Until Defeat feel a constant desire to consume. It started out small. Brunch at Stella’s. Dinner at Carlos and Murphy’s. But it grew from there. Not long afterward, all Until Defeat could think about was their want, their need, their desire to swim in a pool of bacon. It was a dream they realized on Forbidden Island, where no desire was too taboo. And so, like the crazed boys of William Golding’s Lord Of The Flies, they went about killing and cutting up all of the island’s boars. But in their haste to tread bacon, to play bacon polo or toss around a beachball in the fat of the land, they neglected to fully cook some of it. Well, that’s how the parasite got in, and then their insatiable glut began to extend beyond the gustatory.
Consumption set in. They began to consume everything around them. They consumed music with an obsessive frenzy. They consumed news and talk shows and podcasts and barely blinked while they doom-scrolled X. Their bodies bloated with ideology, with identity politics, with division. It made them drink and drug with abandon. The parasites thrived in this new environment. Like a Cordyceps fungus, it pushed them for more and more and more. It consumed their relationships — with their family, with their friends, with lovers. It made them think in transactional terms. Nothing made them yield. Nothing stilled their destruction. And, because nothing is forbidden on Forbidden Island, they did many many other unspeakable things.
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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.
