100 Acts of Minor Dissent E-Book

Mark Thomas

• Herausgeber: September Publishing
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

100 Acts of Minor Dissent is a hilarious account of an entire year spent living provocatively. From successful campaigns against Royal Parks and multinationals, to arts and crafts with porn mags, from annoying estate agents, to raising cinema workers' wages, comedian and campaigner Mark Thomas stopped at nothing. The Acts were sometimes bold, sometimes surreal. Many brought about change and others were done for the sheer hell of it. Whether at the gates of the Saudi Arabian embassy or the checkout at Tesco - people reacted with laughter, shock, outrage and occasionally anger. Sometimes all of the above. 100 Acts of Minor Dissent makes for dangerously inspiring reading. Please note this is a fixed-format ebook with colour images and may not be well-suited for older e-readers.

Leseprobe

THE RULES OF MINOR DISSENT

100 Acts of Minor Dissent to be committed in one year,from 14 May 2013 to 13 May 2014.

Verification of the Acts committed will be conducted at a liveperformance in Sheffield on 15 May 2014, where each and everyAct will be counted and confirmed.

Should 100 Acts be committed, the materials used in creatingthe Acts will form the basis for a free week-long art exhibitionat the Millennium Gallery in Sheffield.

Should 100 Acts fail to be committed, a forfeit shall be levied.That forfeit shall be the donation of £1,000 to UKIP.

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First published in 2015 by September Publishing

Copyright © Mark Thomas 2015

The right of Mark Thomas to be identified as the author ofthis work has been asserted by him in accordance with theCopyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means,electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,without the prior permission of the copyright holder.

Cover art, book design and illustrations by Greg Matthewswww.designbygreg.uk

Printed in China on paper from responsibly managed,sustainable sources by Everbest Printing Co Ltd

ISBN 978-1910463031

www.markthomasinfo.co.ukwww.septemberpublishing.orgTell us what you think @SeptemberBooks

PROLOGUE

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‘WHERE DO YOU GET YOUR IDEAS FROM?’

When you are as famous as I am, you have to do a lot of interviews with local newspapers to sell tickets for your gigs. So the question, ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ is oft heard. Here are some of the answers I have given.

‘A stall in Brick Lane. They literally sell random ideas in plastic bags; it’s a tenner a bag. You never know what you are going to get in them, and sometimes I end up phoning Andy Parsons, saying, “Look I’ve got a bag of ideas, I can’t use this stuff but you might be interested.”’

‘I have a team of drunken dwarves who write ideas in marker pen on my naked body.’

‘Pixies.’

‘I paint pictures with my breakfast and start with the first image I see emerge from the yolk.’

‘Ikea.’

‘I watch Family Guy repeats on BBC3 until my mind wanders off to somewhere interesting.’

‘It was 2 a.m. in a hotel on Saddleworth Moor while my agent shouted “I’m not leaving the room until you tell me what the new show is about!”’

The last one is true.*

2 a.m. – 7 March 2013 in a hotel room on Saddleworth Moor, my agent and I hold a late-night creative workshop. Sitting amid matching rose-patterned wallpaper and pillow cases, squeezing plastic milk teat sachets into cups of tea, while the wind on the moor rattles the windows, this is our cultural world; Dostoevsky meets Alan Bennett.

The idea of doing a show called ‘100 Acts of Minor Dissent’ had been  floating around for a while, but I had always put it off. Perhaps because to  commit the 100 and tour a show around the country performing for  

* As is the breakfast one.

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two hours for 200 nights of the year is hard work. Perhaps because I thought a better idea might come along. Perhaps because a better idea had come along.

At 2 a.m. my agent screws up his face and says, ‘I am not leaving this hotel room until you tell me what the new show is about.’

I blurt out the idea. He shouts, ‘Great!’ Five minutes later he has left the room. Nine hours later he tells me the first gigs have been booked and I am committed to carrying out 100 Acts of Minor Dissent in the course of a year.

‘Where do you get your ideas from?’

I get them from the panic induced by my agent squatting my hotel room and shouting at me.

‘So why are you doing this?’

I really do a lot of interviews with local newspapers, so many I can lip-synch the follow-up question, ‘Aren’t you getting too old for all of this?’ Let me take the questions one at a time.

An Act of Dissent is a simple way of saying, ‘No, I do not accept this and, as my silence may be construed as acquiescence, I would like to make a small gesture to indicate that you can all go fuck yourselves.’ It is the rebuttal of the thin end of the wedge. It is a way of saying no to the countless small compromises we make each day.

Look, I say to the local arts correspondents, I live in the same area my family has lived in for generations, my sister is vicar in the local church, my cousins used to live at the end of the street, my nan and granddad were air raid wardens in WW2 and their shelter used to stand just one minute’s walk from where I live now. Here they are on their fire truck.

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I love the fact that my children went to the same primary school I went to.

I love that their head teacher used to teach me.

I love feeling part of my community.

I love that my old postie and I swap biographies on punk and new wave musicians.

I love that when I go into my local independent coffee shop they say one word, ‘Espresso?’ And when my wife isn’t with me they say, ‘Cake?’

I like the fact that Terry the tramp doesn’t beg off of locals when he is pissed.

I like that we buy him coffee when he is sober.

I love that when walking past my local barber sporting a cut from another establishment he came out into the street and in a shocked voice bellowed, ‘Oi, you seeing another barber?’ then walked back inside loudly proclaiming to anyone who would listen, ‘It’s as if he wanted to be caught.’

I love where I have been born and raised, but where there was once a hospital at the end of the street there is now a Tesco, literally. The old cinema is a wine warehouse; the local deli run by the mad Italian guy who made up the prices according to what mood he was in, that’s gone. We have a Tesco, a Costa, Sainsbury’s Local, another Tesco and estate agents: loads of estate agents; a rash of arrogant Mini Cooper-driving Dapper Laughs wannabes.

So I am doing 100 Acts of Minor Dissent because I love local communities and the way they work, and I hate the way neoliberalism turns our streets into bland replicating copies of each other. And, yes, I am aware I sound like a Marxist Victor Meldrew but, guess what, I’m over 50 and I don’t give a fuck.

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TWO STORIES ON THE NATURE OF DISSENT

When my son was four years old I took him and his grandmother to Tate Britain (Tate Ancient). I said, ‘Today, son, we are going to an art gallery.’

He innocently responded, ‘Will any of my pictures be there?’

He had no idea that to be on display in a ‘proper’ art gallery you had to qualify as an artist and be approved by a series of critics and curators. For him, art was something you did and then put on the wall. Not wishing to crush youthful aspiration, I replied in neutral tones, ‘Not unless we take some up.’

‘Can we?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I replied.

‘I’ll find the Blu-Tack,’ he said helpfully.

So we set off to the Tate, my son and I, accompanied by my mother-in-law (she’s a devout Catholic, a volunteer at Oxfam and reads the Daily Mail; I feel compelled to say that I love her). We casually walked in with my son’s paintings rolled in my hand, wandered around for a while and shortly found a quiet spot near a series of oil paintings, then deftly hung my son’s works in their rightful place.

I recently found the video footage I took of that event. My son stands in a yellow Pokémon fleece next to his drawing of a spider and says to me, ‘Will anyone buy them, Dad?’

‘We’ll have to see,’ I say.

Then my mother-in-law interjects, ‘Well they’re a lot better than most of the stuff in here.’

Looking back on that event there are two clear categories of dissenter in this story: my son, the accidental dissenter, and my mother-in-law, who knew you are not supposed to hang your own pictures in an art gallery, the transgressor. I see my role in this story as mentor.

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These are not fixed roles; as my son got older his role changed from innocent to transgressor.

He came home from school aged 16 in a rather truculent state.

‘What’s up?’

‘I’m in trouble with English.’

‘Why?’

‘I was a minute late and the teacher shouted at me, “You are a minute late for an English lesson – that is disgusting.”’

‘What did you reply to the teacher?’ I enquired.

‘I said … “It’s not disgusting, miss … it is tardy. It is regretful, it could be rude, it could display a belligerent or ambivalent attitude towards the class, but it is not disgusting, and as we are in an English lesson I think we should use the appropriate word.”’

Some are born dissenting, some achieve dissension and some have dissent thrust upon them.

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AND SO IT BEGINS …

ACT 1 The Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003 requires a publisher to deposit two copies of every book with the British Library; it is a nice law and has existed in some form in the UK since 1662. It means every book ever published since that date is held in perpetuity by the library, forming a cultural and intellectual archive for the nation.

I found this out in 2013, after self-publishing the play script of Bravo Figaro!, a play I had written about my dad.

I do not react well to legal letters unless I am sending them. So when the British Library legal deposit team wrote me a legal letter, a somewhat threatening letter, saying, ‘Unless you send two copies of Bravo Figaro! to the legal deposit library within 14 days of receipt of this letter we will fuck you up with paper cuts from the index cards!’* I behaved to type and the following day I sent the British Library a box of 100 copies of Bravo Figaro! with a note:

Dear British Library,

RE: Donations compliance.

These have not been selling as well as I had hoped and are lookingfor a good home. If anyone wants to take a copy out of the libraryyou might actually give them their own personal copy. Perhapscharge a small admin fee, say £5 and then, if you wouldn’t mind,send the money to me.

