polyform

Root and Branch

2011-12-25T03:19:00.001-08:00

This one diffused and startled moment

When the light drifts on the current,

And you are far away, but emphatically connected,

Because these gardens of memory grow within me,

Tendrils scrolling through the low crumbling stones,

Great swaying trees, evergreen monuments to the endless words,

Branching from one another, spoken and not, the understandings,

The mis-taken, the branches that are bare fruitless lines

Of what we failed to say,

Whole hillsides of rolling wildgrass faces, voices, strays,

Deep roots unseen and unsuspected, coiling within and into

One another, moments into each other, hours that tap wellspringing

Years and nights and seconds,

In the rich pungent soil of me,

The wet

Pooling in the cupped loam,

The wet of your kisses, of your tears, the wet between your legs,

The mingled wet of sweat and the salt trace of pure body, de-composed,

The elemental grains of decay and life, dust impregnated with nourishment,

The unending thirst for you, the gravity and the reaching, root and branch.

You are far away, but emphatically connected, you are the root and the branch,

My garden is overgrown with you.

In these moments, as the light ebbs, and my wakefulness

Is the low berm of heavy stones crumbling at my feet,

The taste of your soil lingers, the grains and the wet,

The cup of the belly swells in the starving dark,

The soil slowly mingles memory with longing

And nourishes improbably,

The autumnal garden made to bloom again.

OR 7

2011-12-19T23:01:00.000-08:00

Every smell

And every stone and

The turning lip of brine

In the bend of the running stream

Are all precious facts,

Spraying like the mist of your breath in the cold,

And I am faithfully tracking

All of it,

Because I'm still looking for you.

I know these roads.

That's the rock face

I lost my light to.

There's the beach where we kissed,

Beyond the tunnel,

Mingling, starfishes

And handprints.

I still have no light

And the road is longer

And colder than

I remember it should be,

But I am still looking for you.

I can still hear

My mother's howls.

It's possible, just,

To be joyfully sad,

To long for what I willfully left behind.

Because I am still looking for you.

Untitled

2011-12-07T01:37:00.000-08:00

There are these great trees out my window,

They live exuberantly. They live

Balanced on the surface of the seasons

Throwing their long-grown colors at me.

Their hands are stiff in the naked air,

Their shadows ignore the light altogether,

They whisper in the language of tides,

They do not know the words for regret,

That we know, have always known, so well.

I wish I knew

How to feel

The way they must feel

The passage of time.

It must be

That their days are our years,

That our hours are their moments.

The running lights of night and day

Are exhalations

That we unknowingly

Release from within,

Without,

In,

Out,

Light,

Night.

They live exuberantly,

Because they live careless

Of those hours, those running lights,

The many colors thrown at my feet.

And my hands are stiff in the cold air,

I do not always see the light,

And my moments last hours,

Falling like leaves

From the sky of my opened heart.

best,

paulmonster-wintering

Letter to K, 10 April 2011

2011-07-29T13:46:00.000-07:00

(Aside: I'm still working on this Iliad thing. I'm just moving in a strange timesense, is all.)

Dear K--

I'm working on a strange, heathenish, practically self-immolating piece about the Iliad and social work. Enclosed you'll find a rough copy of my notes.

I performed a version of what you'll be reading a week [sic] ago, at the Someday Lounge, a bar and music venue in Portland's Old Town. I wore a ragged set of mechanic coveralls, I used a microphone, and I had onstage a milkcrate concealing 2 bota bags of cheap Shiraz. I merely read off what you're seeing, plus some additional lines about what a Sacrifice is, and whether the Gods prefer flesh or wine, and then I demonstrated how to proplery sacrifice to the Gods, concluding by emptying half-a-bota-bag of wine over myself.

This piece is already growing of it's own volition. It wants to be more physical than these notes convey. it's a mingling of the radioactive obsession I have with Ajax and Diomedes from the Iliad, plus my equally radioactive vocation for Incident Reports--

--also enclosed please find an Utne article discussing why I love Incident Reports. Now, my IR tone is not quite so dispassionate as a police academy would require, but the purposefulness, and the incisive, persistent agendas are definitely there, hidden yet inexorable in the identity of the writer, of their authorship.

The Latin 'auctoritas' is at the root our words--and, I argue, our understandings--for 'author,' 'authority,' 'act,' and 'actor.' Auctoritas signifies a creator's responsibility for their work; the ability to call things as you see it; the 'doing' of things, more so than the 'planning' of things.

When I write Incident Reports, I see it both as a (supposedly) dispassionate act of recording, of witnessing what's happened; but more so I see the writing of it as an act of auctoritas, an exercise of the subliminal agenda...

...for more often than note, the Incident Reports I write tend to be a cry in the dark, the only response our purportedly rational world will sanction, in the face of such terrifying things as whatever I happen to be writing about.

And that's pretty much exactly how I feel about the Iliad, and about really good and penetrating performance work. At their best, so many of the works I really care about in this world are cries in the dark, hopeless but desperately brave confrontations against obscene odds, ultimately useless but also, mystically, enough. Profoundly enough.

There's a vein there that I need to mine, about loyalty in the more current context, or surrender; and piety or trust in the meta-context...

As it is, there's solid stuff for maybe 7 minutes. But the veins are rich beyond telling. As I write this my mind's eye ravenously wanders throughout, as distracted in the detail as I am in the telling of all this. I'm confident of building something really special, but there's quite a lot of work to do, clearly.

And I'm just beginning to realize, in the wake of performing what I have on 1 April, that in fact the real work is happening through and during actually performing, with an audience on top of me... Jad Abumrad talks about how he designs Radiolab's sound for the 4th or 5th listen. What if that deliberate meticulousness was radically mixed with the ultimately ephemeral ethic of performance? Stringent, manic, visceral qualities evolving each time I perform, with new and freshly discovered substance/text, borne aloft by a durably built structure, a set of fixtures, pole stars around which all these constellations revolve.

Thus, in, say, a 6 show run, every night is different, a progression through the themes, but each night is held together by the same hinge-pins. And each of those hinges grow, and emerge more and more clearly with the telling...

best,

paulmonster-auctoritas

The Clackamas Project

2011-06-29T01:17:00.000-07:00

I just finished teaching in a kickass project in Clackamas County. The link is to an Oregonian article, talking in broad terms about it. Below are the answers I sent to some questions the Oregonian reporter asked me via email, recorded here for old times' sake.

===

I’m a professional theatre artist and educator in our fair city. I am being paid for my time. I also work for PlayWrite, Inc., working with at-risk youth to write and develop plays, and then stage them with professional actors. And I work for Janus Youth Programs’ Buckman House, a residential transitional facility for juvenile sex offenders.

I believe very strongly in the totality of community. That is, in order to be a fully-functioning human being in community with others, I believe that we must accept and acknowledge the dysfunctional, the underprivileged—the adjudicated—just as much as the functional, the privileged, the innocent. Roman playwright Terence, himself an emancipated slave, wrote, “I am a human being. Nothing human can be alien to me.” And I believe he meant that we all have the capacity, and, in some ways, the responsibility, to look to the horrifying as much as the beautiful, the tragic and terrible and sublime all together. We are derelict in our responsibilities as citizens if we simply ignore what we do not understand. I believe much suffering we experience as a community arises from the collective amnesia and myopathy that we impose on ourselves.

I’ve led performance workshops for advanced drama students, for at-risk/homeless students, for students with behavioral issues, for students with substance abuse issues. I believe that performance is more than flashiness, or sexiness, or even talent. Live performance is a means for an individual to speak clearly and specifically for their own perspective, to an audience assembled for that purpose. Shelley believed that poets are “the unsung legislators of mankind,” by which I think he meant that real art is not merely an exercise in vanity, but an honest and meaningful attempt to make sense of the world, to govern ourselves in the best way, to harness creativity and passion for the greater inspiration of us all.

I’m working with these students to discover and refine that which is redemptive and honest in their own experiences, and give the beginnings of form to that. The stakes are real; audiences are wonderfully equipped to see through bullsh*t. My goal with these students is simply to open the door of possibilities that giving voice and audience to their creativity can mean for each of them, individually.

I do this work because, at my core, I identify with the prejudices and obstacles they live with. I was an angry, dysfunctional young student with a troubled home life, I’ve never been comfortable with authority structures, I deal with assumptions about my behavior or attitude that bear no basis in reality to this day.

As an artist, I’m exhausted by work that merely perpetuates a privileged, myopic, superficial perspective of the world. I’m sick and tired of endless productions of the same misogynistic, milk-toasty plays or movies or music. Now, ironically, Shakespeare—who epitomizes “safe” establishment work—saved my live when I was 14. Theatre performance was the cathartic channel that allowed me to develop healing perspective over my own emotional traumas.

As an educator I’m specifically drawn to the underprivileged, because as an artist I know that the real work to come, is not going to come from people emulating Shakespeare or even any other mainstream figures now current; the work that will save lives, the way Shakespeare saved mine, will come from those who break rules and struggle at every level, and mightily, the way Shakespeare himself once did.

How to Fight Gods

2011-04-11T19:42:00.000-07:00

These are rough notes for a one-man piece I'm developing. I performed a version of this text at the Someday Lounge on 1 April, with a microphone, myself in dingy mechanic's coveralls, and a milkcrate hiding two bota bags of cheap Shiraz. Note that this wants to be more than these notes indicate now. I don't know what it will be, but it's already growing. The version I performed included a section on How to Make A Proper Sacrifice, addressing the question of whether the Gods prefer flesh or wine or both. At the end of which, I emptied a bota-bag over my head.

===

1. Try not to fight a God. This is hard. You usually don't actually know if you're fighting a God until after S/He's finished unwinding your guts for you. But there are signs. Say, your knife breaks. Or a bird sh*ts on you. Or an earthquake and a tidal wave and radioactive disease wipes out a bunch of your people. That's when you know you're fighting a God. You should back off.

2. It's hard enough, fighting mortals. Have you ever, actually, really fought someone? The human hand has 273 individual bones. That's 273 moving parts that can break, that can send little shoots of pain to crawl up your rippling arms, to sear your massive shoulders, grab you by the neck and take you down to your knees, sobbing like a child over the mangled, bloody ruin of your once splendid hand. (I don't actually know if there are 273 bones in your hand. I made that up.)
But I don't give a f*ck how brave you are. I don't give a f*ck about your brains, or your strength. How pretty you are. How much money you have. Your Mama or your Daddy. What counts for more than any of that, is How You Handle Pain.

3. There are more kinds of Pain than there are people in this world. And you don't have to get hit to feel pain. You can't take the cream out of the coffee, you know. Bullets only travel in one direction. Talk all you want, talk all day and all through the night. But you will never un-say that thing you said.

[Briseis Section]
It's never actually about the thing right in front of you. Achilles quit the war because of Briseis and you think, what the f*ck?, right? A girl? He steps away because of a girl. What's the sense in that? Bullsh*t sense is what that is. Let me talk about Briseis for a second.

She's the 20-year old with her tits popping out all the damn time, she's the one with the pale eyes and the parted lips, the thighs you can't stop thinking about, the neighbor's daughter that you can't get out of your head. Or maybe she's your own daughter, you sick f*ck. Because this is the thing about Briseis: it's wrong.

It's f*cking wrong. All of it. This whole godd*mn war is a f*cking sex crime gone nuclear, our lives are getting f*cked in front of our very eyes. Helen, sh*t.

Briseis was just some pretty young thing who Apollo loves. Or doesn't, depending on your point of view. And because she's sacred, okay, because she's off-limits, like you don't touch her with a finger much less your diseased little prick unless you want the Divine Archer to mulch your nuts with a corkscrew--

Because of all that, why, of course you can't take your eyes off her. She's forbidden. Sacrosanct. She's hidden in plain sight, she's the One Who Got Away, she's the coy pair of eyes that belie the little "no" her full, gentle, sweetly parched lips whisper in your ear.

I'm speaking now to the men in this room. Sons. Do you not feel the rage welling in you? You're a working man. Your work is personal, you work with purpose. We were brought here to do something real. And hard. A task for grown men and heroes. You're not asking for anything less than your due.

You glimpse the small of her back, the arc of her throat, the easy mellow wine of her voice, and these are your riches, this is your worldly wealth. Her freckles are stars on the sky of her body, and you can count each one of them. She hums softly in the kitchen, in the car, in the bath where she thinks you can't hear. Her arms fold around your shoulders just so, and her legs wrap around you the way a net wraps a gasping fish.

I don't think he's heard the bad news, that his best friend is dead. But I can't see any Greek who could do that job. They're all lost in dark mist, their horses too. Father Zeus, deliver the Greeks from the dark. Make the sky clear. Allow us to see with our eyes. Destroy us in the light, since destroy us you will.

[Close Holds]
4. In a Close-Hold Engagement, the objective is not just to neutralize the subject. The objective is to remove all uncontrolled elements from the situational context. What does this mean? Regarding the hostile subject, this means definitively, and if necessary forcefully denying that subject the means to violently dispute your authority. Close-Hold Tactics are designed to immobilize, to incapacitate. Your body is a lever. Your tactics, your choices that you make: what to say, how to say it. A lunge, a thrown fist. The kind of knot only you tie. The way you pivot against a wrist, the slow squeeze, your knees against his chest, the firm, steady grip on his throat and your open palm smothering his face, holding him down under the water... Close-Hold Tactics magnify your physical strength, your body, your will. You're built for maximum force in minimal amounts of time. It's not just instinct, it's systemic reaction, cascading operations designed and directed to maximize force in a specific, highly confined moment.

You have a god inside you. This is where you remember who you are.

best, paulmonster-ajax

Letter to L.

2011-03-17T22:33:00.000-07:00

Dear L--

I don't know where to start. All kinds of drama, and good things, too. I miss you, of course; daily I encounter at least half-a-dozen stirring or strange things blooming throughout our conceited little city, things I note down in my addled brain to talk to you about, but then I always remember you're in another hemisphere, and then I get all curt and snappish, if at the House, or mopey and distracted, if at Workshop.

We're at WS right now. My writer is having twins. She nearly gave birth on the last day of Week 1, and they had to rush her to OHSU before we even saw her that day, because her babies aren't actually due until the end of May. And we've just started Week 2.

I've evolved into the resident Willy for every demonstration of Death of a Salesman; previously, I'd been the reigning Hamlet. I'm personally happier--Willy has more ground to cover, with less cultural baggage, fewer cognitive obstacles than Hamlet. But there's also some pressure. Wily is not an easy piece to play. I usually get wiped out on Day 1 as a result.

Due to the vagaries of the Workshop hierarchy, I now possess sufficient rank to regularly lead day 3 or 4 of Week 1 and compete with M for leading workshops L or K aren't available for. Which is strange, considering I don't believe myself to be that more skilled than P or A, who are next in standing. But with C gone, T unwilling to lead whole workshops and likewise A, and with this glaring you-shaped hole in the room, we make do with what we got.

And I'm not even going to go into all the sad disasters at the House. Suffice to say that Mr. P is gone; I now assist V in the Level 2 groups; someone f'ed-up next door and now we can't afford paper towels or relief staff; the guys have come out to every single Workshop performance except RM, and I'm already looking at other jobs. And that's just the big-picture stuff.

There's a rhythm now, that I know you're familiar with, between the Workshop world and the House world. I'd built similar rhythms of my own in my other working-life setups. It's dangerous because, as I get better at it, I get safer. My ideas and my tactical choices--how to handle writers/clients in crisis, how to apporach the long days when they all stack up on top of one another, how to write a proper progress note--which is a whole new thing, by the way, we now have to note everything with real attention to detail, and we can't give a guy units unless their MSP reflects the activity as an established objective... you can imagine how thrilled N is by this. The guys, too, such as they are... so now the last hour or two of every shift is spent noting what's been done, and while I personally kind of enjoy and appreciate this--it makes us more communicative, more deliberate and ultimately useful--I also know it takes time away from actually working with the guys. And on a busy day, this is crippling...

But my point is, as time goes on and I gradually get better at stuff, this work gets tamer, it loses my interest, as the urgency to solve things cools, and the not-sexy drudgery of simply doing the long, not-mysterious work it takes to actually do things, emerges.

But by nature I'm built on triage principles, and my ability to deal effectively with crisis stems from a kind of amnesia I suffer, an emotional amnesia, where the grand and staggering insights or the truthful and epic experiences are, not so much forgotten, but sealed away in various chambers, cleared from the decks in order to be ready for the next thing.

This 'clearing of the decks,' is what makes things get successively easier over time. It's troubling to me, that I've drawn myself together with essentially self-confining and self-sabotaging features, a built-in and gradual self-destruct mechanism, without which I would probably be busy destroying the world right now.

Instead of which, I'm now finally moving, inch by excruciating inch, on developing my own work--about which I'm too close and too vulnerable to go into detail here just yet. But I am performing on 1 April, which is apt, as I'm pretty much a fool for doing this, and in so little time.

B is making more noises about developing post-Workshop stuff for successful writers, and of course in my insomniac moments I toss and turn and wrestle with half-formed, fiery ideas about what to do and how to make it work. I'm in touch with Clackamas County Youth Corrections to put together a performance program there, too.

But these are like a small pageant of paper lanterns floating along on a vast, long, dark river, of which I can only see so much. These and more beatiful and terrible little things, proud of themselves, but only so much, while the endless current carries them along, and I do not know where this current leads, I only know it's strong.

Travel safely, you. I can't wait to compare notes with you, and share a drink, and maybe plot our next podcast again--

affectionately,

paulmonster-argentine

Letter to S, 3 Feb 2011

2011-02-08T16:02:00.000-08:00

Hey S--

It flatters me, of course, that you think of me as a hidden guardian of Portland. it's true that a great deal of my masculine psyche has been built on crimefighting- and masked-hero- foundations. Thus, our mossy city broods under the weight of its many hidden crimes, and I am its avenging conscience, flitting about with only my bike and my pack for company...

...actually, I spend less and less time actually biking, and more and more driving the PlayWrite carpool. We're at Rosemont right now, which always makes me wish I had daughters of my own, strange to say. These writers have so much imagination and feeling, as you know, and yet I live such a starved and secluded life, quite literally a sentence for most of them to endure. Most are clearly in desperate need of a hug, which is of course so strictly forbidden.

Prior to this we did New Aves, which L ably led, and prior to that the Showcase and Portland Night High School. We have Mt. Scott immediately after Rosemont concludes in two weeks, then White Shield actually overlapping a little bit. As far as I can tell, there's no real reason why our operational tempo has stepped up so dramatically, excepti8ng the usual varying requirements of individual sites. Concurrently, it seems like PlayWrite's current coach roster is the thinnest it's been in a long time, with the old guard all but gone, and the newbies not quite sticking, for various reasons. When I think about it, the weird synergy of B, the fatalistic exuberance of A, the strange grandiosity of T, the cold fervor of C--it's a wonder that any of us can sustain the centrifugal forces at work throughout.

I remain as vulnerable financially as I've ever been, perhaps more so, and it gets harder and harder to justify the sacrifices necessary to maintain my PlayWrite availability. This, I know, is the core of my difficulties right now, a tough little knot to solve. It's deeply important to me that, of all the work I'm doing, I can honestly say I fully and deepl.y believe in their core missions. All my works are built on roots of service and selflessness, the conviction that meaning and purpose are indispensable, in all things; and to do anything without meaning is ultimately wasteful. The problem with these values, is that selflessness necessarily leads to a neglect of self, a fundamental dynamic that I believe is responsible for why, in our fair city, a typical individual in social services makes so very little, compared to the vast majority of our peers; and that same dynamic prevails in performance, where work of substance and quality is somehow held to be far less valuable than the insubstantial, the superficial.

I take it on faith that my information remains incomplete. Ultimately, I refuse to conclude that these values, as thus described, are as unsustainable as my current experience indicates. But this is a close-run thing. It's a high-stakes game here at PJS HQ, and we play for keeps up in this here piece.

"Elsewhere" V. II is a pretty big success right now, I'm happy to say. We sold out all but one of our originally scheduled 5 performances during the scattershot Fertile Ground Festival, and we've thus decided to extend two more performances, just for the joy of it, really. Ellen wrote 4 new pieces, and even though, once again, we generally felt rushed and strained through the rehearsal process, Tech and Dress felt like an ample and healthy process, for once, and quite suddenly--without actually putting that much thought to things, really--I find myself surprisingly proud of our work, in a way I rarely am, in my experience.

Now, Shaking the Tree Studios, where we're performing, seats only 55 in our current setup, so a Sold Out house is not, in fact, all that hard to engineer. But it is authentic and truthful, to know that we as a company have grown in the interval since August, and the pieces we've carried over since then have grown quite a lot, too...

Let me know how things go in Lombardy, as you can. I've been remiss in following your blog, I'm afraid, but I will check in there soon, too. Know that your friendship and your talent are very dearly missed out here--

best,

paulmonster-mayhem

Excerpt, Letter to C, Draft

2011-01-13T16:57:00.000-08:00

...I closely identify wit the need to love and be loved. I regularly brim over with grief and bewilderment at my own loneliness. But ultimately, I'm rooted here in this kind of impoverished exile, because I believe in the work I do, and I see no distinction between what I do and why I do it, and I own the fact that these are crippling standards to maintain. There is no room, realistically, in my cracked and worn-out heart, to fully love another in the way I would need to in order to be so beloved in return. And that's a terribly difficult thing for me to accept.

I just finished a short piece for an evangelical NGO's benefit fundraiser, here in Portland. Compassion First builds and staffs shelters and social agencies for rescued victims of sex trafficking in Indonesia. For all my talk about high moral standards, and how why I do something ought not to be distinct from what exactly is being done, this was an instance where I could happily silence any of my own misgivings about evangelical Christians in SE Asia, particularly as their moral integrity dwarfs mine, the way cedar trees dwarf a patch of scrub grass.

There was very little text, just a handful of statistics supplied by the NGO. There was a small stage, maybe 20 X 20, set in the center of a sea of dinner tables, in the Jantzen Beach Marriott Hotel, which is the kind of sleepy, slightly seedy, down-at-heel corporate establishment that looks like it lost its real luster just after Reagan left office. Seven of us performed a ten-minute piece, that progressed in an arc from playfulness, to violence, to the kind of oppressive sexuality that I necessarily abhor, and, in my professional as well as artistic capacities, I find I spend altogether too much time with (which is another reason why I rely so heavily on Splendid Isolation). All this was thinly veiled in abstracted physical gestural languages, abstracted enough to fit the parameters of our commission, but clear enough to seriously affect our audience, and our own selves.

The Executive Director of Compassion First told us that the main goal in commissioning us, was to give some sense of real faces to the numbing lists of names and numbers. To his credit, the man spoke of how he'd been to an insane number of fundraising banquet functions, and the only ones that had meant anything to him were the ones that had used some form of original, authentic performance to distinguish the reality of their work from the necessary, hollow pageantry of the events themselves. Thus, even as my crypto-Catholic sensibilities were repulsed by the overly earnest, short-sighted and self-centered theological rhetoric typical of the Catholic experience of evangelicals, my instinctively contrarian, anti-establishment artistic self daily grew righteously militant in this cause and these aims.

This is the kind of work I was built for, only I wish there were more of it. And yet it's a matter of no small concern, that I've just effectively wished for more opportunities to perform some seriously fucked-up shit.

Next week is the big PlayWrite Showcase, a big fancy-dress to-do that's a long day of work for me. I won't be performing this time, which is alright, because I will be wrangling writers, hanging lights and getting up onstage to ask for money.

This is, I think, the toughest part of all my non-profit obligations. I exist and I do my work on the sufferance of the idle privileged, those with enough dispensable income to afford not to engage directly with the injustices that assail their consciences. Now, of course I'm grateful for their generosity, but at it's worst I'm made to feel like a servile draught animal, chartered to haul their heavy loads for them. The money is everything, and it's ultimately so little, a pitifully meager resource among a great many others that are far more urgently needed; above all, the need for presence, of mind and heart, real engagement with the real work that needs doing, the kind of unflinching strength and resilience that's beyond price, beyond measure...

best,

paulmonster-draught-animal

Letter to J, 27 December 2010

2010-12-29T01:46:00.000-08:00

Dear J--

I have a half-written response to your last kicking around somewhere, and I'll be sending that quite soon. Suffice to say that I love you dearly, and I can't guarantee I won't punch this new Orpheus in the face if I ever meet him, but ultimately, you must do what you must, and I must support that. And my own heart knows how critical it is to love and be loved, and I know what I myself have done to those around me, to those close to me, in the name of such passion, and thus, even as I myself have desired you, and tested y own heart against my own truths, I know your heart is true, that you do what you do for the right reasons and meaningfully.

That aside, I write tonight in crisis. I'm getting as drunk as I can at my neighborhood bar. These days I work at an independent living program for adolescent male sex offenders, which is, as you may surmise, arguably the toughest job I've ever held, which means something, coming from the likes of me.

Tonight, the devil came to pay me a visit. Tonight was one of the toughest shifts I've ever worked--I'll even say right now THE toughest. And keep in mind I've worked with deaths on the scene, several times, and brawled with drunks twice my size, and I've had a twelve-year-old pee on me during a performance.

The shift had 3 distinct phases:

1. I had to ask two guys for U/A drug tests. Now, I've done roughly a million of these in my professional life. Asking grown men to pee in a cup for me is, disturbingly, practically second nature. What was different this time is that I was required to U/A two adolescent male sex offenders, who themselves inevitably have histories of trauma as well as perpetrating abuse. This made a situation already awkward, triply so. It was pulling teeth just to get these guys to comply in the first place (because normally, we do saliva swabs but tonight we're out of saliva swabs so we had to do pee-in-a-cup tests, which require staff to witness the test in order to verify that the client isn't substituting someone else's urine or such.) My guys were none too happy about this.

2. My friend S is looking for an extra hand in her wig dept at OSF, and she thought of me. The contract is ten months.

Now, to be clear, OSF is, for me, the Theatre equivalent of Josef Stalin. I've seen I don't know how many embarrassingly crappy plays there, even as I've seen some good, sterling work, too. (I'd guesstimate the ratio at 1 in 4.) What gets me is that S' offer is $12/hour with unbelievably good benefits, albeit at the Josef Stalin of Regional Theatre in the US as I regard these things. Wheras my current work at Janus Youth's Buckman House pays all of $10.05 an hour, with bullshit benefits, and I'm doing essential work for my community, and it allows me to pick and choose the theatre that I believe in.

I'm convinced there's no right answer to this situation. So much crap springs from OSF, and is perpetuated by their aesthetic, that I don'[t know if I could endure that proximity intact. On the other hand, Buckman House is arguably the most difficult position I've ever held, and I took a pay cut to do it. I've lived beneath the federal poverty line and without health insurance ever since I left the County Library 7 years ago.

3. Tonight, one of my buys disclosed to me the full extent of his offenses. This guy is very warm, very positive, very outgoing, has a good heart, and has some physical and mental limitations. He's bonded with me as a trusted staff member that he feels he can confide in. And tonight, what he disclosed to me... consider the worst, most terrifying scenarios available to your imagination, and then explode them. T's demons are so insidious, so horrifying that I can hardly bear writing about them even as obliquely as this. The SBD therapists at Buckman, who between them have over 30 years experience in the field, have both told me that T's is the worst, most difficult case they've ever seen. For myself, knowing what I now know in his own words, and having dared to verify even the barest facts in his case files, I basically want to stab my eyes out.

Usually, I'm really awesome at being resilient and steady. I see my own work, in a continuous line from Hooper Detox and DePaul straight through now, as a means of fighting living monsters. I'm not even doing the real fighting--obviously, my guys are--and the monsters are basically immortal, confined in each of us, and so each day is a long, grinding, simmering confrontations between these hotly confined forces of good and evil, long hours of patient listening, and the most pig-headed, jackass-stupid and stubborn arguments I've ever had in my life, and then these terrible nights that you just can't predict, that you do your best to be ready for, and now here I'm holding on with all the poetry and philosophy, all the art I know, and all the training I've had, and all the people I love, I'm holding it all in my heart as closely as I can, just to get past this night.

I'm in no state to make any kind of decision on the OSF gig. I've a healthy legion of projects running right now, plenty in train. January and February will hustle past me with alarming quickness, just as these last several months have. I'm at a stand, though. For all my effort and care, I've no community to speak of, no peers who share my values. Even R and CH, they're too invested in a complacent performance world for me to be able to get behind. I can't say I know what to do instead, I wish I did. I've only my own arrogant conscience, my slowly percolating projects, and these monsters to watch day after day, out of which I barely eke out my living...

Know that I adore you, and I'm sending you as much New Year Luck as I can spare--

best,

paulmonster-monstrous

Letter to M., 13 October 2010

2010-10-13T11:16:00.000-07:00

Dear M,

I hope things are going well with you in LA. As per usual, I've missed you a great deal.

We never really had a proper summer here, the weather constantly shifting from one extreme to the next. Taking that as my cue, it seems I never really gained my footing over the course of these last few months. It feels as though I've worked very hard for very little pay, and given a great deal of myself to my friends with almost no support in return. For some reason, it's getting harder and harder to remember my role in the decisions I make, and it gets that much easier to cultivate the old patterns of resentment and isolation, which I've known far too well for far too long.

These days I work with adolescent male sex offenders in an "independent living" program, adjudicated youth who have completed their sentencing and treatment requirements. Our program is the final gateway to their reconstructed lives.

Aside from housekeeping duties like medications, record-keeping and head counts, the real meat of my work is in listening and counseling, perhaps two steps shy of true "therapy," but nevertheless delicate and deeply draining, arduous work. Some shifts are sleepy, uneventful parcels of hours, with only the monotonous routine of the hourly headcounts and medication distributions providing any kind of tempo. But most shifts are a complicated dance between this mandated monotony, and successive waves of the most melodramatic, infantile, or the most terrifying and insurmountable emotional and physical crises imaginable. I walk out of most shifts with the full spectrum of emotions firing simultaneously--something I know I've come to value as the ultimate criteria in all my work, theatre- and day-job, and thus I know it's a dangerous high, a kind of addiction that I've engendered for myself. It leaves me exhausted, but I do love it so.

