The Evolution of Surveillance Part 2, Looper's Night Archive, Skateboard Preorders, Perspectives on a New Age, Questions from a Grade-School Art Class, Another Hat

"Tribalism is very hard to reconcile with progressive visions of a world of equality, fairness, and understanding. The moment you being to see other human beings as being somehow outside your perimeter, you can believe they’re less than human – objects to use or, worse, destroy."

– Connor Wood

"To fight the empire is to be infected by its derangement. Whoever defeats part of the empire becomes the empire; it proliferates like a virus…thereby it becomes its enemies."

– Philip K. Dick, Valis

For the first time in six years, I have no upcoming gigs on my calendar.  Art Outside was a profound, beautiful farewell to my festival season and a lovely port to kiss goodbye as I set out to sea on a frightening new adventure in self-discovery, study, writing, studio work, and wide-eyed travel.

I don't know who I am or what I am becoming, but I promise I'll have even more time to help you even more directly than I did before.

• If you'd like Skype/Hangout lessons in guitar, songwriting, live art, public speaking, or any of the other things I do, email me and I'll be happy to help.

• If you'd like to scoop a superb cut-rate deal on any of my available original live paintings, now is your chance to hit me up with an offer I can't refuse.  Split payments and offensively low bids encouraged.

• If you'd like new custom work, you know how to get ahold of me with your budget and ideas...

• And if you want to book me for music, art, or speaking, it would be my pleasure to fly out there.

For now, I'm off to the cave.  See you with more inspiring goodies in two weeks.  Enjoy, and be well!

View From The Horizon: Perspectives On A New Age

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Afraid of the machines? Worried the universe is running down into chaos? Afraid of a surveillance state, or ecstatic that we're nearing The Ascension? (Choose your flavor.) Well, cut it out. The more things change, the more they stay the same. This talk should help you keep a healthy realist optimism for, oh, another twenty years or so...

Michael Garfield at Burning Man's Center Camp Café (in a talk originally titled "These Are The Good Old Days: Reverse Nostalgia From A Citizen Of The Future") explores the basic dyads of life and death, past and future, Heaven & Hell, self & other – and explains how to move beyond them for Better Living in the 21st Century.

Note: Due to dust in the equipment, this recording was cut short right before the Q & A. Typical Burning Man technical difficulties. Apologies!

The Evolution of Surveillance, Part 2: Red Queens & Evil Eyes

The next installment of my serial essay on cyborg spirituality and evolutionary conflict is now online at Reality Sandwich:

With the evolution of the eye came predation, and with predation came herd behaviors...So began an evolutionary arms race that modern biologists describe with the Red Queen Hypothesis, named for the way that teeth and armor, poisons and immunities, continue to leapfrog each other on a treadmill as generations come and go. Police call it 'escalation.' The logic is simple: over numberless generations, offensive and defensive strategies sharpen each other, drawing both into remarkable intricacy and precisely interlocking interdependence...  (Read more.)

Last chance to preorder my skateboard!

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The boards are almost in – now is your last chance to preorder my limited series Creation Skateboards deck artist-direct!  $85 includes the board (signed, if you like), a sticker of the painting, a download of my forthcoming album, and shipping anywhere in the US.

To order, use paypal to send money to my  email with a note including your shipping address.  That's it!  Your board will be at your doorstep ready to shred or hang on the wall in a few short weeks.

Looper's Night Collaboration Jam Archive!

Free (Pay-What-You-Like) Downloads

Over the last eight months I have held about a dozen experiments in musical collaboration between people who have never jammed before, all of us running through my multi-channel loop station so I can remix everyone's live performances on the fly.  Half DJ, half conductor, all terror!  What started as a residency at Flipnotics Coffeehouse in Austin grew wings and came with me on tour this summer for awesomely fun experiences at Rootwire Festival and Burning Man, among others.

Now my favorite Looper's Night performances are free for your enjoyment.  Caution: we get weird.

