C.S. Studio

YE OLDE SUMMER PARKING LOT SALE {{{TOMORROW}}}

Cactus Store — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 21:16:16 GMT

THE TIME HAS COME AGAIN

Friend of Los Angeles, our summer heatwave Parking Lot Sale is Tomorrow!
We just put SHADECLOTH up over the parking lot, so will be a shady shopping wonderland amidst the barren concrete wasteland we call home.

📅 Saturday, July 25
⏰ 11:00 AM – 3:00 PM
📍 3209 Fletcher Dr, Los Angeles

We’ve got loads of strange plants, discount tees, a few hoodies, CS pots and other giftables for ya.

Plants from $5 to to $5000 !
A big rack of old, discounted shirts!
Come and make a friend!

We hope to see you there

FOR THOSE OF YOU IN NYC!

We are thrilled to announce the next NYC Hort/Culture event of this season, a celebration of the Smithsonian Folkways release of Orca’s Greatest Hits, a collection of interspecies recording by the great Jim Nollman.

Jim will be joined by NHT favorite David Rothenberg, who has also spent his career making music with birds and ponds and many other nonhuman (and a few human) musicians.

Stay tuned for the next Specimen Monthly for a deep dive into Jim’s work, and grab tickets HERE

XOXO

CS & NHT

A Respite from the Doldrums

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 16:13:56 GMT

Greetings reader,

It is enchanted to encounter you once again at these digital crossroads.

As we enter the doldrums of the summer, we have a few fun things lined up in both New York and Los Angeles and some other goings-on that we wanted to tell you about.

We are back and fully recovered from our travels East and come bearing invitations, speculations, and news at this tail end of a full quarter millennium of American imperial folly.

Earth Does Not Belong To Man

Cactus Store — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 14:02:31 GMT

こんにちは dear reader,

Greetings from a speeding bullet train en route to Kyoto.

Our little team just touched down a few days ago in the great megalopolis of Tokyo for an installation and lecture as part of our recently released collaboration with Japanese brand Goldwin.

We’ll be back in a few days to follow up last month’s wonderful HORT/CULTURE event with our second installment featuring Andrew Farnsworth and claire rousay. Tickets are available now, but going fast!

More on all this below…

HORT/CULTURE RETURNS TO NYC

We’ll be back stateside next week for the next HORT/CULTURE event of the season on Monday, June 22nd at Nine Orchard. Join us for an evening of deep listening with Andrew Farnsworth of the Cornell Ornithology Lab and artist/composer claire rousay as we explore the NYC soundscape.

Tickets for last month’s incredible rooftop spectacle with Olivia Shao and the Sun Ra Arkestra sold out and these will, too, so get yours today while you still can! A huge thanks to everyone who came out and helped celebrate the great Marshall Allen’s 102nd birthday. This was truly one for the ages; a perfect evening.

GOLDWIN x CACTUS STORE

Last year we went to South Africa and Namibia as part of an on-going documentary project we’re working on here at the studio. Over the course of 10 days, we got up close and personal with some of the most otherworldly plants hiding in the rocky crevices of this vast, arid region known as the Namaqualand.

These little dumplings — along with the other monstrous species that dot the landscape – would inspire what would become the designs for our collaboration with our lovely friends over at Goldwin.

As part of this project, we put together a presentation and installation for their storefront locations in New York, Kyoto, and Tokyo that will be up in all these locations through the end of the month. If you, like us, happen to be in Tokyo this week, please join us at nonlecture books/arts this Thursday, June 18th at 6PM for the final presentation.

For the majority of you in this dear readership that probably cannot make it to the presentation, we’ve included the text and some select visuals below as a tasty treat while the full meal itself includes habitat recreations (with help from our friends at the Manhattan Botanical Garden and The Succulentist), films and photographic prints by Andy KD, and live audio/visual accompaniment courtesy of our sister project Nonhuman Teachers.

Keep in mind that this non-lecture relies heavily on visual puns, so if/when things stop making sense, you kinda had to be there…

EARTH DOES NOT BELONG TO MAN

Dots

As far as we know, really as far as we even can know at this point in our understanding of physics, the Universe is around 13.82 billion years old, give or take about 50 million years. While we still have no clear idea as to its actual form – be it one of infinite expansion, heat death, or an oscillating Big Bang/Big Crunch loop – by our best estimates the Universe contains around 2 trillion galaxies – themselves filled with something like 10 septillion stars. For the non-brainiacs in the audience, that’s a 10 with 25 trailing zeros.

Earth is itself 4.5 billion years old. Formed out of the gravitationally compressed debris of our very own personal star we lovingly call the Sun, itself but a dot in the spiral arms of the Milky Way.

Because this story is fairly long and we are still firmly in the domain of numbers that are beyond the computing power of our limited wetware, let’s hit the fast forward button real quick and jump ahead to our main character moment.

To broadly set the scene here, we are on the grasslands of eastern Africa – it’s about 300,000 years ago and we are carefully scanning the horizon for any large threats i.e. the lions, tigers, and bears of nursery rhyme fame. These anatomically modern humans – the ones with all the same bits and bobs as us, minus the plastic parts – they didn’t enter the scene until the Earth had been doing its thing for 4.2 billion years. Some of the things it had been doing during this time include: five major extinction events, five ice ages, and a complete transformation of atmospheric and oceanic chemistry, creating the environment that we now know and love.

Behavioral modernity – the suite of cognitive and cultural capacities that distinguish us from our more ape-like antecedents – is itself only 70,000 years old; agriculture – a mere 10,000; and industrial society, whose consequences have been a disaster for the human race, according to some notable thinkers, is but a piddling 200 years young.

