You fly over what was once Winnipeg. It’s known by other names now. None you would recognize. You feel the air gliding over your sleek body. You dive through the sky with ease. Never landing, for there is no place to land. No buildings or bridges or roads or any signs of life. Of course, there is still life — you are one such example — but it is nothing like it once was. Back when it was Winnipeg. Over the years and millennia, it’s returned to a state of nature. Nature does no one’s chores. Sweeps no one’s floor. Does no one’s dishes. Nature is no one’s whore. Nature is desolate. And desolation is normal. Natural.
But it was once called Winnipeg. And it was once alive.
You swoop low. Over the flaked ground, over its dried and powdered skin. Rock outcrops, scoured as if by giant claws, are islands of exposed bone. Great granitic vertebrae like stone sea serpents arc in and out of lakes of frozen sand.
There is little shelter where you fly. Long and lightless fissures, thick with shadows, spread out like black veins across a diseased landscape. Nothing lives in them. The wind sucks at their mouths and steals from them baritone screams.
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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.