My Answers To Questions from a Grade-School Art Class

Tia Parr & Cory Nevins collected these questions from their art class with The Homegrown Kids Of Conway, Arkansas, Fall 2013. Here's an excerpt:

Q: Where do you think the future of art is going, and as an artist, do you feel that you are co-creator in the evolution of art?

A: I think we're creating more and more media and that art is more popularly understood as being creative in any medium. So there will be gene-poets who make new kinds of animals and plants, there will be professional dreamers who share their recorded imaginations, there will be mind sculptors who connect people's experiences in novel ways, there will be artistic explorations in robotics (musical sculptures that play along with you like living bandmates, and buildings that respond to your mood), there will be chefs who make impossible foods out of 3D printers...and there will STILL be painters, and blues guitarists, and standup comedians, and all of the other art forms. We will continue finding new ways to express ourselves and share those ideas. (Read more.)

Aaaand, More Hats

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My last bass drop hat ever.  I'm still totally open to other designs – power animals?  magical sigils?  sacred geometries? – if you'd like something with personal flair.  Let's make something that is uniquely YOURS.  You'll still be proud to wear it in a decade...

A Manifesto For Live Art | The Evolution of Surveillance | New Tunes From Black Rock City | Indiegogo Campaign Update

It's time to get real with you all.

Landing from another three month tour's been really difficult.  There's no use in hiding that the life I've chosen is full of its own unique hardships – like financial insecurity, endless car repairs, and coming home to new property managers changing everything about the one "stable" place I know.  I can talk about change all I like, but like most people I struggle to embody it.

I've loved dedicating my blood, sweat, and tears to festival culture for the last six years but I have to wonder what more I could be doing with my life.  There must be some way to make a bigger impact in the world, to serve more people with my gifts.

This blog goes out to 7,000 people, now.  I want to hear from you and learn what I can do to make my presence in your life more meaningful, inspiring, and useful than it is.  What could I be doing better?  How can I repay you for your time and your support?  Let me know.

...And while you're pondering that, I'll just keep doing what I love.  Here are two of my finest essays yet; a fierce new free live EP from Burning Man; and some fun new merchandise for supporters of my Indiegogo campaign:

Painting While Dancing: A Manifesto For Live Art

It takes a special kind of person to be a live painter. It’s one of these emergent 21st Century art forms that remix performer and audience – exposing the mystique of the artist and inviting everyone else into the party. Most of us are used to – maybe even tired of – explaining what we’re doing to unfamiliar fans and promoters. Being an artist is weird enough; but being a live painter requires a person to actually thrive on the combination of fear and wonder that people inevitably bring to encounters with the strange.  (Read more.)

New Merch For Supporters of my Indiegogo Campaign!

This campaign is about so, so much more than shiny new stuff – that's all just there to subsidize the deeper and more meaningful work I'm doing to start meaningful conversations about our rapidly-changing world.

I made an event page for my work as a Google Glass Explorer where I've been sharing tons of news and articles about the questions of Big Data, health issues, and general anxiety about the future raised by advanced technologies like Glass.  Definitely check it out.

And last week I hosted a public chat on Tawkers, a really cool site for social discourse, about all of this.  You can read the archived conversation here:  "Art & Spirit in The Age of Surveillance."

On that note...I promised all of you a new essay series combining my twin passions for the past and future, and here it is – part one of my paleontology/transhumanism remix:

The Evolution of Surveillance: Burgess Shale to Google Glass

New dimensions unfurled and into them grew an exponential burst of minds and bodies, urged by necessity into new games of sight. Endowed with the radical new ability to detect at a distance, the naïve ecologies of Earth accelerated into unprecedented combinations of locomotive swimming chasers and chased. Simple musculatures adapted to navigate new axes, to maneuver. Surveillance – literally, "to watch from above" – was born...and animals like Anomalocaris were the black helicopters of the prehistoric ocean.  (Read more.)

