Sun Ra

A large chunk of the country sweltered in a merciless heat wave, fruit bats and possums falling dead from trees. The RAN fired across the bow of a boat carrying desperate refugees. In was in this background that I went to see the Sun Ra Arkestra on the first night of the 2014 MONA FOMA festival.

Beautiful warm high summer evening I went down to an old wharf reclaimed warehouse on reclaimed from the sea Hunter Street. Having seen Sun Ra once many years ago -- sometime last century -- and knowing what to expect, I was still blown away by the joy, by the sonic oscillation, by the wild fire jazz bebop rave burning free across interplanetary space. The juxtaposed rhythms, chaos of vibrating space.

And as I was driving home, I was struck by the beauty of the moon reflecting off the waves. The Sun endlessly explodes and flames, radiating heat and light and all manner of energy. After seven minutes or so these expanding wave vibrations bounce off and make the moon glow. And the light then falls the surging endless wave upon wave of the lagoon. The light strikes sensitive cells in my eyes and is then relayed, in a effort to make sense, to my brain.

And so with Sun Ra Arkestra. This cold, empty, outer space depth of an idea struck me as a way to make sense of the band. Sun Ra used to speak of being transported to the planet Saturn. This transportation is the unifying idea for the band. Sum Ra created, and the Arkestra continues this science fiction mythos as a theme for their performances. This is seen in the Eygptian flavored space age customs, in lyrics which sing of other worlds and dimensions, of interplanetary harmony. And when they play the music rolls and swirls and bounces around and at times is reinforced to make bigger and stronger waves, while at other times the sound is undercutting and making stationary waves. Sound rises from the vibrations and mingles to bring forth new sounds that have never been played. These future echoes come to life and fall away.

Horns sounded, drums and piano and guitar and bass and an assortment of voices filled the hall. The audience swayed and danced and clapped along. The band encouraged the audience to become part of the band, part of sound, part of the cosmic harmony. The band played the Hobart Blues and I closed my eyes and swayed and dreamt down, dirty, ballsy Chicago brothel blues. Strippers glistening in the light half covered by feather boas, pasties blinking reflected diamonte crystals. In my reverie it was appropriate for the Arkestra to play “When You Wish Upon a Star,” as music, like dreams, builds our desires from the void, melting them away in an instant. And I thought that if Finnegans Wake is the book of the night, the book of dreams, then Sun Ra Arkestra is the song of the night, a vast endless soundtrack to dreaming.

Dream Factory Manifesto

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How can we speak of a dream factory?

Socialism?

Capitalism?

Classless Society?

What are our dreams? A better life, a life of co-operation, of working together.

What is a factory? A place to work, where things are made. From Blombos Cave to the Apple plants in the Special Economic Zones of the People's Republic of China, we come together to make things. Man woman young old black white. Work is what unites us, the coming together to work. Work must become play.

Even deeper work ((think elastically) and the complex of changes (social and physiologically) and feedbacks involved) created us.

Does work create language? Have women always done the bulk of the work? Did women create language?

Factory from the Latin factor. a maker, a doer, performer, perpetrator, one who strikes the ball.

We need to turn away from the dystopian narrative. We need to create utopias - we can write of utopia and mock the plutocrats.

Thomas Moore brought the word Utopia into being. The idea is old, older than the name, think of the utopian farces of Aristophones. In Cloud Cuckoo Land, Pisthetaerus chases away the poet, the town planner, the inspector, the oracle peddler, the law mason.

Pisthetaerus becomes like a God.

Utopia; what is the meaning? It could be outopia - no place, or it could be eutopia, good place. Does it matter? Moore gives us only utopia, teasing us or misunderstanding? Culture arises equally from the fact of not remembering the quote correctly as it does the note perfect recital.

Tales and myths, or so I am told, are powerful emotional tools that pass culture and morality down the ages. Let us not pass down the morality of our parents, of the police man, or an edginess that actually dulls.

Reject bourgeois concepts of conflict in literature! Let us build to our own climaxes!

I am not naive, but I seek to become naive.

Johnny Rotten sang "There is no future", it was implied but not understood, unless you make it yourself.

He also sang, "Your future dream is a shopping scheme." Let us write, let us spew, let us draw, let us extrude, sing, scream, paint, cry, act, shout, perform, build our dreams. For ourselves.

No more tales of junkie lusers - realistic and gritty as they may be, they only reinforce the power of Kapital over us, they only reinforce our alienation.

Reject the cult of violence and death. we are, our children are fed a steady diet of death, let us say enuf. Choose (as George Michael quaintly said) Life. Real active live work, as opposed to the concentration of dead labour.

Work going back the generations - something done, deed, action - weorc, worc, werkan, werk, verk, warc, werah, werk, gawaurki, vareza, ergon, orgia, gorc, verziu, vargas, vragu, waurkjan, wyrcan, wrikan, wrecan, yrka - and PIE *werg-. Also an urge, THE HUMAN URGE.

Do not be wishy-washy.

If you want to be cynical, do it properly, give up all wealth and possessions, live in a wine cask, do not eat meat, and see the knife as your friendly doctor.

If you wish to be a skeptic, again do it properly, doubt all things, even your own thoughts and experiences. Walk with friends who will save you from the cliff.

To create to make to do to act to play to dream. To struggle to win.

Be realistic, the graffito spoke to me, demand the impossible. The Dream Factory. The space where we build our dreams. A place of work and struggle.

A lifetime of compulsion. A dream of play. Two or three days a week at most, maybe a week in every six. Child care at the work place, schools serving breakfast and lunch, helpful police men and women dressed in natty grey uniforms with pink piping, passing out condoms, and directions to lost tourists, lovely and unarmed.

Philosophy has only interpreted the world, the point is to change it. Is not art a mode of philosophy? Is not art a love of wisdom, a way of interacting with the world. The point of art is to change the world.