Similarly, in my theatre world, I've been blessed with a steady current of meaningful, exhausting but ultimately limited work, at an unreliable tempo. It's a distinct advantage to know enough to know when to say no. And it becomes a most effective advocate, when meaningful work, difficult work does cross my path, and here I have this internal process, bourne of expensive experience, that goes to great pains to show how a potential project may be either worthwhile or utterly wasteful. I'm surprised, honestly, to feel utterly grateful for this tremendous fund of experience that I draw from on a daily basis. I'm surprised because I know how often I've felt hemmed in and weighted down by the very same thing.

Currently I'm working on a strange, beautiful little project for a local playwright's group, a monologue set in a suburban backyard, kind of a nervous breakdown extended over 8 pages. there are about 7 or 8 playwrights in the group, and as a fundraiser they've commissioned themselves to write short pieces, all taking place in and around a specific house belonging to one of the writers. I'm given to understand that most of these pieces are monologues. Each piece has been given a site in the house--dining room, bathroom, kitchen, basement, etc. I have no idea how much of an audience to expect, or how big this house is (I'll be visiting it for the first time Friday night, and performing on Saturday). being in the backyard, I definitely feel I got lucky with the luxury of an epic space, ample room to really test and explode things.

New work, specific work--work that's about clearly defined and illuminated people or ideas, and not merely pretty ciphers or overwrought cleverness--more and more I gravitate to this level of ambition and performance, and, surprisingly, away from Shakespeare. We are all at the mercy of our own growth, I suppose.

There have been a predictable succession of passing infatuations, incipient relationships collapsing under the burden of my neurotic misanthropy, or her comparatively uncomplicated worldview, whichever comes first.

Choosing to be worthy enough, whether of exceptional work, or deep love, or simply of a good night's rest, or gratifying sex--for a long time I assumed the choice to be worthy of all this was a simple choice. But as I watch my friends struggle with devastating breakups, and as I experience myself the price my "career" pays for my "principles," to me it seems too simple to say that we choose these things. None of us, so far as I can see, can be so emotionally ruthless and inwardly numb as any of these catastrophic circumstance expect us to be.

Increasingly I'm finding what I thought to be wisdom is really mournful courage, sometimes grim and sometimes joyful.

I wonder if any of this makes sense, or resonates in any way outside of my own head. The next PlayWrite workshop I'm teaching and leading begins next week, after the experimental monologue, and as this will be at Portland Night High School, one of our more disaffected sites, I'm aware that my growing nervousness affects everything I work on, including this letter.

I miss you more and more as time rushes by.

lots of love,

paulmonster-abides

Letter to E, 8 August 2010

2010-08-18T15:33:00.000-07:00

Dear E--

As you know, I, too, spend a great deal of time thinking about how not to waste my time. You mentioned (back in June) how you feel both young and fresh and jaded and cynical, an ambiguity to which I closely relate.

Particularly in the (weird, sad) world of dating. I've had enough relationships, enough experiences now that my List of Danger Signs to Watch Out For now practically encompasses every woman I've ever been attracted to who may themselves be attracted to me. Which is perplexing, to say the least. I like to think that, over time, I've explored and learned enough to be an emotionally competent, if not accomplished, partner (wow this letter got ridiculous pretty quickly). So in some ways, it's basically as though I've grown shy just as I'm beginning to get good at stuff... if that makes any sense. I suppose it's also true that I've always been, not shy, it's not quite the right word, but rather a deep distrust of masculine heterosexual norms, that makes me reticent to initiate things like flirtations and such. (My professional experience in mental health and addictions recovery communities only enhances these tendencies.)

Thus, the more I know and the more experienced I get, the higher my threshold for action becomes...

Lately, in [my professional world],I've gotten to know some new colleagues socially. It's surprised me how many people I consider my peers identify themselves as polyamorous, and how nuanced the meanings are within that label. Seen through the lens of my clinical world, at one level I can't even distinguish between 'polyamorous' as a healthy intimacy norm, on the one hand, and what could quickly be labeled impulsive emotional promiscuity, clinical classifications meant to be independent of moral judgment (though clearly pretending to be free of value judgments, in anything regarding sex and intimacy, is a tricky proposition at best).

It's not my place--nor is it really my function as a friend--to in any way evaluate or diagnose the emotional behavior of my friends and colleagues. Now, I can't help but frequently access, and positively benefit from what diagnostic skills I do possess. But in relying on that boundary--to not treat my friends as patients or clients--I'm given to seeing and understanding a great deal more.

A similarly ambiguous experience occurs whenever I get really drunk or high, or witness friends or partners so doing. Conversely, I've dated women in recovery, and experienced myself the awkwardness of being on the other side of a (in her case, much more stringent) boundary. In all of these instances, I'm as much an observer of my own interior tensions--between wanting to engage and enjoy myself, on the one hand, and awareness of my professional obligations the next day, on the other--so much so that the actual experience of drugs or alcohol becomes magnified by the act of self-observation, a heightened awareness--which, so I'm told, is frequently the point--that can be just as exhausting as a day at work.

In this context, I strongly relate to your stated need to scream and holler from time to time, particularly at the frustrations of an obstinately ignorant world. Where your indignation springs from righteously progressive feminism (and that substantiated in spite of so hostile an establishment as the Catholic University of Portland), mine is the brittle and corroded residue of the thousand little compromises of the working day world, compromises only ever made for the sake of the merest outliers of our identities. By which I mean, the petty situations, where we're asked to stay late to finish work properly belonging to others, where we're asked to tone down intrinsic differences for the sake of unity and workplace solidarity, where the priority of doing the right thing is abandoned for the sake of the convenient.

These are the ethical and moral characteristics, I think, behind questions as innocuous as, "what play should we do next, and why?" or, "should I apply for that position knowing I would have an uphill battle to deal with, knowing what I know?"

I do agree with your observation that theatre is a place where we can create ourselves, in the fullest sense. I guess in my experience, much as I love and am devoted, ultimately, to that ideal in theatre, I've experienced too many dissonant creations. Caught in the tremendous exhileration of self-creating, we too easily neglect to listen to one another.

It is the classic struggle between discipline and liberty. Focus dissipates in favour of giving ourselves, and to each other, free rein to establish our own individual presences. I worry at how strong work requires some version of this struggle, this tension, to in some way play out in just about every rehearsal process I've ever known. When I was less experienced, I felt this was a fair price to pay. Now, I'm not so sure.

Where your lovely letter needed swelling string music, mine, by contrast, needs some howling, plaintive Northern soul.

I hope your summer is going splendidly. Look to hear more soon--

Affectionately,

paulmonster-pomerium

Excerpt from my Letter to C.

2010-07-27T20:24:00.000-07:00

Dear C,

I work with this population every day. They come from all walks of life, have all kinds of faith, have experienced terrible abuse, or no history of abuse at all.

1. None of this is your fault. These things simply happen, an artifact of our world we live in. You're both loving parents and it's clear you've been amazing in raising J. and K. to be strong and vibrant people.

2. This gets better. An experience like this can be empowering and defining for J., and for K., given time and healing. This does not need to define her negatively.

3. Her diversity of friends can be a strength. People with different perspectives unconsciously show us different ways of looking at the world. That kind of wisdom does not come easily any other way. If there are obviously negative or harmful individuals associating with J., then of course they should not be tolerated, but otherwise, it's important to examine what we do not know before passing judgment. The worst case scenario (which I've seen in my professional work countless times) is the forced isolation of an individual, which only fed a stronger resentment and anger and catalyzed worse behavior later.

4. There does not need to be a reason. Drug-seeking behavior is a disease, not a character flaw. We do not need reasons to have a cold, flu, or cancer. There are things we can do to make us more vulnerable, like smoking or wearing wet clothes or whatever, but that's not a guarantee, nor is it really a reflection of our moral values. My point is that it's easy to cast judgment and say that someone is a bad person because they sought out drugs. But we are not bad people because we catch colds. At bottom, these are flaws in our neurological chemistry that we all have in subtly different ways, that manifest differently.

Some people drink. Some people have a temper. Some people get unstoppably curious. These are all examples of impulsive behavior that, when they act on it, trigger our brain chemistry to react with an adrenaline rush, and what is called, 'the dopamine cascade', where the chemicals and hormones in our system make us feel excited and energized, like the world is a fascinating place. In and of itself this is not a negative thing--it's how we experience all forms of pleasure. But when our system learns that the same physical actions result in the same pleasurable feelings consistently, our system starts prodding us to do those same physical actions over and over again. This is the basis of addiction as we currently understand it. The same chemical reactions happen in alcohol addiction as in drug addiction, pill-seeking, gambling addiction, sex addiction, etc., etc.

There is always hope. J. now has a precedent to reach out for help. That's something that the vast majority of individuals who have had similar experiences struggled to find and did not find. She has a strong support network. I have every confidence, from a professional as well as a personal perspective, that she will emerge from this stronger and healthier as a result.

Please know that I'm thinking of you all, and I'm willing to visit with J. and K. whenever possible.

best,

paulmonster-kuya

Excerpt from my Letter to C

2010-07-05T22:34:00.000-07:00

...It's true; I am, in fact, a hopelessly addicted letter writer. It began years ago, when I was doing a fair amount of traveling in AmeriCorps, then on my own, then on tour with various productions. Letters kept my friendships healthy, and nourished me in a way journalling never did.

My passion for stamps is purely ancillary to my love of writing and reading letters. Whereas most stamp collectors favor cancelled stamps and postmarks, I collect stamps purely for use, and particularly the interesting postage of other countries, no matter how remote the possibility may be of me writing from the Ukraine, say, or Bhutan.

In these recent years, letter writing thrives in my work environments, which typically involve long hours of minimal activity punctuated by highly concentrated moments of tremendous emotional heavy-lifting. (I work at a local nonprofit agency serving a broad range of at-risk youth. This particular program deals with young male sex offenders in residential treatment.)

In that context, I entirely agree with your point about mail being like flowers: it's astonishing, really, how an almost insubstantial gesture of awareness can have such a restorative effect. In that respect, it has a bit in common with live performance--I believe it's by disarming our expectations, by disclaiming that it's just for a limited run, that live theatre is capable of the tremendous insights and the real work; and likewise, that these merely ephemeral letters, simple bits of paper with scarcely more forethought than a grocery list, can and have kept me sane, simply by being signed, sealed and delivered. I've witnessed deaths firsthand, immediately before me, and I've worked long hours with clients, co-workers, friends and loved ones grappling with honest-to-goodness life and death issues; and in every instance, the most meaningful breakthroughs were made only after grasping the gesture that counts for more than just the sandcastle it seems to be. Like letters, or theatre, but also heartfelt apologies, or admitting responsibility, or letting go of resentment, or choosing to go, or stay...

Excerpt from my Letter to J.

2010-06-11T11:28:00.000-07:00

Dear Pirate,

It is not beyond the realm of possibility, that I might get my shit together and somehow contrive to visit you, much the way the Mongol horde visited central Asia, or the plague visited Egypt. I say possible, but many kinds of things are possible in June, and I must await the ripening of certain possibilities before I could possibly say, with any certainty, whether California has cause to dread my approach, whether it's time to start digging trenches and evacuate the non-combatants.

Truly, by this point in 2010, I'd hoped to be far better grounded than I yet am, to have a firmer grasp on things. But I continue as impoverished and uncertain as ever before, though I am at pains to remind myself that I'm rich with evidence of the worthiness of my decisions.

Thus, my days are brimming with good things. I spend too much time sleeping, and I wish I were more assertive and more thorough in my works and days. But the core of it is true: I have the rudimentary tools necessary to be of use to my friends and my community, and if I'm not in action as often as I'd like to be, at least those few actions are memorable ones, and there's a great deal I can point to that would be worse for my absence.

I'm writing to you now, having just seen a production of The Cherry Orchard at one of the new little repertory theatres in town. It was a fair-to-middling piece, but I don't necessarily hold that against anyone. The production carries a number of dear friends and colleagues--though I'm happy that so many work so often, it is wearying to see the same tactics employed repeatedly to unvarying effect.

But neither are my friends helped by the script, even in this new translation of Stoppard's. Surely I'm not the first to remark that Chekhov simply wrote the same play over and over again; or, at the very least, our contemporaries regrettably keep designing, directing and performing roughly the same structure, just with slightly different verbiage. I can certainly understand how this state of affairs came into being; actors, but particularly actresses of a certain age practically groom their own social circles to reflect the family and class dynamic reiterated repeatedly in Seagull, Vanya, 3 Sisters and Cherry Orchard. All the more frustrating as I'm certain that each of those scripts are authentic and expansive enough to be capable of fresh discoveries, if only we could free ourselves of the oppressively predictable Stanislavsky legacy.

No doubt I'm shamefully neglecting Chekhov's real achievements, and the context in which he worked. And we all operate in reaction to our immediate predecessors. It is of some consequence, I expect, that during our time Chekhov ranks as worthy either of emulation or reaction.

The night before, a dear friend gave me an extra ticket to see Maya Angelou at the Arlene Schnitzer concert hall--which, in spite of its primarily concert function these days, is in fact a close contemporary of the Geary in San Francisco in all kinds of ways. An epic space in the old style, back when they designed prosceniums--proscenia--with diligence and affection, before the ruinous influence of amplification. The space was absolutely packed, as to be expected. I was apprehensive, at first: my fuzzy memories of Clinton's first inaugural are of a splendid voice, resonant with first-hand experience of all the salient points of 20th century America. But when I read her poetry, even when I was very young I thought her work simplistic and maudlin.

I'm happy to say that I was much impressed. As a presence Angelou is worthy of the space, even if she doesn't technically fill it. (It's a surprising and saddening effect of amplification, I believe. Surprising because I would have thought a broader range of artists would've developed a likewise broader range of technique by now. As you and I know well enough, it's about so much more than mere volume, and even if shackled to a page, the tactical possiblities for connecting with an audience are myriad.)

But Dr. Maya Angelou is now roughly 80 years old. If she wants to sit onstage with a mike stand the whole time, and some nice Stickley furntiure as a backdrop, I'm down with that. As to my impression of her poetry, I found that her mind and her heart animate her work the way the sould does the body. She herself delivered a very telling remark: she is not a writer who teaches, but a teacher who writes. It is no wonder, then, that I found so little to be moved by on the page.

More even than her own work, Angelou spoke of the poetry that saved her life, poets and writers that convoyed her through terrifying times. It was all deeply inspiring. Throughout I was conscious of the fact that she is among the last of the living generation that ended Jim Crow; she told us of the six or seven large white men who tried to lynch her uncle, mirrored 40 years later by the six or seven large white men in crisp uniforms, sent by the first black mayor of Little Rock, to escort her to that same uncle's funeral with all due ceremony.

She said something very important to me: she said that we've all been paid for. We wander our lives with these massive burdens of ignorance and shame, we brood and worry against the impossible debts we live with. And those are real debts, to be sure. But the only way to lend any meaning to centuries of slavery, violence, pogroms, autos-da-fe... is to own them all as our ancestors, all those innumerable and forgotten victims. "I am a human being," Terence says. "Nothing human can be alien to me." Whether lovely and glorious or terrifying and worse, the roots of all that suffering extend into each of us, bequeathing us with equal heritages of hope and horror. And the only possible meaning this could have, is to decide that all that sacrifice means something to us, for us. We've been paid for. Our time here is the only gift they could have given us, from out of the terrible reach of all that trauma.

And it is a gift, for it removes the question of owing anything to anybody. Or if we do, it is only to convey the limitless balance of our own redemption forward to those who come after us.

In writing this all out--and it's important to note, if it weren't altogether obvious already, that these are my own faulty and incomplete glossings of what Maya Angelou said--it strikes me that the rhetoric reflects no small amount of St. Paul and St. Augustine, but bursting the prism of Christ into endless refractions of sacrifice, not one Son but countless Stars illuminating all of us.

The current Prefect for the Congregation of the Faith, which is what used to be called the Holy Inquisition, is a prelate named William Cardinal Levada, who was previously Cardinal Archbishop of San Francisco, but before that Archbishop of Portland. When I was an altarboy it was a fading distinction to serve at the Masses he celebrated, for he was always a dour and grumpy, self-involved cipher, and people seemed to have neither understanding nor regard for ceremony in my day. It is an interesting question, if the grumpy Cardinal, now effectively the Grand Inquisitor, had been even a little bit kinder in his orthodoxy, then maybe today I might not be so wholly heretical.

For it's true that, as far as Maya Angelou goes, I lovingly embrace my heresy. And that anachronistic distinction between heresy and orthodoxy, for which otherwise intelligent and godly people tortured and burned one another for 20 centuries, still endures in the stigma of mental disease, in the which paradigm I am like the agnostic masquerading as a Dominican in my line of work...

...wow. I really had no intention of wandering so far into my lapsed Catholic consciousness when I began this letter. I blame your infernal influence, and my growing awareness that June is already destroying all my time and money, which of course feeds my growing, lapsed-Catholic guilt at failing to visit those I love. But Maya Angelou says I'm paid for, so fuck you, Cardinal Levada.

Congratulations on opening Opus! I should like to hear more about it, and of your no doubt sterling work. When next you visit Portland, there will be a whole battery of fresh discoveries to convey to you: midnight waffle carts, a new apartment and roommate, how best to crack a bullwhip.

I am so happy things go so well with you, in just about every quarter of your world, as far as I can see. Except that, once again, you've abandoned your partner in the middle of a hell of a case, chasing down your damnfool crazy-ass hunches while the real detectives do all your work for you. Chief says nobody wants to partner with you ever since you 'accidentally' shot that state trooper last year. You know that poor guy still has to wear a poop bag because of you? They put him on the dispatch desk so he could keep his pension. Chief keeps sending me down there to make nice so the staties don't jam up our caseload. It's like hanging out in an overturned portapotty. I hope you're happy.

best,

paulmonster-terentius

On PlayWrite

2010-05-29T15:38:00.000-07:00

So this is the third time I've been asked to MC the semiannual PlayWrite Showcase. I find this kind of thing challenging. It's a delicate task to set the right tone for this work, enough that people understand what's going on, but not so much that the whole event becomes maudlin or cheap. Below is the full draft of my intended remarks; in the even, the wider-angle-lens paragraphs about the world around us were truncated, understandably, and just like both other times I've done this. (I still feel that the wide-angle-lens about art and truth and fear is essential to say, though. And I really wanted to wear the red dress a friend lent me for the occasion, but that, too, was vetoed, in consideration of more conservative sensibilities that may or may not have been attending. Yet another instance of how the good and progressive broad-minded ones always get shafted by fascist homophobes.)

===

Thank you all so much for joining us this evening. I'm Paul Susi, proud actor and coach on the magnificent PlayWrite team, and I've been detailed to help walk you through what we're doing tonight.

For those of you new to PlayWrite, here's how it works. A crack team of 8 or 9 professionals helicopters in to one of any number of underserved youth organizations, right here in Portland. The first four days are spent urgently exploring the core of what makes a strong play: conflict, tactics, character--and all that makes a strong character: needs, secrets, fears. We strip away whatever feels settled, whatever feels like a story. If there's any hing of a predetermined plot, or of a character's inevitable fate, it's the coach's job to challenge the writer, at the very least that the writer might earn their conclusions, really learn and experience themselves what they propose for their characters.

To that end, we spend a lot of time encouraging our writers to be specific. How does it feel to be a hungry buffalo? How would a fat rattlesnake move? Does a calculating, edgy knife experience rage? And--my favorite question as a coach--why?

This is what makes the coach's job so ticklish, and so crucial. Like Chiron, the half-man half-horse tutor of Achilles and Hercules, the coach readies the writer for epic things, but we do not, we cannot fight their battles for them. We can't even answer the very questions we so endearingly ask, over and over and over and over again. Our object always is to spur our writers to discover their own truths, and face their own fears.

And this, in my view, is the real core of what any of us do in the arts. In our daily lives, this reality we all share binds us with terrible truths, things so powerful that we as individuals only dimly grasp their meaning: ballooning oil spills, police violence, or the death of a lover, or the loss of a home. And we fear what we so dimly understand: we fear the stigma of addiction, the blind rage of a child, the burden of consequence, the loneliness of the labels we wear.

All great art--insofar as such a thing could possibly be defined--all great art operates on the things we know to be true, and the things we fear. As artists we seek to reshape and reveal, discovering for ourselves these things we all struggle with, in our own desperate way, every waking day. In this seemingly small and inconsequential act of creating something our own, the great and terrible truths and fears that surround us become subject to ourselves. From slaves and debtors, we crown ourselves monarchs and heroes.

In the typical PlayWrite workshop, the heavy lifting happens in the second week, when the writer faces the blank page alone, the coach writing down the writer's words only, and no two such journeys are ever alike, and no the most accomplished and brilliant writer in the world can ever write the plays that these writers have given us. If they cannot say what needs to be said, then no one can, and we are beyond fortunate that they chose to write. They chose.

Now, tonight, you'll hear what they chose to say, and how they chose to say it. Sometimes it's a single speech. Sometimes it's a full-fledged play. And sometimes the writer commits to a whole new level of work, shaping their words into music. They all chose to share this tonight, but not every writer could choose to be here tonight, for all kinds of reasons. Nevertheless, we acknowledge every writer's work, even if it's with a simply, empty spotlight. We are here tonight not only to celebrate what they've given us, but to experience for ourselves the reshaping and revealing of our own truths, our own fears, profiting by their extraordinary journeys. Think on this--no other art form so critically requires a living audience to complete itself. This work is never finished, never can be finished, unless and until you join us in this room, tonight. This is your cue to turn off cell phones, pagers, recording devices of any kind, things that flash, buzz, vibrate or explode. Consider this your initiation, o heroes, your rite of passage, for by turning off your ipad, you join an epic confraternity older than Aeschylus.

best,

paulmonster-red-dress

Excerpt from my Letter to K.

2010-04-23T10:30:00.000-07:00

...Only recently does it feel like I'm emerging from this past harsh winter. In many ways, I'm actually still quite lost in it. 2009, redemptive and astonishing in some ways, predictably decimated and besieged my spirit. Life and work deteriorated into a terrible and humiliating crush of stuff, just STUFF that never stopped pushing and crushing. I began 2010 prepared to seek vengeance for 2009's abuses; now I'm approaching yet another birthday with even just a little bit more exhaustion and dismay as before, and an even longer tale of indignities for which to seek satisfaction.
As demoralized as this may sound, however, there is, in fact, a great deal of joy in my days, grand little pieces in which I take some pride, things that are worthy of my love--
--for that's where my great bitternesses and griefs are all rooted, so far as I can see: as I grow older, the citadel of my pride only strengthens, and I rush that much quicker to the conclusion that the world is not worthy of my love. This citadel grows out of grief; it is in fact a lament written in bluster, for all the heart-blood poured out quite uselessly, as much for myself as for others.
There is something true, here, though. I know enough to know that my pride, my heart-blood is worth something, and I feel its wastage practically as an act of aggression:
How dare they? How dare they drop the ball at Copenhagen? How dare they tolerate such crappy work in this theatre community? How dare they continue to sanction such grievous acts of police violence in this city? How dare they...
I do not mean to draw neat equivalencies between all of these things, and it's true that I do little enough to justify how personally I take all of this. Still, to me, that only underscores how tough this problem is. For I am notorious for my emotional firewalls: I have few close friends, and fewer of these know enough to begin to understand my impossible families. My professional world in the addictions-recovery/mental health community exists in an entire other universe from my performance community, as that is likewise almost literally a hemisphere away from people I care quite deeply for, and that quite apart from my families entirely.
The problem here is that I am the flying bridge linking all of these emotional provinces. And so volatile are they all, that a full-fledged crisis in one of them never fails to somehow coincide with another crisis, in an other emotional province... And I have a hard time defying the accusation that I am, in fact, the agent of crisis, transmitting from one such remote emotional province to another...
Oftentimes, my vestigially Catholic self will take quite seriously the Apostle's enjoinder, to live each moment as a sacrament (I forget which Apostle so memorably said this). And so I lurch from project to project, meeting to meeting, day to day desperately seeking to expiate my all but sinful contagions. As silly as this sounds, I cannot help but point out the etymology of the word, 'tragedy,' translated literally as 'goat-song,' from whence 'scapegoat.' My theatre and my work are the sacrificial offerings I make to atone for my unwitting crimes. But by that measure, I'm failing indeed.
Again I reiterate that there is more joy, in my day-to-day existence, than this angstiness allows for. Right now I'm teaching at Rosemont, a residential rehab for adolescent women in custody for behavioral and/or substance abuse reasons. I'm teaching with a group called Playwrite, Inc--a local nonprofit that leads two-week workshops teaching at-risk youth how to write plays. At the end of those two weeks, their works is staged with professional actors. Both as a teacher and an actor, this is the finest work I do.
Concurrently, I'm rehearsing, and am about to open a production of 'Madeline and the Gypsies' at NW Children's Theater. I'm playing the Strong Man, and I'm having an extraordinary time. Secret: I've always loved the Madeline bookes. That alone is more than enough to counter my habitual theatre people misanthropy...
...I did not mean to ramble at such length, and in so scattered a fashion. Know that this is all by way of saying, in my own, inscrutable way, that your friendship and company is much missed...

best,

paulmonster-rar-rar-rar

Excerpt from my Letter to E.

2010-04-09T03:34:00.000-07:00

...I hear you.

A part of me says that all of us are unsuited for one another. Since we each contain Whitman's multitudes, what right can we possibly have to find the suited one? Who themselves may or may not be looking? In this context, 'settling' is not a compromise. It is almost a moral imperative.

In my chequered history of intimacy (which reads like an Abbott and Costello oral history of the Thirty Years' War), the good bits are where my flawed insuperable multitudes clamor a kind of harmony against her flawed insuperable multitudes. Such things cannot be choreographed, not really...

Little Strokes

2010-03-11T02:37:00.000-08:00

There's this thing that happens, when you're driving along in unfamiliar territory, and you're trying to follow directions while you're noting the world around you. Because you have to look, you have to pay attention, to note the landmarks and the curvings of the roadway, so you know where to turn, where to stop, where to go slower and so forth. It's basic sense to do so.

But it's so easy to lose track of the directions, or of the landmarks, or of both, really. Unfamiliar territory is by definition devoid of routine, cannot be taken for granted, does not behave according to predictable rules, otherwise it would be familiar. Things change, detours and washouts and new buildings happen all the time, and maps and directions can lie, sometimes egregiously.

I believe I've been following just such flawed directions, navigating an even more tortuous landscape. I know I haven't been faithful to those directions as I ought to have been. And the ground continually shifts beneath my feet as I go.

A beautiful moment happens, when you realize that you are not where you expected to be. For a fraction of a moment, anything is possible. Down is up. South is east. One way could be any way. You get your bearings and you move along, but in that tiny piece of a moment, I believe that your heart is suspended in a forever place, a seam of realities that unzips into the next piece of concrete information, from which you take your point of departure.

There are moments when I as an artist realize that I am not as good as I thought I was, that my narrow field of expertise is precisely that narrow. In the Great Library of Potential Achievement that we all borrow books from, what I thought was the sum total of everything there is to be said on a given subject only turned out to be half a shelf from the discard handtruck. There is so much more to be said, so much more to learn. My ego, of course, winces and crumples to realize such things. But the other half of me honestly savors this. It is what I imagine the exhileration feels like, after you've jumped but before you pull the ripcord on the parachute. I'm immensely grateful.

best,

paulmonster-white noise

little specks of red under their beaks

2010-02-16T15:24:00.000-08:00

I was walking home in the afternoon, on a cold, misty day. It didn't look like daylight, or any kind of light. It was like the absence of light, of any kind, and it was breathtakingly lovely.

Houses were half-built, lights glowed warmly, trees were suggestions of trees, only so high. And about my feet, too, there was a flowing swelling of mist, and my clothes were beaded and heavy, and even my breath swirled and ebbed in front of me.

There is a park across the corner from where I live, auspiciously named Unthank. It is a wide plain with a baseball diamond, and a long, tall row of swaying trees curving across the breadth of it. Beyond the trees, a play structure and a basketball court huddle awkwardly, like afterthoughts. At night, when the sky is clear, you can see the stars quite clearly from here, with a wider view of the night sky than anywhere else (though you must be careful lest the wandering police shoot you for doing nothing much at all, particularly at night and in my neighborhood).

This afternoon the plain was covered with seagulls, hunting worms. They almost seemed afloat in the mist, and the grass appeared and dissolved beneath them, and they chattered and stooped lazily in the not-light. For some reason, I could clearly see the little red specks on their beaks, and their pinions were so specific and just so. From time to time one would watch me warily, and one or two of his comrades, also, before deciding all at once that the meals before them were more interesting.

