Who Will Survive the Shopocalypse?
(Dispatches from the struggle against consumerism)
By Reverend Billy
It Didn’t Feel Like A Starbucks Anymore
I walked into the Starbucks on the corner of 67th and Columbus, around the corner from the Lincoln Center. It was after dark, but still early. I sat next to the window. The place was filling up, maybe a performance let out or something. I was in that slow mood you can get into in the city, just staring at a newspaper I picked up from a chair. There’s all the violence in the papers these days, and I was doing that thing of reading the heaviest news very lightly. I’d look up from my massacres, glance around.
A guy next to me had a nice laugh, small fair black man with lively eyes. He didn’t have a computer or a coffee. He was talking to a tall laughing white woman with a strong face, with the bearing of a statue in the park. What were they up to? They didn’t look like students. The two weren’t on a date. The windows with the darkness on the other side mirrored back everyone sitting every which way. The cappuccino machine hissed, the baristas efficiently placing the lattes on the high counter.
I returned to my paper, to some eastern European country with separatists and innocents in shock. The usual official statements gathering around the bloodied bodies. The statements never change at all - same words. Regret and resoluteness. Then I looked up again. The tableau of customers was like a picture of life. People sitting at tables. A couple coffees here and there, but mostly just people sitting talking quietly and then returning to a pre-occupation. Something on everyone’s mind.
Then I heard a very out of place thing - so much so that at first I assumed it was an iPod with volume problems, but no, it was a woman, who was, no doubt about it - she was singing - from across the room. Now there was a lot of chatter and droney sounds in here - so her voice almost felt like a memory of a sound. But I found her, standing there like a diva with her mouth WIDE open. She was over to my left, she had black hair and a dress with a fish on it, she was singing with happy abandon. I think I actually looked back at my massacre at that point, the way you do, because I didn’t want to admit to myself that this was happening. The two at the table near me looked at each other and turned back toward the singer - and now there was second woman singing.
Now, this songbird was closer to me and I could hear some of the words. “Start stopping, get ready, start stopping.” I want to stop a lot of things, but what are they talking about? The coffeeshop is a big one, and loud sound has that echoey quality, and most of the people were not noticing, or were refusing to register, that these surreal words were coming through us. There was a slow motion quality. Most of the customers did not look up from books, iBooks, magazines, date’s faces or whatever. The body positions stayed put. This is that first wave of embarrassment, or is it hipness - you don’t want to respond. Am I about to have an experience?
By now a good six or eight people are standing, and I can tell they are a group because they are singing the same words. “Stop Shopping! Stop Shopping!” It sounds like an anthem. It has a triumphant quality, and our cafe socialites are coiling into their own fetal positions because this is all just too happy for a New Yorker to accept easily. This enthusiasm! What’s the problem? Are these Christians or what? -- But now there were, I counted, fifteen singers and they were singing harmonies, with insistent chord changes. The Starbucks’ manager can’t help himself - he’s out in the tables trying to talk to first one singer, then another and the tall girl from the next table over, with her friend who was swooping his back and arms to the rhythm - oh they’re in this cult too. The tall woman began to solo in an obviously trained voice, “We’re gonna put those Nikes down and we’ll Stop Shopping, Stop Shopping!” It was an over-the-top, Broadway type delivery. The choir was now up to a couple dozen, the whole place milling around, four part harmonies, and an electric piano was now out on a table with a musician at the keys, he’s beaming like Stevie Wonder.
