Gaia Community: Michael's Blog

Album Review: Elbow's The Seldom Seen Kid

http://michaelgarfield.gaia.com — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 00:59:46 GMT

Elbow

I love this album so much that four hundred words are criminally insufficient to do it justice; but I wrote this brief review for a music journalism job application and, partial as it is, it seems pointless to keep it locked up on my hard drive. Enjoy!

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Manchester ballad-kings Elbow found a good thing early on and have ridden it well, doing very little to redefine themselves since 1997's Asleep In The Back. There's a magic potion somewhere between frontman Guy Garvey's velvet rasp, the band's consistent ability to kick out highly dynamic slow-burning odes and dirges, and their rare competency in team songwriting (it's never clear in exactly which instrument their tunes first germinate, as if each piece escapes the studio process to emerge fully-formed). Sudden sprays of aggressive distortion or overpowering organs pepper otherwise tender, even cautious music. Choral repetitions forget they belong to a love song, and hook into hypnotizing drum and bass grooves until an afterthought of a fadeout. Exultant stadium singalongs take turns with ominous, swaggering lounge numbers. One minute, you're hallucinating drunk on your back in the alley outside a pub - and the next minute you're soaring over the golden meadows of your youth.

Elbow's greatest strength is their ability to repeatedly pull listeners though this wash of contradictions, finding the most stirring sentiments and primal urges and then throwing them into the ring together. It's a formula that reaches new levels of sophistication on their latest release, The Seldom Seen Kid (Fiction Records, 2008) – in which divorce proceedings inspire floor-stomping anthems, the small grief of loneliness is rendered in widescreen, and the city’s dirty streets magically transform into a romantic wonderland replete with siren-violins and a disco ball made from the Moon.

Garvey’s lyrics paint rich, tactile emotional space that swings from voice to voice, by turns abrasive (“cramming commitments like cats in a sack”) and nostalgic (“out of a doorway the tentacles stretch of a song that I know, and the world moves in slow-mo”). It’s a moving cocktail - one that can get you drunk before you know it - and so I’m willing to forgive the occasional clumsy tracks where depth is traded out for overplayed suave (“Audience With The Pope,” “The Fix”). There are fewer dragging moments on this album than some of their previous efforts, fewer saccharine stumbles and crawling, undeveloped melodies. They do exist – although by the time the album’s last twinkling electric guitar riff fades away, even the rough spots seem indispensable, endearing, somehow part of why this band is worth it. Elbow is, after all, a bar band – and it is these little testaments to their status as ordinary blokes, these slurs and frayed edges, that drive home the incredible humanity of their music.

Tags: visionary music, elbow, manchester, guy garvey, michael garfield, the seldom seen kid

Giving In To Astonishment

http://michaelgarfield.gaia.com — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 22:35:14 GMT

Michael & Nikki at Burning Man

(I'll be making this available as author-read audio; email me
at michaelgarfield at gmail dot com if you are interested in a copy.)

Giving In To Astonishment:
Scenes From Burning Man’s American Dream

“The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn’t, you’ve got an adventure in the dark forest ahead of you… [Visionaries, leaders, and heroes]’ve moved out of the society that would have protected them, and into the dark forest, into the world of fire, of original experience. Original experience has not been interpreted for you, and so you’ve got to work out your life for yourself. Either you can take it or you can’t. You don’t have to go far off the interpreted path to find yourself in very difficult situations. The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience – that is the hero’s deed.”
- Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, pp 48-49

“The function of ritual is to pitch you out, not to wrap you back in where you have been all the time.”
- Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, p106

i) Thursday morning while getting coffee from a Hawaiian grower, my partner and I meet a student from UC Davis who is photographing male fashion here for her graduate thesis. She’s building a case for this event as a kind of male wardrobe skunkworks, a rare place where men are afforded the options that might get them ridiculed at home, to explore their male feminine for perhaps the first time. She grabs and Polaroids us, me in my girlfriend’s borrowed (stolen) skirt.
Sure enough, later that day I’m recovering from a brutal paddling at the hands of our neighbors, The 7 Deadly Sins Lounge…my payment for a “Flaming Blue Fuck” shot, as decided by spinning a wheel (I got the pricey and appropriate “Lust”). Sitting tenderly on my amazingly sore ass, I’m approached by a powerfully queer fellow, in clown makeup and a chest-waisted day-glo yellow suspendered tutu emblazoned with a smiley face. He asks, “Are you wearing a SKIRT?”
I look down in mock surprise. “Yes…”
He smirks, cocks his head to one side, and puts his hands on his hips, looking at me with joke puzzlement. “Isn’t that a little bit GAY?”

ii) Thursday evening, I attend a discussion at Entheon Village led by psychonaut-chemist-hero couple Drs. Ann & Alex “Sasha” Shulgin, the pair responsible for popularizing MDMA as a therapeutic substance and pioneering the synthesis of thousands of other psychoactive molecules in their home LAB (“Large Animal Bioassay” – a joke acronym for their daring and rigorous self-testing). In a compassionate description of the insane (“interesting”) United States legal morass surrounding mind-altering chemistry, Sasha Shulgin the sage octogenarian regales our overflowing tent with a core contradiction: The US classifies DMT as a Schedule I substance, something with no known medical or therapeutic value, in spite of government-funded research to the contrary, over a decade old – a chemical that is illegal to transport in any fashion from one place to another. The only problem: DMT is manufactured by every animal brain, as well as a wide range of plants, “Which means,” remarks Shulgin, “that the judge, the prosecutors, and everyone in the courtroom, is transporting it from one place to another.” He chuckles with remarkable aplomb, considering the decades of persecution he and his family of researchers have suffered at the hands of an authority who remains unwilling to understand either the scientific or social import of his life’s work.
Probably the most-experienced and rigorous molecular voyagers alive, a pair who have accidentally spawned innumerable subcultures and liberated countless new mental states into awareness, the Shulgins are unquestionably quite comfortable with the paradoxes of life – paradoxes that bare themselves in every moment of the burn, in snippets of conversation and through incongruous luminous apparel, in the fantastic weirdness of the so-called “Mutant Vehicles” that litter the playa and in the awe-inspiring view at night of this incredible extraterrestrial metropolis that blossomed forth from an alkaline lake bed last week and will be gone in another, scattered back into garages and closets the world over, incubating until next summer.

“Things are coming to life around you all the time. There is a life pouring into the world, and it pours from an inexhaustible source.”
- Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, p272

   iii) Sometime midday on Tuesday I’m stopped by a pleasant young British man who asks me for sunscreen. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” he says, “but you’re the only person I’ve seen who’s as pale as I am, and…” Our conversation reveals this to be his second burn; he admits feeling the need to return since, for his first year, he didn’t “relax into it” until the fifth day. Hoping to score more inveterate advice, I ask what he means by “relaxing into it,” and the answer is simple: “I just didn’t get over being AMAZED by everything until it was almost over. Everywhere I went, it was, ‘Oooh, tits!,’ or ‘Oooh, blinky!’”
   It’s a commonly reported impression from these frothing shores of unrelenting creative surplus. I can’t make it through a day without at least a few similar discussions of sensory and emotional overload. There are workshops, NECESSARY workshops, on how to keep your outside-world romantic relationships from flying to pieces in the sensual centrifuge – or, failing that, a dozen mixers for rebounding (although every bar & dancefloor already serves the purpose). Some camps gift earplugs to those who can’t find rest amidst the clock saturating “oontz oontz” of 300-watt theme camp audio systems banging from every direction (I had surprisingly little trouble with this, excepting the one afternoon my neighbors to the South played Don MacLean’s “American Pie” on repeat for over an hour – and another night when I awoke from my stolen midnight hour-nap to a pandemonium pile-up of throbs stomping on each other, screams, megaphone drunkenness, I swear the tilting roar of a DRAGON, temporarily cast into the half-asleep pit of helpless blurred aural hell from which neither waking nor dreaming could offer any relief – a condition I later described as “Putting the ‘bed’ in Bedlam.”).
   Hourly or more I was reminded of comedian Joe Rogen’s account of his first DMT experience, during which he met a transcendent alien being who urged him through the trip’s unimaginable gorgeous painful intensity by saying, “Don’t give in to astonishment.” As prepared as I felt after years of anticipatory reading, documentary research, and incessant questioning of those friends who had gone before me, this became my mantra for the week. Determined and even eager to take everything in stride (or perhaps more appropriately, the cyclic gait of playa bike pedaling, frequently caught in thigh-burning tire chews through dust drifts before sweet release onto clean and easy straightaways), the moments came when my exuberance simply couldn’t hold as a strategy, my intentions and agendas buckled under the mass of the senses, and in my sobriety I faded into the periphery of an experience too large for my skinbound social constructs to hold. In these seer-less glimpses through Burning Man’s unembarrassed literal luminous ether and into/as plain transparent being, an offering from no one to no one, the unconcerned and unquestioning blossom of sound and color and feeling, this dearly-held dictum is gone without regret or even remembrance. I am learning the lesson breathed by the multitudes before and alongside me: I don’t “give in” to astonishment because I AM astonishment, whatever else I thought I was and I will think I will be. I am astonishing, the verb. In the rapture of exultant community, my brightened little person self, no thicker than flame or smoke, is silently, wordlessly singing: I am Burning Man, I am Burning Man.

“You couldn’t relate at all to something in which you did not somehow participate. That’s why the idea of God as the Absolute Other is a ridiculous idea. There could be no relationship to the Absolute Other.”
- Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, p227

   iv) Against all caution to the contrary – “Don’t bring a strained relationship to Burning Man unless you’re ready to feel it split apart in a meteoric fireball” – I did, and lost a two-year tread against the insurmountable complexity after the intensity of a partners’ heart-opening yoga session tore my love down the middle. Eight hours later, wandering alone through the chilled black pre-dawn Wednesday morning, wings spread to lift a heart heavy from the hanging medallion of “newly-single,” I turn a corner and am unwittingly and suddenly in line to be seated at the nostalgic Red Eye Diner, lifted chrome and all from the roadside of some false Norman Rockwell memory.
   Behind me beams a tower of a man, ruddy cheeks and sideburns between the khaki coat and hat of the burn’s Rangers – a volunteer peacekeeping team, now nearly 300 strong, patrolling the playa so police don’t have to – a kind of desert-clad jedi elite revered by the many and (apparently) feared by those few who lack the discernment to distinguish their Ranger SUVs from external law enforcement (a.k.a. “The Man”…a confusing handle, out here). Here is a Bigfoot of a man, whose friendliness leans on menace from simple size, loud and wide (and, he tells me almost immediately, cocained).
    He fishes around in shirt pockets and hands me this year’s commemorative patch, ranger-generated quasi-official swag: Old Glory in negative color, the Man tastefully figured over blue and black stripes. It’s the first machine-stitched example I’ve ever seen of the optical effect by which extended staring at a surface or pattern leaves an identical phototracer image on the retina in opposite colors. The patch, beyond being the most professional item I’ve been gifted so far this week, tickles me with its playfulness: Its maker not only assumes recipients to have specific knowledge of visual illusions (a safe bet, here), but seems to have woven in a veiled statement on the participatory nature of the American Dream itself, a reminder that our experience exists not only or even primarily in our symbolic objects but emerges only through our active engagement. That is to say, although maybe I’m merely projecting, this modest gift elegantly contains the coherent transmission of a profound perspective on this entire thing, its place in our larger culture and reality as a whole. And it may have taught me more than the many wonderful but nonspecific gifts I’ve received out here about what Burning Man IS, in all of its simultaneous saturnine silliness.
Perhaps that is why I am drawn so powerfully to this place and these people, that cocktail of play and gravity. Then again, this place is huge, and I am regularly reminded by testimony and experience that a person finds what they attract, here, what they want or need but certainly what they ARE, or are BECOMING, in some way. This is all an intensified reminder that we get what we are looking for (whether or not we realize that we are looking for it, or sometimes that we are even looking for something at all). The myriad energies and impulses of Burning Man are a zodiac, deeper than any exploration except by (and as) the whole beyond any sum. Like life in “the default world,” we can only know the vastness of being through imminent examples, discrete forms and experiences and we see only what we are – what through our evolutionary psychic and cognitive reasoning our bodyminds decide to pass up into conscious awareness – whatever patterns with which, out of a deep history of functional necessity, our being has decided to vibrate in synchrony…what we, in this harmonic unison, tacitly conspire to bring into being with our very attention. (Talk about “radical participation!”)
   And so I have begun to reevaluate everything that “happens to me” here as something that I only see or feel because I AM it, that I TOUCH as external to me but KNOW to reflect deeper truths of identity than I may be willing to admit. (“MAY be,” because the fire of this place has incredible momentum for burning away such limited identities and plunging one – willingly or not – into new and wider self-conceptions, as if we are all here to bathe ourselves in it of the people to whom we ordinarily pretend and discover the clean newness of some more and less human “being” underneath.)
    …Which is all a mild cause for concern when, after waiting in line for maybe half an hour, the Ranger and I are finally seated in a cramped corner of the diner (one booth, one table, four bar stools, ten square feet of kitchen) only to be immediately made to wait again for shift change. As our French-speaking staff disappear behind a curtain to their campsites and leave us unceremoniously with each other’s impatient indignance, and one minute pulls and stretches into twenty or more, I scan the amusing deconstructed menu. (All of this for…scanning the kitchen… grilled cheese and the cold ground-gritty dregs of coffee?) Leave it to the French: a dozen half-intelligible synonymous entries for grilled cheese, poking fun at both menu lingo and my own illusion of choice. Shoulder-to-shoulder with an increasingly upset and noisy ape-man in dress of authority, I smile and nod at the swelling aggression. Here is a man who believes he is owed something, professing an injustice to the other diners, his voice hoarse and boxy, unaware or unconcerned over the obvious distress his protest is catalyzing in a small crowd doing its best to be agreeable and easygoing, and wait. It says, after all, for Christ’s sake, in the pamphlet they hand you upon entry, that you are not ENTITLED gifts. To receive them, when given, with humility, and to not complain about it otherwise. Here is a man who, in his defense, has for nine consecutive years put himself in trying and frequent service of a community of questionable decisions (While in line he told me of a burner who in 2006 executed a double forward flip off the Man’s elevated platform, landing perfectly erect but dislocating his ankle, crumpling to the ground where he lay moaning while other people scrambled over him unaware…not to mention countless other forms of goonery). Here is a man who does in fact deserve the gratitude (or at least open appreciation) of that community, but he’s acting like a petulant child in flagrant non-acknowledgement of this city’s core principles, pounding the counter insisting on his idea of a good time and splashing scowls on everyone around him. When, finally, the cookstaff returns and we are served, half of his free sandwich is redistributed to someone else who has been waiting to his other side, and in an outrage he throws his own half-eaten piece on the dirty ground, stomping out cursing before a wake of awkward silent relief. Whatever code of Ranger honor binds him to his duty and service remains a mystery to me. Oh, it takes one to know one, though; this is my world, and if this disconcertingly seismic rambunctious caprice isn’t Michael, then it is a facet of whatever bigger thing or self I am. Yikes.

   vi) I’m standing in line in San Francisco at an AT&T store waiting to bicker (no, please let’s not bicker, let this be easy) with the desk staff about getting my broken cell phone replaced. There are bright colors and big video screens, multi-lingual clientele and strange sensations…and here, on the first day after hitching my ride out of Burning Man, back in “the matrix,” I’m feeling the first anticipated round of nostalgia for that hallucinatory desert home world, trying to imagine that this air-conditioned orange and blue spectacle is some especially subtle and ironic art installation, that I’m relieved to be momentarily in from the wind and dust, that making it to the counter to get a new phone is some strange play exercise and a trip-within-a-trip commentary on what we as a culture neglect to notice or appreciate about the ever loving gift of our own created technicolor lives. Meanwhile, outside, just a scatter of strange pastel city blocks from my feet, the great blue roiling Pacific Ocean, Oh God, Nature, and I don’t mind being in here because you can take the burner out of Black Rock City, but…
   And I do my best to commit myself moment to moment, in every meeting and in the carriage of my body, to bringing the love I found out in that abominable gorgeous bliss wasteland (totally, TOTALLY unwasted, a sleeping primordial landscape entirely appreciated to the fullest possible human extent) back here into this internally-combusting modern urban beauty-mess. It’s a real blessing to follow up my first burn with this vagabonding, new voyages in unfamiliar places, realms not completely alien but rife with gambits (Of the people I know out here, who will let me sleep on their couch? Can I find an open laundromat on Labor Day? Did my friends in Colorado pull through for me and find me temp work out here like they said they could? Can I carry all of these things around every day for the next two weeks?)

