New Time-Lapse & Live Music Videos • Collab with Tourmaline Todd • Mural in Progress • Festival Announcements

“Technology reflects who we are. If we want to have better technology, we must be better people.”

– Nikola Danaylov
(Review the Future Podcast, Episode 57)

Thank you for reading this...you are the one for whom this work is made.

If you have any questions, say hello.  I'm always glad to hear from you!

love,
Michael

– Music – Paintings – Writing – Talks –

Beyond Duality - POV Live Painting Time Lapse

Watch on YouTube
Free Downloads: Narration | Music
Buy a print of "New Age Cleopatra"

What happens when we cease identifying Nature as something outside of us?  What will our culture look like when we see our cities and our songs as something Earth is doing?  This video features my Google Glass first-person footage while live painting my own vision of a future in which "made" and "born" are not two separate categories, narrated by an excerpt from one of my talks on human evolution and transpersonal psychology, and scored by music improvised on acoustic guitar and looping pedals as a performance of this new cybernetic nondual paradigm.

"Really" featuring Jenuine Cello

Watch on Youtube

Download music (pay what you like)

I've been waiting years to grab a solid video of this song, one of my favorites – it goes deep, says a lot in few words, and has a lovely funky little break in the bridge that opens up this modest number into something truly groovy.  Superb accompaniment by my friend and frequent co-conspirator, Jenuine Cello.

Recorded live on Febuary 4th at the monthly live looping residency Jen and I have held at Strange Brew Loungeside, Austin's finest listening room, for 14 months now.  (Incidentally, you can now like the Loopers' Night fan page on Facebook or join our Facebook group for more direct participation.)

Lyrics:

Nothing ever goes away, really

It only ever changes shape.

Innumerable masks and shades peeling

off your only lover's face.

We grieve and overcome the late

weeping, stranded in an elder age

but everything has been exchanged

sealing the gone in all that still remains...

We have traded blood and even if you die

no flood can wash away the sky.

In the cold and mud we're left asking why

but love will only answer, "I AM"

We lean on battered hearts and faint

weakened, wounded for the want of taste

but nothing ever leaves or stays, here

cuz Heaven permeates all space...

"Living Ships"
New Small Studio Collaboration with Tourmaline Todd

12"x16" – studio – oil and acrylic paints on canvas
Buy a print of "Living Ships"

Really getting into more collaboration paintings this year (check my Instagram for more on that) – this one, my homie Tourmaline Todd let me take home and finish.  I really like the opportunity to catch the pass and bring it home across those last few yards, to use an awkward football metaphor for art...the markers lend themselves quite well to finishing and detail work.

This piece is one of several in a new "best of" collaborations section in my store.

Mural in Progress

Not much to say about this one except I'm having a blast working on something bigger!  This painting is on the curved ceiling of a friend's camper here in Austin – about seven feet wide or so.

 I've taken little clips of time-lapse video on my phone using Lapse It Pro for Android and a magnetic-footed Joby Gorillapod, which I'll be sharing soon.  That's a gift you can expect to keep on giving – expect 1080p time-lapse videos to be a thing, now.  :)

Upcoming Events

All that hard work's finally beginning to pay off – the quality of festivals inviting me to join them this year is amazing, and I now curate not one but TWO monthly gigs in Austin (Loopers' Night and Paint Jam) that are each unique and excellent in their own right.

Highlights:  I'm presenting on technoshamanism and teaching an interactive live looping workshop at this year's Moogfest in Durham, North Carolina.  And I'm playing music at Boom Festival's Chillout Gardens in Portugal this August!  Hot damn, folks – if you'll be at either of these, hit me up...

I'd love to know where YOU think I should be this year – check out my calendar and let me know if you think anything is missing!

Keeping The Portal Open // New Legendary Babe Live Painting // My Talk From Firefly 2015 // Four New T-Shirt Designs // Stuff You May Have Missed

Aloha, everyone! I hope that you're enjoying autumn – and that you don't mind me starting out this latest update with a lengthy but amazing quote. It's worth it.

