the last ditch: An Introduction to Tagish ElvisMatayoshi Mitsuo, the Japanese Jesus Christ
Matayoshi Mitsuo is an eccentric Japanese politician with the conviction that he is the God and Christ.
According to his program, he will do the Last Judgement as the Christ but the way to do this is totally within the current political system and its legitimacy. His first step as the Savior is to be appointed the prime minister of Japan. Then he will reform Japanese society and then the United Nations should offer him the honor of its General Secretary. Then Matayoshi Jesus will reign over the whole world with two legitimate authorities, not only religious but also political.
He has presented himself in many elections but he has not won yet. He has become well-known for his eccentric campaigns where he urges opponents to commit suicide by hara-kiri.Adam Green - producer - co-director
Adam Green grew up and still resides in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, Canada. His coordination of The Elvis Project is a culmination of his many talents. As an artist, musician, and owner of a graphic design and silk-screening business, Adam easily transferred his many skills to the production of The Elvis Project – his first film project. He also picked up a video camera on the Elvis tour and dedicated many hours in post-production to the editing of the Project.
A student of art some years ago at the Victoria College of Art in British Columbia, Adam continues to excel at creative endeavours. Adam’s easy-going attitude has, in the past, enabled him to effectively teach several students the art of mural painting on walls of businesses around Whitehorse. With a steady hand on the steering wheel, Mr. Green managed a wide range of tasks and brought together a varied group of individuals to complete The Elvis Project.
When he is not busy with creative work, Adam enjoys eating moose meat, playing ice hockey, and spending time with his two young children, Keddy and Nolan.
Bill Kendrick - co-director
Bill Kendrick spent his early years in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, before completing a university degree in Montreal and heading up to live in Canada’s Yukon Territory. The Elvis Project is Mr. Kendrick’s first serious foray into movie making, contributing his writing, camera, and editing talents to the project.
In the North, Bill has worked in a variety of settings, including construction, solar energy, and education, as well as generally earning his “Wild Bill” reputation. As a dedicated photographer in high school, the theft of his photos in Central America turned him off the photographic arts – that is, until recently – and in many ways The Elvis Project has been the catalyst for his renewed interest in visual mediums.
Bill is very much still part of the Yukon experience, and can typically be found laughing and telling stories in Dawson City or Whitehorse.
Elvis Presley - featured personality
Elvis A. Presley, of the Yukon Territory, is truly the documentary subject of The Elvis Project. Born Gilbert Nelles to become Elvis A. Presley, Elvis’ life-changing UFO experiences have affected him profoundly. A songwriter, artist and a creator of Yukon promotional items, Elvis has both played with Chubby Checker in Las Vegas and built his own cabin in the woods in Tagish, Yukon.
Elvis has released two albums lately, Elvis Presley Still Living (1996) and Elvis Presley Armageddon Angel (2003).He currently lives in Ross River, Yukon with his partner Jesse.
Elvis also won a pink Cadillac while in Las Vegas.
Charlie Rose - heartbeat of the Armageddon Angels
Charlie Rose is the drummer for the Armageddon Angels, Elvis’ touring band, and is featured throughout The Elvis Project. As the dynamic pulse of the Armageddon Angels, Charlie went on the timeless tour through the Yukon Territory and did his best to bring the King into the building on time.
Mr. Rose feels that the northern quadrant is a fine place to learn, grow, and experiment with ideas. According to Charlie, “the buffalo came on a rock. It sat flat on the granite griddle while the gods of sun and rock incubated a drumming machine.” Charlie Rose then walked away from the rock with the feeling of “boogie woogie” and all that shakes. Since then his life has been swept away with a flurry of bands and shameful road-trips.
Charlie is now in the process of patenting a drum-set that previously lived in the depths of his mind and now sits proudly in his grandmother’s living room.
An Introduction to Tagish Elvis
The year is 1994. Steff is 21 and has just moved to the Yukon for an "experience".
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Shortly after this table was painted, the artist legally changed his name from “Gil Nelles” to “Elvis Aaron Presley.”
I found this table used in a secondhand shop in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory.
I’d moved there a month before and it was my first time ever living alone. I needed furniture, but I’ve always had a pretty quirky sense of humour: While I like nice things, if I can’t have it nice, then I’ll have it funny.