Free Download: Earth Song For Sky Dance [EP]

This year marks my second stint as the official music for Center Camp Café's aerial fabric dance showcase at Burning Man.  (Here are two videos from 2011.)  They get up there on aerial silks and dazzle a captive audience; I hang out on the ground and improvise a live electronic soundtrack to their movement on guitar and effects.  Earth Song For Sky Dance.

Think Boards of Canada meets instrumental Nine Inch Nails.  Can you hear the dust in my pedals?  :)

This is just the first of several performances I'll release for free this fall.  Something happened to me this summer and I feel like my live sets are suddenly much groovier, more textured, and passionate.  I'm opening new portals with this whole cyberguitar thing, and really look forward to sharing the best of my shows from Gratifly, Rootwire, Fractal Planet, and Scoot Inn with you all soon.  In the meantime, enjoy this one...it's a quickie but I like it.

Guitar Looping & Aerial Dance at Burning Man 2013

I recorded video through Glass while playing, so you can get a sense for how dizzying it is to try and operate a guitar, all of those pedals, and keep an eye on my collaborators while I'm playing.  Apologies in advance for the vertigo.

Playing & Speaking at Art Outside 2013

This is my favorite festival of fall, each year, and one of the highest artist/guest ratios of any of them year-round.  I'll be performing on the spectacularly beautiful laser-cut Folk It Up stage late night on Saturday and giving a talk on "Entertainment as Social Action" in the Pavilion on Saturday afternoon, as well as making an increasingly-rare live painting appearance with Third Coast Visions, the art collective my friends and I started here in Texas.  

This year's lineup is populated with many of my favorite local, regional, national, and international acts and the grounds themselves will be a magical wonderland of creativity, so I hope to see you there.

Parting Thought:  Separated at Birth?

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My Creation Skateboard Is Here! | Burning Man Through Google Glass | Rootwire Mural Video | New Live Painting

"As consciousness expands, so does the risk of insanity."
– John Horgan

"Our idea of unity and our way of solving conflicts is simply to eliminate one of the two parties...But this is the habitual dualist's solution to the problem of dualism:  to solve the dilemma by chopping off one of the horns."
– Alan Watts

My Creation Skateboards deck is finally here!

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Before I say another word, let me simply revel with you in a moment of modest success:  back in January over 1300 friends, family, and total strangers voted my design to victory in the international Creation Skateboards DIY Contest.  Thank you guys so much!  I just got word from the company that the boards are on their way – and not a moment too soon, because I'm broke as a joke after summer tour and needed another kickass perk for my indiegogo campaign to help support me while I pursue my Greater Calling as writer of provocative, futuristic meta-disciplinary ecodelia.  

So please:  buy this skateboard by contributing to my campaign.  You're helping me dedicate more time to sharing my words and insights with the world, and less time to hustling art.

Here's what's been on my mind, of late:

Someone whose opinion I greatly respect just pointed out to me that my posts about Google Glass sound like unequivocally positive fanboy raving - "breathless like a nun in adoration" - and so I want to be totally clear about how conflicted and ambivalent I am about all of this. It's important you guys know where I'm coming from, and that I'm not just gleefully strolling into Borgdom. In fact, the only reason I took on this opportunity as a beta tester is because the whole thing scares me silly.

I'm terrified by the knowledge that the people in power today think human beings can be reduced to data and reprogrammed...by the thought that I may not even recognize my children as human, or the world they grow up in as one in which we can survive. That we will be so caught up in the "bread and circus" of our Brave New World that won't even remember what we've lost.

But fearing the technological future feels to me like a symptom of the same dissociation that got us into this mess in the first place: the idea that we are separate from the automatic, unconscious realm of nature and the body, that we are one thing and the planet is another.

That is exactly why I agreed to become a Glass Explorer – to face these fears, to better understand them, to find what peace I can in my heart torn between enthusiasm for a world of unimagined possibilities and grief for a world crushed underfoot by machines. Demons are angels denied, hell is heaven resisted. I feel the urging of a greater Self and I'd rather help it come alive in love than fear.

