Dispatch from A One-Man Singularity / Entirely Too Many Pretty Things

Hey friends!  Quick Note:  

I know most of you signed on for art, but chances are that means you're smart and curious and have one eye and ear turned toward the transcendental – and lately, it feels like my art is mostly here to get you to stay still for long enough so we can have a deeper exchange.

I know that we're all overwhelmed and it's impossible for us to catch up on it all, but hopefully the work I do beyond the easel can inspire you in the moments when you're driving, working, listening to podcasts, looking for new things to read...the new podcasts and live solo acoustic sets I published this month are better than anything I was making a few years ago and I hope that they creep into whatever part of your life is lame right now and improve it for you suddenly and radically. 

Last thing:  I'm writing science fiction now.  Here is a preview of the piece I'm working on: a dispatch from the world in which AI has made it hard to tell what's real, and what's a forgery.  I made this sample audio recording in part as the first of a series of micro-casts as this story writes itself, and in part as an audition to be an Audible audiobook reader.  (Maybe I'm trolling Audible by sending them sci-fi about the day in which we can't be sure of anything we hear...?)

And now, the new stuff!  Consider supporting me on Patreon if you appreciate these emails – I'll be putting out more special work exclusive to subscribers, soon.  I love you and I'm grateful for you always!

blessings

Michael

Music Video for "VALIS" with Dance Artist Donna Zakura

Watch on YouTube

Download Music

Donna's FB Page

Here's my first music video since dinosaurs, featuring amazing dancer Donna Zakura and her equally amazing videographer Anthony Dempsey.  They weren't the only great discoveries I made while in Australia last (Southern) summer – here for you are new recordings of my talks & singer-songwriter performances at Mycelium Studios in Melbourne and Backyard Network in Sydney.  The storyteller/fireside chat format was a delightful change of pace and drew new insights and stories out of me – plus, you get to hear some new songs.  :)

"My Dark Companion"

48"x30" – acrylic & oil paint pen on canvas

fine art reproductions

other printed merch

Labradorite peacock demiurge unfolding limbs in interstellar darkness, iridescent living music stirring from its slumber, wave on wave of scintillating eyeless self-awareness, blossoming serrated rainbows spooling out from glistening wet froth of possibility, potential into actual, a lucid dream that eats your waking life...

Original piece painted with oil and acrylic paint on canvas – begun at Llano Earth Arts Fest (Llano, Texas) on 11 March 2017, continued at Euphoria Fest (Austin, Texas) in April 2017, and completed over countless late nights in the studio through 18 July 2017.

My most successful instagram post ever and, perhaps for the same reason, maybe the most time-intensive painting I have ever made.  Dedicated to Ali McGhee.

"Beija Flor III"

18"x24" – oil and acrylic paint on canvas

fine art reproductions

other printed merch

Beija Flor (Portuguese for "flower kisser") visits some San Pedro cacti on a flight through the imagination. The hummingbird brings joy and love...but it's also a fiercely territorial relative of the Velociraptor!  Never Forget.

Australia Tour Live Recordings Now Online!

 

Melbourne, Australia at Mycelium Studios • Sydney, Australia at Backyard Network

Two of the better shows I've ever played, now yours for free or what you can afford to offer.  Each of these recordings captured a full hour-long talk and a full singer-songwriter performance in an intimate live setting with attentive audiences, and you definitely hear and feel the difference.  I am glad I finally had the time to mix these down and share them with you!  (If you're reading this on my blog instead of email, here are some preview tracks:)

New Future Fossils Podcast Episodes

  

0034: Tara Djokic, astrobiologist

0033:  Jon Lebkowsky, co-founder of EFF-Austin

0032: Mark Henson, visionary painter

Three episodes of Future Fossils with three awesome people, covering the bases of art, science, and spirituality with stories about the early days of the World Wide Web, the first life on Earth, and the future of art as a tool of political provocation.

More Writing at Steemit

Exhumed from the ruins of my old writing job and made available again for the first time in years:

Sex, Drugs, and Evolution: Are We Smart Enough to See Through Separation?

The Overflowing Void: On Shabazz Palaces & Burrough's Naked Lunch

Upcoming Events

28 July – Austin, TX – Cherrywood Studios
Decentralized Art Shows – Cryptocurrency Art Opening

30 July – San Marcos, TX – KIVA Bar & Lounge
Cyberguitar set with Hello Crescendo, Bull Moose & Bonnie, laissez faire cassette

1 August – Austin, TX – Sidewinder Bar
Cyberguitar set with HoneySon, AlexAlco, Mode Dodeca

17 - 23 August – Big Summit Prairie, OR – Oregon Eclipse Festival
Speaking & Playing live music for yoga (with Emelie Rose)

27 August - 4 September – Black Rock City, NV – Burning Man Festival
Speaking & Playing Cyberguitar at Palenque Norte & Burners Without Borders
Details TBA

7 September – Austin, TX – Crux Climbing Gym
Cyberguitar (Floating Islands) set with Funkotron, The Mismatch, Gasoline Boots, Skymomma, DJ Lefty

22 - 24 September – Utopia, TX – UtopiaFest
The festival's first-ever sunrise set!

