A Pause For The Cause-> Sun Ra: Do The Impossible

Sun Ra: Do The Impossible airs on American Masters Tonight

Tonight, after about 4 years of work, my wife Christine Turner’s film, Sun Ra: Do the Impossible, premieres on PBS.

I wanted to share it here because living alongside someone whose job it was to immerse herself in the world Sun Ra created gave me a fuller understanding of his work, and what she shared influenced my thinking during a time when I was rebuilding my creative framework, one that motivated the creation of this Substack.

If you aren’t familiar with Sun Ra, you should be. He was an iconic figure in the jazz music scene in the latter half of the 20th Century whose eccentric performance, presentation, self-mythologization, and philosophies inspired generations of musicians, storytellers, social and political thinkers.

Sun Ra is widely considered the godfather of Afro-futurism. His idiosyncratic presentation and self-generated mythology arose out of a philosophy meant to encourage people to look beyond the boundary of what is ordinarily considered possible as a way to inspire boundless thinking that might change our material reality.

That simple idea, made me reconsider so much of the music and culture I’ve consumed for decades - the hyper street heroics of Wu-Tang Clan, the Gothic Futurism of Ramm:Ell:Zee, The Space-Funk of Afrika Bambaataa & The Soul Sonic Force, to my generation’s embrace of the lingo and philosophies of the Nation of Gods and Earths (“Peace God”), and how these ideas fit into the historical arc of Americans of African descent in particular, and marginalized Americans more broadly.

As I stepped back into producing “work” in 2025, with the goal of underlining the importance of the subcultures from which my own “success” had emerged - Hip-Hop, Youth Culture, Bootleg Culture, etc - I started to slowly push out work shaped by thoughts that had been brewing for years, only to find that the moment that those ideas had been developed to address, had passed. I realized simply shining a light on the small corners of culture wasn’t going to be enough to address the moment we currently live in.

This moment, one in which our government is more openly than I’ve ever seen, positioning itself to target its own citizens—by ideology, by ethnicity, by socio-economic status—without the cloak of clandestine operations, or typical political double speak. In this moment, the work of imagining alternative realities, has utility. It seems to me that the task now is less about creating additional points of inspiration and more about pointing directly at fully developed bodies of work that inspire people to —Do The Impossible. This film and the work of its subject can work as tools to create the leaps of action, organization, and change this moment demands.

All that, to say, if you’ve been interested in anything I’ve posted here on Substack, and even if you haven’t, Sun Ra’s story may have something for you right now too.

Tune in to American Masters on PBS tonight, or check the film out sometime over the next month as it will be viewable on PBS’s website through mid-March.