The Evolution of Time (My Talk From Oregon Eclipse) // MG + Singularity Bros // Future Fossils Galore // Apocalyptic Painting Sale

“I’m just some squawking monkey standing on a wooden box. I’m not going to pretend I have a handle on the situation.”

– Tony Vigorito 
(Happy Birthday, Tony!)

The Evolution of Time: Biology, Mythology, and Consciousness

- My talk from Oregon Eclipse -

Hey friends! As I settle in for a season of writing and patient, introspective work – and grapple with travel withdrawal - I'm looking forward to unpacking several of this year's best live recordings for you.

This one from the Global Eclipse Gathering in Big Summit Prairie, Oregon was for the biggest audience I've ever had. I feel like everybody's awesome energy gave me some extra focus and enthusiasm for a very all-encompassing riff, on how we can navigate time as a landscape, using our attention...

360º Video Playlist | Free MP3 Download

I mention plenty of this year's pet topics: flowers as a planet-wide catastrophe; how everything's a remix (and has always been a remix); how mastery is not enough and we can set our sights beyond, on transformation.

But some really marvelous NEW stuff came up in this one, also – just a testament to how inspiring it can be to share some space-time with you, up there, and how I'm convinced original ideas emerge through GROUPS of people (even if one person does most of the talking).

Anyway, here is the whole thing in a 360º video playlist I shot from stage, or the unedited audio from that video for listening while operating heavy machinery or performing surgery or what-have-you.

If you get something out of this talk, share it with a friend!  I'd love to help as many people as I can with navigating these insane-o rushing waters in between one age and the next...

360º Video Playlist | Free MP3 Download

- Apocalyptic Painting Sale -

Available Paintings | More Info at FB Event Page

Speaking of transitioning from one age to the next:

I'm selling all of my original artwork! It's time for me to write my debut book on evolution and psychedelic futurism, "How To Live In The Future" – and to do that I need to take a long break from painting and hustling my art.

(Not a FOREVER break...I'm still taking commissions for new work, I just won't be painting live at shows for some time.)

Here are some of the paintings still available – head over to this page for a complete list and ignore the listed prices!  Discounts of 50% are totally fair game and I'll be willing to consider more. We can set up monthly payments if you like, and I'll still ship the piece to you before it's fully paid.

I also accept cryptocurrency payments, if that's your thing.  Thanks for taking the time to check out my work and I hope your next adventure is a good one!

- New Podcast Episodes -

Future Fossils is on a roll right now!  Starting with a special two-part interview with one of my greatest inspirations, the historian and mythographer William Irwin Thompson – and then moving on to explore the relationship of time, art, and the body with tattoo artist Christopher Sheehan – and then indulging in an electric dialogue with astrologer Adam Sommer about the dance of Mars and Venus, masculine and feminine, iron and copper, over history and through our lives...

Subscribe on iTunes (iOS) or Stitcher or Google Play (Android)

 

 

I also recently appeared on The Singularity Bros Podcast, which I assure you is as cheekily self-aware and wonderful as the name might have you think.  We talked about how technology is empowering us all to become superheroes – OR supervillains – and what it's going to take from each of us to level up responsibly and enter this intense new world with grace, humility, and love.

That means a frank discussion about the dark side of decentralization, the critiques of Universal Basic Income, and other, sillier topics glimmering on the horizon of "the Broosphere" (yes, we went there.)

Stream/Download Singularity Bros Episode 111

- Stuff You Might Have Missed -

This “masterclass” I taught at Moogfest 2016 covers my occult philosophy of loop-based music, walks listeners through the construction of layered live compositions, and drills into some tech specifics for performance.  Dig it here.

Something magical occurred that night. A portal opened. Call it what you will. All this music's just an overture to what came next. We never saw it coming. Now it's all that I can do to not grab onto what remains of that extraordinary mystery...

Unfold into the atmospheric grooves on Bandcamp or Spotify.

