Long before Sun Ra packed his bags and moved to outer space and back, he spent a good part of the 1950s preaching on a street corner on the south side of Chicago. We would have liked to have seen that.
Fast forward to 2000 and someone (it's left mysteriously vague who it is) stumbles across a folder labeled "One of Everything," which is on the verge of being destroyed. Turns out the folder contains the original typed manuscripts of 46 of Sun Ra's proclamations--no, “detonations”--from those early street-corner days. John Corbett, writer, producer, and School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Adjunct Associate Professor, compiles the manuscripts, transcribes them and the result is the Whitewalls release The Wisdom of Sun Ra: Sun Ra's Polemical Broadsheets and Streetcorner Leaflets.
We mostly love the first half of the book: all 46 manuscripts, reproduced in color (though mostly the colors are beige and cream), showing Ra's scratch-outs, margin notes, and... uh... idiosyncratic typing style. The second half of the book comprises the same set of manuscripts cleaned up for easier reading. Collectively, the broadsheets treat racism, class, and America's historical destiny all in the context of a critical re-reading and reconfiguration of the Bible. We find in them a healthy dollop of interpretive genius with a generous sprinkling of crazy-man rambling. Just like Ra himself.
Among the notable passages, this one leapt out at us: "You are the key to the world's confusion. If you turn again, the door to life will open. It is better to have the right key to open a door than to knock for an eternity and never be welcomed inside." True dat.
