Michael Garfield's Love Without End Tour Newsletter: Grateful Dead
Showing posts with label Grateful Dead. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Grateful Dead. Show all posts

25 January 2015

Preview My New Solo Album | My Biggest Painting Yet | Grateful Dead Envelope Art | Novelty Generators Podcast | New Writing For Globalish

"If I had to bet my life on what's more real, I bet on the thing that inspires me."
– Annie Lalla, MDMA therapist

The thing about a planetary culture is that as the Earth gets smaller, all the consequences of our actions happen faster. Cause-effect relationships are more immediate and tangible. The feedback loops draw tighter. We can see the patterns in how everything we do affects the whole.

Re-associate yourself and let the moral evolution happen. Power lies in understanding. No, it isn't comfortable. Yes, it's an improvement.  And now, our regularly scheduled programming...

My Final Solo Cyberguitar Album's Almost Here...

My new album drops this Tuesday, January 27th.  If, as Hakim Bey says, "Every recording is a tombstone of a live performance,” then I believe this is the greatest tombstone I have ever made. 

Most of y'all probably don't know that I make music...or that I was pouring my soul into my music career long before I became a professional artist. But songcraft and mapping new terrain between acoustic and electronic music on guitar is my great adventure, and this album is the product of techniques refined across 100,000 miles of touring.

If you enjoy my art, or my ideas, I hope you'll take some time (with headphones, or a hula hoop) to listen to this music - and the many other albums I have on that site and offer you for free. I've channeled some amazing places into sound and let some awesome inspirations through that I can't claim, but wonder at when I go back and listen.

This is music for a journey, flow arts, making love - it's rich with atmosphere and feeling, and I'm honored that I get to share it with you.  Thanks for your support!

Cleopatra
32"x48" – oil & acrylic paint pens on masonite

Painted (so far) at:
• 15.10.2014 & 19.01.2015 – Studio
• 25-26.10.2014 – Art Outside (WELDER, DJ Vadim, Fort Knox Five, Phutureprimitive,The Widdler, BoomBaptist, Thriftworks, Kaminanda, D.V.S*, Blue Sky Black Death, Emancipator, Papadosio)
• 12.12.2014 – $3 Shows at Swan Dive (Amy Arani, One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, Carry Illinois, Trouble in The Streets, Groovement, The Holy Child)

A tongue-in-cheek homage to some of my favorite artists (points if you can guess). I always thought that nudes were cheating: easy sales, and all too often they objectify the feminine. But that became my challenge: can I make a piece that's both ridiculous and reverent, that satirizes "festy art" yet still evokes the ancient-future sacred visionary landscape earnestly?

I don't know if I succeeded, but I really liked the process. Still deciding whether I will leave this how it is or finish it with (tasteful) iridescent highlights in two weeks at Gem and Jam Festival. Regardless, I'll post detail photos soon. This is my largest piece to date and has a lot of tiny touches in it...

Or, for those of you that need more color...

Somehow doubt I'll win given the amazing competition...but regardless, this was super fun.  I rarely have a reason to exhume my Prismacolor pens and doodle major iconography like this...

My Guest Appearance on Novelty Generators Podcast

If you're short on big ideas and visionary vistas, here's something that should jumpstart your imagination: I recently enjoyed a wonderful discussion with filmmaker Niles Heckman on his Novelty Generators podcast. We talked about everything from how the human brain is co-evolving with machines, to the future role of myth, to some of my favorite graphic novels, to how a global culture challenges idea of wilderness...

More Writing for Globalish: Read. Watch. Awaken.

My main gig nowadays is as a writer for this fabulous new website, Globalish – where we explore the intersection between ageless spiritual teachings and contemporary culture.  Here are the articles I've written for them since my last newsletter posted:

Channel 1: Revolution

Channel 2: Travel

Channel 3: Art

Channel 4: Life

Next Month: See you in Arizona!

"I followed weirdness and wrote about it. The exploration of the unusual became a way of being. Most of the interesting people I've met did the same thing."

07 March 2013

Too Much Great New Stuff - But What Else Is New?

