Humans
- Steve Danziger (author)
- Elæ Moss (artist)
ISBN
978-0-9860505-1-0Page count
62Keywords
Play, Plays, Production, Theater, Theatre, Script, Scripts, Performance, Performance Text, FictionPublication date
2014Language(s)
EnglishPublication media type
Print DocumentPerformance Text
MOONS of JUPITER / TALES FROM THE SCHMINKE TUB
Moons of Jupiter:
A man with a terrible southern accent, alone in his cabin, argues with a voice in his head about the moral imperatives of eating a freshly slaughtered rabbit. Surrendering to the voice’s pestering, he goes out on his porch seeking stove wood. Instead, he finds an alien eating the wood, speaking to him in the voice of Cary Grant, intent on abduction. What follows is a three-way battle between man, voice, and alien, as the man wrestles with past regrets, the repercussions from a lifetime of isolation, and a determination to keep his cosmic virginity.
Tales from the Schminke Tub:
Thomas Delice, a medevalist gangster. His wife Natalie, a lawn fetishist. Our narrator, a felonious greenskeeper, nursing home lothario, and jailhouse assassin. Unable to seduce Thomas, he agrees to kill Natalie. Then, unable to seduce Natalie, he agrees to kill Thomas. All he knows is, someone must die, or those infamous ‘candy apple’ pictures of him and those kids at the carnival will make their way to the cops. Which one should he kill? And has he already done it? The answer, perhaps, lies in…the Schminke Tub.
Chris Ross, author of Born and Raised, has called Moons of Jupiter “Sedaris meets Deliverance” and Tales from the Schminke Tub “Pinter meets Pinkerton,” and had this to say about the volume as a whole:
“It’s with lines like, ‘After a particularly fruitful afternoon in which I not only mowed the lawn but also removed a notoriously persistent weed from her tomato patch, Mrs. Delice attempted to seduce me’ that Steve Danziger trapezes the big top with sickening precision — the kind of splinter that takes days for you to realize.
“Let the words speak for themselves. ‘I gave him some chewable laxatives under the guise of providing him with amphetamines, and he gave me a job referral.’
“Don’t let the writing fool you. This is hard.”
About the Contributor(s)
Steve Danziger is the pen name of Steve Rosenstein. He has no idea why this is a big deal, but his friends find it endlessly confusing. He lives in Brooklyn, NY, the land of his birth, but grew up in Marlboro, NJ, where his arrest record included (in unrelated incidents) inciting a riot and urinating on a clown. Renouncing gainful employment, he received his MFA in Creative Writing at the City College of New York, and is currently a PhD student at Binghamton University. His work has appeared in Fiction, The Coffin Factory, Word Riot, The Brooklyner, Anemone Sidecar, Locust Magazine, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Florida Studies, and The Wall Street Journal. His reviews and essays can be read online at Open Letters Monthly, where he is a contributing editor.
Elæ Moss is a multimodal artist-researcher, curator, designer, and educator. Seeking Speculative Solidarities, they employ analog and digital media to investigate human, institutional and ecological systems and to iterate open source strategies for ecological and social change. Recent projects have shown at La Mama Galleria, EFA Project Space, STWST/Ars Electronica, Usdan Gallery, Judson Church, the Segal Center, SOHO20, Dixon Place, and the Exponential Festival, among others. Select publications include Big Echo, Tagvverk, Vestiges, Matters of Feminist Practice, The Transgender Narratives Anthology, Choice Words: Writers on Abortion, The Brooklyn Poets Anthology, and Resist Much, Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance. Books include Ground, Blood Altas, Overview Effect, Sweet and Low: Indefinite Singular, Bodies of Work, and The Precarity Bodyhacking Work-Book and Guide. Moss is a Professor at Pratt Institute, and the developer / founder of the Operating System + Liminal Lab. More at: https://onlywhatican.net and https://theoperatingsystem.org.
