Life Finds A Way • Hyperstition • Freak Flag Mailbox • Psychedelic Book Club • Post-Covid Festivals • Art & Science • The Future Is Disgusting

"We're in a freefall into future. We don't know where we're going. Things are changing so fast, and always when you're going through a long tunnel, anxiety comes along. And all you have to do to transform your hell into a paradise is to turn your fall into a voluntary act. It's a very interesting shift of perspective and that's all it is...joyful participation in the sorrows and everything changes."

– Joseph Campbell

Consummations and conversations: I've been very busy lately in the Future Fossils Facebook group and Discord server but have nonetheless brought these works — some very long in the incubator — to completion. The relief is real, the resolution deep! Here are my latest psychoactive brain treats to augment your navigation of the weirdness that is 2021:

NEW MUSIC 65 MILLION YEARS IN THE MAKING

Listen at Soundcloud • Purchase at Bandcamp • Save to your Spotify collection

"Life Finds A Way" (and the one-minute instrumental coda "Hyperstition") have been in the works since my dorm room days in 2002 — so not exactly the Cretaceous, but might as well be.

This latest addition to my ongoing album-in-progress The Age of Reunion (which you can scope out and pre-order here) brings acoustic guitar, synthesizer, Chapman Stick, organ, electronic drums, and four-part vocal harmonies together into something appropriately bombastic, groovy, operatic, and apocalyptic to serve as the vehicle for proggy epic pop adventures into the pre-and-post-historic.

Here are a few different ways to engage.  Get out your headphones and hold onto your butts:

🦖 Soundcloud (for time-stamped commenting) 🦖

🦖Bandcamp (for lossless audio downloads) 🦖

🦖 Spotify (for saving to playlists) 🦖

Patreon supporters get some sweet exegesis with an extra half-hour of my Ian Malcolm-esque ranting on the inspiration behind this song: technological evolution, complex systems, accidental magic, reality ruptures, and the end of the world. If you're "like me...a digger," then dig into all that here:

UPCOMING BOOK CLUB CALLS

Speaking of awesome science fiction and general weirdness, we're discussing two amazing books in the Future Fossils Book Club this summer.  I hope you can join us!

I PROMISED YOU I WOULDN'T STOP PAINTING

And now that I have a place I can customize however I like (the pressure!), I started small by upcycling our trashy old mailbox into something that screams "weirdos live here."  Next up: my closet doors...

NEW FUTURE FOSSILS EPISODES

Lastly, while I'm not toiling away at my admittedly-excellent (4.8 stars on 147 Apple Podcast reviews) day job show, Complexity Podcast, I've been knocking out some wonderful conversations and solo casts for Future Fossils. And here they are:

I talk with Mikey Lion, music producer and co-founder of Desert Hearts, and Malena Grosz, creator of The Party Pro Toolkit and director of Stargate Reunion, about the pandemic’s distortions of time and community, flow states and festival time, gatherings in the No New Normal, the impact of stage design and architecture on how community events shape individual experience, the tension between intimacy and scale, DMT and other life-changing experiences, the good parts of tribalism, psychedelic integration, and the future of festival economics…

Watch Here

On 23 May 2021 as part of the latest Complexity Weekend hackathon, I hosted a live panel discussion with four unique and fascinating minds: 

Michaela Emch is a communication and marketing specialist, translator, cultural mediator, biomimicry practitioner, safari guide, keen naturalist and biology enthusiast. Andréa Naccache is a psychoanalyst and a doctoral student in philosophy of law at the University of São Paulo, with an MBA in finance. Meredith Tromble is an artist and writer who makes installations, drawings, and performances. Timothy Clancy work ranges from sophisticated simulations of violence & instability to systems thinking for business.

We discussed the relationship between the arts and sciences, conflicts of interest between systems and individual people, and many more interesting threads at the intersection of complex systems research and creative innovation.

The first in a new biweekly, patrons-only sidestream for author-read essays, commentary on current events, mailbag replies, and experimental format episodes. First up is a reading of and commentary on my Part Six of my book-forever-in-progress, How To Live in The Future: "The Future Is Disgusting."

Here's a teaser:

The future that I want, the only future I believe worth living in, is full of love — and love is all about relaxing boundaries. Erupting into our Italian gardens, smashing manicured taxonomies, and popping our extropian illusions of a better life beyond constraints, love is the greatest trickster that reveals distinctions in imagined unity and unifies apparent opposites, to hell with definitions; it is time for you to learn.

