Michael Garfield's Love Without End Tour Newsletter: visionary culture

Showing posts with label visionary culture. Show all posts

24 March 2015

Interviewing Erik Davis on TechGnosis | How To Live in Wonder | New Paintings | Printed Throw Pillows | New Articles for Globalish | More Gigs

"Forward! Ever Forward!"

– Terence McKenna

Happy Spring, everyone! This blog marks my transition from a biweekly to a monthly newsletter, which means I'll go deeper with more carefully curated highlights. If you'd like to stay in the flow and see absolutely everything, I welcome you to follow me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Youtube. One format won't replace the other – hopefully these changes help me offer more to all of you, more fluidly.

And now, for this month's news – starting with one of the more fun conversations I have ever had:

Interview with Erik Davis on TechGnosis:
Myth, Magic, & Mysticism in the Age of Information

Last week I joined Erik Davis for a far-reaching and lively conversation on Erik's soon-to-be-reissued book, Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information. Erik is a personal hero of mine and one of our culture's weirdest and most wonderful writers – a culture critic and religious scholar whose writing spans topics including the visionary culture of California, black metal philosophy, stage magic, neuroscience, and psychedelic transhumanism (for starters). I've been a guest on his awesome Expanding Mind podcast twice (in 2011 and 2012) and it's always a pleasure to speak with him.

Here are both parts of our chat. Part One is more free-ranging, and Part Two is more focused on how his ideas and the book have aged since their first publication in 1998:

Watch Part One on Youtube

Watch Part Two on Youtube

Also: Just the week before, I had another great conversation with Shawn Madden of New Paradigm Radio on how to live in wonder and thrive in an age of accelerating change. Where history and myth intersect – where science and magic are joined – where childlike awe and grown-up discernment cross-pollinate – that's where the renaissance lives. Here is my take on it.

New Live & Studio Paintings

I've been hard at work at two of the biggest and most ambitious pieces that I've ever done, which I'll have ready for you soon! But in the meantime I have also managed to chip off a few pieces of the transcendental hyperobject and get them down on canvas. Here are two more modest recent works that kind of hearken back to when I started painting:

One Solstice Is Unlike Any Other

18"x24" – painted live at Llano Earth Arts Festival

oil and acrylic pens on canvas

View on FB

Untitled Collaboration with Tourmaline Todd

8"x22" – painted at home

oil and acrylic pens, and acrylic paint, on canvas

View on FB

Stream/Download My Latest Cyberguitar Album

"Experimentally symphonic, layered to perfection, pleasing to the ears, as if Mozart and Random Rab did a mashup series while taking a stroll through the forest. Sophisticated. Bending the lines of spirituality, electronic technology, and organic instruments..."

– Souls In Action

You can also grab a free sampler of some of my favorite tracks from 2014 here. Enjoy!

Warning: May Increase Likelihood of Lucid Dreams

Throw pillows just joined the extensive catalog of printed items you can find at my Nuvango store – alongside men's and women's tees, greeting cards, laptop skins, and phone cases for both iPhone and Samsung models. Click either of the images below to browse your many possibilities:

More Writing From My Full-Time Gig at Globalish

I am honored to be a part of Globalish – not only to have such a solid vehicle for my ideas and writing, but to find a business culture dedicated to real personal and social transformation.

We're offering our readers something more than just a better story. Here are my most recent contributions, in each of our four categories (my favorites are at the top of each):

REVOLUTION

On Martin Luther King, Jr: The Difference Between Inter-Connection and Prior Unity

The Scent of Poopourri + Mark Cuban's Digital Waste Cleanup = War

Skateboards in Afghanistan: A New Front Line for Women's Liberation

TRAVEL

Time To Think Straight: Terence McKenna Denounces New Age Relativism

Back to Basics: Iran Through The Eyes of A Japanese Tourist

CNN: "Can LSD Make You A Billionaire?" – Silicon Valley Tripping Goes Mainstream

Transmetropolitan: The Art and Politics of Egyptian Street Artist Ganzeer

If I Die on Mars: Finding Self "Out There" Upon the New Frontier

ART

Journey To The Dreamtime in This Will Destroy You's New Music Video

Evolving Gods: The Sci-Fi Hindu Pantheon of Abhishek Singh

Prayer Nuts: Pouring Love into Tiny Objects of Human Devotion

Scientist Uses Ion Beams to Etch Sand Castles on a Single Grain of Sand

LIFE

On "Opia": Eye Contact & The Optical Illusion of Our Separation

In & Out of Open Mouths: The Erotic Mysticism of Tooth Brushing

We Were Never Born: Jack Kerouac on Silence, Birth, and the Self Illusion

What Would Buddha Splice?: Where Synthetic Biology & Artificial Intelligence Could Meet

Upcoming Gigs

Parting Shot

Here's a photo by the fabulous Adam Pugh of the lion painting I'll share in next month's newsletter (and which you can see in various stages of completion here):

“The spiritual qualities of the icon sought to transform the flesh, to deprive it of its coarse material substance, to dissolve it in light and re-mould it in spiritual plasma. Icons are sacred images that reflect the physical and the spiritual, the human and the Divine, the visible and the invisible.”