If we hit the pause button here, we’ve already skipped over 99% of the movie known as History, a truly Eames-ian traversal of scale. Within this framework, it is an obvious farce to even momentarily consider the idea that we humans, the blip of life that we are, could claim dominion over the Earth. Poor Chief Seattle, whose words inspired the name of this presentation, is probably spinning in his grave as we speak.

Despite this, we seem to be suffering from a planetary bout of Main Character Syndrome, an illness whose symptoms include a number of suicidal tendencies: deforestation, ozone depletion, megafaunal genocide, and other quirked up behaviors. Now, I’m no cinephile, but as far as I know, most films don’t introduce their protagonist in the final frame.

Starring role or not, the horror flick of Life is genuinely scary when you stop and really consider the implications of these facts: humanity is not even a subplot in the narrative arc of history; we wouldn’t be on the iMDB page let alone listed in the credits themselves.

When you tug at this thread long enough, inevitably you arrive at the uncomfortable navel gazing vista of the great existential questions of philosophy, the big who, what, where’s, and why’s of existence itself. This is not the most fun destination for an intellectual hike, so it comes as no surprise that we often don’t keep these facts front of mind.

Even now, as we’re gathered here amid the towering symbols of man’s dominion over physical reality, it’s hard to believe that this land was not always the concrete hellscape we currently inhabit, but rather a sprawling verdant lowlands set atop millions of years of sedimentary layers, the alluvial deposits, volcanic ash, and marine sediment forming a layer cake of time.

And it is especially hard to remember these facts as you’re passively exercising near total dominance over space and time, reclining semi-comfortably in seat 29C, your body propelled by quadruple jet engines through the air at speeds unattainable by any natural force. This all while you quietly thumb the screen of a device that instantaneously connects you with any other human on the planet, even now, as you’re miles above all 8 billion of their heads, just a few hours away from your final destination, the Namaqualand.

Namaqualand

The name itself, in the indigenous Khoikhoi language, means the land of the Nama Khoi people, who have raised cattle and sheep here for the better part of two millenia.

For most of the year, the arid terrain is a bleak gesture of the Earth’s callous indifference to any and all living things. The region runs along a narrow strip of the southwestern coast of Africa, spanning from southern Namibia down into South Africa. It is composed largely of exposed rock. The gneiss, granite and schist that erupts from the land was once part of the supercontinent Gondwana and has slowly been worn smooth by billions of years of weathering.

These broad, unimaginably vast expanses are infrequently punctuated by dry riverbeds, sparse scrub and the occasional rocky dome, called inselbergs, themselves among the most ancient landforms on Earth’s surface.

But following the winter rains of August and September – remember, this is the southern hemisphere we’re talking about – the ground explodes in one of the most extravagantly abundant blooming events on the planet. Sheets of white, orange, and yellow flowers extend to the horizon; the vastness of this display visible from space.

These blooms, and more specifically the plants that produce them, are why we’re here nearly 11,000 miles from home. Much like Gulliver in his shipwrecked days on the island of Lilliput, we find ourselves at the mercy of these minuscule lifeforms known collectively as the Mesembs, a family of freakish dwarf succulent plants.

Some of the most unique and sought after genera of the Mesembs grow here and only here on the remote rocky outcroppings of Namaqualand. Despite their diminutive size and an impressive camouflaging ability, they possess a strange siren call that lures xerophiles from all corners of the Earth.

Starting in the late 1600’s, botanists would make the journey to the Namaqualand in search of mesembs and the many other unique plants of the region – odd bulbs, swizzle sticks, and various caudiciforms – describing them and sending specimens back to various institutions around the world, the otherworldly forms blowing Victorian minds. And while there is no shortage of hallucination-inducing specimens in this region, it is the pint-sized Mesembs that truly capture the hearts of botanists the world over.

Perhaps it is their very non-plantness that piques our interest. Or perhaps it is the implied gender-role reversal – their cleft leaves the definitive inversion of the phallic form of so many other species of succulent plants. Or maybe it’s more simple and they’re just undeniably cute.

Whatever it is, these plants are true anomalies of the plant kingdom.

Dumpling and His Wife

Dwarf mesembs are among the most morphologically reduced plants on Earth. Millions of years of hard-fought adaptation to the extreme environment of the Namaqualand – months to years without any appreciable rainfall and extreme heat – have compressed the entire architecture of the flowering plant. Root, stem, leaf, and reproductive structures are reduced to a simplified body that, in many species, consists of nothing more than a single pair of fused succulent leaves that barely peek out from the ground, fleshy stars in a galaxy of soil and stone.

This reduction of form should not be mistaken for a simplification of function: it is extreme specialization driven by the unrelenting evolutionary forces that operate at the boundaries of survival. We see this in extremophiles in the most inhospitable habitats imaginable – bacteria growing in the cooling systems of nuclear reactors (which look remarkably like lithops); worms attached to hydrothermal vents in the remotest reaches of the ocean; and of course the beloved Tardigrade. Affectionately known as the “water bear”, it is an ancient creature that has survived all five major extinction events and even the vacuum of outer space.

In the case of Lithops, this specialization has resulted in the development of unique forms such as the aforementioned fused leaves. In addition, these leaves are adorned with windowed tips, which allow for light to pass into the plant body itself to perform photosynthesis, which normally occurs on the surface of the plant. This in turn allows for their largely subterranean existence – protecting the plants from desiccation, predators, and voracious human collectors.

