The location was secret. A puzzle needed to be solved. A map that wasn’t a map was drawn. A password revealed itself.
After its twists and turns, traversing Winnipeg, looking for clues, I had arrived. A large man, arms crossed, stood in front of the door. He patted my pockets for weapons and moved aside and watched me through two tiny pinhole eyes. His face was all chin and cheek and forehead. A slat in the door slid open and another man stared at me. He waited for the password.
“Rascal Flatts.”
He slid the slat shut and opened the door and took the money from my hand and ushered me inside.
You Steve?
For tonight, yeah.
He led me through a narrow hall, a channel, a corral, up and door stairs, through locked doors, passageways, until my sense of direction dimmed. He was my Virgil through the underground. He looked back from time to time to see if I still followed. I held up a glass of red wine before me as if it were a torch. The brick walls were wet with moisture. A trap door opened. A hatch in the ceiling. I climbed the ladder into a living room. For some queer reason, my ears popped.
The room was peopled as if a seance were soon to take place. A single candle cast a whisper of light. We were all like faceless daemons. We were summoned into being. I joined the throng, sat in a chair, and slipped on the hooded cloak left for me.
A small kitten, unfazed, unperturbed by strangers, by their ominous and harrowing humming, by their chanting, walked innocently around the bleached pillars and ancient ruins of our feet and legs. An archeologist of an archaic humanity. It purred gently.
A man stood and spoke. His face hidden behind a veil of shadows.
We are here gathered before you, O Great and Powerful Rascal Flatts.
We echoed the incantation: O Great and Powerful Rascal Flatts.
You who control the sun and the stars and the moon and the night and the darkness and sin, O Great and Powerful Rascal Flatts. (O Great and Powerful Rascal Flatts.)
We call upon you and the One True Sound. (One True Sound.)
May the One True Sound consume our minds and bodies in your honour, O Rascal Flatts. (O Rascal Flatts.)
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To read the rest of this review — and more by Steve Schmolaris — visit his website Bad Gardening Advice.
• • •
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.