- UPCOMING SHOWS - 

14 October – Austin, TX – SquareRüt Kava Bar

Cosmic Americana & Cyberballadry Singer-Songwriter Set

Free All Ages Show

2 - 5 November – Austin, TX – Vortex Repository Theater

Original Music & Sound Design for P3M5:

Plurality of Privacy Project in 5-Minute Plays

3 November – Austin, TX – Guan Yin Tea House

Cyberacoustic Guitar Instrumental Set

2 1/2 hours of live music for Gong Fu Tea Service

New Hummingbird Live Painting | William Irwin Thompson Interview | More Sublimation Tees & Tanks

“I carry a torch that is as old as the human spirit, and as I journey forth I seek a broader vision and support to help me communicate as purely and uninhibitedly as possible. This is a statement and a prayer…”
– Amanda Sage

This week I'm giving you a lot to chew on, some work that I'm especially proud of.  So I'll skip the preamble and let the content do the talking.  Enjoy!  And hopefully I'll see you at Holy Mountain in Austin opening for Taylor McFerrin this Saturday, or at Gratifly Festival, or Arise Festival...

Beija Flor

11"x17" Poster Prints | Full-Size Giclée Prints

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"Note that the flower – with its multiple and layered invocation, a figure-ground dissolution of inside/outside that works as a snare for insect attraction – the (now self-referential) book, and the jewel share a vocation: organized, and thoroughly seductive, fluctuation."

– Richard Doyle, Darwin's Pharmacy pp.64-65

16"x24" – paint pens on canvas, created live at:

2014 06 13 – 16 Firefly Gathering (Flagstaff, Arizona) during

Kokopelli, Jahmontee, Nico Luminous, Nanda, Quanta, Akasha, Digital Rust, Love & Light, Mr. Rogers, Sixis, Johnny Swoope, Pumpkin, Random Rab, Kaminanda, Whitebear, Itom Lab

2014 06 19 – 22 Sonic Bloom Festival (South Park, Colorado) during

Soulacybin, DJedi, Kyrstyn Pixton, Cualli, OTT, Tipper, Nominus, Future Simple Project, Merkaba, Amani, Treavor Moontribe, Ayla Nereo, Saqi, Wildlight, Bird of Prey, Dopapod, Birds of Paradise, Mr. Bill, Random Rab

"Beija Flor" means "flower kisser" in Portugeuse. This summer has been full of visits from hummingbird energy in various ways and it only seemed appropriate to honor these beautiful creatures with a portrait that recognizes their sublime and joyous spirit. After nearly a year at home in Texas, this is how I felt to get back out on the road and join my friends for festival season...

(What flower is he kissing?  Why, the 1000-petaled lotus connecting us to God, of course – the "glass chrysanthemum" or Sahasrara chakra that mediates our soul's descent to matter, and through which various spiritual traditions direct attention at the time of death.  What better place to plant a kiss?)

Browse Buttons, Cards, & More on Zazzle

On The Horizons of Planetary Culture: 

Cyborgs, Psychedelics, & Spiritual Evolution

Listen/Watch at Reality Sandwich

One of the of the best – and most controversial – conversations I’ve ever had is now live at Reality Sandwich: My second rap (here is the first) with poet-philosopher William Irwin Thompson, former MIT professor and founder of the legendary Lindisfarne Association, on the transformations of self and society in the collapse of civilization and the emergence of a planetary culture – cyborgs, surveillance, and psychedelics in an age of paranoid apocalypticism and inspired new visions for our species.  Get ready for a wild one, folks…comments welcome!

Full notes on the two-hour conversation – including mentions of Douglas Rushkoff, Erik Davis, Buddhist Geeks, Mindful Cyborgs, Richard Doyle, Philip K. Dick, Jan Irvin, Buckminster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan,Terence McKenna, Burning Man, Bitcoin, Google Glass, DADARA, Joan Halifax, Wendell Berry, and more – at the link above.

New Dye-Sublimation Shirts at Infinite Bit

I still have several cool shirt & dress designs for sale at Ravenectar.  Here are a few more in production with another great apparel startup, Infinite Bit.  Being able to my print art on clothes like this almost makes up for the no-hoverboard thing, in my opinion...

T-Shirts | Tees

T-Shirts | Tees

T-Shirts | Tees

Upcoming Appearances

Now Accepting Commissions!