I was fascinated, and a little terrified. I'd never seen so many seagulls away from the ocean, and so calm. I hear them, from time to time, lost, I suppose, in the labyrinthine tributary watersheds of the Willamette and the Columbia (I don't imagine them to be all that bright, the more I think about them). And I then think of myself, a little bit lost, a little bit hopeless, and surprisingly calm, too.

best,

paulmonster-kehaar

Letter to J., 27 Nov 2009

2009-12-06T22:35:00.000-08:00

Dear J--

You spoke of turning within for the winter. More and more it feels as though the real task, the main task of my world right now, is about opening my inner life until it matches, and becomes, the life I live outwardly.
I have, of course, no idea how to accomplish this, definitively. I only know, or see, the millions of little things directly in front of me, the petty things mingled with the profound--things like getting out of bed, or writing this letter, or writing that play, or feeding my cat, or, or, or, or...
My inner world is a mess of grand-scale things half-built; physical and emotional discoveries squirrelled away in readiness for something I'm not even conscious of; unfought arguments and lingering memories that don't want to fade away. This inner world has been pretty consistently so, for a s long as I can remember, only expanding in scale as time goes by.
Once, I was admonished by a soon-to-be-ex that, of all the people she'd known, I had changed the least--that in fact, I hadn't changed at all. At the time, I was much dismayed by this (I was a pretty miserable and unlucky boy when I first met her). Now, it actually makes some sense to me, even if I know she meant nothing comforting by that remark.
To a certain degree, my outward life already does reflect this inner constancy--my outward life is a kind of waking sleep, a continual process of waiting and holding my physical space in readiness for that which is next. Holding space in readiness has served me well thus far--it's like in those male-centric action movies, where the steely-eyed warrior concentrates on jumping-rope or disassembling guns for awhile, an aleaborate dumb-show that says, "Look at me, I'm a cold-ass motherfucker," which is invariably followed by scenes that are devastating or redemptive or humbling, as if to say, "Train by all means, but you'll never, ever be truly ready."
To be fair, I am not a cold-ass motherfucker, nor do I know how to disassemble a gun (and I'm pretty bad at jumping rope, too). But I really love, perhaps too much, that sense of deep inhalation, the coiling of the spring, the self-imposed discipline of calming, before storming. As a result, the performances I'm personally proudest of, and the things I've done that I believe I've done well, were none of them random, inscrutable flukes of fortune, but meaningful and intentional things that had to be cared for and nourished over time, that required deliberate attention and steady nerves.
But I can't say that this neat little story happens with any kind of frequency. In all honesty, most of my time is spent in that deep inhalation, physically hunkering down while my inner, emotional life tumbles and roils against itself, in spite of my repeated efforts to keep calm and sleep well. Maybe that's the real task of my life right now.
A piece of music, or a rare play, or most likely a finely made piece of writing, will cross my path, from time to time, sending me stirring and tumbling anew, hungry and fiercely inspired. They tend to prod me into an almost drunken, joyfully angry state, where I'm indignant that the rest of the world ignores so much loveliness or sacrifice or wonder. And then I get secretly, happily sick with my own ambition, to do the same but more, lusting for that righteous distinction of being unworthy of the world's neglect.

Happily Reading:
On the Shortness of Life--Seneca
What I Loved--Siri Hustved
Penelopiad--Margaret Atwood
The Developing Mind--David Siegel
The Harsh Cry of the Heron--Lian Hearn

Listening To
Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears
AC/DC
High, Wide and Handsome; the Charlie Poole Project, Loudon Wainwright
Madeleine Peyroux
Radiolab

These days I'm taking care of my Grandma during the day, and then teaching with PlayWrite at Portland Night High School. With winter, I'm always happy except I'm lonely--or lonely except I'm happy, it's always twinned like that.
I'm not taking care of my Grandma, so much as I'm studying her, so that I can recognize her ghost, which I think of as a joyful thing, though it may sound morbid; but also to discover her; counting her pills, tabulating her vital signs, the clinical facts which signify her earthly presence, while my head and my heart record her laughter, and the way she smiles at her grandchildren, and her fickle appetites, and her lonely sadness. Her confusion and her emptiness, that are themselves precious fragments--vital signs--of 74 rich and terrible years. I am studying her, for the time when, in every instance I say "I," I'll actually mean "We," and mean her as well as me, as I already do for my Grandpa, and my other grandparents, and every other person whose death I've witnessed. (No I'm not an axe-murderer.)
My cat Wendell has drawn in all his neighborhood friends to seek shelter in my apartment at night, and now their proprietary mien is so complete that I generally feel like an ill-mannered, boorish guest in my own apartment--clumsy, overbearing, smelly, and shockingly ignorant of polite feline society. I suppose they only tolerate me because I'm bigger, and I'm a soft heat source. Wendell is sympathetic but helpless.
I hope you're keeping snug and warm in your new home, and that your journey within is a fruitful one. Know that you are loved and missed--

ps--PlayWrite, in which I coach at-risk youth to write plays, and then they're performed by professionals, has a showcase on 14 and 15 December--FREE--call or email me for details...

Excerpt from my Letter to B, 20 November 2009

2009-11-27T16:22:00.000-08:00

Dearest B--,

Last Tuesday I was handed this script... I was expecting something abbreviated, powerful, perhaps unfinished but bursting at the seams—in short, a typical PlayWrite play, as such things go.

I’ve coached and acted once before at this location, under PlayWrite’s aegis, and that was a profoundly overpowering experience, difficult and delicate work that paid off handsomely in the end, for the writer I coached and in the performances, too. So I had some idea of what I was signing up for in this round, and I went about it cheerfully and diligently, as best I could.

But I did not expect, nor could I expect to encounter a script that tore me up as powerfully as this one did. I was given to play Dirty Belly, a dirt clod, a terrifying and an anguished little guy filled with anger, and harrowingly vulnerable. On the surface, Dirty Belly is the antithesis of his author, S., a stout, powerfully-built young man who habitually hides behind a mystifyingly dry sense of humor, and a curtain of soft black hair that reaches to his chin. S. is the kind of teenager who commands a room by his silences; whom every girl watches even if he may not himself possess movie-star looks; at first glance, he is a massive, lumbering presence—until he picks up a basketball, which is when he brazenly displays a startling aptitude for cunning audacity. (At one point, he slapped away a shot attempt like I’d just disparaged his sister. Admittedly, my basketball skills are silly at best—a point I blame on the heartbreaking experience of being a Blazers fan in the early ‘90s—but still, to slap away a shot mid-air is a thing to see.)

We had a hard time reading S. throughout the workshop; he was often late, reluctant to engage, and his dry, unvaryingly cool and arch affect tended to distance himself from the coaches. But one-on-one, his work tended to be deeply engaging and rich, but this in fragmentary flashes, apt to dissolve away in his almost caustic humor, as quickly as it appeared. At the group check-ins at the end of the day, he seemed genuinely moved—as if himself quietly surprised at how personally involved he was becoming—and afterwards, in our own daily debriefings, we coaches would gather and puzzle fruitlessly over whether S. was truly with us.

The first week of PlayWrite is all group work, with the one-on-one stuff spliced in here and there, and we coaches make a point of continuously rotating so that, ideally, every writer will have worked with every coach at least once in the course of that first week. Week two sees an assignment of coach-to-writer for the rest of the workshop. I often feel like we all then slip over the horizon from each other, locked in our own careful, desperate little duels. We still gather as a group at the end of each day, and again as coaches to debrief, but these do little to suppress the lonely, quietly exhilerating and painstaking quality that now characterizes our work, as distant from one another as undiscovered continents.

In those debriefings, we caught flashes of what S. was doing via his coach, G., but of course I was too deep in my own writer’s work to fully grasp the implications. G. worked like a hero through S.’s surges and ebbings—and she is a far stronger and more experienced coach than I—but even so, at the end of Week Two, S.’ play seemed drawn up short, only just about to cut deeper into the heart of things. As scripts were assigned to the coaches-as-actors, G. took the unusual step of appending an entire extra blank page to his typed-up draft, to be filled in on the day of performance.

Myself and one other actor were assigned his play on performance day, with little time to prepare or rehearse. Having done these readings quite regularly for some years now, I know that only the most cursory forethought is given to these casting choices. All our customary efforts in performing a play professionally are necessarily abrogated in favor of concentrating on our writer’s needs. And rightfully so—often I’m given cause to wonder at how much more and better work would be accomplished if a few of these professional theatres could more closely follow our line.

G. and S. were both equally aware that the play could, and ought to go farther, but G. was understandably reluctant to push too hard, lest S. get trapped in a panic of perfectionism and lost time. T. (the other actor) and myself were mostly confined to a single read-thru, offering and asking for such input as we could, but mostly holding back, while G. and S. improvised a final, cautiously rushed writing session.

This, I think, is the heart of why the piece went on to overpower me so completely: I witnessed, in a removed, almost offhand way, a process which I myself had guided other writers through at least half a dozen other times before. Each word, each feeling is phrased so carefully that it indelibly affects the actor’s task. Whereas typically, I construe my obligation to be to find meaning and emotion in a given text, here it’s much deeper, unavoidably more personal: I must parse through the high flood of meaning and emotion running so vividly before my eyes, choosing the pieces that cry out most clearly, in the hope that I, as the actor, can in turn reflect and amplify my writer’s original passion.

This act of witnessing was unique to S.' situation. As a coach, the actor’s task is glimpsed at two or three removes; but as the actor, already cast and seated immediately before the writer, my whole attention was completely contained by the quiet, tense silences, and then the raw work unfolding in front of me, S. and G. both hurrying to catch every possible moment left to us.

Thus I never really got to take in his script, as such. Every spare moment was another line added, a word tweaked, another question answered or asked. We had once chance to run it on our feet before the audience arrived, and even that was just to get the words out loud.

Playing Dirty Belly live practically tore me apart. Laden with the knowledge of who S. is, and all the previous days’ history of dissembling and vulnerability, something of S. himself seeped into what I was doing with Dirty Belly, and quite to my own surprise, I found my own emotions ranging beyond my control. This is a dirt clod scared to death of being torn apart, yet who yearns to dissolve into a dust cloud; who loves—revels in being dirty, yet passionately hates the names he’s called as a result.

In the course of the play, Dirty Belly falls into a dark, filthy, terrifying garbage can. I was given a stage direction to scream—really scream—and in that moment, something deeply rooted in me tore loose. I’ve been told, by a number of people who were there, that my scream shook everyone visibly, but that S. himself was utterly still, intent. The play ends with Dirty Belly wailing in the dark, faced with the choice of grasping a fishhook lowered from above, thereby risking being torn apart in the process, or remaining alone in the suffocating dark. S. believes the play is unfinished.

Clearly, this play continues to haunt me. Dirty Belly, and by extension S., and now to a startling degree I myself, am still stranded alone in the deep bottom of the garbage can, and the fishhook gleaming overhead. I can think of nothing else except to write this out and send it to you, with my love, and the hope that this finds you well and thriving—

Stay warm, and travel safely—

2009-11-15T16:58:00.000-08:00

My student these last two weeks, M, is happy. She's perhaps the sunniest person I know right now. Not ridiculous Disney-saccharine happy-sunny; her happy is like a pleasant simmer, a continuous pop-rhythm of speaking and moving that belies the terrible things she's experienced.

Every student in this facility has experienced terrible things, horrifying things that decimate and unravel any confidence most reasonable humans could possibly have. But the key to M's happiness is something unstoppable, something no memory, no wrong decision, not even the hint of violence can touch: M is in the middle of a lucky streak. She's getting out in 8 days. Her family has picked up the ball again, working with her therapists and the authorities to work their shit out. She's gone clean, and her best friends are going clean to support her. The play she's writing reflects this sense of momentum, this culminating build to her life.

I've had cause, in the past week of working with M, to consider the nature of lucky streaks, the momentum that overthrows everything in its path, until it doesn't again. I can say nothing to M that will broach this; she doesn't need to hear this, I wouldn't be able to articulate it properly, it's not a necessary discussion and it's not necessarily my job. "There is a tide in the affairs of men..." and so on.

But for myself, I've experienced that tide, several times. It ends when it ends, with nothing to systematically say how or why they do, just as they begin when they begin, without a fair means of predicting their onset. Riding them, or even trying to exploit them at all, has generally yielded indifferent results. Trying to anticipate the end, too, does nothing to alleviate the harshness of the end... witness, for example, how many highly intelligent, sophisticated and eminently reasonable people failed disastrously at anticipating and preparing for the end of the last economic lucky streak, and I don't think that was for want of trying.

This ties into a broader obsession I've had over a great deal of time, now, on the nature of the responsibility of memory, the cumulation of experience that then exerts an inexorable influence on my actions. My day-to-day tempo has predictably slowed; remembering what I've done and why, what I haven't done and why not, seeps into the active moments of doing things and not doing things, in a way that endangers my health, but that I find unavoidable.

In performance, my instinct and my desire now tends to more and more action, physically and emotionally, of greater depth and magnitude, as a way of counterbalancing this instinctive suspension that occurs in the rest of my waking life. Oh, these late 20s...

M's play is finished, and with any luck, nothing will have happened this weekend to undermine her budding momentum. She has a habit of eating as many as 4 pounds of sunkist orangines during our sessions, one after the other, the slices disappearing as quickly as she can speak. By the end of our sessions, she invariably has entire sculptures of orange peels dominating the table.

In the hope of learning something of how to sustain her kind of momentum, I believe I'll take up orangine eating now.

best,

paulmonster-aktion

2009-11-08T20:57:00.000-08:00

Years ago, A. was visiting her family, and we spent some time together. Neither of us happened to be in relationships at the time, and, after some tentative circling, we drew together again, surprised and moved by how hungry we were for our memories of ourselves. And for a while it was like when we were in high school, and we were lovers again, physically and emotionally intimate in a way that fed us, sated our appetites, like we had in our hands all we wanted from the world. I remember the shape of her mouth when we kissed, familiar and as known--really known--as if it were my own mouth, which it was, and the feel of her body nestled against mine, the shapes and the softnesses, the subtle changes, even then, from the few handful of years before, when we were still together.
I am so grateful, as time goes by, to have experienced such love. Which was not, which never felt fated to be lasting, and we never treated it as such. But we lived it, nevertheless, so fully, that I still feel the comfort of it, the knowing familiarity of it, like a sweater I could put on in the cold. My memories of sensory things--the touch of her tongue, the light of her eyes, the softness of her hips--are so vivid, their ghosts play at my senses, in the space between dreaming and waking. I sometimes wish I could forget the intervening years, casually misplace my maturity, and be again who I remember being then.

best,

paulmonster-remembers

Why Are We Here?

2009-05-24T18:22:00.000-07:00

[Note: below is a draft speech I composed for the Playwrite Showcase last week. I was asked to host and it was awesome. The speech I ended up giving was shorter and more tailored and worked just fine, but I like the broader points here so much that I'm posting it here, where I should be posting more things if only I had the wherewithal.]

My name is Paul Susi, I'm your MC tonight, blah blah blah...

Why are we here? That's the first question the lead coach asks every day of the Playwrite workshop program. It's a great question, it works on several levels: #1. It's easy. Most of us will know in real terms, why we enter a given room before we do. Unless, of course, we don't. 2. The question goes, "Why are WE here?" Which is great, it lays the groundwork for a collaboration between equally dedicated people, as opposed to the status differences of teacher and student. 3. "Why are we HERE?" We focus attention on the task at hand--not the big picture that paralyzes, not the home situation or the school or the rest of the endless reasons to do nothing, say nothing, write nothing--no, this room, this moment, this thing right now.

In the big picture, US household wealth went from 64 trillion in 2007 to 51.5 trillion by the end of 2008. 13 trillion evaporated. Oregon's deficit in this biennium is 850 million. The Literary and Education Dept.s of two major theatres in this city have disappeared, almost overnight. Which means we in the theatre community have mortgaged our futures, just as much as everybody else.

So Why are we here? Realists and cynics, who are perfectly rational and even lovable people, oppose arts funding for entirely understandable reasons. "How can we fund your thing," they ask, when I need to fund hospitals and schools and all those other things, too? What makes what you do more deserving, more real, than all those other priorities?"

Each of us in this room, every beating heart gathered here tonight has a stake in what happens, up on this stage. We are parents and teachers, counselors, coaches, actors and writers, and all of us, every single one of us, living, breathing humans that think and feel. But what we do here, everything from these last two years' worth of workshops to this night with you in this space here and now, is somehow less substantial, less quantifiable--less real--than the 13 trillion that evaporated last year. It's less real than the big pictures that paralyze--the endless reasons not to act, not to hope, not to write.

I'm at once both a realist and a fool, deeply serious and a deeply whimsical man. I believe that truth happens in the space between the irreconcilable, in the impossible places, the backbreaking moments between our writers and our coaches. Between humans.

In this theatre tonight you're going to see the impossible. Singing typewriters, needy toothbrushes, gophers who can't dig. An organization that fights tooth and nail for that most impossible of things, the 1 to 1 ratio. And most impossibly of all, an whole host of playwrights and songwriters who've spent most of their lives surrounded by realists telling them to do less, try less, hope for less.

Every word you hear sung or spoken tonight--aside from mine--was written by these humans seated up front. We're here tonight to recognize that, and to recognize all of our collective parts in that achievement.

I say the world outside is filled with impossible, imaginary, unreal things, bigger than any one of us, more than we know what to do with. We're here tonight, the reason why we're here is so that the rest of us can somehow learn from these writers, how to do the impossible.

So turn off your cell phones, forget about the big picture. Halfway through, there'll be a 15 minute intermission. And at the end of the evening, and again tomorrow, and again a week from now, I dare all of us to ask ourselves again, why are we here?

best,

paulmonster-deficit

Excerpt from my Letter to B

2009-05-04T15:44:00.000-07:00

...What does feel new at this point, at least to me, is a growing trust in the intuitive course of these issues. The back-and-forth, call-and-response quality of my vocational questings do seem to seamlessly fold into each other, piece by piece and slowly resolving into a larger whole, serene in its contradictions. Without any substantive evidence to say so, somehow I'm still convinced of the correctness of all this. Similarly, Plutarch didn't cite the decline of oracles as proof the gods don't exist; instead, he affirms that "the god's abandoning of many oracles is nothing other than his way of substantiating the desolation of Greece." Which I interpret to mean, in my own, sybilline fashion, that even my ample evidence attesting that I have no real idea what I'm doing, indicates only that my decisions are mine to make, and not that I don't exist, say, or that they're being arbitrarily made for me by an indifferent power, or such like. This is encouraging, I feel. One less thing to worry about, you know?

best,

paulmonster-ne-plus-ultra

Letter to L and E

2009-04-30T17:40:00.000-07:00

...Things go well here in Portland, though not without frustration. Sushiland just isn't the same without you unsavory types.

Your cookies in January inspired me, I think. Lately I've been coaching with an awesome group called Playwrite, in which coaches are paired up one-on-one with at-risk kids to write plays. Last week my writer was a 16 yr. old foster kid and abuse survivor in a residential rehab, a cutter on self-harm watch with pretty destructive and caustically cynical tendencies. Now, I think of myself as a relatively tough customer. Like I could beat you up easy, E, just a couple of quick jabs and a decent uppercut and you're done. L, that's harder because she's so cunning... But for whatever reason, for all kinds of reasons, this writer started getting to me. 3 hour sessions would leave me exhausted, like I'd just stormed through a 10 hour day. Keeping my humor and my composure began getting harder and harder.

Somehow, somewhere in there I remembered your cookies. Your splendid, splendid cookies, perfect little roundels of richly chewy wondrousness. Savory coasters of hope on which to rest my overflowing goblet of despair.

Encouraged and made determined by your example, I picked up an old recipe for Chinese almond cookies. Eggs! Almonds! Baking powder! Two whole sticks of butter! Emboldened rather than discouraged, and with your delicious examples enshrined in my memory, I quickly set to work.

At first, all I'd hoped for was something tasty to feed myself. But somewhere along the way (halfway through cutting up both sticks of butter into baby-pea sized bits), it dawned on me that the heaviness of the day was leaving me. Even more so when I was kneading the dough, my hands and fingers buttery-shiny and puffs of flour all over myself.

Since we can't give gifts to our writers, the next day I gave my fellow coaches as many cookies as I had left over, and then stopped at Powell's to pick up a cookie cookbook. Finally, I now have a relatively safe and legal outlet with which to satiate my remorseless urge to deprive the world of its butter supply.

As you may be able to tell from all this, I continue to move forward underemployed, skating along on an empty tank from paycheck to paycheck. Prospects abound, and such work as I do have slowly but surely leads to more. I have days where it feels like I'm holding my life together, with both hands and barely (as I seem to say with increasing frequency). But I also have days where tide and time are resolute allies, and the whole world is commonly conspiring to quietly favor my bravest designs. There's a vintage WWII era British poster that aptly captures the moment for me. On a socialist-red background, spelled out in big block letters, very simply, the words, "Keep Calm and Carry On." The whole thing surmounted by the British Imperial Crown.

My experimental theatre group, The FORGERY, unveiled our first little piece two weeks agoi in a bar/music venue stage. Untitled, the piece ran for less than 20 minutes, following a series of mundane characters leading repetitive and colorless lives. Gradually, their world is overrun by living sleeping bags. The whole thing had no dialogue, and we had original (and very specifically timed) music underscoring everything, in the Four Tet-early Radiohead-Aphex Twin vein. It was wonderfully awesome.

Our audience loved us, and we even surprised ourselves to discover that we'd actually succeeded in crafting a decent piece. Plans are in train to do more, and more, and yet more.

I'm advocating a paradigm for theatre, where we move away from six-week runs, and tech weeks, and even one-night-only's. What if a complete Work takes place over the course of an evolving year, built from a constellation of diverse pieces--puppetry, movement, text--lasting only as long as each piece needs to last, minutes or hours. Each piece is one evening, in a found space, perhaps different each time, and it's defined by being both complete in itself and also yet one more star in a slowly unfolding constellation.

The audience gets to drop in at any point--it's non-linear storytelling--and maybe we get to repeat ourselves, revisit and revise pieces as we continue to craft the larger Work over a longer period of time...

best,

paulmonster-rules-britannia

Evening Incident Report

2009-02-09T15:24:00.001-08:00

I was biking home late the other night on N Williams, here in Portland, when I saw a man passed out on the sidewalk. It was maybe 2:30 am, and from the thin, tell-tale trail of wet leading downslope from him, I could guess he'd pee'd himself.

Even at this late hour, there were three or four passersby in hailing distance; one casually smoking a cigarette twenty feet away from him, probably a nurse on break from the nursing home next door; a couple walking their bikes home, stepping off the sidewalk to go around him; and a fuzzier gentleman living on the streets, with a rucksack and stained jeans, walking in the opposite direction. All four were studiously ignoring the prone figure in their midst.

I stopped at the corner, walked my bike back and watched for a second. He was curled on his side in the fetal position, blocking the breadth of the sidewalk, and his back rose and fell regularly, a good sign. He looked to be in his early 30s, black male, glasses, wearing a plush dark tracksuit, plain sneakers, and there was a baseball cap on the ground next to him. His sweater was zipped up covering his face. Likely he had simply had too much to drink, but my medical brain saw the urine trail and worried that, in adults, unconscious urination can be evidence of trauma, seizures or lord knows what-all. Further, at this late hour with a hidden moon, visibility was poor, and the urine trail could be a blood trail. Even a minimal blood loss could be fatal on a cold night like this. Also, if he hadn't lost his wallet and other valuables already, he would likely lose them before the sun came up again.

I called 911 before approaching him, because my neighborhood is sadly, slowly reverting to the early 90's violence, and I'm paranoid about situational traps. (This is what happens after watching a decade's worth of Law and Order franchises.) With the operator on the line I tried to wake him up, which took some doing. At this point, the smoker guiltily pretended to just notice us and started calling 911, too.

He was slurring his speech, pretty confused, answering everything in monosyllabic, vaguely affirmative grunts. I asked him if he wanted an ambulance, and he said he did, repeatedly.

In the five minutes we waited together for the ambulance, the man stayed in the fetal position, looping in and out of consciousness.

"Are you on your way home somewhere?" I asked him.

"MLK," he replied.

"Did you have too much to drink tonight?"

"Uuuh, yeah..."

"You want the ambulance, right?"

"Yeah. Ambulance. Yeah."

"Try to stay with me, man. Don't pass out again, okay?"

At this point, he started sobbing, violently.

"What's wrong? You okay? What's going on?" Panicking, I was worried that I hadn't checked him over, that maybe he actually did have a traumatic injury and I hadn't told the 911 operator, so the ambulance wasn't rushing and he might be bleeding out or something. But I didn't want to check him over in case there was a weapon and I might provoke something, and without gloves or a wound kit (and three or four drinks in my own system), I was pretty well useless anyway.

"No, no, ahhh..." he said, as the fire truck and the ambulance pulled around the corner.

I stepped back to let the paramedics do their thing. I passed along what I knew and why I called to one of the firefighters, who thanked me and shook my hand. I slowly biked away.

Post-event, I've this habit of rigorously questioning everything I do or say in situations like these. Why didn't I ask one of those passersby to stick around, maybe make the call instead of me? That way, I could've conceivably looked him over to rule out the scarier things. Was I in any way limited in action or intention by any kind of racism? My reluctance look him over, my hesitation as he sobbed, my Law and Order-style paranoia... The most I can ever hope for in these purely ad-hoc, drive-by situations, is to do no harm. That, and to hope that he'll be okay. I chewed on this as I arrived at my apartment, greeted the neighborhood cats, and tucked in for the night.

best,

paulmonster-lights-out

Unsent Letters New Year Edition

2009-01-31T00:16:00.000-08:00

Dear J--

...I've grown to loathe myself lightheartedly. As an artist and a teacher, I find my learned voice to be ponderous, alienating and obtuse, too often obsessed with things no one else has the time of day for, and too poorly equipped to convince them otherwise. But then, neither am I so inclined to condemn myself over those issues as I otherwise would have only a few days ago. I'm well-suited to be the outlier, speaking from beyond the familiar and pliable confines of the mainstream. true, in this reading of myself, I'm aspiring to an unhealthy, hubristically ambitious oracular status; but that's what I find so amusing, what leads to the lightheartedness.

I like that there's this impulsive, brazen voice inside me that likes to pick fights with conventional wisdoms, pronounce with complete confidence on matters over which I have the flimsiest grasp--and all of this usually in support of those I love; or, if not that, then ranged implacably against the thousand-and-one enemies wrongfully hounding them and theirs. I like that this voice asserts itself most prominently when the rest of me is most uncertain and fearful. I like that this voice can be trusted for such things, by far the most reliable thing about me. I can accept its price; I can accept the consequence that I am less likely to be regularly employed, and that I'm prone to frequent and discouraging changes of fortune.

I mention all of this because I'm convinced a kindred voice operates within you. Given this world and these circumstances of our current incarnations, and the similar modes of pride prevailing within us both, a tempered awareness of the multitudes within is invaluable, and the brazen voice in particular needs to be well-tended to.

I worry that your 'brazen voice,' made brittle by difficult and grindingly consuming work..., lashes out against yourself--raising havoc against your health and your conscience. In this context, while our histories are far from identical, nevertheless I speak from analogous experience... As your friend who loves you deeply, my intention is to do all I can in support of your health and your conscience (the two being inextricably interconnected)...

If you allow your brazen self room and time to speak fully and openly, I believe (paradoxically, it may seem) that it can be your surest compass navigating the storms and the calms of these worlds. Because your brazen voice is none other than your own heart, as it is with me, headstrong and unyielding. Given leave to speak, it will only speak truthfully. Constrained against itself, nothing is safe.

All of this may be entirely self-evident; indeed, perhaps already moot. Believe that these are the meanderings of a loving and trusting, if no less brazen heart of my own.

You asked after the job hunt: quite difficult, though I am strangely euphoric about it. The economy in Portland, like with the rest of the country, continues to stumble around in a gibbering, self-defecating stupor. My reserves are officially exhausted. I've strung together some teaching gigs that are entirely inadequate, and I'm more dependent than ever on the Filipino-Russian mafia, which would be deeply disconcerting for me except that this long operational pause--in which I wander through endless and frequent interviews, applications forms and so forth--has forced me to think even more deeply about my path, really hash out the core assumptions in ways I couldn't well do before. Down-and-dirty processing, as you would put it.

At first, as you might expect, this was a painfully tortuous experience, my health and conscience sizzling like bacon fat in a cast-iron skillet. Clearly, the means and methods by which I've sustained myself for the last several years, culminating in what was supposedly the most propitious of conditions in the last few months, then to drift and decay in the last six weeks, cannot be carried on. It's time for a change.

Once that key premise is established, everything opens up. My chief occupation now is the wholesale re-conception of everything I am. It's daunting; everything's in question, starting with whether performance will continue to be a priority for me. I know you've experienced similarly radical re-evaluations of your own course and ideals: the terror of these days when all things must change, and the dangerous excitement at confronting so many possibilities on such a scale.

It's like I'm shopping for fruit, squeezing and poking the juicy bits of my life. Some things just aren't ripe yet; others are long past their sell-by date...

best,

paulmonster-arjuna

Wind in the Willows Notes

2008-12-29T21:20:00.000-08:00

Hello All,

Following is a short program note I wrote for "Wind in the Willows" at Shakespeare Santa Cruz, recently closed. I include it here for nostalgia's sake, and to shoehorn just one more Polyform entry through before yet another New Year. I do miss this show.

===

Kenneth Grahame began telling the story that eventually became The Wind in the Willows as a bedtime story to his son, publishing it in 1908, a time and place offering significant parallels to our own. Great Britain had just experienced the long and divisive Boer War, fought halfway across the globe at a strategic artery of her empire. The nation was confronted with the impossible task of disastrous and increasing military-imperial expenditures crippling the national economy. Figures and themes in his rambling book echo those of his day: the newly ascended King Edward VII was an indulgent, headstrong dandy famous and beloved for his whimsical devotion to fun. The elegiac English countryside had given way to industrial wastelands, abandoned mines and the desperately poor. But in many ways, the paternalist sensibilities of Badger and Ratty still prevailed, in political leaders like Lord Salisbury, thrice Prime Minister and the last to govern from the House of Lords, who was slow to rouse and decisive in action; and his brilliant nephew Arthur Balfour, who sparkled in society, drifted through life and was ever loyal to his friends (as Foreign Secretary, he crafted the Balfour Declaration, presaging the modern State of Israel). As Secretary at the Bank of England, Grahame experienced firsthand the noontime of Britain’s imperial career, and he could glimpse the fragile underpinnings soon to come catastrophically undone. Grahame’s work is an artifact from this lost but enduring world.

best,

paulmonster-badgerstripes

From the Lighthouse Suite

2008-12-18T22:20:00.000-08:00

It's like a Stephen King novel. It's the Odyssey with fewer booty-hungry Greeks. I'm just trying to get back home, that's all.

I started off Tuesday afternoon with a full tank of gas, sunlight and ocean streaming across the horizon and a clear Rte. 1 leading north from Santa Cruz all the way up to Eureka. The highway is littered with gorgeous little coves and beaches looking out onto myriads of clashing rocks, breathtaking waves, precious little parking lots hedged in by rusting permanent barbecues, chained up picnic tables and precarious little goat-path trails, and then dunes that swell and dive as gracefully as frozen mirror-images of the waves lapping the cliffs. Pomponio and San Gregorio are my favorites.

