LIFT YR. SKINNY FISTS LIKE ANTENNAS TO HEAVEN
PHARMACY presents:
LIFT YR. SKINNY FISTS LIKE ANTENNAS TO HEAVEN
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 6, 8:00 PM
Short Plays by:
Wes Walker
Sharon Yablon
Hank Bunker
Kevin O’Sullivan
Poems by: John Tottenham
Music by: Ad Nauseam Project
“Color: a Curtain Raiser”
written and directed by Kevin O’Sullivan
with: Lara Phillips, James Storm
"New Works"
written and performed by John Tottenham
“Remedy”
written and directed by Wesley Walker
with: Alex Brown, Andy Hopper, Lake Sharp
“American Barbecue”
written and directed by Hank Bunker
with: Greg Littman and Mickey Swenson
“Half Gifts”
written and directed by Sharon Yablon
with: Lee Kissman and Jacqueline Wright
“Gursha”
written and directed by Kevin O’Sullivan
with: Mike Shamus Wiles, Trace Turville and Kim Debus
Thanks to The Mountain
473 Gin Ling Way, LA CA 90012
Pharmakos.org
LOVE MINUS ZERO/NO LIMIT
PHARMACY Presents LOVE MINUS ZERO/NO LIMIT
Thursday July 26, 8:00
Short Plays by John Steppling, Lee Kissman, Wesley
Walker, Kevin O'Sullivan
"Cutter (Perfect)" written and directed by Kevin O'Sullivan
With: Lara Phillips, Richard Herd, David Weininger
"All This" written and directed by Lee Kissman
With: Julie Summer, Carlita Penaherrera
"Among the Kelp" written and directed by Wesley Walker
With: Kadina de Elejalde, Hank Bunker
"A Closer Walk With Thee: A Religious Playlet in Six Scenes" written by John Steppling,
directed by Kevin O'Sullivan
With: Lee Kissman, Jim Storm
The Mountain
473 Gin Ling Way Los Angeles, CA 90012
(213) 625-7500
"Calzada de los Muertos" Kevin O'Sullivan
Calzada de los Muertos
A short play by Kevin O'Sullivan
Performed at Mutiny in Heaven,
the Mountain, Los Angeles, October 19, 2006
Simmons ... Eugene H. Butler
Mara ... Lara Philips
Dennis Hollingsworth has a short video of the performance.
"The Last Day" Bernard Goldberg
The Last Day
A short play by Bernard Goldberg
Performed at Mutiny in Heaven,
The Mountain, Los Angeles, October 19, 2006
Sam ... Gregory Littman
Joe ... Tom Waldman
Jenny ... Coleman Hough
Beth ... Tanya Kahana
"Reptiles" Kevin O'Sullivan
Reptiles
a short play by Kevin O'Sullivan
Performed at Wow and Flutter,
the Mountain, Los Angeles, May 18, 2006
Bates ... Mickey Swenson
Bledsoe ... Michael Shamus Wiles
"The Comet Gazers" Sharon Yablon
The Comet Gazers
a short play by Sharon Yablon
Performed at Hits of Sunshine,
the Mountain, Los Angeles, July 20, 2006
Lance... Eugene Butler
Karl ... Andy Hopper
Renee...Jacqueline Wright
"Twelve Inertias" John Tottenham
John Tottenham is a British expat poet, long based in Los Angeles. His writing has kept its pallor in the California sunshine & in it one can disinter traces of a distinctly English morbidity, a lineage that runs from the Graveyard Poets to Joy Division. With precise economy Tottenham's poems comment on the world around him by focusing on the self, a self grappling with the disillusionment and despair that follows the demise of 'great expectations'. His brutal narcissism can be bleak as Beckett, relentlessly dark and laceratingly funny. Enjoy.
KEVIN O'SULLIVAN
NO GREAT DISTANCE
This is the season you looked ahead to, the later days -
By which time, you imagined, some measure
Of satisfaction might have been attained.
And this is how far you have come...
You assumed, incorrectly,
That you would eventually get around to doing something
With your life, that there would be some reward for all this.
For what? For all this frustration.
THE LIFE OF THE MIND
Here I must remain, lost
In a closed world of disorder, studying
And smothering the frantic underpinnings
Of my lassitude. Pausing, now and then,
To take stock of my lack of activity,
My varying states of immobility.
