Too Many Wonders? You Decide: New Live Albums, Time-Lapse Video, Salamander Painting, Coloring Book, & Podcast Episodes

Whoops – I guess I went a month without updating everyone about the new work...you were probably as busy as I was so let's just call it even.  Hope that this newsletter stays inspiring, not overwhelming.  God forbid that I contribute to the distraction avalanche.

If you'd prefer a bite-sized update every time I make a new thing as opposed to monster digest updates like this one, there's always Patreon (and if you've been enjoying my emails for years, I hope that you'll consider making the migration – subscribers helps immensely and I make a point of showing you I love you).

As an aside, I just republished some of my old fan-favorite essays on Steemit: "Ode To A Paradigm Shift"; "Transformational Festivals Are A Symptom of Dissociation"; and "A Manifesto For Live Painting".  And I was on my friend's great podcast Third Eye Drops again, this time (Episode 102) discussing the evolutionary biology and mythological dimensions of MONEY.  I say a lot of things I haven't said on record anywhere else, on a topic that is pretty key for all of us.  (Don't know when I will say more on these things, but I really should...)

That's all for now.  Thank you for opening this message and I hope you benefit from what's inside.

love

Michael

New Coloring Book Time-Lapse Video:

"On James P. Carse's Finite and Infinite Games"

Youtube • DTube (Steemit for Video) • Vimeo

I have decided to make the coolest dinosaur coloring book ever – AND the coolest reptiles and amphibians coloring book ever.  At least those two.  As I complete each page I'm giving every Patreon supporter at $5 and up the PDF and PSD files for it, to print out or color on a tablet.

I'd love to make more integrated coloring book time-lapse + music + podcast excerpts videos like this one above a bigger part of what I do – but I'm stretched pretty thin right now. So to that end I've mademore coloring book pages and more videos the object of my current Patreon stretch goal (to make a clean $1000 a month on that platform, which isn't too too far away...)

Here are pictures of the first dinosaur and reptile coloring book pages, both of which have extensive backstories dating back to my childhood that you've been spared, here:

Derp Alert!  

New Barton Springs Salamander Painting

for the Save Our Springs Alliance

24"x18" – acrylic paint on canvas

signed cardstock and canvas prints here

This spring I took a part-time gig with Save Our Springs Alliance and I'm finally starting to feel like a citizen of Austin. You all know how much I care about the history of place, and it's awesome to sink into the decades-old lineage of conservation work this organization holds and continues. Austin's one of those rare cities that has not yet totally destroyed the natural resources that made it beautiful to live in in the first place...

Austin's Barton Springs is home to a totally unique salamander that exists nowhere else in the world. I painted this to raise awareness of the valiant efforts by Save Our Springs Alliance to preserve the habitat of this beautiful creature, and to alert people to the importance of the Edwards Aquifer in general – which is also the source for clean water for millions of people, and is currently endangered by both deregulated development within city limits and secret fracking about 40 miles west of Austin. This piece is the second I've made of the Barton Springs Salamander, Eurycea sosorum.

Wherever you live, take care of it. Other creatures depend on you. If you live nearby, you can support the Save Our Springs Alliance by donating here.

New Instrumental Album: Live at Flowstorm 2018

Spotify • Bandcamp • Feedbands • Patreon • iTunes

Google Play • Tidal • iHeart Radio • Napster

For those of you unfamiliar with my music, you're coming in at a very good time.

This set was improvised live on acoustic guitar, pedalboard, voice, and iPad Pro to an international audience of professional flow artists: hoopers, fire dancers, poi spinners, and many others.

This informal collaboration, as well as the glorious Central Texas wildflower eruption all around us, and the sweet song of the frogpond in the distance, led to what I believe is one of my strongest instrumental freestyle sets of all time.

(It also happened to be on the Eve of Easter and on the third anniversary of my first gig - also at Flowstorm - with my beloved guitar Charlotte, a Taylor 322e.)

All of the tracks are named after local wildflowers. The album art is from one of my greatest inspirations, the legendary Ernst Haeckel, author of Art Forms in Nature.

New Live Double Album: Live at Arcosanti

Bandcamp • Patreon

Recorded live on 11 and 12 November 2017 in the amphitheater of the legendary Arcosanti, Arizona – an historic experiment in ecologically-integrated architecture – for Convergence, a first-of-its-kind collaboration between visionary architects, artists, and permaculturists.

Arcosanti is one of the most inspiring places I've ever been and playing there was the fulfillment of a dream I've had since I first visited in 2005.  The vibe was high, the desert winter beautiful, the crew and venue incomparable. This double album is a landmark record of the sweet, ripe moment when it all came true – if only for a moment.