21st Century Romance: Digital Music for Analog Love | William Irwin Thompson x Burning Man | John Perry Barlow x Google Glass | New Videos, Merch, & Live Recordings

"They say when you meet the love of your life, time stops, and that's true.  What they don't tell you is when time starts again, it moves extra fast to catch up."

- Ed Bloom, Big Fish

Ideamensch recently quoted my interview with them in their list of "35 Habits That Successful Entrepreneurs Use To Get Things Done."  My contribution is old and taken out of context, but it's a good list in general, if you're looking for ways to be more productive.

But I'm not sure that being productive is most important thing in life – try as they might to convince us all otherwise.  I often feel like it's a bad habit I have to unlearn, that I'm stuck on "show and tell" overdrive – but to what end?  I'm sure I could improve my strategies for saying more with less, inspiring by example with a fuller-yet-more-spacious life, and I'm always open to your insights.

In the meantime, here I am sharing work of which I am extremely proud.  I do this as an offering to others, but I really love this stuff.  I get lost in this music and these patterns for hours every day, and hope that you ultimately benefit from the loving dedication and enjoyment I invest into my work.

And I deeply appreciate all of the help you guys continue to provide to keep it flowing.  When you pick up prints or music, or commission a painting, or hire me for a private party, or whatever – it all goes to paying rent that just doubled; to starting a long-overdue life in Austin with my beloved; and to finishing the most ambitious projects I have ever undertaken.

Whenever you share my work with your friends, or invite me to enjoy your own creative efforts, our every interaction helps reinforce this path of joy and service.  Thank you.

May all of this blossom like red fireworks in your heart.

Michael

21st Century Romance:
Digital Music for Analog Love

Listen/Download

21st Century Romance is a double-disc LP of highlights from my 2013 tour, improvised performances channeling the spirit of places like Rootwire Festival and Austin's Historic Scoot Inn into luminous, deep-chill heroic electro-ballads.

It is a consummate recording of my years honing a new kind of music – freestyle instrumentals that wed past and future, live and studio, the world's most familiar folk instrument with a dazzling array of electronic hardware.

The music is just one part of a multimedia release exploring the ever-more-intimate embrace human and machine through multiple channels, including original digital art, first-person time-lapse live painting videos taken through Google Glass, laser-engraved bamboo jewelry, inspirational performance philosophy, and more – a feast for the senses, articulating a healing transcendental vision for humankind as we stride forward into an age of epochal change.

But what it all comes down to is this:  an hour and a half of music I'm really proud of and can't believe I made live in concert without premeditation.

Two tracks – "Sweat Anthem" and "Green Ranger" – are entirely free downloads and the rest of the album, liner notes and all, is $7.  It's the only record of dozens on my site for which I'm asking anything at all – mostly just to see who still cares about all the time and love and work that goes into the craft of music.

Buying my friends' music is one of the most satisfying things I do and I hope you feel the same...because it sounds so much sweeter when you've made that commitment.  (Remember new CDs?)  If you want a physical souvenir, the album is a free download with this poster:

Ernst Haeckel Tribute Poster

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Ernst Haeckel is one of my personal heroes – the 19th Century scientific illustrator who single-handedly named, described, and drew thousands of deep sea creatures discovered by the world's first trans-oceanic research expedition.  (If you want to be inspired, watch this documentary about his life.)

He saw evolution as the unfolding mind of God and recognized no boundary between art and science...and his lavish illustrations reflect his sensitivity to natural beauty and geometric perfection.  This signed 11" x 17" poster on glossy cardstock is an homage to his beautiful plates of diatoms, sea stars, and jellyfish – featuring the series of hand-drawn and digitally manipulated fractals I designed for the liner notes of 21st Century Romance as part of its exploration of the analog-digital embrace.

I Made These Videos & They're Super Cool

Cultural historian William Irwin Thompson had no idea when he gave this talk on the circus in 1975 that it would one day go so nicely over Burning Man footage taken thirty-eight years later...

My friend and colleague Topher Sipes threw down some epic visuals with me at the Scottish Rite Theatre in Austin a few weeks ago.  Here's a clip of that super trippy set – full video coming soon...