But then I got snarled in San Francisco traffic, I missed the Rte. 1 turnoff from the Golden Gate Bridge and I ended up stranded in a logjam several hours long, from Novato all the way up to Santa Rosa. After three hours' crawling up the 101, I pulled over at a Motel 6 for the night. But I remained undaunted.

Wednesday I saddled up and rolled north again, finding my way across to the 1, weaving through redwoods and myrtlewoods. I bought coffee in Fort Bragg, ate pancakes, listened to NPR, rather enjoying myself. But shortly after the sun went down, my battery warning light started flashing. My headlights dimmed noticeably when I accelerated, and the battery gauge drained, too. But when I eased off the accelerator, or when I idled at full stop, gauges and lights returned to normal. Concerned, I called my Dad, discussed plausible causes (I thought it was the alternator, Dad thought the timing belt or corroded battery stems), then I pulled over at Rio Dell for the night.

I spent the night at Humboldt Gables Motel, which was where I spontaneously started muttering "RED RUM" to myself. I waited over an hour for a scrumptious and heavy little pizza. I spent some time staring sadly at my driver's belly. I was recommended to a parts store next door to a mechanic's shop, first thing in the morning.

Whereat I practically walked into an Andy Griffith episode. Of the seven or eight variously disheveled, heavyset or rail-thin John Deere trucker-capped gentlemen who unctuously opined on my scrappy little Ford Explorer's symptoms, I would guess only one of them actually worked at the parts shop. I nodded sagely, exchanged knowing gutteral utterances, laughed appreciatively at what I thought were jokes. Sometimes they laughed with me. Sometimes they didn't.

Mike the Mechanic ("you do theater, huh? I'm an investor in B-movies. Last month my wife and I both won stock car racing trophies, no kidding! God bless!") replaced my alternator in record time, and without swindling me, which was nice of him. I got back on the road, ever northwards bound. Satisfied that I was right and my father, in this case, wasn't, I took this for a good omen and continued north.

Throughout this saga, glowering snowy clouds gathered above the crashing, roiling water, and the trees shook and swayed over the thin ribbons of asphalt I clung to. By the time I'd purchased a new alternator, hail and snow showered in great driving drifts. Eureka and Crescent City were very wet. Harrowing switchbacks folded the road sharply into the wind. It was epic. In the late afternoon, I indulged a walk in the Lady Bird Johnson Grove of Redwoods in the Redwood State and National Parks. (Towering, silent, hollowed out by fire and bereft of heartwood but still sprouting living burls that themselves grow to tower high overhead...)

But after I crossed the Oregon line, the weather grew steadily worse. And worse. I drove with only a meager stream of fellow travelers: semis gingerly creeping through fog and sheets of hail, and lonely little sedans that similarly hoped to avoid the mess on I-5, but lost beyond knowing in the soaring bridges and the blinding rain. A bowl of chowder and some coffee in Bandon, and then I stopped in Yachats for the night, even though I'd hoped to make it to Portland already.

In Yachats, I'm staying at the Dublin Motel. Which has. A Lighthouse Suite. The only available room, an ersatz lighthouse with bunkbeds. It's tall and narrow, like what you imagine a lighthouse to be, and the falling hail rattles resoundingly. This is the best roadtrip ever.

Letter to D., 25 Nov 2008

2008-12-01T04:08:00.000-08:00

Dear D--

I just saw an extraordinary piece of theatre last night. Mary Zimmerman's "Arabian Nights" is running at Berkeley Repertory Theatre until 4 January, and belive me when I say it's worth its own trip to the Bay Area.

I used to read Hadawy's translation of the Arabian Nights back in high school. It's an intricate, fantastical, obsessive and chaotic compilation of endless stories, brought together by the framing motif of Scheherazade, a newlywed queen whose tyrannical husband kills his brides on their wedding nights after sleeping with them. But because he can only kill at night, Scheherazade contrives to tell him stories so compelling that every night, the king delays the killing until the next night, until the story properly ends. But Scheherazade nests stories within stories, weaving characters and ideas from one into the next, so deftly that the king loses track of the passage of time, loses himself in the endless stories, and gradually--howsoever improbably--the two genuinely fall in love with each other, over the course of 1,001 nights.

The performance I saw had an enormous cast, an ensemble of fifteen, with everyone playing at least three characters. Most were accomplished singers, Chicago actors from Zimmerman's Lookingglass Company who easily handle rhythm and movement and intelligence and voice, all as a matter of course. They literally tumbled through their stories and characters, catapulting each other into costumes, desires, sorrows, carpets. 22 different lamps and lanterns flew through the air (I counted at intermission). Pillows became turbans, prayerbeads became cowbells, a shabby rug and a low coffee table--hoisted on four shoulders--became a magical flying carpet. It was erotic, hilarious, cruel, cacophonous, and breathtakingly simple.

Seeing that show gave me hope--much needed--in theatre performance. It reset my default intake mode as a theatre-goer--a default that had repeatedly been compromised, bypassed and patched together since the last truly compelling work I saw; a default diminished by having been made to allow for budget constraints or lack of training or poor craftsmanship--in short, by having experienced so much bad theatre.

It's given me a new reason to continue in theatre: I now overwhelmingly desire to work in the same tradition as Zimmerman's company, if perhaps a bit less pretty, more juicy.

Thank you for holding down the fort back in PDX, and for keeping me in the Forgery loop. Strange to say, but having the Forgery simmering alongside this show I'm running has been really, really valuable to the process. The mechanics of "Wind in the Willows" lend themselves quite easily to a broad-minded, meta-conceptual exploration of ideas, images, and even the practical nuts-and-bolts of effective performance design.

The vantage point from within the very depths and fulness of 'Willows' is quite apt and far-reaching: it's like working on the construction site of a skyscraper, and being able to see all the way across the city, to that other (bigger! lovelier! more ambitious!) skyscraper we're working on.

The things I like about 'Willows' are not coincidentally the same things, or many of the same thigns I liked about 'Arabian Nights,' albeit with substantially less acumen. In 'Willows,' I'm enchanted by the little, simple, graceful gestures that effectively signify much more profound things: dyed silks that are held to be rivers and snowscapes; characters found in puppets, objects, thin air. The passage of time conveyed by the bare minimum of movements and beats (and some excellent light work).

It has also been useful to realize how all of this works only when in concert with some kind of destination, a cause or mission that drives these 'effortless' things--for the truth is that it is effortless only because you don't have time, or indeed anything at all to spare dwelling at a single moment. In that sense, all the great epics are essentially road movies: Odyssey, Don Quixote, the Divine Comedy, Grapes of Wrath, Batman Begins. All of these narratives have at their core a compulsion to arrive in some vision of a place, person, or state of being, and in each case the compulsion will ride roughshod (quite literally) across any obstacle in their path.

All of which is yet another facet of my ongoing preoccupation with the deeper nature of violence...

Of our three major sources, I'm not quite sure what that compulsion is in "Harold...," and "Rabbit..."'s is also murky, though no less evident in effort.

Aside from the thoroughly magical world of 'Willows,' I spend my time here in Santa Cruz reading, biking about, indulging insomnia at a 24-hr. diner, and eavesdropping, as it were, on the college existence all around. Grateful as I am, and fortunate, to be here, I much miss all things Portland. The wanderlust grabs hold of me from time to time, and I find myself looking for an excuse to drop into gear and drive, as when you were a mere six hours away. More and more I look to the sea.

Know that your lovely presence and friendship are much missed. More soon,

badger-love,

paulmonster-in-the-willows

Letter to J., 17 Nov 2008

2008-11-29T03:15:00.000-08:00

Dear J.--

I trust this finds you thriving in the Pacific. It's quite a thing to imagine; thousands upon thousands of miles of ocean, far beyond the horizons of anyone or anything, and then to suddenly find a cluster of volcanic islands up from the depths, utterly their own, unattached to any continent above the ocean floor. I imagine swaying palm trees and the soft touch of sand...

It's my day off after a long tech week, and my director and I are in Oakland, visiting old friends and recharging our batteries after a long and arduous Tech Week. I don't know how familiar you are with the conventions of theatre production; Tech Week is when all of the technical elements of a performance--lights, sound, costumes, sets, props--are plugged in, usually in the final two weeks of rehearsals. Ten hour days are the prevailing expectation.

For the most part, this has been a restful, deeply satisfying and healing experience, in welcome contrast to the project immediately preceding back in Portland. I'm playing Mr. Badger in an adaptation of "The Wind in the Willows," a lovely old Edwardian book that's a cross between Winnie-the-Pooh and the Hobbit. And Santa Cruz is, of course, breathtaking, if a little complacent. But it's hard not to feel a bit removed from the reality of the living world: this is performance for a privileged subsection of the community, and while this does have merit of its own, it's apparent that I am complicit in a perpetuation of exactly the kind of stale, sleepy theatre I used to rail against. Still rail against, come to think of it.

It is further apparent how incomplete my day-to-day life is, without an authentic, palpable engagement to the community in service, as opposed to privilege. I've begun trawling through Craigslist again, looking for a day job in the nonprofits to come forward to back in Portland. there are definitely fewer hirings going on these days, which is worrying, and I also know enough from much experience to be wary of these my chosen fields, where both halves--the Public Service piece of me vs. the Creative Performance--have a tendency to be all-consuming, and then I've my own bad habit where I blame the demands of the one for my shortcomings in the other, whereas in fact it is really my own failure of imagination, a simple deficit in wit and stamina, and nothing else.

Truthfully though, there is a deeper core of me that has achieved a kind of peace with all of this late-twenties-angsty-soul-searching-crap. I've come to trust that it's the striving for, the constant, honest attempting, which truly safeguards me from utter apathy and mediocrity. (There are times when I believe what I just wrote, and then there are times when I believe a little less.)

Santa Cruz has a haunting loveliness to it. Not so much surreal, as not-real, irreal, as it were. Antique rollercoasters wreathed in fog, sea-worn steps leading down from the cliff-edge straight into the water, bookstores and haberdashers wedged in among the palm trees and boutiques. It is a strange, ethereal place, curiously provincial even in its urbane trappings. The constant sunlight (unusual, I'm told, for this time of year) saturates surfaces, dulls the edges of things.

It is a place well suited for the kind of extended, meditative self-discovery it sounds like we're both engaged in, at the moment, albeit after our own fashions. This is a liminal place, to my eyes built of thresholds and almost nothing else. To move or travel in any way is to depart and arrive through entire transformations, a daily experience of epiphany that staggers me by the sheer volume.

I pick up a book, and the sea breeze rifles the pages. I say a line in the theatre, and the lights shift, and the world changes on cue. I sit to write this letter, and in the moment's pause when the words are slowly, barely falling onto paper, this letter is endless.

Please do keep me posted of your ongoing, evolving discoveries, as I hope to keep you posted of mine. Already I've much cause to be heartened by your friendship. Be well,

thunder and milkshakes,

paulmonster-badgerstripes

The Golden State

2008-11-03T17:56:00.000-08:00

In the last 48 hours, I've driven through most of California. I had fleeting opportunities to visit distant friends before they moved ever more distant, and this being California, I felt sufficiently (uncharacteristically) daring enough to saddle up and go visit them. The first leg took me north to Berkeley, the second south to Los Angeles.

Seeing my distant friends, even if only for an hour or so, seemed silly on the face of it, considering that I drove hours and hours so to do. But taken altogether, the experiences were startlingly profound and wondrous, from my end of things.

What is it about dropping into gear and going, just going...? The mind's eye tracing the long squirrelly lines on the dog-eared maps. Contour curves echoing in the real world so satisfylingly, just so. The wind blowing through the car window, the passing lights echoing the night sky, the reassuring glow of destination cities appearing right where they're supposed to.

I'm away from home. The context of safety and normalcy is removed from me. All bets are off, all things are possible, and the gesture of going to see someone I may not see again for some time, if only to see one another once more and nothing else, becomes a profound gesture, something almost cosmic, transcendental (this is California, after all). (No I haven't smoked anything.)

Barrelling down Highway 101 from Santa Cruz, the rich hills and ridges of coastal California now live behind my eyelids, I see them in the night, sunlit in my memory and past the stillness and sharpness of the meager moon. The faces of my distant friends are echoed in the breaking waves, their voices chatter in the clattering rocks, I catch the fleeting lilt of their voices and gestures in the friendly nods and half-shrugs of passing strangers. (I swear I haven't smoked anything.)

Distant myself, I've been sufficiently stirred by all this to re-connect with those I've been intentionally or unintentionally distant from. And it's strange; it is this season, perhaps pregnant with profound and long-awaited change (I hope I hope I hope); or it is the endless cohort of friends who all seem to have birthdays within days of each other right now; or it is simply me waking up after a long sleep, recovering from a wounding theatre experience into a light and delightful one...

My letters are coming out again. Daylight is breaking again. The road unspools upward again, for the first time in what feels like a long time.

best,

paulmonster-road junkie

Southwards Bound

2008-10-24T14:52:00.000-07:00

I'm heading south to Santa Cruz, performing in "Wind in the Willows" at Shakespeare Santa Cruz. Quite stoked. Am playing Mr. Badger, which I find most apt.

I'm looking forward to a sojourn away from Stumptown--leaving something is the surest way to teach me how much I need it. Also, I'm about due for some serious California exposure.

I'm also looking forward to kick-starting my letter-writing habit once more, as typical of all my road adventures. And this time, thanks to my friend Jen, I have a digital camera to play with. With any luck, letters and blogging should pick up right quick.

Due to last-minute scheduling silliness, I had to forego my customary karaoke send-off, much to my disappointment. Still, know that I miss and love you all. Look for more soon.

best,

paulmonster-roadwarrior

Oceanside BART Station

2008-09-13T10:22:00.000-07:00

I dreamt a troubling dream last night. In my dream, I was at my
father's beach house in Oceanside. The real beach house, at first
glance, seems to be a monumental affair, using the big arches and the
soaring, clean lines of the McMansions of the suburban gated
developments, but the reality is that it is a big, empty house, with
hardwood floors and deep plush carpets, but nevertheless an empty,
small-feeling house, of white surfaces, an unfinished feel, and
windows onto a larger world outside.

When I dream about it, my father's beach house is always a much larger
affair inside than out, with large-scale rooms, long corridors,
cluttered garages, inhabited. But from the outside, it seems compact,
pulled together, yet complete. There are unusual changes of level,
short staircases, skylights, paintings hung, none of which correspond
to the real place.

I dreamt that I was staying alone in the house overnight. I'd brought
my bike in my father's jeep. I had papers and my laptop in one room,
a sleeping bag in another. Slowly, my father's house became a public
place, like a gallery, in which theatre people were gathering for a
reading of a new play. Sam Gregory, maybe it was a new play of yours?
Because at this point, you showed up, at which I began to apologize
for missing your birthday gathering last weekend. Then the reading
began. Of the play being read, I have no memory.

At some point, I was supposed to be in the reading. Then, gradually,
it dawned on me that I was being gently told that I was no longer in
the reading. For no reason in the waking world that I can fathom, the
theatre hosting the reading (even though it was staged in my father's
beach house) became, at this point in the dream, Theatre Vertigo. At
first, it was a two-person play, but later, others stood to deliver
lines. (I do not recall who the other person was. But he had dark
hair, perhaps a goatee, glasses, and dark eyes.) Perhaps there were
other plays being read? It's a shame I have no memory of the plays,
because they were enthusiastically received.

Sometimes in my dreams my father's beach house at Oceanside morphs
into a vast, fantasy BART station in San Francisco that doesn't exist.
It's a big, sun-drenched, multi-story,
above-ground/underground/

tunnelled-into-a-hillside affair, with scummy
cornices and trod-over gum on the concrete walks and pedestrian
overpasses, and a monorail platform. It's always commuter-crowded.
(To my knowledge, the waking world San Francisco Bay Area Rapid
Transit System does not include a monorail.) When this BART station
shows up in my dreams, I usually forget that I'm dreaming.
Remembering that I'm dreaming was a deeply important early skill I
learned when I was little, to help myself end nightmares in the midst
of them. (Lately, as this dream will go on to indicate, I've been
losing the ability to do that.)

I turned away from the gallery crowd, nursing a small and blossoming
regretful resentment, and into the concourses of the BART station,
looking for a newspaper. Going up the stairs, I entered the rest of
my father's house, and it was late at night in the house, even though
outside through the windows, I could see the sun setting, on a
coastline that I've never seen in the waking world but I've always
seen in my dreams. Somehow I realized that most of the guests at the
reading were sleeping in the house.

I decided to leave for Portland, to avoid the awkwardness I sensed
gathering around me like a smell. I had a load of laundry in the
washing machine in the cluttered garage, so as I'm loading up the jeep
with my disassembled bike, I put my laundry in the dryer. In the
garage, in a small anteroom where the washing machine is, there were
objects and possessions that once belonged to an ex-girlfriend, with
whom I had a bad breakup a long time ago, and the sight of these
objects, with her distinctive handwriting on them, deeply pained me.

At this point, Kerry Ryan popped her head into the garage,
sleepy-faced. "Oh, it's you," she said, and then left. Sam Kusnetz
then popped his sleepy-faced head in, blinked, and turned away.
Searching for a paper grocery bag for my clothes, I found one with
three sticks of half-melted butter, which I threw away. I then put my
dry clothes in the jeep and started the engine.

The radio came on, loud, Etta James' "I'd Rather Go Blind". With the
engine running, I realized I had forgotten something on the floor of
the open garage, perhaps a bag or something. Running back in to grab
it, a third man, whom I've never seen before, but looks a lot like the
actor who plays Al Sweringen on Deadwood but much thinner and gaunt,
pokes his head in the door and yells indistinctly at me for being so
loud. I apologize and rush away.

Driving the jeep through the beachfront roads, I glance at the clock
and it's much later than I'd expected, 6:17 am. I park in a parking
lot to nap before driving back to Portland. The nap is brief and
fitful, and guests of a nearby hotel were partying in a living room
suite that opened onto the parking lot near me. I remember slouching
down to avoid being seen by the smokers who lingered outside.

When I woke from the nap, morning had come on with fog and some
drizzle, and the green of the grass was sharp and clear in the grey
morning light. I got out of the car, and somehow you were with me,
Sarah Dyrhaug, and we went walking through what I thought was a hotel
complex, but in the morning light seemed to be some sort of new,
well-endowed private college campus or something. The architecture
was of hardwoods and concrete piers and big, beautiful,
well-engineered monumental doors. Inside, there were beautiful new
rehearsal halls and auditoriuii, filled with dancers and musicians and
students rehearsing purposefully and diligently. The seats were new
and comfortable, and filled with bags and things belonging to the
actors and dancers. Some floors were strewn with sawdust, evidence of
sets being built or construction still ongoing. The rooms were named
for donors and patrons of the school, and I remember speaking sadly
and angrily about how unhealthy that custom is.

Glancing into one of the halls, I caught the eye of a tall, lovely
brunette with full, red lips, dark blue eyes and a light summer dress
and striped socks, who smiled at me, and I flushed.

At one point, Sarah, you and I walked around a corner and into a lobby
that opened onto a courtyard, from which it was apparent that other
buildings housing yet more crowds of students and theatres clustered
around this one. People seemed friendly enough, of all ages, but as
we exited, a security guard came up behind us and told us that we were
on private state property (a contradiction in waking world terms but
of perfect sense when I dreamt it). But he then stammered and turned
away abruptly, as though suddenly thinking that we were maybe supposed
to be there after all. We decided to continue walking.

At this point, a third joined us who had been with us all along, but I
do not recognize who he is in the waking world, though we apparently
knew each other. He is short, heavyset, glasses, dark hair (perhaps
the scene partner from the reading?), wearing a black kanga hat and a
black shirt with a wide white stripe on the left side, running from
shoulder to hip. Yes, he's dressed like a cheesy jazz musician.

We walk into a larger central glass-domed structure, that seems to be
a museum or a memorial of some kind, with sculptures and explanatory
text and balconies within. This building and its contents explained
something crucial about the rest of the place, though I can't quite
say what that crucial thing was. But it was a startling and dreadful
realization.

The brunette came up to us, friendly, curious, chatting. We were just
beginning to explain to her what we'd realized when the security guard
returned with others, carrying headbands that were painful and
brainwashing (yes, this sounds silly and star trek-derived, but in the
dream I was furious and terrified). They put headbands on the
brunette and on jazz musician before I realized what was going on. I
knocked one out of the hands of the guard putting one on Sarah when
another succeeded in slipping one over my eyes. Knocking it out of my
face, I remember the feel of gripped fingers around my arm, spit on my
face, an elbow in my back. The guards were yelling, I was yelling,
and then I was fighting that terror you get when your consciousness is
awake but your body is asleep, and something terrible is happening
that you must stop before it's too late. The guards were screaming
that I couldn't fight it, and then it was just me, fighting to wake
up, fighting to realize that I was dreaming but dreading the
possibility that I wasn't.

There were long, lonely moments when I'd almost succeed but I couldn't
wake up, and I thought, I will never wake up. This has trapped me.
Something is happening.

Then I forced myself to wake up, and I did, and it took long, deep
breaths and serious blinking before I could reliably ascertain that I
was truly awake (can that ever be reliably ascertained?) and with
difficulty I constructed the factual basis of being awake, of having
dreamt the entirety of the preceding dreams, and the realization that
I had to tell you about it, though why each of you specifically I
can't quite say.

Throughout the dream, time felt real. Movement felt real. Though the
transitions and events seem disjointed in recollection, the experience
of the dream carried the certainty of actual things happening.

I actually feel guilty about not being able to prevent the headbands
from taking the brunette and the jazz guy, and probably you, too,
Sarah. I've just spent the last hour writing this down and listening
to Etta James' "I'd Rather Go Blind" on repeat, slowly feeling a
little bit better about it all.

On Violence

2008-08-17T14:13:00.000-07:00

Lately I've been obsessed with violence.

I hasten to say that this is not the X-box fueled, consequence-less, mere vacuum-sealed brutishness prepackaged and mass distributed ad nauseum, although such things are, inevitably, related.

Somewhere--I can't remember where, exactly--I read a formulation of this thing I'm obsessing over, described as an encounter between 'an implacable object vs. an unstoppable force.' The Iliad is replete with this: opposing heroes, closely matched, practically identical, really, except for some one little thing, an entirely arbitrary distinction consisting merely of who happens to be at which end of a particular bronze-age weapon.

This is where Homer pulls out endless thumbnail sketches, five-second obituaries: Joey Hoplite born and raised in the tough streets of South Thebes, he loved his golden lab 'Argos', his Ma made his favorite spanikopita every day expecting her baby boy to come back from that strange war overseas, but Joey would never see his mean old neighborhood again, for black swirling death found him there on the sands by the Scaean Gates.

Precious as such bits are, there's something deeper going on. I think Homer is in the business of describing moments, in time and space, where incontrovertible pieces of reality directly confront one another, and then a fundamental transformation takes place. Reality shifts; that which was certain is changed, in a deep way, and nothing is as it was.

That moment, to me, is the truth of violence. This is independent of any gloss of judgment that can be imposed--these truthful moments occur equally in volcanic eruptions, murders, and car accidents, but also in quiet deaths, collapsing balloons, melting candles. Homer describes his violent deaths as though they captured qualities about each of those things all at once, suffusing his battle dead with the totality of their lives gracefully, fleetingly, but indelibly.

There is the cliche that time slows down during a car accident, or in any kind of traumatic event. To me, the effect extends in all directions: colors sharpen and heighten; pain or pleasure intensifies; tastes and smells lodge in the back of the palate and don't go away for days and days to come.

Thence the fact that, when it comes to these truthful moments of profound change--i.e., violence--everything that has happened before and everything that will happen after is and will be profoundly affected by that moment. Interpretations of past events resolve into completely different patterns of meaning; all events to come will be underscored by this which happens now.

I remember a pack of hip cycling pirates that passed me on the Marquam Bridge, wearing black and red tights and stripes and big red flags with skulls and crossbones spraypainted on, but the skulls were actually gearcranks and the crossbones wrenches. Laughter, and bantering. Moments later, descending the long decline on the Eastside of the bridge, I saw their flags waver and plummet, and a telltale diverging of cyclists around a space, like a current suddenly blocked, or magnets pulling filings away. Somehow I also incongruously thought of crop circles.

G is 6'4", maybe 220 lbs, mid-40s. He was about 5 minutes ahead of me on the bridge pedal, riding a souped-up mountain bike. I would surmise he was coasting at 30 mph on his bike, when a rider ahead of him dropped a water bottle. His bike tripped the way my foot trips on a curb. He went headfirst over his handlebars, cracking his helmet in three pieces.

When I got to him, two other cyclists and a volunteer with a walkie-talkie were diverting the rest of us and calling for an ambulance. G presented unconscious, fetal/recovery position on his left side, urinating, yellow mucus and blood at his nose and mouth, unresponsive dilated right eye and a closed left eye with a pronounced contusion, possibly prolapsed. In other words, he had suffered a major concussion, probable internal bleeding and hematoma, and he'd hit the ground so hard that I suspected he had popped his left eye out of its socket, though I couldn't be sure.

In this situation, all I or any of us could do (without a full ambulance rig and the training/credentials to use it) is ensure that he stays safe and relatively stable until the ambulance gets there, lights and sirens blazing. I did a quick check to see if anything else was broken, determined that I didn't want to move him out of the fetal position and kept a finger on his pulse to make sure he was still with us. He started snoring regularly, which is a sign that while his airway might have some problems, he's breathing well enough for the time being, enough that I didn't want to intervene.

Then we waited. We waited what felt like an unconscionably long amount of time, but it was probably only five minutes. A pair of bike-EMTs came by and took over, turning him on his back, repeating the checks I did, and starting PIC lines and saline for starters. G started coming to a bit, tried to get up and deny medical assistance--all good signs that at least he could still try to do those things--so we had to do some convincing and gentle coercion, to keep him still while the EMTs worked. Then we waited for the ambulance to get there.

Cyclists passed around us, slowing to gawk, some even dangerously stopping, causing all kinds of trouble and a lot of nervousness. A doctor ostentatiously asked us if we needed her, playing up her status the way someone does when they don't really want to help, but want to be noticed for offering. She didn't move to look at the guy, only those of us around him (all of us clearly occupied). When she recognized colleagues from her hospital, more full-throated bonhomie energy went to them than anywhere else. "Fancy seeing you here!" "Shouldn't you be offering to help?" "Nah, looks good but I'm off the clock."

Throughout which we were still waiting for an ambulance, cringing under the backslapping doctors, wondering about the nature of this place, where so many different realities seemed to be converging and mingling at once. For how can G, with seriously life-threatening injuries entirely beyond our scope, coexist in the same space as these disinterested doctors, or those crowds of silently shocked cyclists, or the frantic volunteer with the walkie-talkie, or me with the saline bag at chest level, or the sweating and nervous EMTs with their skimpy little kits... how could we all be on the same bridge at the same time? The sun was climbing, the river shimmered far beneath us, and G was lapsing in and out of consciousness while we hovered around him, bravely resolving our faces to somehow mask the panic.

The ambulance took an excruciatingly long time to get to us. By the time it arrived, G was conscious but disoriented, indistinct and contradictory in his responses, blanching in the heat. We strapped him onto a backboard and the paramedics took him away.

Best,

paulmonster-on-the-bridge

Excerpt, E-letter to C

2008-08-07T07:41:00.000-07:00

The following is a response to an open question on a listserv I picked up on. C asked what the standard arrangements for non-union actor pay in Portland are. Lots of people responded on the tax end of things, and no one publicly responded more specifically, understandably. I didn't either; the following was sent directly to her, as I suspect others have done. (I doubt the wisdom of broadcasting what we're being paid, as it may engender bitterness/envy/revision to the detriment of us all.)

(I post here because A. it's useful in tracking the trending of my own thinking on the matter, as it has developed over recent years; B. this is my sandbox; and C. I much doubt how widely Polyform is read these days. Which suits me just fine.)

===

Dear C,

First, THANK YOU for teaching high-school theatre. You rock, you're deeply needed and deeply appreciated, the arts in the schools being what they are.

Taxes aside, I have yet to discern a working 'standard pay rate' in non-union theatre in this town. This is, incidentally, one of the strongest arguments for pursuing a union career.

The most I've ever been paid for a theatre gig in Portland is $3000, for a six week run and a four week rehearsal period. The least is, of course, nothing. Small-medium theatres are being generous if they can afford to pay $500 for a comparable time commitment. That covers everything from staged readings to full on performances, run crew to solo work. If your students want to work primarily in the Portland area, they should expect dependence on a day job at least for the time being, until they sort out whether to move elsewhere or pursue Equity or not.

I have my own reasons for not pursuing an Equity card, and it is by no means the correct choice for everyone. But not pursuing union status means very specific trade-offs: in what to expect in terms of pay, but also professionalism, artistic integrity, intentionality, relationships, family, etc., etc. Race and gender also inevitably play--and should play--very important roles in this, which is ultimately a personal decision.

For your students who are devoted to theatre as an avocation--that is, as something yet more meaningful than a day job, with higher standards and a deep commitment to growth and survival--I advocate as broad a meaning for that avocation as possible. That is, be as open and accepting of developing your art backstage as on-, and, at least initially, push your boundaries and your comfort zones as much as you can. Maybe that means you need to be the annoying emo kid with the two hour monologue show for awhile. With time, everyone learns what is beyond the pale, and what is absolutely unacceptable, and those are necessary lessons that can only be learned the hard way.

Then, once they do accrue that experience (which they may well already have), absolutely do not compromise on those learned lessons. For some people, that means getting paid a certain minimum, or never taking off their clothes onstage, or never commuting past the West Hills, etc., etc. These instincts are every bit as valuable and necessary as our onstage performance instincts. They keep us healthy and sane.

My last suggestion is to find and support a day job that is healthy and engaged and engaging with the rest of the world, whether theatre or non-theatre. Your identity as a citizen of the world can only be reinforced by as vibrant and sustaining a day-job as possible, to complement your position as a theatre artist. Now, clearly, oftentimes this ideal is impossible, but it's meant to be a moving target, a constant process to discover and perfect one's conscience and integrity in all respects, not just the onstage bits. The healthier the private person is, the heathier the artist will be. This can translate in multiple ways for every individual; for me, working at non-profits and government jobs in addictions recovery and emergency services has been my bag. For others, it's making comfortable wages in the service industry, or plugging through med school, or finding a sugar daddy, or whatever. There's no judgment in this that's relevant, other than your own.