“Inhabiting your body – reuniting with its intelligence – is one of the most potent political statements you can make. Disembodiment is tacitly modeled and promoted by every institutional hierarchy in our society – whether corporate, political or religious. Each of them is shaped around a top-down ‘command and control’ power structure run by the head of the organization, with executive power consolidated at headquarters – which might lie with the CEO (‘chief’ derives from the Latin word for ‘head’) in head office, or with the head of a political party in the nation’s capital (‘capital comes from a Latin word for ‘head’), or with the head of the church. The implicit message embedded in these hierarchies is that the head should rule. That message remains acceptable to us only because it expresses, even as it further consolidates, our relationship with ourselves."

– Philip Shepherd, "The Embodiment Manifesto"

“Oh, would that my mind could let fall its dead ideas, as the tree does its withered leaves!”

– Andre Gide

Wouldn't that be something. ;) And now...

New Live Painting: "Navel Gazer"

Paper & Canvas Prints Here

24"x36" - oil & acrylic paint pens on canvas

Painted live at the following spacetime coordinates:

2015-10-17 Austin String Band Festival

2015-10-23 Art Outside Festival*

2015-10-28, 11-02 Studio

* to the music of Liberation Movement, GAUDI, DJ Happy Happy James World, Bonus Junk, Nightmares On Wax, Invisible Allies, & KiloWatts

My first portrait – sort of. Based originally on the legendary beauty of Renee Somerfield (@reneesomerfield), but – just like they always do – it took on a life of its own. In accordance with my tireless and inane quest for personal firsts, this is also the first black and white painting I've ever done. There's a lot of subtle detail and transparency that even I can scarcely believe was accomplished with paint markers...but hey, it's in the limitations of the medium that both adventure and discovery reveal themselves.

Check it out in more depth and detail on my art site.

Four New T-Shirt Designs
Just in Time for the Holidays

Yay, finally, I got some new art on all-over printed tees!  (Still sorting out where to get more leggings, yoga pants, etc. printed after learning that my last manufacturers weren't delivering up to my standards.  But hold on tight!  I care about helping you ornament your lower half, as well.)

Clockwise from the upper left, we have: "Pura Vida," "New Age Cleopatra," "Purple Haze," and "21st Century Romance."  Three of these are based on sketchbook pen and ink work that I took into new dimensions digitally, blending human and machine, you know, like I like to do.

Speaking of which:

My Talk from Firefly Gathering 2015,

"Human Meta-Organisms: Endosymbiosis 

& Emergent Planetary Culture"

Free Streaming/Download

Recorded in the Light Lab Creations Dome at Firefly Gathering 2015, here is my deepest and most complete rap yet – mashing up nondual eastern mysticism with western psychology with evolutionary biology with psychedelic transhumanism with your standard MG standup goofery.  And thanks again to David Titterington for his amazing cover art!  Some juicy nuggets from the talk:

Love does not require a relationship between separate selves in order to exist.

The self is something that the world is doing. And the self is an adaptation to a specific set of ecological circumstances. It’s not a fixed point.

To talk about this time in the life of the Earth as the human age is not anthropocentric. It’s not arrogant. It’s an act of our growing humility in recognition that we are a phenomenon of the planet’s automatic processes. That a city is something that the planet is doing.

Listen to it and let me know if it stirs up any big ideas!

Keeping The Portal Open:

MG interviews Erik Davis on the

Blurring of "Real" & "Virtual"

Erik Davis is the author of TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, & Mysticism in the Age of Information (recently reissued by North Atlantic Books with a new afterword). An investigation into how our transcendental urges play out in the realm of high technology, it is a rare treat – both an exemplary work of scholarship and also a delightful read – a florid, fun, and virtuosic play of language. Even more impressive is that in our metamorphic times, this book has aged considerably well. TechGnosis is in ways more relevant today than it was in the rosy dawn of 1998, before The Matrix and the iPhone, Facebook, and Edward Snowden. We’re living in the future. Read this book and learn the territory.