John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and author of the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace, seems surprisingly at odds with Google Glass in this short interview...

I shred eight-finger polyphonic fretboard tapping in this vaguely latin lightning number on the overwhelmingness of modern life, recorded at my 30th birthday show in Austin...

Here's A New Painted Hat!

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Yay!  I had a lot of fun with this "Biomechanical Slurk meets Easter Sunday" snapback – painted on a canvas Grassroots California lid, which offered a better surface and let me render more detail.  Let me know if you'd like one – or custom-painted anything.  (Murals!)

These Pins = Mmm

Two of the prettier things in which I've played a part, these matched "warm" and "cool" double-posted enamel pins are $20 each from my homies at Kolorspun.  This is a banger 2" pin – the kind that would shine like a train headlight on the front of a fedora or flash enough to signal a search plane if you ever got lost in the woods.  Just saying.

New Pay-Whatever Live Recordings

Download for Free/Donation
Buy 11"x17" Prints of the Album Cover

Recorded at my friend Aisha's Valentine's Day 50th Birthday Party in North Austin...we start off with a lengthy melodic psyambient guitar improvisation, then roll through a few of my fan favorite "standards" from the twelve-year MG catalogue. Suffused with dark chocolate and the seductive decor, these performances for a home full of Burners and other delightful weirdos are rife with shimmering, sultry haute technique.

Highights include a best-yet take on the ongoing quasi-improvisation, "Extinct" - building on but significantly different from prior iterations from The Manifestation Celebration 2011 and my birthday party at Whip In 2012.  Also, a pretty tight version of my percussive guitar anthem, "Offering Hands".

Download for Free/Donation

Improvised by strangers on the tail end of an all-night house party, while sampled and remixed on the fly by Michael Garfield. Featuring: Mitch Mignano on Microkorg, Acoustic Guitar, & iPad; Jared Buchsbaum on Melodica, Mellophone, & Clarinet; and Anthony Paul on Human Beatbox.

Recorded live at a private house party in Austin, Texas on New Year's Day, immediately following my solo sunrise set.  Be warned:  this is extremely weird.  Album artwork by the inimitable Kaliptus.

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...

The Enlightenment Conference, New Print Store, & Plenty More Art

"People wish to be settled; only so far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them."

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

"When patterns are broken, new worlds emerge."

– Tuli Kupferberg

Register for The Enlightenment Conference!
Click here for more info

I was just confirmed as a speaker for one of the most awesome online events I've even heard of: The Enlightenment Conference, a three-week intensive with luminaries the world over, including Alex & Allyson Grey, Lama Surya Das, Father Thomas Keating, Jean Houston, Howard Bloom, my singer-songwriter role model Stuart Davis, my friends The Nadis Warriors, and dozens of other amazing people who will be sharing their insights on how to wed spiritual development with life in the world of business, family, and the everyday.

Not only can you just sign up for free and get all of the recordings as they're released, but you can also apply for a student or low-income scholarship (although the whole thing costs less than a hundred bucks, if you're sitting pretty).  They're also accepting late registrations...sign up today and get access to the collective wisdom of an utterly inspiring group of people!

My Latest Article on BigThink

When I have the time for it, I write and speak on issues of human-technology co-evolution in loose affiliation with the Hybrid Reality Institute, whose blog on BigThink.com has featured some of my finest writing.  The latest installment is an excerpt from my epic two-hour conversation with poet-philosopher William Irwin Thompson, one of the most incandescent minds I have ever encountered.  We spoke about why prophecy is not prediction, compared the futures of Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Kurzweil, discussed elemental magic, and much more...

The Singularity & Other "Dimensional Failures of Topological Imagination"

If you're interested in how the past connects to the future – and who isn't? – it's a great read.  :)

New Video: "All That's Left Is Stars"

From my April show at the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport.  An old song, a sweet song, one that captures that feeling I went on to try and express in almost all of my improvised instrumentals...the lyrics are below so you can read along while you listen:

Watch on Youtube

Lyrics:

We laid on the lawn, the grass to our backs

and emptied our minds in frozen silence.

