2021 has kept me busy! I’m sharing a brief note about recent appearances and what’s coming next.
First: high weirdness. Artist, musician, filmmaker, podcast host and longtime integralist Stuart Davis had me on his show, Aliens and Artists for a proper metaphysical conversation on non-human intelligences. I guess I’m coming out of my weird closet. Here’s part one and two.
My colleague and friend, Eric Reynolds, has taken hold of the wild Clubhouse hype coursing through social media and channeled into a weekly gathering of 60+ participants (Mondays, Wednesdays and Sundays). As of this week we finally have our own “club”: Integral Leadership. Connect with us on Clubhouse.
Mutations is now on there, too! So stay tuned for the imminent kickoff discussion.
Tomorrow (Tuesday, 3.9) I’m honored to be co-hosting the first #BrooksBooks reading group on TMBSFM (The Michael Brooks Legacy Project). It’s a Patrons-only event where we’ll be reading through books that inspired Michael’s internationalism and political, spiritual, integral “cosmopolitan” thinking. We’re coming up on the one year anniversary of Against the Web, so Luke Savage is joining us to talk about the book as well as his excellent review of it on Jacobin.
Luke was referring to former president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who as of today has his political rights restored, making him free to challenge Bolsonaro in the next election. TMBS produced an excellent Illicit History of Lula’s story, and it was only last year that Michael was able to interview Lula.
It feels auspicious that we’re kicking off the series with this news, or like laying a rose at the grave of a dear friend. Somewhere, I hope Michael is smiling.
Just a few more things in this bricolage. Last week I had the pleasure of jumping on a GTAA panel to riff about A Scanner Darkly (the film), and you can catch that here:
The Gebser class is in full swing now, and Patrons can expect a Mutations book club happening soon to talk about Ursula K Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven (look for it on April 4th). In Richard Doyle’s excellent TEDx Talk on Philip K. Dick’s meta-fiction, he talks about how PKD’s narratives are perfectly scrambled hero’s journeys, matching our own post- or meta- modern times of complex-dynamical slipstream. PKD is on one end of the spectrum of art that might fit into a hypothetical canon of “planetary” literature, and Le Guin would be on the other end. The Lathe of Heaven is inspired by PKD’s writing, but with Le Guin’s touch, its surrealism has another kind of effect. George Orr presents with the “new subject” of the planetary era, a hero who expresses integral being and knowing and doing. And the text itself is a tempest in a teapot version of our planetary crisis. You’ll see what I mean.
There’s more, of course, but that’s all I can say for now. The real action is happening over on my word processor…