   vii) And now, sitting without pants in “The Washing Well,” the heaven-sent open laundromat on Labor Day, money belt tucked under my boxers and feeling like a proper vagabond in my last clean shirt. (Colored by Hawaiian red clay, it reads “Do It In The Dirt”…and I left it in the bag all week at Burning Man, ironically.) Whatever a “proper vagabond” is I don’t know – but here is my notion of such a person: traveling at a deliberate pace, sharing and receiving, learning and using humility, keeping my eyes and ears wide open to experience what Allyson Grey in her lecture at Pantheogenesis Temple a few days ago called “life as a synaesthetic symphony,” tuning in to the quiet voices, intuitive whispering, which is how I found this laundromat in the first place, by taking an urging left instead of a silent right on my way out of the phone store (where nothing is free again, apparently – some art installation!).
   This same suggestive silence led me into conversation with a particular man at Pantheogenesis a few days ago, where we eagerly discussed an exciting point from Daniel Pinchbeck’s recent lecture – how we seem on the brink of a collective awakening to psychic energy and engineering, akin to the 18th Century threshold between fearful awe of lightning and an electrified industrial revolution. Instances of so-called synchronicity seem by all sensitive accounts to be on the rise, drawing us toward an inevitable reckoning between our current mechanisms and a world of more vivid and obvious structuring, simultaneity of cause and effect, free information, living language, playful inexplicability, trust and instantaneous response that will challenge our very notions of the separation between inner and outer, question and answer, the strange (to us) overlay of our linear living experience and the inescapable knowledge of the at-onceness of all time and all-hereness of space.
   One of Daniel’s examples came from a burner who had declared his desire for a fig, and THE NEXT THING that happened? Someone walks by with a basket of figs and offers him one. My new friend tells me how he had lost his coat two days earlier in another camp and found it, after Daniel’s rant on synchronicity, sitting in the corner of the temple, waiting for him like the world knew he’d find it there. By the end of this conversation, he is offering me the ride to San Francisco I’d been worrying about. These are small requests – not rain dances, not politics by the hyper-democratic mechanism of collective wish-fulfillment. Not YET. But, but…I was attending this lecture, and having this conversation, while wearing the one custom shirt I brought to the Burn, the freak-flag betraying my most deeply-held sociopolitical platform, my model for visionary economics, the most hope-inspiring thing I can think to say in the midst of this Malthusian delusion of the United States: “Imagination is our greatest natural resource.”     Sure enough, I end up sharing the RV back to California with five others: two globetrotting women on their way “back to Egypt” via Yosemite…and a fellow illustrator, musician, concert poster artist and his partner, who let me stay the night in their second bedroom and wake up to the delicious coincidence that he plays drums for a friend of mine from college, someone whom I haven’t spoken to in years. Eating my breakfast, I muse on the persistent reminders of how miraculous it all is, this experience of one thing leading to another, when I know that REALLY, this is ALL one thing, happening at ONCE. Being surprised, or confused, is our reward for trying to understand this party as it if were a parade.

“Chance, or what might seem to be chance, is the means through which life is realized.”
- Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, p203

   viii) On my way out to Burning Man, I read The Power of Myth, transcript of a conversation between ur-comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell and journalist Bill Moyers. Campbell, you may remember, seeded the public consciousness with the idea that myths are not merely the inadequate explanatory schema of ages past, but maps of experience that connect us, when we immerse ourselves in them, to the vaster patterns of humans being and becoming. They teach us how to navigate the parade of our lives, and deepen our sense of belonging in a mysterious but somewhat/somehow sensible universe. I am in love with Campbell’s ability to weave together the disparate mythologies of cultures the world over, highlighting common contours that converge on the horizon line of our collective unconscious, archetypes as the intermediaries of an organic intelligence alive too deep for our waking awareness to contact directly. But in spite of the rapture I feel when reading Campbell & Moyers’ incredible exchanges on the trans-cultural core form of the dead-and-resurrected savior, or the organismic and embodied origins of deities hidden in our shared evolutionary heritage, or how 13th Century troubadours shook the world apart by inventing and professing for the first time the notion of personal romantic love as a spiritual ideal, my Burning Man experience was most illuminated by their discussion of the mandala…

“In India, I have seen a red ring put around a stone, and then the stone becomes regarded as an incarnation of the mystery. Usually you think of things in practical terms, but you could think of anything in terms of its mystery. For example, this is a watch, but it is also a thing in being. You could put it down, draw a ring around it, and regard it in that dimension. That is the point of what is called ‘consecration.’”
- Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, p74

   ix) The mandala is a circular map of the world common to every wisdom tradition from the Tibetan Buddhists to the Navajo Indians. Circular, because of our universal understanding of the circle as a symbol of wholeness, totality…because the heavens above stretch out infinitely beyond the circular boundary of the horizon…because of lunar cycles and the relationship between the full moon and a full belly or breast or basket. Mythological circles are the containers of everything, and within them everything is organized, the center point representing a still axis or fertile ground of origin (masculine and feminine creative power, respectively), the node around which the rest of the mandala effulges or accretes.
   A compass is a mandala. A map of our solar system is one, as well. Understand the map, and you can understand the territory. The reading of a mandala, like the exploration of any metaphor, illuminates a network of meanings, placing them together in a landscape of interrelated significance.
   A week into my forays at Burning man, and I’ve finished The Power of Myth, allowed it to percolate in me while I give my attention to the stupendous display of creativity that bombards and invites me from every direction. This is, after all, what Alex Grey has declared “The Freest Place On Earth,” the living example of our western republic’s constitutional freedoms, a place so intentionally permissive that – finally! – the only taboo TRULY IS cruelty to the environment and one’s fellow beings (of course, taboos get broken).
   Such open, radical acceptance clears space for an unprecedented array of strange beauties:
   …Being swept up in the silent theatrics of a playa documentary team’s between scene choreography. I find them recruiting in someone else’s camp and follow them into the center of the playa, where we are paired up and filmed kissing, falling to the ground, lying there for long, still, amused minutes as if dead – I’m not entirely sure what this bizarre pantomime is intended to communicate about Black Rock City – except that it’s full of weirdo film students – but it was delightful to connect in this way with a total stranger, in front of the camera, in the middle of the desert. And I came back to camp at dusk, grinning to report I had stumbled onto film…a fitting spectacle for my first ever Monday at Burning Man.
   …Attending a seminar held by Poly Paradise on understanding and overcoming jealousy, after which my ex-ex and I are coached by a fellow attendee for over an hour in Nonviolent Communication and then draft our (long-awaited, long-discussed, finally realized) first working constitution for a mutually satisfying open relationship between us.
   …Packing ourselves into a sweating friendly mass of couples both straight and gay for a workshop on male full body erotic massage, a form of electric body work that culminates in a surprisingly nonsexual intensity that shudders me from lips to fingertips, prickling pleasure-gnosis revealing the precise locations of personal contractions in my subtle, auric body – and suddenly I know can I heal myself, for suddenly I know beyond doubt that I have the hands of a healer (and wow, she does too, apparently). Leaving the sweat-and-serotonin drench of the massage tent, I share a depth of surprise and gratitude and comfort/relief, praise for this newly discovered realm of embodiment, through “Were you there for that, too?” eye contact with the half dozen gay men I was, not an hour earlier, worried would kick me in the head while tossed about in the throes of orgasm.
   …Roaming around on a photojournalistic tour of the endless fake road and warning signs: “Yield To Art In Plaza,” “Reserved For Theme Camps,” “Now Leaving The United States,” “Speed Limit: Terminal Velocity,” “Department of Spontaneous Combustion,” “Larry Harvey for United States Congress,” “Slow – Children At Playa.”
   …Getting myself zapped by “Got Stickers?” camp’s electric fence in exchange for a delicious frozen margarita, then standing with my woman, each of us putting one hand on an arm of their variable-voltage electric chair, and closing the circuit with a kiss.
   …Watching the biggest smoke rings I’ve ever seen get shot from some invisible cannon across the playa and into the evening sky, trailing arabesques as they drift up into the air like giant lung cancer jellyfish, one of them threaded by a party of skydivers.
   …Playing guitar with one hand and spinning fire poi with the other.
   …Drinking a Canadian margarita blended by a chainsaw motor and calling that breakfast.
   …Hunkering down with goggles and face mask through two day-long dust storms that turn our entire camp, tents with sleeping bags and all, into a rippling alkaline dunescape.
   It was some time in the middle of one of these dust storms, I believe, when I recognized, possibly even while staring directly at a pale white Sun no brighter than the Moon, that Black Rock City is a mandala.

“I think of mythology as the homeland of the muses, the inspirers of art, the inspirers of poetry. To see life as a poem and yourself participating in a poem is what the myth does for you.”
- Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, p65

   xii) I am only familiar with a handful of mandalas – the Tibetan wheel of the Six Realms, the magnetic grid of the Cardinal Directions, and the four quadrants of Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory. On a Cartesian plane, Wilber has divided domains of human knowledge into the interior (loosely, mind and experience, the first-person perspective) and exterior (loosely, body and description, the third-person perspective) along the y-axis, and into “singular” and “collective” along the x-axis. You end up with a grid of the various ways that truth can be found in the world, the various long-competing methods of inquiry finally put to work in complementarity.
   I studied Wilber’s work in graduate school and have not forgotten his insistence that our models are no replacement for direct experience – that we must not mistake the map for the territory. And yet, fresh from my immersion in Joseph Campbell and absorbed by how the perceived world is constructed – how fact and interpretation wash back and forth, creating one another – I can’t help but suspect that the TERRITORY is actually the MAP. Carl Jung, after all, said that dream architecture signifies the dreamer’s mind. Since our minds construct the contents of consciousness according to their favored theories of self, it seems perfectly rational to engage the world in a way that recognizes perceptions as propositions ABOUT the self. Rather than “mistaking the map for the territory” by losing myself in the disembodied game of theoretical abstractions, I set out to discover just how deeply the intentional ritualistic design of Black Rock City, and my own half-conscious meaning-making, shape the literal physical topology of the event. And so, for the last twenty four hours of my stay at Burning Man, everything has cast itself in a new light, a glowing metaphysical, metaphorical grid overlaid on the dusty streets of the city, reaching back in time to web together all of my experiences in a newly-discovered structure.
   Consequently, my theme camp, situated facing the 9:00 Portal, fell into the upper left quadrant of personal experience and individual psychology – albeit with our camp bar and tent door open to the lower left quadrant, the jurisdiction of shared meaning and intersubjectivity – what “we” know, what is true for us, our common language and symbols. It makes sense for my partner and I, arriving at Burning Man in a confused state over our relationship and torn between personal and mutual interests, to be camping on the boundary between “I” and “We” – just a few minutes’ walk from where we attend those 7:00 workshops on open relationships and partner massage down in the Land of You and I.
   Across the mandala, the Opulent Temple Sound Stage at 2:00, square in the middle of the empirical, behavioral, anatomical domain of the upper right, where my strongest individualistic urges all week focus me on the sight of dancing women, the joy of being out alone to peoplewatch, intensely interested in seeing other people’s experiences from an objective distance.
   At 4:00, Entheon Village’s lecture series on drug policy, social reform, sustainable design, and crystal lattices makes perfect sense – Entheon sitting, after all, in the dead center of the lower right quadrant, domain of the collective exteriors, socioeconomic research, network logic, complexity. In retrospect, it’s little wonder that this is where I have found so much discussion about synchronicity, ecology, and unified field theories.
   And right on the 3:00 Portal, between individual behavior and social practicality, the Red Eye Diner, where the Bigfoot ranger threw his petulant fit and disturbed everyone’s micropolitics of decency.
   At 12:00, between “I” and “It,” the Temple (“Basura Sagrada,” Sacred Trash) where Burners were encouraged to write their prayers for deceased loved ones, performing ritual release from painful personal identification and to equanimous simple observation.
   At 6:00, between “We” and “They,” shared experience and economic infrastructure, waved the banners of Center Camp, where people alternately gathered on couches to watch live music or entered data into information kiosks, huddled together during the whiteout of Monday’s dust storm or stood in line to buy coffee and look up lost friends in the registry.
Center Camp is body painting and filling out the 2008 Census. The Temple is silent prayer and stargazing.
   This is the thinking in which I’m steeped, the mythological and the geographical making sweet angel love in my psyche, when after sundown on Saturday night the wind & dust finally relent and our camp, Deviant Playground, finally cleans up and heads out to get front row seats to the Burn. I am expecting now that all of my experiences will be textured, impressed by this hidden fractal enformy, everywhere I go to yield conversations predicted by the coordinates, my last night at Burning Man to be the decoding of an endlessly rich cryptex I can finally navigate with some minor degree of intentionality.
   And then we are all walking together toward the center of the promenade, the axis, the point of all points, the mathematico-spiritual origin of this entire orgy, the center of the galaxy. The art cars have all answered the homing beacon and cluster in a circle around the Man as if waiting to be nursed, or prostrate in deference. The entire crowd, 50,000 strong, has accreted/gravitated around and within this flammable blinking equator, eyes and subwoofers turned like petals to the Sun, all charged by the pressure cooker of eager flesh, all expectant, light shooting everywhere.

   xii) Four days vagabonding in San Francisco and in spite of the great people I’ve met and the lovely homes in which I’m staying – and in spite of the delicious fact that I took the 19 North to Market Street and bought everything I need to do live performance painting at Golden Gate Park’s 10th Annual Power To The Peaceful Festival this weekend, I feel like I’m losing the glow. Perhaps traveling to distract myself from the post-Burning Man blues really wasn’t such a bright idea, after all. And then, on a deck looking out over the Bay Bridge and a vast swath of the city at night, the ancient flickering spectacle of gathering that yawns into unwalkable distance, life love and death stretched out before us hidden in plain view, one of the guys with whom I’m staying says, “At Burning Man, there was so much to do that…it’s not that I was doing things RANDOMLY, so much as…I wasn’t using my social self to make the choices.” And all at once I taste it again, The Freest Place On Earth.

   x) Yeah, it has a commercial side. Like every other fucking thing in our society. But that in no way detracts from the good of what is accomplished by this event. The magic of this place.

“Myths are so intimately bound to the culture, time, and place that unless the symbols, the metaphors, are kept alive by constant recreation through the arts, the life just slips away from them.”
- Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, p72

   xiv) So, the middle. The mandala’s Godhead-Spot, on Saturday night, with the largest display of saturnalia around us that I have ever seen. Oh I’ve seen larger crowds, but this is ALL ONE SINGLE PARTY.
   THIS one has a fifty-foot Duck Car with a flaming Mohawk.
   THIS one has a full tour bus AND trailer covered in white fur & glowing from inside.
THIS one has more blinking things than the alien city on the fucking Moon.
   THIS one has spindly Victorian tricycles squeezing flame minarets from twinned antique flutes, and a van crowned by insectile light webbing that curls into a gently poised ten foot tall wireframe heart, the alien love symbol of some tryptamine entity giving the Earth language of affection a college try, flanked to each side by battleship wings of subwoofers.
And firetruck sentinels guarding the Man’s central conclave like lions to either side of each cardinal portal.
And hundreds of chagrined firedancers disallowed due to high winds.
   And apocalyptic orange light on the low clouds.
   THIS one has me finally donning the ankle-length Ethiopian gown my mother bought in Kansas City the week before I left for the desert, the cool, thin fabric barely touching my skin, the most sacred article of clothing I possess, at long last out of its giant zip-lock bag for the appropriate hour, a sacramental and sacrificial garment now obviously meant for THIS, NOW, the bearing witness of a grand ritual transition.

   xiii) This book is falling apart, as I write this.

   v) [I write the following passage waiting in the front row to watch the burn, steeped in the moment’s incredible anticipatory energy. The intensity of waiting is so powerful I feel – as I often do – as if I have died, as if the whole affair were taking place in some adjacent alchemical realm where mundane identity is shed and sacred anonymity is the norm. And, in my best attempt to do something worthwhile with my wait, I start exploring the various voices in my freshly dead head, the muted clamor of subpersonalities that come together as Michael in daylight.
   My friend Lindsey asks me what’s up, so I tell her, and she says, “Oooh, voices? How many are there?”
   And I know she’s being silly, so I’ll be silly too, and say, “Hmmm…five, I think.” And I listen for a moment. “Or six.”
   “Or six?”
   “Well, one of them is kind of in between being and not being. It’s not ‘six.’ It’s ‘OR six.’” Many spiritual traditions add one to any count in their sacred geometries – the one extra actually representing the void from which all forms emerge. It’s kind of like pouring one for your dead homies...]
   (Or Six.) Well, here we are. Waiting. On the other Side. You are already dead. I think a lot (a LOT) about the Super Mario World game, the first released on the Super Nintendo, the punchcard of a new system, and in it, a Dungeon Castle navigable only by climbing around on fences crawling with turtles (Turtles? The only CLIMBING turtle in the world is the SE Asian Big Headed Turtle, a personal favorite, but then). And to get around them, find a gate in the fence, and punch it. It’ll swing you around onto the other side.
   [The music is intensifying around me. Fireworks are shooting off. Flames are spraying everywhere. The inner world and the outer world are mirroring each other. It’s all I can do to think, to get this down on paper in the middle of this carnival.]
   DUNGEON, mind you.
   [Cheering!]
   Rocks.
   [Eruptions!]
   Ominous tritone organ music.
   [Strobes!]
   You’re – primary colors! – you’re almost, er, uh, maybe already
   [I turn the page to write one more word exactly as the Man erupts in flame.]
   DEAD.