Kevin Kelly inspired me with the thesis of his book What Technology Wants that we take a more deliberate, discerning approach to technological adoption. That we not simply rush in aroused by the thrill of novelty. That we treat our technologies (both machines and ideas) as our children - acknowledging that they have a life of their own, and we can only do our best to rear them lovingly.

What some might call giving myself to Google in human sacrifice, I call choosing to love a problem child, in the hope that taking the third path between the past-loathing uncritical techno-optimist and future-loathing neo-luddite reactionary will lead us into a world where the Made can get along with the Born.

If I'm a sacrifice, it's in the service of trying to teach people how to relate to technology with caution, care, sensitivity, and discernment. I think the vast majority of my fellow Glass Explorers are just cracked out on a Future High and walking into an open manhole. All the more reason to try and be a loud, exemplary exception to the rule. Figure out what good things can be done with this, and how to think about it in a healthy way.

The knights of old wielded double-edged swords. They were trusted to do so. Just because something could hurt you doesn't mean we shouldn't use it. (In fact, "If guns are outlawed...") So yeah, I'm an enthusiast. A reluctant enthusiast. I want to do my small part to steer this in the right direction.

"The good news is that the increase in entropy of the civilization we're experiencing is, in a sense, feeding the whole new information of a planetary culture. It's precisely the chaos of an industrial society that is creating the passion to create alternatives, so that the entropy or noise is creating the possibilities for innovation and music."

–William Irwin Thompson

This is a conversation.  Feel free to weigh in on Facebook or Indiegogo, or email me personally.  I'll find a way to answer you in the essays I'm writing about this over the next several months.  Your feedback is invaluable to me.

In the meantime, below are the some of the videos I've taken through Glass at Burning Man & Rootwire:

Message To Your Future Self, Part Three

Daniel Pinchbeck on Surveillance & Transparency

The Cathedral of Celestial Mathgic Through Glass

Rootwire Collaboration Mural Through Glass

The Arrest

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Dedicated to everyone violated by the prison industrial complex for a nonviolent crime.  I wanted to do a painting that disturbed me, that was visceral and unsettling.  That felt violating.  (And, I wanted to ape the style of my homie and fellow live painter Andy Reed.)  I don't know if I pulled it off...looking at it now, all I can think is "space bacon."  Which in some weird way, I guess, is appropriate.  :P

Painted live at

Ecstatic Saturdays (Dallas, TX) 2013 04 13 - Bliss Goddess

The Upper Decks (ATX) 2013 04 19 - Sun Salutation

The Parish (ATX) 2013 04 27 - A Live One, Papadosio

The Granada Theater (Lawrence, KS) 2013 05 01 - Papadosio

Californos (KCMO) 2013 06 29 - Luminaries, Miss Conception, Wstndgrl

The Parish (ATX) 2013 07 04 - Psymbionic, Gladkill, Andreilien (Heyoka)

The Parish (ATX) 2013 07 05 - Mountain Standard Time, Earphunk

12th & Porter (Nashville) 2013 07 21 - Gates

Click for a closer look at the process:

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That's all for now, folks.  I know it's a lot.  I'm being way too productive these days.  Thanks for sticking with it!  Love and gratitude...

MG Music on PBS! | Winning Skateboard | New Collab Painting | On The Road To AURA

"Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood."

– Henry Miller

"Some things, though right, were considered wrong for generations. Since the value of righteousness may be recognized after centuries, there is no need to crave an immediate appreciation."
– Zengetsu

Good advice for navigating an increasingly novel universe, don't you agree?  At any rate, here are my latest creative (or possibly not) offerings, for you to evaluate now and then again in a few hundred years:

MG music featured in KLRU's Arts in Context: Sky Candy

A milestone moment came for me last week when I watched the PBS documentary on my friends Austin aerial dance troupe Sky Candy and our show together last fall...and found my music woven into most of the 26-minute film.