Over a glitchy Google Hangout (you can watch both parts on YouTube), Erik and I discussed our culture’s highest hopes and darkest dreams for our collective future, and how they’ve both become more complicated since the turn of the Millennium.

If you imagine browser windows as a kind of portal in between dimensions – if you wonder when the apes and whales will open social media accounts – if you believe that we can find a way to surf the turbulence of our connected century with grace and humor – then read on…

Stuff You Might Have Missed

Free download of my definitive "cyberacoustic guitar" live PA set from Firefly Gathering 2015.  Improvised to a yoga class and thus well-suited for movement, but I hear the music's also good for straight-up chillout sessions, painting, writing, driving – anything where you would like to set a deep and atmospheric mood.  Download it here.

I found this cleaning out my hard drive and found it interesting and worthwhile, reflecting on how little and how much my life has changed in two short years. I’ve released more virtuosic and accomplished music since the EP we discuss here, City of Jewels – but it remains one of my favorites, and is still as free as ever on my Bandcamp page. Enjoy...

para bien de todos,

Michael Garfield

Quick Science Rant // New Live Painting // Hummingbird Stickers! // Art Outside Announcement

But First, A Riff on Science & Wonder

"Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop."

– Carl Sagan

We have personal stories and collective stories.  I think it will probably help to see the work I do as a writer and speaker as addressing and investigating the collective dimension of our stories.  William Irwin Thompson wrote that history is the ego of society and myth is its soul.  So learning our evolutionary history is to establish a much deeper grounding for our collective ego…and then to recognize it as a provisional and ultimately groundless scientific fairytale (even as the best we have) is akin to seeing past our ego story into our essential Mystery.  

One of my main theses over the last few years has been that science in its finest form as endlessly unfolding inquiry is basically a spiritual practice – the humility of wonder in pure curiosity, beginner’s mind as a prerequisite to any good experiment.  Of course, the process always ends by disconfirming or confirming a hypothesis, and then we start again with some assumptions – how we choose to ask a question’s all about the paradigm from which we’re asking – so there’s always going to be a point of ingress for the myth, the story by which observations are explained.  Laboratory breakthroughs are the moment of divine invasion; scientific journals are the holy texts.  Each has its visionary fringe more sensitive to the anomalies, the saints in wilderness encountering uncanny revelations, and orthodoxy that rejects new revolutionary insights as if they are immune cells.  The only difference between the institutions we call science and religion are the speeds at which each culture is reformed; the process is identical.  Organized religion’s like a solid; science is a liquid.

And I think we’re on the cusp of something even quicker – the networks that we’re growing are accelerating our adventures in discovery and peer review – and we are possibly approaching our real biological constraints of how fast we can mentally adapt to seeing things in totally new ways.  (Of course, we’re also learning how to be more flexible.  In my finest moments I can let new worldviews flow through me…though I always settle back into a lower state of order.)

Do any of you think about this stuff?  I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Endothelial Goo Conveyor

Poster Prints & Giclées Here

The first piece that I ever got so fed up with halfway through that I actually tried to destroy it, but the spray paint ran out and it ended up looking so cool, I decided to roll with it and finish what I'd started.  Another step closer to the "H.R. Giger takes 2-CB and gets over his natal trauma" aesthetic I started carving out with this year's painting, "New Age Cleopatra Basks Apocalyptically..."

Painted live with oil & acrylic markers and aerosol paint on canvas (36" x 24") at the following events in 2015:

07-25 Quixotes (Cream Cheese Accident), Denver, CO
07-28 Boulder City Park ("painting in the park" with Randal Roberts, Morgan Mandala, Chelsey Crandell, Joshua Wine Morriston, and many others), Boulder, CO
08-01 Taos Mesa Brewing (Treavor Moontribe, Planewalker, Desert Dwellers, Kaminanda, Kannizle, Buno), Taos, NM
09-02 Empire Patio, Create Culture (Zonra, Soundshaman, Sanjiwan, Fractala), Austin, TX
09-23 The Other Side (Spiritual Rez, Red Sage), Denver, CO
10-02 Westbank String Shop, Austin, TX

Original piece still available – email me with inquiries.