Even more astounding is the incredible variation in leaf patterning, a form of cryptic mimicry that allows populations to camouflage themselves among different rock types, creating distinct species in disconnected localities.This camouflage is so localized that adjacent populations on different rock types may be visually unique.

Their flowers, just one among the many responsible for the region’s superbloom, are disproportionately large relative to the plant body and powerfully scented to attract moth pollinators at night while their UV-tuned colors attract bees during the day and draw the minimal attention from predators.

The whole organism is a study in radical minimalism: millions of years of biological compression into a tiny, dumpling-cute form. It is a living vessel of raw survival.

Perhaps it is this diminution – the reduction of life’s most essential forces into a windowsill companion, that so enamors us. After all, we have always been weirdly drawn to small things. Maybe this response is a biological relative to our innate love for our infant children, a Kindchenschema transference to the nonhuman and the inanimate. From the mini worlds of the dollhouse in the Victorian era to the contemporary micro-sculpture of William Wigan, there is something oddly compelling about the world in miniature.

Not only are little things cute, they are controllable, manageable, the chaos of the world brought to rest in the palm of our hand. The associated flood of oxytocin and an ebbing of norepinephrine is a most soothing chemical cocktail for our delicate nervous system.

Indeed the private collections of growers the world over -– the greenhouse itself a bubble of managed atmosphere – speak to a desire to wrest control from the forces of nature and transpose them to a scale the human hand can manage.

This is but one example of a twisted relationship to scale that has been with us from our early days on the savannah. It is an example of evolutionary mismatch; a feature of our biological software that is long overdue for an update; a blindness to the small world around us that often eludes our attention unless brought to the fore with the help of the psychedelic transformations of size common to science fiction, psychotropic drugs, and, occasionally, blockbuster family films.

Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves

In Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, zany inventor Wayne Szalinski accidentally shrinks his titular children with an experimental electromagnetic shrink ray he built in his attic. Along with some other annoying neighborhood kids, they end up lost in the family lawn. At ¼” tall the space is suddenly transformed from one of domestic bliss into a nightmare-ish forest: the grass is as tall as trees, ants become monsters and water droplets deadly projectiles.

Imagine if we all were forced to go through this kind of extreme size inversion therapy as children – would it give us a new reverence for the minuscule? Would it make us respect and even fear the majestic clover, the humble pebble, or the pesky mosquito?

Speaking of mosquitoes: while it’s always a good idea to carry a whistle when hiking in case of lions and tigers and bears, you really should be more concerned with getting full coverage protection with your bug spray of choice.

The fact that the obnoxious buzz of these bloodsuckers registers as little more than an annoyance to us – even though they are the deadliest creature on Earth – is exemplary of an incongruent threat response. Apparently you need to enlarge the threat to savannah-like proportions, or shrink yourself Szalinksi-style, for our outdated brains to take notice of certain things.

More than just threat detection, this scalar blindness affects our basic perception, skewing our ability to see the world as anything but one designed at human scale. During those first few hikes in Namaqualand, it was much easier to be in awe of the larger-than-life plants that dot the landscape, monstrous Aloe trees and Pachypodium namaquanum that could never be replicated in the controlled-climate of a greenhouse.

But it isn’t until your eyes fully adjust to this new world that you begin noticing the treasures underfoot. It’s not just that they are so good at hiding themselves after millions of years of practice, but their sheer size in contrast to the enormity of the landscape is baffling. And in a continued zoom-in/zoom-out vertiginous play on scale that would make even Hitchcock queasy, the dwarf mesembs in habitat are themselves larger-than-life show stoppers, often dwarfing those in cultivation.

Even for inept xerophiles like ourselves, it really was worth spending hours baring our asses to the burning Namibian sun to finally find a clump of Conophytum hidden in the rocks. In some cases these plants are decades or even centuries old, patiently awaiting their annual sip of water since the dawn of the Industrial Age.

All this is to say that the next time you see a Lithops or a clump of Conos or a Muiria (which is my personal favorite of the mesembs) let it be a reminder that one doesn’t need to resort to the transmogrifying extremes of a Walt to be able to stop and truly revel in the power of the non-human little things that surround us.

Although it probably wouldn’t hurt…

The Grey Goo Problem

A quick detour here as a colorful lesson in the dangers of human hubris.

It is a velvety-rich poetic justice that our fetish-like miniaturization complex would itself birth an entirely new arena of incomprehensible anxiety-producing technologies.

In September of 1989, Donald Eigler, then an IBM physicist in California, excitedly scrawled the words “DID IT!” in all caps in his notebook, the “it” here referring to the physical manipulation of a single atom.

Using a scanning tunneling microscope, itself the product of cutting-edge research at IBM Zürich, Eigler found that he could move individual atoms by bringing the tip of the microscope very close to, but not quite touching, atoms of the element xenon. Over the course of 22 hours, he and his colleague painstakingly applied this technique to move these atoms into a man-made arrangement, thus creating the first atomic graffiti.

Forget about William Wigan, this feat of God-like manipulation is orders of magnitude more impressive than any artwork and certainly the last stop on the physical control train, expanding human dominion to the very building blocks of matter itself. It would give rise to an entirely new field science, nanotechnology, and with this, inspired new and fantastical visions of human creation and destruction via the so-called “Godfather of nanotech”, K. Eric Drexler.

Recognizing the potential of atomic manipulation, Drexler dreamed of creating molecular assemblers – machines the size of individual molecules that could do our bidding, constructing virtually any physical object one atom at a time, vis-à-vis Eiger. Think of this nanotech as essentially a 3D printer, but instead of making silly little plastic bits, you’re able to print reality itself. Any physical object — inanimate or living – could technically be created in this manner, giving us, in Drexler’s words “effectively complete control over the structure of matter”.

