Bad Gardening Advice (not radio)

In Charlie Kaufman’s Antkind, the protagonist art and film critic, B. Rosenberger Rosenberg (who is not Jewish), says that to properly understand a film it must be viewed seven times. He goes on to describe this method of madness, which is as follows:

Step One: The Nameless Ape Experience, in which he strips himself of all ego and intellectualism and simply watches the film the way Joe or Jane Everyperson would do. Easy enough!

Step Two: Why?, in which he doffs the psychologist’s hat to find a personal connection to the film, plumbing the depths of his psyche in order to do so. Why does it make him feel this, why does it make him feel that – this and/or that kind of thing.

Step Three: How?, in which he uses his vast filmic knowledge to explore how the filmmaker achieved the results they did – this helps to understand how cinematic techniques forced him to laugh or cry or ponder uncontrollably, &c., &c, &c..

Step Four: Backward Viewing, in which the film is viewed as a “non-narrative avant-garde experiment” and allows him to see patterns unencumbered by meaning.

Step Five: Upside Down Viewing, in which the physical world (and its effects, i.e. gravity) can be ignored (and, thus, its effects on the psyche can equally be ignored.)

Step Six: Conventional Viewing, in which he watches the film again – essentially another Nameless Ape Experience – however, in this Step he also establishes the film’s ranking with respect to “Best-of” lists, i.e. best film of the year, best films of the decade, best films of the century, best film of all time, and on and on and on, &c., &c., &c. He says, “Without these lists by truly educated critics, laypeople would find themselves at the mercy of Hollywood marketeers and celebrity sycophants.” I couldn’t agree more!

Step Seven: Don’t Watch the Film, in which he does not watch the film. (This Step is not well-described, and may involve replaying the film, scene-by-scene, line-by-line, in his head, recreating its characters, their expressions, their actions, the plot, &c., &c., &c., in his mind’s eye.)

Only then, says B. Rosenberger Rosenberg (again, not Jewish) can a film properly (rightly, knowledgably, professionally, critically) be understood. And, presumably, reviewed and written about.

Although Antkind was ultimately disappointing, in that I hardly cared how it ended (and skipped over paragraphs and pages in ever-increasing amounts as I came to its near-interminable conclusion – a plot was barely in existence, or, if one did exist, as its beginning seemed to promise, it died somewhere around page 338), I did not forget the description of his Seven Step Method for Properly Understanding a Film (SSMPUF). Perhaps it was because I felt a kinship with a fellow art critic. Perhaps it was because I had long ago developed a similar (yet entirely unique) Method of Madness (MoM). Perhaps it was because I wanted to be B. Rosenberger Rosenberg (not Jewish). Threither way*, it was the only part of the novel that I can fully remember. (The novel had hardly anything to do with real ants [Order: Hymenoptera; Family: Formicidae].)

Nonetheless, it was with B. Rosenberger Rosenberg’s (still not Jewish) SSMPUF in mind that I tasked the 48th Annual Schmolaris Prize Jury Panel (SPJP) to select this year’s Schmolaris Prize Winner (SPW). I told them to listen to each short-listed album as if they were nameless apes, I asked them to understand why it did what it did to their psyche, to attempt to understand how such a thing was accomplished, to listen to it backwards and upside-down (if that’s even possible to do with music; still, I encouraged them to do so), to listen to it again, in the conventional manner (or manner of their choosing), and then, simply, to not listen to it at all.

And so, it is with great pride that I announce that the SPJP – who, I may add, are all women – has chosen to award the 48th Annual Schmolaris Prize to Orelands for their album Secrets and Select Missions.