And that ensures the future will be positively gross, because as every set of paired antitheses resolves within the immanent-transcendent whole appearing as the herald of another era, nemeses are written into myth together; warring faiths combine their efforts to create economies; and everything you loathe today is indispensably a part of who you are, in truth, and who you could become if you survive and live receptive to the gnarly lessons of reflection offered up to you by love.

Someday all you hate will lose its charge within a greater truth — which, in a way, is even worse than knowing it will just persist. No: it becomes a part of you, and therefore worthy of your love; you learn to dig the things you feared; your brain adapts to shifting norms; we really are remarkable in our plasticity, and you’ll regard you-reading-now as hopelessly naïve, and small, and understandable, for all your ignorances are enshrined and glow within as relics of the origin of that more terrible and beautiful, awake and all-embracing thing you are.

MISCELLANY

Available NFTs at Rarible

Available NFTs at Foundation

My ever-deepening feed of wondrous musical discoveries

New Leggings & Cases // Three New Paintings // New Unplugged Music Video // Custom Violins & Flatbills // Essays on the Microbiome, Necromancy // Another Guest Spot on the Midwest Real Podcast

"Sharing, not secrecy, is the means by which we create infinite wealth. The wealth of networks, the wealth of knowledge, revolutionary wealth - all can create a nonzero win-win Earth that works for one hundred percent of humanity."

– Robert David Steele (former CIA agent)

“All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.”

– Anatole France (Nobel Prize-winning poet)

Merry Christmas, everyone!  After six months of experimentation, I've decided to make this a weekly (shorter, easier, more digestible) newsletter starting in 2016.  That way you won't be overwhelmed with an absurd abundance of new music, art, and writing (like you'll see below).  Here's to a smarter generosity, a less demanding way to stay in touch.  

That said, I hope you reap the full rewards of this last monster update.  Thank you so much for letting me give of myself to you in this way – some of you for eight years, now!  We'll keep learning and growing together.

For those of you with less time, here're highlights:  I finally have a complete on-demand merchandise store setup at Society6; I just quietly made all 71 of my musical recordings at Bandcamp entirely free (including several previously unreleased live albums); my sweetest and most poignant song so far is up on Youtube; and three new paintings showing off a more refined technique are now live at my online print store.  All of that and more, below.

I hope you have the greatest Christmas ever, and that you get laid by angels right as everyone is cheering and the clock rolls over to a New Year.  Much love and many blessings!

New Words (Writing Archive)

My second appearance on the Midwest Real Podcast, in which host Michael Phillip and I discuss the shifting nature of "reality" in the Internet Age, and I outline for the first time ever my belief that the 21st Century is best understood as a species-wide collective psychedelic experience.

My second article for the Body Hacking Conference Blog, in which I playfully undermine the idea that our bodies are computers with a visionary jaunt into the future of "hacking" the microbiological ecosystems in our guts.

My latest short blog for Reality Sandwich, in which I introduce you to the awesome artistry of my friend Void Denizen, whose work brilliantly confuses comedy, rap, and necromancy.

New Song (Music Archive)

Watch on Youtube // Watch on Vimeo // Watch on Facebook

A ballad for my friend, fellow songwriter Luke Redfield, in his style, about the silver lining to be found in getting stuck, in losing something beautiful, in having to sit still and wait for life to change:

Heard that you were unwound

know you have found your inspiration

closer to the ground

than you prefer to glide.

But all your pretty sounds

come from a place of desperation

the space between the howl

and the Moon inside...

All that open road is only a reflection

of the freedom that you know is in your mind.

Hard to go there when you know it's a projection.

So much easier to play it out...

I'm sorry about your car.

Sorry about your sweet Australian.

Glad to know that you can play guitar again.

It seems to all come down

at once, confounding explanation.

Feet and wings both bound

right when you need to fly.

But when you're not allowed

to get around, the revelations

come through clear and loud

and the soul grows wide.

All that time out turns you inward for reflection

and confinement makes a diamond in your eye.

You won't find it chasing highway for the legend

so I'm glad you had to sit one out.

I'm sorry about your car.

Sorry about your sweet Australian.

Glad to know that you can play guitar again.

The story of all your scars

deserve the songs you've earned by failing.