Considering giving up.
Then giving up.
LXXIV
Always the thought of time running out:
Always more time. It passes quickly
Due to lack of change or care. Always there,
As if it had never been. There is never as much
As there was...to evade, absorb,
Accumulate and rue the loss of ;
To ponder how it moves
And will one day move without me.
RECOGNIZABLE REALITY
My days are short
And strenuously idle,
A tapestry of vagueness
Spread thin and frayed
With agitation. While the carpet
Far below resembles a desert
Landscape: a tumbleweed torpor
Of hair and dust.
ESTIVATION
Throughout the summer
There haven’t been many breezes
In the exterior world. Day after day,
Just folding over. My mind not moving.
Bowed down and undetermined,
Picking at scabs of time. Given the choice
Between stark panic and dull suspense,
I have taken the latter.
LXXXIII
Out of this boredom nothing can emerge
For all has merged into it. All hope and sensation
Accedes to its creation. Perfectionism itself
Becomes an excuse to do nothing...and solitude
Is just another form of laziness: the freedom to drift
Unchecked and unencumbered, when you can’t drift
Anymore, and when you have forgotten
How to do anything but drift.
ILLUMINATION
For too long a conduit I have been,
Receptive only to the works of others.
In this way, in a way, I have kept myself
Going; and were it not for the pleasure
And enrichment I receive at this font,
I might long ago have given up.
Then again, I might have
Achieved something myself.
FEAR OF KNOWN THINGS
For a long time I have succeeded
In avoiding reality.
It has remained on the rim
Of my existence, slowly spinning, kept
At a respectful distance;
Accepted, feared but never faced,
Supplanted by a jangled state
Of grace.
AT A LOSS
I cannot proceed naturally. On the verge
Of the verge of application, I become too conscious
Of finally vaguely making progress to make any further
Progress. The awareness that I could be doing more
Prevents me from doing anything at all. I am unwilling
To lose myself, to face that which is already lost or those
Remains which remain to be lost...and I confront once more
The only thing I’m capable of creating: a blockage.
XC
There are no levees capable
Of withstanding the torrents of distraction
That surge through my mind. Tender
Resentments, useless trivia and tired lusts
Are carried along like debris on a swollen river,
From which, very occasionally, a lucid thought
Emerges, only to be sucked back down
Into the sewage of pettiness and vanity.
YELLOW AFTERNOON OF THE SOUL
I am reliant upon spurts
That soon sputter out. The slightest diligence
Unleashes a heightened awareness
Of my own existence...my own innocence...this precious life...
I want to stop; It has to simmer down
To a manageable boredom. And with this desire for composure,
Fear of death and torpor merge in an unlikely union
That bears no fruit.
THE MEASURE OF A MAN
A long time ago I made a decision
To become a failure. It wasn’t
As easy as I thought: browsing through life
From one distraction to the next, while waiting
For the last lost moment to become unseizable.
As if there were some fundamental honesty
To not striving: There wasn’t. -
I suspected it all along.
Ashtray Heart: A Sad Sex Song in Six Parts
It is my pleasure to present Ashtray Heart, six striking pieces knit together by the yearning for connection, the power of lust and the siren-tug of desire. Suffused with modern alienation, these stories provide the reader with exquisite moments painted in smoke and flame – stories that provide both nourishing heat and hurting burn. I am proud to introduce you to these six talented writers, with whom I’ve had the great honor to work in my private writing workshops.
Here is Jill Weiss, whose story with its rugburnt knees and broken pearls features a heroine who struggles with her current appetites and a doomed sexual obsession from the past that still haunts.
Bruce Mosier draws a delicate triptych of images through three meetings with the stranger who will become his own personal stripper-angel and perhaps temporary savior.
Meet Deborah Kagan, whose witty internal monologue charts the minddrift during a less-than-ecstatic coupling.
And Lori Sambol, who conjures a mystical event of matrilineal intensity – where the mother passes on to the daughter a strange and terrible gift.
In a medical gown, ‘the ass of the sinner is always out,’ observes poet Vicki Whicker in her wryly melancholic tale of an impossible and ill-fated love.