The world of Orelands, the world of Secrets and Select Missions – as I wrote in the highly celebrated (some would say vaunted) review from November of 2024 (and in which I’ll reproduce here because of its elegance of style and form and structure – and in doing so I’m also suggesting that Secrets and Select Missions has a similar elegance of style and form and structure)– is a world very much like our own, one full of lies and betrayals, and, of course monsters, hideous abstractions of our psyches made real, made flesh or of animated stone, roaming empty forests with impunity, searching for a meal, a lonely peasant, farm labourer, mill worker, to gulp down, to devour in a futile attempt to satisfy its insatiable hunger; a world of gold-hoarding dragons and wyrms, of ancient amulets and precious jewels; a world of spells and illusions (deceptions, by another name); a world ruled by the divine right of kings and queens, who need not be benevolent, those earthly examples of God, those short-tempered, those easily angered, those all-too-willing to take up the sword and fight and kill and die; a world in flux, in change; a world nearer to the cradle of creation than our own; a world of dreams and wonder; a world where one could be whatever monster one desires: valiant knight, honourable apprentice, skilled interlocuter; poet, poisoner, or prisoner; muse or lover; plague-bearer or healer; prince or pauper; a world of natural beauty, with winding rivers flush with fish, with forests full of birdsong, with crisp spring freshets and a sun whose rays piercethrough tightly wovenbranches and brambles, into places that would otherwise remain unlit, unseen, and unknown; a world bursting with life and love, and, yet, a world livid with itself; again, a world very much like our own.

And with that in mind, as a kind of sweeping, landscapish overview, as if our mind’s eye had attached to it a panoramic lens, let us swoop down into the scene below, into and below the canopy, to land, now as if we’re a bird, on a nearby branch (where we will morph – because we can do that in this world – into a nameless ape). Our mission (one hardly secret or select) is simple: to listen.

This year’s Schmolaris Prize recipient, Secrets and Select Missions, begins with a question: Who stole your liberty? It then asks, as if in response to an unseen, off-camera shrug of the shoulders, “Well then, what kind of monster are you?” It suggests that many times we are the authors of own misfortune. When we lie to ourselves, when we go from fib to fable to falsehood, we poison ourselves, we distort things, we ignore the patterns that cause fatigue and anger, the ones that push and pull us apart – and we become – perhaps as a kind of disfigured means to an end – monsters. We become like Francisco Goya’s Saturn, and devour our children. Saturn’s attempt to thwart his demise fails, of course; instead, it precipitates the very thing he tried to prevent – his freedom, his liberty, in this way, was stolen only by himself. Orelands asks us, “Are we any different?” Are we any different from the myths and ancient stories of our past? Have we learned from them? Or have we stumbled when we should have been hitting our stride? Are we humming along in these trying times? Or are we tripping over – and eating – ourselves in the process?

Is that the kind of monster you are? We are?

Although Secrets and Select Missions dwells on our struggles to understand the suffering and adversity that modernity presents to us – the increasing failures of communication; the lack of meaning, the weight of its absence, the stains it leaves onus; the polarizing and contentious issues of our time; the way we forget so quickly; the way it has all become indistinguishable from a lucid dream; the way we erode ourselves from within – despite this, the album doesn’t lack, or want for, a hope that things could, if we’d like it, be different. It conjures up – and is encouraged by – a sense of invictus: a sense that despite such hardship there remains a part of us – the good part, the loving and caring and kind part of us – that remains undefeated, that remains unconquered. It is the part of us that refuses to be blind to beauty in all its forms (and, rest assured, its forms are legion). On All Seasons, Orelands finds common ground with a small stream and the way the sun and its morning light shimmers as the water trickles past it. Beauty need not be unique. Beauty need not be rare. It is in the cold winds that blow off the lake. It is in the armour of ice it will eventually don. All seasons – and every month and day within them – are beautiful.