On the flipside of this, we have the so-called grey goo problem, the most well-known and frightening implication of Drexler’s ideas. It goes like this: if assemblers could build anything, they could of course build copies of themselves, which could build copies of themselves, which could build copies of themselves, inevitably consuming all biomass on Earth. Apparently Drexler thought this would resemble a grey goo of sorts.

That was 1986, but here we are 40 years later alive, goo-less, and arguably well.

Nanotech is perhaps a case of theory walking the dog of technology, a condition which has given rise to some of the best and most prescient works of science fiction, but by no means is it a reason to believe some version of this doomsday scenario is not valid. Nor is it the only scenario in which a blindness to the small, to the scales beyond our tactile reach, could spell disaster.

The Power of the Collective

At this point, I think we can all agree that Earth does not belong to man. But it might belong to ants.

Pound for pound, we might have the upper hand, but man for man, ant for ant, it’s not looking good for us. Of the approximately 20,000 species currently described, there are an estimated 20 quadrillion ants on the planet. That’s not quite as many as the number of stars in the sky, but it’s nothing to shake a stick at either. We’re talking 2.5 million ants per person on Earth, again confronted with orders of magnitude that are simply incomprehensible to our brains.

And I get it, you can stomp ants like nobody’s business – but two-and-half million is a lot. Some species roll through the grasslands of central Africa 20 million deep with a single-minded directive and an appetite for destruction.

Like ants, some of the most successful – and that’s successful in an evolutionary sense – some of the most successful organisms on Earth are themselves not actually individuals but groups of networked individuals, working and in some cases presenting as a single entity.

Pando is somewhere between 16,000 and 80,000 years old – it is the oldest living organism on Earth. Sprouted from a single seed, it is now an entire forest of quaking aspens that share resources across a single root system spread over 160 acres of the Fishlake National Forest in central Utah in the United States.

The Portuguese man o’ war becomes even more confounding to behold when you learn that while visually presenting as a semi-coherent blown-up-glove of a jellyfish, it is in fact composed of millions of zooids, each one a highly specialized organism. In fact each zooid is so specialized for its specific function that individual zooids cannot survive outside the colony. Each one of these special little guys, while morphologically different, are somehow genetically identical, an unprecedented instance of twinning with a powerful sting, to boot.

This is the power of the collective. This is how a plant the size of a single grape can become visible from space; how a nanoscale virus can suspend the march of a rapacious global order; and how a single atom, manipulated just right, can threaten an entire planet’s worth of life. It is a force that harnesses the transformative power of scale. You must simultaneously zoom in and zoom out to truly understand it, which, like rubbing your stomach and patting your head at the same time, can be frustratingly hard.

Perhaps now is an opportunity to resume the position and bare our asses once again to the blazing sun, to look down beyond our normal scale for guidance on how to work and live together on a planetary scale. Not as a collection of individuals but an individual collective. Lucky for us, the connective tissue is built and although the original Utopian vision for this technology did not come to pass, but rather birthed totally new forms of horror and alienation, there are still reasons to hold out hope that we can recognize our place in the Gaian order and come together to work as a whole.

And with that, we once again find ourselves admiring our mesemb collection from the comfy repose of the Philosopher’s most agreeable armchair, cueing up a much needed rewatch of the The Incredible Shrinking Man.

End

If you’ve made it this far dear reader, we thank and applaud you.

We’ll be back at the studio in a few days, but until then, take care of yourselves.

さようなら,

Cactus Store and Nonhuman Teachers

SUN RA ARKESTRA LIVE IN NYC

Cactus Store — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:03:47 GMT

Earthlings,

For those of you residing on North America’s north-eastern coast, we’ll be beaming back to NYC later this month with some otherworldly friends for the inaugural event of our most beloved ‘HORT/CULTURE’ series. We beseech you to join us for what surely will be a lovely evening on the Lower East Side.

Tickets available here: ‘HORT/CULTURE’: Olivia Shao + Sun Ra Arkestra.

And if you happen to find yourself elsewhere on God’s green Earth, perhaps you still may enjoy learning about some intergalactic theories of art and life or benefit from a few uplifting stories from New Zealand and beyond. More below, dear reader.

Respectfully yours,

CS Studio & Nonhuman Teachers

‘HORT/CULTURE’ RETURNS TO NYC

For the uninitiated amongst this readership, ‘HORT/CULTURE’ is our delightfully dim-witted attempt at salon-style gatherings where we pair artists, scientists, educators, thinkers, and various other lifeforms to bridge disciplines in unexpected ways.

We’re very excited to announce that we’ll be returning to NYC for another season (our third!) featuring five evenings of infotainment and erudition with some amazing guests. Full dates below with links to tickets — space is somewhat limited and these usually sell out, so snap ‘em up while you still can!

𝙼𝙰𝚈 𝟸𝟻: Extraterrestrial Intelligence: Olivia Shao + Sun Ra Arkestra
𝙹𝚄𝙽 𝟸𝟸: Soundscape Ecology: Andrew Farnsworth + special guest
𝙹𝚄𝙻 𝟷𝟻: Territorial Pissings: Gotham Coyote Project + Lady Pink
𝙰𝚄𝙶 𝟷𝟿: Urban Landscape: Alex Wolfe + special guest
𝚂𝙴𝙿 𝟸𝟹: Habitat Loss: Eric Sanderson + Legs McNeil

Also, this season we’re offering a tier of pay-what-you-will tickets. If you can afford to give more than the General Admission price, that is both wonderful and very much appreciated, and if you can’t, pay whatever is comfortable for you. No one will be turned away for lack of funds!