Then there is Caron Perkal, who cooks up a mesmerizing tale that follows the slow poisoning of the bond between two people when one succumbs to green-gouging jealousy.
These stories seared. I trust they will do the same for you, individually and as a whole installation.
The idea behind these private workshops is to write with rawness and rigor. To always go deeper. To tear the skin from language, to dig into deepdark and bring back perhaps a tiki torch, or a flicker of recognition or, perhaps…a luminosity. To feed our heads, hearts and souls – always works-in-progress – and to crack open the writing. If you’re interested in learning more, maybe joining a workshop, you can check out my website, rachelresnick.com or myspace.com/rachelresnick and then send me an email through the site.
RACHEL RESNICK
Scary Monsters
Monster; 1. a legendary animal combining features of animal and human form or having the forms of various animals in combination, as a centaur, griffin, or sphinx. 2. any creature so ugly or monstrous as to frighten people. 3. any animal or human grotesquely deviating from the normal shape, behavior, or character. 4. a person who excites horror by wickedness, cruelty, etc.
--Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary
"The function of the supernatural, is to exempt the text from the action of the law, and thereby transgress the law."
--Tsvetan Todorov, "The Fantastic"
A child is afraid of the dark. Specifically, the dark of the room, when the door is closed and the child is left to his fervid imagination. What he fears is ineffable, unnamable. He has not yet learned that one of the ways we allay our fears is by naming them. The names will come soon enough and they will be both exotic and mundane.
There are no such things as monsters, the child is told. His parents, his teachers, insist they exist only in an imaginary world. Primitives, the Ancients, peasants may believe in such things but they have no place in our modern, industrialized world. Perhaps the child is reassured, submits his instinctive belief to the authority of adults. No such things as monsters. But doubt persists. It festers, it germinates, it irrupts the cool comfort of disbelief. History can be read as an unbroken chronicle of monsters great and small.
A child awakens, alone in a dark room. Solitary with her thoughts. Terrifying thoughts. "Go back in your room," her mother says. "There is nothing to be afraid of." There is always something to be afraid of. Adults, for instance. Did not her mother tell her not to talk to strangers? The world is full of terrors. Abductors. Molesters. Murderers. Monsters. "Go back in your room," she is told. Go back to your fears.
Real threats in a real world, what need of fantasy? Yet it persists. The imagination goes where it wants. A child cannot control his or her nightmares. Do we outgrow them or do we just become inured to the persistent strangeness of our dreamlife? We have just left a century that saw its share of horrors. Global wars and a multitude of lesser conflagrations. And we have had our share of monsters, real monsters, too. They have names: Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot. And there are others, too numerable to mention, whose names are known to the masses or only to their victims. And there are those who are unnamed. What room is there left, in the imagination, to conjure up more atrocities, more monsters? Has familiarity with real horror banished the monsters to the dark recesses of our unconscious? And still we seek them, in books, in films, in the stories we tell ourselves to become spooked. Perhaps we invent an imaginary world of terrors so that we can convince ourselves that they are not real. But they are, but they are.
I used to have bad dreams when I was young. the kind that sent me running to the safety of my parent's bed. That place where, arguably, all my troubles started. The first thing they did was forbid me to watch scary movies. The image of a giant octopus wrapping its tentacles across a bridge still haunts me, a residual childhood fear. I have swam in shark-infested waters, but the unlikely image of a giant cephalopod strikes more irrational fear in me than the grinning-teeth of a great white. Such is the power of images, however, mundane, on impressionable minds. My parents banished me from their bedroom which seems, at this remove, the appropriate thing to do, but it took them years to convince me there were no such thing as monsters. By then I was old enough to go to church and I learned to fear the devil instead.
The fallen angel, a cautionary tale. Lucifer, the radiant one, the upstart son. He is cast out of heaven for disputing God's supremacy. A rebel, an old, old story. Now the devil reigns in Hell and makes our lives miserable, or so we are told. But not everyone feels this way. In the mountains of Iran, there exists a sect who worship Satan. A proud, fierce tribe, they recognize in him a fellow rebel, one who stood up against an oppressive master, and paid the price for his rebellion.