   xv) There was so much more to that night: third eye wonders, safety risks, the Shrine of Fortuna, ongoing play with paradoxes and inversions, a pervasive triradial geometry popping up everywhere, fascinating conversations with fellow wanderers, the inheritance of a boomerang, and finally passing out from exhaustion with my wife and a nosebleed on a couch in front of the Café Stage at Center Camp at five in the morning only to be awakened and evicted by my own album shimmering and slamming over the loudspeakers (and only the two of us knew; it was like attending my own funeral) – then walking on dead legs back to camp in birthing light past exhausted burn-barrel clusters turned eastward in silent expectant devotion, the playa already on the out-tide, the first tents already folded like flowers back into the desert ground, the amazing calm of this city finally ASLEEP.
   And so much more to say about the land, the mythological playa winter, the simple duration of place that seeped into our schedules and, like persistent roots, penetrated and crumbled our rigid sense of city time, forcing us to let go of the “What/Where/When” as anything more than a handbook of intriguing but improbable diversions.
   And a palpable wound in my writer’s duty that, sitting here a week (only one week!) later in a café on Fillmore, I can’t line up my vagabonding mind and schedule with the desire to say what I have left to say about the shadow work of my first burn, the continuous ebbing and surging revelations drawing me deeper into the understanding and experience of “the world out there” as an esoteric map of whoever I “actually” am.
   And the myriad synchronicities and soul-family recognitions kindled at Black Rock City that have led me half-aware around the industrial cyber-beach of San Francisco in the contrail of Burning Man’s passage.
   But for now those stories will have to wait…and anyway, one of the best hard lessons of my “virgin Burn” is that there are ALWAYS more stories untold, more roots than branches, the conscious boat skimming across the choppy meniscus of an unconscious ocean bulging with glowing fish and dark angels.

   xvi) For now, I will say only this about the Burn itself: Here I am with fifty thousand people’s eyes trained on an effigy into which we have all invested the idea of the American Dream, filled it with our hopes and fears, our criticism and cherishing, our making of peace with the past and our cautious celebratory embrace of the future, reverence and wistfulness, eagerness and irony, love and loss, joy and anxiety, all that would have been but never was, all that is and will not be, the Leviathan of industrial exhaust and pharmaceuticals, the Phoenix Eagle of innovation and community. And the Man takes FOREVER to burn down, they have to light it twice, bouquets of fireworks everywhere, flourishing echoes of independence, encouragement from the coming us that this moment is the first light over the horizon, a cosmic passage, the magical instant between this page and the next, and I am so blessed to be here to report back to my friends and family that I have seen the American Dream finally collapse in a fountain of ashes and cheering, foundation buckling to crack and release the most exultant orange firelight, bending metal and wide sighs of dragon smoke, an inferno vortex that pulls us all into a tribal wheel of squeezing bodies, a galaxy party spinning in tight counterclockwise coils around the rising ghost, a crowd cyclone primally praising what we were all the way to heaven, crying tears of relief and cooking our faces in the heat of its dying light. And here I am again, running hand in hand with Lindsey, weaving through the whirlpool with kindergarten glee, washing in the innocence of a new day, given in to astonishment and lost in absorption, eyes and ears overflowing with celebration, newly confident that I can soon write home and tell them our hope is NOT EVEN audacious. It’s plain and obvious, natural and common as the earth or sky. And it’s here. And it’s us. It’s a dream, all right, but dreams are borne from our imagination, and imagination is our greatest natural resource. There is more than enough to share.

[Post-script:] After Burning Man, after my two-week sojourn in San Francisco and before my move to Chicago, I returned to Boulder and spent my precious last days there sleeping on my friend Tristan’s couch, breathing as much Colorado air as possible. One night, while talking with Tristan (who couldn’t make it to Burning Man this year), I mentioned how fond I had become of wearing a skirt, of knowing we all had put aside our judgments and agreed to let each other present ourselves in whatever ways we were most comfortable. He said he’d met a man who put it well: “At Burning Man, you are free to be who you actually are.” (But the all-important caveat:) “You might not SUCCEED, but you can certainly TRY.”
   The night before I left, I noticed an interesting book – Hakim Bey’s T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (published 1985, one year before the first burn) – sitting on an old broken television in Tristan’s apartment. I’d heard of this book but had never read it, picked it up out of curiosity and opened to this:

“The dérive or “drift” was conceived as an exercise in deliberate revolutionizing of everyday life – a sort of aimless wandering thru city streets, a visionary urban nomadism involving an openness to ‘culture as nature’ (if I grasp the idea correctly) – which by its sheer duration would inculcate in the drifters a propensity to experience the marvelous; not always in its beneficent form perhaps, but hopefully always productive of insight – whether thru architecture, the erotic, adventure, drink & drugs, danger, inspiration, whatever – into the intensity of unmediated perception & experience.
“The parallel term in sufism would be ‘journeying to the far horizons’ or simply ‘journeying,’ a spiritual exercise which combines the urban & nomadic energies of Islam into a single trajectory, sometimes called ‘the Caravan of Summer.’ The dervish vows to travel at a certain velocity, perhaps spending no more than 7 nights or 40 nights in one city, accepting whatever comes, moving wherever signs & coincidences or simply whims may lead, heading from power-spot to power-spot, conscious of ‘sacred geography,’ of itinerary as meaning, of topology as symbology.”

And then:

“Art project: the construction of a ‘map’ bearing a 1:1 ratio to the ‘territory’ explored.”

Once again, I have mistaken the party for a parade.

Tags: burning man, hakim bey, joseph campbell, ken wilber, michael garfield, mythology, shulgin, daniel pinchbeck, alex grey, carl jung

A Window Into The Future Of Sound

http://michaelgarfield.gaia.com — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 00:12:41 GMT

A Metaphor For Progress (courtesy of NASA/GSFC/Dana Bery)

The way we listen to music today is not going to last. A bevy of new technologies is set to radically change our relationship to auditory media. novel speaker materials, remarkable advances in recording equipment, and pioneering mind-machine interfaces have perched our culture on the verge of a world we would scarcely recognize: where music can be played back on any surface, where headphones have been replaced by custom isolated open-air audioscapes, and where we don't even need mouths to sing or hands to play our instruments. For your consideration, I present the following major innovations - each of which, sooner or later, will force us to reconsider what we think we know about communication.

The first, like many wonderful discoveries, came from failure - failure by the UK Ministry of Defense to find a suitable material for dampening the sound of their helicopters. Instead, they stumbled upon a unique honeycombed structure that conducts sound with surprising efficiency. Already, the technology as been sold to NXT Sound, named SurfaceSound, and crafted into folding flat-panel speakers (14 mm thick) and "speakerless" automobile interiors and mobile phones.

New Ultra-Thin Speakers by NXT

It has also been fashioned into transparent overlays for computer screens, which can be segregated into as many as SIX isolated sound panes. It's only a matter of time (less than a year, according to NXT's projections) before we have integrated speakers in our greeting cards and digital photo displays, and ultra-thin clip-on speakers for juicing up obsolete non-musical surfaces. One of the most exciting prospects for SurfaceSound is as a responsive natural interface for audio engineering - according to the Discovery News article, it "can be made to vibrate when touched, with individual frequencies tailored to each finger" (a benefit of its capacity to be partitioned). With the ability to place sound-conducting surfaces almost anywhere imaginable, the next challenge for NXT seems simple enough: to make "silent loudspeakers" which can only be heard when the listener is in direct contact with the speaker surface.

---

It's an end that may already have been achieved, albeit differently, by Holosonic Research Labs. Their incredibly cool Audio Spotlight technology fires a narrow beam of ultrasound that distorts in a predictable pattern through as it travels through air. The result is the sonic equivalent of a laser - an invisible ray of sound that can only be heard by someone standing directly in its path. (Their technical explanatory page can be found here.)

UFO Not Included.

I'll say it again: Audio Spotlight turns the AIR into a loudspeaker that can only be heard by standing INSIDE of it. Sound can be projected like a beam of light, bounced off of surfaces, and manipulated in all kinds of other novel ways. The New York Times called Audio Spotlight "the most radical technological development in acoustics since the coil loudspeaker was invented in 1925," and with good reason:

Headphone museum tours are over, soon to be replaced with isolated audio programs for each display. You can listen to music over open air in the public library. The insane cacophony of public advertisements will be forgotten in favor of more discrete "hotspots" pedestrians will learn to systematically avoid. Performing musicians will be able to broadcast multiple submixes into their audiences to compensate for micro-variations in venue acoustics - or even play several concerts at once, through which listeners can move as they dance from one end of the room to the other. You'll never register a noise complaint against your neighbor's bassy stereo system again. The technology is already being adapted by an impressive array of clients, including

Eastman Kodak, Hewlett-Packard, GM, Motorola, and Walt Disney Imagineering (the guys who build the rides). (A full list of current applications can be found here.) It isn't long before our children are digging iPod earbuds out of the attic and querying their internet implants as to what the hell those things are...

---

And when they do, they'll probably be using technology similar to Emotiv Systems' Epoc, a new videogaming interface that replaces handheld controllers with a mind-reading headset.

Epoc "Mind-Reading" Headset

Combining 100 year old EEG technology with new software algorithms that analyze human brainwave patterns, the Epoc is a glorified biofeedback device, enabling its users to navigate computer interfaces with nothing more than intent. Beyond its immediate gaming applications (headsets will be on the market for $300 this Christmas), Emotiv is exploring numerous applications in robotics, education, and medicine - making it possible, for example, for quadraplegics to operate household devices on their own. I'm giving us a year before progressive musical acts are using these or similar headsets to control electronic music production arrays - heralding the advent of a long-imagined age when artists are able to directly convey their thoughts to an audience.

(A speculative recipe: combining the Epoc with the Audio Spotlight yields the potential for multi-scaped audio arrays that are activated and operated without so much as lifting a finger.)

And if that weren't enough, it is easy to imagine how such a device - apparently already well on the road to ubiquity - might catalyze a radical development of mental acuity in our culture. Having to learn what is currently an uncommon finesse with concentration and intent could well improve the focus and self-control of everyone who uses it...and already, I can hear the next generation marvel with pity and disbelief at our limited attention spans and cognitive agency.

(More on this here: Discovery Channel)

---

The Epoc's clever decryption of brainwave semantics has its limitations, however. One significant "drawback" (if that term can even be applied to such a stunning advancement) is that it cannot read your brain with enough precision to decode speech. You'll still have to move your mouth to talk...

...UNLESS, that is, you're using Ambient Corporation's Audeo, a neckband-mounted microchip that relays nerve impulses on their way to the focal cords to a computer, where they are translated into an audible computerized voice.

Ambient Corporation's Audeo, Doing Its Thing

Although the device can currently recognize fewer than 200 words, Ambient is working to release an improved model by the end of the year that recognizes individual phonemes and has a functionally limitless vocabulary. Michael Callahan, Ambient's twenty-four year old co-founder, recently placed the first public "voiceless phone call" at a recent technology conference (You can find the video embedded in The New Scientist's recent article). In support of my generation-of-techno-yogis hypothesis, Callahan says that making clean electrical signals that the Audeo can understand requires the specific, deliberate imagining of voicing each word - something he calls "a level above thinking."

It's an innovation whose significance extends beyond the obvious enabling-speech-in-the-mute. Private telephone calls will be made in public, by people who look like they're listening to you. Ventriloquism through invisible wallspeakers and audio beams will further challenge our confidence in human perception. Maybe our hyper-attentive descendents will be able to deliver two different speeches at once. (Most of us already know how to talk without thinking...all it would require is to also talk while thinking. It's like riding a bike.)

But for me, fettered as I am by my unilingual peasantry, one application takes the cake: linguistic software could be packed into that auxiliary computer, finally realizing something not too distant from the long-fantasized Universal Translator.

It's not technomusical telepathy, but it's close. We're getting there. Yes, indeed: the future is singing quite a tune.

Tags: music, visionary music, UK, NXT Sound, SurfaceSound, speakers, Discovery News, Holosonic Research Labs, Audio Spotlight, lasers, NY Times

New Research Uncovers An Orchestra Of Bird Music

http://michaelgarfield.gaia.com — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 22:07:30 GMT

Three recent articles on bird music research have deepened my already profound appreciation for our sonorous avian companions:

1) Teresa Feo and Christopher Clark of Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology just published their study of unusual adaptation in the Anna's hummingbird that allows males to sound a 4 kHz chirp (four octaves above Middle C) by vibrating their tail feathers in flight. Normally birds of this size are too small to generate any significant amount of noise - but by spreading out their specially-tapered outer tail feathers during a 100-foot dive, these hummingbirds turn themselves into living reed whistles. (Overwhelming evidence that tail-shaking is sexy, no matter the species.)

? Teresa Feo & Christopher Clark

The delicious literary twist on this story is that Feo is a clarinetist in the UC Berkeley marching band - so it comes as no surprise that she noticed the reed-like musical courtship of the Anna's hummingbirds in San Francisco's shoreline parks. It won't be long before this discovery is standard to biomechanics textbooks, adding Feo to the slim ranks of biologist-clarinetist-rockstars...score another point for being an artist and a scientist!

(More on this here: Discovery Channel ...and here: UC Berkeley)

2) The so-called "duck-billed" dinosaurs (or hadrosaurs), an extensive group of four-legged, herding herbivores, are famous for the bizarre ornaments each species carried atop its skull. These crests evolved from the nasal bones, and many of them were actually hollowed out by sinus cavities - a strange feature that has perplexed paleontologists for decades.

Velafrons Skull

Now, a theory first proposed by Carl Wilman in 1931 is gaining credence - the recent discovery of Velafrons coahuilensis ("sailed forehead from Coahuila") in Mexico by paleontologists at the Utah Museum of Natural History supports the hypothesis that duck-billed dinosaurs used their head flair to amplify species-specific "trumpeting." From the neck down, each type of hadrosaur looks nearly identical - but their wild variety of crests would each have produced a different sonic signature.

Hadrosaur Family Tree

A study of hadrosaur ears by James Hopson indicates that they were at least as well-developed as those of modern crocodilians, many of which use auditory signals for mating. And several scientists at Sandia Laboratory have reconstructed hadrosaur nasal passages in a computer and actually made music with them .

Parasaurolophus Sinuses

(David Weishampel famously constructed a six-foot twist of PVC piping, the approximate length and curvature of a Parasaurolophus crest, that he blared for dinosaur documentaries back in the 1990s - let me know if you can find a video of this online!). The funky armature of Velafrons is one more compelling piece of evidence to suggest that Earth in the Late Cretaceous Period was a pretty noisy place - covered, as it was, with roaming herds of thousands of five-ton trombones.

And yes, using the principles of Lazy Taxonomy, birds count as dinosaurs, so dinosaurs count as birds.

(More on this here: NY Times ...and here: Discovery Channel)

3) I almost want to devote an entire essay to this one: Scientists at Cardiff University have found that male songbirds exposed to environmental pollutants sing longer, more complex tunes that are favored by female songbirds! Specifically, European starlings (Sternus vulgaris) that grow up eating insects full of synthetic estrogen (!) and estrogen mimics sing longer, more frequent, and more intricate tunes.

European Starling

Researcher Katherine Buchanan and her colleagues cracked open a few starling heads and found that the high vocal center (HVC) of these birds' brains is significantly enlarged by these chemicals...which also disrupt endocrine function and paradoxically weaken the starlings' reproductive efficiency.

