"The truth, from my perspective, is that the world, indeed, is ending – and is also being reborn. It's been doing that all day, every day, forever. Each time we exhale, the world ends; when we inhale, there can be, if we allow it, rebirth and spiritual renewal. It all transpires inside of us. In our consciousness, in our hearts. All the time."
So! Craziest summer of our lives so far? I'm only twenty-eight but this year's cross between the energies of 1929 and 1969 has me singing the changes; regardless of what futures you imagine are on their way, everyone I talk to is feeling a massive shift in our understanding of social norms, relationships, and personal beliefs at the same time that rapid technological changes are reshaping our very definition of "human." What a perfect time to be on tour working to inspire everyone to ground themselves in loving participation through these transformations!
On that note, my intense schedule has kept me from posting all of the new art and music as quickly as I'd like, but here are my photographs from Wakarusa, Desert Rocks, and Impulse Festivals over the last few weeks. I'll continue to add to this album as the summer continues – for now this is the best way to get behind my eyes and see festival season as I do (minus the rain- and dust-storms). Enjoy!
Oh, and I painted a skateboard! Picked up a couple of blank decks in Wichita during my move to Austin last fall, and this is the first of them – dedicated to my awesome skateboarding brother John Garfield, who wows all with his legendary skillz. Click the pictures for a closer view:
Yes, it's for sale. I'm not sure for how much but if you want it, drop me a line. This is a concept piece, not meant for skating – but the hope is that I can show this to a skateboard company and convince them to collaborate on something. (Know anybody who'd be into that?)
For anyone who wonders what inspires me – or wants to see me at my jazziest, my friends at New Basics Poetry in Austin set up this cool speaking opportunity on their bus (aka guerrilla venue) downtown during South By Southwest. I winged this forty-five minute talk about creativity, evolution, aliens – oh yeah, and my work – with musical accompaniment by my favorite cyberguitar recordings. It's a DIY multimedia philosophy performance, as lively and spark-throwing as I could make it.
Upcoming Gigs
I'll be playing cyberacoustic guitar improvisations (folktronic prayerformances honoring the sacredness of each here and now) as well as making live art at all of these amazing events this summer. These are just the festivals, though – I have more dates all over the country on my full calendar, here on facebook and here on my website. Hope to see you out there!
"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."
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...
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.
available - 2009 04 03 Mondrian Hotel (DJ Maji) - 20" across
Attempt #2 at using a compass on a circular canvas to explore new territory. This one is a bit more "vegetable" and less "mineral" than the last...a more complex design, intentionally lacking in radial symmetry (numerous different radii with the compass, repeated with rules but somewhat irregularly). Tiny variations in radius due to the dulling pencil on my compass gave it a slight asymmetry, which is ultimately more organic anyway.
I have always wanted to do more charitable work with my art – specifically, to do live painting at a charity dinner. And I finally got my chance when Mesa's Broadway Palm Theatre, under the PR direction of the amazing Gary Kimble, organized a benefit gala for Emma and Taylor Bailey. These girls were born joined at the heart, and that heart is now failing due to the stress of having to pump blood for two bodies. So Gary and company put together OneHeartUmbrellaCampaign.org (a tie-in with the Broadway Palm's production of Singin' In The Rain), where they're auctioning off umbrellas signed by a tremendous array of celebrities (including Debbie Reynolds, William H. Macy, Alice Cooper, Ellen DeGeneres, Josh Groban, Amy Grant, Goldie Hawn, Hugh Jackman, Jim Belushi, Reba McEntire, Geoffrey Rush, JK Simmons, Michael Phelps, Firesign Theatre, Kevin Bacon, and the full casts of every production on Broadway, just for starters) in order to raise money for their post-operation care (their separation and the double heart transplant is being donated by the surgical team). I made it very clear to Gary that I had to be a part of this, that I needed to donate a live painting to the auction. I taped an umbrella to my easel and worked on it off to the side while they put on an awesome variety show and dinner for a packed house.
At the end of the night, the Taylor's priest came up to me and suggested I offer them the umbrella as a memoir – after all, there are a ton of umbrellas already up for auction. And I did, and they took it home. So there it is...like Gary said to the crowd that night, in one sense these girls gave the biggest gift of anyone, because they gave everyone the opportunity to do good with their energies, to contribute to something meaningful. There is now a foundation to fund the medical care of children like Emma and Taylor who were born with such rare complications that no other organization exists to support them. And I finally got to do a live painting for something real.
2009 04 05 XL Men's Urban Pipeline (Community Arts Expo)
I knocked this one out while chilling at a delightful monthly event that transforms one of downtown's empty parking lots into a community art fair. It was as strange as it was charming...but only because I had no idea before coming out that most of the participants were vocal members of the LBGT community (the DJ was pounding the gay disco all Sunday afternoon, much to the chagrin of those such as myself, whose booths were set up right in front of his speakers). There was some lovely work there, though, that made the day just fantastic – my personal favorite being the dichroic glass pendants by Nick & Brent at SweetEarthArt.com.