I say all of this because it's an inherently co-dependent and unhealthy thing, to be committed as an actor and nothing else, and then to face the inevitable dry spell, when the work is scarce, or unfulfilling even if plentiful, and to find one's passions limited and constrained because nothing else in your daily world supports you in a meaningful way. In my experience, while the money is important, facing yourself with integrity is all the more so, and should be. But we should remember that, unless you choose to, you don't have to answer to anyone else for these personal choices. I say that for myself as much as anything.

So that went a bit beyond the terms of your question, but I do still think these are important and interrelated points to make.

Best,

paulmonster-dragoman

Unsent Letters Digest

2008-07-26T00:14:00.000-07:00

Lately my letters take longer to write, turn out to be far longer and more meandering than my letters used to be, and are far more likely to be abandoned, unsent, as time spools away. Encountering drafts of letters in my big letter-book is like encountering sadly fascinating shipwrecks half-buried in the beach.

===

Excerpt from my Letter to Jen, dated 23 June, unsent.

...I just moved to a rad new apartment, of my very own, in N Portland, where all the women are strong and so forth. My books fit, which is extraordinary. 8 or 9 cats live in the villa-esque courtyard; they strategically position themselves, like sniper teams, covering every approach, every exit, every gap in the hedges. Whenever I come home, they troop around me like a protective detail, distancing themselves to allow optimum range of motion against, say, marauding raccoon hordes, or rogue Russian secret agents, or Voldemort's dementors. Two always follow me in--one on post at the door, the other clearing each room in my apartment, faster than I can turn on the lights.

Only when they're satisfied that my place is secure do they allow me to pick them up and cradle them (they rotate every other shift or so), reluctantly purring in spite of their training. I imagine the cats assigned to my protection detail are the cat equivalent of retired Brooklyn cat detectives forced into retirement by budget cuts, injuries sustained in the line of duty and too many run-ins against the NY Cat Commissioner. They see this as a dangerous gig, the result of bad luck and worse friends at headquarters, and the need to protect their pensions until they can catch a better break. In other words, I very much doubt that gruff little ginger, or the chubby, clipped-ear longhair would either of them take a bullet for me. But I find them reassuring just the same...

...It's troubling to say as much; but for me, this is the optimal level of current and projected work to have... my days and weeks are woefully tight, entirely without any margin for error, much less expansion of committments to the workplace or school. Attempts to do so have gone very poorly t o date--cause for concern, not alarm, but troubling nonetheless. It seems I'm happiest--as you no doubt know by now--only when I've my back against a wall, actively disputing some expected path or another (cue me in a Cyrano nose: 'No' to headshots, 'No!' to the Equity card chase, 'Thank you No!' to the college capitulations, 'Again, No!' to "normal" hours), and every time I try to buck my own trend and give 'normal'-cy a try, things go from strained to breaking with entertaining alacrity.

Lately , a number of respectable theatre people--or at least, what passes for respectable in these parts--have been goading me to audition more, to seriously take up the Equity path, to get representation and so forth. Nothing I haven't already heard elsewhere, but deeply flattering all the same, and all the more so as each passing season sees that many more repetitions of this same conversation, against some seriously growing evidence that my Public Service world, long the bulwark of my day-to-day survival and the mainstay of my civic conscience, is rudderless and all but failing.

It's noticeable, now; it's been a very long time since my Public Service interests--the EMT work, the homeless advocacy and addictions recovery--have been seen to flourish the way my Theatre world does, albeit beyond the pale of a more conventional reading of that term, 'flourish.' My conviction that the two should be deeply interrelated, equally prized priorities in my life has repeatedly foundered on my lack of formal credentials, my firmly rooted insecurities and the absence of unified role models...

===

Excerpt from my letter to Robert, dated 9 July, unsent.

Only now that summer's more than halfway gone, does it feel as though Portland has well and truly left the last winter behind. As if to compensate, summer now seems to rather insistently assert itself across the city. Trees sway despondently in the sudden, swelling heat. Noses and shoulders redden like ripening fruit, peeling delicately. Dogs and cats take on perpetually martyred expressions.

Time passes strangely, fitfully. Details have clearly shifted, but the topography of the emotional space I inhabit has not substantially altered from that of one year ago, or even arguably of two years ago. I don't necessarily feel like I'm absolutely frozen--rather, it seems I'm fighting one long, drawn out struggle, a decision that's well over two years' in the deciding.

The true nature of this decision remains ultimately hidden, as it must, until well past the currency of these events and days. That is, I can't begin to say what it is I'll be arriving at; I only know, now, that much is shifting, and not always in directions I understand.

I find myself constantly revisiting employment and vocational decisions. Opportunities to perform or teach seem to conflict with increasing intractability against the occupational demands of my 'day jobs,' to the detriment of both worlds. There simply are not enough hours in the day, nor can I consume coffee quickly enough to devote the full measure of time and energy and diligence necessary to do good work. I belive the difficulty stems from the fact that, as time goes on, my own standards heighten; also, the obvious solutions, once tried, tend to no longer apply again.

A friend of mine likes to underscore the importance of paths of least resistance. He believes too much credibility and glamour goes to the difficult paths merely because they are difficult. He posits that there is purpose behind a rooted obstacle; ignoring its purpose invites further and more profound mistakes...

But I ultimately think this approach to be no more inherently advantageous than any other. 'Ease' is every bit as subjective a criteria as, say, 'Good,' or 'Happiness.' Because nearly any conceivable outcome can be framed within either an active or a passive interpretation of those terms, using those terms as means to determine correct action looks less and less reassuring over time.

As a function of the tenor of these deliberations, I've been thinking about taking up one of the martial arts, perhaps aikido, or fencing. The regular physical practice of an adversarial discipline might provide the kinds of insights unavailable to me from the comparatively sedentary practice I'm currently pursuing.

And as I write this, it occurs to me that perhaps this is the point my friend is disputing; for me, the instinct to fight, fully and comprehensively, is both deeply expensive in all manner of ways, and deeply reqarding for me. The pieces of myself that carry my identity, that have survived and thrived over time, are the same pieces that have always forcefully insisted against prevailing expectations, conventional wisdoms, 'easy' choices. In an apt inversion of the applied rhetoric, it's comforting and even reassuring, for me, to have broadly defined and unstinting obstacles, against which I can easily describe myself in equally defined and unstinting terms. Thus, my desire to formally train in a physical discipline; I am addicted to the spoils of my own hopeless-case self-immolations, cannibalizing my own remains to feed the same habit.

This is a mode of thinking I blame on years of American war movies and the music of Bruce Springsteen.

Against which, as a surprising and unexpected new perspective, I've begun to consider the approach of the Quiche Mayans as recorded in their Popul Vuh, or "Council Book" (also called, "The Light that Came from Beside the Sea," and "Our Place in the Shadows," and "The Dawn of Life"). Among a great many other things, the Popol Vuh describes a way of looking at the world in diametrically opposed dualities are rather deeply interrelated and complementary conceptions: death, for example, doesn't necessarily mean the annihilation of life--beheaded heroes continue to advise their children and even impregnate their wives. The heads of patrilineal noble families are known by a title that translates literally as "Mother-Father." And the Quiche Mayan word for "world" translates literally as "earth-sky."

In the terminology of my own life, I've always hoped that, by braiding vastly disparate vocational disciplines, something stronger, better balanced and eminently capable would emerge. Perhaps the lesson of the Popol Vuh is to likewise embrace the overwhelming contradictions inherent in that intention as an element of weight and substance equally important, yet another strand in the braid...

best,

paulmonster-plumed-serpent

2008-07-04T13:49:00.000-07:00

I found a trunk of old stuff in my father's house, dating back to high school for me. Filled or almost-filled notebooks, stolen office supplies, crayons and oil pastels, blank tapes and cds, back issues of the NY Review of Books.

The notebooks describe a desperate and searching teenage dork, who thought rather much of himself but was too self-conscious to say as much, and rarely completed a full sentence. Said dork actually had a point sometimes, but usually failed to convey that meaningfully. Also had a lot of energy.

I took a lot of notes on random shit. I've got the entire Plantagenet lineage written down; important federal regulatory agencies formed since 1900; excerpts from the Tao Te Ching; an explanation of Griswold v. Connecticut; a breakdown of DNA construction theory... I was obsessed with as broad, as wide an angle lens as I could possibly hold. I think I still am, but in a less scattershot way, simply because I couldn't keep it all together. (I'm still fighting that battle.)

Regarding myself ten years ago is a strange experience. I think I had a sense that I'd take some hits through these years, but it clearly shows that I hadn't gotten knocked down yet. Now I feel more worn around the edges, a few scars to show for my troubles and all that. Not dejected, but certainly spent in some ways. I've narrowed some things down, but equally opened some things up... apparently, I still can't finish a sentence or clearly say what I mean.

I'm going to grab the trunk and haul it over to my apartment shortly. Context is important. Also, it's important to remember, and to see the evidence, that fountain pens were far too much trouble, and the resulting penmanship on my part is silly. Yes, I was one of those guys. Shut up.

best,

paulmonster-steamtrunk

A Very Fine Birthday Weekend

2008-05-22T00:57:00.000-07:00

I began my birthday (which was this past Mother's Day, now 11 days ago) a bit on the tired side. I was behind on some readings for class on the Monday following, so I set down for a fine breakfast at Jam on Hawthorne, then relocated to Sound Grounds for coffee and Plutarch with my readings. Then began the adventures.

My friend D. happens to share the same birthday with me. So, after a couple of hours fortifying myself with caffeine and urban community monographs, I strolled over to Pine State Biscuits and purchased some of the finest and most extraordinary biscuits I've ever tasted, fresh from the oven, and brought them over to Laurelhurst Park for D., where D. and assorted other friends were slowly gathering.

The weather was very strange and inconstant, one moment brilliantly sunny, the next pounding with rain. We were tossing a football around, earnestly praising each others' feeble skill, as sports neophytes necessarily must, when some small children, wandering away from a larger Mother's Day picnic table uphill from us, absently joined in.

Now, I'm not one to do much of anything by half-measures. I can troop out legions of directors who will affirm my willingness to try practically anything at full tilt. Teachers and instructors who habitually shake their heads, disbelieving my audacious imprudence. Cousins and uncles who think I dine on danger, washed down with unhealthy quantities of hazard. When the rain started in, and some of the lesser souls trembled with cold, I stepped up my game.

Suffice to say that, while everyone got pretty wet, myself and the small children got spectacularly mud-splattered. Cassandra, who is 8, got in some trouble from a (dare I say) rather uptight and unforgiving parent, who was upset about tracking mud into their car. No doubt said parent eats kittens, looks like a potato and votes Republican, but who am I to judge? Mitchell, who is six, was less afflicted with offending uncleanliness, and so spared parental wrath. Poor Cassandra had to pitifully wash at a drinking fountain before allowed to reenter the ambit of familial acceptance. I commisserated as best I could, enduring the cold, disapproving glances of respectable grown-up types.

See, the thing is, if you're going to toss around a football, you mine as well mean it. You have to own your game, dominate the field, refuse to tolerate anything less than your own invincibility. Thus generations of American football movies. On my birthday, how can I model anything less for the little ones?

Fortunately, Cassandra seemed not to blame me, nor was she herself all that discouraged. Later, we played wiffleball, in which, for the first time in my entire recollection, I successfully connected bat with (wiffle)ball, not once but three or four times! You have to understand, I was the kid in grade school who was so abysmal with bat and glove (and yet so damn respected and trusted and secretly pitied) that I was consistently chosen for umpire. And yes, of course, of course I had to dive for the base a few times. I mean, my kit was already pretty well dirtied, what did I have to lose? You can't say you've played ball unless you truly mean it.

And then somehow the group fell to encouraging me to jump through hula hoops held vertically over the ground, so that, after much more tripping and mudslinging, I was even filthier. It was a glorious afternoon.

I then made my way up the hill to my father's house, where a grand convocation of the Susi clan was taking place. Every year, the forms and semblance of a corporate board meeting are invoked to go over the numbers and strategies of the Susi Ventures Corporation LLC, such as they are. Only my father and one or two of the aunts take these forms seriously; the rest of my aunts, uncles, cousins and my Grandma use the occasion to preen and politely jockey for position in the shifting mosaic of my family.

My Grandma gently chided me for being so scarce at family functions. My cousins laughed at my dirtiness. Extended-leaf dining tables groaned under the heaping, massy piles of squid, rice, pork, and other less readily identifiable, more dubiously edible dishes. Since my Grandma notoriously forged birth certificates at will, a single cake was used to celebrate my birthday as well as hers and my Aunt Marisol's, all three of us supposedly born all on the same day. As we only had so many candles, and to flatter my Grandma's vanity, I am officially 7, Grandma is 10, and poor Aunt Marisol is an advanced 14.

I use my rank as the eldest of the US-born cousins to benevolently arbitrate chess and checker games, rein in the hyperactive and encourage the reticent of my cousins. I vaguely remember being small, and surrounded by a seemingly endless crowd of loving big people, shielding and feeding and playing with me, so many kuyas. I was forcibly drawn apart from the family in my pre-teens, then re-introduced, as one returned from an enforced exile, in my late teens and early twenties through now. This conferred an additional, prodigal mystique, making me somehow more beloved and yet forever distant. Aunts and uncles regularly confide their insecurities, their confusions with our strange and overwhelming adoptive country and their apprehensions and hopes for the family. I am the consigliere of my family. Would that I could be better worthy of the rank.

But with my younger cousins, things are less complicated, and it pleases me to play a part in what must be, for them, a similarly endless crowd of loving big people shielding and feeding and playing with them. I cut them slices of the joint birthday cake, and they say, "Thank you, Kuya Paul," and I blink fiercely with happiness.

I wrapped up my birthday by biking home, showering and changing, and then biking down to the Ambassador Karaoke Lounge, where a whole crowd of fellow Portland theatre Taurii magically appeared, and we sang and drank and sang for quite some time. It was here that I learned, for the first time, that my birthday--11 May 1981--coincides with the death of Bob Marley. As if I weren't already hauling enough of a burden. Then I went home and slept.

jah-rule,

paulmonster-poplicola

A Letter to Portland's City Council

2008-05-06T21:43:00.000-07:00

Dear Mayor Potter, Commissioner Adams, Commissioner Leonard and Commissioner Saltzman,

I write in response to the news that the city intends to cut funding for the Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center. For what it's worth, I honestly believe that this is an opportunity.

I was born and raised here in Portland. I'm the son of immigrants fleeing a third-world dictatorship. I'm as divorced from my native cultural heritage as I am detached from this cultural context. For most of my career here in Portland, my perspective as a performing artist has been that Portland as a civic establishment is not particularly well-disposed towards diversity in the arts.

There are some obvious circumstances in play, mitigating this perception: Portland's economy does not present sustainable opportunities for a broad-based arts community capable of self-sufficiency and long-term engagement with this city's civic fabric. The demographics, and the history of housing and employment discrimination, has had the added effect of minimizing and marginalizing what diversity is present in this city, particularly when it comes to diversity in the performing arts.

Of the established theatres, only Milagro Teatro/Miracle Theatre has succeeded in maintaining a commited vision supporting diversity in this artistic community; everyone else's efforts have been mere spring thaws at best, flashes of seasonal exuberance that quietly fold when the funding dries up, never lasting long enough to build real momentum or community roots. Most theatres rely on an inconsistent, fickle and demeaning funding process that inhibits growth, innovation and originality. 501c3 status; private donor patronage; seasonal ticket subscriptions--none of these conventional funding sources are in any way designed for serious, career-spanning explorations in diversity, integration, cultural discretion, gender roles, politics, violence, social justice, civic responsibility, etc., etc.--in short, none of the themes which live performance today is specifically tailored to meaningfully deal with. Authentic exploration of any of these themes is an inherently risky undertaking; neither donors nor earned income sources are reliably disposed towards shouldering that kind of risk. Even the laudable efforts of the Regional Arts and Culture Council produce shots in the dark, occasional windfalls that cannot be guaranteed for future support. We simply do not have a sustainable model for the performing arts.

The Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center has often been the exception to these observations. For over 25 years, the stated mission of the IFCC has been to foster and promote diversity in the arts, in a multiplicity of disciplines and means. The IFCC has been a home to a broad range of artists, all committed and determined to further the cause of diversity in our arts community, and each success made possible only through the real and palpable advocacy of the IFCC. It's been one of the only real long-term establishments specifically supporting diversity in the arts in this city, and as such it's been an inspiration and an encouragement for me, an assurance that this city is neither blind nor insensitive to my peculiar position in this society, nor to those of my peers.

In our current straitened economic circumstances, there is ample precedent for unraveling what little established support there is for the arts in this city. This is an accepted tactic, for a public that's accustomed to shrill, deceptively simplistic zero-sum decision making, pitting the arts against similarly vulnerable public funding dimensions--parks, or emergency services, or social services, or the disabled, or education, etc., etc. Perpetuating these precedents is a demonstrably unhealthy approach to local governance. We mortgage our future growth for short-term, stop-gap fiscal band-aids. We divide and cripple potentially powerful coalitions of constituencies into petty, balkanized groups incapable of protecting their own interests alone, much less furthering a broader community agenda.

I write to suggest that there's another way. Make the IFCC the flagship of a renewed commitment to diversity and community engagement. Use a decision to turn around the destruction of its public funding into the beginning of a broader discussion on funding each of the aforementioned priorities sustainably. The diversity of this community, specifically diversity in the arts, can provide meaning and depth to this city, in ways that promote and complement the economic and civic priorities of this city. The arts in general--and the performing arts in particular--are the means by which we can refine, communicate, discover and develop our identities as individuals within a community, specific to ourselves and to this city as a whole, independent of corporate and commodified influence. By linking this priority, integrating this priority along with the rest of the historically vulnerable publicly-funded dimensions, you can make this debate not about which constituency to betray, but how we can all work together to collectively agree on fully funding all of our priorities, how we can all live together in the same city, and not a series of isolated, defensive and antagonistic cities.

Together, the city as a whole can explore alternative funding methods: tax breaks for high-profile, "guardian angel" donors, corporate or private, willing to step in and work with the city to protect our collective priorities. Or debt relief for specific organizations that would otherwise lose their public funding. A citywide subscription drive, allowing individuals and businesses to post an "Arts Supporter" or "Public Citizen" certificate in exchange for a monthly or an annual fee, revenues then dedicated to the Arts or to the General Fund. We can explore methods of structurally altering the urban climate to accomodate our priorities: city ownership of properties, or a public debt that specifically supports the arts, or education, etc.

The announced decision to withdraw public funding from the IFCC is absolutely an opportunity for you to collectively turn around and surprise voters and commentators with a completely different approach, overturn unfortunate and unimaginative precedents, demonstrate long-term political commitment and foresight and rally an untapped, underserved and unorganized broader constituency that doesn't even know we exist yet.

Better yet, we get to take credit for something that was already identified as a priority a generation ago--our predecessors already did the heavy lifting in getting the IFCC established in the first place. All we have to do is keep it open, and we can claim a triumph.

To reiterate: the problem is not that we have unsustainable priorities: the problem is how to make our priorities sustainable. It will take work, and sacrifice, and difficult decisions, absolutely: this is the essence of public service. But let's use the opportunities we have at hand to move forward protecting and nurturing our priorities, instead of destroying them. Together, we can cultivate a political climate in which, in even the most depressed of economic circumstances, priorities like the arts and diversity need not be vulnerable to the vagaries of ill-designed funding schemes. We simply need the political will to protect what we already know is worthwhile. Demonstrate to this community that you are indeed committed to diversity, if not in the past, then now more then ever.

Best,

paul j. susi
citizen

Saddle Up.

2008-05-01T06:34:00.000-07:00

Today in my Politics of Poverty class, we discussed the poverty/gender/race axis underlying homeownership, aka the American Dream v. 2.5. During which I repeatedly and rather heatedly harangued against the rigged shell-game that is the homeownership chimera of middle-class virtue, relying on an old-fashioned, dignified, affordable, money-is-just-money approach to renting. Since neither my forseeable income nor my peripatetic lifestyle will ever conceivably support the demands of a mortgage, let alone my vulnerability to redlining, predatory lending practices, property-value-based xenophobia, etc., etc., why should I buy into that?

Ironically enough, later today I finally decided: I'm pulling up the stakes and boxing the books again. St. Johns, I love you, but I just can't afford the grueling bike commute, and the doubled-up rent, and the late night/late morning stumble-home. Oh, how I'll miss you...

You might say that this is the sort of thing home ownership is supposed to protect you against. I would argue that one is just as vulnerable in the one instance as the other--the primary difference being the illusion of ownership.

But nothing says adventure better than an apartment search. I'm already pursuing promising leads, and am confident to have this matter all straightened out right quick and smart-like. Come this time 30 days from now, I'll be a happy bunny.

I swear, it's these early morning hours that feed me something special. I know, I know, much of it is ragged endorphins and that exhausted giddy weariness thing that accompanies the caffeine-crash, but I tell you it's something mighty healing to get to feel the sky and the sun choose to lift themselves back up, again and again, just when it seems they could never ever get up not once more.

Solidarity,

paulmonster-renter

ps--did I mention I love Steinbeck novels? Happy May Day!

Excerpt from my letter to K, 22 April 2008

2008-04-23T00:10:00.000-07:00

...Such as it is, simply determining to do better carries a great store of promise for me right now. Against all the obstacles in my path, all the evidence of my shortcomings, and the manifest feebleness of my available means, to choose to do better--to believe in a world where it's possible to do better--seems to me to provide an unassailable font of strength, impervious to these personal indictments, these self-inflictions, the hatefulness of self-awareness, the unbearable heaviness of being.

It makes heartache palatable. It's what I hope to breathe in, whenever I take those long, deep-filling sighs (as I langorously gaze pensively through the lace curtains in my stately manor-house overlooking the moor). And thereby, as they say, hangs a tale.

Not that I enjoy many opportunities thus to languor, per se. From time to time I'll be lucky enough to look out a window at just the right moment, when the cloud cover thins, and then everything--leaves, windowpanes, faces, gutters, newspaper boxes--everything lights up as surely as if someone flipped a switch. But mostly I seem to be pretty well occupied with galloping apace like a fiery footed star to and from Phoebus' lodging. I'm lucky to know by now how important it is, purely for my own well-being, to spur myself to write to friends like you, from time to time...

...I want to pass on to you a haunting story I just read, from John McPhee's Pulitzer-winning "Annals of the Former World."

A Dutch colonist named Hendryk Van Allen landed in what is now New Jersey/Pennsylvania, roundabout 1650. The Dutch at that time believed the area was chock full of copper, and Van Allen was in charge of a prospecting and road building expedition, sent to exploit the Minisink Valley. The highway he built there was the first on this continent, supposedly largely intact to this day.

One day, Van Allen was hunting squirrels with his musket. Now, 17th-century musketry was an unwieldy, literally scattershot proposition, and hunting squirrels must have been about as easy and as necessary as whitewashing an igloo in a snowstorm. I have to think that Hendryk was particularly upset by this one squirrel, or that he was a particularly bull-headed colonial type, because he missed and reloaded his musket three times, crashing through the forest and making all kinds of noise, throwing away powder and shot he'd have to send to Rotterdam to replace.

At the third shot the squirrel dropped, but when Hendryk picked up the body, he found no trace of shot, but rather an arrow through its heart. He looked up to see Winona, daughter of Chief Wissinoming of the Lenape, smiling at him from a red canoe. They soon fell in love.

She told him, among other things, legends of their valley; how the entire vale was once an inland sea, and how the Great Spirit emptied the sea to make a home for the Lenape. At the Great Spirit's instance, the water rushed out through what is now known as the Delaware Water Gap.

Shortly thereafter, Peter Stuyvesant surrendered the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam to the English, with scarcely a murmur of protest. Calling in all their chips, the Dutch government ordered Hendryk back to Holland, perhaps to answer for his anaemic copper returns.

We can imagine Hendryk thinking of low, swaying fields of tulips stirring beneath the windmills. He did not have the heart to endure the calumny and ostracism that a young Indian princess bride would entail. She leapt from the peak of the Delaware Water Gap before he could finish explaining himself. Sorrowing, he quickly followed.

Believe it or not, McPhee's book is about geology. That story, which I've embroidered a bit for effect, is why he won a Pulitzer for it, I would surmise. There's a novel or a play in that...

Look to hear more soon. Know that your friendship is missed, as ever.

Love and Tulips,

paulmonster-water gap

Love and Dustbunnies

2008-04-19T03:36:00.000-07:00

Being in love is like getting run over. Sometimes it kills you and sometimes it don't. --Tony Earley, The Blue Star

S. is a thin, sharp-eyed young man with bright red hair. He wears Carhartts dungarees and dark baseball caps pulled low over his brow, a thin attempt at covering some of that bursting red. He steps inside slowly, affecting nonchalance, absently picking at pens and loose papers on the desk, staring at old calendars.

We get to talking about weather, news, cars, weather, coffee. There's an undertow of sounding-each-other-out, of gruff-good-humor, the kind of thing two kids wanting to look and sound like grownups will look and sound like. After a good piece of this, we're both satisfied that the other is true and means well. We kick up our feet, we lean back, we come clean. We're two kids in the early morning, talking things out, talking in circles and back again, likely as not just to hear the sound of another voice.

He recently completed the program, meeting a baseline of requirements set by the Oregon Youth Authority: a couple thousand in the bank, a place lined up to move into, a wage job that he's been holding down for a period of time, no parole violations, paperwork and education completions.

S. is twenty years old. He's worked hard, he's paid his debts, he's struggled and succeeded, he's corralled his legendary temper, he's gotten a fair job in a tough hiring sector. He moved into his place, and his girlfriend of six months moved in with him. She's nineteen years old.

After three weeks, his bank account was empty, his parole officer was unhappy with him, the girlfriend's parents were pissed, and he was being ordered by the program to have his girlfriend move out until she could get a job and save enough money to split expenses before moving in again. She moved out and went back to her parents yesterday.

There's no way around it, S. is heartbroken, lonely, misses her terribly. He'd be pissed with the program, except that he sees the sense of it, which is more than a great many men many times his age can say. He loves her the way a litter of puppies loves their mother. Without her, he's all tangled and floppy, hungry and panicky. If he smoked, he'd be burning up whole cartons. As it is, he's twirling capless pens in his fingers, he's thumbing the brim of his cap, he's laughing nervously and talking a lot.

===

My half-brother's girlfriend of four years left him about two months ago. My brother has four kids from a previous marriage; all four of them are less than 12 years old. The last four years have been important ones for each of them; she was a mother in all but name to them. That their relationship ended abruptly and sadly is tearing my brother apart. The fact that he still loves her isn't easy, either.

My half-brother is 34, pale, with bags under his eyes, a thin shadowy bristle of a beard, and a tired, forced smile that doesn't hide much.

Because I was dropping off his car that I'd borrowed, we met in a parking lot today, like mobsters avoiding tapped phones, keeping an eye out on whomever might be following us. Under a clear, cold blue sky we tilled over the same territory S. ploughed up the night before:

What is it with women?

Why are we so helpless with them?

How do I figure out how to survive this?

How can I make it better?

===

S. is a bright guy. He picks up on things quickly. He's affectionate, resourceful, he doesn't give up.

My brother is a good man. He's a loving, capable father. His kids love him to bits. In the broader story of my Family, my brother is ten times the son and grandson I can ever be, and that's not to denigrate my abilities.

Myself, I don't pretend to have any more answers than either of these two. Strange to say it, but, for different reasons, both came to me looking for guidance and comfort, whenas I have as much cause to seek as much. I've been asking those questions since high school, and look where it's got me.

The three of us are living very different lives, heading for very different places. But then again, S. dresses like me, my brother looks like my Dad, and I share a house with dustbunnies and drifts of junk mail. We had very different relationships; they're recovering from something immediate, while mine, I'm only now realizing, comes from awhile ago and isn't quite something I know how to articulate here. But all three of us can talk long, meandering circles around this thing, and feel better about it for now, but that doesn't change what it is. Wisdom comes only after much tiresome rambling, and more false starts than I care to remember, and even then, wisdom won't necessarily mend anything.

After a while, my brother and I sagely nodded to each other, to our shared loneliness, to the great blooming clouds overhead. S. drummed his fingers, yawned widely and turned for home. I waited for the sun to come up again. Then I saddled up my bike, wrote this blogpost, and went to bed.

Best,

paulmonster-dustbunny

Lists are our Friends

2008-04-16T00:40:00.000-07:00

Roughly Annotated Ideas for Performances That I Need to Flesh Out.

The Odyssey, with Odysseus played by a human, and everyone and everything else as puppets. Perhaps a series.

The Illiad as a prologue to this. With a core of several humans. Puppets erupting from the Trojan Horse.

The Work Song Project, a perennial familiar.
The Vallodolid Debate. Spanish Dominican friar and bishop Bartolome de Las Casas, at the request of Emporer Charles V (in his capacity as King of Spain), debated the celebrated humanist Gines Sepulveda on the moral, theological and ethical injustice of the Spanish colonies in the New World. Sepulveda defended the infamous encomiendas, Las Casas introduced the revolutionary idea that the "Indians" were human beings worthy of respect and dignity. Forerunner of modern Liberation Theology.
Untitled. Five homeless men and women living in an abandoned train station are driven out by a flood. The station is alive. Puppies, empties, plywood shacks, glistening rails. Place vs. Space.
The Anabasis. Xenophon's account of a small, "elite" Western military force that got hoodwinked into invading Mesopotamia by monied interests, then betrayed and abandoned in-country, surrounded by hostile, armed populations that they don't understand. Survival through superior military force and dumb luck, and a long march up-country to the Black Sea. To be told as a story of loss, dressed in manufactured glory, desperate to obtain meaning.

