Behold the brilliance of Bass City.
Though to live there is hard. Unless you have money, that is, then, as it would be in many cities, it’s an easy and debaucherous life. But even so, what’s a poor astronaut to do? It is almost as if the isolation of the spaceship is preferable to the loneliness of the bustle of the busy city, where the bright lights in neon green and pink bedazzle and blind, a stark contrast to the dark black solemnity of space; where the streets are strewn with both rubble and rabble, drunks and whores and blonde-haired bums who make the wet alleyways their homes; where grit and slum are mashed into a putrid paste, a slurry that intoxicates some and kills others.
That is what confronts Anpod Giggy (formerly of the wonderful and Schmolaris Prize short-listed Toil & Trouble) on his latest interstellar adventure, Bass City Blues. It is a world that would make Sodom and Gomorrah blush. And what would you do if even the sinful, those of wrath and sloth and greed, rejected you? Perhaps you, too, would hear the sultry beckoning to voyage into the beyond, into the great unknown, and seek thy fate elsewhere. For some astronauts are not made for this world.
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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.
