“I used to want the Queen's head, but now I want the crown” - Roots Manuva
The old lady at front of the post office queue draws her breath when she hears it will cost £5 to send her birthday card registered overseas.
“The Royal Mail been stealing my post!” she meekly protests. “We all got a letter about it!”
It's true. We all got that letter. A local postman had been nicking our mail. And now the old lady is getting charged a fiver to send her grandson a birthday card. She seems to be implying that the Royal Mail are criminals, in the act of committing daylight robbery.
The Turner Prize winning artist Steve McQueen battled with the Royal Mail for quite a while. He created a set of stamps featuring the images of dead British soldiers from Aghanistan, after collaboration with the families of the soldiers. He didn't consider the artwork complete unless the Royal Mail published the stamps; but they refused.
A popular graffiti artist, once hunted by the law but now a household name whose street art is protected and celebrated, recently forged hundreds of notes of currency. The Queen's head was replaced by an image of Princess Diana. These £10 notes now exchange on Ebay for £200.
The son of Princess Diana is about to get married in two days time. According to the satirical new show 'Have I Got News For You', The public were encouraged to send in their responses:
Money makes the world go round. All around the world, from Wall Street to the Himalayas, we trade, and barter, using notes and coins – notes and coins often bearing heads of state. You can bet your bottom dollar that most of us want to be richer – we want to have more notes and coins.
But in a world where an energy crisis is ever looming, where an expanding population sees increasing disparity between rich and poor, and where environmental stresses threaten our very existence, I am pretty sure that our relationship to value needs to change if we are either to evolve – or, more bleakly, survive. And it needs to change fast.
This week, Boris Johnson 'personally' appointed me Hackney's street champion. I will be coordinating efforts to promote an initiative called
the Big Lunch. Organised by
the Eden Project, the Big Lunch aims to get as many people having street parties as possible on June 5th. The premise is simple; break bread with your neighbour. Let's face it - it's harder than we think, isn't it? Whilst many of us Londoners are proud to see such diversity amongst our neighbours when we get on the tube or walk down the high street, we're not often challenged to actually interact with people from a different background to ours. We might nod hello to our Muslim neighbours, but the likelihood is we will never know what they eat in the evenings, and likewise, they will never know what we eat. We're much more likely to have had Chinese takeaways than to actually have stepped across the threshold of a Chinese woman's house. But at least trade brings us together. We'll drop 50p into our Turkish shopkeeper's hand. Our hands might even touch.
The original trigger point for the 1995 Birmingham race riots was an alleged rape of an Afro Caribbean girl by a group of South Asian men, but bad feelings between the Afro-Caribbean and South Asian communities were not uncommon. It was rumoured that South Asian shopkeepers did not like to touch the hands of their Afro-Caribbean clients when giving change. According to Afro-Caribbeans, South Asians viewed them as 'untouchables'.
I come from a family of shopkeepers. My Indian grandfather had a convenience store in Kenya. He, like many other Asians, arrived in East Africa to set up small businesses. Often, these were shops. How do our local shops serve us? Are they there to simply trade? Or do they play a wider role in the community?
Whenever I visit India, I love getting shaved. Often, I'll just visit a man with a cut throat razor on the street, like the one pictured here.
This man will not only shave me with a level of precision and care I've never encountered anywhere else in the world, he will also massage me. I will leave his chair feeling like a million dollars. But the experience will only cost me 50 rupees. What will 50 rupees buy me in London? A cup of coffee, if I'm really lucky (a cup of Starbucks coffee will cost me £2.50, or 170 rupees); whilst a shave at a gentleman's barbers in Regent St will cost me £45. And it won't be as good as mister man with a razor on the streets on Bombay. I could buy 66 of his shaves for that price.
When I'm having a shave, it's not only the end result I appreciate – it's the process. Today we can buy our groceries online. The need to actually talk to people face-to-face is disappearing. We actually crave anonymity. But I love that awkwardness, that tension, that threat of conversation when we sit with a hairdresser. Do we talk? Or perhaps the conversation between my head and his hand is enough? A skilled hairdresser is like an artisan. Do we make pleasant chit-chat when we paint, or sculpt? But hairdressers are different... part of their job is to make a client feel at ease.
