1.Buy House 2. Sell Art 3. Paint House + Stuart Davis + Mantis Aliens + Complex Systems Conversation

✨🎊 BIG ANNOUNCEMENT & MOVING SALE  🎊✨

Browse Available Paintings

Browse Paper & Canvas Prints

We bought a home in Santa Fe (!!!) and so I am putting all of my remaining original paintings and canvas prints up for sale at a negotiable discount in order to help my family afford the once-in-a-lifetime costs.

We love it here in New Mexico and after a very tumultuous life of move after move after move, I'm so grateful for the chance to make a steady and secure and lasting Nest of Peace and Creativity where I can host friends and family and make as much beauty, truth, and goodness as possible in all available media. But this is a daunting endeavor and it's taking all we have and more to make it work. We live as frugally as possible but still need to secure some basic amenities to make this transition comfortable. 

In short: 

If you would like to bring some color/love/deepweirdness into your own life, now is the best time ever!

Please drop me a line if you want to talk about acquiring any of my work. 

There are, of course, much easier ways to show support - like Patreon, Bandcamp, or Substack subscriptions, or Venmo transfers, or grabbing paper prints. I am immensely thankful to anyone who offers anything, and everyone who has, and I promise to show it by living up to my potential (like, for example, finally lighting up that laser cutter I have not had space to use since I acquired it! Oh yes, I have PLANS.).

That's all. Thanks for reading this. My love and blessings to you and you all. 💜🥳🎉

Epic New Podcast About Aliens

Listen Anywhere

I’m not going to waste your time trying to explain Stuart Davis. He’s been a guiding star for me and presumably many other irrepressibly nondisciplinary artists for over a decade, one of the founding figures of my adult psyche in its pluriform contortionism. Musician, painter, poet, talk show host, stand-up comic, film-maker, and depth psychologist, the man knows no bounds and it’s all I can do to follow closely and listen carefully, which I have since I first encountered his work in 2004.

Stuart is long overdue to be on the show, but the timing is perfect, because we’re here to talk about ALIENS. Not the admittedly excellent film, but the living reality of them and their astonishingly intimate relationship to us, as disclosed by the growing archive of guests on his show, Aliens and Artists.

We discuss the ethics of withholding advanced technologies like zero-point energy from the general public; Rick Strassman getting kicked out of his zendo for psychedelic research; circadian rhythms, sleep disruption for dream yoga, and parenting sleep deprivation psychosis; when Psyche argues with the Mantis; the self is a choir; daily banishings and welcomings; and why we implore you to only work with the visitors that respect human sovereignty.

I’ll stop now. Just listen and be amazed.

PS – My two-part interview is up on Aliens and Artists now as well. I haven't heard the final product yet because of all the things, but word is it's a banger. 📣🔥🎶🐙

~ Man Meets Mantis ~

Since we're having fun being weird,

Get Prints

This is my first ever collaboration painting with Ada Taylor Garfield, my daughter:

It's dedicated to Stuart, obviously, and available for sale, I suppose, but honestly I'll be surprised (albeit delighted) if anyone bites. Who are you? People who learn the intimate weirdo stories of my paintings sometimes get all "but I can't take your holy object" on me. Ultimately, though, I let them go and if they stay it's meant to be. But this one's definitely special: Ada drew the grass with the blue marker.

Know someone who might benefit from an awkwardly intense mantis reminder? Prints are all yours.

And One More (Awesome) Thing

Watch on YouTube

Last month as part of the latest Complexity Weekend hackathon, I hosted a live panel discussion with four unique and fascinating minds — complex systems researchers Tom Carter, Jenn Huff, Pietro Michelucci, and Richard James MacCowan— and discussed archaeoacoustic design as a form of extended cognition, the continuity between the ancient and postmodern worlds, biomimicry, and many more interesting threads at the intersection of complex systems research and creative innovation.

It was awesome. I hope you enjoy listening to it half as much as I enjoyed participating.