Most people have no clue that I've been a devoted songwriter since 1999 and that my music matters more to me than almost anything I do...the songs on this live album are the fruit of that long practice and I've polished each of them with love and patience over years.

This really was a magical concert and I'm glad I get to share it with you.

New Future Fossils Podcast Episodes

with Doug Rushkoff, Charles Shaw,
Tim Freke, & Steve Brusatte

Lastly – here are four of the best episodes of this podcast I've ever had the honor of releasing.  The show's on every platform, and you can find links to the show's page on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc. in each episode's show notes:

Patreon • Steemit

Patreon • Steemit

Patreon • Steemit

Patreon • Steemit

That's enough for now.  I'm sure that you agree.  ;)

Gratefully Yours,

I'm Done Hustling Paintings – Live Art from Levitation Festival – New Full Band & Duet Recordings – More Articles from Globalish – New Painted Hats – Summer Festival Schedule

“To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, 
all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine.”

― Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Some things in life are so serious all you can do is laugh."
– Mark Twain

After Today, I'm Done Hustling Paintings

I'm done trying to sell my original paintings.  I've never felt any conflict between creativity and commerce, but for whatever reason I have sold hardly any of my pieces in the last two years, and trying to hustle them just cheapens what I do and distracts me from the work.  I'm grateful to have found another satisfying way to make a living, as a writer, and that I can go on making work of personal significance, and sharing it with you, without the burden of the hustle.

That said, I put a lot of work into a new art gallery and store last month, where you can surf my art by year, read up on them, use magnifying view to scrutinize them in excruciating detail, and order prints with greater ease than ever possible before.  Here's the whole new full-featured gallery where you can order prints – and here's a list of all of the original paintings I still have available.

Views are always free.  I hope this work improves your day a little.

Psych Rock Thistle

Magnifier View // More Info // Prints

Levitation Festival (formerly Austin Psych Fest) is – if you can believe this – the first real rock & roll festival I've ever attended.  I had no idea!  People had come from all over the world and were genuinely there for the music – really committed, excited fans.  I'm so used to this "transformational festival" rhetoric about breaking down the boundaries between artist and audience, producer and consumer, but the honest truth is that when everybody feels like they're contributing then nobody is listening, and the people who have actually honed their craft to a professional level are often lost in the noise of everybody trying to show off.

In the sense that an amateur is someone who does it for love (amor), I'll always be one.  And I'm glad to have inspired so many other people to get out there and paint at shows, and play guitar, and study science...but wow, it was such a refreshing thing to be at a festival where the bands were playing and the audience was listening and when I set up to paint there weren't fifty other live painters.

I played my musical set at Levitation from the deck of a converted Airstream trailer that opened up like a transformer into an awesome stage, joined by my beloved Nicole Taylor on viola and my homie Randall Warren on cello, and there was a whole campground of people vibing to us when we brought a morning rainstorm down on them.  Afterward I met a bunch of great people who had traveled from all over the country to be there – and even a few inveterate psych rockers who'd come from London and stuck around for fifteen minutes while we broke our gear down to let us know they'd never heard anything like the music we were playing.

What a beautiful festival.  And so clarifying to my sense of who I am and what it is that I'm doing, musically.  Folks, if you like psychedelic electro-acoustic post-rock, you'll like these new recordings:

New Full Band & Duet Recordings

Free Download // Streaming Page

On the first Thursday of each month, an ever-evolving lineup of daring instrumentalists gather at Strange Brew Lounge in Austin, Texas. Exploring new music technologies and spontaneous collaborations in a boutique listening room environment – often in tandem with pioneering dancers and live visual projectionists – Loopers' Night is a truly one-of-a-kind event.  These recordings are of the completely improvised all-hands-on-deck jams we have at the end of every show. In many cases, these people have never played together before.

Please share this music if you like it! Loopers' Night is a community project and we appreciate your help spreading the word.  (Here are links to more info about our next shows on 4 June & 2 July.)

Easter w/ Nicole Taylor on Violin

Free Download // Streaming Page

One this rainy morning in Central Texas, at a lovely small flow arts conference on a permaculture farm, my partner of ten years and I performed together for the first time in entirely too long.  I looped her fiddle work and mixed it together with my own acoustic guitar improvisation while fifty or so world-class flow artists jammed along on hoops, poi, staff, sticks, and other toys.  It was a beautiful moment and the resulting recording conveys the spirit of that loving and relaxed environment.

New Articles for Globalish

My latest writing for the excellent web magazine Globalish.com, where we explore the lived experience and meaning of awakening in the digital age.  Every article frames a totally fascinating (provocative or downright gorgeous) video – even if you're not interested in my writing, you'll almost certainly be as moved as I was by what I'm writing about.

