"By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it.
The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired." 
(Nikos Kazantzakis)

Humans love art because like children with scissors and paper, you can never be too sure what will happen next. Making crazy things brings us closer to the unknown. Unknown is best place for artists to hang. You cannot buy the unknown. You cannot train it to be well-behaved. Treat it too preciously, and it will lose its raw wet beauty. Only thing to do is embrace it.

When you are playing music or making theater - even when you are playing good team sport, you quickly learn that your success is tied to the success of others; that when they rise, you rise too, and that when they fall, so too do you.

So, what could be more splendid then daily rain of unknown on your life and those with whom you make art? Pretty soon you may find like Spoonman, that when you give your life to the unknown, what results is more often than not, very very strange - oftentimes even stranger than you can imagine.

The Interplanetary Festival is Spoonman's wish for our solar system - a gathering of what is most beautiful, profound and strange in creation. This explains why COBRA LOUNGE was strange in this way - never entirely earth-bound experience. When you are youngish Spoonman, you think your sparkly toys are so unique. Later you see you were just part of some hidden tradition, suddenly no longer hidden.

And who is to say that representatives of other planets have not long been and are not already among us? Did Sun Ra have to be registered to vote on Saturn to make music that evoked it? What Martian comedy traffic school certified teacher like Lord Buckley? Were quirky Dadists really more at home in Geneva than in some colorful corner of Venus? Where were our "alien" sensibilities forged anyway? On a distant planet or right here in the dark reaches of the imagination?

We can have an Interplanetary Festival any time we like because we already have one that goes on year round. Other earth festivals are just not weird enough. Oh, maybe Ozfest nails some of the noise and chaos, but it cannot begin to really capture the sense of startling surprise that a good combination of De Kooning screensaver and Mingus ringtone can.

I say we push these impulses forward. To the love of the unknown, we add the desire to love together, to collaborate. The road to art is very narrow, for at every turn, strange beauty must fight its way past conventions, petty moralities and small-minded pressures to conform. The great infinitely expandable Interplanetary Festival will be our destination;
another impossible reason to desire further.

We will seek

Art that awakens patience

Experience that evokes lost worlds

Deep love for all beings

Harmony with all spheres

Props to the good powers

Respect to the rest

& wherever possible...

Hot hair-raising celebrations!