When he’s not building the world’s largest paper shredder to protest Enron or leading the “Billionaires for Bush (or Gore)” into action, political prankster Andrew Boyd travels North America teaching a workshop called CultureJamming101. (He’ll be in Toronto at Ryerson University this Tuesday, January 14.) Over the years, he’s collected hundreds of stories of successful culture jams. Determining with his class “what works and why” is a core part of the workshop, and it’s a process that has yielded a kind of culture jamming “best practices.”

“But can’t ‘worst practices’ be just as enlightening?,” rabble.ca asked Boyd during a phone interview last month. Boyd was game to find out. And, so, we asked you, our readers, to tell us about the most spectacularly disastrous culture-jamming pranks you’ve been part of. The tales of activist accidents below are some of our favourites.

Disarming Disappointment

I worked with the Toronto Disarmament Network duringthe debate over the EH-101 helicopter purchase in the early 1990s. As part of our protest, we constructed an eight- by three- by twelve-foot helicopter out of papier mâché. We used this prop well for a few weeks with the intention of taking it to Ottawa to cast on the Peace Flame on Parliament Hill.

We contacted an affinity group in Ottawa who was supposed to make all the plans and ensure that the Parliament grounds were open for our demonstration. The Ottawa group did the media work, and we had dozens of reporters and cameras following us as we marched through Sparks Street Mall towards Parliament Hill.

About thirty yards away from the gates, we noticed hundreds of people milling around the lawn.

“Great!” we thought. “The Ottawa group did way more than we expected and got a crowd for us.”

As we got closer, we noticed many of the people gathered were young and in wheelchairs. As we approached the gates a cold reality began to dawn on us. The advance team had done everything except check the schedule for the Hill. If we were to take a few more steps, we would be ungraciously disturbing a ceremony for athletes from the Special Olympics.

With nothing else to do, we turned and left, dragging our scale-model helicopter behind us.

Jim H.
Victoria

Ditched Dykemobile

When I lived in Newfoundland, I relished the annual Pride Celebrations, modest though they may seem tosome cosmopolitan mainlanders.

A couple of years after bursting out of my closet, Idecided that I wanted to make a bit of a splash in theSt. John’s Pride march in honour of my personalliberation. My girlfriends and I ‘liberated’ ashopping cart and converted it into a rolling rainbowmade of painted cardboard, polyester streamers andlots and lots of well-concealed duct tape.

Alas, on the way to pride, a trick front wheel slowed us down so muchthat we had to abandon the contraption behind alaundry mat or risk being terminally late for the march.

When we returned to retrieve our queer art project, itwas nowhere to be found.

Anne H.
Toronto

Bungled Banner

It took several friends and I four hours to complete ourintricate eight-foot banner for the G8 solidarity protest in Ottawa last year. Using all the primarycolours, it read: “Crush Corporate Fascism” andfeatured a crossed-out dollar symbol and a crossed-outswastika on either side of the slogan. We were proudartists that day.

As anyone who was there can attest, it rained inOttawa during the protest — really,really, really hard.

At the end of the first day, our cotton banner wassopping wet, even though it had never been unfurled.However, what was most disappointing was therealization that the majority of the letters andgraphics had been created with water-soluble paint.Our banner now consisted of little more than a fewillegible faint-pink letters straddled by a blackswastika and a black dollar symbol.

Not to be defeated, we snipped off the swastika andthe dollar symbol and, using a fat, permanent, blackmarker, scrawled “Resist Corporate Rule!” across theremaining three feet of thread-bare cotton for use onthe next day of the protest. It took about fifteen minutes tocomplete.

Chris C.
Halifax

Mall Mishap

On a frigid January weekend, as thousands were protesting the 2002 World Economic Forum in New York City, a team of New Brunswick university students marched into Fredericton’s largest shopping mall to engage our community in critical discussion about capitalism. Our plan: disrupt the corporate agora with bongos, iron pots and slide whistles.

After positioning ourselves on all four corners of the greasy, congested food court, we launched into a frenzy of percussion and wind, overpowering the hum of tired voices and muzak, while the less musical amongus darted through the crowd handing out pamphlets and slipping posters into magazine racks. Shoppers and the minimum-waged stood as still as mannequins as they struggled to make sense of the noisy spectacle. A vaudevillian security guard scanned the scene as if his head were on a swivel.

Our makeshift band squeezed out a few primal rhythms before the security guard persuaded us to exit the building, flanked by unexpected applause.When the police arrived to investigate our political mischief, they found us all huddled against our locked vehicle, sharing body heat as we waited for a friend to retrieve an extra set of keys.

Andrea M.
Fredericton