...And here is where I wax poetically about the double-bind of maleness, the intimate relationship between creation and destruction, the aesthetic bonus we inherit for growing up on a polluted planet, speculation about how my own musicality correlates with toxic produce and breakfast cereals, and the crucifixion. Back in my college town of Lawrence, Kansas, the sunsets are gorgeous - heartbreaking reds and pinks and oranges. The vibrancy is due to atmospheric pollutants that scatter sunlight, filtering out higher frequencies and leaving spectators with the low, slow throb of the longer wavelengths. It's only so beautiful because, for hundreds of miles west of Lawrence, the skies are choked with agricultural dust and smokestack exhaust. Here in Boulder, Colorado, flanked to the west by the Continental Divide, the clean air doesn't offer such a spectacle. For those of us who see beauty in intensity, it doesn't get much more inspiring than this: living at the end of the world. Just thinking about it makes me want to sing. Maybe my HVC is swollen.

(More on this here: Science Daily ...and here: PLoS)

Afterword: After a careful consideration of these stories, I noticed that they correspond to three of the four different instrument groups (as I learned them in grade school: woodwind, brass, and string instruments, respectively). But, of course, birds have been at music for hundreds of millions of years longer than we have and have all their bases covered. So I'd like to include Exhibit Four, allowing us to make a full bird-orchestra in our imaginations, complete with percussion:

4) Woodpeckers.

Dinopium benghalense on the drums.

Tags: music, visionary music, Teresa Feo, Berkeley, Christopher Clark, hummingbirds, clarinet, San Francisco, Discovery Channel, hadrosaurs, Velafrons

Painting While Dancing, Part 4

http://michaelgarfield.gaia.com — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 00:55:52 GMT

Icarus, from http://www.fredzavadil.com/images/stories/fred/icaru

Painting is dangerous.

We don't typically think of painting as dangerous, because we imagine the landscape print in our motel room to have emerged uncomplicatedly from the sweatless brow of some middle-aged homebody with a neat row of clean brushes and a comfortable desk chair. We are the children of Late Capitalism, recognizing product over process. Our physicists are busy looking not for fundamental relationships in the universe, but fundamental particles. We seem not to really grasp the wisdom in statements like, "Happiness is a journey, not a destination." Machines build things for us.

Through clever modern chemistry, being an artist is almost totally non-toxic. You don't even have to get your hands dirty; just use an electronic stylus and tablet, and you can do more with pixels than you ever could have with messier media. And you can do it sitting down.

Even the treacherous borderlands of the mind have been neutered, packaged, labeled, and thus contained. Psychedelia is trite. Been there, done that - our chain retailers advertise with swirling floral blooms and rippling waves of color with an otherworldly richness that puts every Boomer album cover to shame.

Maybe acid did break our parents' chromosomes...or maybe we, like the kids of those Brazilian shamans, have just been innoculated to these deeper weirdnesses by growing up inside of them. Maybe consumer culture just gives us too much to experience, and we've grown even thicker shades to wear as we parade into the Light.

Aliens, angels, ascended masters? Oh yeah, my buddy channels them. Bilocation? I did that, once. We're living in a world that is rending the minds of our parents to tatters, and it's No Big Deal. The extraordinary is, like, so totally ordinary.

But I don't blame any of us for blinding ourselves to the incredible intensity of our age. After all, we're dealing with what Rudolf Otto called the Mysterium Tremendum - the deep unknown at the heart of the world that is so beyond our ken that we could not survive the knowledge. We cower from the face of God for good reason: that creative Source is a burning brightness of which fire is only a cool, pale imitation. History can be read as the story of one daring soul after another throwing itself into the flame, hoping to capture a spark. Our lineage is one of suicide missions, artists and scientists sacrificing themselves for the greater knowledge and experience of the collective.

I believe that the danger of creativity never really went away - it just moved, leaving a sediment of the once-extraordinary behind as it rolled outward like cooling lava into the sea. We live on what was once the boiling coitus of elements - now the terra firma, solid and predictable terrain. Genius and Madness are neighbors because they move fast enough to stay ahead of everyone else, snapping up beachfront property as fast as it is made. (Madness just builds a slightly shoddier house, slightly closer to the tide.) And playing around on the edges is inherently dangerous. In any form, creativity challenges preconceptions, digests conventions, and throws us to burn and drown in the intensely unfamiliar. It changes who we are. "Being creative" is agreeing to an adventure from which nobody has ever, ever returned.

The deep blue pigment bygone painters used for sea and sky was cobalt - it drove them insane with chemical poisoning. Nature photographers have a bad habit of being eaten by wild animals or falling off of cliffs. The most gifted musicians seem especially likely to drown or overdose. It's a common myth across ancient cultures from Africa to Athens that the best artists inherit their talent through deals with water spirits - deals eventually repaid with blood.

(For more on this mysterious phenomenon, I encourage you to read up on the Saturn Return and the 27 Club.)

The Muse - actually an entire coterie of entities that the Greeks held responsible for inspiring every creative act - is a lunar, feminine archetype. The muses were water nymphs, legendary for blinding those arrogant enough to challenge them.

Honest artists admit that they can claim no ownership of their creative work - that it emerges through them, and not from them. And like the biological creative passion of our sexual inheritance, artistic creativity drives us into all kinds of self-destructive recklessness in order to satisfy its own expansive urge. The Muse does not care about you, except as a means to an end. The island on which we perch our traditions is literally built from the bones of artists and scientists.

I think about this a lot, when painting at concerts in front of a heart-rattling beam of sound. I may not have to worry about carcinogenic paints devouring my brain, but that doesn't stop me from feeling like I make my living like a deep sea creature on periphery of a hydrothermal vent, somehow surviving on the narrow ledge between crushing pressure and unbelievable heat, thriving off the rich intersection of extremes. Those benthic creatures lay root at the sweetspot where the ocean carries sustenance directly into their blood - and I plant myself right where a wall of tidal music energy is sieved through my energetic body into crystalline patterns of paint. These images are the love child of the audience's and performers' energies feeding back over a massive electrified circuit, leaving cross-sectional deposits in opaque pigment on a black board - a kind of spectrograph of the evening's collective resonance, deformed and amplified by the matrix of my interpretation.

And this is matter-of-fact science. Chemist Ilya Prigogine won a Nobel Prize for his theory of dissipative structures - the gist of which is that order emerges when so much energy flows through a system that it must reorganize into a higher level of complexity. If it can't keep up with the surge, it is totally destroyed.

Necessity is the mother of invention, just as whirlpools form because the river's current is constrained by the lay of the riverbed. Life is the floret that pushes forth from the equal and opposite vectors of structure and chaos. And so, like Robert Johnson (a member of the 27 Club), I find the soul of my artwork at the crossroads. That's about as deep a truth as I have ever known: that creativity lives in between things, balanced on the head of a pin, spilling from the broken crust of opposing forces.

Putting in my earplugs comes with a sense of frontier glee akin to what I imagine a welder feels when lowering the mask: the pride of having to wear protective equipment so I can play on the turbulent edge of knowing. I didn't think to bring any on my first night out painting, and my ears rang afterward for an entire day. Working on fine art in a crowd of hundreds of drunk dancers requires a special awareness of the space around me, should any teetering reveler pitch over into my easel or elbows. Keeping a dance party schedule means getting to sleep at hours that can't be good for my health. After five consecutive nights of painting, my legs begged for days to wobble out from beneath me.

And even in this supposedly enlightened age, I still have to work in a cloud of noxious fumes if I want to use gold or silver paint. (It's funny: When I was a child, I acted in a public service announcement declaring the dangers of huffing paint. I was the "bad kid" who didn't learn his lesson from the hospitalization of his friends...and now here I am huffing paint every week, only barely against my will.) My burning nostrils connect me to every artist who ever chose beauty over practicality.

I like to think that this job is somehow a mythological gauntlet or trial, that the frightful intensity is a door to greatness. Surely, these four-hour performance painting sessions are growing more muscle in my legs, cultivating my ability to improvise and listen, and teaching me how to conduct myself like a professional. Maybe one of these days I'll come out of the kiln with the strength and coherence that can only be found in fire. Maybe this is just what I need, in a culture that has abandoned its rites of passage.

In the meantime, however, I'm glad that performance painting doesn't require me to dive any deeper into the creative maelstrom than I already do. Sustainable artistry requires compromise, comfort, and care. It demands that artists be responsible enough to keep a little distance from the turbulent shores of the Godhead. Get too close and you'll be consumed, erasing any further gifts you might have transmitted. If you care at all about keeping yourself alive and sane for long enough to do something more than a single incandescent opus, remember that the womb has teeth. The sun is on fire. You can't breathe underwater. And painting is dangerous.

"What gives light, must endure burning."
- Viktor Frankl

The Visionary Art of Michael Garfield

Tags: visionary music, music, painting while dancing, Trilogy Wine Bar, Jantsen, Alala, Ilya Prigogine, Viktor Frankl, Robert Johnson, 27 Club, Muse

Blue Stone Jones' Electronic Music Podcast

http://michaelgarfield.gaia.com — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 19:50:35 GMT

www.bluestonejones.org

In the midst of vast culture-level arguments over digital rights and intellectual property, my friend Matt Jones does something incredibly cool: he releases a bi-weekly podcast of his original electronic music compositions, Blue Stone Jones. His so-called "musical sketchbook" features recordings of his Live PA sets, various studio experiments, and whatever else he manages to cook up with laptop and accessories, delivered neatly to your computer for absolutely nothing. If you have twenty minutes in your week you could fill with tasteful and evocative electronic music, I highly recommend that you subscribe to his podcast.

He also publishes his work under a Creative Commons 3.0 license, which means that you can share it with as many people as you like, so long as you don't alter or sell it. As someone who releases all of my own music under a Creative Commons license, I really resonate with Matt's modus operandi - and for that reason, I've started a collaborative project with him, somewhat akin to The Postal Service's album-by-correspondence (songwriter Ben Gibbard and electronic composer Jimmy Tamborello (Dntel) put together an album a few years ago by sending each other tracks in the mail - long ago, before the age of services like YouSendIt.com and Zshare.net allowed us to do these things electronically).

I've been using live loop sampling more and more in my performances recently, the consequence of which is that I've accrued a fantastic amount of short loop phrases that have been just languishing in my computer, waiting for some clever and daring remixer to cook up something with them. My particular looping pedal, the Boss RC-50, offers three channels of recording banks for each patch - meaning I can record and loop three different sound samples and play them back individually or together. So I've been sending Matt these blocks of three short audio clips at a time, and he's been tinkering with them, adding synthesizer pads and wild drum programming, enriching the tonal palette of the bits and pieces that I've fed him. The result is pretty cool - he's featured his first two elaborations in the latest podcast, which you can listen to or download here. And of course, it just wouldn't be full-thrush primate mutual grooming without him tipping a nod to my music and my blog in his own blog, here. This is only the beginning of what promises to be a very enjoyable long-distance musical relationship. I have to admit, I think his solo work is more impressive - but I suspect we'll ripen over time.

And meanwhile, I encourage you to check out Matt's piano work in the band Blue Stone Jones, a jazz and funk ensemble that is definitely worth your listening. So go do it.

Tags: visionary music, music, iggli.com, Michael Garfield, Matt Jones, Blue Stone Jones, Creative Commons, The Postal Service, Ben Gibbard, Jimmy Tamborello, Dntel

The Trans-Human Music of Akhentek

http://michaelgarfield.gaia.com — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 19:55:06 GMT

www.myspace.com/akhentekmusic

A moment of speculation, rooted in a study of universal trends: Human history can be defined as development along any of numerous axes, but my preferred story-for-our-species is of an advance in mind control technologies. For good and ill, the development of our consciousness flies tandem with our expanding capacity to access and explore various states of mind at will. Our command of navigating mind with sensory and electrochemical stimulation has matured to include everything from early entheogenic experiments with drumming and chanting, to contemporary techniques of magnetic temporal lobe stimulation and virtual reality immersion…and with the impending advent of biotech and nanotech that will profoundly deepen the intimacy between brain and machine (and erase such primitive distinctions), we can be sure that mind control is one of the best markers we have for measuring our humanity (and our trans-humanity).

With this in mind, I spend much of my time looking at contemporary art and music as touchstones, clues to our place as a self-transcending species in the cosmos. Every time I see intention meet technology in a deliberate manipulation of mindstates, I rejoice that we are on the right track. And nowhere is this confluence more apparent than in the careful structuring of electronic musicians like Akhentek, a self-described “crystalline array technician” from Elphinstone, BC, whose psy-trance productions are “precision engineered sonic textures intentionally designed to induce higher frequency mindstates.”

Akhentek’s nuanced tracks, like the burbling glitch of “Spectrality” or the free-floating guitar and synthesizers on his “White Girls In Saris” remix, definitely induce a strange, buzzing feeling – and unlike many other buzz-inducing artists, I know that he’s doing it on purpose.

Deep beneath the art of this music coils the esoteric science of neuroentrainment: getting the brain to vibrate at specific frequencies. It's an easy enough trick. Our brains expect to hear more or less the same thing in each ear, so they split the difference between tones that don't quite line up, creating the auditory illusion of a single note. This activity requires special collaboration between the right and left hemispheres, which syncs brain activity at that agreed-upon mean. If the left ear hears 104 Hz and the right ear hears 108 Hz, the entire brain will pulse at 4 Hz - with the brainwaves producing a corresponding state of mind. It's one of the cheapest ways to engineer consciousness. No drugs, no surgery, no nanobots - all you need is a pair of headphones and a "crystalline array technician" to prepare the sounds for you.

These binaural beats coast inaudibly across each other underneath warm and deep mastering, giving this music the strange quality of feeling at once transparent and mysterious. It’s little wonder that he has a background in biology and “Brazilian Genetics” (which I assume is a euphemism for ayahuasca initiation) – this guy’s eye and ear are definitely trained on human evolution and accelerating its numerous permutations. Cascades of twittering clicks and swells of buzzing oscillations sweep through me as I listen, reformatting my consciousness on a subliminal level. I start feeling the effects of his “rare sensitivity to frequencies” as the café around me starts to ripple with gauzy transparency.

We may be a long way from having total agency over individual awareness. In the meantime, however, I’m relieved to know that we have innovators like Akhentek out there fighting the good fight, sculpting sound with to elevate consciousness directly and for the greater good, those secret agent techno-shamans enlightening unwitting ravers and inspiring the next generation of state-engineers to plunge even deeper into our limitless potential to explore – and create – novel states of mind.

Akhentek’s music, as well as information about Entheogenetic (his electronic music label) and the Entheos Gathering (his festival) can be found online at CBC Radio 3.

He is also an member of the Zaadz Visionary Music community. Go be his friend:
http://akhentek.gaia.com

Tags: visionary music, music, iggli.com, zaadz visionary music, Akhentek, transhumanism, H+, psy-trance, downtempo, electronica, states of consciousness

Soundtrack To Your Funeral, Part VII: Switching Off

http://michaelgarfield.gaia.com — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 23:26:14 GMT

http://www.veganfamily.co.uk/flood15.jpg

Compared to Life (if the familiar dyad even makes sense), Death is famously dispassionate. Death doesn't care when, or why, or how, or who. Death can not care, because caring is the job of the living. And so choice has precious little to do with death, which is why we clutch at whatever choices we do have about our final moments. We usually don't have the luxury of the death we would prefer, and so we do insignificant and desperate things like making living wills and funeral playlists, pre-emptive strikes at the infinite unyielding unconcern of nonexistence.

Some cultures don't consider suicide to be as tasteless as ours does (thanatophobic and euphemistic, we have a long history of plucking out our own offending eyes without mourning our lost sight). Here and now, we can do little to decide the terms of our passage without distressing the ones we love.

We can, however, write declarations of love that stamp a seal of determination on our last breath. Tenderly capturing his request to die in the presence of his beloved, Elbow frontman Guy Garvey penned an exemplar of such quietly raging hopeful confessions: the organ ballad, "Switching Off." Painting precious, half-iambic metaphors of his last night's fading lights from the perch of candid youth, Garvey imagines a distant and peaceful shutdown - and his partner's place beside him, amidst the creeping noise and the crumbling synchrony.

Elbow - "Switching Off"

Last of the men in hats hops off the coil
And a final scene unfolds inside
Deep in the rain of sparks behind his brow
Is a part replayed from a perfect day
Teaching her how to whistle like a boy
In love's first blush

Is this making sense?
What am I trying to say?
Early evening June, this room and a radio play
This I need to save
I choose my final thoughts today
Switching off with you

All the clocks give in, and the traffic fades
And the insects like...like a neon choir
The instant fizz, connection made
And the curtains sigh in time with you

You're the only sense the world has ever made
Early evening June, this room and radio play
This I need to save
I choose my final scene today
Switching off...

Ran to ground, ran to ground for a while there
But I came off pretty well, I came off pretty well...

