“We can only navigate outside as well as we can navigate within.”
– Timothy Leary
I'm not really clear on how I've managed to get so much done with all the parenting and day job, lately, but regardless I'm pleased to share these latest highlights with you! Enjoy and feel free to write back if the spirit moves you. (And of course, if you like this stuff I hope you'll share the newsletter with a friend; not touring festivals anymore means I get almost zero chances to build out this list the way I would prefer to, one inspiring in-person conversation at a time...)
🎨 New Art: "Liquid Sunrise" Blotter Art (Signed/Numbered)
The Shakedown Gallery in San Francisco is the world's premier source for blotter art, and I'm honored to finally get some artwork into their collection! Grab your own (perfectly innocuous and legal) prints of my piece "Liquid Sunrise" — released in a signed and numbered series of 100 as part of their special Bicycle Day 2022 drop, including works by my friend and hero Randal Roberts and many other greats — for a better price than pretty much any other print deal I've ever offered. Much like the peak experience they depict, they won't last...but at least you'll never have a bummer "oh man, human AGAIN?" come down.
🎸 New Solo Acoustic EP: Empty Frames
These are placeholders to stake and commit to record songs I love that aren't ready for prime time yet. A song ought to stand on its own and I hope these do, but this is basically me sharing my songbook with a feather in it for a bookmark. They mean a lot to me but I haven't found the time to give them a proper studio treatment yet. We have:
1. Ian - about my baby son, with maybe some Elliott Smith and (sleepy) Tenacious D and Lana Del Rey swimming around in there.
2. A Merry Mess - not sure exactly but a tip of the hat to Jeff Buckley and my friend Mitch Mignano.
3. The 120th Shrine - regarding The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, kind of a cowboy ballad since you're riding a horse a lot, but also gliding.
4. Seeing Like A State - with a nod to James C. Scott's book, about mathematically guaranteed injustice and the tragedy of being one of the ants out of a plane window.
5. Buried Together - for Nikki Taylor, with whom I intend to be interred, God Willing.
6. Frog Seven Green - a vignette of life in a hot tub under shade sails on the porch of a basement apartment nestled up close to the mountains in Santa Fe with a young family.
credits
📝 New Writing: The Future Is Noisy
A nearly-completed draft of my first new chapter of How To Live in The Future since 2018 (!) is now available to Patreon supporters, and is in edit now to be published (in what I'm sure will be a very different-looking for) at Return.Life soon. Here's an excerpt to whet your appetite:
Noise is here to stay because making noise on purpose can jolt a system out of its rut. The fool in the king’s court or the heyoka at Sun Dance both keep the social system from settling into maladaptive complacency. When mass extinctions disrupt the byzantine symbiotic networks of mature ecosystems, fine-tuned specialists take the hit and loose, messy generalists that can catch as catch can — the raccoons, cockroaches, Lystrosaurs — misfit organisms that seemed forever out of place suddenly come into their own and help reboot the entire food web. It pays for the biosphere to keep these clowns around.
Then there’s Michelle Girvan, who explains that literally just the live feed of a camera trained on sloshing water in a bucket is enough to double the predictive horizon of a machine learning algorithm trained to model weather…seeing further by leaning less on memory. Similarly, Erik Hoel hypothesizes that dreams function to prevent “overfitting” of the brain to its conditioning, allowing it to generalize from past experiences to novel future scenarios. It would fit, then, that not only jazz and noise music but the myriad other dreamlike expressions of modern art — from surrealism to cubism to combinatorial music — all emerged at a time when we started to “lose the plot,” or perhaps more accurately realize that the story the modern world had been telling itself was nothing more than a linear projection drawn poorly from heavily biased historical sampling.
In times when you can’t trust the score civilization has been following, it’s a more sensible recourse to stop following the conductor and play by ear. Cognitive scientist Tyler Marghetis, in studying the quantitative data tracking critical transitions among improvisational jazz ensembles, notes moments when the entire group breaks through and shifts together all at once, like a pirouetting murmuration of starlings; the pace and immediacy of this kind of response is impossible for those who insist on an objective “view from nowhere” – a monolithic canonical version of reality – and refuse to accept that, in Thompson’s words, “A fact requires a theory just as a flame requires an atmosphere.” In other words, people who refuse to relax their focus, let figure dissolve into ground, enter a flow state that can respond faster than the clunky executive processing of the frontal lobe, and dream with the agility of a disinhibited mind in attunement. Education at the edge of history can’t rely on the authority of educators brought up in a world that no longer exists; a postapocalyptic pedagogy for digital natives discards rote memorization and writes curricula that emphasize curiosity, lifelong learning, collective intelligence, and the power of search.
Become a patron if you want to soak up my illuminated mystic science rantings right away...
🎧 New Future Fossils Podcast Episode 185
Be forewarned: This latest episode is some extremely heady stuff. But thankfully, it's also full of heart and soul...
Back in February, Jonathan Rowson posted two clips (here and here) from his latest in-progress writing tlimito Twitter, where it succeeded in baiting a bunch of the folks with whom I regularly interact as members of the so-called "Liminal Web" into reflecting on the value of partitioning a global boil of loosely-associated "sensemakers," "meta-theorists," and "systems poets" into well-meaning but ultimately dubious cultural taxonomies.
I had plenty to say about this (here, here, and here) from my awkwardly consistent stance of being both enthusiastic and skeptical about apparently everything. But so did numerous other brilliant and inspiring people, including Bonnitta Roy, Stephanie Lepp, Ashley Colby, and Jason Snyder – all of whom I've wanted on the show for a while (with the exception of Stephanie, with whom I had a great chat back on episode 154). So I took it upon myself to press for an on-the-record group discussion about the virtue and folly of putting labels on sociocultural processes and networks that are defined by their liminality: Is this ultimately a good thing, or does it just kill the magic in a foolish servility to economic pressures and the desire to be recognized as A Movement?
When we finally met at the end of March for our call, the conversation turned to issues with more urgency and gravitas — namely: Is it even helpful to spend all of our time talking about crises and metacrises when there is so much work to be done?
What transpired was easily one of the more profound and inspired conversations I've ever had the good fortune to host on this show, although it was also more beset with insane and infuriating technical problems that getting it ready for release took over thirty hours of excruciating editing. I am so immensely glad I am finally done and can get on with my damn life! But also that I get to share this with you and hear what the rest of our scene(s) have to contribute to this discourse.
📚 Next Book Club: When We Cease To Understand The World
The Future Fossils Media Club returns next month on May 14th at 1:00 - 2:30 pm Mountain (12 noon Pacific, 3 pm Eastern) with a discussion of Benjamin Labatut's award-winning When We Cease To Understand The World, a visionary exploration of "the complex ties between scientific and mathematical understanding and personal and historical catastrophe...a book that fuses fact and fiction to revelatory and profoundly disconcerting effect."
You can grab your copy at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org Reading List — and whether or not you can make this call, I recommend going there to check out an extensive (although not comprehensive YET) list of recommendations we've discussed on the show. (I love Bookshop.org because it's a small but still nontrivial diversion of excess funds away from Amazon and toward local booksellers...and I get a tiny piece of every sale at no additional cost to you-the-buyer.)
"I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.”
– Blaise Pascal