Ironic Reminder: You Don't Have To Move

Navigating Radical Uncertainty & Making Art: Vital Conversations • Metamodern Weirdness • Digital Community • Biomechanical Easter Eggs

Hi Friends,

I hope you’re holding up through everything. A quarantine, you know, is from the Italian for “forty days” — that’s how long you had to sit there on the boat before debarking. Whatever brave new world awaits us must be really something, seeing as we blew past forty days a while ago…

I’ve already said my piece about how this crisis might help us find new and better answers than the ones we all got stuck on. Now, deeper into it, I’m just trying to help where I am able. That looks like starting some new (very modest) digital community initiatives, talking sense to crazy when I can, being present as a father and a partner, finding time to play guitar, keeping my head on straight…

The tiny devil on my shoulder tells me to remind you I have art for sale, and that you’ve never had a better opportunity to scoop up one of my originals (because the prices seem imaginary to me, now, and wouldn’t they look better on a wall than in a closet?). The tiny angel on my shoulder tells me I should give as much of it away as possible. I’ll do my best to find a compromise.

Don’t hesitate to write.

Love,

Michael

Music • Paintings • Essays • Talks

New Painting: “A Very Giger Easter”

Here I am before the inevitable quarantine buzz-cut showing off a new 30”x15” canvas I’ve been chipping away at here and there for a couple months. In contrast the rapid start-to-finish I’m used to from live painting, sometimes a piece at home will live in a kind of untouched half-done limbo for weeks at a time…and it feels good to linger and really contemplate that next step, like playing chess by mail.

This piece was one of those. Very nearly called it “My two-thousand-dollar-a-day Fabergé egg habit,” in honor of the great Bleeding Gums Murphy. Here it is head-on:

More close-up pictures on my Instagram.

It’s one of about two dozen pieces that I have for sale right now, and you can pretty much ignore the prices in my master list and make a “Crazy Eddie’s Fireworks” offer. My place is (REALLY) small and I’d rather see these pieces find a good home.

Help Navigating Radical Uncertainty

I feel weird talking about my day job in this newsletter, but it wouldn’t seem like an honest accounting of my creative work without letting you know about Complexity Podcast, the show I host and produce for the Santa Fe Institute.

SFI is the mothership of complex systems research, and for the last six weeks I’ve been lucky to work directly with our president David Krakauer — a brilliant evolutionary biologist whose work has inspired much of my thinking and writing — on a special mini-series exploring on how to navigate the radical uncertainty of our global crisis. (I’m especially fond of this one on surviving a mass extinction and/or market collapse.)

I’ve learned volumes doing this show and these episodes in particular, and it’s been immensely rewarding to know that these podcasts have been helpful to so many people at a time when things don’t make a ton of sense. I hope you find them helpful, too.

Join Our New Discord Server

Lately I’ve felt like social media is an ocean full of sharks and I’d rather just hang out in a cozy lagoon with a few close friends. Also, it feels like this pandemic hit the human species in our weak spot — namely, the civic life, the clubs and neighborhood communities that were eaten by the state and corporations in the last few decades.

If you would like a smaller, less diluted scene, I hope you’ll join us on our Discord server, maybe even hop on one of our ongoing Sunday video calls. I am amazed and humbled by the badasses Future Fossils Podcast has attracted to my life, and it would be awesome if you got to meet them, too.

New Future Fossils Episodes

Episode 142 is a conversation with one of my favorite fiction authors, Alex Shakar, about the profound darkbright bizarritude he channels through his two visionary satirical novels The Savage Girl and Luminarium — two works that show the möbius strip of sacred and profane, futurity and timelessness. We bounce off a long list of paradoxical domains, including saving the world with consumerism, metamodernism, ironic religion, virtuality, neurotheology, trauma and radical meaninglessness, the military entertainment complex, hikikomori, and zen comedy…

Episode 143 is a conversation with documentary film-maker Sanjay Rawal about his profound and inspiring movie, 3100: Run and Become — which explores the spiritual practice of long-distance running around the world, from the American Southwest, to the Kalahari Desert, to a remote mountain monastery in Japan. We discuss how Sri Chinmoy (a student of Sri Aurobindo, the founder of integral yoga), started the 3100 mile race in New York, and what it has become; how to be a documentary film-maker without engaging in cultural appropriation; endurance running as an integral yoga and an act of spiritual service; exertion as its own reward; and how ultradistance running and other endurance sports close the gender gap. This was literally a moving conversation for me — after talking with Sanjay, I put on my shoes and went for a run. I hope it does the same for you.

