Despite his passing, the shadow of the lungless legend, Thomas “Tommy Smoke” Cigarette, still casts itself darkly upon the landscape of trío telfær’s soul. They stand before his snowy grave, heads down in contemplation and sorrow, as if they were themselves gravestones; so still, so cold are they.
In front of them, a small mound juts out like a potbelly – it’s a heaping shrine of cigarettes, and trío telfær, as they usually do every Jan. 24, which is Mr. Smoke’s birthday, bends and gently places another three cigarettes onto the shrine – a small gesture of thanks for the time they’d spent together. In doing so, the belly gets a little larger. Of course, the pile of cigarettes is sopping in the summer, and compresses into a mushy mass; others scavenge the tobacco, drying it out as best they can before inhaling – and so the potbelly shrine expands and contracts with the seasons, almost as if Tommy Smoke, under the ground, still breathes, still lives, still smokes deeply, down into the pit of his stomach.
In the stillness of their silence, trío telfær is reminded of their time at Luigi’s, when they first met Tommy Smoke. The air was so thick with cigarette smoke, one could barely see their hands in front of them. They thought someone at the party had brought a smoke machine, but it was all Tommy Smoke. “A smoke machine ain’t got nothing on me,” he said, and he exhaled a plume that may have single-handedly given 12 people cancer.
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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.