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www.hopedance.org
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| <back | home Interview with Reverend Billy by Amy Landau Reverend Billy (aka Bill Talen) has been preaching his unique anti-consumerist message since the Giuliani years in NYC, when Times Square abruptly morphed into a corporate-sponsored, Disneyfied mall for tourists. Today he conducts monthly “sermons” at St. Mark’s Church in the East Village with his 30-person Church of Stop Shopping choir — characterized by a frenzy of “strange-alujahs,” credit card exorcisms and preachings against the evils of transnational corporations. He spreads his “stop shopping” mantra all across America and Europe, staging “retail interventions” against Starbucks and Wal-Mart, despite countless arrests (he is no longer allowed to set foot in Starbucks anywhere). Reverend Billy prides himself on the fact that he defies interpretation. In fact, no one is quite sure just who or what he is. What do you hope to accomplish with these “retail interventions”? On the first level, it’s education. I’m on a cell phone over here and you have a cell phone over there and we have somebody between us who’s picking up a sweatshop product from the Disney shelf. Disney’s products are exclusively sweatshop products and they oversee an ecosystem of some 10,000 factories around the world. So if we just have a conversation with each other, “You know what, honey, I read in the paper that 15-year-olds girls in Sri Lanka make these little items here and I don’t know how good I feel about buying that thing.” And you’re talking across someone who’s listening to you say this. So in that sense, it’s just education. Lots of really decent people just have to know where the products come from. Right now, people don’t know about Starbucks.... I think there’s something else that’s probably as important, but less easily described. And that is re-claiming public space, going in and saying, you know what? You say this is a lobby of your corporation. But to put this lobby in your corporation, you destroyed the public space that had been on this street. You overwhelmed our culture, to place your architecture, your protected corporate space here, so I’m going to invade you back.... I was starting to understand that sort of counter-invasion — make the retail environment the stage and then have other people shift their feelings about it, and start becoming bolder than that puritanical, very constricted consumerist dance we’re in. You walk to the product, you browse, you reach for the product, you pick up the product, you walk the product to the counter, you swipe your credit card, you bag the product, you take it out the door. It’s very set and yet, that limited number of gestures... it’s a formal dance, a consumer dance, that is called freedom, that is called democracy. And it’s anything but. You know it’s satisfying to have a bunch of consumers turn and be baffled and start giggling and get angry and leave or stay. And sometimes they applaud! We’ve had performances in the Disney store where they just applauded. We completely shifted them out of the consumer-hypnosis. The Disney Store — they sold their stores now — the Disney Store was thick, thick, with aggressive mythology. I mean you have little characters all over — Smarmy, Goofy, Pluto, Aladdin — you have 800 of them all trying to vie for your attention. It’s thick with energy. If you break that energy, if you go against that directive, that consumerist script, it’s really powerful. Do you think you’ve been able to do that — to wake people up who are caught in the consumerist cycle? It’s impossible to measure. We licked and nibbled and chewed an entire Starbucks in Barcelona with a group of 60 local people. Two days ago, I was arrested at the Marriott Marquee in Atlanta, taken down into this bright orange jail cell in the hotel. We’ve exorcised cash registers at Wal-Mart’s and Starbucks across the country. We have our little invisible theater plays on the website that people download and teach each other and perform at festivals and they send us the video back for the website. People are doing it. You can’t measure whether it’s successful or not. I just don’t know. I know that right now we’re in a cultural shift where people are saying to each other, in effect, “Something’s wrong with my life — there’s a dullness here.” The repetition of logos, the repetition of industrial imagery is become so extreme, we’re living in a supermall. Something about the secondary and the tertiary distractions, something about the I-Pods and the computers just isn’t enough. If you’re in a traffic jam, if you’re in a parking lot, if you’re in a line in back of the cash register, if you’re in consumer life with your body, in the consumer dance, something about all those techno gadgets just doesn’t really work. We’re really going through a change right now, I think. Do you think your mode of political theater is somehow more effective than more traditional types of protest? I think there’s something effective about being Reverend Billy, coming