– L. Evseyeva

20 August 2014

Toad Painting From Gratifly & Arise Festivals | Aya Awakenings Video | My New Visionary Culture Gig

“Creativity occurs in the moment, and in the moment we are timeless.”

– Julia Cameron

Finally back home from all the traveling. Ready to dig in for a few months and finish some much-loved but long-overdue projects. Very eager to share recordings from this summer – the music, yes, but also my talks on transformational sobriety (wow, THAT one was well-attended!) and art as politics (because we vote with our attention).

Time to huddle and create for a couple months, until Art Outside in October: new studio music and paintings, and A LOT of writing for my new gig at Globalish, and the necessary sweet moments of stillness that punctuate the creative act.

I'm still available to book for custom work or gigs on a lark. Until then... ❤

Żabka

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Canvas Prints & Posters

18"x24"

Painted live with Molotow, Montana, Elmer's, Sharpie, & Liquitex paint markers at:

Gratifly Music and Arts Festival (2014-07-26, 27)

during Wildlight, The Polish Ambassador, Zach Deputy, Rising Appalachia Music, William Close And The Earth Harp Collective, Closing Ceremony

ARISE Music Festival (2014-08-08, 09)

during Gaia Experiment, Organix Jam,KatsüK, Celestiowl, Sonic Geometry, Mikey Fisher Breaks, NumiNative, Inti, Buddha Bomb

"Żabka" is Polish for "little frog." Toads are amazing creatures – ancient, metamorphic, sturdy, adaptable. Their habit of consuming the skin they shed has made them an especially potent image for transformation. The most potent animal toxin comes from a frog (batrachotoxin, from Phyllobates terribilis); the most powerful hallucinogen does as well (5-MeO-DMT, from Bufo alvarius). Amazonian tribes use the secretions of another species (Phyllomedusa bicolor) as a ritual purgative to purify themselves for hunting. (This "kambo" ceremony renders people temporarily and inexplicably immune to the shock of electric eels.)

I used to draw frogs for a living. Working as the scientific illustrator for the Department of Herpetology at the KU Natural History Museum, I stippled the description plates for dozens of new species of frogs my boss, Dr. Rafe Brown, discovered in the Philippines.

The trend continued in grad school, when I was hired by my graduate advisor, Dr. Sean Esbjörn-Hargens, to provide a frog-themed cover illustration for his amazing book Integral Ecology: Uniting Multiple Perspectives on the Natural World.

Come to think of it, I've always had a thing for frogs and toads. My first recognition as a writer was for a short story I wrote in the second grade, about talking dart poison frogs. My earliest attempt at an illustrated manuscript was on the life cycle of frogs and toads, the year before. My first detention was for skipping class to hunt for toads in between school buildings, growing up in Florida. (I spent SO much time catching toads and tadpoles as a kid.)

My most enduring shame is the memory of killing a toad by throwing it, before I was old enough to know what death is. That's probably why I defended them so fiercely from bullies in middle school...and why I love that scene in E.T. when Elliott liberates the frogs from his school's bio lab.

My great inspiration Ernst Haeckel, who coined the term "ecology," is also famous for saying that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" – meaning, the development of individual organisms is a kind of re-enactment of their whole evolutionary history. We all start out as single cells, then grow into worm-like creatures, then fish, and so on...humans do this in the womb but frogs and toads go through their transformation out where everyone can see. Perhaps that is part of their enduring mystery and appeal. Certainly it resonates with my own open-studio process as a live painter, letting everyone observe the work unfold in public.

This piece in particular marks a turning point for me – the moment when I took paint pen technique into a new dimension of blending and transparencies. A little Alfons Much, a little Futurama, with this painting I find myself one turn up the spiral of my lifelong love for these amphibians.

Clip from the Austin Aya: Awakenings Panel Discussion

A short clip from my hour-long panel discussion (free download here) with directors Rak Razam (Aya: Awakenings) and Mitch Schultz (DMT: The Spirit Molecule) on "mnemonic cross training" and how the entheogenic experience can help us learn to maintain our integrity through complex, difficult situations.

Futurism & Visionary Culture Writing with Globalish