New Hummingbird Stickers!

Get Some Stickers

A few years ago, in preparation for Burning Man, I marked up a plain white tee-shirt with the slogan, "Imagination Is Our Greatest Natural Resource."  This motto grew some wings and flew away, just possibly inspiring this book by futurist Ramez Naam.  It's been a while since I had any stickers, and the time felt ripe to resurrect the motto with a kiss from Beija Flor.

If I see you in person, ask me for one – or you can buy them in quantities both small and large at michaelgarfieldart.com.  Help me spread inspiration and encouragement in your town!

A Roadrunner in Progress

One of the reasons I love live painting is to share the entire process with people. To demystify the creative work and invite other people to imagine themselves as empowered creatives (who much have to spend a few years sleeping in their cars, and postpone having kids for a decade, in order to cultivate their dreams into their waking lives). 

This roadrunner kept showing up on my journey through the enchanted American Southwest and, like so many of my other paintings, just asserted itself as the subject of my next piece. Little did I know that I would have to paint through a vicious windstorm, the easel gorilla taped down and still bucking I'm the gusts, to finish this the night it needed to be finished...

You can read more about this piece, and pick up a print, on my art site.

Playing + Painting + Speaking at Art Outside

I'm honored and delighted to share my first singer-songwriter set in years (here and here are some older recordings) with this year's Art Outside family! We've all got to live our passion, and mine is writing songs about psychedelics, making love in zero gravity, the landscape of eternity, and running from the terrifying beauty of our higher selves.

Years of experimental guitar practice will definitely enrich the atmosphere we'll feed and share together in the pecan grove at the Folk It Up Stage on Saturday at 12:30 pm – but this will be a set of finely crafted ballads, odes, and anthems for the dreamers and lovers. I've played this festival each year since 2010 and feel like I'll be coming home – I cannot wait to share an album's worth of new material with you!  (If you're not going, it will be recorded.)

Love and thanks for all of your support!

My Finest Live Record To Date | Midwest Real Podcast | More Gigs in CO, TX

"You've got what the intergalactic call a very 'planetary' mindset, Morty."

– Rick Sanchez, Rick & Morty

"For one brief moment, I felt the heartbeat of creation, and it was one with my own."
"We ALL feel like that all the time. You don't hear US gassing on about it."

– Philip J. Fry & Bender Rodriguez, Futurama

––––––––––– Presenting my new live LP, Balance! –––––––––––

This month's big announcement is what I believe might be my single finest instrumental concert yet.  After ten years of perfecting my unique live rig, creative palette, workflow, tone, and voice, I've finally arrived at cruising altitude.  It's music for discovering the peace you are...with plenty of adventure, longing, glitch, and psychedelia along the way.  Enjoy!

Credit: Photo by Michael Grab | gravityglue.com @gravityglue

Pay-What-You-Want Download Here

When you buy music on Bandcamp, other people can see that the album is getting support – your avatar and comments are displayed on the album page – and they're more likely to buy it themselves.  Your purchase makes a huge difference in how new fans encounter my work!  So thank you...

An opportunity to publicly declare that you support smart music.

(Of course, you're absolutely welcome to have it for free, as well.)

Here's what some wild-eyed young kook wrote about this album:

This is the only audio recording of an musical performance that occurred on June 13th, 2015, in concert with Andrew 7 Sealy's yoga class at Firefly Gathering, in outside Flagstaff, Arizona. It descended in the pocked debris field of an old eruption, now a hilly grove of evergreens within a grassy valley deep in Northern Arizona. As the spirit of this place condensed, it clattered through a man-shaped sieve of road-emboldened curiosity and dedication to the task, then killed and resurrected the guitar by using it to channel deep-time grooves through sampled and remixed, responsive, warm, and fluid sound.

