Michael Garfield's Love Without End Tour Newsletter: June 2021

"We're in a freefall into future. We don't know where we're going. Things are changing so fast, and always when you're going through a long tunnel, anxiety comes along. And all you have to do to transform your hell into a paradise is to turn your fall into a voluntary act. It's a very interesting shift of perspective and that's all it is...joyful participation in the sorrows and everything changes."

– Joseph Campbell

Consummations and conversations: I've been very busy lately in the Future Fossils Facebook group and Discord server but have nonetheless brought these works — some very long in the incubator — to completion. The relief is real, the resolution deep! Here are my latest psychoactive brain treats to augment your navigation of the weirdness that is 2021:

NEW MUSIC 65 MILLION YEARS IN THE MAKING

Listen at Soundcloud • Purchase at Bandcamp • Save to your Spotify collection

"Life Finds A Way" (and the one-minute instrumental coda "Hyperstition") have been in the works since my dorm room days in 2002 — so not exactly the Cretaceous, but might as well be.

This latest addition to my ongoing album-in-progress The Age of Reunion (which you can scope out and pre-order here) brings acoustic guitar, synthesizer, Chapman Stick, organ, electronic drums, and four-part vocal harmonies together into something appropriately bombastic, groovy, operatic, and apocalyptic to serve as the vehicle for proggy epic pop adventures into the pre-and-post-historic.

Here are a few different ways to engage. Get out your headphones and hold onto your butts:

🦖 Soundcloud (for time-stamped commenting) 🦖

🦖Bandcamp (for lossless audio downloads) 🦖
🦖 Spotify (for saving to playlists) 🦖

Patreon supporters get some sweet exegesis with an extra half-hour of my Ian Malcolm-esque ranting on the inspiration behind this song: technological evolution, complex systems, accidental magic, reality ruptures, and the end of the world. If you're "like me...a digger," then dig into all that here:

UPCOMING BOOK CLUB CALLS

Speaking of awesome science fiction and general weirdness, we're discussing two amazing books in the Future Fossils Book Club this summer. I hope you can join us!

I PROMISED YOU I WOULDN'T STOP PAINTING

And now that I have a place I can customize however I like (the pressure!), I started small by upcycling our trashy old mailbox into something that screams "weirdos live here." Next up: my closet doors...

NEW FUTURE FOSSILS EPISODES

Lastly, while I'm not toiling away at my admittedly-excellent (4.8 stars on 147 Apple Podcast reviews) day job show, Complexity Podcast, I've been knocking out some wonderful conversations and solo casts for Future Fossils. And here they are:

I talk with Mikey Lion, music producer and co-founder of Desert Hearts, and Malena Grosz, creator of The Party Pro Toolkit and director of Stargate Reunion, about the pandemic’s distortions of time and community, flow states and festival time, gatherings in the No New Normal, the impact of stage design and architecture on how community events shape individual experience, the tension between intimacy and scale, DMT and other life-changing experiences, the good parts of tribalism, psychedelic integration, and the future of festival economics…

Watch Here

On 23 May 2021 as part of the latest Complexity Weekend hackathon, I hosted a live panel discussion with four unique and fascinating minds:

Michaela Emch is a communication and marketing specialist, translator, cultural mediator, biomimicry practitioner, safari guide, keen naturalist and biology enthusiast. Andréa Naccache is a psychoanalyst and a doctoral student in philosophy of law at the University of São Paulo, with an MBA in finance. Meredith Tromble is an artist and writer who makes installations, drawings, and performances. Timothy Clancy work ranges from sophisticated simulations of violence & instability to systems thinking for business.

We discussed the relationship between the arts and sciences, conflicts of interest between systems and individual people, and many more interesting threads at the intersection of complex systems research and creative innovation.

The first in a new biweekly, patrons-only sidestream for author-read essays, commentary on current events, mailbag replies, and experimental format episodes. First up is a reading of and commentary on my Part Six of my book-forever-in-progress, How To Live in The Future: "The Future Is Disgusting."

Here's a teaser:

The future that I want, the only future I believe worth living in, is full of love — and love is all about relaxing boundaries. Erupting into our Italian gardens, smashing manicured taxonomies, and popping our extropian illusions of a better life beyond constraints, love is the greatest trickster that reveals distinctions in imagined unity and unifies apparent opposites, to hell with definitions; it is time for you to learn.

And that ensures the future will be positively gross, because as every set of paired antitheses resolves within the immanent-transcendent whole appearing as the herald of another era, nemeses are written into myth together; warring faiths combine their efforts to create economies; and everything you loathe today is indispensably a part of who you are, in truth, and who you could become if you survive and live receptive to the gnarly lessons of reflection offered up to you by love.

Someday all you hate will lose its charge within a greater truth — which, in a way, is even worse than knowing it will just persist. No: it becomes a part of you, and therefore worthy of your love; you learn to dig the things you feared; your brain adapts to shifting norms; we really are remarkable in our plasticity, and you’ll regard you-reading-now as hopelessly naïve, and small, and understandable, for all your ignorances are enshrined and glow within as relics of the origin of that more terrible and beautiful, awake and all-embracing thing you are.