Live At Eight Thousand Feet & Two New Paintings

"For a relationship to stay alive, love alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, boredom. Relationships fail not because we have stopped loving but because we first stopped imagining."
- James Hillman, archetypal psychologist

"Imagine it's 30 years from now. You're looking back at the history of your relationship with desire. There was a certain watershed moment when you clearly saw that some of your desires were mediocre, inferior, and wasteful, while others were pure, righteous, and invigorating. Beginning then, you made it a life goal to purge the former and cultivate the latter. Thereafter, you occasionally wandered down dead ends trying to gratify yearnings that weren't worthy of you, but usually you wielded your passions with discrimination, dedicating them to serve the highest and most interesting good."
- Rob Brezsny, pronoid astrologer

(Before we begin, let me suggest you view this on my website, the way it was intended...)

..:: MUSIC ::..

Live At Eight Thousand Feet (2011)

Back in March, I played at the Shumei International Institute, a spiritual center built on the holy mountain outside Crestone, Colorado. Not only did the magical energy of the land and venue infuse my playing and singing with a special clarity, but I had the rare blessing of guest musician Andy Skellenger adding cajon and tablas to half the set. And he kicked ass. From now on, whenever I play those tunes alone, there will be pieces missing!

Plus, I got some best-yet recordings of other tunes, like the slow-burning acoustic-electronic love song "Underground River." And I finally caught the lightning bug in the bottle: my three-minute rant on the co-evolution of LSD, DNA, the atomb bomb, and the internet is there for you all to agree or disagree with, as you see fit...

As usual, the whole album is free if you want it (although you have the option to pay me too, if you see fit); but unlike usual, I scored four lovely videos of Andy and I rocking out together and linked to them on the download page.

Check out the two of us tearing it up with the rowdy "Offering Hands" – an ode to the ego-obliterating intensity of revelation, if you're into that kind of thing:

Watch this full-size on Youtube / Vimeo

Like that? Go watch the other three, and help yourself to the whole album, at MichaelGarfield.net.

..:: VISUAL ART ::..

(Click on each image for a closer look.)

In Between Seasons

2011 04 08 Quixote's (Math Games, Absynth Quintet)

2011 04 13 Hodi's (That 1 Guy, Better Than Bacon)
24"x24" - paint markers on 1/4" masonite

- signed 11"x17" poster prints - $20 or two for $30 (plus $5 s/h) -
original painting for sale - make me an offer

This painting is as confused as Boulder's recent hailing-while-sunny "spring" weather. There are no such things as five-pointed snow flakes...so what are these? Cherry blossoms have five petals, not three...so what is going on here?

Well, as within, so without. Admittedly, I made this while Mercury was full flush Retrograde – confusing communication, technology, and insight, and driving us inward for integration. I don't feel quite as much like an ice-captured blooming than I did a few weeks ago, Thank God.

Endlessness

2011 04 15 The Other Side (That 1 Guy)

2010 09 02 Portal Patch (Lynx, Vibesquad, Future Simple Project)

18"x24" - paint marker on 1/8" masonite

- signed 11"x17" poster prints - $20 or two for $30 (plus $5 s/h) -

original painting for sale - make me an offer

Started at Burning Man 2010, but it was missing the really juicy detail that convinces me a painting is actually complete...so I got back in there with the fine-tipped markers and ripped it up with some tryptamine jewels. You might say this is an overhead map of one person "getting it" in a crowd of the oblivious...but you'll notice that we're all woven together and already that insight is starting to bleed over into everyone else.

..:: WRITING ::..

• Part Two of Ode To A Paradigm Shift, my rant on the evolving philosophy of science, is now up on Solpurpose.com. Here's a clip to whet your appetite:

We are at the end of one science and the beginning of a new science – one that dismisses the ancient but futile quest for total knowledge (and, not so implicitly, total control) and the narrow-minded insistence on the linear progression of cause and effect, for a celebration of the newer and more confounding questions introduced by each answer, for a playful exploration of co-causation’s latticework, which unifies all perspectives in a mutual creation and returns us each to center even as the dream of measuring our world’s boundaries recedes into nonsense.