What happened there: from wood and magnets, spacey and pastoral rhymes and dreamy neo-minimalist folk-funk evolved some teeth and veered afield to afrobeat and glitch and UFO sound healing, kinda change-your-life shit, and True. Future. Jazz.

One instant reverent and pure as prayer, and then it’s like some weird organic bio-metal fused from everyone’s collected effort that surrounds and holds us, flowing chrome reflecting rainbows. Starting off all kissy, it becomes a party, goes through growing pains, and takes you through them with it, but you GET there – you can catch your breath atop the mountain and behold the epic vista, and we’re all relieved together and we’re all one thing and THAT’S the kinda show it was and is and always is.

When being part of something taking form inspires all of us to grow as well, and tells us through a kind of ritual that circumstances always change – when we involve ourselves – tears flow, the happy ones. This music was created on the spot with only training, no agenda, open mind and heart…

So listen through some quality devices. Better speakers, better sound.

––––– My spot on the delightful Midwest Real Podcast –––––

•

Credit: Photo by Reid Godshaw | Harmonic Light

Free Streaming/Download at MidwestReal.net

"Friends, we've got a sprawling, fanciful, new show with writer, visionary artist, and debonair brain-melter, Michael Garfield! You shan't regret checking it out!  Michael Garfield can only be described as a polymath… a renaissance man… Something of a debonair brain-melter. At times, exchanging words with him honestly feels kind of like speaking to a library with a mouth. I’m not really sure how he does it.  Michael is also a serial creative. He writes for a number of websites, paints and makes music."

– Midwest Real Podcast

This was a totally fun, equal parts profound and silly, chat with host Michael Nelson – who has also interviewed some of my most inspiring friends and allies, so I encourage you to dig deep with his podcast.  He also started a really cool Facebook group, Third Eye Drops.

If you're a podcast fiend like I am, you might also dig my appearances on Expanding Minds, Psychedelic Salon, In A Perfect World, Here We Are, Novelty Generators, New Paradigm Radio, Project Bring Me To Life, Gaian Radio, Zap Oracle, and Minds.com.  (And of course, there's also my free archives of talks and interviews for the truly dedicated...)

–––––––––– Upcoming gigs this month in CO, TX ––––––––––

Yay, I'm finally coming back to play some gigs in Colorado!  I hope you can attend my show in Denver with Spiritual Rez & Red Sage next Wednesday, or my set for the super fun live looping festival in Colorado Springs next Friday.  

And if you're in Austin on October 1st, the monthly avant-live-electronica group jam I've been hosting with looping cellist Jen Mulhern is coming up – it's a super intimate and hi-fi venue (voted best sound in Austin), and we go as deep as possible with it.  We'll lay a blanket out for you!

RSVP on Facebook

RSVP on Facebook

RSVP on Facebook

What Is Transformational Sobriety? Plus, FOUR New Paintings...and a Violin.

“To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.”

– Henri Bergson

It's been a crazy summer!  My apologies for going an unprecedented six weeks between updates, but that just means this blog post's packed with even more new art and writing than it usually is.  And wow, this summer's given us so much to savor...

Let's begin with what I think might be the most intense and awesome talk I've ever given – on how we're all made of drugs, and how sobriety is not about abstaining from embodiment in all its messiness, but listening to intuition, learning to embrace life with full-bodied wisdom, and surrendering to that which knows what's really best for you.

I offer this to anyone who might enjoy or benefit from conversations on addiction and desire and mindfulness and new beginnings. In retrospect, it is a kind of ladder to the Moon that only makes it just beyond the chimney. But perhaps it points you in the right direction.

Free Download/Streaming

Presented at Arise Festival, Loveland, CO, 10 August 2014.  Cover Art by David Titterington.

New Paintings!

This summer really satisfied my need for adventurous art – holding on for dear life to my easel in a windstorm, surfing weird waves of synchronicity, working in new media and venues.  Each painting has a story and a field of meaning.  I hope you'll take the time to click through and read more about whichever piece you find speaks to you strongest...