OLIVIA SHAO + SUN RA ARKESTRA

For the inaugural event of this season, we are out-of-this-world honored to be joined by curator Olivia Shao, whose recent UFO-themed show at the Drawing Center blew our simpleton minds, and the living legends of the Sun Ra Arkestra for an exploration of extraterrestrial intelligence in its myriad forms – from the peculiar ways it pops up in the visual arts throughout history to the Saturnalian origins of Sun Ra’s music. More musings on this below.

This evening also happens to be the birthday of the Arkestra’s 102-years-young bandleader Marshall Allen, who began playing with Sun Ra in 1958 and leading the Arkestra in 1997. He is, perhaps, the coolest man on planet damn Earth and it is our distinct honor to be in his presence on this special day. Gifts are, of course, not required, but certainly appreciated.

SUN RA: VOICES OF SPACE

As we were putting together this season of programming for ‘HORT/CULTURE’, we had a lot of Sun Ra playing in the studio. The man was truly a singular force and the story behind his music is one of the richest in American music history.

One of the more delicious bits of Sun Ra’s mythic lore is the early visionary experience he had as a young man in Alabama. It was there in 1936 at the Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University that a young Herman Poole Blount (he would later legally change his name in 1952) was transported to the planet Saturn. In an oft-quoted passage from John Szwed’s seminal biography Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra, Blount-later-to-be-Ra describes the event:

My whole body changed into something else. I could see through myself. And I went up... I wasn't in human form... I landed on a planet that I identified as Saturn... they teleported me and I was down on [a] stage with them. They wanted to talk with me. They had one little antenna on each ear. A little antenna over each eye. They talked to me. They told me to stop [attending college] because there was going to be great trouble in schools... the world was going into complete chaos... I would speak [through music], and the world would listen. That's what they told me.

It was many years later and only following a difficult stint in jail as a conscientious objector to World War II and an uprooting from Birmingham to Chicago that Blount officially changed his name to Le Sony’r Ra, Sun Ra for short, and began to flesh out his personal and artistic cosmology. He formed his Arkestra, recruiting prominent players from the vibrant Chicago jazz scene including longtime members Pat Patrick, John Gilmore and Marshall Allen. With a uniquely eclectic take on jazz and a truly otherworldly aesthetic, the group – whose name changed as frequently as it’s lineup – was a genuinely avant-garde presence in American music and culture.

While Sun Ra’s interest in the cosmos and extraterrestrial life was very much the tip of the spear culturally – the American public, largely first introduced to ideas of space travel and alien encounters in 1947 with the Kenneth Arnold incident would later be consumed by a preoccupation with these notions during the Space Race – it followed in a long tradition of musicians looking up from their instruments to the heavens above. From the Musica universalis of the Pythagoreans to the harmonic endeavors of astronomer Johannes Kepler; from the swirling celestial tonality of Haydn to the early electronic experiments of Louis and Bebe Barron, cosmically influenced music is as old as music itself.

And when we zoom out from music to the arts in general, we see that extraterrestrial life has been present throughout the history of human cultural production. It goes without saying that here we begin to dangerously toe the line between conspiracy-addled clickbait, which, in and of itself is extremely fun in a boomer-coded-hotel-TV-watching kind of way, and a more thoughtful examination of how we as humans have always looked upward and outward to better understand ourselves and and our lives here on planet mf’ing Earth.

Ms. Shao’s recent curatorial effort, Voice of Space: UFOs and Paranormal Phenomena at New York’s Drawing Center, was an astoundingly comprehensive survey of extraterrestrial imagery in the visual arts that explored how UFOs and paranormal phenomena play a shape in our understanding of the universe, and how they challenge and expand our beliefs about humanity’s place in the cosmic order.

So today as these keys click-clack and The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra plays on the speakers and millions of by-the-wind sailors (Vellela vellela, such a beautiful name) wash up on the beaches of California, it feels totally understandable for humans to invent extraterrestrial explanations when confronted with such confounding scenes, whether they be a rare beaching of alien-like sea creatures or a total solar eclipse.

When we see strange, otherworldly shapes and figures show up in primitive cave paintings in Australia or Renaissance frescoes in Italy, perhaps their presence is nothing more than the misunderstood renderings of a mundane natural phenomenon like the Vellela colonies being blown to shore. I mean look at these things, they certainly don’t look like they’re of this world, right? And the same goes for the many other hydrozoans and cnidarians and cephalopods that quietly populate the unknown fathoms of the world’s oceans.

But beyond the obvious and overwhelming aesthetic otherness of certain species, there may actually be reason to believe that some forms of life here on Earth actually did originate from outer space. Despite the Rare Earth-pilled mockery of a few geocentric colleagues, a group of 33 scientists published a 2018 paper entitled “Cause of Cambrian Explosion - Terrestrial or Cosmic?” suggesting that life on Earth has been significantly affected by biochemistry of an unknown origin.

The paper itself is a furthering of the Hoyle-Wickramasinghe thesis of Cometary (Cosmic) Biology, a flavor of Panspermia with a surprising amount of evidence to back it up. The thesis here is essentially spelled out in the name, but professor Wickramasinghe walks it out a bit more, suggesting that "comets are the carriers and distributors of life in the cosmos and life on Earth arose and developed as a result of cometary inputs." This paradigm-smashing idea continues to not sit well with many scientists who derided this paper as “insane” (they especially didn’t like the idea that octopus and other cephalopods arrived on Earth via eggs cryogenically frozen on a comet in some kind of an intergalactic DoorDash) upon its arrival.

