[gallery]
So, when Mistigris sailed off to Avalon (until it was needed once again) in mid-1998, I was left (no passive voice, my friend: I left myself) a little high and dry for lack of a creative milieu (and, specifically, one I was at the centre of.)

I’d nearly completed my metamorphosis from juvenile penner of doggerel to “mature” composer of sonnets to a fully-realized published auteur of existentialist prose poetry (well, you saw it coming in the final few Mist packs; CT-*.LIT in MIST2000 represent a fully transformed writer: one who just isn’t very much fun anymore) and made my way to the nascent Vancouver poetry slam stages, where I obstinately refused to retool my divine visions to cater to hoi polloi by making them accessible and, y'know, enjoyable – even a poem about how great something was would have to contain some little speck of rot at its heart, a hidden knife to be twisted in the closing line. The good news is that I had found my voice as a writer! The bad news was that that voice … was that of depression. And verily I’d ardently cultivated an ability to hold forth on any subject and tease out the saddest and most devastating inconvenient truth it harboured just beneath its surface. (Wake up sheeple!) But despite this uncanny knack, it didn’t exactly make me any friends; I didn’t quite ascend, skyrocketing, through the ranks of our local spoken word community, speaking my harsh truths to power. (Mostly I just made old ladies uncomfortable at open mics with my intense negativity.) In short, poetry wasn’t doing me any favours – it wasn’t leading me on grand adventures or even getting me laid. And worse, the cultivation of my dire voice had me looking at the world through arse-coloured glasses, actively pursuing the heartbreaking in order to appease my strange muse. (Hi, is the new issue of Acme Novelty Library in yet?) The best I could hope for from the poetics of depression was a deeper and more profound depression – oh boy! So with some trepidation I set the poetry aside (never really to fully pick it up again – I pivoted to creative non-fiction with a poetic voice, but concluded that most of those poems didn’t really need to be written: however completely they encapsulated the experience of being me, I already knew what that was like and no one else cared.)

So that was it. Maybe I could get a job, find a nice girl and get over myself. But no: I was nonetheless an effete longhair, and if I wasn’t writing poems I had to foppishly be doing something creative. But what? Well, what did I do before I discovered BBSes? It just so happened that I’d studied classical piano for some 15 years, beginning at the likely premature age of 3. But due to the curriculum of the Royal Conservatory of Music, it wasn’t a creative education so much as an indoctrination; students were taught to reproduce, not interpret, and I had burned out on it not long before burning out on the artscene (and, indeed, burning out generally for the better part of a decade.) But I knew I enjoyed music – seeking inroads into the computer as a compositional tool had been one of my entry points to the artscene, and though I couldn’t in 1999 see a future for tracker music (sadly, just as mine was beginning to grow almost listenable) I figured that my future would be more filled with tunes than with poems.

I owned a piano, but it lived at my parents’ place; indeed they had told me that we would not be moving it until my lifestyle stabilized and I could expect to be maintaining the same residence indefinitely, because moving (and then tuning) a piano is an expensive proposition. So I stewed in contemplation of what instrument is enough like a piano that my 15 years of training could help me to transition? For years I went in circles figuring that I’d need some kind of synthesizer keyboard, but worrying about what capabilities I would need it to have, fearful of buying The Wrong Model and ending up unsatisfied with my new creative interface. Then, one week, I was exposed to three fateful accordion performances, and it struck me: an accordion is kind of like a piano. At least, half of it is.

So I found my way to the accordion. I had moved right out of computer art, seemingly for good, but still had one foot in performance poetry, getting on board with a 2005 group literary revue (spearheaded, incidentally, by the same fellow who blazed the trail for my first phone call to an artscene BBS: guess he was just a thought leader!) for which I provided words, music and dramaturgy: That’s My Brain And You’re Killing It! The show was a bust, garnering enough audiences in its 5-night run to cost all participating poets only $50 each for the privilege of having taken part, but a funny thing happened during our tour of promotional previews… (actually, several funny things happened: at the Song Slam at Cafe Deux Soleils, we paraded off stage singing our anthem and disappeared into the bathroom, growing quieter and quieter, leaving the night’s next performer to begin their act… only to return 5 minutes later, growing back up from a whisper, emerging full-throated seemingly still chanting our inane lyrics, interrupting the performer-in-progress. But I digress.) At January 2005’s monthly “Raw and Cooked” works-in-progress event at the old performance art hub the Western Front, the poets performed a handful of their most splendidly strange poems, and after they exhausted their slice of the evening… they were followed by a duo of consummately cultivated punk, singers who couldn’t sing playing instruments they couldn’t play, exuberantly and with impeccable accessorization. And they needed an accordion (and, y'know, someone who knew how to play music) as part of their ensemble. Happily, the performance poet association was a temporary one, and so I was happy to moor my ship to their landing and see how much fun we could have on shore leave.