Martian Arts EP on Spotify // The Evolution of Surveillance // Authentic Self Expression // New Painting: Colibrí // Becca Tarnas & Mitch Altman on FF

“We could say that love is a tenacious adventure. The adventurous side is necessary, but equally so is the need for tenacity. Real love is one that triumphs lastingly, sometimes painfully, over the hurdles erected by time, space and the world.”

- Alain Badiou

Greetings, friends!  A lot of gifts to share in this one – hope it finds you well!  

Enjoy and stay in touch...

– NEW PAINTING –

Colibrí (Beija Flor II)

acrylic on canvas // 18"x24"

paper/canvas fine art reproductions

t-shirts, tapestries, phone cases, totes, pillows, mugs, and more

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Original piece painted at home, a commissioned remix of 2014's "Beija Flor," one of my favorite pieces. The first hummingbird painting flew to Bangkok to join the collection of Greenpeace's Director of East Asian Operations the same day international news announced that vandals had written the Greenpeace logo over the hummingbird Nazca lines in Peru, those famous ancient petroglyphs visible only from the air. 

That weird coincidence – like some globe-spanning karmic shuffle – was just one of many "winks" returning my investment in these lovely birds. I'm glad to revisit this creature with three more years of experience as a painter. To spend some time with it and learn from it.

– NEW MUSIC –

Martian Arts EP is now on Spotify and Bandcamp!

It's also the new titles music for John Lentz's The Invisible Room Podcast.  He offered up the EP's first review:

"My vibration burst into the great beyond listening to this album. I didn’t want to come back. I felt myself riding waves of the infinite, supported by the unbounded ocean of being. The rhythms, the ongoingness, departing, returning, expanding, contracting, and the many sudden very strange moments—all of this gave way to the mystery itself...This music brings me home."

Martian Arts EP is free to Patreon subscribers.  Or you can grab a print of the album cover art – a collab between myself and Tourmaline Todd – and download the tunes for free.

– NEW WRITING –

The Evolution of Surveillance, Part 3: Living in the Belly of the Beast

What do cameras, Pokémon, and the atomic bomb all have in common? They are reflections of the automatic and emergent evolutionary process of the universe becoming self-aware... This is the climax of my three-part memoir as a Google Glass Explorer, exploring natural history to understand how we got here and what we can expect of our bizarro Brave New World.  (Here are Parts 1 & 2.)

Authentic Self-Expression: Impossible or Unavoidable?

How can we live authentically when:

1) The systems we’ve created are opposed to human nature; and
2) We made it this way?

We’re out of touch with who we are. We grew thinking that somebody has The Answers, and those answers can be bought.

They can’t. Here’s why.

(Here also is my archive of exhumed short writing – from 2015, when I was editor of nonduality zine Globalish – on Steemit.)

– NEW PODCAST EPISODES –

Episode & Show Notes Here

Episode & Show Notes Here

– UPCOMING GIGS –

8 July – Austin, TX – Square Rüt Kava Bar
Apocalyptic Folk Singer-Songwriter Set. 8 - 10pm

Free All Ages Show

10 July – Austin, TX – Capital Factory
"The Pre- & Post-History of Surveillance, Virtual Reality, and Swarm Intelligence"

A Special Live Taping of Future Fossils Podcast at EFF-Austin with Panelists: 

Heather Barfield, Maggie Duval, Paul Toprac, & Kevin Welch

Keynote Speaker on Time, Evolution, Consciousness, & Cosmos

Playing the festival's first-ever Sunrise Set!

Sneak Peek at my new Dinosaur Painting • Coming Down from CoSM • Live Looping Pedalboard Teardown • New Live Album • Read the First Few Sections of my Book • My Talk from Sonic Bloom 2016 • And I Love You

It's been a crazy autumn, friends. I pray that it's been relatively smooth for you, and that you recognize your challenges as collective opportunities for learning, growth, and evolution. May we live in interesting times! It may be hard to keep up the enthusiasm for a transformation that could stretch out past our lifespans, to contribute all we have to building something we won't live to see completed. But that is the human project. Keep with it and I will do the same.

If there's anything that I can do to help you find your peace or purpose through the madness, let me know.

Meanwhile, I'll continue working on what gives my struggles in this life a sense of meaning. Right now that means a book, a studio album, and a podcast, each of them focused on the complicated blessing of a human life in this specific time.

My Patreon subscribers have an inside track with all of this, including early access and exclusive content – plus, the benefits of knowing that you're helping me give everything to spreading messages of inspiration:

Now for all the new work.  As always, thanks for reading – and may you discover all of your forgotten blessings, like a twenty in your jeans...

Sneak Peek: New Dinosaur Painting

Here are some sneak peeks of an epic dinosaur piece that I'm working on right now, another window into that revisionist prehistory, The Psychedelic Age of Dinosaurs, I started with these pieces of Tyrannosaurus, Carnotaurus, Spinosaurus, Nanotyrannus, and Triceratops.

Subscribe to me on Instagram for "stories," videos, and other fun ephemera as this piece comes together.  It's already shaping up to be one of my most intensely detailed, luminous, and weird live paintings yet...

Hummingbird Blankets Available to Order!

It's time again!  I only have a few of these lovely woven cotton blankets on hand that I can ship in time for Christmas – once they're gone, the wait time goes back up to 6-8 weeks, so if you would like to order one of these for someone now's the time!  Grab one here (or share this link on wishlists).

Coming Down from CoSM

I just played (and spoke) at Alex & Allyson Grey's Chapel of Sacred Mirrors in upstate New York!  CoSM is an amazing place, a worldwide hub for visionary art.  My offerings felt very overdue.  It's one thing to feel part of a "noetic polity," a community of mind, and quite another to ground that connection face-to-face, together in a place and time.  I finally saw and felt what the Greys are building firsthand and it was a truly humbling weekend.

Both my three-hour presentation and my instrumental live set will be made available for free to Patreon supporters soon (and to everyone else sometime in the New Year).

Meanwhile, here's a selfie that my painter hero asked to take with me.  :)

Live Looping Guitar Pedalboard Teardown

I would like to make more of an effort to put my skills to work by training other people (in guitar, live looping, paint pens, live art, and whatever else you think that you could learn from me).  Skype lessons are one way so let me know if you are into that – another is this walkthrough of my rig:

"Guitar Moderne reader Michael Garfield has a natural science-based perspective on looping and live sampling that is mind expanding. He also offers some straight, nuts-and-bolts info about his gear and how he uses it."

Read all about how I turn one guitar into a symphony of glitched-out cybernetic awesomeness at Guitar Moderne (my favorite blog for experimental guitar).

New Live Release: Austin, Texas 2015-11-11

While I continue grinding away at my book, podcast, and first album of actual SONGS in many years, here's a peek at some of those songs in their earliest public appearance, stripped down solo acoustic, still finding their legs but obviously chomping at the bit and rearing at the gate.

New songs here range the gamut of geek, from a piece about Jurassic Park coming true ("Life Finds A Way") to a piece of gonzo journalism from the space between birth and death ("Indecision") to a weirdly tropical number about the neurophysiology of awakening ("Always Catching Up").

You'll also hear some time-tested versions of old fan favorites like "You Don't Have To Move" and "Let It All Get Out" sprawling into lengthy and weird looping explorations, and – this is a storyteller format set – listen to a lot of weirdo ragged banter between me and everyone who was there for my girlfriend's birthday...  Stream or download it on Bandcamp.  (This one is free to my subscribers.)

Read the First Few Sections of my Coming Book

Here's the preface and first two short chapters of the book I'm writing, How To Live in the Future.  It's an evolutionary tour of hyperspace that hopefully helps people find their way through all the change of our extraordinary century.  It begins with an homage to Archeopteryx, my spirit animals, and possibly the most important fossil ever found.

We humans are creatures of becoming, works-in-process – just like the legendary Archeopteryx, the so-called "First Bird" whose discovery in 1861 was the first fossil evidence of evolution by natural selection. Half bird, half reptile, Archeopteryx has much to teach us as we navigate this turbulent transition from apes to angels.  This piece I originally wrote for Projections Magazine may well become the preface to my book.  Read it here.

My Talk from Sonic Bloom 2016

In this talk I conjured up an even more ambitious bouquet of ideas than usual, constellated around the work of Penn State information scientist Richard Doyle and the argument that art and language grew from psychoactive interspecies intercourse.

What does the evolution of the Mind-At-Large teach us about the role of creativity in culture? How do artists function as the organs of erotic signaling within the selves-enjoying superorganism of the Biosphere? What is the highest purpose art can serve?

All these questions – and more – will be danced around, linked, juggled, entertained, and possibly even answered in this mind-expanding thoughtstream as it makes its way to spill out in the Ocean of Primordial Awareness...  Stream or download it here for free.

And, Lastly:

Gift yourself the glowing warmth and satisfaction that you get with patronage this season, and get your front-row seat to my creativity in every medium.  It is 1000 times more awesome than just getting emails from me – I host ask-me-anythings, you can connect with other patrons and meet new friends, and you get your name in the acknowledgments when I release the book and album:

Thanks again for reading and may all your days and nights be full of sweet embodied ease!  Now:

"Find what you love and follow it to glory.”