For Orelands, this relationship with nature is an important part of overcoming that modern sense of endless ennui or despair. By immersing oneself in nature, by hiking deep into the forest, to stand in a place where no one has ever previously stood, so remote, so isolated is it, to engage in a kind of forest-bathing, a secular ritual, letting its greenness, its alpha-pinene, fill one’s senses – visual, olfactory, somatic – to embrace what Edward O Wilson called biophilia, to become, in such a way, a biophiliac, they can return that sense of freedom, that sense of liberty, and perhaps that sense of wild abandon, too, the call of the wild that had been lost. (As well, Orelands, being a Flinflonian band, must have felt that this connection to nature – and to its benefits therein – was particularly tenuous this year, as forest fires threatened the city and laid waste to the surrounding areas; areas once ripe with the jackpine** they sing about on Countdown.) It is nature that provides Orelands with something to believe in, something to rely on, as a source of genuine healing. It is nature that provides them with a feeling of the numinous (albeit of the secular, materialist sort.) That sense of looking up at the night sky, seeing the uncountable number of stars and nebulae and galaxies, and feeling, in comparison, tiny and insignificant. (This is not a bad feeling! On the contrary, it is one of the most liberating feelings possible.) Some may find such a feeling  encapsulates the meaninglessness of the universe, that we – humans, and the trials and tribulations inherent therein – do not matter in the slightest, that we are less than minute drops in a great, great ocean. Which, although true, is not the important lesson to take from such an observation. Rather, it is that we are the ones who ascribe meaning to it. And so when Orelands asks us “Is there a meaning you rely on?”, they are also asking – and the SPJP was unanimous in emphasizing this point –“What, in this world, is beautiful?” And beauty is without a doubt something one can rely on – for it is, as I’ve already stated (and which is essentially the entire thrust and reason for the existence of Bad Gardening Advice and the storied Schmolaris Prize in the first place) beautyexists everywhere. There exist the most brilliant and shiny of stones hidden amongst layers of duff anddirt, waiting to be found– theycan be passed over a thousand times unseen, and yet theystill exist. The light from a galaxy far, far away may never reach our eyes – remaining, to us, unlit; forever in the dark, forever a mystery – and yet they, and their beauty, still exist, too. 

Let us now turn into a seed – let’s say we’re attached to the winged samara fruit of the black ash – and we whirl and helicopter from a raised bough and spiral gently– elegantly – down and toward the warm and womb-like fecund soil. There we land, amongst the moss and sporocarps. What is the mission of a seed? To grow into a tree, of course. It is needless to say that a tree is not a forest. But a tree can easily become a forest. And it is this aspect of Secrets and Select Missions that I appreciated the most. That no matter how desolate the destruction has become, no matter how hot of a forest fire has ravaged the countryside, no matter how bereft of life and liberty the world has seemed to come to, there is always that potential for renewal. If we let it. A forest is possible once again. We can, in the words of Stumbling, get back up. We can, in the words of Lucid Dream, shake ourselves awake. A single seed is sometimes all that is needed.

And if you listen closely, real close, putting your ear to the ground, you may even hear it grow.

OK, I lied. There is an ant that appears in Charlie Kaufman’s Antkind – a sentient (and very intelligent) ant named Calcium from one million years in the future. He plays a burnt violin. He shrieks “Eureka!” He creates a disease called Time Rabies that infects the past. All of it – Calcium included – is also part of a film, a kind of play within a play. Even the reader – unfortunately me, in this case – is also part of the film/play. And the last words of this film/play are “Everyone is miserable. Injured. In pain. Worried.”  

And now is when we start Step Seven.

- Steve Schmolaris

September 16th, 2025

*“Threither” is used to indicate a similarity between three alternatives.

**And maybe black ash, but their distribution, according to Trees of Manitoba: A Field Guide, is primarily in southern Manitoba. However, it is also notable that black ash – and all ash trees, for that matter – are now on the endangered species list, like the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List, thanks to the invasive, and beautifully iridescent, emerald ash borer. By highlighting Fraxinus nigra, Orelands may also be lamenting that this refuge from ennui and despair is itself coming into peril; that it, too, may be stumbling rather than hitting its stride.