Astronauts working on the exterior of the International Space Station, which recently has been found to be covered in bacteria, despite space being a lifeless vacuum.

Comet Lovejoy, whose gaseous tail was recently discovered to contain ethanol the simple sugar glycolaldehyde, the first time complex organic molecules have been detected on a comet.

Of course truly new ideas seem crazy at first, but over time we eventually learn to accept the best of these new models and the march of enlightenment moves haltingly forward. Maybe octopus eggs were delivered to Earth on a comet, maybe aliens did zoom over to witness the baptism of Christ, and maybe Sun Ra really did transport to Saturn one day in 1936. Some things will always lie beyond the limits of our knowing while others may eventually be borne out through advanced research, but either way, these avant-garde ideas offer new perspectives on what it means to be a part of this big cosmic soup.

So put on The Night of the Purple Moon, cue up an ep of Ancient Aliens, order something depraved on DoorDash or whatever the fuck horrifying app is in your area and enjoy the short breath of your time here on Earth as this bizarre conglomeration of atoms, at least for one episode.

THE GOOD NEWS

We all need some levity in these increasingly dark times. Thanks for reading and hope to see you out there in the soup.

Adios,

CS / NHT

DATE CHANGE

Cactus Store — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 17:26:35 GMT

Dear gentlefolk of the Southland,

While we would of course love to see you this weekend, conflicts of a calendicular nature have arisen, forcing us to move our SPRING GREENHOUSE SALE to next weekend, May 2nd - May 3rd.

All other details remain the same, so please bide your time just one week longer.

CS STUDIO SPRING GREENHOUSE SALE

Saturday & Sunday May 2nd - 3rd

11am - 3pm

3209 Fletcher Drive

Los Angeles, CA 90065

In the meantime, we have ever dwindling amounts of our latest drop of fundraiser shirts supporting our friend Woody Minnich and his nursery Cactus Data Plants. Snag one while you can and if you’re in LA, we’ll have some IRL at the sale next weekend.

Adieu,

Springingly Forward

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 14:02:03 GMT

Dearest worms,

We hope you are well and springing forth from the dark soils of winter. Scroll down to check out some new designs from our latest edition of the Fundraiser Shirts Initiative and some news from the plant world.

Respectfully yours,

CS Studio & Nonhuman Teachers

QUICK UPDATES & ANNOUNCEMENTS

1.) The newest edition of our Fundraiser Shirts Initiative just dropped. Look like a freakass and support the great work of our friend Woody Minnich!

2.) The kind humans of KCRW visited our greenhouse, the Nonhuman Teachers Botanical Archive, to meet some of our rare and unusual friends.

3.) Earlier this month the botanical world lost one of its great sculptors, the incredible Pearl Fryar. Check out the wonderful documentary on him A Man Named Pearl. RIP!

4.) Our seasonal Spring Cleaning Greenhouse Sale will return to our parking lot on April 24-25 with an impressive haul of new plants for adoption and various duds and doodads looking for their forever home. Mark your calendar!

5.) Spring is springing throughout Los Angeles and thanks to a wet weekend, we are currently enjoying some lovely wild blooms. Call the Thomas Payne Foundation’s Wild Flower Hotline to find out what’s blooming throughout the southland.

FUNDRAISER SHIRT: CACTUS DATA PLANTS

We’ve just released our newest batch of designs from our Fundraiser Shirts Initiative earlier this week. This entry features a collection of reprints of shirts illustrated by our dear friend, the legendary cactus explorer Woody Minnich.

Woody is known internationally for giving presentations on his extensive field work in the diverse terrains of the places he has traveled - from the fog deserts of Namibia and Chile to the wadis of Socotra and arid grasslands of Western Australia. We decided to honor Woody’s commitment to exploration with these international editions of his original designs.

Originally made for his New Mexico nursery, Cactus Data Plants, the illustrations often were used for the annual Inter-City Cactus and Succulent Show & Sale here in Los Angeles.

50% of profits from this shirt go to Woody to support his continued research of the worlds’ desert biomes. Long live Wendell Minnich!

RIP PEARL FRYAR

Sadly, this missive also marks the passing of another titan of the botanical world, the great hedge wizard Pearl Fryar.

For the uninitiated, Fryar was a master topiary artist: the Calder of shrubs, the Miró of bushes, Fryar carried on the millennium’s old tradition of topiary from his humble home in Bishopville, South Carolina with a creative whimsy and playfulness unmatched by his predecessors.

Thankfully, the Pearl Fryar Topiary Garden lives on under the stewardship of fellow topiary artist Michael P. Gibson. With over 400 living sculptures, many of which first came to the garden as orphans found at local nursery compost piles (be still our green hearts), Fryar considered the garden “his gift to the world.”

From the cypress animals in the gardens of Pliny the Elder, to the conical shrubbery of Versailles (Le Nôtre was a bit more of the McCarthy of topiary), to the IP-focused grotesqueries of the Epcot Center, the history of topiary offers a twisted reflection of the history of human civilization. Fryar boldly brought this tradition into the 21st century with characteristic verve and a great generosity of spirit, creating remarkable organic shapes that reflect the quirked up absurdity of our times.

While our little obituary here is but the tip of the proverbial iceberg when it comes to Fryar’s work, the wonderful 2006 documentary “A Man Named Pearl” is a touching remembrance of this great oak of a man and we highly recommend you check it out.

May he rest in peace!

In the words of Pearl himself: LOVE, PEACE + GOODWILL.

CS Studio & Nonhuman Teachers

This Weekend: Thy Annual C.S. Holiday Parking Lot Greenhouse Cleanout Sale!