Turns out, it has never yet ended! Because our outsider format (initially: sea shanties and early ‘80s goth and industrial on accordion, banjo and ukulele) wasn’t an obvious fit for anywhere, we got to go everywhere as a species of variety spice, from festival stages to guerrilla gigs in illegal venues (hello, McBarge!) and just highly memorable oddball gigs like the opening of a tattoo parlour. (While we weren’t able to turn our nerdy background to the same good use that eg. bryface has, we weren’t totally dissociated from it: early memorable gigs included VIVO’s Video Game Orgy, and a ground floor association with Vancouver’s chapter of Free Geek – “I will support your endeavors in whatever way I can… with an accordion” – eventually put us on stage with Richard Stallman!) A functional band demands a certain quantity of administrative duties – setting rehearsals, making and distributing song arrangements, booking and promoting gigs – and it turns out that these were not entirely dissimilar to the divers & sundry thankless tasks that made up being senior staff in an underground computer artgroup! (Unlike the artscene, it turns out that being in a band actually pays, too! Terribly, but it’s not entirely sunk time – only mostly.) And like running an artgroup, there are always personnel changes to keep on top of. It’s not that members quit, but they just, y'know, stop sending in submissions. Then there are the finances and keeping track of everybody’s pirate codenames (so, as you can see, not much has changed. Greetings from “Blackbox Squeezebeard.”) And Mistigris always had trouble maintaining a web presence (finally addressed!) but we never had to deal with Wordpress pharma hacks!

My projects typically have a lifespan, and some time after that runs out, I get the memo and regretfully move on. Mistigris ran out of juice in a period of grand upheaval after three years and a bit, but this delightfully unlikely, perpetually self-reinventing “jug band of the damned” The Creaking Planks has been an ongoing concern for over eleven years now (over 3 times the lifespan of Mistigris Classic!) with no signs of any reason for it to close up shop. (The most unlikely part was getting it going in the first place, playing the songs least appropriate for its instrumentation – which is basically, “any acoustic instrument allowed except for guitar.” Once the speed bump of its establishment was traversed, no further obstacle comes anywhere close.)

You heard a slice of us in MIST1015 with our unused demo for the mobile game Afterland (I was pushing hard to get some game art included in the pack for promotional synergy, but despite early promising signs it didn’t make it in) and the Planks arrangement (sans-Planks) of Dead Man’s Pants; you got a chance to see a couple of our curious posters in MIST2000 (and a few more of them here! some of them the best work of flyingfish, who was part of the BBS milieu back in the day and has remained a living link ever since) I had hoped to invite you to our 11th anniversary concert scheduled for the evening of January 29th, 2016, but I prioritized the timeliness of other tie-ins and … underestimated the amount of time it would take me to reflect back so many years and connect the dots leading to this point. So, uh, you missed it. As the date approached, I considered the poignant twist of the knife approach, ending the post with “and it’s tonight, too late for you to make plans to attend.” But I was too busy, y'know, playing that show, so I had to revise the knife further: “it was last night.” (scratch) “It was last week.” (scraaaatch.) “It was one month ago.” Well… OK, it was slightly over one month ago.

I’m being silly, since of course most of you on the Internet live far, far away from us and wouldn’t be casually making plans to visit in any event (but if you’re nearby, our next scheduled gig is April 22nd at the Little Mountain Gallery!), besides which the good news is that thanks to our recent orientation toward posting film clips from our rehearsals, you can enjoy us in the comfort of your own home, whenever is convenient. This unlikely number dropped basically the same week as MIST1015 and I was kicking myself at having lacked the foresight to fold it in to the pack (the one thing I left out, apparently) – it’s a sweet little demonstration that we, too, remember watching the movie “Hackers” in 1995 with a mixture of bemusement and a modicum of dismay at how much they got wrong. We’ll be resuming these as a regular series, so if you enjoy – please subscribe! Cheers.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoORTedaJlY&w=560&h=315]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoORTedaJlY