I don't know about IW, but I had a vision one night -- I think it was in
June. A voice told me to go forth as "Sandwichman". Actually there
wasn't really a voice, but it makes a better narrative if I say there was
a voice. And really, I've been kicking around the sandwichman motif for
around 14 years. So it wasn't as if that vision in June could be
properly called an "upheaval".
The funny part about this is that I'm not kidding. I found a West
German army surplus officer's cap that I've modified with a Sears
catalogue photo of a timex watch and I've engineered a pair of sandwich
boards out of corrugated plastic, velcro strips and elastic straps. I did
a good job designing the sandwich -- it's pretty comfy. The boards have an
illustration on them from a 1946 Fortune magazine promoting "deferred
profit-sharing plans" administered by the Chase Bank of New York. The
title of the improvisational research piece I'm doing is "a fixed amount
of work", which alludes to a chapter I've written in a forthcoming book on
working time (it's in a Routledge series on social economics). The back
board also has these lines from a Brecht poem:
In your house
Lies are roared aloud.
But the truth
Must be silent.
Is it so?
The front board has a quote by humourist Frank Hubbard (which is more
often attributed to Mark Twain or Will Rogers):
"'Taint what a man don't know that hurts him; it's what he knows that just
ain't so."
What I'm going to do is walk up and down the streets of Vancouver handing
out leaflets recruiting for a proposed organization called the "Action
Research Theatre Collective". My real intention is to engage people in
conversations about what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. If anyone has
read this far and is at all interested in what I think I'm doing, I can
recommend two guiding texts. The first is "The Flaneur, the Sandwichman
and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering" by Susan Buck-Morss (New German
Critique, Fall 1986). The second (I've mentioned it before) is Walter
Brierley's novel, The Sandwichman, pp. 202-225.
The Buck-Morss piece refers to the blurring of distinctions between
advertising/information/entertainment. My research on the "fixed amount of
work" excavates an episode where the most venal publicity snake oil
became "approved textbook knowledge" without so much as a how de do from
the economics profession.
Tom Walker