You're the only sense the world has ever made
This I need to save
A simple trinket locked away
I choose my final scene today
Switching off with you

This song is one of the truest love letters I've ever heard, daisies growing from a double grave, holding hands to die of old age, because "You're the only sense the world has ever made." Whatever happens between now and then, God save this feeling, this certainty and adoration, togetherness and memory, this "simple trinket locked away," until I can look back and smile at its accurate prediction.

We may not get to choose how we die, but we can hope against hope that we die in someone's arms. We can't carry anything across that threshold, but we can carry our cares right up to its silver edge. We can adorn our lives with these solemn vows, giving worth to each living moment. We can prove that death is in fact meaningful, because it is by death that we determine what is valuable. Romance as I know it is a skull with rose window eyes, burgeoning even as it breaks. And so there is nothing more romantic than telling someone you want them there when you die.

"Switching Off" is a perfect portrait of recognizing what matters. It is the beauty of yearning listening as it strains against fadeout. It'd be a strange song to play at my funeral - bringing the particulars of my death into sharp focus, where wishes may not hold against facts - but I would put it on my funeral playlist anyway, because it so gracefully captures for me the timeless splendor of love. Because we may not get to choose, but we can always hope to choose. And after years of arguing for the concrete value of choice, I am only now beginning to understand the diaphonous, glistening value of hope.

Tags: visionary music, music, iggli.com, soundtrack to your funeral, Elbow, Guy Garvey

Painting While Dancing, Part 3

http://michaelgarfield.gaia.com — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 21:04:47 GMT

Painting @ Trilogy Lounge, 2008 03 06

Sometimes I feel like grabbing someone and pleading with them to please remind me what I'm doing, pretending to be a painter. It's a term I can only offer with the following (usually unuttered) disclaimer:

I don't know how to use a paint brush. I am intimidated by the notion of mixing my own colors. In fact, I have no formal education in art of any kind - and so I use paint markers on foam board. I borrowed an easel to do my first show.

It's one of the enduring ironies of my existence, that I define myself by my work but the best descriptor for what I do is something I don't consider myself to be. There's more than a little imposter's guilt in me when I carry my easel into the Trilogy Wine Bar every Wednesday night to be a painter, like I accidentally received an invitation to the party and I don't have the guts to admit I don't belong there. Like I'm a wild bird that snuck into the aviary to live off the free food. Like I'm a fox pretending to be a lapdog.

But I might make up for my lack of disciplined training with twenty years' experience of doodling in class, at parties, on planes, and in my sleep (although those images rarely survive the morning). A childhood of dinosaurs and aliens carried me into a scientific illustration course in college, from which I was hired directly to draw plates of frogs, snakes, and lizards for species descriptions at the University of Kansas Natural History Museum.

Frogs, University of Kansas Natural History Museum

I reconstructed the fossil armor of bizarre pig-crocodiles, two hundred million years dead...

Aetosaurs, July 2005

...and pieced together the awkward gait of extinct flying reptiles from trackways preserved in the mud of an ancient lake.

Pteraichnus, Tate Museum of Casper College

I brought to life numerous prehistoric invertebrates in ink - alternate-reality lobsters with rows of flippers and compound eyes.

Nettapedoura, University of Kansas Department of Geology

Over the three years that I was working daily hours at the museum, I must have drawn at least a hundred thousand scales.

Gekko, University of Kansas Natural History Museum

How I stumbled into live painting is easy to see, in retrospect: those were three years I spent drawing with headphones on, learning to make the cleanest possible lines with the smoothest possible strokes, making immersive and meticulous detail my natural habitat. Training and straining my attention. Doing my best to hold the pen as lightly as possible and push the rate at which a person can stipple in a relaxed and even rhythm. Dot after dot, slowly sculpting the contours, ridges, recesses, tubercles of creatures as long as my thumb, working under a microscope, moving through my whole arm in slow sweeps and hypnotic pointillist pecking.

The living pulse of this work is trance-inducing, tunneling through boredom into exultation. Hunched and squinting, I felt connected to the ocean of nameless monks whose gilded script illuminates our ancient sacred manuscripts. And there was never any doubt for me that I was working in a church - a temple to the natural world, complete with byzantine catacombs of holy relics, shelf after shelf of preserved creatures from all over the world, soaking in alcohol jars.

But then, I was probably the only one having such thoughts. I was the contract artist in a hall of scholars and their graduate disciples, a hundred others who would probably have balked at the notion of science as a religious institution. (Kansas is, after all, the epicenter of a fierce debate between Evolutionary Biology and the so-called science of Intelligent Design. It's a tender topic.) Not a grad student, not a field researcher, not an official employee, I worked as someone whose dreams of paleontology had evaporated and left me in the alkaline and existential expanse of accidental mercenary illustration.

And so, long before I had ever entertained the notion of live painting, the whole foundation had already been poured. A degree-carrying biologist pretending to be an artist, or an artist pretending to be a biologist? Whether inking frogs in a corner of the herpetology library or staking out easel space to the side of the stage, I can't shake the feelings of being a peripheral animal, living on the fringes. The meditative and monastic quality of my experience as an artist, ritually ornamenting some precious text, has flown from the stone cloisters of the halls of science and landed in the whirling ecstasies of more embodied worship.

While illustrating descriptive papers and field guides in the museum, I used the creative faculties of my right brain to present ideas with fidelity and frugal care. While tracing psychedelic lattices and floral blooms in vivid color at concerts, my left brain remains engaged in executing emergent rules and patterns, the visual genome and evolving geometry of pieces I consider living and breathing artifacts of the evening's energies. The organic metaphors that pervade my identity and work, my doing and being, point to the deep structures of my ecological education - while the creative yearning and the commitment to exact visions are the signature of a poetry that runs through my life in settings hushed or boisterous, scholarly or celebratory.

With all of this in mind, my inability to paint (according to my definition) makes little difference to my identity as a naturalist-artist-monk, exploring the strange fauna of the subtle energy worlds conducted by heaving bass and dancing throngs. Plate by plate, I'm assembling a new field guide: a field guide to living jewelry, the bizarre beauties of a mind just on the other side of this one.

2007 12 14, Trilogy Lounge

2007 12 19, Trilogy Lounge

2008 01 29, Avalon Ballroom

(There are many, many more of these images in my portfolio...or rather, my museum.)
Whenever I set up my easel and pull out my bundle of paint markers, I remember one passage in particular: Aldous Huxley's introduction to his essay, "Heaven and Hell." Before my work in the museum, before I recognized the sacred responsibility of the artist, this passage fell through my eyes and down into my deepest reaches - rippling outward until now, finally, I hear it and know who I am:

"Like the earth of a hundred years ago, our mind still has its darkest Africas, its unmapped Borneos and Amazonian basins. In relation to the fauna of these regions we are not yet zoologists, we are mere naturalists and collectors of specimens. The fact is unfortunate; but we have to accept it, we have to maket he best of it. However lowly, the work of the collector must be done, before we can proceed to the higher scientific tasks of classification, analysis, experiment, and theory making.

Like the giraffe and the duck-billed platypus, the creatures inhabiting these remoter regions of the mind are exceedingly improbable. Nevertheless they exist, they are facts of observation; and as such, they cannot be ignored by anyone who is honestly trying to understand the world in which he lives.

It is difficult, it is all but impossible, to speak of mental events except in similes drawn from the more familiar universe of material things. If I have made use of geographical and zoological metaphors, it is not wantonly, out of a mere addiction to picturesque language. It is because such metaphors express very forcibly the essential otherness of the mind's far continents, the complete autonomy and self-sufficiency of their inhabitants. A man consists of what I may call an Old Wold of personal consciousness and, beyond a dividing sea, a series of New Worlds - the not too distant Virginias and Carolinas of the personal subconscious and the vegetative soul; the Far West of the collective unconscious, with its flora of symbols, its tribes of aboriginal archetypes; and, across another, vaster ocean, at the antipodes of everyday consciousness, the world of Visionary Experience.

If you go to New South Wales, you will see marsupials hopping about the countryside. And if you go to the antipodes of the conscious mind, you will encounter all sorts of creatures at least as odd as kangaroos. You do not invent these creatures any more than you invent marsupials. They live their own lives in complete independence. A man cannot control them. All he can do is go to the mental equivalent of Australia and look around him."

So that's what I do.

Tags: visionary music, music, iggli.com, painting while dancing, Michael Garfield, live painting, Trilogy, Boulder, Colorado, electronica, biology

Painting While Dancing, Part 2

http://michaelgarfield.gaia.com — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 23:44:10 GMT

Live painting was a curiosity to me, bizarre and insignificant, until last summer, when I finally got to see it actually happen. I had just moved to Boulder from Lawrence, Kansas, where I had been working as a scientific illustrator. Colorado seemed fertile with opportunity, but I was crazy from coasting on my last few hundred dollars while finishing an online degree program and recovering from what may or may not have been the flaming crash of a three-year relationship. I was teetering like a drunken meadowlark on the fencepost between manic exuberance and a panic attack, when my buddies from Lawrence drove up and took me out to the Red Rocks Amphitheatre to catch Sound Tribe Sector 9 (STS9) in concert.

STS9 is the flagship of a recent musical movement called "livetronica," an integration of traditional band instruments with electronic music elements, manipulated as it is happening, on stage. Although artists had been playing around with "live PA" set-ups for years, a full marriage of traditional and emerging technologies only happened a few years ago, when laptop music production software like Ableton Live suddenly made it possible for artists to do all of their soundsculpting in realtime, while recording, under the heat of stage lights. Live turned the laptop computer into a legitimate instrument, and one of the first bands to capitalize on this was Sound Tribe, for which computers perfectly complimented their already-quasi-electronic breakbeat drumming and trance-inducing guitar patterns. (You can find features on their use of computers in concert here and here.)

But that's all pretext for me to explain how the band's reputation for innovative syntheses led them into partnerships with other performance artists, to augment their already-dazzling concerts. The most famous of these is Kris Davidson, a painter whose works have morphed over time from pretty but somewhat prosaic geometrical diagrams:

Kris D, 2003

...into vivid, layered, and organic dripping scapes reminiscent of natural history illustrations and mycelial microscopy:

Kris D, 2007

The point is that Kris D was painting with STS9 when I saw them at Red Rocks last September. And for the first time in my memory, I got to watch someone paint and dance at the same time. I showed up for the second night of a two-night run, so the evening began with what looked to me like a finished painting on stage...and then Kris spent the next three hours burying it in washes and strokes that systematically and repeatedly redefined it. What started out looking like a wall of cubes became a sprawling cityscape, then the face of a mechanical goat, then a spray of tribal warpaint. The painting was breathing and dripping, shifting and blooming, while Kris dashed in for a few quick brushstrokes before retreating a few feet to gain some perspective. He bounced back and forth in a wide stance, perched on the stage with the ready tension of a bowhunter and the easy, casual hips and shoulders of a track runner.

There was something playful, almost flippant in his back and forth: the springy rave dancer with eagle discernment swooping in to exact some measured micro motion and then yaw back out into loose-limbed and watchful bouncing. And back and forth in those oscillations all night. It was an exaggeration of the double-moded painter stereotype, juiced into a higher octave by the uptempo beats and epileptic light show. Ah: this is the difference between painting alone at home, and painting on the receiving end of ten thousand intoxicated dancers. The incredible intensity of Red Rocks - literally, built over the bones of indians and dinosaurs, and channeling thousands of watts of sound between two ruddy monoliths that thrust up from the mountainside like heaving whales - that energy was rushing down onto the stage and through that brush into the painting.

While my own ass-shaking had merely bled heat energy into the mountain air, Kris D funneled that same vibe into a haunting and mysterious work of art:

Kris D, Red Rocks 2007

Here was someone who wasn't merely doodling in class, or cooped up at home with his canvases and cats. Here was someone who had managed to shine, to really shine, in front of thousands of people, without being a member of the band - a rockstar painter who musicians request to goof off with them on stage. Here was someone who got to play pro at some of the best parties in the country and had found an audience for his work that studio artists can scarcely imagine. Here was someone who made his living by painting while dancing.

And that's when I started taking live painting seriously.

Tags: visionary music, music, iggli.com, painting while dancing, Kris D, STS9, Sound Tribe Sector Nine, Michael Garfield, Red Rocks, Boulder, Colorado

The Soundtrack To Your Funeral, Part VI: Takin' Life So Serious

http://michaelgarfield.gaia.com — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 00:25:19 GMT

www.roadkilltshirts.com

As I've said before, the soundtrack to your funeral is as personal a playlist as you'll ever make. Assuming you have the luxury of deciding what to play to your mourning crowd (and assuming that you have the luxury of a mourning crowd), the funeral playlist is your final opportunity to give a life-affirming message that helps people deal with their grief and conveys the sum of your wisdom in a personal voice.

If it's not clear already, I take this responsibility very seriously. But then, I take everything very seriously. I was born under a Capricorn Sun (on 8 January, same day as Elvis Presley, David Bowie, and Stephen Hawking), and have recently come to appreciate the full significance of this: Capricorn is ruled by Saturn (aka Kronos), the god-devouring Lord of Time and the home planet for intense gravity of both metaphorical and literal varieties. Capricorns are saturnine, heavy, pragmatic, associated with bones and the skeleton, earthiness and history.

And so it comes as only a little surprise that I became a paleontologist, only to shift my attentions to the study of time itself. Little surprise that I was so deeply drawn to Boulder, Colorado, where I now live in the shade at the foothills of the Flatirons and play in a band called Ethereal Underground. Little surprise that I paint bones and eruptions, that I've abandoned the notion of delusion in favor of "practical versus unpractical realities," and spend so much time thinking about the unconscious as if it were geological strata.

Little surprise that many people can't tell when I'm joking, and that I can't tell when they are joking, either. I experience my own feminine compassion as an expanse of drought-cracked and fire-tempered clay, stoic and willing to soak up the spilt blood of human suffering in an ancient, patient embrace. Even my jubilance comes wrapped in rough gauze, a romantic appreciation of the grinning skull, a stealing of each moment's blooming flesh from the bare jaws of transience. Historically, astrological Saturn presides over the 1st House (incarnation) and the 8th House (death): gravity and graves, you know.

And therein lies the incentive for me to make sure that one song in particular is not left out of my funeral playlist, Ash Grunwald's "Serious."

Ash Grunwald - "Serious"

Now, sometimes I act like a fool
With those dark clouds and worries inside
When we live small lives that are way too short
And don't need no reason why

We've gotta stop takin' life so serious
Stop takin' life so serious
Stop takin' life so serious
You don't even know what you have

Sometimes I worry about the future
Are we ever going to find our way?
I don't even realize that we're living in the Good Old Days

I told you, stop takin' life so serious
You don't even know what you have

And your mind can get stuck just like Ararat*
Dangled carrot of desire in your head
Now your heart feels just like a bowling ball
Have you listened to a word I said?

I told you, stop takin' life so serious
Stop takin' life so serious
Stop takin' life so serious
You don't even know what you have

(*I'm not entirely sure that this is what he says, but it makes sense.)

I refuse to accept the assertion that we can only appreciate what we have when it's gone. I have in vivid memory a thousand moments of lightness that pull me out of my well again and again, reminding me that this is just as much "it" as anything else.

If I really do have an opportunity to make a difference in the lives of those who survive me, I hope it's by lightening their hearts. I hope it's by shaking them with the urgency and intensity of my good humor, shaking them out of their time-wasting sad sack nonsense into a larger perspective that floats in the vastness of our world and cannot help but respond to it with play.

And what better way than with a riotous uptempo slide guitar song growled out by a man named Ash? There's something in this about fighting fire with fire, the irony of such a bouyant message coming in the form of such a stern declaration. It appeals to my saturnine self, striving for something sillier. It speaks to my inner fool. It jumps on the bed until I bolt upright laughing, half indignant and half hilarious with surprise.

And it rocks. Which pleases me, of course, being an Earth sign and all.

Tags: visionary music, music, soundtrack to your funeral, Ash Grunwald, iggli.com, Capricorn, astrology, serious, Boulder, Ethereal Underground, Saturn

Two New MG Live Music Videos

http://michaelgarfield.gaia.com — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 19:51:10 GMT

After a year of apologizing to people for not having recent examples of my music online, I can finally take a break. Here are two videos from my 13 March 2008 show at The Laughing Goat Café in Boulder, Colorado. One is of a pretty little song about ego death, and the other is of an instrumental ode to the discovery of LSD by Albert Hofmann in 1943. Hopefully, if I am doing my job, watching these videos will expand your mind a little bit.