Common Themes:

Loss
Entitlement
Humiliation
Wit
Deprivation
Animating Objects

Best,

paulmonster-stew

College Cont'd

2008-04-08T17:17:00.000-07:00

In typical polyform fashion, I unwittingly signed up for a 400-level and a 500-level course at PSU. Both classes--Politics of Poverty in Women's Studies and Urban and Community Health in Public Health, respectively--are small, challenging, intimate seminar settings filled with intelligent, articulate, accomplished people with alphabet soups' worth of degrees to their names. How did this happen? Well, the PSU computerized Quick Entry admissions process delightfully does not distinguish the lowly undergrad from the PhD candidate. I'm a little dismayed and a lot pleased by this egalitarian turn of things, which I highly doubt would have been possible a handful of years ago. However, compared to my classmates, I'm like a marsupial that somehow bounced into the jungle cats exhibit. "One of these things is not like the other." I'm a coconut in a basketful of avocados. I'm the dirty Cunningham in Scout's class in "To Kill A Mockingbird." Thankfully, the last 26 years of my existence lends some limited but relevant experience to this predicament.

I'm loving the work--scholarly journal articles and readings from expensive university publications, with weekly written reviews and some field work coming down the pike. But it is challenging, no mistake about it, humbling and exciting both at once. I suspect that, in the time to come, I'll come to appreciate the work it takes to get to this level of the game through more conventional paths. But I also know that I would not have had the patience, 8 years ago, to work through the cattle-call process, and I scarcely know that I have that patience even now, where my largest class is only 14 people.

Usually, I'm the guy in the room who says the first couple of starter responses after the prof asks us to talk about something and then an awkward pause ensues. Thanks to my theatre training, when I see a gap in the flow, I jump in with both feet and hope for the best, and resort to self-deprecation when I sense myself sounding silly, which is always. I think I've won some respect and affection for this, but it's tricky, because everyone else in the room has a formal mastery of established fields that I can at best only be conversant with.

To top it off, I was very surprised to see that I'm the only male in the Politics of Poverty class. Due respect to the Sisterhood: gentlemen, haven't we collectively learned by now that the loveliest, most provocative, most intelligent and captivating women are to be found in the Women's Studies dept? Dudes, systematically subverting an entire gender through outmoded power structures doesn't turn them on anymore.

Sigh. Someone has to collectively represent and apologize for his gender, and, as usual, I guess it's just my turn.

Best,

paulmonster-marsupial

Excerpt from my Letter to Bob, 3 April 2008

2008-04-03T05:07:00.000-07:00

...Look at this. Yet another long tale of months gone scurrying by. Time and events conspire very quickly to depose any sense of control I can ever begin to pretend. My letter-book is filled with half-started letters to you, every one laid waste by the phenomenal pace of things.

Fortunately, as forbidding as such obstacles are for me, it takes but one instance to break a self-imposed cycle of frustration. Begging your patience, this letter is largely going to be about achieving that instance for my own purposes.

I hope things go very well for you in the North Country. Recently I've been reading and re-reading some very moving and lovely books that have reminded me of you--specifically, your sense of character, your gentleness, a kind of hapless wisdom, that sort of thing. The books are: "Jim the Boy," by Tony Earley; "Gilead," by Marilynne Robinson; "No Country for Old Men," by Cormac McCarthy; and "In Dubious Battle," by John Steinbeck.

On the face of it, these are all 'rural' books, taking as their settings primarily country settings and issues, but they are also all very heartelt books, in my opinion. Each of them carry characters who are etched with knowing or witnessing fatal things, and each of these characters cope with the fatality of the world by casting themselves as these clear, vast reflecting pools, in which they can turn inward to see the world reflected, remembered, almost re-ordered and rebuilt, and their parts in it reprised or redacted. They are creatures of memory, missionaries of slaughtered traditions, transmitting hoards of affection and responsibility along to the rest of their respective books.

Perhaps I'm reading too much into it, but my sense is that there are parallels between the bits of yourself you've shared with me, and the knowing, introspective, beleaguered and loving qualities--set amidst a violently traumatic backdrop of other strange and beautiful people--all to be found in those titles.

I should point out, though, that it's also pretty clear to me how prone I am to seeing what I've just finished reading wherever I look next, as often with reason as not. "Julius Caesar?" --There goes Cassius walking right by me, lean and hungry. "Middlesex?" --Loose threads on my sleeve, floating in the wind, as from Smyrna. "The Odyssey?" --Oh look, that lovely woman is waiting for me, just like Penelope.

Further, it seems to me that the Natural World spurs these dubious connections: insight is whimsy made respectable, and there are few things I can think of so whimsical, and yet equally respectable, as when whole trees suddenly explode with cherry blossoms. The World demands to be seen anew, and when our eyes are willingly seeing what we could not see before, the insights do not end with the confines of the physical world. Sleep is even richer. Women are somehow lovelier. Coffee is sharper. Everything old is new again.

I open "Long Christmas Ride Home" on the 18th of this month, in which I'm puppeteering a variety of shadow and bunraku puppets, plus a cameo live appearance as Baby Jesus in a Nativity sequence. Which Is. Going to Be. Awesome....

Write as you can. Know that you're much missed. Look to hear more soon,

paulmonster-eikon

College (Gaaah!)

2008-04-01T06:08:00.000-07:00

After years and years of threatening to do it, it's finally getting done.

I am now.

Officially.

Attending University. (a little piece of me died just now.)

I'm a Quick Entry Student in the School of Community Health at Portland State University, dutifully plodding towards a bachelors' degree. My first class was today, Urban and Community Health, PH 543, populated mainly with grad students. I am one of maybe three people not currently seeking a graduate degree in a class of 14.

I'm clearly out of my element as far as credentials, but the class is designed rather nicely, has an engaging group at the table, all seem rather accepting of me (no one's laughed me out of the room. Yet). Everyone appreciatively ooh'd and aah'd when I cited my EMT experience and my various jobs in the field.

The assignments are going to be rather fun: tracking health issues in the media for a given urban community, constructing a public health profile of a Portland neighborhood, and writing a half dozen essays.

We meet in a beautiful sky-washed room on the fourth floor of the new Urban Studies Center, overlooking the streetcar and the skybridges to the other buildings. It's the glass-and-brick version of an ivory tower, high above the dross. Privilege incarnate.

best,

paulmonster-undergrad

Answering the River God

2008-03-24T04:28:00.000-07:00

I will speak plainly.

Your heart is a reservoir, swollen and ugly. You aim your brow carelessly, rashly, wastefully.
Your warm hands are tender knots chopping at the distance between us. Your eyes and lips blaze all too righteously. The nape of your neck quivers with the firmness of your argument. It's ridiculous.

You're far more dangerous when you don't raise your voice, you know. It's strange, but that's your temper, cold, understated, irreversible. Your voice, with its ragged, curt serrations, tersely rushes under your breath, faster than either of us can think. And then you say
such
things.

In those moments, I tell myself that I can see through the gap between your shoulderblades. Floating there in your bottomless reservoir, mingling with the bitter and the sweet, I tell myself that the face of my reflection is just a face, the image as far from the truth of me as the setting sun is distant from its rippled, shining, watery rain.

I tell myself to lave my hands in your water.
Slowly, slowly,
the biting chill eases, reconsidering, taking its sweet time, warming up to the idea of warmth.

And then, achingly slowly, my cold hands warm in your running cold water slowly warming, your reluctantly kindled smile slowly unfolding.

I know enough to know that this solves nothing, settles nothing, changes only your mood and mine. There is no enough.

There is only your bottomless reservoir, your warm hands, and the beautiful ruin of the setting sun running through my fingers.

paulmonster-matador

Imaginary Friends

2008-03-03T11:56:00.000-08:00

When I was little, I had not one, nor even a handful of imaginary friends. I had a world of them. I would walk down a street certain in my conviction that a crowd of beings accompanied me, swimming the air at my shoulder, or flying overhead, or galloping behind me. Centaurs, eagle-owls, that sort of thing. Some had names.

Some were so specific as to have entire identities, whole and complete--exiled or orphaned royal heirs disguised in the imaginary-friend realm to evade murderous step-parents. Explorers and warrior-monks sojourning in my company, hoping to convince me to accompany them on their latest impending expeditions. Last survivors of their tribes, nations, or species, painstakingly entrusting their culture's half-lost secrets to me before they died.

Some were so vague as to be merely the edges of shadows caught in the corner of the eye; you couldn't look at them, you couldn't see them directly, but they made their presence felt.

They trusted me with the secret of their collective existence. I trusted them for protection, foresight, advice. It was a neat arrangement.

Many, or perhaps even most of them survive in my books. They are now, as they always have been, at once both a venerable and a deeply disreputable population of talkative, jealous, plaintive, unapproachable, effusive and altogether astonishingly wise souls. My relationship with them has also matured; some can speak more insistently to me know, and others have commensurately lost their influence (those latter sulk in the corners, wailing from time to time, yet still, as often as not, their view will prevail just as before).

But I miss the innocent certainty I used to have about them. When I walk down the street, their brilliant, bristling company is now no more than a metaphor. I miss the truthfulness of their existence, something I earnestly believed in, and earnestly still want to believe in today. I miss their company a lot.

Overrun

2008-02-29T21:24:00.000-08:00

Things go rather poorly, I have to admit. I've painted myself into a corner where everything I see, in my day-to-day world, is yet another sullen pebble of disappointment to add to the heaping mountains of such pebbles, great silent cairns crowding my field of vision.

I've made some mistakes recently, oversights, evidences of my collapsing sense of discipline, my increasingly rudderless and listless disposition. I'm isolating and insulating myself, retreating to my books and my piles of laundry.

Giving the matter some thought, I have to admit that I'm deeply angry and humiliated with myself, for having made myself vulnerable (again) for the sake of a long-term relationship (what else?) that ended six weeks ago. It is deeply disappointing, and distressing, to admit that I needed someone, who could not be there for me as I needed her, and consequently I no doubt did not give her what she needed.

In all honesty, this relationship was already beginning to end many months ago. And things with her are fine and civil enough post break-up. I doubt we will stay close, which is of some sadness to me, but at this stage, I'm having difficulty keeping what friendships I do have, much less do I have the energy to cultivate a troubled one.

What decimates me is how conscientiously I tried, how hard I worked, at not letting myself get in my own way, being open to vulnerability, intimacy, all the authentic and true stuff--I called it as I could see it, I was by no means perfect, but I certainly did the best I knew how to do, and still my own neuroses and blind spots, my own muddled emotional confusion and those unwieldy, massive, looming structural complexes of shame and anger and guilt that I can't seem to untangle, all these things succeeded in bringing down what had been the healthiest relationship I'd had in a long time.

Of course, she'd had her side of this, too, none of us can ever claim to be utterly innocent anymore. But what I'm saying is that I can see how my own shit alone is more than enough to break my own back. And under that kind of baggage, how can I possibly retain the levelheadedness, the clarity of heart and mind necessary to be loving and good and generous and present, as seems to be all too necessary? I am perplexed. Cue: "Beast of Burden," The Rolling Stones.

At more than a few weddings (which I am, as you might expect, very loathe to attend) (it's the acres of forced emotions, the manufactured preciousness, the desperate, cloying, emotionally manipulative and manufactured tenor of strained and meaningless ritual, I know I sound pretentious but that's what it reads like to me), I've heard it mentioned as a throwaway cliche, that "these two are so lucky to've found each other." And while I applaud the sentiment, if I accept the premise, then I must accept that, by the very terms of the statement, the rest of us are more likely doomed not to find each other, whomever that other may be.

In this circumstance, I must accept that, whether I'm prepared to or not, these are the terms I've been given. Now, given how brutally expensive (emotionally, physically, financially) emotional intimacy is for me, is it reasonable to continue to make myself vulnerable, chasing the chimera of a fortunate, unlikely mutual discovery? This is not meant to be cynical. This is an honest question. Cue: "What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?", cover by Diana Ross and the Supremes.

Like any other human, of course I hunger for companionship. Sex. Solidarity. Perhaps a family. A true and authentic connection with a compeer. But in the course of evolution, the continuous accrual of experience and weak wisdom, it has been revealed to me (in my capacity as a mangy, half-mad, bitterly ascetic Hebrew prophet) that it might just be more than I have the ability to create, for myself and for someone else.

Here and now, it was proven that it is beyond my ability, in this moment, to stay healthy enough for myself in my inner life and for another in a relationship at the same time. It's the actual demonstration of this inability of mine that has me brooding and taciturn, wounded and scared and vaguely betrayed (again like a Hebrew prophet).

I can accept the possibility that this may change, at some point in the future. But to do so, I have to give voice to the possibility that it may not change, ever, and that all possibilities, ranged with every gradation in between, lay before me, desolate and gorgeous like the body of an absent lover.

Best,

paulmonster-solus

I wish to be a river god.

2008-02-21T19:48:00.000-08:00

Jealous of daughters, water, sources, my pride. Fabulous horns twisting through my dripping hair.

It would suit me well: lazy, somnambulant ebb, my surroundings roughly etched with evidence of my glacial progress, and a temper that ruins, overwhelms, inundates, erases. My watery eyes already wander through men, women and gods. I am already inexorably driven, like rainwater searching for the sea.

And then I could say that my bed is rich with the silt of my memory of you. I'd gather myself in pools of hungry stillness, quietly sifting the pebbles of your devotion. On my broad shoulders I'd carry away farmhouses, thinking only to lift the weight of your heart from mine. At night my breath will mist whispering your name among the trees.

I'll fan out into the mountains, I'll seep through the coarse soil, I'll brim under the taproots, cresting the feeble riverbanks, beading sweat on your skin, tracing your footprints in glistening bathwater. Because I am water in your hands, I am the clear, fragile stillness held by your cup, I am the trace of wet carrying the salt from your eyes, I lightly cradle your body on my falling tide, I am sweetness welling at your lips.

I wish to be a river god, captive of passion, tempted by hard, unyielding earth, chained to my course by divine decree. If I were all of these things, you would hear hoofbeats in my voice, and the crack of smooth rocks driven in the channel, the stirring of reeds in standing water. And then you might listen.

best,

paulmonster-tiber

Mass E-Mail Sent 19 January

2008-01-22T01:26:00.000-08:00

Following is yet another of the periodic mass e-mails I send to invite you, in a long, dilatory and discursively meandering fashion, to yet another play I'm performing. If you would rather not receive such things from me, please let me know. It's chock-full of strangely mixed metaphors, half-formed ideas, an insouciant and unbending impertinence, and foul-smelling bicycle grease. Honestly, I don't know why you let me do these things to you.

===

These days, I spend a lot of time facing down panic.

Disaster is familiar and careworn, having lost its shock-value. It's an old sweater lazily draped on an armchair. I see it, I recognize it, I know it so well that it hardly registers anymore. Catastrophe comes with the coffee and the cream. I crash through my day wrestling with my temper, with the intransigence of clocks and papers, with the paralyzing grip of melancholy. Sometimes I lose those wrestling bouts.

My bike now has an 80-watt Halogen headlight. It's a small motorcycle headlight with an 85 gram acid battery strapped to the frame, sheathed in secretive black insulation. Together with an ultrabright flashing LED, my forward lights are now the brightest and most conspicuous they've ever been (my rear light is still only a single red flashing LED, I'm looking towards acquiring another). Gearing up for a night ride, it looks like I've weaponized my Bianchi.

I view bicycle lights as expressions of impossible hopefulness. Here in Portland, a number of high profile cyclist deaths have underscored the tenuous vulnerability of human lives in a mechanized setting. No 80 watt headlight is going to deflect the conspicuous irresponsibility of a driver who can't be bothered to notice someone who doesn't look, think or act like themselves. I take my life into my own hands whenever I leave for work.

And at the end of the day, that's not necessarily entirely negative. It's useful. Awareness of fragility, of insubstantiality, is a cold but calming comfort. The details blur; only truthfulness and empathy distinguish me from the inanimate elements of road and sky and dust. Even that distinction is merely superficial--there is a dignity in gravity, a purposefulness in wind resistance, a mischievous turn in the glitter of broken glass on the road. "Tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything."

In that spirit, sailing down the dark road with my ridiculously bright lights, sixteen-wheel oil tankers mere hands' breadth from my face, my lungs singing with the rush of cold wind and my beard dripping with dewdrops condensed from my breath, the shared road can open an unsuspecting island of sanity, flush against the caustic strictures of insanity evidenced all around. There is a quality of firmness and self-possession in this most transitory and inconstant context.

And there, as in so many other unsuspecting places, I find myself touching the fabric of the theatre that I love, even while I'm negotiating a hairpin turn against the blind flank of a triple-trailer and an oncoming SUV. Because I got mad skillz like that.

I'm playing the Meiji Emperor of Japan for Profiles' "A Few Stout Individuals," opening tonight. The Meiji Emperor is one of those historical figures who elicits the entire range of passionate opinions at the mention of his name. He overthrew the archaic Tokugawa Shogunate, restoring the centralized power of the Emperor; he was largely responsible for the rapid modernization of Japan in the latter half of the 19th century, opening the island empire to commercial and cultural contacts with the Western world while successfully resisting Western attempts to subjugate Japan; and he's the spiritual, ideological and literal grandfather of the militant nationalism that brought on the Second World War in Asia. He stands at the tipping point between millennia-old traditions and perspectives on the one hand, and unknowable possibilities on the other, equal cause for reverence and disgust.

He is but one facet of a play that revolves around questions of memory and responsibility and identity, complicated themes that underscore my waking world the way traffic lanes underscore a street. It hasn't been an easy process; the problem with figures like the Emperor, is that it's too easy to settle for a caricature of the man, too easy to pass judgment on him and simply blow past the paradoxes--the tenderness and the harshness, the willful ignorance and the transcendent empathy. Every night I proudly step into a bewildering fog of lines that loop back upon themselves, intentions that muddy and shift with the changing stage-picture, and a rather dashing set of costumes that make me look like a tanned member of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts' Club Band. Fun and back-breaking, as such things ought to be.

If I could have my way, my days would not be such regularly desperate, fighting affairs. My hands and legs wouldn't ache so much with fatigue, my temper wouldn't be so brittle, my countenance wouldn't be so 'grave', as one friend of mine recently put it. And I would be better about remembering friendships as I ought to, and returning calls quickly. For the time being, I must remember that all of these things lie within the confines of this shared road, and I must trust my lights and their ability to illuminate them.

===

"A Few Stout Individuals" runs every Thurs, Fri, and Sat at 8 and Sun at 2 pm, at Theatre Theater on Belmont and SE 34th, from now until 17 February. www.profiletheater.org Call me and I'll hook you up with tickets.

Don't stop believing,

paulmonster-meiji

An Open Letter to the Federal Government

2008-01-04T12:49:00.000-08:00

Dear Congressperson/Senator,

As a proud citizen of the state of Oregon, I am pleased to see that the FY08 Omnibus Bill passed by Congress includes a $20.3 million increase for the National Endowment for the Arts... These federal resources will increase access to the arts in communities nationwide...

As a theatre artist, my experience of the cultural environment in this country is a marginalized, subsistence-based experience. Public policy at the NEA is little more than a (very public, very political, very important) gesture to me.

Still, thank you again for your support. I suppose I won't try to overthrow the Federal Government. Yet.

Best,

paulmonster-st just

PS--Thanks,
Theatre Communications Group

On Seeing the Strangest Things

2007-12-04T16:53:00.000-08:00

Every day we see the strangest things.
Lamp posts toppled by the wind,
Mountainsides swept away by simple men,
and we make
the usual careful adjustments
for our eyes to cope with the
full shock of fire and force so
limitless.

The wondrous passage of time,
The limitless unfolding of memory,
those are
The twin, miraculous trees,
dripping soft,
incandescent fruits
so heavy with potency
that we forget the taste
of anguished dismay
eventually.

Every day we see the strangest things
Water lapping over the lip of a curb,
The warm features of a carved wooden rabbit,
smooth with years,
And I lose
all of my collected, glowing fruit,
My heart is emptied, exultant
as a tree barren of leaves,
and I forget
how to understand
why I am not with you.

Excerpt from my Letter to Sacha

2007-11-20T22:05:00.000-08:00

... I hope this round of change is at least coming about with some gentleness--or, failing that, some swiftness. No matter how badly needed, I always find change to be traumatically mortifying, as much a cause for anguished trepidation when said change approaches, as for wholehearted relief in its aftermath.
...Physically, the human body is built to sustain extraordinary transformations of all kinds--but never for very long. Those of us who aim to make transcendent change a way of life will always risk serious consequences to our lymphatic, cardiovascular, and nervous systems. In theory, the serenity implicit in the phrase, 'transcendent change' should counter those risks, but I, for one, am too much of an adrenaline junkie to take this for granted....

best,

paulmonster-leaf-on-the-wind

Dry Leaves and the St. Johns Bridge

2007-11-06T23:50:00.000-08:00

Late last night I was biking home from the theatre.

I now live in St. Johns, and one of my commuting routes is the St. Helens Highway, running north and west of the city, skirting the looming, forested hills on the left and squat, dusty industrial establishments on the right. Run down apartments and occasional truck-driver bars ornament the long, desultory expanse of rutted asphalt. The air is thick with the muted breath of whispering trees and eddying river currents only barely masked by the crumbling buildings lining the road.

Last night there was a high, misted, cold wind coming in from the river, behind the massive oil tanks. A loose wheel-spoke and the strangely fickle disposition of the roadway made for a wobbly, surprisingly challenging ride. For the most part I kept my head down and leaned into the slope of the road as best I could.

There's a long glacis that supports the on-ramp to the St Johns Bridge, some miles north of downtown proper. Rough-hewn stone guardrails edge its downslope side, and ivy-covered trees overhang the upslope. The ocassional streetlamp throws shadows all across the road, somehow managing to inspire both a trapped, almost claustrophobic anxiety, and overexposed vulnerability. It puts you in mind of Dante's ascent of Mt Purgatory, or Kafka en route to the Castle, or Scooby Doo looking for a kidnapped Shaggy.

Last night I was surprised by the quiet, solitary quality that edged through the senses as I was climbing. There was no fear, really. There was only the long, up-climbing slope, and the emptiness of the open road, and the cold wind in the trees. This road was externalizing the small, quiet, echoing cell that imprisons the heart in its most deserted hours, sentenced to bereaved abandonment the way others get solitary confinement.

There are times when the seas of emotions roiling within us--joys, desires, disappointments, hopes, grief-objects, the things we can't bear to forget and the things we can't bear to remember--everything seethes, topping the cliff-edges containing us, and our souls whistle like teakettles. In the natural world, it's something like when icebergs the size of England calve from the side of Antarctica. You feel it all, all at once, fully and utterly. Heartbeats echo in your head like kettledrums.

When I reached the top of the approach, the stars in their endless distances burst through the trees. The high gothic green spires of the Bridge, topped with red lights, rose above the mottled shadows. I could see the constellation Orion and the heavy pearl of the moon, and the answering lights of the city, and the long, empty road below me, and the wind played in my scarf and around my shoulders. Dry leaves swept at my feet. The loneliness fell away; in its place I felt stillness, lapping at my senses like the riverwater far below.

In my recollection of this, much should be attributed to the endorphins thundering with my elevated heart rate, amplified by Irish whisky (what use are endorphins without whisky?, a wise man once asked). But the truthfulness sweeps through the experience, borne along with the dry leaves, rising overhead like the stars on Orion's belt, so helpfully pointed out by the spires of the Bridge.

I'm working a show right now, that's humbled and overpowered my inner life even as it bounds and sparkles outwardly. It's underlined all the usual questions for me, about my Fitness for the Work I've Chosen, about my Process for Choosing What I Consign my Life To, about Who I Want To Be When I Grow Up. Questions that should be raised. Questions I should always be trying to answer.

Standing on the shoulders of the St Johns Bridge, watching the lights dancing on the water and the dry leaves swirling in the empty road, embracing the stillness within the long uphill road of being is a much gentler thing than before, and I've reason, now, to be very grateful for it. The Rocky theme plays in my head, and I can laugh at myself for this kind of soapbox melodrama, but secretly I can't help but genuinely feel such sweeping things. It is such a privilege to work and create, even as it is an unending struggle. Seen from the top of the bridge, the cause I have for gratitude easily eclipses the exhaustion.

===

Come see "A Lovely Day". The ensemble boasts of the indefatigable Jeffrey Gilpin, the luminous Lauren Grace, the Gallic Nico Izambard, the incomparable Blaine Palmer, the unsurmountable Ted Rooney, the redoubtable Gretchen Rumbaugh, the irrepressible Kerry Ryan, and the unstoppable Randall Stuart. Go to http://www.upontheseboards.org/ for reservation and location info. It's Free, because I'm just that good to you, baby. 7 more showings: Nov 1, 3, 5, 8, 10, 12 and 16. All at 7:30 pm.

pumpkin loving,

pjs

2007-10-05T16:42:00.000-07:00

In my dream, a large yellow dog with very soft, ridiculously pillowy fur is playing chess against an unknown relative of mine--specifically somehow a relative, yet someone I've never met.

There is also a smaller mechanical device assisting the Yellow Dog against my Unknown Relative. The Mechanical Device is about the size of a shoebox, with two red eyes and a series of antennae capped with round red plastic caps (for safety, as in: "don't poke your eyes out on my antennae, but if you're three years old, and you absolutely must stick this in your face, I come with safety caps anyway").

In my dream, I'm a participating observer of this game.

It's actually not chess. The board has 9 sides to it. There are at least 3 different groupings of chess-pieces on the board. The object of the game is hidden to me. But the game is incredibly important--winning, not so much, but playing well, that's the real purpose. The Yellow Dog is concerned that his scrum of bishops (I counted maybe 8 bishops remaining of more than a dozen to begin with) are being poorly managed by the Mechanical Device's suggestions. My Unknown Relative is smirking behind her sunglasses. Beset with the Yellow Dog's impatient aspersions, the Mechanical Device buzzes and chirps peevishly. I am curled against the enormous bulk of Yellow Dog, puzzled by the game and distracted by shiny objects just outside my field of vision.

I don't know what any of this means, nor am I particularly compelled to assign any meanings. More and more I'm dreaming very vivid, very specific dreams with incredibly detailed characteristics, which I appreciate. It makes me look forward to sleeping (as if I didn't do so already). Once I dreamt that I was on a plane filled with cardinals, who happened to also be the Sikh bodyguards that assassinated Indira Gandhi in the 80s.

===

The sky is a mirror, someone once said. By which I take it that they meant that the conscience is as expansive and all-seeing as the limitless sky.

===

I can't stop thinking about the radio towers above downtown Portland, with their gleaming ruby aerial lights trickling like tears down the face of the night clouds. The tops of the hills and the arcing spines of ridges float on the thick banks of mist, counterpoint to the floating lights of the bridges, reflected far below on the dancing river water.

best,

paulmonster-refracted

i feel it all, i feel it all

2007-09-21T21:02:00.000-07:00

S___ was sobbing. She stood by the phones with her long hair draping her face, and big, clear tears rolling down her cheeks, and her eyes and cheeks were rippling with clenched anguish. People were perplexed. She wouldn't talk much. I was perhaps the third or fourth staff person called to try to talk to her.

I got her to sit down with me to talk about why she was crying, and for a while, she wouldn't look me in the eyes. She couldn't speak more than half a sentence before her face would flush, and this mask of angry grief would stop her and she would quietly wail.

"I feel everything," she would say. "Why do I have to feel everything at once?" And her high forehead pinches and her fists dig into her thighs, and she bares her teeth, looking for all the world like a caged and cornered animal, a fiercely desperate thing lost in the world.

Slowly, furtively, I get her to talk about her loved ones--the ones that haven't hurt her. By talking, she detaches from the convulsing, consuming emotions. It's painfully slow. I almost have to teach her how to talk. A survivor of trauma and abuse can build the most intractable walls against all comers, no matter how genuinely honest, and the grip of her despair is far stronger than anything I can offer in a few short minutes at the end of my shift.

So it is all the more remarkable to me how the same creases of her face that define the deeply rooted and engulfing grief, can also echo the broad, bursting smile, and her glittering eyes are lost in cheekbones, laughter etched at the bridge of her nose and the dimples on the corners of her mouth.

I've already forgotten what her drug of choice was. She stayed for less than two weeks. She left and came back three times before she left for good. I have no idea where she is now, how she's doing. I'm not even sure I remember her name. But her face, and the way she went from falling-down-like-a-burning-house to glowing-like-a-newborn, especially when she talked about her fiance ("He always says the right thing. I wish you could meet him. He always knows exactly what to say"), these are things I can't forget, thankfully. Through her, I, too, feel everything.

Best,

paulmonster-cathartic

Off-color: An unsent letter

2007-09-15T11:06:00.000-07:00

Warning: may not be suitable for sensitive readers

I know how it goes. We have so much cultural artifact that tells a man that 'you are not a man, that it is un-manly, for you to fuck a girl without being on top.' And the other way, from behind, we name that after a dog, and by so doing we slyly call the girl a bitch, to the nervous chuckling of our collective masculine subconscious.

Whatever. If we both like it, if that's what she's hungry for, that is enough, I always thought.

But with this one, it's much different. With this one, the rhetoric is reversed.

She is the sky, the towering, over-arching, limitless and dominant sky, her breasts the heavy fulness of ponderous moon and all -eclipsing sun, her skin the soft endlessness of pale clouds, nipples that color and sharpen like stars, hair that echoes the wind in the trees painted by the setting sun.

Dominate, in this sense, is as much a reference to a soaring dome, as it is to ownership. If we follow in this vein, the brown of my skin and the impenetrable tangle of my dark, coarse hair is then the mysterious, fearsome and captivating 'feminine' darkness to her bright, clear, overpowering and 'masculine' light. Dark, brown earth, bright, clear sky.

That, too, is a myth and a trap to be wary of; to be fixated on details like this is to be voluntarily shackled. There's always something more.

best,

paulmonster-closeted

Excerpt from my Letter to Brenna, 3 September 2007

2007-09-05T21:57:00.000-07:00

Right now in Portland, thick, teeming rainclouds hang low in the sky, only partially masking a brilliant sunset like a blindfold carelessly tied. All the worn brick warehouses and the light glass office towers are warmly glowing tonight. Every color is alive in this light, and all the frailties, all the ruined pieces showing through the potholes and the tired faces are softened and even somewhat mended. The wind moves gently and the whole street stirs.