2008 12 18 & 2009 04 10 & 11 Chipper's Lanes, Mondrian Hotel, & Tempe Beach Part (Zoogma, Pere La Chaise, & My Fest) - 16"24"
As befits my "Phoenix is Purgatory" hypothesis, I've taken the opportunity to circle back around and work on a few old paintings that didn't feel totally finished. You know, burn off some karma. This is one of them, from my Colorado tour with Zoogma last December (original painting here). If it feels a little "rain" themed, it is...my normal outdoor set-up at Mondrian Hotel was compromised by the first Phoenix rains since February. Apparently, rainstorms here are sporadic, and I kept moving my easel back outside, inside, outside...eventually just camping out between the DJ and the front door, while everyone squeezed like clowns into the bar. I finished it the next day at Tempe's gorgeous waterside park, where they were having a huge convention of non-profit organizations to raise awareness of the various programs available to benefit children. I set up next to the stage for my friend Nicole Duran's new project, RaiseTheVibration.org...the music was surprisingly angsty and screamy given the context, but the vibes were indeed high. I even got free reiki from a beautiful woman. :)
Be glad I don't have the energy to give the full story of painting at this rave by the Firebird Raceway on the south extremity of town...it was a very long, very interesting night where I was set up between four other painters, some of whom where quite friendly and some of whom were strangely cold (as if that's required of someone in order to be professional). This is another act of closure (original painting here)...I went over the first night's work with a coat of spraypaint, then one of my fat yellow graffiti pens, and ended up with something that reminds me of one of the local desert flora reaching up into the psychedelic architecture of night (Seriously...what makes you think there isn't some vast, transcendental structure webbing our planet's sky? You really think that you, with your primate brain, evolved on the savannah to comprehend distances of a few mere miles, would even notice something a light-year across?)
Same party. The absolute freakin' highlight of my entire musical evening was Daedelus's mashup of Daft Punk's "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" and Imogen Heap's "Hide And Seek." Oh my God, it was amazing. I'm still getting chills just thinking about it. Check that dude out if you haven't already.
But anyway, the painting...I swiped a few big masonite panels from the Raise The Vibration's area at My Fest, where they were letting people just go to town on them and paint inspirational slogans or whatever to display around the camp. At the end of the day they had a few left over so I made out like a masonite bandit. But since I went straight from there to the rave, I didn't have time to give them the typical black priming coat, so with this one I started by using my 3" black graffiti marker and giving it my first ever "brush-textured" background. It kind of harkens back to my second-ever live painting, once upon a time in Boulder. You probably can't tell from that tiny picture, but I signed it both ways so it can be hung "upright" either horizontally or vertically.
One of my best-ever live painting stories happened to me while working on this piece. Earlier that night I met the daughter of someone whose work has had a profound influence on me: Drunvalo Melchizedek, the author of The Ancient Secret Of The Flower Of Life. We got to talking and by the time I had started this painting, I had given her one of my extra masonite panels to work on. She wanted to use one of my easels but since it was already being used to display another painting I was trying to sell, I suggested she go find some twine and tie her painting to my back, so we could paint conga-train style. And she did. And we did. It was probably the most ridiculous thing I have ever done in public. Matt Brown of The House Of Flying Paint was working next to me and stopped what he was doing to walk over and give me a very curious look. "I don't know," I told him. "It's a first for me, too!"
Unfortunately, we didn't get any pictures of it.
available - 2009 04 12 Easter Moon (Rabbit In The Moon - Urban Pipeline Men's Medium)
The last act that night was the oh-so-Easter-appropriate Rabbit In The Moon, which is widely regarded as one of the finest shows in rave culture. Admittedly, their costuming was amazing, but given my fondness for live electronica, and since the flyer said "100% live show," I was expecting a little bit more than one guy on a computer and another guy shouting weird kraut-rock stuff like, "I – control you! I – control you!" over and over. That said, almost everyone was at the first stage to see them and from where the painters were set up, between stages one and two, there was very little traffic, so I got to work on this new shirt in almost complete peace.
And about the shirt: I've been thinking a lot recently about the massive global transition that I believe is coming in the next few years...I've done a lot of research into actual hard science about this stuff, astrophysics and geomagnetics, evolutionary biology, and the postmodern science of time. And as far as I can tell, there is a real consensus about something major going down in 2012, not just among the pre-modern indigenous cultures, but from numerous modern methodologies, as well. So the whole "world as egg about to hatch" thing has been preoccupying me, recently. "I'll split this shell" is a line from one of my old songs, "Time Machine Dream". The image came back around on a new octave sometime in the last few weeks, with all of the reading on hyperdimensional intelligences and chaotic bifurcations I've been doing. Plus, it seemed right, for Easter: a visual pun on the resurrection of Christ just as we seem geared up for what some people are likely to interpret as the Second Coming. It's either a happy little shirt or way too damn heavy. I can't tell, these days.
> Writing
Three recent essays from my Visionary Music Blog about the shifting self-other boundaries of contemporary music performance:
For whatever reasons, our culture has decided that we are not all musicians. Instead, a few trained (or not-so trained) specialists are expected to get up on stage so we can live vicariously through them. There are musicians, and there are spectators. But I don't think the distinction is so clear cut; we're all participants in something larger called a "concert" that requires both artist and audience in the same way that fertilization requires both male and female.
I don't want us all relinquishing our creative agency to whomever The Machine decides is going to be The Next Big Thing. In an age when we can all produce our own books/video/music/fine art/theater, I think it's time for us to reclaim our inspiration from centralized corporate governance. At the same time, even as an artist I prefer to let the guy on stage take the reigns for a little while.
I believe that we as a species are currently witnessing the evolution of a new relationship between the inner and outer worlds, renegotiating that tricky self/other boundary...and in the process we might ultimately reach a new platform of musical development at which the individual has internalized not just the other players, but the instruments themselves.