Regarding the former, I had this to say (during a concert at the Hive Gallery in Los Angeles):

"It has a lot to do with Joseph Campbell and mythology, and how we look up at the sky and we see patterns, and we give them an identity. We see a cluster of stars and we call it 'Orion,' or 'Scorpio,' and we invest our meaning - and in some sense, our world - in these patterns. And if we were to shift just a tiny bit, those patterns would change, and they would cease to have the meaning that we had ascribed them. And I saw a picture online the other day that showed, side by side, an image of a neuron - a single neuron - and an image of a map of the entire universe. And it looked exactly the same."

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/08/14/science/0815-sci-w

"And so, to the degree that we are the inside of a cluster of neurons, discharging electrical impulses like so many stars in a constellation, our sense of self is contingent on us holding one particular angle on it, and if we move just a little bit, then we change that self, and we change the meaning. So that's what this is about."

Now that you've been primed, I hope you enjoy "All That's Left Is Stars," my sweet little melodious deconstruction of our astrological psyches:

Michael Garfield - All That's Left Is Stars

The latter song, "Spokes," is - in the tradition of my other instrumental pieces - a double entendre. I explain its dual meaning in the first part of this video (if you want to skip ahead to the shredding, it starts at 1:11):

Michael Garfield - Spokes

For more videos and free downloads of other live recordings, please visit me at myspace.com/michaelgarfield.

Tags: visionary music, music, guitar, tapping, Michael Garfield, Albert Hofmann, LSD, Joseph Campbell, Hive Gallery, The Laughing Goat

Guitar Videos: Good, Bad, Ugly

http://michaelgarfield.gaia.com — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 20:05:07 GMT

Anybody who knows me even a little bit knows I adore people playing the guitar as if it were some other instrument. Let's start with this nameless hero, playing solo piano on a Paul Reed Smith:

Playing Guitar Like Piano

No arms? No problem. This next guy proves that if you can kick a guitar, you can kick ass on a guitar.

Armless Guitar Player

Let this be a lesson to those of you who think that rocking out means playing a basic lead line on one neck of a triple-necked guitar. More unused strings and unexploited potential does not mean more rock. Consider this part two of my argument that it's not how much gear (or how many limbs) you have, but what you do with it:

Tripleneck Solo? Hardly.

Kind of a misnomer, calling this a "tripleneck solo," right?

...for the same reason (more ≠ better), rocking out does not mean playing a giant Flying V in Times Square...like this guy (Ralph from The Guitar Shack):

Giant Flying V Guitar In Times Square

Take note: that's the world's largest guitar for ONE PLAYER. I can't even imagine what the world's largest multiplayer guitar looks like...BUT! Here are two cool videos of multiple players on a single instrument - first, something a little simpler, ("Jerry's Breakdown" by Jerry Reed):

Four Hands Guitar

Right now, you're thinking, "Wow, that was cool!" And indeed, Antoine DuFour is an amazingly clean player, and his glasses are sexy. But consider that Tommy Gauthier's simple folky bassline was played by a fiddler, not a guitarist. Give him his due credit for the crossover, and then hold onto your butts. Here's Mozart's "Rondo A La Turk:"

Rondo Alla Turka

Enough said.

...Or it would be, if I hadn't found this amazing piece of work from the Aranjuez Guitar Quartet, playing Danny Elfman's theme to The Simpsons:

Aranjuez Guitar Quartet

Tags: visionary music, music, guitar, Aranjuez Guitar Quartet, Danny Elfman, Mozart, The Simpsons, Antoine DuFour, Tommy Gauthier, Jerry Reed, Paul Reed Smith

Painting While Dancing, Part 1

http://michaelgarfield.gaia.com — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 00:43:16 GMT

[For a better look at my paintings, visit my portfolio at myspace or photobucket.]

Every Wednesday night around 9 pm, I drive out to the Trilogy Wine Bar here in Boulder, Colorado, where my friends Jantsen and Alala have a weekly DJing residency. Together, and with a rotating crew of talented guests, they pack the evening with a variety of electronic subgenres.

As little as a year ago, what they do would have sounded like some kind of alien language to me: dubstep, breakbeat, crunk, glitch, technofunk, whomptronica... And this is music that somehow I've discovered I enjoy - a lot - even though unrelenting doubletime drum breaks over inarticulate gangsta rap and shotgunned with the squealing of deconstructed sound clips is something from which I once would have run screaming.

But no longer. I really enjoy this stuff, now. And I'm sure that a big part of it is that I spend each Wednesday night communing with this music as deeply as possible. I'm not just there to dance; I'm there to paint. It makes a difference, to be part of the show.

Trilogy is split into back and front rooms. The front is a classy, somewhat upscale wine bar and restaurant (a giant triangular wine rack fills the wall behind the bar, in honor of the triplet sisters who own and run the place). Tasteful techno-buddhist paintings on wooden panels accentuate the subtle intensity. Their happy hour is a $5 bottomless glass of wine between 5 pm and 7 pm - an incomparable deal, in this town, and a major boost to their favored reputation. Evenings usually feature some DJ tucked away into one of the corners on a mobile PA system, playing the music that wine-drunk club girls in shiny heels invariably grind to - good for dancing, but typically unremarkable.

A tight squeeze past the couples lining the bar along the North wall and down a narrow hallway brings guests to the back room, which is a totally different creature altogether. Exposed black rafter beams strung with a dozen different brands of Christmas lights hang high over the grimy concrete floor. Soft wall lighting casts long low shadows on the navy walls. A liquor bar, the mirror image of its sister on the other side of the kitchen, sprawls dozens of bottles in front of a smudged mirror. Giant red drapes hang between two fake potted trees on the stage, which is normally a mess of unused stage monitors and snaking cables.

This is unequivocally the best small venue in Boulder. Any band that draws more than fifty and less than three hundred people calls Trilogy its home away from home (and it's popular with some acts that draw far more, on nights when the party spills out into the front room and a video feed is projected on the wall for a second-class audience). The sisters are well-regarded and the notoriously feisty security staff is actually pretty nice, once they get to know you. Bartenders are smiling and loose with the drinks, and the water cooler by the door only occasionally runs dry.

But Trilogy's real claim to fame is its sound system: A moat of subwoofers arranged beneath two massive, monolithic speakers that hang from the ceiling like landing spacecraft frozen in flight. Halfway down the South wall is a mixing board with more knobs than could ever be employed by any band capable of fitting on stage, operated by soundmen made half deaf and half drunk from the power of the equipment. It's a rig capable of unleashing a tsunami of sound and lighting up venues ten times the size of Trilogy. (Thankfully they never run it at full volume, but some of the engineers are obviously more deaf than others. Conversations don't come easily at Trilogy.)

And so. Every Wednesday night, I trundle out into the evening, park along the painted brick walls next to the alley side door, and tote my easel and materials inside to render the night and its noises in paint. This is my job. I work here. Painting while dancing.

---
For upcoming entries in this series, I'll share some of the impressions and the inner process of live painting, as well as recount specific experiences and offer photographic play-by-plays of select paintings as they unfolded over the course of an evening. Stay tuned!

Tags: music, painting while dancing, visionary music, painting, dancing, iggli.com, Jantsen, Alala.One, Michael Garfield, Boulder, Trilogy

R. Luke Dubois' "Timelapse Phonography"

http://michaelgarfield.gaia.com — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 02:10:02 GMT

R. Luke Dubois - Timelapse

Add one to the list of Things We Somehow Never Realized We Were Missing:

Everyone in my generation, and most of the people in the generation before it, grew up in a spacetime remix. When we weren't busy telescoping through every perceptible level of order in films like Powers of Ten, we were flickering past the growth-blossoming-and-death of a dandelion, or the decomposition of a fox, with time lapse photography. (Here's a link to an excellent gallery of time lapse movies.)

Unimaginable fifty years ago, this kind of zippy rollercoastering is the water in which all of us interneters now swim. Hell, even my cheap digital camera takes time lapse movies.

But innovations that focus on one sensory modality don't always cross to other senses (to my knowledge, we still don't have any taste samples in magazines). One restrospectively obvious omission from our history-compression fad has finally been pioneered by R. Luke Dubois, an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University's Computer Music Centre. His 2006 album, "Timelapse," squeezes all 857 Billboard #1 Hits from 1958 to 2000 into 37 minutes.

That's right, 37 minutes. Pressing each song into one second for each week it topped the charts, Dubois' "time lapse phonography" offers a totally unique view of musical history, a kind of Earth-from-space pass over pop music that bears no resemblance to the world we know. Gone are the uptempo headbobbers and tender ballads, and in their place stretches a panoramic wash of anonymous tone (although listening along with the enhanced-CD allows you to attach a song title to each grain of sound). Here's Dubois' explanation:

"I thought it might be interesting to try to find a way to compress sonic time, not simply by speeding it up, but by using statistical averaging of the sonic information in the sound in a way that preserves what I feel to be many of the cues we need to appreciate sonic detail... This process generates an overall impression of the sound fed into it, blurring and fusing its features into singular, sustained, and very rich tones."

It's the difference between walking with dinosaurs and gazing across present-day badlands at a cliff of eroding strata, millions of years of life and death laid bare and abbreviated in a single gesture. This is musical archeology.

And no music is safe. The soundtrack to Casablanca and Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier are both rendered in the same way on this album (the former is cleverly titled "Time Goes By"). Dubois also time-lapsed Handel's Messiah on a separate compilation.

You can listen to excerpts from the album at Cantaloupe Music's website, which I highly recommend if you have a taste for the strange or enjoy cultivating a deeper temporality.

Ian Mathers wrote a florid review of the album for Stylus Magazine, in which he summed up Dubois' work pretty perfectly:

"Some of the tones sound vaguely choral, some like ghosts trying to harmonize; others like far off ringing rotary phones, dental drills — but nothing too unpleasant or harsh, as you'd expect from the hit parade.

As Mathers continues, time lapse phonography is "more interesting as a thought experiment or teaching tool than as music." But wow. Wow. As thought experiments go, it's pretty magnificent, a humbling work of sound that pulls listeners out of our unreflexive immersion and lifts us to a grand vista where cultural realities ebb and flow in tidal time.

Tags: R. Luke Dubois, visionary music, music, iggli.com, Cantaloupe Music, Bach, Handel, Casablanca, Billboard, Stylus Magazine, Ian Mathers

Oh, Irony!: An Ode

http://michaelgarfield.gaia.com — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 21:44:47 GMT

timetomotivate.blogspot.com

Normally I don't do this. Normally I don't dip into the bedlam of internet discussion forums. They're engaging, but only until you realize that pearl diving in a flame storm is usually fruitless. Bless the new egalitarian discourse of the web as much as you like, but it has a disastrous consequence: the notion of authority is not just dethroned where appropriate, but faced with total mistrust in almost all circumstances.

And so when anyone attempts to make some kind of sweeping claim about, for example, the contemporary challenges of avant garde art, it is not uncommon for an entire jungle of composting critics to swarm on such claims with their rote anti-dogmas. Still believing the schoolyard battlecry, "That's just your opinion!," these people have a valuable place in the discourse. But it's limited. And when such mulchers sincerely propose irony as an answer to criticisms of irony, it's obvious that they're out of their league.

What the hell am I talking about? Well, Paul Lonely just published "The Kosmic Karma Of An Integral Poet," his manifesto of reconstructive, postpostmodern art, on Daniel Pinchbeck's website Reality Sandwich. It's a beautiful piece of writing and I highly encourage you to read it, but for those of you with an imaginary time shortage, the gist is this:

Pointing out the relativity of anybody's truth has long since played out its novelty. Deconstruction is important, crucial, but adolescent. Nobody's going to deny you your teenage years, but you're expected to grow out of them at some point. And consequently, many artists are justifiably concerned with the current culture's acid canonic opinion on the shallowness of beauty, the impossibility of global moral claims, and the illusion of common truth. When, eventually, all of this gets boring, what do you find to replace it? Is there a way to square the mighty irreverence of pluralism with the yearning for sacredness that refuses to die in us? Yes, there is...

...but of course, many people read Paul's poetic essay as a unilateral attack on all of the gifts of postmodernity. Many saw it as a return to unself-reflexive ideology (failing, of course, to notice how their own zealous clinging to irony is Big Time Hypocrisy). And so I did the only thing I could think to do, after trying to disarm the bomb with rational argument: I wrote a poem.

There's a new kind of merit involved in being heard online, one that requires an author to take the perspectives of the listeners even more intimately than before in order to "write under the radar" of their ceaseless mastication. I'm no literary scholar, but maybe using irony to attack irony is just what some people need.

And so this is me possessing the ironic perspective in order to demonstrate its boundaries. This is me relishing in the shotgun vitriol of unchecked deconstruction in order to do something unthinkable among the mulching layer of deconstructionist critics: make a point.

I'll leave it up to you as to whether or not it's a success. But consider that even asking for your feedback suggests that we may share a common reality - or at least an articulation of individual realities - and that even if you disagree with my take on ironic artwork, it's because you and I have some kind of mutual understanding about something. And so something survives the relativity, after all. Relatively speaking.

........

"Oh, Irony!: An Ode"

Oh, Irony! How wonderful you are. How authentic. How bottomless is your wealth of wisdom. How ultimate is your offering of truth.

Oh, Irony, how superior you are to other modes of expression. How cleanly and finally you have demonstrated that nothing is more true or good or beautiful than anything else - except You, of course. How contained and coherent you are.

Oh, Irony, thank you for liberating me from believing anyone can have any kind of legitimate authority over anyone else. Thank you for ridding me of my precious, poisonous ideologies. Thank you for digesting everything I ever cared about, including my self, and birthing me smiling into the vastness of existential surrender.

Oh, Irony, how lonely I am here with nothing to believe - except You, of course. And how eternally satisfying you are! How lovely it is to never tire of deconstruction. How endlessly yielding is the indiscriminate analytical grinding of Your Great Work, which shows me in my limitedness how everything I love is a cultural daydream. How pleasant it is here, doubting even my love for this boneyard.

Oh, Irony, how useless I am now, married to You, unable to escape Your Lying Convictions. How confused I am when arguing for Your Absoluteness. How painful it is to admit that Your Great Truth applies equally to me, and to You. How much I loathe myself in fleeting moments when I recognize that after receiving Your Gift, there is nothing upon which I can pin my heart.

You have eaten my dreams and offered nothing in return.

You have eroded my passion and left me to waste in the depths of unmotivation.

You have baptised me into the Church Of Insincerity, and now I pray only for myself, for I know through Your Great Truth that there is no greater source of knowledge.

You have taught me to pray for the imaginary grace to realize that prayer is a waste of time.

You have consumed Yourself, and left no ground for even Your Own Anti-Doctrine.

Deep in the blindness of Your Cannibalized Eyes, Your Wisdom is finally honored in ways grander than Your Imagining:

Oh, Irony.

You have taught me that I do not need certainty for sincerity.

You have taught me to love the world in spite of its flimsy construction.

You have taught me that reality requires agreement, and You have shown me just how deep this vein extends, into everything I consider my own.

You have taught me to listen to the constructed claims of others, because they can show me new dimensions of my own constructed world.

You guided me into this living experience of a mutual world, one more fundamental than the quirks of my isolated perspective.

You taught me insincerity as a method of exposing insincerity, and in so doing, You bore me through ennui into a fuller, more vivid sincerity than You could ever guess.

Thanks a lot. I owe You one.

Tags: visionary music, music, iggli.com, Michael Garfield, Daniel Pinchbeck, Reality Sandwich, Paul Lonely, irony, Ken Wilber, integral, integral art

You Have To Be In Love: MG Interviews Ken Wilber, Part Three

http://michaelgarfield.gaia.com — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 00:56:03 GMT

Form Is Emptiness, Emptiness Is Form

[Here are links to Part One & Part Two of this interview, highly recommended if you intend to make sense of the lingo. And immediately below is the audio for this part of the interview, so you can listen along.]

You Have To Be In Love: Michael Garfield Interviews Ken Wilber, Part Three

MG: So, as a musician who wants to communicate a message of love to the world, basically, I have to get two things straight. Which would be that I have to be a skilled communicator, and I need to develop myself in whatever ways are relevant to the medium in which I'm attempting to express that message. But the other is that I actually have to be in love. For it to be a totally authentic message, I actually have to be in a loving state of mind when I'm engaging my work.

And there's something that I've seen so much of, just living up here in Boulder, and there's so much "conscious media" - there's like a node of truly conscious media, and around it there's this vast morass of media that seems to be following the style but not the substance. Alex Grey really railed on modern advertisement in his book, The Mission of Art, for painting a glowing aura around a hamburger. And whoring out this spiritual stuff.

Thai Ronald McDonald, blessing you.

KW: And yes, there's a lot of that in Boulder, around so-called "integral."

