SUN RA ARKESTRA LIVE IN NYC
'HORT/CULTURE' returns + some news and Panspermic musings from HQ
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.
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