I have film scoring fantasies, and am super honored that the producers at Arts In Context went with the music I offered them – which is now available to you for free, my first soundtrack, taken from four albums from the last two years:

~ Free Download Here ~

You can watch the KLRU documentary at this link.  And do, because it rocks.  I have a few quick appearances on screen around 7:25 and 20:00, during rehearsal and performance for the amazing Land Without Evil.

Creation Skateboards Contest -- We Won!

Thanks to everyone's help, my entry into the Creation Skateboards skateboard design contest won with over 1,300 votes – the most "likes" I've ever gotten on anything, ever.  Y'all rock, I am so grateful for my frands!  This board will join the fall lineup and live forever alongside boards by some of my favorite visionary artists.

Creation Skateboards interviewed me about my inspiration for this painting and more:

This is a year for both more light and darkness, but that dragon has a buddha riding in its brow, and that’s the Master we each have in us that knows how to abide and ride this out. We all have many voices in our heads, many neural subroutines, but we can develop the Master self-pattern that organizes and integrates the rest. That’s the best way to make it through an age of crazy transitions…

Read the whole interview here and then cruise around their site, it's pretty cool.

HeARTs Aware Collaboration Painting

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painted live by 
Chaeli Cardenas, Chance Roberts, Molly Gardner, 
Michael Garfield, Randi Southard, Nathan Jones
(...did I leave anyone out?)
on 2012 February 9 - 10 at La Zona Rosa, Austin, TX
for HeARTs Aware, a benefit for The Amala Foundation

I don't know if I can say anything authoritative about what was essentially a transpersonal effort.  Live art collabs are a very special kind of special...some kind of greater vision emerges silently from the interaction of our partialities.  Our techniques complement one another, our rhythms playing across one another sometimes intimately.  This piece is just wow, for me.  Just...wow.  It's raw, because I told everyone to just leave it be after a weekend of attention.  Time for us to move on to the next more perfectly visioned landscape....

Nonetheless, we were all still itching to touch it up.  I had to remind my friends of our half a dozen other unfinished collaborations.  Get a hefty serving of integrity with your rainbow cat!

Playing, Painting, & Speaking at AURA This Weekend!

I'm excited about this.  Beautiful locale, fabulous musicians, world-class artists in the gallery.  Stretch your body and mind together while I play live music for yoga with Kelly Searcy...or download those yoga sets and listen later, because I record so many of my sets, after all.

There will be so much cool stuff going down in the Tribal Council dome alone, not to mention the rest of this event...really, truly, I hope I'll see you there.  Florida in February.

You Know, "Hats"

The latest custom numbers for adventurous heads:

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A note on hats for the invested reader:  I'm honestly swamped with hat orders, so unless you want something ambitious and pricey, then I hope you're willing to wait.  It's a meditative, patient task, not exactly lucrative, more of a way to pray and play and practice and make money all at the same time while living in what my grandmother calls "holy poverty."  Which I enjoy...but it's not scalable – hence my renewed focus on licensing and merchandising.  If you have any ideas for how my art could be applied to something useful, let me know.  I'm open to and appreciative for your suggestions.

And with that, I must disappear into a smoke bomb to rest my fingers.  Love you.  Stay in touch if you want to.  And live amazed, because it's good for you, and all of us...

New Live Painting | MG at AURA Festival | Make My Skateboard Real!

‎"No one should be ashamed to admit they are wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that they are wiser today than they were yesterday."

– Alexander Pope

"To a sincere student, every day is a fortunate day. Time passes but he never lags behind. Neither glory nor shame can move him."

– Zengetsu

Thanks in no small part to the support of everyone reading this, 2013 already feels like a success.  Not like things have been easy for me or anyone, but they're certainly moving!  Among my recent merit badges:

• Winning "Live Painter of the Year" for 2012 in Treethugger's national people's choice awards, on the heels of completing my most time-intensive painting so far;

• Hitting #1 Experimental Musician in the world on the Reverb Nation charts (hard to believe, but I'll take it) and booking a slew of great gigs for this spring;

• Getting back to my paleontologist roots to tell the story behind my latest live painting (below).  Integration!