MG: But there's actually a transformative demand, you're saying here, that's being made on the artist their...whatever, you know, the Muse.

KW: Right.

MG: There's actually a kind of multivalent practice involved, that is a practice of mind and a practice of body that's involved in being a good artist.

KW: Yes, and the key thing to what you're saying is that whatever state of consciousness an artist is in, whether they're conscious of it or not, is going to be whatever informs and impacts the artifact. And that is what will be, that's what is available, that's the impression that it will have on viewers or readers or listeners of the art. And that's a really crucial item in integral theory, is that these artifacts of art are being created by sentient beings, and sentient beings impact those artifacts with essentially the nature of consciousness that is doing the creating. And that that artifact will then evoke a similar state of consciousness in sentient beings viewing or impacting or coming into contact with it.

And so that means that - exactly - you can have artwork about love from someone who is genuinely in love, or is genuinely conveying feelings that they had when they were truly in love - that's still alive for them - that, like it or not, will impact the artifact. And likewise, there's this sort of adulterous, fake, advertising sort of stuff. When a false consciousness creates a piece of art, the dimensions of what is communicated in that art will include the false nature, will include the tinniness, will include the inauthenticness [sic] of it. And a good critic will be able to spot that. And of course, to be a good critic, you have to be integrally alive to all of these dimensions yourself. Somebody who is green can not be an informed critic of turquoise art. All they'll see is how much of those signifiers can get into their altitude. Which is very limited.

But that's a really important point, is that whatever you wish to convey in art is something you genuinely have to be in a state of, yourself. Or have immediate access to it, or certainly a good, genuine recollection of it. And that is what will be conveyed. And you can't really choose some of these factors. And that's what's kind of an important point, is that you can't really choose the altitude that you're in. You can choose to sort of convey the highest that you're possible of, and you can get in the highest states that you're possible of, but that might be for example, um, green. Or it might be orange. Or it might be turquoise, but whatever that altitude is, is the altitude that will come across in the artwork. And that's why we can look at artwork, we can read something - certainly, reading something and you just get the feeling that, "Oh, this person is very, very amber," or "This person is very turquoise, this person is very green." It comes across as a smell, a touch, a feel. Its actual signifiers are embedded in that space, in the artifact.

And so leading edge artists, almost usually even unknowingly, but they do find themselves at a leading edge of transformation, and so their signifiers are coming down [from] a level or two above where the cultural center of gravity is, and is speaking to people in a way that is then actually transformative. And as a secondary issue, it might also - the impact of that transformative art might be doubly increased by having transmutational elements in it as well. And then it comes across as something that carries an extremely timeless and important message.

And so both of those dimensions are ones, though, that cannot be faked. Because your consciousness can fake what you're saying - you can put the glow around the hamburger - but what comes across in the artifact doesn't lie. The artifact tells the truth. And whatever you actually make is the product of the entire being of the maker. And if there's something in there that's false, or crooked, or wrong, it will come out. And we all know artists that have, you know, famously have a particular kind of shadow that just shows up in everything. And that's just one example, but the artwork doesn't lie. The artist might lie, but the artwork doesn't lie.

MG: Hmmm. Yeah. So that's an excellent place to jump from that...earlier on, just a few minutes ago, you mentioned why we do art. Because it's an attempt to express or communicate some something beautiful. And you know, I make that expression/communication distinction here, because in any case, it's moving into the signifier and back into someone's first person awareness. And it may be that it's private art, and it may be that you're only making it for yourself, but at the same time, it's still in some sense a communication from your self in one moment to yourself in another moment.

KW: Right.

MG: From one perspective to another perspective.

KW: Right.

MG: So basically at this point, I would kind of like to - with that anchor - kind of flip this conversation a little bit, because we've spent a lot of time analyzing the nature of artwork, and rather than systematizing it in a scientific survey or exploration, I'd like to ask for you to discuss why we do art, why we do music, how we experience music - this cluster of concepts - from more of a poetic place. I know that you write extensively in both an analytical voice and also as more of a spiritual poet. So if we can just step back from integral theory as a heuristic device, and then if I can hear you talk about these things as an artist. Why do we do artwork? Why do we make music?

KW: Right. The fundamental answer to that is that it's basically an essential need of human beings, and it expresses something that - if we're going to talk specifically about an aesthetic view, then we're talking about that judgment that humans make about what is attractive to them. About what's beautiful. And that's essentially something that, I mean, even postmodern art, which certainly sometimes doesn't look beautiful, is nonetheless expressing what postmodernists find attractive. And it's that feeling of what's attractive, the feeling of what's beautiful, and both the sort of self feeling of that, and the desire to communicate that.

So although all art isn't necessarily this type of communication, most art does have a component that is this, and it's a central part of it. And it's the communication of that which you feel is really beautiful about life. And in my own case, what I find really beautiful is both informed by sort of a second and third tier vision logic and vision, and a causal and nondual state. And both of those point to "what is beautiful" as a vast...wholeness. A harmony. A balance. A universe where, no matter how things appear on the surface, underneath them, they're beautiful. And everything that's arising is exquisitely beautiful. Everything that's arising is a[n] ornament of Spirit, is an absolute, positive manifestation of the ultimate Divine.

And whether it shows up in first-persons or second-persons or third-persons, it's showing up as this exquisite, painful beauty. And that beauty can be expressed at any altitude, and so you can express it in first tier terms, you can express it with second tier terms, you can express it with third tier terms.

It is, in terms of my own writing, because I have selected to write in certain academic circles, then the form of my writing is often constrained by what's accepted in those circles. And that's a kind of third-person, analytic, rational, cognitive sort of overview. So even if I'm writing about things that are transrational, I'm giving a rational summary of them. But my work never confuses the two. I, more than anybody, point out that this is just a map; we don't confuse it with the territory. And all of my books have a call for praxis, or practice. And even going back to the first books I wrote, like No Boundary, each chapter is a theoretical discussion about a particular level of consciousness, and then at the end of that chapter, each chapter has dozens of practices that you can do to evoke that level. So it's grounded in a praxis that wants to really evoke, for everybody, this universal beauty. And this universal radiance. And this universe of a splendid ornamentation of the one and only Divine. And that is most immediately expressed in artistic mode, cuz artistic mode is one of the sort of...well, it's just the way I speak, and it's the way that most human beings celebrate something that they find wonderful, and that they want to share with somebody else. And they want to take that "I" space of beauty and wonderfulness, and make a "We" space out of it. Expand it to as many people as possible. And make that communication to as many people as possible.

And so one of the ways that I do it in my own writing is, after I've written, you know, hundreds of pages of technical stuff, then I'll sort of slip into poetic descriptions, and poetic celebrations, and more artistic modes of celebrating this, um, profound Great Perfection. Entire books have been written by just taking those parts out. The Simple Feeling of Being, for example, is an entire book of just the poetic statements. So, definitely, there's a place for that, and it's a primary place, in terms of my own expression of my own understanding. But, again, it gets curbed when I have to write technical and theoretical, analytical writings.   And so I play by those rules. But even then, I try to sneak in a little bit of poetry, because that is a more intimately first-person mode of expression, and less a third-person, dry, analytic mode. And it's certainly not true that I, you know, have some sort of addiction to the cognitive line, or anything like that. It's just "When in Rome," you know?

MG: No more than I do.

KW: Yeah! [Laughs.] So those're a few reflections, in terms of what I do as an artist.

MG: Yeah. So, then, that's what Ken Wilber does as an artist... And what I'm picking up from this whole scope is that from a witnessing or a nondual vantage, that because everything is arising as this beautiful and luminous integrated wholeness, that there is, in some sense, a movement or an effluence from Spirit in which the entire work of the universe is a single artistic act.

KW: Yeah.

MG: So if you could just expound a little bit on that, about the motivation of Spirit to create...[let's say,] this conversation as a work of art.

KW: Right. And that fundamentally comes out of the superabundance of Spirit itself. And what it would be able to do as ultimate, absolute Spirit. And there've been lots of theoretical arguments about this, I mean, going back to Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle argues that the ultimate One, because it's complete in itself, has nothing to do with Manifestation. It wouldn't create anything, cuz that would imply a lack. Plato, on the other hand, says, "Well, wait a minute: A Spirit that can't create is less full than a Spirit that can." [We laugh.] And so, for Plato, there're shadows in the cave, but they're shadows of the Light. And once you discover the Light, you're supposed to embrace the shadows.    Well, actually, Plato was a - even though he's branded as a dualist - he really ultimately was a nondualist, and saw ascending and descending as one essential process.

But that's certainly my point of view, is that it's a superabundance of Spirit, and a superabundance of I-AM-ness that causes it - and "cause" is not quite the right word - but just is why - also not quite the right word [We laugh.] that it overflows. Again, cuz there's no causality here, there's not something in time that pushes Spirit to do something over here. It's a radical timeless superabundance. Once Manifestation is created, then you can talk about time, and then there's temporal unfolding, but all of these things are modifications of Spirit itself. And Spirit itself remains...you can describe it poetically as vast, and full, and omnipotent, and infinite, and eternal, and so on, but those are all, um, metaphors. And the Absolute itself is...the best it can be described is just pure emptiness. Unqualified - including that. But, metaphors then help to talk about it, and that's where you talk about the superabundance of the One. The superabundance just causes an overflowing into the world, and it's a sharing capacity, but it also then creates different viewpoints out of itself.

It's like if you want to play checkers with yourself, as a - kids do this all the time, and they are first learning checkers and they want to play it with themselves, and they play one side, and then they try to play the other side, but then they realize it doesn't work, because they know that the other side's going to do. And so it sort of dawns on you is that the only way you can have a real game is if you take different perspectives, and forget that you're taking the other perspective. Or you won't get a real game going. And so out of this superabundance, in order to get a real game going, Spirit creates all these different perspectives and then forgets Who It Is.

And there is a slow evolving back to a remembering of that - again, sort of metaphorically putting it that way. But individual perspectives can wake up at any time to their fundamental oneness with this absolute, pure I-AM-ness.    And that is a...well, a union of the human and the Divine, and an intersection of the eternal timeless and the world of time. All of which, though, is nonetheless a product of the superabundance of this Divine Mystery.

And that's part of what my own writing is tracking, and attempting to give some coherent expression to. Although, it again remains...you know, they're just inscriptions on the...on the face of, uh...stuff that's gone with the wind...and are good stories for this time, because I think they stick, but they're just stories. And just ways of tracking what this superabundance is all about. And I generally write it at a turquoise/indigo level of communication, just cuz that's about the highest you can go at and still have a fair number of people that will understand what you're saying.

MG: If you've got really good news, you see something really beautiful, you've got nobody to share it with...from a mythological perspective, you can say it's like, "Well, you got nobody to share it with, you gotta make somebody."

KW: Right. Basically, that's exactly right. You know, it's no fun having dinner alone. You can't really get into things like sharing, and you can't really get into things like love, in terms of loving-of-another, and so for all of these reasons and lots of other sort of metaphoric reasons, it makes it easy to understand why, even if you are perfect, absolute, infinite One, if you wanted to - just to say again - even have a game, or just have something that was going to surprise you, if you wanted to actually have an adventure, then you could dream something. But in order for that dream to really work, you'd have to forget during the dream that you're the one doing it. Cuz otherwise, it just doesn't work. So all of these different ways that Spirit starts the world, the different accounts of them, all have some notion of amnesia. Or forgetting. And all have, in terms of the path of realization, some notion of an-amnesis. Or remembrance. Or recognition of something that's already true, and not something that has to be created. And that's why the Supreme Realization itself is just a recognition of ever-present Big Mind. The recognition of ever-present True Self. And not something that has to be created or developed.

But in the world itself, that's manifest - that world - in this particular go-round, relates by evolving. And evolution is the one central notion of the manifest universe. And so we track Spirit's unfolding in the manifest universe, which is the universe of itself, and we track that through development and evolution. And that's just sort of one of the stories that sticks best in this particular manifest world. But you can see how all of these stories about manifestation have to do with forgetting who you are in order to get a good game started.

MG: You know, every work of art has multiple interpretations, so even here in the mundane, vividly, there's a progress by which this artist is - in attempting to communicate a single message - actually creating this multiplicity of perspectives, constantly.

KW: Right, yeah. And the more evolved the artist is, the deeper the implicit number of perspectives it will accept. And therefore, there's just a depth to the artwork that is noticeable. There's a presence in the artwork that's noticeable. And that depth is just almost palpable. You can just sort of feel it. And the more developed a person is, the more depth they have. The more it becomes something that you can actually just feel in their presence.

MG: All those other interpretations, right on the other side of perception.

KW: Uh huh!

MG: Well, thank you so much, Ken.

KW: Well, sure!

MG: This is a lovely opportunity, and really, I think I speak on behalf of a lot of people - all my friends who helped me formulate some of these questions, and the Zaadz Visionary Music community, the integral community at large - when I say, thank you for your time today.

KW: Great! Thank you, Michael. This was fun.

Tags: Boulder, music, visionary music, Ken Wilber, Michael Garfield, Alex Grey, integral, integral art, No Boundary, Simple Feeling of Being, Plato

Complex Coherence: MG Interviews Ken Wilber, Part Two

http://michaelgarfield.gaia.com — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 20:05:17 GMT

Secret Worlds (xkcd.com)

[Continued from Part 1. I highly recommend that you read these in order, as a great number of confusing terms are explained in annotations throughout the interview. The audio for Part Two is available below, so you can listen along.]

For the audio of this interview, please email me at michaelgarfield (at) gmail (dot) com.

KW: The artist of the postmodern era is basically the artist that comes to reduce everything to equal fragments, including itself, in preparation for all of those fragments being integrated. And that's what art in the coming years can do, is get into art that doesn't solve the temporal problem or the duality problem, but solves the plurality problem, the self-loathing problem, and the lying. The fundamental lying that is at the heart of art in the postmodern era.

And so, again, that can be felt in the artist. The artist goes from feeling like a, ringing like a, cracked bell - because everything they criticize, they know at the bottom of their heart the same criticism applies to their own artwork, and if everything else sucks, their own artwork sucks, it's just as well to be deconstructed, and so nothing has any fundamental meaning in postmodernism and all you're supposed to do, all you can do, is put up stuff for ironic exposure and basically deconstruct anything that's out there. And that's all that postmodern art can do. It cannot offer a positive vision. And so we're coming to the end of that era. And it's a preparatory era, it's sort of John the Baptist, basically. And that's why, again, it's very exciting to be in art at this time, if you have teal or turquoise consciousness. I mean, I can sorta go on about that theme and let me just pause about that cuz part of this is that we were going to sorta have a discussion...

[We both laugh.]

MG: Well this - yeah, thank you. In this kind of a context, then, when Gebser says that the new music is in a position to abolish previous time forms, he's actually speaking to the music of green deconstructionism.

KW: Yes, he's speaking of that, and -

MG: Of this digestive layer.

KW: Yes. Yes, he's confusing it with that, and he also, in some of the positive aspects of that, he means a nondual state. Cuz that does abolish time.

MG: Yeah. And then, just kind of moving from that point, at which we're starting to reassemble things and bring a tender appreciation of the partiality of our perspectives -

KW: Right.

MG: And, you know, a recognition of deeper universals -

KW: Right.

MG: How do you see - and let's stay on this topic for just one more question, because time is so fundamental to musical expression - as you described in your work, each altitude of development is aware of, and expresses artistically, a new mode of temporal experience. I've been really fascinated by the work of Arvo Pärt recently, and he describes his music as an expression of "the wing-beat of time," which is this tension between the linear time of rational awareness and this timeless space that we seem to start to push into when we recognize that the time that we experience from any perspective is a constructed notion, and we - I'm a little wary to say this, but it's almost like time-as-a-spatial-matrix.

KW: Yeah.

MG: And so, I'm just curious, given that you have spoken with so many integral musicians, and have explored that notion of time as it emerges in this integral vision-logic awareness, how do you see that being experienced and communicated in integral music?

KW: Well, I certainly agree with the gentlemen you quoted about music certainly can be two-winged, one floating on timelessness and one floating on whatever the constructed nature of time is at any given level. And I think that is where we actually start to talk about sort of the two different dimensions of what art can do. And one, again, is structural - its altitude, what actually is the altitude resonating in the signifier of the artwork. And that means that if you do music, primarily from a red altitude, then in ways we don't full understand, red signifiers will be transmitted along some sort of conducive medium, and be picked up in another sentient being. If the other sentient being has the same essential bodily structure as you do, then that sentient being will resonate with the same altitude, it will resonate with red, if it has emerged, in their own case.