"Strength of Conviction"

Paint pens on canvas (18"x24")

View in HD / Buy Prints

About the white tiger as a totem, from Balanced Women's Blog:  "Seeker of personal truth, having the power and strength of conviction, living simultaneously in the realms of both shadow and light..."

>>> Read my whole rap about this painting here. <<<

"Attention"

Paint pens on masonite (24"x32")

View in HD / Buy Prints

(Original Available)

Original piece painted live at Firefly Gathering & Sonic Bloom Festival 2015 during the music of Warp9, ProJect Aspect, PEGA5U5, Unlimited Aspect, Cirque Roots w/ Jyshua Pcalyps, Deya Dova, Aligning Minds, Nanda, Luminaries, Safi's Lab, Little Giants, Saqi Live Band, Jeremy Sole, Nickodemus, The Trancident, Shpongle, Sonic Bloom Orchestra, Kaminanda feat. Eve Olution, Phutureprimitive, & Random Rab.

A portrait of the roadrunner ( Geococcyx californianus) that lives in the yard of my hypnotherapist friend in Albuquerque. I feel a kinship with these birds. They're fast, alert, decisive creatures, not excellent flyers but agile, charismatic, colorful, and radiate the strange enchantment of their desert home. They're sometimes called "Snake Eaters" because they're quick enough to eat rattlesnakes (and catch dragonflies and hummingbirds from the air) – that alone is amazing, and in fact while I was working on this painting at Sonic Bloom Festival, at the foot of the Spanish Peaks in southern Colorado, a friend of mine found a rattlesnake among the tents and killed it with a hatchet. He showed me the tail tip and the rattle that he kept, the tail still squirming on the hatchet blade...

>>> Read my whole rap about this painting here. <<<

"Moving On"

Paint pens on canvas (18"x24")

View in HD / Buy Prints

(Original Available)

Original piece painted live at Sonic Bloom Festival​ 2015 to the music of Unlimited Aspect​, Russ Liquid​, VibeSquaD​, Desert Dwellers​, Kinetic Groove​, Mustard Tiger​, Talib Kweli​, & STS9​.

When visionary chaos theorist Ralph Abraham wrote in the MAPS Journal a few years ago about his original experiments with DMT in the 1960s, and how they inspired his explorations of fractal mathematics and computer visualizations, he mentioned that one of the notable characteristics of the tryptamine "realm" is how entities don't seem to be restricted to contiguous space. We mundane animals in meatspace need to be connected by nerves and blood vessels and skeletons, etc., but the seeming-beings of the DMT-verse are "wireless" unities of pattern, rhythm, and color. They exist more as musical themes than solid blocks of meat...

>>> Read my whole rap about this painting here. <<<

Untitled Diptych

Paint pens on canvas (16"x10")

View on Instagram

Now in the private collection of Bill Ottman, founder of the exemplary social network Minds.com and host of this amazing conversation I had last year with Erik Davis, Neil Theise, Richard Doyle, and Mitch Mignano.  (Links go to interviews.)

Custom Texas State Flag Violin

View on Instagram

Not much to say about this one, except that I love painting instruments and hope to do more soon!  Some of you might remember this piece from last year, when I was asked to paint the front of the violin.  The client asked for a matching back and white sides so that he could have it signed by famous fiddle players.  Super fun!

Side Note:  In case you ever need to make your stringed instrument playable again, my fiancée is an amazing luthier and does magical things to violins and guitars all day (I know because I visit her at work).  Here's her FB page.  She also plays viola in the Sienna Quartet, in case you're gettin' hitched.

New Articles for Globalish.com

These are, seriously, some of the best pieces I have ever written.  I'm honored that I get to share them with you.  And some of them are super controversial!  So please have fun with that...  :)

Comparing The Religion We Call Marriage to the Wilderness of Love
Marriage is a species of religion, insofar as both are ways in which romantic re-connection is pursued by those who do not feel complete already. Binding to the narrative of loss and rediscovery this way, we’re wearing double-image goggles: Heaven isn’t now, so we postpone our bliss in time; true love is out there somewhere, so we look for it in other people.