Glad to know that you can play guitar again.

New Paintings (Gallery of Available Pieces)

"Diaspora"
24"x32" - oil and acrylic pens on masonite

original painting available – email me with inquiries

Buy 11"x17" signed poster prints for $20 each

Painted at:
2015-12-19 at The Gatsby (Austin, TX) to
The Lagoons, Kindaheart, Muddy Flowers, Caterwaulrus, 365colours

I used to paint one piece a night, back when I started making art at concerts. I enjoyed the looseness, dynamism, energy, and flow of pieces that I knew I had to finish then and there. But somewhere in the last few years, I started hanging out with "real" visionary painters, folks who painted all day every day and logged 150 hours in their average works. How am I supposed to look legit next to these people if I don't start putting way more work into each new live painting? So, I left the "start-and-finish-in-one-evening" pieces on the ground behind me (metaphorically).

Flash forward to this year, and I'm nostalgic for the rapid failure and success that comes with cranking out new pieces fast-as-possible. Plus, I happen to be reading some far-future, totally insane posthuman sci-fi by the great John C. Wright at the moment, and his books have a way of focusing on loooooong-term visionary space migration projects, building spherical space stations around stars, "sophotransmogrifying" all rocks and ice in a solar system into thinking matter...that kind of thing. It really tickles me in the part obsessed with what comes after our imaginary line between machines and living things has been erased once and for all: a minded, living, and responsive world where weapons have opinions, people are technology, the ships that carry us between the stars are ecosystems, more like gods than rockets, and each new invention glorifies what we call "nature" now, instead of being held against it.

Linked thematically to many earlier pieces, this one is another love song to the emptiness of space, which life would fill (indeed, it probably already has) if given any chance to do so. Think of the lusty yearning to explore the vast frontier...now lay that feeling over images of coral spawning under the Full Moon...

"Carnotaurus Wakes Up In A Very Unfamiliar Place"
36"x24" - oil and acrylic pens on canvas

original painting available – email me with inquiries

Buy 11"x17" signed poster prints for $20 each

Painted at:
2015-11-04 Empire Control Room (Austin, TX) to Hullabaloo, Detox Unit, Gaddy, and Fractālà
2015-11-07 Calavera Corazon, 2 GypsyZ Art (Kerrville, TX)
2015-11-11 Home Studio (Austin, TX)
2015-12-02 Empire Control Room to Digital Rust, Somatoast, InertG, Twips
2015-12-11 Empire Control Room to Blockhead, Botany, Bonus Junk, Lefty

The premise: is there is a "bardo" realm between lives for human beings, why not for dinosaurs? The Tibetan Book of the Dead talks about how when your body fades away at the moment of death, you are plunged into a bizarre and turbulent world of mental reactions. I can only imagine the surprise our protagonist must be feeling to discover herself in the whirling kaleidoscopic hyperspace of the after-and-before-life...

"Cosmic Giggle"
24"x24" - oil and acrylic paint pens on four canvases

original painting available – email me with inquiries

Buy 11"x17" signed poster prints for $20 each

A studio painting of what I imagine God's crystalline internal organs must jiggle like when humans do our ordinary silly human things like fall in love and kill each other...

In addition to this month's live paintings, I also painted violins #003 & #004, and hats #180 and #181:

Apparently it is my lot in life to craft or reimagine magic sigils people use to shield and ornament their withered-but-recuperating pineal glands.  If you would like my help re-framing this time-honored gangsta tradition as the PC alternative to wearing indigenous head-dresses to music festivals (or the politically incorrect alternative for anyone attending a funeral), just let me know what's crying to express itself through you...

New Designs (Full Collection)

You asked, I answered: here are seven spankin' new leggings for all of your cyborg Shakti cosplay shenanigans!  Make a memorable exit in these lovely all-over printed, six panel polyester leggings, which will let you move and keep you warm and wick the sweat and turn heads.  If you order a pair, tag me in a Facebook or Instagram post about them and I'll share your picture!

But that's only one facet of the many-sided jewel that is my new Society6 design collection.  You'll also find phone cases, clocks, travel mugs, fleece blankets, t-shirts, and innumerable other made-on-demand items upon which you can blow your lottery winnings, legal settlements, and 401K.  I get 10% of what you spend.  Yay!

Upcoming Events (Full Calendar)

A few of my first major dates in 2016, with plenty more in store!  I hope to see you out there...

