The hot sun surges above Jaywood on Untitled (Swirl). It casts a long shadow before him, a simulacrum of himself. He stares at it, considers it, mimics its movement, converses with it. Who are you, he asks. He watches as it scrolls through its phone. As it becomes listless. He listens to it as it waxes and wanes rhapsodically. What’s going on in your head?
A shadow is always faithful. Though it tries to escape. Runs off into the horizon on thin spider’s legs. It always comes back home. Jaywood interrogates his shadow. Mewls to it. Consoles it when it weeps. Cuts it down when its ego infects it. Pops it like a zit. Bites back when it froths at its mouth. Jaywood the stabilizer.
Most people just see the shadow, thinks Jaywood. They see what’s projected in front of them, in all its distortions, it all its mangled glory. The shadow is the dream of greatness. It’s the largess of life. Big tings. Jaywood suggests that they trade places. But the shadow must agree, too. Would it want to be seen like this or like that, like dis or dat — these are the tings it must consider.
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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.