And it is in nonsense that we rediscover ourselves – in the ceaseless irruption of the incompletely understood into our tidy matrices, a reminder (a co-conspiratorial one, if we are lucky) that the universe is bigger than our laws (even if we call them “universal”) and as its fruit, our lives are themselves a thin tiling of the familiar like verdigris/filigree/gold leaf over the faceless mind of tireless, revelatory, orgasmic creation.

• Taste-making music blog LostInSound.org just reviewed my cyber-acoustic guitar album The Body Electric and had some very cool things to say about it. Coming from another musician and trusted voice in the live electronic music scene – LiS's Pietro Bondi – these words are high praise:

Experimental and unique...this latest work shows great skill and potential as a guitarist and composer. Patient in their construction and determined to stay in melodic but unpredictable territory, [Garfield's] tracks glide through seamless changes, sometimes climaxing, sometimes spiraling off into quiet grooves or gurgling swamp sounds. The spacey, modern edge brings the simple pluckings and cleverly produced sounds into an envelope in which anything seems possible...

Right on! I hope you enjoy the reads...this weekend I'm off to paint at two more gigs in Denver with the esteemed visionary artists Alex & Allyson Grey, so expect some really inspired work from me in the next newsletter.

Thanks for your time, and have a beautiful day!

Three New Album Covers, New Time-Lapse, & Meeting The Self You Aren't

"To understand ourselves, we must embrace the alien."

- PZ Meyers, octopus neuroscientist

..:: New Time-Lapse & Talks ::..

Last fall, journalist Charles Shaw and I embarked on The Light & Shadow Tour, a six-week, thirty-city journey across the United States that combined music, speaking, and documentary film-making into a profound voyage not only through the terrain of American culture but also into the depths of our nation's conflicted psyche.

A big part of it was gathering interviews for his amazing documentary Exile Nation, which is just about as thorough and moving a view into the issue of justice and prisons in the U.S. as I have ever encountered. But we also had a unique opportunity to speak with audiences all over the map about the role of "the shadow" – the repressed voices not only in our culture, but also in our individual minds:

The shadow is the part of ourselves so profoundly disowned that it shows up not as a quality of the self, but a trait of other people – not a choice that we are making, but a fate that imposes itself upon us. And to whatever degree we continue to refuse acknowledgment of our shadows, we remain the desperate victims of life instead of its joyous collaborators.

It isn't easy to write a new story of the self - and to constantly re-write that story, when new truths come to us in the form of disarming companions, rude awakenings, and other surprises. But it is the work set out before us, if we are to live as whole people and give the most of ourselves to the birthing of a new and better world.

Meeting The Self You Aren't is a free compilation of clips from my talks on that tour, a pastiche lecture on the stories we exclude from our own. I used excerpts to narrate this latest time-lapse live painting video for "Stun Flower" (which is, incidentally, also a music video for the title track from my latest cyber-acoustic guitar LP The Body Electric, and a kind of tutorial for anyone interested in how to draw near-perfect Golden Spirals freehand):

Watch this in HD on Youtube / Vimeo

..:: Album Art ::..

I've been heavy on the album art recently...

Meeting The Self You Aren't features another example of the new hybrid freehand/digital style I'm working out – a tunnel into the unmapped I:

Michael Garfield - Meeting The Self You Aren't (2011)

But I've also had the delight of making album art for other people for the first time. Here's a link to Freddy Todd's new mix for Grassroots California, for which I modified my painting "Tunnel To The Moon" with the awesome digital kaleidoscope software Repper:

Freddy Todd - Neon Kaleidoscope Mix (2011)

As much fun as I had with those two covers, I'm proudest of my art for my friend Jay Jaramillo (aka ProJect Aspect)'s debut full-length LP, Put This World On Hold. This album doesn't officially drop for a couple of weeks, but in the meantime I encourage you to click through and get down to his other tracks. He and Freddy are two of the hottest rising star DJs on the scene right now and it's my honor to call them my peeps.

Jay's concept was of a planet of puzzle pieces caught midway through explosion:

ProJect Aspect – Put This World On Hold (2011)

Each of these images is available (with or without the type) as a signed, glossy 11"x17" poster print for $25 each, or $35 for two (shipping included – just email me and I can have prints to you within a week!).