- Abraham Simpson

Behold! All At Once, A New EP, Tutorial Video, Two Paintings, & A Hat

Greetings, friends!  I'm trying to put these things out frequently and keep these updates shorter, but Good Lord.  It's been a very busy and productive, gratefully engaged, enthusiastic, driven year so far.  I hope you're feeling some of that ignition in your life as well!  Here's what I've got for you:

My Newest Tunes, Your Next Adventure

Download Here

"Five minutes in and I've forgotten every bad dream I've ever had."

– Ivan Marko

(And how exactly am I supposed to remain impervious to reviews when I hear stuff like that?)

This music is a gift, and medicine* (*this statement not evaluated by the FDA).  So take it.  You can read more about it on the download page if you like knowing about records before you listen to them.

(It's also a solid starting point for diving into the 69 releases I have captured live and shared for free since I began to loop guitar.  Intuitively, I would also recommend this one and this one.)

In related news, here is the annotated video I made of the performance.  I have waited years for footage I could use to show folks how I build my sound on stage, and here it is: a "how to" on how one mic and guitar become these intricate, expansive, braided, glitchy, burning grooves...

Watch in HD with Annotations on Youtube

New Studio Painting: 
"Many Beginnings & No Ending"

Buy Poster Prints • Share on Facebook • Original Available

I don't ordinarily paint like this at home (unless it's custom hats).  But when I do, I'm also listening to documentaries.  Awesome nonfiction videos I watched while working on this painting:

Fresh Dressed // What Are Animals Thinking and Feeling? // How Stories Last

Why Ordinary People Need To Understand Power // Blue Planet // Cosmos

New Live Painting: "Lucky Fish"

Buy Poster Prints • Share on Facebook • Original Available

I was born with the Moon in Pisces ("the fish") – according to astrology, a recipe for moody artists and dreamers. We evolved from fish, and the fish lives on in all of us; our hands modified fins, our fishy brainstem still at the base of our instinctive action and intuition. (You can read all about this stuff in science journalist Neil Shubin's awesome evolutionary biology book, Your Inner Fish.)

Fish are also a sign of luck in many cultures – whether as the decorations in a Japanese garden pond, or as a symbol of plenty and abundance (eg, Jesus's loaves and fishes in the Gospels of Mark and Matthew). They take on mystical significance in the life-changing synchronicities that inspired the visionary science fiction of Philip K. Dick, and even look valuable – all those shiny scales! So it felt right as rain to paint one, finally.

Original piece painted live in Austin, Texas with oil, acrylic, and aerosol paint on masonite (24"x32") on 22 January 2016 at Flamingo Cantina to the music of Irie Samurai, Dosage, Sharkweek, and Bonus Junk; and on 24 January 2016 at the HOPE Outdoor Farmer's Market to the music of The Mismatch and SEFO.

Custom Painted Hat #182

You can now use this page to learn more about, and order, a lovingly detailed, one-of-a-kind hand-painted, waterproof, and awesome custom hat.  Thanks for your business!

You May Have Missed: Hummingbird Blankets!

Look Closer, Learn More, Maybe Buy

Yep, these are a real thing now.  They're real!  And they're even more soft and comfortable than I'd hoped they'd be.  The first to order just got theirs and folks have sent me lots of happy pictures of their new throw blankets (you can see a few on Instagram).  They're huge, they're made in the USA from cotton grown in the USA (60% recycled), and they're woven on some kind of crazy robot loom that reads my painting and turns it into some crazy robot language in order for this to be.

Really, when you think about it that way, they're a bargain.  I totally agree and I'm super grateful to finally have something so nice available so affordably.  And they're freakin' practical!

Upcoming Gigs – Full Calendar Here

Parting Thought

"Why do almost no films ever show civilization functioning, institutions doing their jobs, democracy working? The answer is simple: laziness. A storyteller’s job is to keep his or her characters in pulse-pounding jeopardy for 90 minutes of film, or 600 pages of a novel. It’s hard to do that if they can dial 911 and get skilled professionals to come to their aid... It takes real writing to come up with a way of keeping your characters in jeopardy, despite there being skilled professionals who want to help them."

– David Brin

• Prints & Original Paintings • Music Downloads •

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

But First, A Riff on Science & Wonder

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

– Carl Sagan

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

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

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

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

Endothelial Goo Conveyor

Poster Prints & Giclées Here

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

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

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

Original piece still available – email me with inquiries.

New Hummingbird Stickers!

Get Some Stickers

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

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

A Roadrunner in Progress

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

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

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

Playing + Painting + Speaking at Art Outside

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

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

Love and thanks for all of your support!

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!