For a number of decades now, there’s been a rumour of a conspiracy involving myself, Steve Schmolaris, and Bad Gardening Advice. It involves CSIS, it involves a shadow (but vastly superior) Manitoba government, it involves MK Ultra… Many seem to think that my writing acts as some kind of triggering device for Winnipeg-music-scene-related assassination attempts, and I feel compelled to use this review of Tell The Aliens’s Stop Calling It A Superpower to tell all — not just aliens — that it is completely, 100%, no if-and-or-buts-about-it, false. Gardeners, good and bad, I beseech you: These are, at best, fabrications, and, at worst, deliberate lies to besmirch my honourable and reputable name!
I have not been a covert agent for the continuation of MK Ultra in Manitoba into the 21st century. My words and writing do not implant false memories, nor do they release false memories, nor do they cause Manchurian-candidate sleeper assassins to become activated like Jason Bourne. Believe me, I wish they did. I wish I had that superpower. But, alas, I do not. You are not in danger!
Let me go back to the beginning. Mind control. Hypnotic suggestion. It all started with J.D. Salinger and Holden Caulfield. For some reason I have never fully comprehended, the assassination of John Lennon — after which Mark David Chapman waited to be arrested while reading The Catcher In The Rye — caused Manitoba to collectively obsess that one of their own dearly beloved musicians would similarly be killed by some insane Manitoba version of Chapman influenced by the hidden codes that I embed into my music reviews. Randy Bachman would be killed, they said. Harlequin would die, they said. Burton Cummings and Neil Young were next!
What phonies! Not only did they not die, I did not begin Bad Gardening Advice as a psy-ops to control others, let alone to activate an army of would-be assassins. But every so often, due to indeterminate and random causes, such rumours reappear and I am, once again, forced to defend myself.
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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.