Night stretched on with imperceptible swirls,

our ghosts through space in a patient spiral.

The constellations drifting apart.

Meaning is lost and all that's left is stars.

Dim clouds milkshade the pointillist black.

There's nothing but breeze through open quiet.

It's a slow pulsing fade from tense and withdrawn,

expanding in place with broken lightness...

The constellations drifting apart.

Meaning is lost and all that's left is stars.

You can download the whole album here:
An Aria For ABIA: Live at Austin Airport

New Convenient Way To Buy Prints

Until today, ordering my prints has been kind of a pain: by email only, and there wasn't a single place online where you could see absolutely all of my paintings and make an informed decision.

But I fixed it!  Take a look at my new merchandise shop at Bandcamp and scratch your head, as I did, at how I managed to crank out over 250 paintings (!) in four and a half years. Once you've enjoyed a stroll through the archives, it's easier than ever to buy the ones that sing to your inner ear.

(As always, I offer discounts if you want two or more prints; for that you'll still have to contact me with your order.) 

Verdilux

Collaboration with Chaeli Cardenas and Jeremiah Allen Welch

6" x 12" – paint marker & spray paint on masonite

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This was an orphan piece for almost two years, after Jeremiah Allen Welch gave me this stenciled board during the MAPS Psychedelic Science Conference in 2010.  But then I pawned it off to my friend Chaeli Cardenas and she got me inspired to work on it again...  Lord only knows what we're looking at, here.

Body Art at Firefly Gathering

 

Click to view the album on FB 

Custom-Painted Hats

Wheee!  All the live long day.  If you want one, hit me up with your hat style, size, favorite colors, any ideas for symbols or patterns, budget (typically between $80 – $150), and mailing address.  Right now touring slows everything else down but I'm still turning around orders in about three weeks.

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Upcoming Festivals

I book new shows all the time, so be sure to check my full calendar on the blog or facebook – especially if you live in Texas, North Carolina, Ohio, Michigan, or Indiana – but here are the biggie festivals I'm excited about:

Thanks for reading, stay in touch, and have a beautiful day!

A.I., Angels, Mass Extinctions...and Benefit Compilations

"For the first time in human evolution, the individual life is long enough, and the cultural transformation swift enough, that the individual mind is now a constituent player in the global transformation of human culture."

– William Irwin Thompson

MG on Spring Forward, Volume II

The new benefit compilation from None Backwards features ALL UNRELEASED TRACKS from Mochipet, Up Until Now, D.V.S*, The Malah, Kappa, Benny Loco, This Is Art, and many more!  Plus, gorgeous cover art by my friend Chaeli Cardenas.

My track's a recent live performance of "Extinct," a crowd favorite from last year's A Million Anniversaries: CyberAcoustic Guitar For Lovemaking, recorded back in January with Austin chanteuse Toni Lane Casserly on vocals.

All proceeds from this album go directly to Rock Against Cancer, a nonprofit organization that supports the emotional needs of young cancer patients with music therapy and special music events.  Next week I'll share the video of this song live in concert – in the meantime, enjoy Spring Forward, Vol. II and put some money toward making a few children's hard situation a little easier.

A.I., Angels, & Mass Extinctions:

A Conversation With William Irwin Thompson

When I'm not painting at concerts, or playing my own, I spend my time thinking and talking about deep time, radical evolution, and the transformation of humankind – you  know, the crazy science-fiction-level questions playing out in real-time all around us these days.

Recently I had the wild good fortune to speak with one of my philosophical heroes:  William Irwin Thompson, former M.I.T. Cultural Historian, founder of the Lindisfarne Association, friend of Marshall McLuhan's and Buckminster Fuller's, and yogic poet world renowned.

Thompson wrote one of my favorite books, Coming Into Being: Artifacts & Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness – a paradigm-busting exploration of the ancient world and human history from the very different perspectives of the people who lived in it.  And his lectures are just as brilliant and far-ranging – he has a way of "speaking in hypertext," connecting wildly divergent ideas with expansive (yet surgically precise) metaphors.

