"We have to continue to learn. We have to be open. And we have to be ready to release our knowledge in order to come to a higher understanding of reality."
The waters are really flowing, these days, aren't they? So much to catch up on, and so little time to share it or even read it. Thank you for sharing your time with me so I can share with you.
(Full as it is, this newsletter came late so I'll send out another next week, on schedule – with new music, my talk and live painting from AURA Festival, and news on my amazingly great gigs this spring! You can sneak a peek on my web calendar...anyone here into Papadosio or Stuart Davis?)
Let's start with some small, largely studio, paintings my friend Chaeli and I just conjured up. This year has already fruited so many fantastic collaborations and there are even more to share real soon!
Lioness (Collab w/ Chaeli Cardenas)
This piece, like most of our work together, involves layer after layer of working over each other, literally filling in the missing pieces of each other's styles. Chaeli has a way with cats, obviously – and her brushwork grew so naturally out of her way with pens. Victory.
"Even though alone in a dark room, be as if you were facing a noble guest. Express your feelings, but become no more expressive than your true nature."
– Zengetsu (T'ang dynasty master)
Chibi Kirin (Collab w/ Chaeli Cardenas)
"The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware."
If You Are A Hat, I Will Tattoo You
Here are some of the pay-what-you-want personalized panels I've been painting for the people who tip me when they order my latest embroidered design with Grassroots California:
I still have some in most sizes – if you'd like one, here are some pretty pictures of the hat as well as how to order yours at less than retail price (plus whatever you might spend to customize it).
Meanwhile the painted hat game is going so well that I have to cut down on them to make time for everything else! I apologize for limiting my availability but in order to work on my music I have to ask that you please only inquire about orders of $130 or greater. If I haven't put you off, feel free to drop me a line with your ideas...
Somewhat more affordably, I made these hats below for my friends at The Headspace – they have a lot of great work from my friends on their site as well, so go browse around and be impressed if you've got a minute. I believe some of these are still available even if they're not pictured on the website, so you might want to write them and ask...
Mind-Blowing Ideas
I have told many of you in person that I believe one of the main functions of art is to draw each other into inspired and inspiring conversation. As I see it, I'm just one warp in the global fabric of the planetary bioplasm, exchanging quanta of selfhood with other/selves like how our Last Universal Common Ancestor was basically one giant genetic orgy without any true species boundaries. Even today it's pretty hard to argue for the concrete reality or temporal continuity of the self with any scientific credibility.
Now that I have just over 6200 (!) of you getting these emails (supreme gratitude!), I need to make sure I'm not just showing off but showing up and sharing some of my most profound inspirations. SO:
• Thunderbolts of the Gods - a film about the Electric Universe Theory
This is the most important science link I have ever shared with you all. Please, just find the time to watch it as soon as you can (if you haven't already). Seriously. There's an amazing stream of comments about this film in my the thread on my Facebook profile. Please feel free to follow my profile and join in with your own science links, crazy space news, etc.
• Last and First Men - the most influential Sci Fi novel of all time
Written in 1930 by the British Olaf Stapledon, this visionary flyover of the next two billion years of human evolution prompted both Arthur C. Clarke to proclaim that, "No other book had a greater influence on my life," and H.P. Lovecraft to call it "the greatest in all the field" of science fiction. His version of the distant future is uncanny, familiar, prescient:
Each of us is mentally a distinct individual, though his ordinary means of communication with others is 'telepathic.' But frequently he wakes up to be a group-mind. When this communal awakening occurs, each individual experiences all the bodies of the group as 'his own multiple body,' and perceives the world equally from all those bodies. But over and above this simple enlargement of the experienced field, is the awakening into new kinds of experience. Of this obviously, I can tell you nothing, save that it differs from the lowlier state more radically than the infant mind differs from the mind of the individual adult, and that it consists of insight into many unsuspected and previously inconceivable features of the familiar world of men and things.
...And that's it. Thanks again for your precious time and attention. May this newsletter serve all beings! You know how to get ahold of me if you want to.
