and mammalian contraction, shuts off when I look at it, and there is nothing left but the ancient and infinite truth of life, mind, and time...an open secret in which all of our human splendor and dignity, story and drama recedes into unnoticeability, empty as I stare at a foreign sky in silence.

(click to enlarge)

On a slightly less epic note, I've added several new images to my online sketchbook archive on Facebook. If you're not already a friend of my art page there, you might want to be – you'll get updated about my new work a lot faster that way.

..:: Music ::..

As I've gotten more well-connected in the dance music scene through my live art, I've co-evolved to make my music more suitable for the venues and audiences that ordinarily support music made on laptops and synthesizers. Those of you who've been following me for a while have watched as it has mutated, branching off into both intricate percussive fretboard magic built for festival stages and elaborate acoustic-electronic soundscapes at home in chill-out tents and other dusky liminal spaces.

Now, I'm pleased to announce that the transformation is complete. My newest album drops this Sunday – the Spring Equinox, March 20th – morning after the closest Full Moon in years, and a perfect time for the advent of a new age in which the carbon-based past of rosewood and human flesh meets the silicon-based future of blinking lights and loving machines. The Body Electric is my ode to the marriage of the animal and mineral, tradition and novelty.

Recorded live over two weeks at shows in Colorado and North Dakota (while I was working on the painting above...what an epic month!), it's my latest and greatest effort to redefine the guitar so thoroughly that the music shines through unimpeded by instrument. This is acoustic music liberated into an entirely new sonic landscape and philosophical vista. And it comes complete with a lush, poster-sized hi-res file of the hybrid ink-and-digital cover art I designed as a visual counterpart to the music, for your psychedelic eyeball pleasure:

The Body Electric (2011)

The link goes live on March 20th and then it's a free download for you and everyone else...but anyone who donates more will receive a download code for the unreleased recording of my concert in Sinai, Costa Rica at the Geoparadise Festival on New Year's Day 2011. It's a performance I'm proud of, including my best-to-date live take of fan favorite "You Don't Have To Move" as well as a collaborative loopscape with shamanistic throat-singer Matthew Kocel and some of the more unguardedly silly between-song interludes that have ever flowed through me.

In the meantime, you can listen to and download two tracks from The Body Electric – "Tunnel Run" and "Touring The Body Electric (SHORT)" – on my Soundcloud page. And you can watch the video for "Tunnel Run" – stitched together from a year's worth of going over bridges – right here, right now:

(If you can't see it here, you can watch it on Vimeo, Youtube, or my Facebook music page.)

Again, thank you from the bottom of your heart for following me down these corridors of the imagination and into the ornamented chambers I find there. If I've managed to open you up even a little bit to the vast wild isness of our lives, mission fucking accomplished. Goodnight, you guys.

New Sketchbook Gallery & MG Philosophizing on the Radio

2011-02-24T16:59:00.000-06:00

"The greater one's science, the deeper the sense of mystery."

- Vladimir Nabokov

"The job of an artist is always to deepen the mystery."

- Francis Bacon

And that is why I live where I do, on the borderlands between inquiry and expression, a transducer of whatever ineffable cosmic mind in which I play a part. This week I have less to show and more to say, including two interviews from recent radio appearances (one focused more on my music, and one focused more on my assumed calling as reconnaissance and mapmaker for the evolution of human consciousness). It's all very thought-provoking stuff and I hope you enjoy listening as much as I enjoyed getting some time on the air to electrocute the worldviews of unsuspecting audiences...

(Nothing new for sale this week, although I still have plenty of available live paintings and am happy to negotiate on the listed prices, if you're feeling the onrush of spring and need some more color in your home...)

New Sketchbook Gallery!

View & Comment on Facebook

I've finally started to archive my favorite pages from years of classroom & airplane doodling, dating back to the prehistoric, misty recesses when I was still in school to study dinosaurs and live painting was not yet even a glimmer on my brain scan. Some of these images will end up recycled on apparel, album art, or concert posters...in the meantime, you can take a peek "under the hood" and leave your remarks in my newly-germinated online sketchbook. You might recognize the seeds of some of my live paintings in there...both past and future.

MG on Expanding Mind with Erik Davis

Listen Here

I frequently quote author Erik Davis in this newsletter, because his perceptive and highly literate view of our species' fringier realms of consciousness - everything from the technospiritual evolution of culture to the art of stage magic - makes him one of my greatest living inspirations. His show Expanding Mind "explored the culture of consciousness: magic, spirituality, psychology, technology," and is my favorite talk radio program. Recently I was lucky enough to be the weekly featured guest:

Liminal science, electro-acoustic guitar, and humanizing the hive mind: a wide-ranging chat with Michael Garfield, live painter, writer, and avant-guitarist/songwriter.

You can download our awesome discussion (not nearly long enough!) from the link above and hear the geekboy excitement in my voice as I discuss UFOs, the philosophy of science, and becoming a guitar cyborg. Once you've had a taste, I highly recommend digging into the archives for some truly mind-expanding conversations...

MG on Live @ Lunch (KRFC FM 88.9)

Listen Here

I was just honored to be the guest for the Fort Collins NPR member station's daily lunch-hour interview and instudio musical performance...if you're curious about the mind behind the music this loose and easy hour of songs and weirdo air banter afforded me a platform to talk about things I normally don't – like my favorite concerts ever, my time travel dinosaur fantasies, and how I understand live painting as the symptom of a sociocultural revolution. It was a fun hour and I'd like to once again express my thanks to everyone who tuned in and caught it live!