It is important to remember the devil was once an angel. Gilles de Rais, Marshal of France under St. Joan of Arc, retreated to his castle after she was burned. This pious man turned his attention from God and France, to the black arts and diabolism. He is reputed to have murdered hundreds of children in his fiefdom, before being tried for his crimes and hung. From him we have the legend of "Bluebeard". Evil always has its twin and the monsters we create are like mirrors which reflect ourselves back at us.
history lesson #1
When the Puritans settled New England they brought their God with them but found that the devil was already there. There was the devil outside, in the forest, with the aboriginal peoples. And there was the devil inside the communities, inside Boston and environs, inside Salem. There is record of monstrous births, heresies, witches' Sabbaths. Fires were lit, necks were broken. The history of early New England, written by the light of a burning witch.
the ruined abbey
Georgian England, perhaps chafing at the democratic pressures of the times, looks backwards and indulges in a kind of faux-medievalism, in the form of ruined abbeys and castles, made-to-order. This first reveals itself in the vogue for Salvator Rosa's twisted landscapes and the revival of gothic architecture, which will soon provide the setting for a new literature about to be born. The Gothic, in literature, may be dated no later than Horace Walpole's novel, "The Castle of Otranto", in 1764. It is certainly well established with the appearance of Radcliffe and Monk Lewis's tomes in the 1780s. The tropes, the figures, are all familiar: the ruined castle or abbey, the faux-antiquities --the whole prop room from myriad Roger Corman films are found in Walpole's, Radcliffe's, Lewis' novels.
acephalus
Sade, an aristocrat whose imagination has engendered unspeakable cruelties, gains freedom with the storming of the Bastille. With the Terror of 1783-84, the gutters of Paris run with blood. The head-count reaches astronomical figures. The logic of the Terror runs its course until it consumes its architects. What need of monsters when you have the Terror? Sade's horrific fantasies, related in masterful prose, pale in comparison to the real horrors visited by the Terror. France cuts of the head of its sovereign and refuses to stop there. It becomes a body without a head. The philosopher of the bedroom will himself appear as a monster, two centuries later, in Robert Bloch's "The Head of the Marquis de Sade."
Monstrum, the Latin root of 'monster', can also mean 'a portal'.
It is the age of revolutions: American, French, Industrial. New anxieties are milled, translated into print. In 1816, in a villa on the shores of Lake Geneva, a young woman pens a horror story on a dare. A cautionary tale about scientific hubris. She is in the company of two poets, one of them a notorious aristocrat. A third member of the party is a literary-minded physician. Her name is Shelley, her book, "Frankenstein". But it doesn't end there. Polidori, the doctor, expands on a fragment by one of the other two. He expands upon it and in doing so he turns it into something else. He turns the main character into a version of the original author and hence, the figure of the sensual, charismatic, aristocratic vampire is born, modeled on Lord Byron. Bram Stoker, at the end of the century will take this further still. Most of us learned this story through a filmed version, in black and white --Nosferatu, Dracula-- or, if you are English, in lurid color --the Hammer films. Hammer Films returned the aristocratic vampire to our screens, and brought its latent sexuality to the fore, anticipating the revolution of the body which commenced in the nineteen-sixties. The vampire comes on like the true return of the repressed, no matter how many times you drive that stake through its heart, it keeps coming back again. This line perhaps reached its culmination in Warhol's version featuring Udo Keir where irony, kitsch and insincere radical politics supplant dread and fear--Marx meets Pop--although apologists for Coppola's "Dracula" and fans of Ann Rice might argue differently.
Note: One of the traditions, in vampire literature, is that a vampire cannot cross the threshold unless it is invited.
pleasures and terrors
"Submission, the gothic imagination insists, is empowering, impervious, heroic."
--Richard Davenport-Hines
"Submission is a gift, go on give it to your brother."
--Charles Manson
Horror, in particular what is known as Gothic, is a product of collective anxieties. From its inception, the Gothic has been associated with inversion, incest, outlaw sexuality, a confusion of categories. Backwards-looking, retrograde, radical, irrational. The dungeon, the rack, implements of torture figure in the classic horror story just as they do in a contemporary S&M catalogue.