Excerpt from my Letter to Jamie, 18 August 07

2007-08-18T17:17:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I think we are all like Schrodinger's cats, little black blind things wandering in the dark. Sometimes I think we are like Mao's paper tigers, fierce and disposable and signifying nothing lasting. And then sometimes I think we're like ronin, bereft warrior-monks casting about for someone to fight with/for, hearts bursting with pride and sorrow. But I also happen to believe that we are like the Tibetan legend, the village that perished in a blizzard, whose souls are continually caught up with each others' cycles of redemption and rebirth,constantly replaying the last lifetimes' worth of rivalries and disputes, constantly having to wait for the others to catch up.

It's like an endless sitcom: there's the Pretty One and the Funny One and the Angry Guy and the Wise Mother, there's the One Who Always Messes Up and the One Who Keeps Hoping and Planning, and whenever one or several of them fuck up and kill something, they all meet in the afterlife, collectively smack their foreheads, and agree to wait around or keep going through the rebirth cycle until That One Guy Who Keeps Getting Reborn as a Tiger can catch up with everybody and then they can all move on to the next level.

The legend goes that, as time went on, the village kept unconsciously growing, until now it encompasses the entire world, and we're all getting reborn into the same world together, because we've all agreed to keep waiting and trying to live noble lives until we can all move on to Nirvana together.

best,

paulmonster-paper-tiger

winged proas, caked blood and other things

2007-08-14T17:33:00.000-07:00

A mass e-mail:

---------------.

In her novel, "The Ten Thousand Things," Maria Dermout describes a funerary rite from Indonesia.

The body is carried out to a ceremonial proa (a kind of galley with an outrigger and sails like wings). Family and loved ones gather in the water. The proa will sail to the other side of the horizon, where the rowers will bury the body on an island, if there is one, or at sea.

As the rowers prepare to sail, everyone sings a long, ancient song of the "Ten Thousand Things." It is a litany of everything and everyone that the beloved had ever known, which they sing so that s/he will remember them when their journey ends. As Dermout describes it, it's a deeply moving experience, sung to the rhythm of the lapping waves and the muffled drumbeats from the proa's musicians (who set the pace of the rowers), improvised specifically for every person. In colonial times, the songs had to be sung very softly in the middle of the night, so that the Dutch officials and the missionaries wouldn't get all imperialistically peeved.

Recently, I witnessed a death at work. A client had been smuggling drugs onto the floor, and he overdosed early one morning, just as I was coming on shift. The paramedics were already there and working to save him, and they worked for over half an hour, but his lungs had filled and he was gone.

As I helped the medical examiner search the room and the body, I couldn't stop looking at his face, masked by breathing tubes, tape and frantically placed IV lines. The caked blood looked like scratches of dark dirt, not the rich red stuff of life. I had known this man--not well, and not for long, but he had kind eyes, and spoke softly, walking the floor with a distant and distracted look, like he was hardly there. Save for that last bit, this body bore no resemblance to the living man I'd known.

When my Grandpa died, I'd watched the death happen, felt the pulse fade, watched his eyes dull and his cheeks drain of color. I was able to see the operation of Death that transforms us, so that the living person I'd known and loved did remain alive in my heart and my memory, while this physical person became an object, a relic, truly detached from the identity of the person. Seeing this actually happen in front of me unmasked the exoticism of Death--I do not fear what I have seen and held in my hand, felt with my fingers and my heart. Even if it is inevitable, and will come to me, too. Because I am convinced that it cannot touch the Ten Thousand Things. I am convinced that my Grandpa was not the one whose cheeks yellowed, whose skin turned cold and waxy; I am convinced that he, and the one with the kind eyes and the faraway voice, had already left for the island beyond the horizon when their bodies became objects and messy relics.

So now I can say 'death' knowingly, and without the capital 'D'--and this opened my eyes to the immortal part of us all, that soars undying above the stars, as Ovid says.

===

Originally, I'd started writing this mass e-mail as a means to send you a copy of a picture of me in this year's Bridge Pedal, of which I am always inordinately proud. But in the writing of this, I've come to realize that every one of you are yet another of my Ten Thousand Things, and that I hope to be of yours. I hope you do not mind too much the mass sending. Please accept my thanks and affection, as this continues to be a long and difficult piece for me to process, and I could not write through this without you. By way of thanks, below is a link to an image of transient earthly glory and triumph.

http://app.wishoo.com/events/providence07/index.asp?gid=%7BF9428D60-F865-49B4-A3CC-09FD0B97CC84%7D

yours,

paulmonster-proa

2007-08-08T23:49:00.000-07:00

A__ speaks a bit like Eeyore, if Eeyore were somewhere between forty and sixty, has been sleeping on sidewalks for most of the last decade, and has a drooping salt-and-pepper moustache that frequently slips into his mouth like a wet, stringy mop.

"We-e-ell, su-u-ure, Paul, I can do that, I gu-e-ess."

It kind of breaks your heart to have to ask this guy to pee in a cup in front of you, but that's a routine part of his treatment program, and he doesn't really mind since he doesn't get an opportunity to use drugs while staying here, anyway, so for him--as for most of the men on the floor--the routine urinalysis test is little more than a nuisance.

But asking any grown man to pee in a cup in front of you can be a humbling experience, for all parties involved. In this culture, it is unseemly to witness another person's bodily functions. It's rather a transgressive act, it makes you aware of the fragility of our pitiful physical substance, it's a forced intimacy, it's cooties for grown-ups.

My job is like managing an oversized kindergarten class with much, much higher stakes.

A___ looks at me with pointedly sad, sheepish eyes, hides his hands in his pockets and shuffles along behind me.

best,

paulmonster-in-a-cup

Excerpt from my Letter to Nina, 13 June 2007

2007-06-18T01:47:00.000-07:00

It scares me, a little bit, that so much of this life business involves living the life you've chosen without actually being entirely satisfied by the choice. All of the breathtaking rigor, the indomitable determination of our bravely severe little hearts yields only so much. And yet still the situation demands nothing less.

I have days where it seems I'm living out a long pageant of an exercise in humility and gratitude, where I'm privileged to witness unbearably courageous and generous works done as a matter of course, and I begin to believe that I live in a world brimming with miracles. Those days must as a matter of course be swiftly chased with days of gripping disaster, anxiety and stupidity, where my fingerprints leave smudges of cataclysm on everything I touch, and even my deodorant smells like regret...

best,

paulmonster-icebreaker

On Dramaturgy

2007-05-27T23:52:00.000-07:00

Dear Mr. M___,

Okay. I'll start by saying that I'm dreadful at keeping on top of my email, and I hope you won't hold that against me.

Secondly. I have no formal training as a dramaturg. In town, there are precious few resources available, although what little there is, is impressive. Mead Hunter runs an excellent program over at Portland Center Stage, both a playwright group and a dramaturg seminar. Unfortunately, I don't have a whole lot of information on it, but I know that it's accessible and that others have benefited tremendously from it.

I look at dramaturgy as being the director's wide-angle lens, so to speak. We provide the deep context, we give perspective on source materials, inspirations, derivations, what came before the writing of the play and what came after. A classic dramaturg, closer to the German model, views themselves as an incarnation of the playwright if the playwright is unavailable. The Royal Shakespeare Company employs legions of post-graduates whose job it is to know the differences between Gielgud's Hamlet and Olivier's Hamlet, down to the different inflections they gave to the same lines, the different buttons on their doublets.

In my view, a lot of the information a dramaturg provides isn't intended to directly inform an actor's performance; it's more useful for the director, and for the show as a whole, the better to craft a complete vision of a production with informed intentions. For example; today, this information is anachronistic, but a Jacobean audience would've been aware that St. James/Sant Iago was an important patron saint of several Catholic military orders. One of his titles, in fact, was Santiago the Moorslayer. The diabolical cunning of Iago is thus identified by Protestant rationalist thought as another incarnation of Catholic militant prejudice. That's a degree of nuance that modern productions of Othello can easily overlook, and not necessarily to their detriment. But an informed production simply has more options to play with than an ignorant one, and little factoids like the above will always start interesting conversations for actors, designers and directors struggling to find focus.

In the Portland theatre community, my experience has been that there just isn't enough time or energy to put a lot of effort into dramaturgy. There's a lot of theatre here that wants to exist in a vacuum, or that can't be bothered to do it's proper homework. A lot of theatres here assume that since they're performing modern work or devising their own pieces, the dramaturg element is unnecessary, and this is a valid decision, given the exigencies of Portland theatre these days, but I argue that dramaturgs for modern pieces are just as essential. A dramaturg provides a useful and a unified voice of opposition to a headstrong director, someone to bounce ideas off of without worrying about the power dynamic, the way an actor or stage manager would. One of the great drawbacks of our fabulous Do-It-Yourself aesthetic, is that it's rather amnesiac, and everyone ends up re-inventing the wheel a lot.

By the same token, this means that there's a lot of opportunity to provide creative insight for directors and productions that are struggling to identify the vital aspects of their work. My advice is to see as much theatre as you possibly can, identify the theatres that most resonate with you and be bold, send more emails, meet people, keep talking about work that you are passionate about.

Dramaturgy manifests in multiple ways beyond the formal position. Sometimes you're the weird actor in the ensemble who brings dozens of books. Sometimes you're the Assistant Director who photocopies the script and gives actors little secrets for their characters. Sometimes you're the house manager who knows a guy who knows a guy who knows how to tie a knot in that special way that one speech in Act 3 keeps going on and on about. Truth is, dramaturgy is a fluid discipline, and you have plenty of freedom to make of it what you want.

I hope this helps. Let me know if you have further questions.

Best,

paulmonster-dramaturg

With apologies for long silences

2007-05-16T20:56:00.000-07:00

When I was little, I once had a dream where I was lost in a strange house with very thin walls, and dark windows that dimly let me see flickering, indefinite images in the night outside. I remember running through many rooms, and eventually running around the outside of the house, looking for anyone. I remembering feeling frightfully alone for the first time in my life.

The moon had very red, very full lips, and it was mouthing words to me that I could not hear. Surrounding houses all had walls where doors and windows should have been. The streetlamps were colder and dimmer than in real life.

==

I've just had a birthday; without any real sense of alarm or dismay, I'm tracking a vague, unsettled place in me that remotely feels or remembers this old dream in my waking life today. Now, I'm thoroughly engaged and up to my elbows in my world--a lover, work, some scattered projects, a life--but something most definitely does feel sequestered, held at bay somehow. I don't know what this means. I don't know if this is just ordinary birthday melancholy, or the stirrings of a familiar deeper monster, or something else altogether. We are all of us at sea, I think, and I struggle to remember that it is a minor miracle that any of us make contact with each other at all in the first place.

best,

paulmonster-inconstant

2007-03-16T02:22:00.000-07:00

I make a point of keeping a certain number of very essential items in my messenger bag at all times. Throat coat, Emergen-C, a water bottle or a thermos of coffee, and four or five bars of Snickers. And that, my friend, is how to be ready for anything.

At work right now there's a nasty bout of bronchitis-inducing bugs going around. At rehearsals, a number of castmates have been fighting their scratchy throats for quite some time. At three weeks from opening, things look healthy, but there's plenty of work to be done and time keeps ploughing ahead. This week alone has clipped past me faster than I've been okay with. I look at the March calendar racing away and I tremble.

When I'm at work, the shifts drag long, punctuated by short sharp shocks of frenzied activity. I get home and sleep hits me, and hits me, and hits me again before I can say stop.

best,

paulmonster-ibuprofen

2007-03-11T00:47:00.000-08:00

We're rehearsing my duel with Mercutio. Romeo's blocked him, trying to break up the fight. "Um, Romeo, I'm kind of in the middle of something right now. Could we talk about this later--ulp!" he quips, just before I stab him under Romeo's arm.

It's nice to be able to laugh as much as we do during rehearsals. Truly, in my experience, tragedies work only when you don't take things too seriously all the time. All in all, I'm having great fun learning and rehearsing some of the most complicated fight choreography I've ever had.

I walk down the street and I can instantly size up potential opponents, prioritizing the targets on their bodies, gaging whether they'll lead with their sword- or their dagger-arms, how many steps it would take for me to close the distance. It's great.

And to top it all off, we had costume fittings yesterday. They've got me outfitted in a sumptuous metallic doublet, a cape, tights and a skirt. A skirt! And a cape! And rapiers and daggers! All I need is a mask and then I can really fight crime at night!

best,

paulmonster-prince-of-cats

2007-03-05T03:01:00.000-08:00

Oh look. It's March now.

Generally speaking, my long silences here can be attributed to a number of reasons:

I'm very easily tossed about by events. Oftentimes, literally so (see previous post).
I tend to take on the tenor of my environments. Specifically, when I'm beset by rather sad or intractable people or places, my own composure reflects the same sadness and intractability. This often then plays out in
My growing aversion to "Processing Things Verbally," as it were.

Let me explain that last bit: I have mentioned this in posts before. Lately I grow more and more impatient when I feel the impulse to mope or whine about something and then not have something constructive, something purposeful that can be drawn from my moping and whining. It feels repetitive and pointless to, first, experience something negative and then spend time describing and essentially re-living that negative experience. See, even writing that here, I'm squirming and rolling my eyes impatiently (while typing, yes, because I'm just that talented). And then? To make it worse? Inflicting it on other people. Why be miserable when you can make someone else miserable too? Thus my reticence.

===

I've started yet another new job. Because serving chocolate and espresso, while certainly gratifying on some levels, rather starved the greater part of me, and didn't pay very well, neither (nota bene: EVERYONE PLEASE TIP YOUR BARISTAS. They make a pittance for working their butts off and they always deserve more).

Now, I'm a Treatment Counselor for a chemical dependency treatment center here in Portland (I am not and will not be so stupid as to breach confidentiality requirements by naming anyone or anything specifically, don't you fret).

I. Love. My Job. I'm part of a crew of staff that are here 24 hours a day, dispensing prescribed medications, charting the progress of clients' recovery, watching people pee in plastic cups, escorting folks on smoke breaks, talking people down or through the rough patches and generally managing the day-to-day business of their recovery from chemical dependency. I used to work at Hooper Detox, the local drunk tank, so I've a fair background in this kind of work. The difference is that these days I'm far better prepared and able to be of use, and this environment is much better structured than my previous experience.

Generally speaking, clients here are much more personally responsible and invested in their recovery than at Hooper's Sobering Station (drunk tank). Back there, people were brought in by police and placed under civil holds, in effect a form of arrest where they had no choice about where they could go until they sobered up. Here, clients arrive either voluntarily, or under court order--but even so, they must make a specific choice between here or facing incarceration by choosing not to be here, or giving up visitation rights for their families, or any number of other consequences. The distinction may be subtle, but I believe it to be crucial.

And I'm very much drawn to the thumbnail-sketches of epic lives that I'm encountering here, on a routine basis: the Slavic immigrant who deftly eluded INS officials in three countries while setting himself up as a petty drug-lord; the smooth-talking Latino father of three who just proposed to his girlfriend through a payphone; the tall, stooped man with broken glasses who gets up at 6 am to attend his AA meeting, with a Measure for Measure quote taped on his door; the mom with four kids, whose youngest son visits with his father to play with the mother here every Sunday, and she weeps for hours after they have to leave...

There can be as many as 50 men on one floor and 30 women on another, and my shifts rotate between the two. The terms of the program stipulate that while here, everyone is monitored at all times; clients regularly receive passes to leave the building for medical, legal and housing or job hunting appointments and family/support groups, but even these are strictly scrutinized. While here, clients receive counseling and classes educating them on the nature of their therapy and various life-skills to assist in their recovery. The program lasts on average for about 4 months.

All this structure serves two functions: first, the legal requirements, whereby many clients are serving sentences that specify this kind of accountability; but more importantly, it's an introduction to the kind of vigilence and diligence that they themselves will be exercising over their own lives from the moment they accept what it means to be in recovery.

===

There, now. I've gone on quite a bit about my new day job and what it is. You may infer from the above that it gets rather busy often enough; there's also opportunity to catch up on letters and read delectable books during the graveyard shifts. No doubt this, too, plays a part in the general upswing of my temperament lately.

And finally, it helps that I'm spending a lot of time playing with rapiers and daggers in rehearsals for Romeo and Juliet at NW Children's Theatre. Playing Tybalt is wonderfully straightforward and gratifying. I can take the button off a silk shirt with just the point of my rapier, and with the thrillingly intricate and poised stage combat choreography we've been drilling, even I'm convinced that Tybalt could do it.

best,

paulmonster-passado

Over the Handlebars

2007-01-31T10:01:00.000-08:00

So I'm biking to work on a beautiful, cold, clear day here in Portland. And I'm just gliding along, coasting down the Hawthorne Blvd. slope. There's some construction up ahead of me, and the two-lane boulevard narrows to a single lane, so I'm merging and slowing. I'm not sure what happened, but I think that's when my brakes seized up and my front wheel froze, and next thing I know I'm flying over my handlebars, landing on my back and tumbling down the street, crunching on gravel left over from the snow a couple weeks back.

People fuss over me, my bike and my bag are pulled over to the sidewalk. I spend the next few moments getting my bearings, urging people not to worry. Then, as I'm calling work to tell them what's happened, no less than two patrol cars, a motorcycle cop, a fire truck, an ambulance and a construction team all show up, lights and everything, the whole bit.

Apparently someone had called in that I'd gotten hit by a car. It's actually very reassuring to see the full might and panoply of SE Portland's emergency services coming out en masse for the sake of a biker. We go through the usual bit of incident reports and medical preliminaries, I reassure them all that, while bruised and embarrassed, I'm pretty much fine, everything's okay and they can all go back to their ordinary days.

I shoulder my badly contorted bike and limp home, climbing back up the long slope, laughing at how painful walking has become. Because it's such a beautiful day, I was looking forward to a productive and busy day, and now I'm home painfully sitting on my bruised and aching butt. My boots, helmet and down vest all look pretty scrappy, now. I'll need to replace my front fork on my poor bike. I've got a good set of cuts on my hands and some bruises I can feel beginning to bloom all over the place...

The last time I went over my handlebars, there was a girl involved and I was in high school. It's nice to know I still got it.

best,

paulmonster-airborne

goats and monkeys!

2007-01-03T19:08:00.000-08:00

I just got cast in NW Children's Theatre's upcoming "Romeo & Juliet", opening at the end of March.

This was going to be the Winter of Capulets, since Blue Monkey Theatre had also offered me a part in their upcoming R & J, opening in February, but, unfortunately, their opening conflicts with 3rd Rail Repertory's "Number 3," which is about to open and closes on the 11th (I'm doing backstage run crew for the latter). (The scheduling math is all very confusing, I know.)

Which is sad, but bearable, especially since I account it an honor indeed to be cast at all, much less on both ocassions. All things being equal, I am quite content.

===

This New Year quite frankly jumped up and bit me. I was dozing in my armchair with a blanket and a stack of books when the digits turned over, no doubt a fair indication of the degree of festivity with which I will continue to observe these seasons to come.

A minimalist narrative of the ball-drop moment, as experienced by myself:

[blink.] [sip tea.] [look at clock.] [shrug.] [sip tea.] [reach for whisky.] [blink.]

===

Happy New Year, everyone. Health and thunder-love to you all.

paulmonster-tybalt

Excerpt from my Letter to Kimber, 21 December 2006

2006-12-29T21:43:00.000-08:00

"...in spite of the rhetoric, nothing's any cheerier because of these ridiculous holidays. In my experience, everything just gets that much more complicated and tiresome. My families are all emotionally riotous. Dealing with people in general takes five times as much energy and time to get anything done. People drive around in a hypercaffeinated panic, ruthlessly poaching parking spots in their grim quests for Christmas baubles. Just about the only thing I do enjoy about this time of year is the weather.

Bracing, palpable cold! Watching cheeks flush, feeling the atmosphere countervail my usually burdensome body heat when I'm cycling up the long hills or navigating the clumsy car traffic. Misting breath punctuating animated conversation. The panoply of functional accessories; scarves and gloves, hats and coats lending dignity, and a calmer mystique, to the roiling sexuality of fashion (it's so much more erotic to imagine what might be underneath, as opposed to seeing everything at first glance). Economy of movement and exposure means that a lot of things are more considered and deliberate; the frivolous stay indoors and wait for warmer weather. And so then sunlight is more precious, more noticeably appreciable. When the sun does go down, it's blankets and coffee, a world that hoards and savors warmth..."

best,

paulmonster-heat-sink

Dispatch from the Longship of Glory

2006-12-14T23:39:00.000-08:00

Truly epic weather has descended upon Portland. These days, my commute typically encompasses me on my bike, descending the long slope of Hawthorne Blvd. into the river and across the bridge, and then ascending the long-buried watercourses that Portland's downtown core has long since stratified into a grid of asphalt streets and paving bricks.

Tonight, Odin the All-Father thought best to send a mother of a storm from over the seas, lashing the bridges with 60 mph winds and rain that bites with chainsaw-teeth. There are streetlights that toss on the wind like ribbon right now. Stormclouds are rolling across the skies. Trees are swaying exultantly. Walking indoors with soaking raiment and helmet emblazoned with soaked leaves and twig-scratches, it's like disembarking from the longship of glory.

Recently I realized that a lot of my friends process things verbally, and I don't necessarily do so, and that this might be why I constantly feel as though I put more energy into my friendships (paradoxically enough) than I get from them. Usually this is okay, but I must needs be careful to avoid the habitual resentment and frustration that seeps into things whenever I usually feel as though I'm being taken advantage of (damn chauvinist pride won't let me suck it up and be a chump every once in a while). (Point being that it's important to recognize the friendships I choose, and that the personal cost of friendship is a choice I must own.)

The whole time I was fighting and climbing against the wind and rain, I could not stop smiling. I hope this weather lasts a good long while.

best,

paulmonster-wet

2006-12-07T22:53:00.000-08:00

As part of my ongoing expedition to Master All Trades, I'm now a barista for a luxury chocolate cafe here in Portland. We're opening a shop in the downtown mall, which will be new for me. Since I've experience wrestling drunks and staring down cops at the local drunk tank, and also appeasing unruly patrons at the Library, and wielding puppets in Idaho, I'm rather looking forward to mastering the intricacies of high quality chocolate truffles and meticulously composed lattes fifty feet away from the Santa Claus kiosk. For a change.

best,

paulmonster-macchiato

2006-12-06T00:14:00.000-08:00

I know, O gentle reader. I failed miserably in my attempt at National Blog Posting Month. I just wasn't good enough, and I entirely misjudged my resolve to post every day. I am a bad, bad polyformer.

But it was not for lack of trying; my screwy-ass laptop is still in the shop. My scattered-ass life is still remarkably scattered. I remain skating adroitly along the seams of insolvency.

I wish I could write that I've moved farther along from the benighted territories that I've been travelogue-ing for so long here on Polyform, but I haven't. I'm still here, lost in the tall grass, ploughing away at the dark, rich, fecund and somewhat smelly earth that is the substance of me. (Perhaps I've gotten more obtuse.)

There is enough pride and joy on a day-to-day basis to keep me going; there is more than enough shame and anxiety, when it comes to the larger picture, to give me pause. I could narrate details for you, but I reckon it would be tedious and repetitive, and it wouldn't necessarily do any good.

What gets me through, what makes it all better on balance, are the quiet moments I spend on my bike in the middle of the night, commuting home, or (and I know how crazy this sounds) the enforced silence of commuting by car, when I'm stuck in traffic and I can't do anything else but turn up or turn down the radio and wait for the logjam of cars in front of me to break. It's the moments in-between, the pauses and the in-breaths, that get me through. They tell me that everything else, all the other little anguishes and the little delights are but as those same moments before, and that somehow everything always leads to something else, one way or another, sooner or later.

Books I'm Reading:

Caesar's Gallic Wars
"The Sea" by John Banville
"Erotism" by Georges Bataille
"The Radicalism of the American Revolution" by Gordon S. Wood
"Romeo and Juliet" by Wild Bill Shakespeare

Listening to:

"Swordfish Trombones," Tom Waits
"Half the Perfect World," Madeleine Peyroux
Baz Luhrman's R & J soundtrack

Drinking:

Stumptown Coffee.

Excerpt from my Letter to Theresa, 24 November

2006-11-25T11:39:00.000-08:00

"...Speaking of which, I almost died last night. I was biking home from the music place, and this car suddenly stops in front of me. At first I thought it was going to park in a spot beside me, so I swerved to pass it on its left; without signaling either way, the car then suddenly veers towards me, making to sideswipe me, and I had a split-second prescience that I was about to be badly hurt--I'm serious, I started to feel myself go numb. Using my classically-trained voice, I yelled "WOOOOAAARGGH" (which is wookie for "You May Break My Body But You Will Not Break My Implacable Spirit, Which Will Haunt Your Miserable Kith and Kin For the Rest of Your Unnatural Days"), and the car screeches, leaving me just inches to clear its front bumper. Inside were a bunch of girls obviously going clubbing, and they were all gasping in fear and astonishment. The driver had her hands to her mouth, which is, I would venture, not the best idea when you're controlling a moving vehicle. I have no idea what kind of traffic maneuver she was trying to pull off; best I can think is that she was trying to do a mid-street u-turn, even though it's a one-way street. I glanced back daggers and kept on pedaling. And for the rest of the ride home I thought about health insurance and how many more lights I could possibly fit on my person. .."

paulmonster-cars-are-evil

An Eventful Weekend

2006-11-13T00:27:00.000-08:00

On Thursday I joined another show at ART, "Inspecting Carol." They needed a sound board op at the last minute and I owe the production manager over there more than a few favors, so I took up the call with alacrity. Sound Board involves things like pressing buttons quickly and preventing small catastrophes from turning into big ones. It's a paycheck, and I'm loyal to the best elements of ART. Plus, I like wearing black. It streamlines some of the more complicated considerations for me, like, say, dressing myself before going out into the world.

On Sunday, I was assigned to understudy a castmember in the event that the worst should come to happen, and someone has to miss a show for health reasons. My previous experience of the grueling ART performance schedule leads me to expect that I will be needed onstage at some point.

In the midst of the long tech rehearsals for "Carol", friends from SF were in town for someone's wedding, and I played host to them in my disheveled house through the wee hours of the night. And then there was the breakfast with Randall, the meeting with Emily-Jane, the late night tryst with T, the repeated airport missions, and so forth.

Late now on Sunday night, I'm overjoyed to discover that I have no shows planned for tommorrow. Tommorrow is the first true non-working-day I've had since before Metamorphoses. (Almost every other day has involved shuffling or accommodating for some other stressful piece of my whacked out world.) I'd recorded this in my book of days, but I'd forgotten about it until I actually checked my schedule tonight, and lo and behold the only engagement I have listed, is donating plasma to the Red Cross at 2:30.

Planning on attending a playwrights' workshop in the evening. Oh but it will be lovely to sleep in.

paulmonster-puma

2006-11-03T00:01:00.000-08:00

I tell you, there is virtue in singing badly.

I had dinner and some drinks with my good friend Erika tonight, one of my best friends in the world. We compared notes on the whole 'being-a-grown-up' thing. We ate pizza and drank beer. And then, because it was right next door, we went to the karaoke bar where I introduced her to that strange little piece of me that loves to sing badly.

I pulled out my old standard, Ray Charle's "What'd I Say", because it's still my strongest piece. And I tried Rick James' 'Superfreak' for the first time, which sucked, but it was still great fun. And then we played Pac-Man for a bit and then I came home.

In my job search, as in any object in which I approach things as a supplicant of some kind, it takes something from me to humble myself before someone else's requirements. I'm not saying that's a bad thing; it's good, indeed, to submit in a fair exchange of labor and experience. But it costs a little something from me, and it was important to have a good meal with a very close friend and then to unleash my inner soul brotha even if only for long enough to know that I will never make it to Motown in this life, alas.

Erika had never seen my karaoke-monster before. She was very pleased at my appetite for public humiliation.

best,

paul-monster

2006-11-01T16:40:00.000-08:00

I'm looking for an extra part-time job to supplement my sadly anemic income stream right now.

Requirements:

I'd like to actually make more money than I spend doing said occupation.
Must not involve murdering or torturing small children or animals. (I've had quite enough of that particular career track, thank you very much.)
No gratuitous anaesthetization of my soul, please.

Possible candidates thus far:

Deliver papers at the butt-crack of dawn.
Drive trucks to deliver papers to the people who deliver papers at the butt-crack of dawn.
Sexton for a progressive church.
Dispatch trucks for a manufacturing company.
Appointment Setter for an alternative health care concern.
Addiction/Detox worker for a nonprofit.
Sales clerk for a chocolate boutique.

Looking for a job is fun, in that deadening, grimly sardonic sort of way. In the meantime, I'm posting a lot here to 1) make up for those lost months and 2) participate in National Blog Posting Month. Because I'm Just That Cool. (I'll put up the logo decal in a little bit.)

Please, save your craven, petty, overwrought and jealous passions for later.

best,

paul-paper-monster

2006-10-31T22:46:00.000-08:00

What is it about the freeway at night that I like so much? Those who know me well are often taken aback when I say anything about how much I like to drive. Especially at night. Whenever I find myself in a fitful, troubled mood, as often as not it's the open road that calms me down.

Portland is veined with a slender net of freeways; I-5 running roughly parallel to the Willamette River, south to north; I-205 that branches east from I-5 and then continues north as well; I-84 bisecting I-5 to the east and Hwy. 26 likewise to the west; and the small belt of I-405 that donuts around the downtown core on the west bank of the Willamette.

Best thing to do, when I'm restless and heady with portentous ideas, is to drop into gear and just drive, sorting it all out from behind my dashboard.

I suppose I like driving at night because I'm less likely to break things than in daylight. Yesterday I busted up the van I drive for the children's theatre I now work for: in my defense, the traffic barrier was well below my line of sight, and this van is pretty beat up already. But I might have done some serious damage to the alignment or the transmission train or some such; none of the gear readings in the dashboard dial correspond to the actual gear the van happens to be in at any given time anymore. And the steering wheel is pretty broadly innaccurate, too. We're taking the van into the shop on Thursday. Fortunately, when you're as experienced as I am in breaking things, you learn to take these matters in stride.