My choices were this for $25 or a ‘70s fake wood table with big knobby staircase-type spindles on it and gaudy fake brass handles for $45. I can justify the extra $20 for taste, but this thing was garish, man.
So I opted for the local item I could keep as a souvenir -- the Sponge Table.
I never thought much of it after I’d purchased it...
* * *
...until three months later, when my first Northern friend came by to hang. Lisa about fell over when she saw the table. She wouldn’t tell me why, just that the artist was coming to see her about some tourist items for her to sell later in the week, and she would “introduce” me.
* * *
Flashforward to later that week. Tagish Elvis, now legally known as Elvis Aaron Presley and formerly known as Gil Nelles, is on his knees before me, belting out “Love Me Tender” in the middle of our mall. People all around are staring at me in my lab jacket as he croons, "...for my darlin', I love you, and I always will."
Gil tells me he's thrilled I’ve happened onto a table of his, because they’re “valuable limited-edition” works of his stunning art. I don’t have the heart to tell Gil I’d paid $25.
Now, when I say dude looked like Elvis, I ain’t kidding. Adorned in a cream-colored Elvis jumpsuit sans sequins, it was evident that the boy’d gone native: all Native Indian beadwork with eagles and shit all over the suit.
When GayBoy visited me up there and saw Tagish Elvis playing bingo as he chowed down on garlic prawns, GayBoy thought he’d been transported to Vegas.
You need to know that GayBoy dreams of having slippers just Dorothy’s: He’ll click ‘em three times, droning, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home...” he'll open his eyes, and there he’ll be -- at Celine Dion’s Vegas extravaganza.
(Repressed Married Man is standing there in his wifebeater, fondling his left breast as he stares across at me. I was just fine until the left tit came into the picture. He just squeezed it! The blinds are down now. Gah!)
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How Gil became Elvis is a fascinating, hilarious, and tragic story involving attempted murder, an alien abduction, chemical off-gassing, and a multimillion dollar lawsuit.
I wanted you to hear about the table first, because the Birth of Tagish Elvis is the trump tale--it’s fucking awesome. I should charge you admission, I swear to God.
I’ll post that story tomorrow. Tagish Elvis is a story you need to hear. And I fucking love that I knew this dude. What an amazingly weird chapter of my life.
Stay tuned. I'd feel better about hyping it if I'd written it already, but the content is primo, so that's got me confident.
The Making of a Legend: Tagish Elvis is Born
ED. NOTE: READ THE INTRO TO TAGISH ELVIS POSTED JUST BEFORE THIS. You'll enjoy this more, if you do.
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This is a “to the best of my recollection” posting. It's been 10 years, after all.
Due to the enormous number of frivolous lawsuits launched by Elvis Aaron Presley (formerly Gilbert Nelles), there should be a lot more documentation available online to substantiate what I’ve got to say here, but sadly almost all the links are several years old and broken. The man made international headlines in the late '90s after a bizarre string of legal cases, not long after I returned to my home in Vancouver.* * *
Meet Tagish Elvis.
Until the '90s, Tagish Elvis was just another guy, Gilbert Nelles, who had an affinity for bingo and karaoke. He just got by, living off his proceeds from selling tacky tourist items, the most popular of which were his sponge-painted goldpans, which are probably hanging on walls all over Germany as I type.* * *
I loved living in the Yukon, but as poet Robert Service once said, the winters there envelope you with "a silence that bludgeons you dumb." It's an incredibly beautiful and mystical place to live, but even today it is a cruel and violent land.
There are those who succumb to those bitter cold and dark winter nights, who lose their tether to reality. They adopt the quirky mannerisms of the lonely and the lost.* * *
And then there are those like Gilbert Nelles.
In the late '80s, Gil had found a stockpile of discarded telephone poles that he learned were up for grabs for the public. He took the countless poles and made himself a log cabin out of them. This was not abnormal behaviour in the North, where the packrat mentality is a holdover from the days of the Goldrush, when a little extra scavenging could mean your ability to survive those bitter winters of legend.
Some will tell you that it was the fire in the hearth on those endlessly, brutally cold Yukon nights that made Gil what he became: insan--err, Elvis.
