We now have Creaking Planks T-shirts available for sale to the general public! If you are impulsive you can buy a shirt (or 2, or 3)
here. If, however, you prefer to research products extensively and/or enjoy purple prose, keep on reading...
What Do You Need To Know About The Shirts?
- For the time being, they are only available in one colour scheme: white ink on black shirt. Sorry, friends: octopus ink. That's just how it goes.
- The T-shirts are sourced from Fruit of the Loom: less ethically produced than American Apparel, but with less flamboyantly problematic baggage. They have been holding up well in band members' trial wearings and washings (note: accordion bellows friction will rub the design away), so if you insist on distressed band t-shirts, you may have to distress them yourself. (May I recommend the -- distressing! -- William S. Burroughs technique?)
- Sizes available: S, M, L, XL -- men's and now women's cuts, please specify! We have been asked about babies' onesies and are considering the option; please let us know if there are any shapes, sizes and styles of garment you feel we have unfairly excluded. (Please note: this design will not fit on a thong. No tentacles there, no box squeezing, and certainly no organ grinding.)
- The price is $15 for a shirt, plus shipping. Shipping within Canada or to the US is $10 per shirt (different countries, but by Canada Post logic...about the same amount) and to Europe... ehh, we can work something out.
- How are you supposed to pay for it? PayPal! or if you don't have that, contact us, we'll work something out. Like an octopus, we're flexible! (Well, OK, not that flexible.)
- In Vancouver, they're currently available at Spartacus Books (3378 Findlay Street), but if you know of a shop that needs to carry some of our shirts, we obviously need to know about it! Currently our fabulous Creaking Planks t-shirts are not carried in any other brick & mortar storefront. (Or our buttons, for that matter. Or, heck, our music. Genuine Creaking Planks™ however are available for purchase anywhere lumber is sold!)
SpongeDev SquarePlanks demonstrates this season's fashionable garment sensation!
And now... The Pitch:
Some pairings are eternal classics just waiting to be discovered. Like balsamic vinegar with strawberries,
taxidermied trophy fish with Al Green, and politicians' faces with pies, from the moment they are first combined one reels in shock that the ecstasy of their meeting has been unfairly denied to past generations.
Another of these fundamental pairings unjustly denied our ancestors: octopi and accordions. Prior to 1829, there simply were no squeezeboxes to juxtapose molluscs with, and even since then, one being an aerophone and the other aquatic... their paths have rarely crossed,
belonging to different worlds. But in this brave, strange postmodern world, the lid has been blown off of Pandora's box, and there at the bottom, intrepid artists have discovered a consortium of octopodes entwined with button-boxes, pumping away at Piazzolla tangos in a passionate cloud of inky
Oblivion. (And Hope. They also found a very small quantity of Hope at the bottom of the box, stuck to an octopus' beak like a wad of chewed gum. At least, I think that was hope... maybe it was ambergris?)
Making up for lost time, visual artists and graphic designers (thanks, Simon Warner, Doc Colour, Bethany Hockenberry, Andrew Schnoor, Amber Lamb, Kirsten Beneke and more!) are combining these two disparate elements as though the clock was ticking, like their subject might suddenly fall out of fashion. (But we know, of course, that the accordion is rebounding from strength to strength after its 50 years in free-fall, so ... are the 8-armed invertebrates in any risk of shedding their eternal appeal? You tell me: optimised for their niche, they have been evolutionarily stable for 95 million years, yawning during the disappearances of the dinosaurs and the dodo.)
As you may recall, we
recently (Jan '15) printed a run of handsome t-shirts perhaps epitomizing this appealing, absurd juxtaposition, the accordionic octopus. The art was made by our very own Daisy-Jones Locher to be used on the poster for our 7th anniversary concert, and though we always knew it was destined to end up on a t-shirt, realizing this manifest destiny took somewhat longer than we'd anticipated. They were available for sale exclusively at our 10th anniversary concert, and though we sold a bunch ... the quantity of shirts printed was in excess of the venue's capacity, so since nobody bought multiple shirts, we do have a few remaining in every size. We will still be carting around a limited selection of shirts to our upcoming gigs for fans to purchase directly from us, but in the meantime we are also officially opening ourselves up to orders for delivery via Canada Post. (
If you hurry, they may still be able to deliver to your door!)
Accordion Octopus T-shirt Trivia: the accordion is upside-down! You know what, the octopus really doesn't care. That's actually the way that Blackbox first learned (well, taught himself) to play the squeezebox, only correcting himself after seeing an accordion played in the proper position on TV -- an option this octopus presumably doesn't have! Anyhow, existing technique and posture for accordion playing assumes a vertebral torso and only two digited limbs; with eight tentacles to work with, octopus accordion style is far more versatile than the B or even C system. Forget bellows shake; this bad mother will tear the bellows right in half!
More Trivia: wouldn't it be bubbling if air was being squeezed out of it underwater? Maybe it is filled with water, underwater, ruining the bellows and rusting the reeds. (And where will an underwater octopus find a rig to melt more beeswax with which to repair the reeds? Oh, don't trouble yourself.) Maybe the octopus is aboveground, holding its breath while it squeezes out a merry jig on a bather's unattended instrument. Or maybe the octopus is like Grace Jones (what, you want me to qualify that comparison?) and is merely
posing with the accordion,
pretending to play it. Maybe.
In conclusion,
now you can go ahead and buy a shirt.