Cactus Store — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 23:18:47 GMT

Christmas is coming, Hanukkah is almost here, Satan has arisen!
Time for our annual CS Studio Holiday Parking Lot Sale.

📅 Saturday, Dec 13 – Sunday, Dec 14

⏰ 11:00 AM – 3:00 PM

📍 3209 Fletcher Dr, Los Angeles

Come to the West Pole (our greenhouse parking lot) this weekend for all, or at least the best parts, of your holiday gifting needs.

We’ve got arm loads of plants, tees, hoodies, handmade CS pots and other giftables for you and your kin.

Plants from $5 to to $5000 !
Have a kiss under the spine covered mistletoe!
+ Live fire cinderblock cookout by Mari Vega and Chas on Saturday!

Live fire cinderblock cookout by Mari Vega and Chas on Saturday!

HO HO HO, WHO WOULDN’T GO?

HOPE TO SEE YOU THERE!

New clothes & updates from the Studio

Cactus Store — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 21:34:12 GMT

Hi friends,

We haven’t forgotten about you, and have some fun things to share. Scroll down to check out some new clothing we designed, our Fundraiser Shirts initiative as well as some other doodads and tidbits.

Wormly,

CS Studio & Nonhuman Teachers

QUICK UPDATES & ANNOUNCEMENTS

1.) New clothes just dropped! Get your best friend the dorky long sleeve they have been dreaming of…

2.) We continue to love the herbal pre-rolls we made with Pure Beauty, and they make a wicked stocking stuffer: find em here

3.) Carlos sat down with Architectural Digest again, but this time to give a tour of our greenhouse, the Nonhuman Teachers Botanical Archive

4.) Our Mondo LA Holiday Parking Lot Sale will be taking place the weekend of December 13th and 14th. Mark your calendars, and more details to follow!

FUNDRAISER SHIRT INITIATIVE

Since time began, we’ve made shirts for causes we love: jaguar corridors, peyote rescue, living soil, …

NY & LA PLANT HAPPENINGS

Cactus Store — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 12:31:03 GMT

As many of you may know, Cactus Store began as a brick-and-mortar retail location in 2014 in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. In 2017, we opened a temporary seasonal space in the Lower East Side of New York City for what was supposed to be just one summer-long popup. While we closed up shop in LA in 2021, we would continue to emerge seasonally in NYC, like many of our beloved plants, until the vacant lot that we called home was sold in the winter of 2024.

As we move away from our humble roots as purveyors of xeric plants and continue to explore the depths of our ecological interests in the from of landscape design (Geoponika) and non-profit arts & education (Nonhuman Teachers) we invite those lucky bi-coastal elites among you to join us in bidding farewell to our beloved NYC home with one final plant offering soiree AND/OR visit our Wonka-esque Los Angeles workshop as we open the studio doors for a weekend parking lot blowout.

For the New Yorkers reading this missive, we have …

Merch Fundraiser: Thornscrub Sanctuary & Peyote Reserve

Cactus Store — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 20:59:14 GMT

Hi friends,

When the world is feeling even more insane then usual we find it helpful to remind ourselves what local change can look like — that’s why we are so excited to be working with Joey Santore on his badass conservation nonprofit, the Thornscrub Sanctuary in South Texas. Scroll down to check out clothing we designed, which all goes to support his efforts, plus other new merch etc.

Wormly,

CS Studio & Nonhuman Teachers

QUICK UPDATES & ANNOUNCEMENTS

1.) New clothes just dropped! Get your great aunt the t-shirt she never knew she wanted for Christmas.

2.) A little project with Pure Beauty is finally out: follow the smoke signals here

3.) Carlos sat down with Architectural Digest to answer readers questions about landscape design…

THORNSCRUB SANCTUARY & PEYOTE RESERVE

If you aren’t familiar with Joey Santore a.k.a. Crime Pays Botany Doesn’t, please do yourself a favor and check out his Youtube and Instagram. …

NAMAQUALAND TRIP PICS & 20% OFF SALE!

Cactus Store — Mon, 19 May 2025 21:50:41 GMT

Hi friends,

We know we’ve been quiet on here recently, we have been trying our best to focus on the physical world… but we promise to start checking into the virtual world to say hello more frequently!

We just got back from a 2 week trip looking at unreal plants in South Africa — scroll down to see a quick field report. Also we put some of our favorite T’s back in stock — take 20% off with the code NAMAQUALAND at checkout.

Wormly,

CS Studio & Nonhuman Teachers

20% OFF SITEWIDE & CLASSIC T’S BACK IN STOCK !

THIS SATURDAY in LA!!!

Cactus Store — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 18:38:16 GMT

Nonhuman Teachers & Fathomers Presents: INTERSPECIES IMPROVISATION & ECOLOGICAL SOUNDS with Jaron Lanier and David Rothenberg

Store opening at Dover Street Market LA!

Cactus Store — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 21:52:33 GMT

Howdy Earthworms!

We wanted to give you our dear readers a sneak peak at our new installation at DSM LA…. It doesn’t officially open until this weekend, but it might just be unlocked if you stop by tomorrow or Friday…

Also, after many requests, KIDS SHIRTS!

Wormly,

CS Studio & Nonhuman Teachers

Nonhuman Teachers Greenhouse at DSM LA

New duds & a special re-release

Cactus Store — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 23:18:57 GMT

Hi again, Earthworms!

We’ve been hiding in our cave dreaming of new gardens, other worlds, and fun t-shirts. We just finished some new duds and you can find them on the ol’ e-bazaar, or scroll down to see the full batch. We also have a re-release of our most requested shirt, Woody Minnich’s iconic hand drawn Lophophora design.