Last year a man asked me to climb naked into a bathtub. He bathed me. He then asked me to get out. I put on a gown and he cuddled me for ten minutes. I paid for the experience. But he wasn't a prostitute; he was a performer. His piece made me feel strange for days afterwards. I questioned the notion of intimacy, and of performance.
Five minutes ago I conducted a business meeting with someone who I have never met. She is an illustrator, and we are writing a book together. I propositioned her with the idea after I found her work online. She claims she often works this way, because her Greek clients have differing cultural values to the ones she acquired in London and South Africa. It is easier for her to work with people online, halfway across the globe, than it is her neighbours.
My local high street in Dalston , affectionately called 'the Waste', is a strange amalgamam of shops. Like most UK high streets, it's in a position of flux. Some shops have shutters on them. Some shops are decaying, musty and hardly see a customer all day. Most busy are the two kebab shops and fish and chip shop. Recently, there's been a spate of shops which mirror gentrification; three independent coffee shops cum restaurants. A gastropub. It's only a matter of time before we see a delicatessen selling sourdough bread and fairtrade products. There are two places I can get my hair cut on the Waste. One caters predominantly for African clientel. The other is Wah nails, a nail bar which is celebrated in New York and Berlin alike. There are two Turkish shops which sell vegetables, but they are overpriced. There are two Tesco Metros within five minutes walk, if you like your vegetables uniformly shaped and plastic wrapped. There are no shops within ten minutes walk where you can buy your vegetables accompanied by a smile and some conversation.
Three days ago there was a riot on Bristol over a new Tescos Metro. The locals didn't want it there. Ex-Bristol rapper Dizraeli has a rather tasty little song called
'Bomb Tesco'. The chorus to this song is “The movement! It's the movement! None of your rulers can stop the movement!”
Yesterday, a man was pissing on the outside of my house. He was much bigger than me so I didn't challenge him, per se, but he still threatened me for daring to give him a dirty stare. He had a sweatshirt on made by Converse, the same company which made my trainers.
My Converse trainers are made from a number of different materials. These probably come from loads of different countries. I have no idea where, or who got paid what, along the way. The banana I had for breakfast comes from Africa. My Iphone was made in China, but the tantalum metal it contains comes from the jungles of Eastern Congo. The paper I read my news from? I have no idea, but I bet it's not the UK. But globalisation is not just about growing economic interdependence between countries. It's about viruses; invasions and infestations of foreign species; migration.
In my hand, I hold a Lewes Pound. It is a local currency which works as part of a transition network. You can exchange it for local goods and services in Lewes. Read closely; it says on it, “We have it in our power to build the world anew.”
What happens when we set foot over the threshold of a space? There are so many different kinds of thresholds;
National borders and homes.
Airports, banks and palaces.
Homes, shops, and hairdressers.
But I want to postulate three questions, in relation to crossing thresholds;
Are we welcomed?
Are we asked to behave in a certain way?
Are there certain rules and regulations to which we are bound?
The 2011 National Census is being conducted by the information branch of Lockheed Martin, the second biggest arms manufacturer on the planet. How ethical is it that all UK citizens are legally bound to comply with supplying information to a company which is based on creating weapons of destruction?
I am a comedian and a poet, and the thoughts I've outlined above are the provocations for a performance which has been commissioned by
Motiroti. I know that this performance will take place in a hairdressers in Dalston. For the purposes of this piece, I am calling each performer a technician, and each audience member a client. The clients will each pay a fee to cross the threshold into the performance. Each client will be assigned a technician.
The performance will constitute of my playfully exploring some of the themes I've outlined above, and perhaps more importantly, a conversation between each client and customer. This conversation will be documented by each client filling out a form, which I am calling an alternative census.
My first point of departure is finding a hairdressers. I am looking for the right place to do the performance. The hairdressers have to be sympathetic to my cause. Is it important for the hairdressers to get the piece? I think so. But many of the people I've spoken to don't come from a background in the arts. They just want to know how much I will pay them to hire the shop for the day.
After all, money is money, and business is business.
And we're all in the business of making money.