The Yin-Yang of Police & Perps: Are They Fighting or Secretly in Love?

Given that “the world’s a stage and all the men and women, merely players,” can we come together as a single play, one great phenomenon, acknowledging a unity that doesn’t just transcend, but maybe even needs, the drama, so it has a plot?

The World's First Holograms for Freedom March Redefines The Protest

We really do not know which futures are in store for us…and ultimately, we won’t get to live the better ones without the shift from selfish personhood to serving Whole-as-Self, beyond whatever stories we inhabit and inhabit us. Paradoxically, to build a better future we must jettison our big ideas and be response-able to what emerges here and now.

Protesting Music Festivals: Do We Really Have to Choose Between The World and Heaven?

It is the brain-bound ego, after all, that wants to free itself from its materiality. Desires are phenomena of flesh – including the desire to rid one’s self of its desires.

Graffiti Only Visible From Space: Where Does Landscape End and Art Begin?

Graffiti is the reclamation of the commons – a digestive act that challenges the boundaries of private property, recognizing life as art and everything in reach as media with which to ornament the world.

Let Noah's "Flaw" Show You How the Worlds of Waking and Dreaming Are One

Somehow the dreaming mind is unattached to categories in the way and to the same degree our everyday cognition is so fervently devoted to them. Letting something be two totally disparate things – letting our identity be local and diffuse at once – is all so hard for half our lives, so easy for the other half.

Is The Music Video Our Generation's Tibetan Book of the Dead?

Death, as a punctuation mark between one life and many (saplings growing in the light revealed by fallen trees), is not so much “end” as “amplification” of the terrible and beautiful intensity of being – what Rudolf Otto called the “numinous,” a mysterium tremendum et fascinans, ecstatic, rapturous, and inescapable.

Hot Chip's Time Travel Shenanigans in the Koan-Tastic "I Need You Now" Video

What we declare to be a cause entirely depends on how we frame the question. Causing what, within what span of time, within what volume, and to what degree? …To whom? There’s always going to be more room to add more complicated answers to this question, as we push the sphere of our investigations outward to include more differentiated parts within the unity of universe-as-one-phenomenon.

How New York's Projection Napping Turns The City Inside-Out

Projection Napping offers us a chance to see ourselves and our environments anew – and maybe even ask about the boundaries we have placed by habit in between the landscape and the body, mind and the environment. What separates us waking sleepers from our city dream?

A Magazine Printed with HIV+ Blood: Who's Aware of the Story?

So many of us hide our stigma, and in darkness marks are all the darker. Rather than exposing them to air and light to heal, we bury them, which makes the mystery and shame much deeper. Hidden, trees don’t grow; they die, decay. If we can’t talk about our problems (as we see them), nothing good can ever come of having them.

The New Scarlett Letter: Hong Kong Uses DNA Tests to Publicly Shame Litterers

Can we authentically maintain the sense of separation necessary to identify as modern individuals when we’re confronted with the striking similarity of every human’s inner life? When every last frontier of mind and body’s named and quantified, when we can’t hide from one another, who is left?

The Mystical Allure of Taboo: Trespassing the Sexual Imagination (NSFW)
Each generation, bound by new taboos, must find its own way there – we only have the opportunity, no guarantees, and many of us lose the way by seeking temporary fixes – but on arriving, every person’s idiosyncratic history no longer matters. All that matters is the sweet release, which lives forever only now and now and now.

New Painted Hats

I'm not accepting custom orders at this time, but Heady HQ in Oregon and I have been talking for a while about getting some of my hats in their shop, so I finally made good on it and sent them a couple brand new pieces.  Hit them up if either of these speaks to you...

Summer Tour Highlights

So many cool new festivals this year!  I'm excited to be back in New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado this June and to get involved in some of New England's emerging boutique festivals in July.  And then Missouri and more Colorado in August!

Check out my full concert calendar for more details about these and several other awesome small events where we can meet up in person this summer...

That's all for now.  Thank you so much for reading and feel free to write me any time!

Interviewing Erik Davis on TechGnosis | How To Live in Wonder | New Paintings | Printed Throw Pillows | New Articles for Globalish | More Gigs

"Forward!  Ever Forward!"

– Terence McKenna

Happy Spring, everyone!  This blog marks my transition from a biweekly to a monthly newsletter, which means I'll go deeper with more carefully curated highlights.  If you'd like to stay in the flow and see absolutely everything, I welcome you to follow me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Youtube.  One format won't replace the other – hopefully these changes help me offer more to all of you, more fluidly.