It's my goal this year to climb my two biggest projects – a book and a studio album – through steady, incremental work.  Telling you the stories behind each new piece gives me the chance to integrate art, science, and spirituality and put flesh on the bones of this long-avoided book-to-be.  So thanks for reading, and enjoy...!

Last Day To Vote For My Skateboard

I'm gonna squee if this becomes an actual skateboard.  And it can!  Just take two second to click the pic above and "like" my design in the Creation Skateboards design contest.  The competition is almost over and it's neck-and-neck...voting and sharing it with your friends really makes a difference!

Thanks to the 800+ people who have already voted to make this skateboard a reality...!

MG @ AURA Music & Arts Festival

This will be my first year at AURA – one juicy berry of a festival, happening this month in Florida.  Not only will I be on their all-star live art team alongside legends like Jack Shure and Jeff Wood, but I will be working in close collaboration with yoga teacher Kelly Searcy to offer live acoustic-electronic guitar music during her classes all weekend!

~ RSVP on FB: Cyberacoustic Music for Yoga at AURA Music Festival ~

SAT & SUN: 11:00 am (Morning Yoga) & 4:20 pm (Savasana Meditation)

w/ Yoga Teacher Kelly Searcy

I'll also be speaking in a fabulous lineup of presenters at the Tribal Council dome – giving a talk entitled "Taking A Cosmic Perspective."  And then of course you have the two dozen musical acts, including my friends Papadosio and their awesome sound therapy side project, EarthCry.

If you can, join us!  If you can't, I'll do my best to bring you back something beautiful.

Last Call for Preorders on Grassroots Collab #2

Would you just look at that fine hat/woman combination?  Thanks to my hottie guitar tech-slash-BFF Nicole Taylor for modeling my new artist signature design, to be released any day now (!) by Grassroots California.

Here's how you can buy one direct from the artist for $55.  That price includes shipping and handling, as well as courtesy waterproofing, so not only is it cheaper than retail but it'll last longer.  Only 420 will be made and then it's on to the next idea...

If you've already ordered yours, thanks for your patience; I'll let you know as soon as I do exactly when it'll ship.  If you haven't received the download code for that complimentary "secret" musical EP to enjoy while you wait, let me know!

This Was All Ocean, Once

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BUY 11"x17" PRINTS ($15 plus s/h)

24"x32" - paint markers on stretched canvas

Painted live at:

2012 09 21, 22 Alloveus Music and Arts Festival

(Loose Leaf, Holding Space, Sheer Khan & The Space Case)

2012 11 16 The Parish (Austin, TX) (The Floozies)

2013 01 18, 19 Crown Plaza Hotel (IAAF Convention)

2012 01 20 The Granada (Eliot Lipp, Sound Remedy)

“It is absolutely impossible to transcend the laws of nature. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws expose themselves.”

– Karl Marx

I grew up in Los Angeles, Orlando, and Kansas City – three places with vivid recognition of their prehistory:  L.A. has the La Brea Tar Pits; all of Florida is basically a giant fossil reef crawling with living fossils; and the whole Midwest has been for most of its existence a warm and shallow sea.  No matter where I clambered as a kid, there were fossil shells beneath my feet.

On the one hand, it's easy to imagine how ancient people, our ancestors, would have thought these grew out of the land – that the soil had its own simple kind of life, an intuition of our planet's invisible bioplasm, the bacterial layer into which we are born and within which we live our entire lives.  To a simple, natural religion for which life is an elemental force of nature, the stones themselves are living and "inanimate" is unthinkable.  Crystals dream their own part in the world being, resting in an ageless knowing of geometric truth – direct apprehension of "the music of the spheres."  And so of course the earth, just as the air and water, would spill forth its own kind of rocky life.