Yours,

CS Studio & Nonhuman Teachers

Online Winter Clean Out Sale 30% off

Cactus Store — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 17:04:08 GMT

Hi friends,

It’s that time of the year to make room on our shelves, so we went through our backstock last week and just restocked some sizes for a bunch of sold out styles.

These are all now 30% off for a limited time at www.cactus.store. Take a gander and use code TELESCOPE fish at checkout.

The beautiful deep sea Telescopefish

It’s been a hell of a start to the new year, so thank you all for the support and well wishes - it truly means a lot.

Wormly,
CS Studio

Subscribe now

And as a bonus for those looking for a little escape right now, please enjoy this reminder that the aliens we have been looking for might already be here….

SMOKEY THE BEAR SUTRA

Cactus Store — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 22:00:14 GMT

Hi,

We’ve put together this newsletter for those wanting to support the situation in Los Angeles and for folks affected by the fires seeking resources. Share this with friends and family in Southern California who might find it helpful.

This list isn’t comprehensive, but it includes links to other lists that are ever being updated. If you know of additional resources, please DM them to our Instagram @hotcactus_la, and we’ll update this accordingly!

Love, light, and SOS,
CS Studio

Subscribe now

A team of volunteers putting together DIY air purifiers at CS Studio, Atwater.

THE GOOSE IS GETTING FAT IN L.A.

Cactus Store — Fri, 06 Dec 2024 15:02:59 GMT

Xmas is coming, THE GOOSE IS GETTING FAT! Time for our AnnYULE CS Studio Holiday Parking Lot Sale. Here’s what you need to know:

HONK!

📅 Saturday, Dec 8 – Sunday, Dec 9

⏰ 11:00 AM – 3:00 PM

📍 3209 Fletcher Dr, Los Angeles

Secret cyber monday sale + Free shipping!

Cactus Store — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 21:39:45 GMT

Apologies for the spam, but while to mere mortals the Black Friday sale is officially over, we thought as a little holiday treat we would extend the sale for an extra day for you as a Substack special.

Use code WORMLY at checkout to get the 20% OFF discount AND you can stack it with the code to ORNITHOGALUM to get FREE SHIPPING (domestic only).

Love,
C.S.

And here is Max’s favorite Moondog song to help you get through your Monday.

FROM SHIRT TO DIRT

Cactus Store — Fri, 29 Nov 2024 13:47:18 GMT

Hi again, Earthworms!

It’s Black Friday—scroll down for treasures, everything is 20% off today (and all weekend)!

This edition of The Specimen Monthly is about our friend Cass Marketos. If you don’t know who she is, then you’re in for a real treat! If you’ve landed here via Cass and don’t know who we are, The Specimen Monthly is a reader-supported rag made by Cactus Store Studio and Nonhuman Teachers 501(c)(3). It’s where we share our thoughts and feelings, and updates from our studio in Los Angeles.

Yours,

CS Studio & Nonhuman Teachers

QUICK UPDATES & ANNOUNCEMENTS

1.) New clothes just dropped! Get your great aunt the t-shirt she never knew she wanted for Christmas.

2.) Black Friday sale is live: 20% OFF the whole dang lot, discount taken at checkout.

3.) Our Holiday Party Lot Sale is Dec 7th & 8th in LA. Gifts galore, we are breaking out the good stuff for this! 3209 Fletcher Dr. 11a-3pm.

SPEAKING OF…

BLACK FRIDAY PREVIEW

Cactus Store — Thu, 28 Nov 2024 19:56:25 GMT

We have a whole crop of new duds releasing tomorrow morning on our web bazaar , wanted to give you dear Substack reader a sneak preview of the lot.

Also in honor of everyone’s favorite holiday we will be having a Black Friday 20% OFF SALE site wide – the discount will be automatically added at checkout.

Also keep your eyes peeled tomorrow for a full Specimen that’s about the Compost Shirts we made with Cass (2 of the 12 are shown below).

Thank you as always for reading and supporting!

Much love
C.S.

PS. for those in LA we hope to see ya at the Holiday Sale Extravaganza, Dec 7-8th at our studio, 3209 fletcher drive 11a-3p gifts galore.

C.S. Studio

YE OLDE SUMMER PARKING LOT SALE {{{TOMORROW}}}

THE TIME HAS COME AGAIN

FOR THOSE OF YOU IN NYC!

A Respite from the Doldrums

Earth Does Not Belong To Man

SUN RA ARKESTRA LIVE IN NYC

***DATE CHANGE***

Springingly Forward

This Weekend: Thy Annual C.S. Holiday Parking Lot Greenhouse Cleanout Sale!

New clothes & updates from the Studio

NY & LA PLANT HAPPENINGS

Merch Fundraiser: Thornscrub Sanctuary & Peyote Reserve

NAMAQUALAND TRIP PICS & 20% OFF SALE!

THIS SATURDAY in LA!!!

Nonhuman Teachers & Fathomers Presents: INTERSPECIES IMPROVISATION & ECOLOGICAL SOUNDS with Jaron Lanier and David Rothenberg

Store opening at Dover Street Market LA!

New duds & a special re-release

Online Winter Clean Out Sale *30% off*

SMOKEY THE BEAR SUTRA

THE GOOSE IS GETTING FAT IN L.A.

Secret cyber monday sale + Free shipping!

FROM SHIRT TO DIRT

BLACK FRIDAY PREVIEW

DATE CHANGE

Online Winter Clean Out Sale 30% off