And now, for this month's news – starting with one of the more fun conversations I have ever had:

Interview with Erik Davis on TechGnosis:
Myth, Magic, & Mysticism in the Age of Information

Last week I joined Erik Davis for a far-reaching and lively conversation on Erik's soon-to-be-reissued book, Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information. Erik is a personal hero of mine and one of our culture's weirdest and most wonderful writers – a culture critic and religious scholar whose writing spans topics including the visionary culture of California, black metal philosophy, stage magic, neuroscience, and psychedelic transhumanism (for starters).  I've been a guest on his awesome Expanding Mind podcast twice (in 2011 and 2012) and it's always a pleasure to speak with him.

Here are both parts of our chat.  Part One is more free-ranging, and Part Two is more focused on how his ideas and the book have aged since their first publication in 1998:

Watch Part One on Youtube

Watch Part Two on Youtube

Also:  Just the week before, I had another great conversation with Shawn Madden​ of New Paradigm Radio​ on how to live in wonder and thrive in an age of accelerating change.  Where history and myth intersect – where science and magic are joined – where childlike awe and grown-up discernment cross-pollinate – that's where the renaissance lives. Here is my take on it.

New Live & Studio Paintings

I've been hard at work at two of the biggest and most ambitious pieces that I've ever done, which I'll have ready for you soon!  But in the meantime I have also managed to chip off a few pieces of the transcendental hyperobject and get them down on canvas.  Here are two more modest recent works that kind of hearken back to when I started painting:

One Solstice Is Unlike Any Other

18"x24" – painted live at Llano Earth Arts Festival

oil and acrylic pens on canvas

View on FB

Untitled Collaboration with Tourmaline Todd

8"x22" – painted at home

oil and acrylic pens, and acrylic paint, on canvas

View on FB

Stream/Download My Latest Cyberguitar Album

"Experimentally symphonic, layered to perfection, pleasing to the ears, as if Mozart and Random Rab did a mashup series while taking a stroll through the forest. Sophisticated. Bending the lines of spirituality, electronic technology, and organic instruments..."

– Souls In Action

You can also grab a free sampler of some of my favorite tracks from 2014 here.  Enjoy!

Warning: May Increase Likelihood of Lucid Dreams

Throw pillows just joined the extensive catalog of printed items you can find at my Nuvango store – alongside men's and women's tees, greeting cards, laptop skins, and phone cases for both iPhone and Samsung models.  Click either of the images below to browse your many possibilities:

More Writing From My Full-Time Gig at Globalish

I am honored to be a part of Globalish – not only to have such a solid vehicle for my ideas and writing, but to find a business culture dedicated to real personal and social transformation.

We're offering our readers something more than just a better story.  Here are my most recent contributions, in each of our four categories (my favorites are at the top of each):

REVOLUTION

On Martin Luther King, Jr: The Difference Between Inter-Connection and Prior Unity

The Scent of Poopourri + Mark Cuban's Digital Waste Cleanup = War

Skateboards in Afghanistan: A New Front Line for Women's Liberation

TRAVEL

Time To Think Straight: Terence McKenna Denounces New Age Relativism

Back to Basics: Iran Through The Eyes of A Japanese Tourist

 CNN: "Can LSD Make You A Billionaire?" – Silicon Valley Tripping Goes Mainstream

Transmetropolitan: The Art and Politics of Egyptian Street Artist Ganzeer

If I Die on Mars: Finding Self "Out There" Upon the New Frontier

ART

Journey To The Dreamtime in This Will Destroy You's New Music Video

Evolving Gods: The Sci-Fi Hindu Pantheon of Abhishek Singh

Prayer Nuts: Pouring Love into Tiny Objects of Human Devotion

Scientist Uses Ion Beams to Etch Sand Castles on a Single Grain of Sand

LIFE

On "Opia": Eye Contact & The Optical Illusion of Our Separation

In & Out of Open Mouths: The Erotic Mysticism of Tooth Brushing

We Were Never Born: Jack Kerouac on Silence, Birth, and the Self Illusion

What Would Buddha Splice?: Where Synthetic Biology & Artificial Intelligence Could Meet

Upcoming Gigs

Parting Shot

Here's a photo by the fabulous Adam Pugh of the lion painting I'll share in next month's newsletter (and which you can see in various stages of completion here):

“The spiritual qualities of the icon sought to transform the flesh, to deprive it of its coarse material substance, to dissolve it in light and re-mould it in spiritual plasma. Icons are sacred images that reflect the physical and the spiritual, the human and the Divine, the visible and the invisible.” 

– L. Evseyeva