On the other hand, it's native to my own upbringing, my own wild current culture, that the Earth is in a state of constant transformation.  There are mountains where oceans used to be, and oceans where mountains used to be.  As a child I would (and still do) frequently look across valleys or up at stretching architecture, and imagine it all under water.  There are pictures of The Great Flood of 1993 all over Kansas City and Lawrence, where familiar buildings poked out like ruins from the water.  Some of those buildings have lines on them above where I can jump to reach.

In recent years, as weather has become more unpredictable, there are more and more people around the world who have lived through these drastic shifts in local landscape.  The not-always-ness of everything is sharper in relief.  The utter sameness of the news cycle is increasingly a joke against the quickening fertile chaos of our daily experience.  Everyone's a Heraclitus, these days.

And yet that groundlessness has yet to really land itself in us.  Physicists recently measured variations in what they call the "fine structure constant", or the strength of the electromagnetic force.  Modern science relies on universal constants in order to maintain its conceit that the universe can be essentially known; postmodern science, by contrast, recognizes that all knowledge is relative and that what we have really sought and found are local consistencies.  

Somewhere, billions of light years away, there are in all likelihood life forms dependent upon an entirely alien physics.  We could never teleport to meet them, or even send a message by beaming a transmission.  We would have to change, from inhabitants of our own physics to inhabitants of theirs, in order to make the trip.

This is the kind of change I believe we must hold in heart as we pass through the years to come...

Since I'm spending so much more time on each painting than I used to, it makes sense for me to try and offer these graphics in as many formats as possible.  Here are a few ways you can grab the new piece in useful formats to carry around with you or gift your friends...

(If you want this on another item, just let me know and I'll make it happen for you!)

Greeting Cards | Buttons | iPod Touch Case | Samsung Galaxy S3 Case | iPhone 5 Case

(Click to enlarge & view the process...)

Custom Hats Are Taking Over My Life

Yes, it's true.  But I don't mind, because it keeps me in a non-stop creative flow, always trying out new ideas, always honing my technique for the larger, more time-intensive paintings.  Here are the newest designs...  

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If you'd like one of your own, hit me up with your ideas – but be aware that my waiting list is about a month long right now.  (Not because it takes that long, but because I have so many other things to do!)

New Experimental Guitar Set FREE @ Archive.org

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD

I have released so many free live albums in the last couple of years that my bandcamp page is starting to look a little crowded...so henceforth I'll be putting up my free sets in the Live Music Archive over at archive.org.

This 40-set from December of last year was improvised start to finish for an audience of noise-lovin' experimental music appreciators, so I got even weirder and more rambunctious than I ordinarily would.  If you're in the mood for a real psych-rock trance-fest, this is where I would suggest you start.

(But if you're looking for prettier, more melodic, subtle stuff, then go have a listen to Love Scenes & Field Recordings, my double-disc highlights reel from last summer's tour.)

...And that's all for now.  Bless it and bless you!  You know where I am if you want to reach out.

NYE Live Painting | Embroidered GRC Hat #2 | Skateboard Design | Evolution & Guitar

"A deeper feeling of care begins with allowing ourselves to move into awe—with all of the different creatures, no matter which ones we’ve picked. If we would attend to them, we would see their colossal grandeur. Abraham Heschel said that awe is the first step into wisdom."
– Brian Swimme

Vote For Me in the Creation Skateboards Design Contest!

"LIKE" to vote for this deck here

Make this dream a reality by voting for my "Every Day Is A New Year" deck at the Creation Skateboards design competition!  One of the coolest skateboard companies ever – judging from the all-star roster of visionary artists who have contributed designs – they'll pick the winner on February 1st by whose skateboard graphic gets the most "likes" on Facebook.

Look, I'm getting tired of competitions too.  I'd rather put your precious energies and attention to a nobler cause.  But success is shared, and I know that it'd make a lot of people happy to skate on this bad boy.  So take a moment if you please!

(If you missed the post about this most-epic-of-my-paintings, you can read it here.)

And now on to the really juicy stuff...

