23 November 2003: Sing the Monkey Song

Happy Monkey Day!

A week ago, on the evening of Sunday the 16th, I walked over to Sherpa & Syrinx’s house and the three of us drove into San Francisco to do a public Paratheatrical Research lecture/demo at CELLspace, a collective dedicated to providing space for cool stuff to happen.

The plan for the lecture/demo was that the audience would sit on couches and folding chairs in a broad triple-rowed semicircle, and Sherpa, with a microphone, would sit in a chair against the wall that faced the audience, and talk about the Paratheatrical Research lab work. In the semicircular space between Sherpa and the audience, five hardened paratheatrical lab veterans would do a miniature paratheatrical lab session, consisting of the basic paratheatrical warmup plus one group polarity ritual (I’m not going to try to describe all the elements, terms, and methods of paratheatrical lab work here – there’s a book that does that now, and plenty of info on the Paratheatrical Research website). Syrinx, meanwhile, would man the table where people could buy copies of the book and, more importantly, sign up if they were interested in participating in the Initiations lab, which starts on Sunday the 30th.

Understand that when I say we were going to do a “miniature” lab session, I mean we were going to do about 75 to 90 minutes of the most physically and psychologically demanding work I have ever encountered, as opposed to the usual 3 hours.

The other demo participants met us at CELLspace: Paradox, ButohBeast, Gabriel, and Serene. Paradox, Gabriel, and Serene will all be participating in the Initiations lab (as will I, of course), but ButohBeast has scheduling conflicts and won’t be able to join us for this one. Zap is also signed up for the Initiations lab, and she came to watch the demo but didn’t participate. Zap wasn’t about to let herself go like that with all those people watching – like many actors (and many non-actors, and many online journalers), she likes to maintain a lot of control over her image, both onstage and off.

It’s been over a year since the last paratheatrical lab, but even longer than that since I worked with some of these people. I hadn’t had contact with Paradox since we finished the filming of Tragos in early 2000.

The depth and intensity of a given lab or lab session is primarily a function of the level of power of the participants (any RPG player knows this already: when a group of wizards perform a ritual together, the power of the magic generated depends on the skill levels of the various wizards involved). Throw one really powerful neurosomatic sorceror into the mix, and the intensity goes way up. Throw in another, and it goes up exponentially, because anyone advanced enough to deal with a paratheatrical lab at all is receptive enough to pick up on the ambient energy, amplify it, and radiate it out to be picked up and amplified by others.

Our demo crew that night had the highest overall power level of any group I’ve ever worked with. See, in most of the various overlapping circles of community I’m connected with, I’m the neurosomatic sorceror. Many of my friends practice neurosomatic sorcery to some degree or another – some quite powerfully – but most people I know regard me as having an unusual degree of expertise in the field. But this crew were all masters. Every one of us was used to being the most powerful sorceror in the room almost all of the time. I’d like to think I wasn’t the only one among us who was slightly intimidated by the sorcerous credentials and skills of the others

Each one of us was very different from the others. Of the five of us out on the floor, I was the most conservative. Not politically, of course (politically, we were all anarcho-tribalists - once one is regularly doing that sort of work at that sort of level, I’m not sure there’s anything else one can be). But I was the one who lived closest to the mainstream, the one who could most easily give an accounting of his life and work that would be coherent and palatable to a non-mutant. Me. Imagine a room with five people in it, all masters of various esoteric arts and disciplines, of whom I’m the least obvious mutant, and probably the one with the least intense presence.

Anyway, the demo was a great success. Afterwards, Sherpa invited the five of us to come out and sit with him and answer audience questions. That was a lot of fun. They were a good crowd (there were about 60 of them). They asked good questions, and bought books, and a few of them have signed up to join the Initiations lab.

Friday was my last day tutoring job. I’m glad to be done with it. Loved the kids, but the management sucked ass. Said goodbye to Wolf Gal, handed off various items in my stash of teaching supplies to her, told her to keep in touch. Took Padawan out to a lavish dinner, told him repeatedly to keep in touch, and then, for the last time, well after dark, he accompanied me on the long pleasant hike around Lake Merritt to the 19th Street BART Station.

This evening I went to a party at Serene’s place with Sherpa and Syrinx, and met many wonderful people and saw other wonderful people whom I’d met before and was glad to see again. Serene initiated a group discussion about community, and then I came home to find this magnificent journal entry by Ace on the same subject.

Tomorrow, Syrinx comes over so I can help her with the cover of her upcoming CD, Dream of the Blue Moth.

Thanksgiving, for me and Dragon Lady, will be at Stagewalker’s this year. If you’re in the Bay Area and you know where Stagewalker’s is, you belong there too. If you don’t know where it is, write to me and I’ll tell you – provided you can convince me that you’re someone I know, and not some random wing nut who stumbled upon this site while doing a Google search for Clown Interrogation Links.

Monkey monkey monkey,
Sing the Monkey Song!
Monkey monkey monkey,
Monkey all day long!

Monkey monkey monkey,
Sing the Monkey Song!
Monkey monkey monkey,
The monkey’s name is Fong!