..:: Music4Change Interview ::..

Last year I was interviewed by Music4Change, a Fort Collins event production company throwing shows to make a difference. They don't archive their interviews online, and they had mine up for such a flash that I even missed it...so here is the full text of our conversation, in which I discuss getting into the live painting scene, the myth and science of creativity, and the purpose of art as I understand it. It's held up pretty well over the last year:

After some time I came to really understand how important inspiration is to the well-being of a person or a culture. We NEED to be reminded of our place in a bigger context, a broader myth, a grander story in the same way we NEED to eat and sleep and breathe. Meaning is essential to human existence and in fact the search for meaning pretty much characterizes human nature, so artists are indispensable. Eventually, the guilt of “not contributing” as an artist and musician like my friend the chef or my friend the construction worker evaporated. I found my worth, and it’s intimately tied to helping other people find theirs, in age of fear-mongering media and alienating social infrastructure.

..:: Next Newsletter ::..

• video from my concert with Andy Skellenger in Crestone, Colorado;

• a new live painting from my shows with Fareed Haque's Math Games & That 1 Guy;

• another installment of my essay series, Ode To A Paradigm Shift;

• and more I haven't dreamed up yet.

Thanks for your time and have a wonderful day!

As We Approach My End In Phoenix

Before I go any further, if you happen to be in Los Angeles this weekend, come see me! I'm playing a few wonderful gigs out here and would love to meet up. If you know people out here whom I should meet, get ahold of me and say so!

FRI 5/15, 5:00 - 8:00 PM at Acoustic Set @ Euphoria Loves Rawvolution Café
2301 Main Street, Santa Monica - FREE
http://www.euphorialovesrawvolution.com/

SAT 5/16, 7:00 - 9:00 PM – Acoustic/Electronic Set @ Cinespace
(a battle of the bands benefit for pediatric spinal trauma)
6356 Hollywood Blvd, Los Angeles - $10 recommended donation
http://cinespace.info/
http://www.thebrainproject.org/PABIHERO/index.php

SAT 5/16, 10:30 PM - 1:30 AM – Live Art @ El Cid
for Carousel Galaxy, Terraplane Sun, & DJ Azmyth
4212 W Sunset Blvd, Los Angeles - $10, 21+
http://elcidla.com

> Imagery

available - 2009 05 08 The Rhythm Room (That 1 Guy) - 16"x24"

If you haven't seen That 1 Guy, make it a priority. Best (non-guitar) one man band ever. I started with purple paint stripes on this one and to my surprise they ended up pretty wormy. Appropriate accompaniment for an act that talks about Weasel Pot Pies and a Buttmachine. Yet there are those silent sentient gazing orbs...calling the worms up out of the ground like snake charmers, the sacred and the profane. Here's a detail of the centerpiece:

available - 2009 05 06 & 13 Sail Inn (The Sugarthieves, BCBC String Band, Black Carl) - 15"x30"

It's been a while since I had time to work on a two-nighter...thankfully The Sugarthieves have a weekly Wednesdays residency at Sail Inn and I got to spend all of last week's gig working on the orbs and hourglasses that make up the background matrix of this piece. Everything here derived directly from a flower of life grid I'd thrown on the board a few weeks ago, waiting for a prime moment. It was my first attempt at covering the entire board with a grid and since I hadn't used a ruler it came out somewhat lopsided. But the imbalance of the piece is held in a wonderful, delicate tension with the formal, measured aspects of it. I got the best of both worlds, I think: careful and deliberate harmonic relationships, but the off-kilter organic sway of my earlier freehand pieces. As is usually the case with two-nighters, this was a troublesome work until it was actually complete; longer pieces are just as improvisational, but often feel like I'm trying to lift a heavier fish out of the waters of the imagination (I usually don't know it's a two-nighter until it's too late). Major successes in this piece include my first satisfying execution of a transparent "glass" overlay, pleasing use of gold paint, and a solid contrapuntal relationship between warm and cool colors, crystalline and fluid forms, visual overtones and undertones. And a nice fractal cube figure. Details of the "yin" and "yang" central elements: