onionbagblog

Image: The lovely Hidden Dingbat Collective

A highly social Thursday evening, combining the company of the good folk of @15QueenStreet, a performance @ColchesterArts (again) and of course some booze action. These blog posts don’t write themselves, y’know.

With the ace Colchester Mini-Bar (that’s not really a bar, and no booze is really involved, oh no…) given the month of January off, the @15QueenStreet creatives called instead for a trip to the Arts Centre.

Hurrah!

Booze followed, but purely in a creative capacity, with future projects and collaborations (very excited, btw) about the promotion of Colchester planned.

Having already attended the Colchester Beer Festival and Mark Thomas at the Arts Centre this week, my hat trick of visits proved to be the most unique and enjoyable. A beer festival is a beer festival is a beer festival; you then fall down. Mark Thomas was ace, but then I was expecting that anyway.

What I wasn’t expecting from Jamie Moakes and You Will Be Rare on Thursday night was an engaging and relevant piece of stand up performance, taking in macro economic arguments and the obsessive world of He-Man.

Hurrah!

Jamie’s vision is to take on the economy. It is a fine and noble objective, but unless you have an oil well in your back garden, then it’s also a vision that is going to leave you somewhat out of pocket.

Instead Jamie has taken a micro economic approach, combining this with a flair for a piece of social art performance: corner the market in a particular commodity, and then you will have absolute power [hold off those He-Man jokes for now...]

It’s not really important where this absolute power is welded - which is just as well, seeing as though if George Osbourne is looking to appoint an economic advisor that specialises in the cult He-Man action figure of Ram Man, then Jamie is, um, yer man.

It’s a niche market for sure, and one which Jamie has been able to control. Put simply, he carried out the quantitative economic experiment of buying up as many Ram Man action figures as possible, and then seeing what affect this has on the overall market price.

The more important qualitative social story here is the performance at the Arts Centre and beyond, outlining what a fickle beast the economy is. Controling a market has nothing to do with skill or judgement; the profit and loss is purely based on quantity.

Jamie told the tale of how he took on the Ram Man world, by first of all stating a few facts and figures. His spreadsheet documents that he has bought to date 109 Ram Mans, at a cost of just over £1,000. It is estimated that there could be over two million little Ram Men in the world, just waiting to find their way over to Sunny Colchester.

This is very much an online project, using social media to spread the message and tell the story, as well as the obvious benefits of eBay to actually source the product and measure any market increase in price.

But what of the conclusion? Is the world of mid ’80s obsessive action figure collectors heading for the same fate as RBS? Sort of. Ram Man’s price increased by almost 200%. The nerds of the internet even began to discuss the implications, noting on various forums that there is currently a run on Ram Man’s [the plural of the short, stocky little fella is addressed during the performance.]

The performance ends with the message of don’t allow the market to control you. The mantra of everything has a price is correct, but you can control the price of a commodity, simply by buying into the dream - or not - as Jamie suggests at the end of the show.

It was all food for thought and drink, which is why the @15QueenStreet crowd then buggered off to the Hole in the Wall and bought five pints of Guinness as a social experiment in booze price fixing.

Or maybe that was just me?

The You Will Be Rare project is continuing, as long as the finances are in place, and as long as Jamie’s good partner can withstand having an army of Ram Men looking down from one end of the bed.

There is plenty of online activity, over @HESAIDTalent on Twitter, the HE SAID Talent youtube channell and the main website for the project.

I personally just loved the idea that it wasn’t even the main character in He-Man that managed to sell out the show at the Arts Centre. I think that this said something about the creative tastes within Colchester…

Many thanks to Jamie for kindly offering to explain more about the project in the podcast below.