"Change Is Everything": Where Fossils, Digital Culture, & The Seeker's Journey Meet

Created or discovered? These are categories, just more reflex action of a mind uncomfortable with the bottomlessness of experience, another raft of thought afloat on oceanic mind without an explanation. Every tale we piece together of prehistory from the traces that remain is no more real, and no less guess-work, than the stories of our own identities – extrapolations, inferences drawn from recognizing patterns, vesicles of meaning we produce as effortlessly and unwittingly as burrows, nests, or trackways.

The Problem with An International Flag of Earth
Perhaps a name tag like the Flag of Earth can be excused on our first day as universal citizens, but someday we’ll regard such seeming-noble notions as the acts of childhood, no longer needing banners under which to join our separate factions. We won’t be “international,” because our solidarity is grounded in our prior unity, within which tribes and nation-states precipitate like bubbles in the ocean.

Transgender in the US Military: Embracing Paradox to Find Authentic Self

In this millennium, societies and worldviews collide and splash into each other, merge and breed and multiply, and what we used to think it means to be a human exponentiates until we reach what would have seemed an unimaginably far horizon, and the word “humanity” no longer holds its meaning.

Experiencing Edgelessness in the Floating City of Kompong Khleang

“No ground to stand on,” we complain when we feel insecure – but do we really need the ground to tell us where we’re standing? Or is there potential in the human spirit, on display in Kompong Khleang, to find our way within a vast, mysterious expanse, to learn to orient ourselves in ever-shifting waters?

Shoes with Human Teeth Provide an Opportunity to See Beyond Duality
Teeth are a kind of koan, if we let them be: reminding us that basic binary distinctions – inner/outer, nature/culture – aren’t sufficient to explain or to experience our lives as they appear in truth.

MartyrLoserKing: Social Struggle at the Junction of the Many and The One

Does it make a difference if this undying flame forever burns within the ribs of Jesus or atop the middle finger of Saul Williams?

And that is that.  Thank you so much for reading!

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!

The Very Best I Have To Offer: Painting Sale, Live Music 2011-2014, New Art, Discussing Ayahuasca, More Art & Future Coverage for Globalish

“One of the definitions of sanity is the ability to tell real from unreal. Soon we’ll need a new definition.”

– Alvin Toffler

Many thanks to all of you for your attention, for reading and listening to my work, for sharing my posts – every once in a while money gets tight but it makes me happy to know it's in service of large audience who are are (even silently) benefiting from what I share and create.

This edition's big news are my cyberguitar retrospective, a sale on my original art, a new painting, and some of the finest writing I've produced to date.  Enjoy!

25% Off All Original Paintings

Browse Available Pieces Here

I think it's actually been over a year since I last offered discounts on my paintings...at any rate, I'm back to wanting them to find good homes more than wanting to ask what people tell me they're really worth. If you connect with a piece but can't afford 25% off the marked asking price, let me know – I'm happy to split the cost up into payments, budge a little more, possibly even make partial trades.

Any money I make on this is going to help me make it through the festival off-season and to continue volunteering my time as a writer and musician. Most of what I do is unpaid labor and I am deeply, deeply grateful to all of you for your support in helping me dedicate my life to my creative work. If you want to show some love but original art is still out of your spending range, I have plenty of poster prints and pins for sale.

My Epic New Name-Your-Price Retrospective

Click Here & It's Yours

"Michael has mastered a method of looping and playing that is on a pedestal all on its own. Ultimately [this album] is an exploration into what you perceive music, the guitar, and technology can do…completely altering it. If you want to go someplace else, someplace new, get this album." 

– Mixolydian Blog

These twenty-seven tracks are fossils of my favorite moments in four years of fully improvised performances. They chronicle the maturation of my voice and sketch the outlines of an epic tour and self-discovery...