So in part, then, there's a vertical judgment about what art is doing. And that is that it is coming from a particular altitude. If it's an altitude that's lower than the present center of gravity [the average level of development] of the culture they're in, then it can be because it's trying to remind us of something that we've forgotten, or it can be pre-conventional [too immature to understand rules and laws] adolescence rebelling a conventional world, fight the system, you know, all the sort of...protest music that is actually pre-conventional, and is protesting the imposition of a[n] amber conventional structure on top of their red impulsive desires and intentionalities. If it's higher than the average center of gravity, then it's the call of the future, it's Art From Tomorrow. Art on a signifier that the general culture is not yet embodying, and therefore it actually carries content and a transformative pull to these higher structures.

And so as the Renaissance was emerging, you would see visual painting go from grand mythic schemes, with actual men as heroic and as semi-divine, and a sort of very powerful mythic background, to a painting that was reflective and coming from an orange rational, perspectival space. So all of a sudden you get three-dimensional perspective for the first time. Which is astonishing, that people actually don't see three dimensions, until they get to orange rational structure. And it didn't get depicted in art until that time. And so even standing in visual art with three dimensions was a transformative pull on consciousness. It's actually art as transformation, as cultural transformation. And then often what was depicted in those paintings was just an individual person. Just portraiture. And because individual egos are the nature of orange society, as opposed to mythic roles and rule-roles in the mythic society.

[Examples: the good son or daughter, a man of the faith, an honorable husband or wife - these things are not defined by the values of the individual, but how the person's behaviors match an external and supposedly eternal concept of the rules and roles of the world.]

And so just looking at this artwork would have the effect of taking someone at amber and pulling them up, pulling them up to orange. And the same thing happened as the postmodern revolution hit art, and you had Marcel Duchamp's urinal just put out there and presented as a piece of art. That artwork is still consistently - I saw another voting where it was voted the most important artwork of the 20th Century. And it's because of what it did - that is, announce that there's an entirely different form of art. It's an art that is self-exposing and self-deconstructing of the present society. And that self-deconstruction became a transformative pull for people at orange to move into green. And of course, all the problems of green, and all the self-contradictions in it. Nonetheless, it's a higher altitude.

And so art can perform that transformative function. But then art can also - and that's sort of a vertical function, if you will. But art can also perform kind of a, what you can think of as a horizontal function of states, and that's not transformative as much as transmuting. And that means that no matter what altitude your at, art can evoke these states. And beyond just sort of subtle emotional states, which good art tends to do in any event, there is what we could call, sort of, spiritual art. And spiritual art, no matter what its content, pulls people into the causal witnessing contemplative states or into nondual flow states, and that actually moves them from a third person to a second person to a first person.

So art starts out as a third person, as just something that you listen to as an object. But then if it really has impact on you, people will start to say, "I really hear that music." Or, "The art is speaking to me." And that's cuz it's moved into a second-person relationship with that artifact. And then if that sort of deep connection continues, the person will move into a first-person identification, then a nondual flow state with that artwork. And so that is a transmuting and a liberating force of art.

So the first one is more of a transformative and a communicating and a working with fullness, and the second one is working with freedom, is actually helping you in a sense disidentify with any particular manifest thing and simply move into a role of witnessing contemplation. Or, then, nondual unification. And so, these two different dimensions that art is working on. And the second dimension of moving into causal or nondual spaces, that's indeed working with the timeless, that's working with an actual eternity, that's working with an actual abyss, a vast openness or presence or emptiness from which each thing emerges moment to moment.

And ultimately, we are that vast openness that is our own Big Mind. The witness in each of us right now that's listening to these words and sees an environment around it, is aware of thoughts moving through its mind, is aware of sensations. The witness of all of those is pure spirit. And art can evoke that realization as a peak experience. And at that point, it's a very real emptiness. It's a pure, absolute, ultimate Spirit. And art is one of the forms that immediately can tap into that dimension and can find ways to transmit it. And that is indeed one of the important functions of art.

So the first is to transmit a certain sort of altitude, a certain space, a certain signified perspective. But the others actually tap into a spiritual dimension, an absolute dimension, a dimension that's eternal and that's timeless and can influence the art simply by going through the mind of the artist on its way to the artwork. And the artifact will pick up as much eternity as the artist can get into it. But being influenced by both of those. So the artist dipping into their own source of creativity, their own vast, open wellspring of creativity, which is itself pure causal Spirit - and out of that comes creative forms. And artists are more attuned, generally speaking, to the emergence of these creative forms. And that's what art is all about, is transmitting those forms that are closest to the timeless, closest to eternity. And so, sort of go back and forth and back and forth between the world of form, and the formless, the world of form, and the formless as the source of creativity, and then that which is created. And that gets transmitted depending on the talent of the artist.

MG: And in this light, where art is - can be - more of a transformative, transmutive technology, the integral artist - the integral painter, or musician, or sculptor, or author - is operating with an immediate awareness of this deeper union beneath the multiplicity. And so is there even - you know, in attempting to communicate anything about the relative world, anything that's contained within this timelessness - is there such a thing as a coherent spatial or temporal message that comes from an integral art, something that we can recognize as a transformative signifier from that altitude? Or is it that the integral artist is so fascinated with and attentive to this honoring of this entire continuum that there is no one single perspective that we're going to be able to recognize as emergent at that level?

KW: Well, I think it's a good question, and I think, though, that there is a signifier - I don't know that I would call it a single signifier, but I would call it maybe a common class of signifiers. And they're signifiers that basically look, touch, and feel vision logic. And basically what that means is a systemic, but a genuinely systemic, acceptance of everything that's arising. And so even though some of the things that are arising can be portrayed in integral art - let's say a red music beat could be included primarily in a piece of turquoise art, let's say - but it's going to be red as it [red] appears in a turquoise space. It's not going to be red as it appears in a red space. So red as it appears in a red space is an impulsive set of signifiers that can not take the role of other, that simply is in a narcissistic space, and it is in an egocentric, power-driven space. And it has no option but to do that, and it can't even take the role of other, it can't even know how you are resonating to this, except as an extension of itself.

And it's entirely - well, it's half different - from how red appears as it's presented in a turquoise piece of art. Even if it's presented alone in a turquoise piece of art, it's presented without the first-person perspective limitation. So in other words, it's just pure power, or pure intentionality, held in its own right, now taken over by a first-person perspective. So it's just sheer power - but power that is actually held in a turquoise space - it's sheer intentionality, but intentionality held in a turquoise space. So at the very least, that means it's red power looked at in a fifth-person perspective.

[The term "fifth-person" refers to the degree of perspective-taking of which integral consciousness is capable. Egocentric red can only account for its own perspective, and so only offers a first-person view. Ethnocentric amber has become aware of the other members of its community and so can guess at what you are feeling and thinking - awake to a second-person view. Worldcentric orange has recognized the multiplicity of diverse perspectives and how they converge on a single system of reality, enabling it to describe things in objective terms (a third-person view). Deconstructive postmodern green consciousness takes a fourth-person view when it further objectifies even the third-person view, recognizing that there is a meta-perspective on empirical reality that renders all truth relative. Reconstructive integral teal and turquoise takes a perspective on the endless contextualization of green's fourth-person revelation and recognizes a deeper level of historical commonalities - not absolute universals, but simple common features of every other perspective. This is a fifth-person perspective, as Ken means it. More on this in a moment.]

And even though the essential contours of power might look the same, there's going to be a flavor to it, there's going to be an atmosphere to it, there's going to be some sort of turquoise signifier - and again, I don't think there's a single one, I think there's a whole class of common turqouise signifiers that that red is going to be held in. And again, nobody knows how that works. Nobody knows how vibrations of consciousness or how levels of consciousness or how stages of consciousness - nobody knows how consciousness itself gets imprinted in signifiers. But the integral theory is that not only does consciousness inform material artifacts, but the viewer of those artifacts has the same resonance drawn forth in their own being. And there might even be subtle energies involved in this, and that's actually a part of how there's a genuine, concrete transmission. Or it just might be that, you know, birds of a feather flock together. But whatever it is, a turquoise signifier or a turquoise space is recognizable, in the whole feeling of, uh, complex coherence that it communicates. And even if it's communicating something narrow, it will be communicating it in a space of complex coherence. And that will have a feeling to postmodern pluralism as something that is really healing a lot of fractures that postmodernism either induced or exposed. There will be an actual feeling to second tier, in the same way that there is a distinct feeling to orange: three perspectives.

And what we're waiting to see is what the actual structure of those signifiers are. Cuz we can look at them in certain individuals, but turquoise is still being laid down.

[Ken's integral theory is evolutionary, in that it recognizes creation and emergence as ongoing dynamic processes inherent to a self-organizing Kosmos. New levels of consciousness first appear ill-defined - frothy, inexplicable, and nebulous - because their newness means that they are not as rigidly established as habits of the universe. For a more scientific treatment of evolutionary cosmology, see the work of Rupert Sheldrake.]

And there's still any number of actual ways that it could be laid down. But right now the general signifiers are basically complex coherence, and a differentiated and integrated consciousness. And that gets transferred to the artwork, and is there to be decoded from the artwork.

MG: Hmmm, yeah. Something that just off the top of my head - when I saw Tool last April, they're working with such...well, you talk about "the red beat," this driving, primal aggressive energy. And yet it was clear from my place in the audience that they were holding it with such even-handedness, and they were allowing the audience to move through these spaces and kind of grapple with this material, with the spaciousness that they themselves were holding for the music.

KW: Yeah, there you go.

MG: Yeah, so that seems to be, that's pretty much what we're getting at, right?

KW: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's a good explanation, that's a good description of it, too.

MG: So part of this - you mentioned that part of this is a process of differentiation, part of it's a process of integration -

KW: Right.

MG: - and that we don't really understand how we charge a work of art with our intent. Suffice to say that there does seem to be a certain balance between being able to hold it in a third person place and to take a perspective on it, but also an ability to enter into it and to, as the artist, live as the work, in its construction. Paul Levy talks a lot about the work being in some sense a projected component of this higher self that's attempting to emerge through you. So what do you see as being common traits among artists who are talented at specifically and consciously communicating a particular vision or state or mode of consciousness? You know - even if we don't know the actual mechanism for this process, as engineers of states of consciousness, what do you see people continuing to find to be useful in their art?

KW: Yeah, and this gets into areas of just how, you know, just where artists themselves come from. Are they born? Are they made? Is it a reincarnation, a rebirth? It'd help explain why somebody like Mozart hits the ground running. Cuz it's certainly hard to explain with normal developmental scales, what some of these individuals are doing. But in terms of just what basically constitutes the artist, there are certainly certain skills in certain of the multiple intelligences. Because there are different kinds of art, there's no single psychograph of, let's say, a second tier artist.

Except there is a capacity, at least intermittently, for second tier cognition. Because that is indeed what is going to be the essential stamping signifier: that fourth or fifth person perspective that gives the feeling, the deep feeling of connectedness and the deep feeling of a complex coherence and the deep feeling of a truly - not the way Gebser meant it - but a truly integral-aperspectival. A truly integral space bringing together any number of different perspectives and showing a common, central feeling to all of those perspectives, the integral universals. And not just the monolithic orange formal-operational universals. And so that cognitive line is going to be the stamp that is certainly one of the foremost things that gets added into the medium and forms, in-forms, the actual structure and the pattern, the flow, the nature of second tier art. And then there's excellence in, and achievement in other multiple intelligences, depending on the nature of art itself. So certain kinds of art will have an excellence in kinesthetic intelligence, others will have an excellence in affective intelligence, others will display an excellence in intra-personal intelligence, and you can sort of go through almost any of the multiple intelligences and find some type of art that makes use of them. And so that kind of gets across the whole point of "What is art?," and "Why do we do art?," and "What's the nature of art itself?"

And to sort of put that aside for a moment to touch on this other question, I'd say that art is the depiction of that which is pleasing. And attractive or beautiful. And in a minute we can come back to that, but human beings - that's the inherent nature of human beings, that's one of the dimensions of human beings, one of the quadrants, in a sense, and so all human beings are artists to some degree. But then some individuals will take that capacity and refine it into really extraordinary pieces of self-expressive and communicative artwork, using almost any number of multiple intelligences.

So one of the things that an integral artist is doing, of course, is firing up second tier cognition. And that means anything that the artist can do to help take the perspective of others, and take the perspective of the perspective of others. And take perspectives on perspectives on perspectives. Cuz even though those sound really kind of abstract and difficult, they're actually straightforward and simple and profound ways that individuals get a view of how other people are viewing what other people are viewing.

But this just comes up, and it's one of the ways that worldviews are integrated. And that second tier automatically integrates the worldview of red, and the worldview of amber, and the worldview of orange, and the worldview of green. And just having even a SENSE of that wholeness comes from one of those higher perspectives. So any sort of practice of perspective-taking, any just putting one's self in the shoes of others, and be able to see not only through one's perspective, but through others, is the fundamental nature of integral cognition.

And then in terms of the states issues, this is where emotional issues of artists get drawn in, because often emotional disorders involve states of consciousness, and many artists taking advantage of that. And of course, it's the whole notion of "There's a fine line between genius and madness," and that line, in this case, is referring to access to states of consciousness, and the ease with which some artists do it, and there's any number of these states. But one's capacity to experience states in a wakeful fashion is an extremely important part of inculcating artistic capacity and particularly the transmutation capacity of art.

And that's into subtle dimensions, and into causal dimensions, and into nondual. And one of the best ways to do that, of course, is meditation. And contemplation. And then one can do that, though, with any particular aim in mind. One doesn't have to do this change of states with a spiritual nature in mind. Although in a sense, they are spiritual, they don't have, necessarily, content that is religious.

So basically, anything that helps open states of consciousness to artists is something that's really fundamental in terms of their own development, and their own program of excellence, basically. And I think really great art, what it does, is it reaches an extraordinary balance between a sort of transformative art and transmutation art. And that's sort of the two wings that I think terrific art rests on. And so those are two sort of dimensions that artists want to pay attention to. And many of them are born doing this, but a lot of that can be trained.

[To be concluded.]

Tags: Michael Garfield, Ken Wilber, Arvo Pârt, Tool, integral art, integral, postmodernism, transformation, transmutation, complex coherence

...And We Helped! ZVM Compilation #1 Makes A Difference

http://michaelgarfield.gaia.com — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 21:41:11 GMT

Derek Albeck - Sleeping On The Dandelions

Zaadz Visionary Music's first benefit compilation, The Dream Is Valid, has finally made a small but significant difference in the world. Our first payout allowed us to offer a $225 microloan to Ramona Díaz, an entrepreneurial local grocer in the Dominican Republic. Within a few months, our loan will be returned and available to help someone else strengthen their community and support themselves without exporting their local resources or succumbing to the hidden strings of international aid.

This is proof of principle: the churning engine of music sales can simultaneously provide exposure for artists and support projects of social benefit, all while offering quality content to We The Discriminating Art Lovers.

For anyone interested, here's all you could ever want to know:

Visit Omstream.com to buy the album for whatever price you decide.
(You can also look at this as making a continuously-recycling donation and getting free music, if you like.)

Zaadz Visionary Music's lender's page at Kiva.org
(Where you'll be able to keep track of our lending history.)

More information about The Dream Is Valid, including a brief manifesto.
(It really is brief, I promise you.)

yours in putting play to work,
Michael

Tags: kiva.org, iggli.com, The Dream Is Valid, benefit compilation, zaadz, gaia, Omstream, Derek Albeck

Blog Updates, 17 February 2008

http://michaelgarfield.gaia.com — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 22:32:45 GMT

In no specific order, here are some things that remind me of other things that I wrote about once upon a time. Enjoy!

Exhibit A
I can't exactly call it a visionary instrument - but it does make me hallucinate: Uwe Steger presents the Roland V Accordion with numerous extensions, proving once and for all that electronics make any conventional instrument instantly capable of a million times more weirdness.

Uwe Steger & The Roland V Accordion

Exhibit B
Stephen Hobley has created a smaller - and maybe more performable - version of the laser harp (I featured Jen Lewin's earlier multi-player design in an earlier post, here).

Hobley's Harp

Exhibit C
And William Eaton has developed the TransPerformance Harp Guitar, which features an electronic bridge that switches from one tuning to another almost instantly and at the press of a button, allowing compositions with fluid transitions between multiple totally different tunings. My imagination is groaning from the strain:

TransPerformance Self-Tuning Guitars

And if that doesn't blow your mind, it's probably already blown and you should be riding on a spare or you'll break your axle! (What, you don't carry a spare mind?)

Tags: visionary music, music, iggli.com, roland, accordion, Uwe Steger, vocoder, Stephen Hobley, Jen Lewin, light harp, William Eaton