Bless them, they replied.

* Strictly speaking this quote is inaccurate, but that was the legal gist.

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Dear Mark,

Many thanks for the box with copies of your book Bravo Figaro! andthe accompanying note. Sorry to hear this isn’t selling so well.

Unfortunately our bookshop isn’t geared up for the kind ofarrangement you suggest.

We’d like to send copies to the other five legal deposit libraries andto approach READ International (which supports literacy in Africa).

All the best.

Frankly, if everyone replied with the same grace and wit as the British Library I would be out of a job.

Fortunately, the target of ACT 2 reacted with the dignity and charm of a masturbating clown.

I assembled a few friends to help with this Act: my long-term collaborator Tracey Moberly (artist from the Welsh Valleys), Dr Bipasha Ahmed (neighbour and psychology lecturer) and fellow comic Josie Long.

I presented these intelligent, incisive and creative women with the most appropriate and meaningful gift I could find – a remote-control Barbie car. A bright and stunning pink toy with the words ‘Beautiful Girl’ on the bonnet.

‘Why do this?’ you ask.

‘Because I am a feminist,’ I reply.

One morning we took the cars up to Mayfair and then my friends raced them outside the Saudi Arabian Embassy.

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The time trials outside the embassy gates resulted in a definitive winner:

While we were taking the victor’s photo, some of the diplomatic staff from the embassy ran up to the railings, shouting and furiously jabbing their fingers in the air. ‘If you let them drive, THEY KILL THEIR CHILDREN!’

The Barbie cars are currently on loan to transsexual and transgender activists who will be racing them outside the Russian Embassy.

ACT 3 is a variant on a popular Act of Dissent, namely this: the epitome of good manners in all decent homes is, upon receipt of junk mail containing a Freepost pre-addressed envelope, to a) insert the contents of the junk mail into the prepaid envelope, and b) post it back to the fuckers that sent it. This is based on the sound logic that if someone sends you their rubbish you are entitled to send it back, at their expense.

My variation on the practised etiquette on receipt of unwanted missives is based on the idea that if someone sends me rubbish I am entitled to send it back AND some of my own.

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Foxtons estate agent sent me a glossy card inviting me to sell my home; I sent back Weetabix. This was accompanied with a note that the company should regard this as a request to be removed from their mailing list.

A motor company sent me half a tree’s worth of promotional cack; I sent back an out-of-date tin of sardines.

Things took a turn for the weird when I received a note from the postman explaining a letter addressed to me did not have the correct postage on it and if I wished to receive the letter I should go to the post office, pay a small fine and the value of the postage. Which I did. The letter was a leaflet from Will’s Art Warehouse.

Enraged at paying for a promotional leaflet, I inserted a large unwanted hardback book into a Jiffy bag and posted it to Will’s Art Warehouse. Without a stamp. I have not heard from Will since.

On discussing this Act with some old anarcho-squatters from the ’70s, they revealed that they would post breeze blocks to people they disliked, who, on receipt of the stampless package, had to pay for the delivery at the other end.

One day later I approach the counter staff at my local post office, who know me well, with a trial breeze block wrapped in brown paper.

‘No, Mark,’ they say as I offer them the package. ‘If you want to send this to Mr Gove, you will need a stamp.’

Times have changed and it appears one can no longer send breeze blocks in the post. But you can …

ACT 4 … send roof tiles.

The tile slips snugly into a Jiffy bag, weighs quite a bit AND fits into a postbox.

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So next time you go past a building site, arm up, then follow the rules:

Be warned: it is a seriously addictive pastime. Just before Christmas my wife was walking down the street when she caught sight of me standing in the middle of a skip.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked incredulously.

I said, ‘I’m looking for a reply to Virgin Media.’

ACT 5 In 2011 tax-avoiding bookseller Amazon acquired the DVD rental company LoveFilm (now Amazon Prime Instant Video) and with it the ire of many of the 10 million in the UK with hearing loss. While in the US Amazon’s on-demand services provide subtitles, Amazon was refusing to do the same for its UK customers, or even provide information about which DVDs were already subtitled and which were not, making choosing a film a lottery if you are one of the 10 million. Why such a difference in policy, you ask? I have no idea except perhaps that Amazon is forced to subtitle in the US to comply with anti-discrimination legislation.

This prompted Stephanie McDermid to launch a petition on  Change.org, calling on Amazon to behave with a semblance of dignity  and provide accurate and comprehensive information about subtitled  

1. INSERT ROOF TILE

2. ADDRESS PACKAGE

3. POST WITHOUT STAMP

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