Using my research position at Hybrid Reality Institute as an excuse, I called up Bill Thompson on Skype back in December and this is what came of it:  an intense, luminous, challenging, wild conversation on the origin and destiny of the human species:

Watch/Comment/Share at Youtube

The whole thing is in audio format over at my lecture & interview archive.  So you can follow up on all of Thompson's encyclopedic references, the hyperlinked transcript is bundled in every free download:

"Catastrophes are often stimulated by the failure to feel the emergence of a domain, and so what cannot be felt in the imagination is experienced as embodied sensation in the catastrophe."

– William Irwin Thompson 

The man's a genius.  Even if comparative mythology, cyborg anthropology, evolutionary biology, and science fiction aren't your thing, this is a conversation that will rock your world – possibly forever.  Not for my own sake but for yours, I highly encourage you to set aside the two hours and change the way you think about being human...

More Custom Painted Hats

This is just not getting old for me...I love the blend of challenge, creativity, and intuition involved in making someone a hat that fits their spirit.  If you'd like one of your own, email me with the specifics (budget, hat style, favorite colors, etc.) and we can get right to it!

(Also, I've had a crazy run of preorders for my upcoming fully-embroidered collaboration with Grassroots California – and I'm still taking preorders, so now's your chance if you want one before they're sold out!)

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Next week: New paintings and music from my adventures at South By Southwest!  Austin's wildest week a year is still in the throes, but I'll have some of my finest work yet online soon.  In the meantime, thanks for your ongoing support, and have a beautiful day...

The Sacred Geography of 21st Century Renaissance Civilization

(If you got this by email, read it as a web page for full rich media splendor...)

Reading Music:

"Meridians" – improvised at Art Outside Festival 2011
(download this track for free)

“As viewed by astronauts from the moon, the earth lacks those lines of sociopolitical division that are so prominent on maps. And as recognized here below, the web of interlacing socioeconomic interdependencies that now enfold the planet is of one life. All that is required is a general change of vision to accord with those contemporary facts.”
– Joseph Campbell, comparative mythologist

“It’s not science to me unless it’s integrated, in such a way that it makes a story. I have this holistic view. If symbiosis is simply the living together of organisms in the same place and the same time, in physical contact with each other…then Gaia, which is the whole Earth living system, is symbiosis as seen from space. You can’t talk about cost-benefit and cooperation/competition because those words are proper for the banks and the basketball courts, but they’re not proper for a scientific explanation.“

– Lynn Margulis, evolutionary biologist

This month marks the maiden voyage of a most exciting collaboration as lead blogger for The Renaissance Project – an international team of writers and film-makers chronicling the emergence of a new planetary culture, performing a new evolutionary mythos through the personal stories of genre-breaking creative innovators.

As part of our launch, I just published what I think might be my finest piece of writing so far – a jazzy, poetic romp inspired in equal parts by Google Earth, media theory, archeoastronomy, and ayahuasca.

If my calling is indeed to inspire by sharing what inspires me, then it's time for me to take up the sacred sword and devote myself to the illuminated word – to give a voice to this swirling nexus of culture and consciousness, art and science, religion and everyday life in which all of us find ourselves as we cross the threshold into a new way of being.  Out of the clamor of interconnected perspectives, we can hear a new tune playing – the angelic choir of seven billion people unified in a blooming ecology of mind, our flesh quickened in exaltation of the transcendental living mystery in which all of us are woven – the song of the human condition as it awakens ever more deeply to itself through a re-animated sacred and sentient cosmos.