Soaring (The Opposite of Trees in Cages)

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Painted Live At:

2012 12 30 Cervantes Masterpiece Ballroom

(Random Rab, Tipper, Ill-Esha, Human Agency, Seied, Cualli)

2012 12 31 City Hall

(Amon Tobin, EPROM, Kastle, Future Simple Project, Seied, Digital Connection)

My last painting of 2012 (and my first painting of 2013) sets the tone for a year of dynamic and reverent animal art...

I saw 67 red-tailed hawks (63 live and four dead) on my drive out to Denver for New Year's Eve...that was a pretty big hint that I had to give this bird its due in my next painting.  The hawk is a powerful animal totem, symbolizing vision, truth, and initiative – all good things to hold in heart while setting out on the new adventures that 2013 is bringing us.

The hawk reminds us to nurture our latent power, to notice what others miss, to view our lives from a higher perspective and move forward with bright eyes and a bold heart...

"When you look at yourself from a universal standpoint, something inside always reminds or informs you that there are bigger and better things to worry about.”
– Albert Einstein

"I refuse to be enslaved by a single perspective."
– Timothy "Speed" Levitch

Thanks to my design shop at Arts Projekt, you can buy this painting on a number of handy items, ranging from cool to crucial.  I only make about 10% on these sales (most of it goes to the website), but it's such a fun way to offer my art to everyone:

iPhone 5 Case | iPhone 4 Case | iPod Touch Case | Laptop Case

Laptop Skin | iPad Skin | Post Card | US Postal Stamps

Click to view the painting in progress:

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My Next Embroidered Grassroots California Flatbill

PREORDER NOW for $55 (s/h included)

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I'm so honored to have another great hat by Grassroots California coming out in just a few weeks!  The first one was a huge hit and I'm still running into people wearing it everywhere I go.  With this one I wanted a subtler, classier design that would suit more people (the first one was so overtly psychedelic it took a special type to even wear it).  And GRC just got a new mold to make size 8 1/4 hats for all of us with giant heads!

Preorder through me if you'd like to support the artist – I won't profit from any sales made on the GRC website.  I'll also waterproof your hat for you at no extra cost, and I'm happy to paint it up a little too if you'd like.

To preorder, just send $55 to michaelgarfield[at]gmail[dot]com via Paypal as a personal gift, and leave your hat size and mailing address in the note box.  I'll take it from there!  And you'll get your hat in early February, just in time for spring festivals.  :)

Evolution & Guitar:

My Set from Art Outside 2012

FREE DOWNLOAD HERE

What does my training in paleontology have to do with my career as an improvisational musician?

This is my first combination talk/concert, a blend of improvised cyberacoustic guitar loopscapes and the science ideas that inspire my musical experiments.  For a half hour introduction to both my music and ideas, you can't do better than to download this free EP.

In it, I explain why we have a lot to learn about the silver lining of humankind's  current evolutionary crisis by looking back at earlier events – like how algae almost killed off all life on Earth by inventing photosynthesis.  And how, by studying how the fin became the leg, we might be inspired to find creative new uses for old, familiar tools...

Thanks to Art Outside for giving me a stage to inspire people, three years running...!

More Custom-Painted Hats

The latest couple of one-of-a-kind custom designs.  Check out my full gallery for ideas if you'd like to order one of your own...

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Top Mystical Films on Reality Sandwich

I'm a regular contributor to one of the coolest blogs I know, Reality Sandwich – an exploration of consciousness, ecology, culture, relationships, politics...  (And what isn't covered by that list?)  They just published a list of everyone's favorite mystical films, and I chose The Fountain – easily one of the most awe-inspiring films of my life so far:

Darren Aronofsky's epoch-spanning reincarnation love story is about more than the quest for eternal life or the fanatical love that justifies it. Somewhere in the interference pattern between a dizzying braid of worldspaces past, present, and future, Aronofsky shows us the transcultural yearning that defines our human condition, regardless of (or, rather, beyond) space and time.

Read the rest at Reality Sandwich...

(You can read my original 2007 review of the film here.)

And that's all she wrote, for now.  Thanks for reading, stay in touch, and live in health!