Desire is invasive, an irruption. It can overwhelm us, weaken us. It can drive us mad. We may demonize the object of our desire or say a daemon has possessed us. Or, if we are so inclined, we may say that we have fallen in love with an angel but it's the devil we're concerned with here. The old game of attraction and repulsion. Add sin into the mix and you have a potent cocktail indeed. We are punished for our pleasures. There's the perpetual dialectic of the body and the spirit, older than the Greeks. The ancients, like ourselves, had an answer for anything. If there was an erotic disturbance while one was sleeping it was attributed to incubi or succubi, demons in male and female form who had sex with helpless dreamers. In the Christian era, this dialectic is played out in the Lives of the Saints; the sublime suffering of the martyrs, the tortured agonies of the damned. Flesh is torn, burnt, pricked and pulled. It's all about the body. What is done with it, done to it. The saint is most often depicted with a beatific, almost erotic, heavenward gaze. The 'bottom' in S&M might understand this look; it is about transcending the limits of the body, wedding the antipodes of pleasure and pain, and entering a realm of bliss.
little deaths
The spectacle of the splatter film seems to have other things in mind. Its punishments have nothing of the sublime. We have left the company of the saints and are back in bed with the Puritans. Think for a moment: in most splatter films, what is the last act before the victim gets the ax? The sex act. In this spectacle every transgression is punished. These films seem to have the same effect as public executions once had. Witness the magnitude of this transgression and the ferocity of its retribution. The message, in other words, is don't go there.
Sex, fear, contagion. Venereal disease becomes funereal disease. The virus is a potent symbol, something that burrows deep and corrupts from within. The history of man is the history of his diseases. The hysteria surrounding the AIDS epidemic is a sort of social amnesia, a forgetting of plagues past. We're always dying of one thing or another. This virus has been demonized like no other in recent history, perhaps because of its first appearance in the margins of society. Its vectors are blood, semen, sexual secretions. Its first known carriers were inverts, demi-mondaines. It is, in other words, a gothic disease. Possession, infection, are two words for the same thing; we are invaded by something without and transformed by it. Horror has always played on these fears (as have politics). The vampire myth most pointedly so. It all comes down to penetration and an exchange of bodily fluids. Perhaps it's just coincidence that Ann Rice's novels have become popular in the twenty years since the start of the epidemic. The repressed, wrote Freud, in one of his earliest texts, "acts like a foreign body which, long after its entry, must continue to be regarded as an agent that is still at work."
closing time
The End of Days or the End of History, millennial fears have not yet been laid to rest. Horror shifts shape. Dread remains constant. We are still frightened by monsters. We are still frightened by ourselves. Horror straddles a variety of genres, from Gothic proper to speculative fiction. Its broad outlines were first limned in the eighteenth century. It has kept pace with science, psychology, and technology, adapting, like a mutable virus, to each new shift in paradigms. In the twentieth century, psychology seemed to supplant the supernatural. There is an explanation for everything. But the inexplicable, the irrational, has returned with a vengeance. Like the return of the repressed.
The child, now grown, has new fears, new pleasures, new anxieties. His or her body strains, mutates into something new, something foreign, something fascinating. Dreams bring new terrors, new sensations. Now he or she seeks out the dark, and in that dark place, his or her fears are projected on a screen. There is no escaping what terrifies us, just as there is no escaping our own death. We submit, willingly, with fear and trembling.
KEVIN O'SULLIVAN
Brit. /fmks/, U.S. /frmks/, /frmks/ Plural pharmakoi. [< ancient Greek scapegoat < medicine (see PHARMACO- comb. form), with alteration of accent and gender: the scapegoat representing a personified remedy.]
A scapegoat; spec. one chosen in ancient Greece to atone for a crime or misfortune.
1903 J. E. HARRISON Proleg. Study Greek Relig. iii. 104 The pharmakos is killed then, not because his death is a vicarious sacrifice, but because he is so infected and tabooed that his life is a practical impossibility. 1923 A. LE MARCHANT Greek Relig. to Time of Hesiod iv. 25 A ceremony in which two men called Pharmakoi, decked with branches, were led out of the city. 1957 N. FRYE Anat. Crit. 41 The figure of a typical or random victim begins to crystallize in domestic tragedy as it deepens in ironic tone. We may call this typical victim the pharmakos or scapegoat. 1997 Shakespeare Q. 48 502 In order for the pharmakoi to be fully effective, steps must be taken to ensure that the dead stay put, preferably not in one piece.