Kevin Killian, long-time Small Press Traffic volunteer, has manfully volunteered to be the opening act for our UK visitor (Caroline Bergvall). His 1997 books are Little Men (Hard Press), Arctic Summer (Hard Candy) and the new Argento Series (Meow Books), which collects many of the poems he has written over the past few years on the intertwined topics of HIV and the films of the Italian horror maestro Dario Argento. With Lew Ellingham Killian has written the life of the US poet Jack Spicer which Wesleyan University Press will publish in the spring. "Five Years in the Life of Jack Spicer" has recently appeared in the Impercipient Lecture Series, and another excerpt from this biography will appear in Chicago Review in December.

October 14, 1997

 

 

The Schwimmer Effect,
a play by Scott Hewicker and Kevin Killian

In 1951 a small band of would-be actresses and atom scientists (Farrah Fawcett, Elizabeth Taylor, Ursula Andress and Goldie Hawn), together with famed attorney Arlene Schwimmer, the "pit bull of Hollywood," gather at Princeton's Center for Advanced Studies to develop the Schwimmer Effect. It's a device to keep you and your loved ones young forever and it's marketed as fragrances, Black Diamonds and White Pearls.

By 1997 the Schwimmer Effect has taken hold of all of Hollywood and indeed the world, except for one tiny corner of mountain fastness in Tibet, where Jack (Dr. Death) Kevorkian, the Dalai Lama (a reformed Ursula Andress) and her ward, Vicki Steubing, join forces to combat an unnatural system of life, death and eternal hype. They watch in horror as the cast of the top NBC sitcom "Friends" are killed one by one as soon as they turn thirty. Half melodrama, half sci-fi spectacular, and half witch hunt, "The Schwimmer Effect" boasts a cast of topflight actors and the thrills and chills of the "Star Wars" adventures!

with Norma Cole, Margaret Crane, Kota Ezawa, Phoebe Gloeckner, Craig Goodman, Barbara Hammer, Jonathan Hammer, Clifford Hengst, Scott Hewicker, Karla Milosevich, Rex Ray, Michelle Rollman and Wayne Smith.

April 4, 1997

 

Wet Paint
a play by Kevin Killian

with D-L Alvarez, Norma Cole, Margaret Crane, Kathi Georges, Phoebe Gloeckner, Jonathan Hammer, Clifford Hengst, Scott Hewicker, Rex Ray, Michelle Rollman, Leslie Scalapino, Rebecca Solnit, Wayne Smith and Alicia Wing

One woman . . . Jay de Feo . . . walking a perilous tightrope between obscurity and fame in the late 1950s. The brilliant romantic artist, taunted by sister Kay de Feo, a mind so vicious she sneaks in night after night to dash more paint on Jay's finished production. Jay, woman, rebel, artist, haunted by a shoplifting arrest in her past, and puzzled by how dark her apartment seems to be getting. And the men in her life, the cute guys who made North Beach a bongodelia of high art and Beat esteem--Bruce Conner, Wallace Berman, Michael McClure, Wally Hedrick. And the visitors from Mexico, who dared Jay De Feo to her masterpiece por chevre--Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera! Her shady psychiatrist, pressuring her to abandon feminist art work and return to Hallmark sell-out. The Hollywood starlet who came to the Fillmore to study up for an important role--Tuesday Weld. And Janis Joplin, the woman who worshipped Jay and inspired "The Rose."

Ocotber 9, 1996

 

 

That
a play by Kevin Killian

with Laurie Amat, Edmund Berrigan, Norma Cole, Margaret Crane, Kota Ezawa, Phoebe Gloeckner, Clifford Hengst, Scott Hewicker, Nathen Lever, Karla Milosevich, Brighde Mullins, Rex Ray, Leslie Scalapino, Wayne Smith

A missing boy, Kevin Killian, pursued by his own Javertian father through the sewers of San Francisco . . . A bisexual couple, Paul and Jane Bowles, dare to preserve a bisexual universe against which to stage their melodramas of addiction and obsession-to bike messengers . . . "Spoke by spoke, I mean to make him mine!" . . . A tormented policeman . . . no, two . . . a drug-addled heiress . . . the visionary poet Hannah Weiner . . . the nut maudit, Alfred Chester . . . lead the fight against the gentrification of San Francisco's leading bohemian refuge, the Sears Building, against greedy slumlords and their enigmatic siren slash granddaughter Sara Sears. First staged in 1987, then again in 1992, THAT keeps coming truer every day. Yikes! Music by Plane (Cliff Hengst, Scott Hewicker, Rex Ray, Wayne Smith). Directed by the author.

June 5, 1998