"We have to continue to learn. We have to be open. And we have to be ready to release our knowledge in order to come to a higher understanding of reality."

The waters are really flowing, these days, aren't they?  So much to catch up on, and so little time to share it or even read it.  Thank you for sharing your time with me so I can share with you.

(Full as it is, this newsletter came late so I'll send out another next week, on schedule – with new music, my talk and live painting from AURA Festival, and news on my amazingly great gigs this spring!  You can sneak a peek on my web calendar...anyone here into Papadosio or Stuart Davis?)

Let's start with some small, largely studio, paintings my friend Chaeli and I just conjured up.  This year has already fruited so many fantastic collaborations and there are even more to share real soon!

Lioness (Collab w/ Chaeli Cardenas)

This piece, like most of our work together, involves layer after layer of working over each other, literally filling in the missing pieces of each other's styles.  Chaeli has a way with cats, obviously – and her brushwork grew so naturally out of her way with pens.  Victory.

"Even though alone in a dark room, be as if you were facing a noble guest. Express your feelings, but become no more expressive than your true nature."
– Zengetsu (T'ang dynasty master)



Chibi Kirin (Collab w/ Chaeli Cardenas)

"The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware."
If You Are A Hat, I Will Tattoo You

Here are some of the pay-what-you-want personalized panels I've been painting for the people who tip me when they order my latest embroidered design with Grassroots California:


I still have some in most sizes – if you'd like one, here are some pretty pictures of the hat as well as how to order yours at less than retail price (plus whatever you might spend to customize it).

Meanwhile the painted hat game is going so well that I have to cut down on them to make time for everything else!  I apologize for limiting my availability but in order to work on my music I have to ask that you please only inquire about orders of $130 or greater.  If I haven't put you off, feel free to drop me a line with your ideas...




Somewhat more affordably, I made these hats below for my friends at The Headspace – they have a lot of great work from my friends on their site as well, so go browse around and be impressed if you've got a minute.  I believe some of these are still available even if they're not pictured on the website, so you might want to write them and ask...







Mind-Blowing Ideas

I have told many of you in person that I believe one of the main functions of art is to draw each other into inspired and inspiring conversation.  As I see it, I'm just one warp in the global fabric of the planetary bioplasm, exchanging quanta of selfhood with other/selves like how our Last Universal Common Ancestor was basically one giant genetic orgy without any true species boundaries.  Even today it's pretty hard to argue for the concrete reality or temporal continuity of the self with any scientific credibility.  

Now that I have just over 6200 (!) of you getting these emails (supreme gratitude!), I need to make sure I'm not just showing off but showing up and sharing some of my most profound inspirations.  SO:

• Thunderbolts of the Gods - a film about the Electric Universe Theory

This is the most important science link I have ever shared with you all.  Please, just find the time to watch it as soon as you can (if you haven't already).  Seriously.  There's an amazing stream of comments about this film in my the thread on my Facebook profile.  Please feel free to follow my profile and join in with your own science links, crazy space news, etc.

• Last and First Men - the most influential Sci Fi novel of all time

Written in 1930 by the British Olaf Stapledon, this visionary flyover of the next two billion years of human evolution prompted both Arthur C. Clarke to proclaim that, "No other book had a greater influence on my life," and H.P. Lovecraft to call it "the greatest in all the field" of science fiction.  His version of the distant future is uncanny, familiar, prescient:

Each of us is mentally a distinct individual, though his ordinary means of communication with others is 'telepathic.' But frequently he wakes up to be a group-mind. When this communal awakening occurs, each individual experiences all the bodies of the group as 'his own multiple body,' and perceives the world equally from all those bodies. But over and above this simple enlargement of the experienced field, is the awakening into new kinds of experience. Of this obviously, I can tell you nothing, save that it differs from the lowlier state more radically than the infant mind differs from the mind of the individual adult, and that it consists of insight into many unsuspected and previously inconceivable features of the familiar world of men and things.


...And that's it.  Thanks again for your precious time and attention.  May this newsletter serve all beings!  You know how to get ahold of me if you want to.