So please, enjoy this declarative first step down the pilgrimage road of my newly-inhabited role as the muezzin for this post-historical call to prayer – I welcome your comments, your sharing, and your reflections as I gear up to expand this work into a regular flow of philosophical performances and, perhaps, finally, a book:

"We Get Around: The Sacred Geography of 21st Century Renaissance Civilization"

"This all starts right here by recognizing that you live on a spherical creature spiraling around the Sun’s own helical trajectory through the dynamic interstellar medium, through cosmic dust and lightning storms, and whichever way you point we can go no deeper into 'space' than we already are. And as the feeling of humanity as a layer stretching out in every direction on the surface of this sphere increases, as you can almost sense those people in their houses, watching tv or making love or crying about work, the children wondering what adulthood is like, the adults wondering about God…this is you, this is your body, and everyone’s successes are your successes. Every new idea is as yours as your heartbeat – out of your control but part of what defines your being in this time and place." (read more)

This is an open-ended project and we welcome collaborators.  If you feel inspired to contribute to this with your own celebration of world creative culture in an accelerating age, you can fill out an application on the website...here's the video I made as part of that process, to state my interest and intentions.  It's the closest thing I have right now to a mission statement:

Yeah, that pretty much sums it up.  :)

EarthKidzUSA's 2012 Visionary Art Calendar

While we're on the topic of awesome creative projects in which I am honored to participate, here's the coolest wall calendar you've ever seen (Long Now Foundation clocks that measure time in the passing of seasonal flowers don't count).  "FutureEarth" is both a solar and lunar 13-month calendar that gives not only the standard weeks and months but also the Dreamspell dates some people use to feel a closer connection to the harmonic currents of time reimagined as art...and with contributions from an all-star line-up of visionary artists (including Martina Hoffmann, Android Jones, Amanda Sage, Adam Scott Miller, Autumn Skye, Jessica Perlstein, and almost the entire Colorado live painting crew), it's easy to see time as art.

AND the $20 you spend on this calendar funds a FREE Youth Art Workshop Series for 2012!  So you're empowering the next generation of creative brilliance by picking up some of these for your family and friends.

Here's my page – big thanks to Justin Maynes for organizing this, and for making me May:

Buy the FutureEarth 2012 Wall Calendar

So Many Hats

I've been on a roll with the hand-painted hats, of late, and here's your proof.  Most of these are still available for purchase, if you see something you like:

"Fireworks" – check price/availability on fb

"Heart Display" – check price/availability on fb

"Tesla" – check price/availability on fb

"Neon Streamers" – check price/availability on fb

"Nightscape" – check price/availability on fb

"Desert Flower" – custom design for Whomp Austin

"Lite Brite" – custom design for Paul Rush

Stay Healthy For The Holidays!

It's out of form for me to publish a bunch of health links in this blog, but I am after all addicted to sharing, and just found some helpful short articles about psychosocial health and nutrition I think it would be a crime not to spread around.  Here you go – a few easy tips for staying sane and in top form during one of the most stressful times of year:

• Smiling Makes You Smarter

• The Health Benefits of Gratitude 

• 29 of the Healthiest Foods on the Planet

• How to Build A Good Work Environment

From the above article:

"Avoid openly trying to reform people. Every man knows he is imperfect, but he doesn't want someone else trying to correct his faults. If you want to improve a person, help him to embrace a higher working goal — a standard, an ideal — and he will do his own 'making over' far more effectively than you can do it for him."

Forthcoming:

Austin is treating me better than I could have imagined.  Not only do I get to celebrate my 28th birthday and Saturn Return with a free concert at Austin's utterly delectable Whip In on January 8th, but – dude! – I just landed an opening slot for two of my favorite bands in Texas, at one of my favorite venues in Texas.  Click the flyer for more info...I hope to see you there!

...and, lastly, if you've made it this far then you probably have the attention span and dorkitude required to reap full satisfaction from the two-hour interview I just did with poet, former MIT cultural historian, and planetary culture pioneer William Irwin Thompson.  It was an incredible conversation that took us from the religious underpinnings of the singularity movement, to the emergence of new multimodal electronic art forms, to comparisons between the current economic crisis and the critical emergence of photosynthesis on primordial Earth.  And I've never met anyone with betteradvice for a future-shocked planet on how to surf accelerating change.  I can't wait to share it with you.

In the meantime, much love and many thanks to each and every one of you for giving me your time and support!  Lord knows I don't get to book shows at amazing conscious festivals, publish on thoughtful and inspiring websites, and create art that adds lustre to a viewer's soul without this amazing network of friends and co-conspirators turning me onto amazing opportunities and making resonant introductions.  Anything I can do to repay you for your help, please let me know.