Episode 144 is a trialogue with film-makers Monica Long Ross and Clayton Brown about their bizarre and wonderful documentary, We Believe in Dinosaurs — and how a creationist amusement park in Kentucky provides a lens through which to examine the tense relationship between science, religion, and business in America. This is a conversation about what happens when premodern, modern, and postmodern worldviews duke it out on a landscape of rapid change for which none of them are sufficient. It’s about the surreal Young-Earth dinosaur museums of Late Capitalism. And it’s about our trust (or lack of trust), and where we put it when we lose the plot.

Go Deeper

Attention is our greatest natural resource. [New Stickers | New Music | New Paintings | New Conversations]

Hey friends! Here's the best of what I've been up to for the last month.  

Hope you're staying sane, calm, responsive, loving, and alert...

Feel free to write me any time.  Good luck out there.

love,

Michael

I used to think imagination is our greatest natural resource – until I realized that attention is the upstream, limiting reality. In our distracted, breakneck age, sometimes we need a good reminder to pay more attention to our fleeting lives.

Inspired in part by Aldous Huxley's awesome novel, Island (in which his utopian society trains birds to squawk "Attention!" randomly, reminding citizens of opportunities to be more mindful), these glossy laminated vinyl stickers are so close to indestructible that they will keep inspiring mindfulness for years to come.

This is guerrilla intervention against the mind-eating nonsense of our tech-plutocracy. Concerned too many people live in algorithmic feed-scrolling fugues like thumb-bearing farm animals? Just slap a few around town and sit back marveling as your town becomes more aware!

While I have your attention:

Bandcamp (download in any audio format you like)

Feedbands (streaming plants trees, pays in Bitcoin)

Spotify (since you're there already)

My sentimental final gig in Austin before relocating to New Mexico was special for more than one reason: long-time musical conspirator and ally Andrew Noble joined me for two days of live performance at the Developer Week Conference. Andrew was a regular at Loopers' Night, the two-year monthly residency that I hosted at Strange Brew, Austin's best small listening room – someone with whom I had developed such a stage rapport, I knew that I could count on him to jump in with me – no rehearsals and no plan – and improvise four hours of killer music.

Most of these two fire days were lost in a recording error – but the music that survived demonstrates something rare and wonderful amidst the sea of mostly-solo tunes in my back catalog: two artists who have played together regularly for a while and learned to follow one another's lead; two voices that contribute to each other, finish one another's sentences, erupt into ecstatic swells and spacious interstices with a trained and listening synchrony.

It's yours to do with as you please – including remix, share, play backwards during rituals, etc.

Same goes for this 17-minute electric guitar instrumental from my performance at EFF-Austin's SXSW party in 2018, fresh on all the streaming platforms (cover art by David Titterington):

Bandcamp (download in any audio format you like)

Feedbands (streaming plants trees, pays in Bitcoin)

Spotify (since you're there already)

And here are the six latest amazing conversations that we've had on Future Fossils Podcast – including the first of three patrons-only book club calls for Liu Cixin's Three Body Problem trilogy:

  

  

I’ve also appeared on a number of other people's podcasts, lately:

The Myths That Make Us, Future Tech Podcast, Tap Iñ, Third Eye Drops, Awake Aware Alive, Mutations...I won't play favorites, but my personal best was probably on display for Artsy AF.

Speaking of being artsy AF, here are two new small paintings I made for my first gallery show in Santa Fe (at Eye on the Mountain).  Both of them are 12"x12" on stretched canvas and available for a crisp Ben Franklin apiece (or its digital equivalent).  Email me if you'd like one or both – I've been hanging them from the corners and they look great on the wall together:

UPCOMING EVENTS

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

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

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

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

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

love

Michael

New Coloring Book Time-Lapse Video:

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

Youtube • DTube (Steemit for Video) • Vimeo

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

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

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

Derp Alert!  

New Barton Springs Salamander Painting

for the Save Our Springs Alliance

24"x18" – acrylic paint on canvas

signed cardstock and canvas prints here

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

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

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

New Instrumental Album: Live at Flowstorm 2018

Spotify • Bandcamp • Feedbands • Patreon • iTunes

Google Play • Tidal • iHeart Radio • Napster

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

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

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

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

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

New Live Double Album: Live at Arcosanti

Bandcamp • Patreon

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

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

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

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

New Future Fossils Podcast Episodes

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

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

Patreon • Steemit

Patreon • Steemit

Patreon • Steemit

Patreon • Steemit

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

Gratefully Yours,

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...