Hidden in the wired depths of the electric woods – and accessible only if you know where to look (a small bark-coloured button on the side of a nondescript electric tree) – is a small room: the sun room.
No windows. Thick walls. A thin door that seals tightly when closed.
And inside is a sun. A small one. No bigger than a basketball. It hangs, as if held by invisible strings, in the center of the room. Rotates slightly, nearly imperceptibly.
The sun – and the sun room – powers every tree in the electric woods. Its golden photons travel into electric roots, into electric trunks, into electric branches and twigs and leaves. The sun is like the forest’s heart. And without it, it dies.
It would be wrong to say that the sun is trapped in the room, wrong to say that the sun would want to be elsewhere (the sun protects the woods just as the woods protect the sun), wrong to say that the sun seeks change. But, as change is inevitable, even for suns such as this one, change is happening – has happened: where once there was a brilliant, shimmering gold, there is gold no longer.
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To read the rest of this review — and more by Steve Schmolaris — visit his website Bad Gardening Advice.
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Steve Schmolaris is the founder of the Schmolaris Prize, “the most prestigious prize in all of Manitoba,” which he first awarded in 1977. Each year, he awards the prize to the best album of the year. He does not have a profession but, having come from money (his father, “the Millionaire of East Schmelkirk,” left him his fortune when he died in 1977), Steve is a patron of the arts. Inspired by the exquisite detail of a holotype, the collective intelligence of slime mold, the natural world and the suffering inherent within it — and also music (fuck, he loves music!) — Steve has long been writing reviews of Winnipeg artists’ songs and albums at his website Bad Gardening Advice, leading to the publication of a book of the same name.