to the front like we did last night, just preaching, you know, with a 40-person choir in their robes, singing in a Starbucks, that’s the way we started our show yesterday. That’s direct. And people hear the lines: “Pushback! Can’t suburbanize Manhattan! Pushback! Don’t destroy my downtown Brooklyn!” They hear the words and it’s direct. In one of our invisible theater pieces, two lovers are at a table and they’re starting to tell each other how much they love each other in a slightly too loud voice and the people in nearby tables in the Starbucks overhear them and have the voyeuristic experience of hearing them say, “I love you, brought to you by Nike Sportswear”.. So you’re sitting there, trying to concentrate on your I-book or whatever and you’re hearing these people who have sponsored love, and, if it’s done effectively, you think you are overhearing them... So which one’s more effective? I have no idea. That’s probably why I do both. Have you shifted your goal from wanting to obliterate Starbucks altogether toward correcting their labor practices? I’m trying to limit the number of Starbucks in Manhattan and in the boroughs. But also, I would like the Starbucks that must be here — I would like the people to be paid sufficiently. Starbucks has done a masterful job at persuading people that employees have medical coverage at Starbucks. Many believe it. Well, the thing is, it’s not that easy to get into the medical coverage program at Starbucks because all Starbucks employees are technically part-time, and they have to have a certain number of hours and a certain level of income to buy into the plan. Another false advertising is what they do with the people in the coffee fields down in Guatemala. They advertise that they pay for scientific reviews of conditions of women and children in the fields, but the investigators come back and say, you know what? Things are really rough there, kids are dying, we’ve got these families who have got to have more income.... And Starbucks won’t move on it. They’ll stall; they don’t want to share money. They are devoted to the shareholders, of course, the biggest of whom is Howard Schulz. So they’re just another global, capitalistic company with the advantage to persuade a lot of liberal and progressive people that they’re OK, that they’re doing what they can. There are millions of impoverished families in Guatemala and coffee is the second biggest import in the country. It’s a big deal. The gross income of Starbucks is more than 7 billion dollars this year. What they are doing right now is unacceptable. They’re the symbol for unacceptable economy. You have a billionaire at the top and you have people who aren’t getting their basic... minimum required nutrition. And that’s in the same economy. And because the government has become so ineffectual and so corrupt, nobody really minds the store. Nobody really says, “You know, you can’t do that.” You once said, “If you really do something that just makes you shake with the feeling of being inappropriate, you’ve probably found a strut, a structure of their culture. You’ve discovered their power. You violated something.” What did you mean when you said “You’ve discovered their power?” Consumer culture has a psychic architecture. It’s very strong. If you achieved a state of exalted embarrassment, you’ve probably done something right. Their entire environment is saturated with constructions, advertisements, sales jobs, Pavlovian drill masters. If you raise your arm the wrong way, shout in the wrong direction, wear the wrong costume, manage the boycott of a particular sweatshop product and you find yourself surrounded by cops and by people who are feeling you violated George Bush America (if you love your county, you’ll go shopping), you might be really embarrassed, you might feel like a naughty person. But if you’re a warrior of buylessness, and you’re doing the god/goddess mystery things work. Is it like you’ve freed yourself from the consumerist power that they hold over you? You’re on the right track if you’re in a state of heightened oddness, if you do your prairie pelican flight, and that’s good. Obviously, talking ideally about freedom is a hard thing to do. But backing away from the product is a kind of marking for freedom in today’s society. Backing away from the product, you’re backing through the door of life: you’re backing through a door into another room, and that new room is your native experience. You’re no longer commoditized. And that’s a very special thing to do. Once you break people out of that consumerist spell, what do they do with themselves? Oh it’s much more difficult. They start building their own life. And that’s the difficulty we want. We want to be in the diffi-Cult. “What Should I Do if Reverend Billy is in my Store?” is now available in paperback. Reverend Billy is currently working on two more books, one entitled, “Who Will Survive the Shopacalypse?” The premiere of his new movie with the working title, “What Would Jesus Buy?” is anticipated in 2006. See Reverend Billy’s website at: http://www.revbilly.com. <back | top^ |