And if asked, they will tell you that Gil's mental instability is most likely thanks to all the toxic chemicals those telephone poles were treated with. All those long cold nights where the cabin would be heated up nice and toasty by fires in the hearth, all those chemicals in the log walls off-gassing into his environs, toxins wafting around that rustic room as he bent over his goldpans, stamping out art that he felt would be his legacy.
People would talk at times about those who’d visited Gil’s home, who'd testify it smelled funny, whether he might've used some of those toxic poles for firewood and ingested those fumes directly.* * *
Elvis, though, will tell you his mind was fucked long before this. It was the FBI. Or the CIA.
There was no cocaine, no toilet, no naked King, no untimely death. No, the government had realized in the '70s the power that Elvis had over the American people, but knowing he could be useful to them, They decided not to kill him, not like with John Lennon and Jim Morrison, who They found were no longer of use, just trouble.
No, They reprogrammed The King for the good of The People. According to Elvis, They thought, “Where can we send this powerful mofo that he’ll be out of the way?”
Canada, naturally. Not just Canada, though. Way-the-fuck-out-there Canada, some 2,800 kilometres north of the American border, to that isolated community of Tagish, 30 kilometres from the capital of Whitehorse in the Yukon, surrounded by trees and silence. As isolated as it really gets.* * *
And we all know what happens in those isolated places: Close encounters of the third kind. And The King was no exception. Everyone loves royalty, even the little green men.
It was around '90 that Elvis reports his first alien visitation. On that first encounter, they took the King for a galactic spin.
The cosmic critters told him how the American government was interfering with his destiny. That Elvis didn’t have to go back to his life as it was in the days of Graceland. No, they said he had to forge a new life here, in the wild, but he needed to be The King. He was Elvis.
The Man couldn’t take it away from The King. He had to be strong, yo.* * *
Enter the Caddy festooned with epoxy-crusted angels. Enter the gone-Native Elvis jumpers. Enter the ducktail, the shades. The monotone-mumble-drawl he sputters at you with. Enter the vanity license plates that read simply, "ELVIS."* * *
When Elvis came into town, the locals didn't call him Gil. Not anymore. No, they addressed him as Elvis, and sometimes more rightfully as The King. When he'd saunter down the street, goldpans in hand, they'd mutter about "That crazy fuck," but to his face, they feigned the respect he so longed for.* * *
Sadly, morphing into The King didn’t have the effect he thought it might have on his wife. In fact, she liked it better when he was reprogrammed. She decided to split.
Elvis didn’t take kindly to this and tried to shoot his wife dead when she tried leaving him in the mid-’90s. He claimed she was just another pawn of that scheming American government. She survived that night, but the Epic of Tagish Elvis was just getting started.
That fateful night, a responding RCMP officer on the scene suggested The King should “seek some help.”
Enraged at this assertion of insanity, Elvis then sued the government, suggesting he was the victim of defamation, collusion, and harrassment.
Elvis continued in this vein over the next several years, suing the government at his leisure, his legal briefs maxing out at over 400 pages most of the time--filled with wild accounts of his abductions, the conspiracy of his reprogramming, citations of their inability to protect him from the constantly meddlesome aliens, the Canadian government's collusion with the American government in trying to obscure his true identity from The People, and so on.* * *
The last real news on Tagish Elvis came when his last attempt to sue the government for defamation and collusion was dismissed. They King was found without sufficient evidence. The courts fined him $10 for “wasting everyone’s time” and he was thereafter forbidden from launching any more laughable legal claims.
I don't know where he is today, whether he's still huffing chemicals in his cozy cabin, churning out his garish goldpans and faux dreamcatchers... but I'd lay my money on exactly that. The crazy shit never goes away in the North. It's bred in the bones.* * *
Had I known he’d become such a legendary weird character in my life, I might’ve taken more time to learn more about Tagish Elvis back then, but there were a lot of freaks in that town, and I always thought the Mad Trapper had the trump card.
Sadly, there are a lot of gaps in my knowledge of The King. I'm proud that I held one of his mammoth legal briefs in my hand. The table lives still, in the dungeon of WhippedBoy's home, where he lives with his wife. It is being guarded as the sacred artifact that it is, and despite my better taste, I will one day restore the Sponge Table and it shall have a sacred spot in my home.