Coming Soon

...And now, I'm off to Peru for a couple of weeks with my friends Papadosio. Hold tight and when I get back I'll have an epic new live painting to share, as well as the final audio recordings from my provocative talks on the Light & Shadow Tour, and a few clips of my continuously-evolving acoustic-electronic looping project. As usual, feel free to drop me a line at any point with questions, comments, or commissions...just be aware it might take me a little longer than usual to get back to you.

Thanks for your time and have a marvelous day!

New Video, Upcoming Radio Appearances, & Art Show This Week!

2011-02-07T14:58:00.000-06:00

"Michael Garfield has some absolutely amazing chops...the

musicianship on this album is truly wonderful."
- Marquee Magazine

So said the first official review for Alive With You, my album of highlights from the 30,000 miles of touring I did last year. Of course, they also said that "just when you start to get lost in Garfield's abilities" my rants about aliens, lucid dreaming, and sex in space break the flow, and that "without the stage banter, this album would be a definite winner." Apparently they didn't much care for the storyteller format - and plenty of people probably agree - so I've uploaded an alternate playlist without the talking for everyone who just wants the music. You can listen to it here:

http://bit.ly/banterless

Before I go any further, I want you all to know that this newsletter is an experiment and I'm thankful to you all for following along with me as it unfolds. Some of you came to me through my music, some through my art, and so I cannot possibly hope to please everyone all the time when one or the other of those strands temporarily takes over my life. (To put it another way, I'm like the Obama of Art...only without international banking family connections.)

This week is heavy on the tunes and light on the views, but it's only because I've been working on an epic new live painting (some of you have seen it in progress at the Praang and Invisible Allies shows...my friend Danny Litin took some amazing pics of me at work on it, which you can find on my facebook profile). I have also started curating a new gallery of my sketchbooks from over the years. Both of those things will show up very soon, so thanks for holding tight! In the meantime...

- "Offering Hands" (Unplugged Across America) -

It's finally online: the last of five unplugged, spontaneous road-side music videos I filmed while on tour last fall. Out of the five, I think it's the finest performance...in no small part due to the ludicrous natural beauty that surrounded me and the relief that two months of touring had finally come to a close. Here's my percussive anthem to finding our common ground in the shared joy and suffering of human experience:

Video Link: http://bit.ly/offeringhandsontour

Download This Song Free: http://bit.ly/mgunplugged

- This Week! -

• 8 Feb, Everywhere - Live@Lunch on KRFC FM 88.9 (Fort Collins)

12 - 1 pm MST, instudio performance/interview

Listen Online - Full Details on the FB Event Page

My first instudio radio performance...you can listen via the dial anywhere on the Front Range, or online anywhere on the planet (and in space, although you might have to wait). I'll have a recording up soon for anyone who can't hear it live.

• 10 Feb, Everywhere - Progressive Radio Network

2 pm EST, guest on Expanding Mind with Erik Davis

Listen Online

Expanding Mind is, without question, my favorite radio talk show - a fearless exploration of the fringes of human understanding, guided by author Erik Davis' encyclopedic literacy of the occult and innumerable esoteric subcultures. I was half-joking when I asked him if I could be a guest...and now it's happening! I'm not sure where the conversation will take us, but it's guaranteed to be both profound and bizarre. I highly recommend you tune in if just for Erik's end of the discussion...

• 11 Feb, Boulder CO - 1111 Wellness (on The Hill)

7 - 9 pm, Time Spiral: A Live Art Reception

RSVP at the FB Event Page

Oh, you live in Boulder? Well, awesome! Come out to my first legitimate art show and meet some kindred spirits in the suffuse glow of fourteen of my live paintings. Live music and snacks will be served unmercifully as you bathe in the delightful aroma of one of Boulder's finest medicinal dispensaries. And Lord only knows when you'll get to see this much of my work in one place again.

- Recent Publications -

• My friends at LostInSound.org recently republished "Live Art Is Nonsense," part five in my ongoing series of essays about performance painting. Here's a preview:

Most art forms are kept hidden in the studio until some dramatic Moment Of Unveiling. Instead, the transparency of performance makes this strange behavior distinct enough to deserve a name that will set it apart in people’s minds from the rituals and religions of conventional studio art. Process becomes an obvious, living part of the piece. Journey and destination take on new meanings. Since music, dance, and theater evolved in context as public entertainment or ritual, they belong in a separate category (especially those composed beforehand). In fact, it is the very change of context that makes something like performance painting strange in the first place.

People have taken to calling this kind of thing “live art.” It is probably better than nothing; but insofar as it is used to realistically distinguish one kind of creative expression from the rest, “live art” is nonsense.

• Thanks to Jonathan "Seymor" Sandberg, who has joined The Field Guide To Live Artists with his recent interview about how he got into live painting and what inspires him to keep rocking out for his friends & family in Detroit...

"I see live painting as a turning point in live entertainment that will offshoot into other new ways and combinations of perception. I see actors, comics, light-operators, photographers, writers, musicians, the unnamed and the not-yet-invented sculpting a new media for an awaiting audience."

Thank you, everyone, for your time and attention. I'm a lucky guy to get to share myself for a living like I do, and I'm always happy to hear from you (be it questions, or comments, heckling, commissions, or whatever) so drop me a line any time...and have a wonderful day!