Artist Rachel Lowther talks about mixing media, the "cruel, seamless finish" of plastic, drawings as spell-casting, and making art for love. (more)

PsycheGround, Vertigoes, Renegade Art, Graham Hancock, The Hanged Man's Ball, Zombiecon, and Radical Movie Night are thrilling New York this week. (more)

What is this Zeitgeist phenomenon that has torn through the American consciousness, and why is it resonating with the people? (more)

[The New Masculine] • National Lampoon calls my good friend Andy Shmushkin, the exiled singer-songwriter, a cross between James Taylor and Lenny Bruce. This is what the new masculine is all about. (more)

[Burning Briefs] • In this video, playa newbie Bill Kennedy is cynical about the purported magic of the Burning Man Festival, but a synchronistic run-in on Fate St., "a heroic dose of mushrooms," a dance with Rosario Dawson, and the improbable triumph of veteran Burner Nugget change his mind. (more)

Alchemical Rubedo, Disorient's Double Rainbow, Sex Magic, Fallen Angel, and a Temporary Cities panel with Larry Harvey are all happening this week. (more)

[Burning Briefs] • In this video, Paul D. Miler aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid brings us all the way back to when Burning Man was young and feral with only 4,000 attendees -- "the ancient mid-nineties." After a romantic break up, Paul leaves New York to relax and "deprogram." But his attempts are thwarted by Pippi Longstocking's playa-wide hunt to prevent him from playing "commercial music" at the festival. With the help of laser-frisbee wisemen, steaming mud baths, crystal-structured art cars, and an otherwordly sonic landscape, Paul is not only able to relax, but to hit "the reset button on the entire imagination of what [he] even can vaguely think of as America." [Video] (more)

Shopture, Women's Rites, Pole Dancing, Sub Swara, Persian Poetry, Harvest Fest, and more are all happening this week.

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William Butler Yeats was fascinated by the mystical and invisible dimensions of life and consciousness, much to the chagrin of his contemporaries, who thought he was a little off. (more)

On October 9, Yoko Ono will present her latest art project to promote world peace, the Imagine Peace Tower. (more)

Since posting my two-part exploration of the Great Prank of 2007, I have had a number of thoughtful and substantial email exchanges and conversations, mostly with people from the Burning Man Department of Public Works – the DPW folks. Larry Harvey, Burning Man's exec director, also gave me a buzz. (more)

[Burning Briefs] • In this Reality Sandwich video, Catherine Burns, Artistic Director of the urban storytelling organization, The Moth, shares her triumphant comeback from a difficult "playa melt-down" at the Burning Man Festival. Deciding "for only one week to live in the present," Catherine embarks on a magical journey of synchronicities, experiencing the only case of ESP in her life, and eventually coming to terms with the loss of her mother. (more)

New Yorkers this week can check out CoSM's Astro-Drama, Punk Rock Yoga, Kirtan with Groovananda, Sound Tribe Sector 9's after party, Turkish Band Camp, chocolate workshops and more. (more)

The aftershocks of the early burning of the man have given rise to discussion about the current state of the Burning Man Festival and its future. It also raises larger questions about art and transgression, creative freedom versus destructive license, cult versus culture, and the future of an anarchic spectacle that holds out a vision of human liberation and community. What did this event, and its various interpretations, mean to you, if anything? And what has it got you thinking about now? (more)

What happened on the playa that Monday night? There you are, in a fireman's coat, hurling through the wee hours across a parched and dusty lakebed in a 1979 American LaFrance fire truck. Above you the rare shadow of the earth has morphed the full moon into a dusky half-burnt clementine that hangs there pendulous like some wandering orb on the cover of a 70s SF paperback. "Baby's on Fire" is spewing out of the iPod, and Fripp's incandescent solo mixes with Burning Man's surrounding soundscape of engines, explosions, house beats, and the rising cries of gesticulating passersby who have-wait a sec-just realized that the iconic 40-foot-tall trademark that centers their entire week of organized revelry is prematurely aflame. (more)

Anticon rapper Sole talks about his new album with a live band, rap, life, social consciousness, the mountains, and his dogs. "In Europe I learned not to rush to and fro like a crazed American," he says, "to stop, smell the grass, take a walk, have your thoughts, chill, read, sip some wine, feel the sun on your face. And that's what this new album is about. When I talk about politics, or society, or history, its a sub plot to my own thoughts.... like 'Ooh the sunflowers just bloomed, four U.S. troops died in a suicide bombing, the dog shit on the carpet, we're gonna invade Iran, honey is the tofu ready?'" (more)

Brian Knep utilizes custom software to create new media art installments that look and feel organic as they react to environmental stimuli. (more)

New Yorkers have lots of party possibilities this weekend. There's CoSM’s 3-year anniversary, full moon and autumn equinox celebrations, Psytrance Dance festivities, Yom Kippur, birthday bashes and more. (more)

In this video from Reality Sandwich's "Burning Briefs" storytelling night, Daniel Pinchbeck shares one of the proudest, most humiliating, and hilarious experiences of his life. Hearing about the devastation of hurricane Katrina while on a "challenging dose of medicine" at the Burning Man Festival, Daniel embarks on a bold mission to stop the burning of the Man in order to create "a center to draft a new planetary constitution." [Video] (more)

Entheogen: Awakening the Divine Within explores the re-emergence of archaic techniques of ecstacy, shamanism, entheogens and the evolution of consciousness to alleviate our ecological crisis. [Trailer] (more)

NYC's underground art collective TheDanger is helping host two art competitions for the Big Apple's most brazen guerrila artists. (more)

Dance to tribal beats with DJ Derajja, groove to the sounds of Zanzibar, learn about sacred sex, chant with ecstatic devotion, attend non-profit bootcamp, and Be Wild with Kianna Love. (more)

In this interview Laura Mccullough shares her poetry and speaks about gender evolution, the importance of poetry, the issue of gender appropriation in art and her new collection of poems entitled: "What Men Want."

Artist and poet Ramekon O'Arwisters uses food and fashion as coded carriers of social and political commentary. (more)

An abandoned grain silo in the heart of Montreal has been converted into a giant interactive musical reverb chamber. (more)

Rumi translator Coleman Barks celebrates the visionary poet's 800th birthday. (more)

Fantasy Bellydancing, the Kirtan Rabbi, Globesonic on the Hudson, UFO's over Bamako, and the Evolve 2012 Music Festival are all awaiting adventurous New Yorkers this week. (more)

As part of an ongoing but essentially lazy quest to wrap my psyche around alchemy, I had recently been drawn towards Paracelsus: the wonder-working itinerant sixteenth-century healer who is sometimes cast as the Copernicus of medicine. Rejecting the leech-loving, bass-ackwards, and literally by-the-book healing practices of most medieval doctors, Paracelsus instead made room for a medicine based on plants, material causality, and self-healing powers of the body. (more)

In his new album, Cosmo Galactic Prism, Norwegian DJ Prins Thomas broadcasts a sublime, eclectic mix from the funkiest reaches of outer space. (more)

Jessica Bruder covers the history of Burning Man in pictures, artifacts, and text inBurning Book: A Visual History of Burning Man. (more)