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!

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

Like/Share on FB

"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!

Mycelium Music | New Live Painting | Custom Violin | Upcoming Gigs | New Merch at Zazzle

“Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.”

– Dan Gilbert

“Thoroughly conscious ignorance has been the prelude to every advance in science.”

– James Clerk Maxwell

The summer's abundance of travel, inspirational friendships, and powerful new chance meetings is well underway...freshly home, I'm eager to integrate all that I've learned and experienced in the last two weeks – and looking forward to some amazing gigs in the month ahead.

I can't wait to share all of that new work with you – but I'm a little behind.  So first things first!

Mycelium Music Compilation Vol. 4
A Benefit for the Amazon Mycorenewal Project

Listen/Buy at Bandcamp

I'm honored to be on this album alongside friends Supersillyus, Numatik, Cactus Bath, and Wei Chi Field, as well as a host of other talented producers.  My track, "Throwing Sparks," is something totally different for anyone familiar with my electronic guitar improvisation – a lush and glitchy arrangement supporting my first Chapman Stick recording since 2008.  Proceeds go to the Amazon Mycorenewal Project, using fungus to clean up oil pollution in Ecuador...a worthy cause!

New Live Painting:

"Manna Vesicles"

Like/Share on FB | Buy 11"x17" Prints

2014-04-18 Scoot Inn – Sheer Khan, Resonant Frequency, The Human Experience, Andreilien

04-22 Austin Community College – The Human Fractals, Bob Slaughter

05-14 Empire Control Room – JPOD, Blunt Force, Cactus Bath

05-22 The Parish – The Nadis Warriors, Random Rab

06-04 Lanai – Fractala, Ram-Z, DRRTY WULVZ, Subaqueous

06-05 Empire Control Room – Quanta, Akasha

06-07 Archaic Revival Festival – Manoj, Desert Dwellers

06-12 Elanosphere – Studio

Inspired by vintage science fiction paperback cover artwork and fantastical NASA concept paintings, "Manna Vesicles" is also my first in a series of odes to the Texas Hill Country, a sacred landscape whose rolling terrain flows with abundant sunlight and spring water, nourishing an incredible diversity of creatures and cultures.

Sometimes when I look up in the sky and see those almost-invisible floating orbs, I wonder if they aren't dust but chi, the subtle energy of the cosmos flowing through and binding the world together. Given recent discoveries about the Earth's magnetic field and its relationship to storms, human biology, and solar activity, I imagine a field of orbs like this in every open sky – fields of interpenetrating influence, transforming cosmic radiation into something life on Earth can use.

The universe is a vast, mysterious place – most of it invisible to us. Space isn't really empty – it's full. This painting's a reminder of that.

Custom Texas State Flag Violin

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My girlfriend Nicole Taylor repairs violins and guitars for a living.  Recently her boss at Westbank String Shop asked me if I'd like to paint the state flag of Texas on a client's violin...and I convinced them to let me have my way with it.  (Here's another shot of the finished job on instagram.)

New Custom Hat: Elephants & Hummingbirds

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Hummingbirds and elephants adorn this latest lid.  I love doing these – let me know if you'd like one of your own!  You can see all 154 I've done so far on my facebook page.

New Merchandise on Zazzle

Laptop Zipper Cases | Laptop Decals | Postcards | Postage Stamps

iPhone 5 | Samsung Galaxy S4 | Samsung Galaxy S5

Every once in a while I meet someone who bought one of my phone cases or laptop decals, and I'm always impressed with how well they came out.  Zazzle does a good job!  So I'm glad to announce new items featuring my painting "Inner Light" from Rootwire and Art Outside Festivals last year. And there are plenty more where those came from:

Upcoming Gigs

I'm honored to be opening for the ultra-talented Taylor McFerrin, son of Bobby McFerrin, in Austin this July.  His jazzy live electronica is taking the nation by storm and it's going to be a totally fun way to spend my only gig in Austin this summer...

And then it's off to three amazing festivals!  Gratifly is a beacon of transformational culture in the Southeast; Portal is a very promising new event in the Northwest; and Arise is widely considered the best music festival in Colorado.  I'll be speaking and painting at all three, as well as playing music with an über-talented coterie of special guest collaborators.  Who's coming with me?

Thanks for reading!  Feel free to stay in touch and have a beautiful day...more soon!