--

best,

paulmonster-greasemonkey

League of Monster Voters

2006-10-30T20:50:00.000-08:00

Here in the great state of Oregon, we get to fill out our ballots and mail them in, as opposed to waiting in long lines on Election Day with little or no preparation. The luxury of having over two weeks to cast our ballots means we actually get the opportunity to make informed decisions on our statewide initiatives. These silly-ass statewide initiatives, by the way, are the bane of my existence. Someone needs to take the business end of a two-by-four to that coterie of dumbass chuckleheads who keep forging signatures so they can put really stupid and obscure measures all over our ballots.

So I'm filling out my ballot with my girlfriend at a bar (what could be more patriotic than that?). And one of those said silly-ass statewide initiatives was at hand, and we were talking about which way to vote (I'd go into the details, but it would take forever and it would give me a headache.) After hashing it around for a bit (like a mouthful of dry gin), I came up with what I thought was a pretty convincing and definitive case for voting against the measure. She didn't quite jump on board right away, so she looked up the online League of Women Voters position on the same measure, and lo and behold but the League of Women Voters endorsed my position point-by-point. She was impressed, and I'm pretty proud that both myself and the League of Women Voters came to the exact same nuanced and deliberative position quite independent of one another.

Now I'm going to relax by conspicuously consuming some apple pie.

best,

paulmonster-league of splendor

An Open Letter to Late October.

2006-10-29T22:18:00.000-08:00

Dear Late October,

You have persisted in throwing extraordinary, highly volatile and emotionally contradictory circumstances directly at my beautiful face for quite some time. Now, I am not a vain man, but neither am I a man of infinite patience. If you continue in your utterly bewildering and quite frankly exhaustive behavior, I shall be forced to take certain stern measures, which neither you nor I find particularly pleasant to contemplate. You may put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Otherwise, you're doing very fine work with the leaves and all. Keep it up.

yours,

paulmonster-pixillated

2006-10-21T00:49:00.000-07:00

I have been a reluctant blogger lately, mostly due to my sadly incapacitated laptop.

But more than this, I've lost even the seldom habit of blogging.

I'm in a strange place. These past months are distant and unmoored to me, both immediate and removed. They are like the figures seen through the lit windows of neighbors' houses at night. I can almost reach through and live there.

A friend of mine has written a play about, among a great many other things, a woman who helps her grandmother to die, and then sets about physically altering her appearance even as she emotionally attempts to deconstruct her identity. Reading the play stirred some turbulent things in me.

I'm often lost, prone to breaking things, happy in my books and in my friends, nervous and scared of this new relationship that's brewing nearby, relieved and wistful for a play I've just closed...

More updates soon enough.

paulmonster-breakable

2006-09-27T23:09:00.000-07:00

It's been a long three weeks since last I posted. Internet access has been scanty at best. For those of you peeking in from abroad, Metamorphoses is running with considerable, water-less success. Things are going well, though with more than a dash of that hectic-spice.

I have a new job performing for children again. I'm doing odd jobs on the side to supplement my modest income. My letters are longer even as my posts here are fewer. More soon.

best,

paulmonster-undertow

Most Surreal Week Ever

2006-09-09T17:22:00.000-07:00

Whenever my very good friend Wild Pirate Jenny comes to town, disastrous things happen. Freak ice blizzards. Debilitating heat waves. Pools breaking. When she goes to New York, it's worse: once she took out the power grid for the whole Eastern Seaboard.

This time around, she came to Portland and my computer died, the Metamorphoses pool broke and I lost my job (through entirely understandable and amicable circumstances, but still highly inconvenient for me). I made the mistake of playing two games of pool with her and I ended up having to wear a skirt all day Thursday.

Just prior to a highly emotional cast meeting (in which we were asked to accept the absence of the water), a tech from the second theatre space in the building came running down to get me. Upstairs, a Japanese theatre company was rehearsing another show, and one of their castmembers had dislocated her shoulder. As the (uncertified) EMT in the building, I rushed upstairs to find a circle of Japanese women sitting around a weeping young woman, with her shoulder looking funny, the way dislocated shoulders do. They were a bit startled by my Bacchus tiger-print skirt, but once I explained who I was they seemed to calm down a bit, more or less.

I made sure she hadn't broken anything, doing my best to explain myself through three translators. I was checking her wrist and elbow, in case there was anything else going on in those joints, when suddenly she started laughing and weeping all at once. All around us, the circle of sad Japanese women erupted in joyous applause. The dour, fierce-looking choreographers and technicians started smiling and nodding. Utterly lost, I turned to the tech who'd run down to find me, and he was just as stumped as I. Apparently, her shoulder had just popped back into place of its own accord, and now everyone thinks I'm a faith healer. She clung to me with her head in my lap while I tried to explain that she should put some ice on her shoulder. Mystified, I made my way back downstairs to the tense, emotional cast meeting, and the rest of this surreal week.

Before she could do further damage, Wild Pirate Jenny left for Denver yesterday morning, and we opened the show with those same acres of silk we've been rehearsing with. Fodder enough for another post later.

In spite of all, I am reveling in these swelling currents, riding the crest of these endless waves. More soon.

best,

paulmonster-yubiwa hotel

Ups and Downs

2006-09-06T11:08:00.000-07:00

I just lost my job today. This job that I've loved for three months, which beat the crap out of me emotionally and financially, just wasn't a good fit from my supervisors' point of view (well-meaning euphemisms, of course, but I have the utmost respect for them for all their honesty and flexibility).

It's a release for me, because I have been struggling at it. I've been doing my best to make things work better, but my best just wasn't enough for it. And that's okay. They've given me the opportunity to resign, which is good of them.

I will miss my residents most of all.

I am embracing the opportunity to rest.

more soon,

paulmonster-unemployed

ps--'Metamorphoses' Opening Friday!!! GAAAAAHHHH!!!!

The Glorious Century

2006-08-28T23:10:00.000-07:00

I rode the Portland Century yesterday. It took me out the back way, pulled out nearly 1100 feet of elevated whup-ass and beat me like a Michael Jackson video for about 7 hours. My riding partner was my castmate, Jeff.

===

Waiting in Line.

Me: Look at all these people.
Jeff: The guy said that there are five times as many people here as they expected.
Me: That's cool.
Jeff: These guys are pretty hardcore.
Me: Yeah.
Jeff: They got the spandex get-up and everything.
Me: Well, if you're into that sort of thing.
Jeff: I'm just wearing jogging shorts.
Me: It gets the job done.
Jeff: Probably be just fine.
Me: You know, I've got an extra pair of padded cycling shorts if you want them.
Jeff: Hm. Maybe I'll take you up on that.
Me: It feels like you're wearing diapers for a bit, but then you get used to it.
Jeff: It obviously works for all these guys.
Me: Well, if you're into that sort of thing.

==

Mile 1

Me: Okay, the map says we start at the Hawthorne Bridge.
Jeff: But the bridge is up.
Me: Oh.
(Time passes.)
Me: It's not going down.
Jeff: Nope.
Me: Let's go another way.

==

Mile 5

Jeff: Well, I think we're back on the course now.
Me: Yeah, I think so.
Jeff: Oh, look, there are other guys with tags and things.
Me: Cool.

==

Mile 10. The First Rest Stop.

Me: Ooh, the rest stops have peanut butter! And jelly! Peanut butter and jelly!

==

Mile 14

Jeff: I don't see anyone else.
Me: That's because we're so fast.
Jeff: Uh-oh. It's already 10:30.
Me: Well, we'll pick up a bit after this. Remember, we had all those streets and things. And we kind of made up that first bit.
Jeff: Sure.
Me: Look, bluebirds!

==

Mile 18

Me: So, do you think the tree grew in the barn, and then pushed it's way out the roof, or do you think the roof collapsed and then the tree flourished?
Jeff: Hmmmm.

==

Mile 20

Me: Well, that was a hill.
Jeff: Yup.
Me: Think there's more of them?
Jeff: Probably one or two. The guide said there wouldn't be too many of 'em.

==

Mile 21

Me: Uh-oh.
Jeff: Yeah.

==

Mile 22

Me: Strong like Ox!!
Jeff: .

==

Mile 23

Me: Thanks for waiting for me.
Jeff: No problem.

==

Mile 24

Jeff: Where the hell are we?
Me: .

==

Mile 25

Me: You tuck your knees and your elbows in and you hunch down over the handlebars, and it's more aerodynamic that way.
Jeff: You're crazy.

==

Mile 26

Me: Oh no!
Jeff: We can do it, just keep climbing, keep climbing!
Me: [gutteral, whimpering sound of dismay]

==

Mile 26.5

Me: I think we're in Ohio now.

==

Mile 27. The Second Rest Stop.

Me: What do you mean THERE'S NO MORE PEANUT BUTTER!?!?!
Some Guy at the Rest Stop: Well, I guess people ate it all already.
Jeff: But we haven't seen hardly anybody else on the ride.
SGatRS: That's because they all passed through before you.
Me: What do you mean they all...?
SGatRS: Well, they didn't want to get caught in the noon heat.
Jeff: [looks at me].
Jeff: Well, at least we're all done with the hills.
SGatRS: That's right.
Me: Yeah, thank goodness.
SGatRS: Sure.
Jeff: I mean, the guide said there'd be a couple of hills, but those were nasty.
SGatRS: Yup. No more hills. Except for that one.
Jeff: What?
Me: [drops banana]
Jeff: But isn't that in Washington?
SGatRS: Nope. No. No. Not quite.
Jeff: Well, but aren't we just going to the river...?
SGatRS: Certainly. And the river is just on the other side of that ridge.

[Time passes]

Jeff: Ready to go?
Me: [Eyeing beautiful British cycling girl in black riding tights with freckles on her shoulders] Not really. But okay.

==

Mile 27.1

Me: Oh my.
Jeff: .
Me: [humming Journey's "Don't Stop Believing."]

==

Mile 27.2

Jeff: Well, that has to be the end of it.
Me: distantly ...don't stop be-lieeeving...

==

Mile 27.3

Jeff: Okay, That's Just Wrong.
Me: But you said that was the--that there weren't gonna be any more--oh no.

==

Mile 27.4

Me: I'm just going to stop for a sec.
Jeff: Okay.
Me: Just for a sec.
Jeff: I'm out of water already.
Me: Where the hell are we?

==

Mile 29

Me: Thanks for waiting.
Jeff: No problem.

==

Mile 34

Me: Strong like Ox!
Jeff: It's not my legs so much as my butt. My butt really hurts.
Me: My leg keeps twitching. See?
Jeff: That can't be good.
Me: At least you're wearing the padded cycling shorts. Think how much your butt would hurt if you weren't.
Jeff: I actually don't really want to think about my butt anymore than I have to right now.

==

Mile 37

Me: Well, this is more like it.
Jeff: If it stays like this, we can make up for lost time.
Me: Those grandmothers keep passing us.
Jeff: Yes, but the important thing is that we keep passing them, too.
Me: They don't call it the granny-gear for nothing.
[A hill appears.]
Jeff: Uh-oh.
Me: Don't say that.
Jeff: But it doesn't look like it's curving down.
Me: Oh no.

==

Mile 41

Me: I haven't seen anyone else from our ride since the grandmothers passed us.
Jeff: I know.
Me: Do you think we missed the next Rest Stop already?
Jeff: I was wondering that. I hope not.
Me: Me too.

==

Mile 44

Jeff: Okay, that hill has to be the last one before the river. It has to be.
Me: I say we stop at that mini-mart and fill up our water bottles again before we tackle that hill.
Jeff: Yeah.

[At the Mini-Mart]

...
Me: I'm just saying, if push comes to shove, we can use the bus tickets.
Jeff: Sure.
Me: I'm not admitting defeat or anything.
Jeff: Well, you did brag about this to a bunch of people.
Me: If push comes to shove.
Jeff: If push comes to shove, we could take a left there and be at my house.
Me: True.
Jeff: I didn't brag about this, you did.
Me: True.

==

Mile 46

Jeff: There's the freeway.
Me: Look, the mountain is right there.
Jeff: Wow.
Me: But how do we get to that road? And where's our Rest Stop?
Jeff: What does the map say?
Me: The map... is not being helpful.

==

Mile 50

Another Cyclist Passing Us Who Isn't On the Same Ride: Are you guys on the Portland Century?
Me: ...yeah....
ACPUWIOtSR: Didn't that start early this morning?
Me: Yeah.
ACPUWIOtSR: Wow. How's it going?
Me: 'sokay.

==

Mile 54. The Last Rest Stop.

Guy at the Last Rest Stop: Hey! There's a Rest Stop here!
Jeff: OH THANK GOD.
Me: [guttural exclamation of relief]
Jeff: And they have water!
Me: And peanut butter! And jelly!
GatLRS: Are you the last riders?
Me: Um.
Jeff: Probably.
GatLRS: They told me that the last rider would come by to tell me that he's the last one and I can close up.
Jeff: They told you that?
GatLRS: Yeah.
Jeff: But how would the last rider know that he's the last?
GatLRS: I think he set out after everybody else did, or something.
Me: Sounds like that knight in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
Jeff: Who's that guy? Are you a rider, too?
That Guy: Yeah. I'm waiting for the sweep van.
Me: Sweep Van?
GatLRS: The van that goes around picking up mechanical failures, cyclists in distress...
Jeff: ...corpses...
That Guy: It's just too hot. I'm not going any further. I'm throwing in the towel and waiting for the van.

[Time passes. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are consumed.]

Me: Jeff.
Jeff: Yeah?
Me: I'm just going to put this out there... Maybe we should think about... Just for a second, maybe we should think about riding back on the Sweep Van.
Jeff: Hm.
Me: We're more than halfway there.
Jeff: Yes.
Me: It's getting pretty hot.
Jeff: Yes. But it's mostly downhill from here, right?
Me: That's what the map says. But we both know this map is pretty tricky.
Jeff: Unreliable.
Me: In the sense that it lies outright, with palpably malicious intent.
Jeff: Yes.
Me: And there's no shame. No shame in being safe. We've got Tech Week coming up.
Jeff: Right.
Me: It's not the Van of Shame. It's the Van of Glory.

==

Riding Back on the Van of Glory

Me: Remember everyone, heads held high. It's the Van of Glory.
Others on the Van: Yes. Right. That's right. Glory.
Me: We just didn't want to show off. No sense in making everyone else look bad by finishing the whole thing. Best to let them think they're better than us for this one tiny bit. And besides, 54 miles--that's like 100 kilometers, right?
OotV: That's right!
Me: So we still completed the whole Century! And we get to ride the Van of Glory, no less.

best,
paulmonster-for-pbjs

2006-08-27T02:35:00.000-07:00

Spoiler warning: Self-pity and introspective angst ahead. Those inclined to wonder after my emotional health are advised to skip to the cheerier posts below.

===

A quiet, little eensy sadness sits on me these days. It is entirely unrelated to the splendor of rehearsals, or the rigors of working my personally fulfilling (if economically and perhaps spiritually impoverishing) dayjob. It is a sadness of discontent, culled from an enduring loneliness and a general dissatisfaction with the direction of my life and times. Nothing more than the usual business, really. But because I am a thoughtful person, and one who blogs from time to time, I feel obliged to dwell on these things when they arise.

Recent personal catastrophes tend to indicate that I will never find a lover in the true sense. My imperfections have hardened, and my instinctive predisposition for isolation has only grown over the years, especially after recent experience. I grow more and more convinced of the gravity of my failings--in the sense that there is much I find wanting in myself, and this must be taken as a positive motive for growth and change, accomplishment and service--but to be convinced of those failings is to have no great love for them, and I do believe it to be true that, for someone to love you, you must first love yourself. But how do you love that which hurts you? Especially when that hurt is of your own substance?

Things become only the more difficult when you can see and feel the presence of affection all around you. I tend to construct masks of reciprocal affection only for their sake, all of whom truly are caring and loving and lovely individuals, quite worthy of affection and respect. But it would be more accurate to call this an affectionate distancing, tendering to others what is due to them, rather than for the sake of myself and my own longings. And this is never meant dishonestly or as a disservice to others, though in truth it may very well be such things. Rather, it represents, in all honesty, the utmost of what I can possibly offer.

It is all an extraordinarily complicated neurosis, which, I assure you, I really would rather not have to deal with, but it's here and I am thus compelled.

I have found isolation to be a cold comforter, by virtue of its simplicity, its clarity. Because we are all of us multitudes within our solitary selves, roiling and tumultuous with memories and passions and fears and dreams, griefs and tendernesses, and it is a minor miracle that I or any of us ever get out of bed in the morning. It's true that sometimes it's a miracle I'm unable to work.

===

I ride the Portland Century in a few hours. You may expect more characteristically buoyant tales of glory and mischief shortly.

best,

paulmonster-eensy

Bacchic Hula Hips

2006-08-21T01:21:00.000-07:00

For my first entrance in this play, I emerge in billowing robes and an astonishing mask, playing the god Bacchus. I even get grapes in my hair and beautiful horns.

Aside from the requisite stuff about messing with mortals and instigating the story, Bacchus is there, basically, to make a grand entrance, and to really introduce the audience to the convention of masked deities making appearances all over the place. So my director called for a bit of flair, some style and punch to highlight the event. To which I can only reply, "I live to serve".

The music and the lights on the pool will heighten things a bit, too, which is good because right now I am entering, in my mask and robes, quite frankly hula-hooping my hips in time to a swaying beat step. The pace is slow and long like taffy, and I am proportionally self-conscious and abashed, blushing and grinning in my mask both at once. Every time we rehearse this scene my castmates and I shake with laughter. My scene partners giggle and stumble their way through this bit.

We've got two weeks to previews and we're in fine form, doing full runs already--something I've almost never been able to say in all my experience. I can't wait to get in the water.

best,

paulmonster-dionysos

Annual Bridge Pedal Triumph.

2006-08-18T16:29:00.000-07:00

Here are some pictures of the latest Providence Bridge Pedal here in Portland.

The Annual Bridge Pedal is one of the things I love the most about Portland. You really haven't lived until you've zoomed down the Interstate on a Bianchi touring bike with not a single automotive vehicle in sight.

best,

paulmonster-armstrong

2006-08-16T16:48:00.000-07:00

PJ looks a lot like one of my troll puppets from my recent "Red Mare" tour. He's all knobs and bumps, with half-tinted aviator sunglasses and a dirty old SF Giants baseball cap. His beard is red and thick and crusty, he's got a bum leg and he speaks in a glowing, gravelly growl.

I took my residents to a baseball game at PGE Park last weekend. We made for an eclectic bunch; misfits, formerly homeless, disabled veterans, freaks and social castaways, tentatively navigating shoals of Portland's fashionably petty bourgieousie. They instinctively made a path for our garrulous, slightly pungent little gang. I felt like Lee Marvin in The Dirty Dozen.

I spent $60 on hot dogs and soda for the group, and then we crept down the bleachers to seats a little bit closer to the field than the ones donated to us (PGE Park is almost never more than 1/3 full). Once there, we took in a nice, long baseball game, the first I'd ever attended.

PJ is what made the game for me. He once coached and ump'd Little League baseball. He comes fully equipped with a colorful wit and an impressively resonant diaphragm, so when he wants to take apart the players or the umpires, the whole stadium looks sideways at us.

"I CAN THROW CINDERBLOCKS BETTER THAN THAT!!!"

Whether he was mocking the umpire's strike calls or heckling the nervy, pint-sized pitcher, or diving for a stray fly ball, PJ absolutely dominated the game. If I'm Lee Marvin, PJ is Ernest Borgnine.

"COME ON!!! YOU USE THAT BIG LEATHER THING ON YOUR HAND TO CATCH THE BALL!!!"

best,

paulmonster-shortstop

The Silk Sea--How I Became a Theatre Marine

2006-08-05T21:40:00.000-07:00

It's hard to articulate just how much I love rehearsing this show. First week of rehearsals has me in paroxysms of delight, transports of sheer exhileration. The cast is magnificent, the director commands the heavens, the theatre is on fire with energy and talent, and my old friend the Silk Sea is back.

I first befriended the Silk Sea when I was eighteen or nineteen years old. I was in a doughty little production of "Pericles" down in the Bay Area, one of a handful of males imported by this same director for a production under the auspices of an all-girls' preparatory school. I stayed in a storybook cottage under the brow of a long ridge in the Marin peninsula, with a daybreak view of the fogbound City of San Francisco just outside my window. My days were spent in the libraries of the City, on my bike or on the buses, and my afternoons and evenings were spent rehearsing a beautiful, scrappy production.

One day, maybe 1/3 of the way through the process, Randall handed me a sheaf of directions. I was entrusted with an extremely important mission; he had custom-ordered a massive quantity of light blue silk to be fashioned into a vast, rolling sea, more than enough to fill the surface area of the floor of a large, ancient barn-cum-theatre, where we were performing. I don't know how to describe how large this Sea was in its beginnings; it was endless, it was Olympic-sized, it was the kind of big that makes everything and everyone else standing next to it look poky and unassuming by comparison. Balled up very tightly, it was about the size of my torso.

To find it, I boarded something like 7 different buses to get from my tucked-away cottage to downtown San Francisco. I walked up the rickety, narrow staircases of a dozen old Victorian office/warehouse edifices in the Tenderloin/Nob Hill stretch, following a trail of breadcrumbs and the bemused assistance of potbellied shopkeepers, world-weary immigrant store clerks, liveried doormen, angry young bike messengers and the ghosts of Barbary Coast pirates before I found the place I was sent to find.

Inside the crumbling belly of a dark and sooty old Beaux-Arts monster, I stumbled into a cave of musty and shrouded wonders. Like spiders perfumed with mothballs, a shadowy little herd of lesbian seamstresses with exotic and implacable accents ushered me past the bolts of rich, deep velvets and the ghostly mannequins painted with translucent saffrons and the elegantly billowing herringbone patterns masking the distant skylights, into an inner sanctum where an ancient and wizened little old spinster was stitching snaps into the opened seams of the Sea. Randall had specified that the Sea was to have three openings from which people could reach out and pop up from beneath its surface, and the little old spinster muttered the whole time about how strange that little man was (I think she was talking about Randall).

Her task finished, she laboriously gathered up the vast Sea into a compact shape (my torso), which she passed to the lesbian spider seamstress, who passed it to me. Papers and signatures were exchanged, seals were affixed, messages were inscribed, and soon enough I was back outside in the brilliant Bay Area sunlight. I remember a stiff headwind, and barely being able to see above the top of the Silk Sea, gushing out of the bursting shrinkwrap. Then there was some heartstopping swordplay against whole regiments of French musketeers, followed by a breakneck sprint across the rooftops chased by SWAT-team snipers, and then I lashed myself to the mast of my galley while I sailed past the Sirens and other sea-monsters, and then the guy let me get on the ferry even though my transfer was expired, and I made it to rehearsal with minutes to spare. (I'm exaggerating: I had to buy a new transfer.)

That evening the Silk Sea unfolded for the first time, and I experienced the first of what was to become many, many collective gasps of beholding. Since that time the Sea has waxed and waned, separated into several Seas and then reunited; its openings have torn and been re-stitched and then torn again; casts have come and gone, sometimes dozens strong, sometimes only five or six of us. I've been privileged to perform with this Sea in most of its incarnations. I've watched the stains and the dust and the tears in the Sea come and go. I am so happy to be swimming in it again.

And that's how I became a Theatre Marine.

best,

paulmonster-mariner

2006-07-21T02:01:00.000-07:00

My dreams have been excitable and volatile, lately. Africa and planes and anxious meanderings, and distant friends, all figure prominently in the wrack and flotsam of my very late nights.

I'm preparing for a wonderfully intensive rehearsal process just about to begin. "Metamorphoses" with ART (for which I was called in to audition on extremely short notice) opens on the 8th of September, begins rehearsing on the 31st of this month, and I've already been writing long summaries and commentaries on Ovid as part of a dramaturgy package I also agreed to work on.

As I mentioned before, I haven't been this excited by a project in a long time. Not to say that I'm not proud of the work I've been doing recently; far from it. It's rather that it's been awhile since a project has looked to well-occupy so many of my passions; antiquities and verse, an intelligent theatre, and an imaginative theatre, and a physical theatre all at once.

Ovid in particular has long held sway in my heart of hearts, vying with Virgil and Catullus for my highest affections. I'm deeply steeped in his verse, fully immersed in his sense of wonder and numinousness.

When I dream I dream of running and cloudscapes and groaning trees. I dream of loneliness and panic and old, seamed faces. Occasionally there are horrors and nightmares that I half-consciously race through, willing myself even in my sleep to push past as much of the terror as I possibly can.

Today was a slow day at work. Heat and sunlight pushes my residents to the Library or to shaded parks by the water, anywhere but their non-air-conditioned rooms. I played poker with my residents, five card draw with a number of characters taken straight from Joyce's Ulysses, writ rather large.

I took my Mom out to dinner tonight, burgers and fries and a chain restaurant that she really likes. We poked fun at each other and complimented how well we both seem to age, and for all the world I felt like a tired sea bird, glad to have made landfall once more.

tramps like us, baby we were born to run

2006-07-18T11:36:00.000-07:00

You've all indicated, at various points in our mutual history, your exceeding willingness to tear it up at the karaoke mike with me again. I propose to do just that.

8:30 pm, Tuesday the 18th of July (That's TONIGHT), at the Galaxy on 10th and E Burnside. Papa's gonna get a brand new bag.

Shine on you crazy diamonds,

paulmonster-funk

Numbers game

2006-07-12T15:00:00.000-07:00

Lester and Tyler are 7 and 16, respectively. We're hanging out at one of the housing complexes my company owns (I'm pitching in on the Free Summer Lunch program).

Lester: How old are you?

Tyler: Guess.

Lester: Are you 8?

Tyler: No.

Lester: Are you 17?

Tyler: No.

Lester: Oh. [Lester is stumped.] I give up.

Me: You know, Lester, there are actually some numbers between 8 and 17.

Lester: [beat] Yeah, right, whatever. How old are you?

What kind of day has it been.

2006-07-10T23:57:00.000-07:00

Yesterday afternoon, after taking out my laundry to hang it on the clothesline, I locked my keys in the basement. Since my front door was unlocked, I didn't think about it until this morning when I was turning the house upside down looking for those keys. I would probably still be looking for them if I hadn't chanced to glance in the basement window, where I caught their dim, leering, jagged-tooth nastily grinning silhouette on the neglected, vengeful, bitchy clothes dryer.

In the movies you see people use pins or toothpicks or sticks of chewing gum or credit cards to open locked doors. They make locked doors look positively malleable, accomodating like tissue in a swaying breeze. You see them do a jiggle thing with their willowy wrists and hey, presto, there we go. And I tried all of those things, as nonchalantly as I could, desperately mopping my forehead while the contractors building a driveway next door ambled their wheelbarrows back and forth behind me. I furrowed my brow and angled my shoulders like they do in the movies. I tried finesse, I tried force, I tried cunning and guile. And I can tell you it's true about the credit card.

$65.00 to a bemused locksmith later, I'm hustling down the street in my beat-up Saturn desperately trying to make up for lost time. J. had his wallet stolen and he's three months behind on rent, and I'm going to pay for a new ID while he gets back up to date on his union's membership rolls. I scoop him up and we go and hunker down at the DMV. We swap touring stories (he's a union stagehand for rock concerts). We read over heavily creased, outdated paperwork. We do our best not to look like the harried supplicants at the dread altar of the forbidding DMV deities that we are.

Hours later I'm back at the office, J.'s tasks done and done well, now scrambling to find the fix for the next exploded basket case on my desk. There are meetings and notes and scheduling shuffles; I am an argonaut navigating the impassable confines of dwindling water coolers and straightened budget arrangements. There are memos to write, commitments to make, policies to draft.

It is a constant, quiet surprise to me that people seem to think I know what I'm doing. I am constantly, quietly surprised at my own capacity to convince myself (albeit howsoever temporarily) that I know what I'm doing. The truth lies rather quite far from any such conviction.

I get home anxious and dreading tomorrow, far from certain as to how to keep things going. My book group meets at my house and I lay out the beer and the chips and the tea. I light the candles and we laugh and speak well, we convince each other of splendid things, we gently disagree and we stridently validate and we cast and re-cast our lives' choices according to our shared lights. The book is only an excuse, really, to meet and share of such things.

I am an argonaut snatching off pieces and shards of grand conversations, leaving my own sometimes powerful words, noting and watching, speaking or not. I am here and I am not. Always I am arriving and departing all at once. This is who I am.

The trees are still warm long after the sun has set. My house breathes more deeply having had guests; it's not for nothing that the ritualized pleasure of hospitality is so powerful to so many cultures. I blow out the candles and set the teabags in the compost and check for my keys before I see my friends out.

Outside, my neighbors have left me flowers, and a warm note of thanks, for helping their friend last week. I sit down to write what kind of day it has been, and then I go to sleep.

best,

paulmonster-argonaut

A fool i'the forest

2006-07-08T14:00:00.000-07:00

I listened to myself for the first time yesterday. An audio theatre company I work with, Speak the Speech, recorded a production of As You Like It that I did last year with Shakespeare in the Park (yes, that's me in the beard. Quiet, you).

It was a weird experience; since this was recorded about 9 months ago, I could sometimes remember and identify the motives behind my inflections, my line readings; sometimes they entirely surprised me. I was pleasantly surprised that my recorded voice is not quite so awful as the voice on my message machine would lead me to believe. I'm still disappointed with some of the choices I made with the famous "All the world's a stage" speech; it's definitely something I need to revisit in the future. But, all in all, not too bad, considering. My character, Jaques, shows up about halfway through Act II.

I've also done work on Speak the Speech's forthcoming "Pericles" (which I'll be helping to edit) and "Part I Henry IV."

More soon.

paulmonster-live

Gonna be Some Changes Made.

2006-07-06T18:58:00.000-07:00

I'm recasting the Polyform Look. "Dots Dark" is fabulous and all, but it's time for something new. You should comment if you wish to register strident opposition to this new regime.

pjs