I never thought this music would be soundtrack to the art, lovemaking, yoga, writing, childbirth, and magic that it has. I'm honored that it resonates with anyone at all. But then, we live in times when cyborg folk makes sense.

For now, this is what I consider the definitive collection of my work – THE place to start, for people new to what I'm doing, and rich terrain for introspection as I prepare for my next phase in life and music.

New Painting

"Freshwater Kraken"

Studio – 2014 – Paint pens on masonite – 16"x24"

11"x17" Poster Prints

Fourth in a series of chromatic explorations into the basic visual language emerging between microscopic life and antique vegetal design. Floral patterns, paisleys, and damasque collide with retroviruses, trichomes, and DNA in a self-organizing burst of juicy color...

More Writing For Globalish

I love to write.  I LOVE it.  And for years I have neglected this because I wasn't getting paid.  Poor form!  I know.  But now my friends at Globalish have me on board as one of their lead authors, and I'm deeply in the game again.  The topics reach from visionary art and futurism to religion, politics, and music.  You will love this website.

Here are links to all my latest – there are too many to read, realistically, so I've starred a few of my favorites:

    • Channel 1: Revolution
    Reza Aslan: There's No Such Thing As "Muslim Countries"
    Prince Ea & Glenn Beck Talk Love and Consciousness *
    The Equivalent of a Lady Pope: India's First All-Female Akhada
    City of Philadelphia Decriminalizes Marijuana

    • Channel 2: Travel
    Google Put Cameras on Camels to Map the Arabian Desert *
    Explore a Miniature Tokyo in this Tilt-Shifted Time-Lapse
    Eye of the Needle: A Psychedelic Journey with Ayahuasca

    • Channel 3: Art
    New Apps Turns Text Messages Into Face-to-Face Meetings With Strangers
    Check Out Mars-1's Freeform Psychedelic Masterworks *
    Journey Through Time and Swim at Midnight with Tokimonsta
    Drone Du Soleil: Quadcopters Join Popular Dance Troupe
    Portrait of a Dancer: José Navas Shows Paradox of Living Today *
    Is the Future of Car Commercials Visionary? *
    Inside Me: 3D Scanner Imagery Digitizes the Human Body *
    That's Not Supposed To Happen: A Film About the Mystery of Life

    • Channel 4: Life
    YourBot App Sold As Way To Preserve Legacy for Hundreds of Years
    Smart Chopsticks: Your Simple Cyborg Health Ally
    Enlightened: Divinity Will Not Beckon On Your Terms
    An Indian Satellite Is Now Circling Mars
    Prophecy: The Future Will Be Absolutely Fantastic
    The Human Heart Is No Longer Necessary To Life
    Cymatics and 3D Language: Who's Aware of the Story? *

Art Outside is in One Week!

My last festival appearance for the time being is going to be a doozy: in addition to performing my fifth annual set and live painting, I'll also be performing alongside cellist Jen Mulhern and vocalist Tina Rodriguez as the musical accompaniment to the ethereal dance & projection work of ARTheism.  Add about a hundred awesome musical acts, a superb and extensive visual art lineup, and some choice workshops, and you get probably the best festival for its price in the United States.  No joke.  Hope to see you there...

Aya Awakenings Panel Discussion Video

Full HD Video | Stream/Download the Audio

The full half-hour video of the panel discussion I had with Mitch Schultz (director of DMT: The Spirit Molecule) and Rak Razam (director of Aya: Awakenings) after Rak's film screening in Austin this February.  Rak and Mitch are amazing guys.  We went DEEP.  It was awesome.

Parting Shot: MG Ravenectar Dress in Cosmic Village's Video

Full HD Video

Uche Sandra Ike wears it proud in this cool shoot for her "Creation Sessions," making music alongside painter Ali Kapper and flow artist Christine Katherine Dice.  It's a cool song and a lovely pastoral clip.  You can buy that dress she's wearing.

Thanks for reading, listening, and sharing.  I hope you have a magnificent week!