A maroon-haired woman with bangs swung a saxophone into the air and now a man a tambourine, and the bravura soprano just a few feet from me, after appeals to stop buying SUV’s, smart bombs, GAP shirts, finally lit into “We’re going to put that Starbucks down!” and now, clearly, the manager’s center was not holding. Chaos was loosed upon his world. He ran to the phone shouting and gesticulating back at not only the singers but the mayhem of laughter and regular customers standing up to wiggle their hips and shout. You couldn’t hear the manager. He mimed calling the cops, I guess, then ran through the room to the front door and began to lock it - only to be stopped by one of the singers, who looked like Jesus Christ. This baritone was putting the voodoo on the manager, morally overwhelming him. The poor manager, when he realized that of course he can’t lock people in, started shouting even more vehemently. All I could hear was “I WILL…” “I WILL…”
The singers were now reaching high harmonies, passionately dancing to the song. “We will never shop again, forever and Amen! Allelujah! Allelujah!” The non-singing customers had made their decisions, consciously or not. Some were trying to join the choir, trying to catch the words. Some were angry, refuse-niks back at the seemingly de-legimitized cappuccino machine. I realized that the shiny sort-of-European coffee apparatus was an altar, and now a new church was grabbing the congregation. And that’s when something very interesting took place. Suddenly it didn’t feel like a Starbucks anymore. I remember the moment that happened. We were now a group of people creating a quality in the room, an edgy circus. The colors were vividly shifting and the air itself seemed like a liquid waiting for its wave. I sensed that there was a sense of recognition, as if we had done this before. There was even a kind of calm authority. No-one would leave, even those angry ones. Customers were dancing alone. The organ was pounding. We all stayed because this was like unexpected sex. But it was time for me to leave.
I ducked out the front door and into the lobby of a dot-com motel. I shed my raincoat. Got the high sign from the Action Manager. I snapped on my priest’s collar and vestment and donned a white tux coat. I tested my bullhorn, made sure the batteries had power. Looking at the big Starbucks from the outside, it resembled some post-modern version of the Cotton Club, the gyrating and sailing sounds. Time to open this door and preach.
The Commons
Our stage is “contested space,” a commons that has been privatized. It is a place where the First Amendment's rights of speech and assembly were exercised but in the era of the transnational corporation are seized by pre-emptive architecture or by corrupted law enforcement. You made our Main Street into a mall? -- OK so we go into your mall shouting.
We come from the traditional performance arts of theater, dance, spoken word - but we find that the stages where things happen that might change our lives - such experience rarely takes place before the usual footlights. Mostly the scripts of the traditional arts are depoliticized by Consumerism. So -- we go to sidewalks and streets, parks and subways, and we counter-invade into the endless spatial offensive of the transnational cookie-cutter stores, their cash register altars, their lobbies and advertising frames. Now that’s a charged stage.
The 24/7 activity of American Consumerism is a highly specific set of gestures, phrases, and reward-and-punishment patterns. The consumers proceed through a formal choreography. The much-heralded American prosperity sends most folks from bed to highway to desk to hallway to elevator back to the car to the evening sitcom-sports-reality of TV. The maze of repetitions is re-created from medicated sleep to medicated sleep. Is this hypnosis or happiness? We’re too hyped to be make the distinction.
The charged stage that we seek interrupts all this like homages to the lives of Rosa Parks or Abbie Hoffman or Subcommandante Marcos - all we can call these scenes are actions. The stages in the case of these three teachers? There is Rosa’s famous bus; with Abbie - the streets and parks and courts of the sixties and; in the case of the ski-masked and piped Chiapas leader -- the air force attack on the Mexican government’s army, but with paper airplanes and laughter. The three re-entered the grand bluff of entrenched power in public space. The three re-took their “Commons.”
Time was that there was a field in the center of town, where people dismounted and loafed, hitched wagons, fools and music yawped, vision uncles winced, cads seduced, traders saved, and everyone but the tax collector cursed the King. Most importantly, there was a kind of talk and a kind of hearing that took place outside of power. Nowadays, we catch our culture-making on the run, because a hologram of the King sits in the center of the park covered with surveillance cameras. The King can’t be alone! He’s copped The Commons.
But The Commons keeps coming back - we have seen, for example, the community come to life in times of extreme joy or tragedy. Ever meet everyone in your neighborhood at the three alarm fire? Those of us at 9/11 remember how downtown Manhattan that September was a promenade, no cars. It was breathtakingly radical that neighbors could slump into their bodies and approach each other. The variety of emotion in the foreground, the weeping and laughing, the ad-hoc help that was offered. It was a heady experiment for those of us in the business of neighborhood-defense. Suddenly we were taking care of each other, no money down. It would have made Rosa and Abbie and Marcos smile.
The Commons can re-assert itself very quickly. The air can be cleared of cars, advertising and other corporate distractions in the exhale of a “What is this?” and some laughter. It can happen in a moment. Suddenly, right there, in the anything-can-happen moment we might be able to ask basic questions about our hypnotizers the corporations. And we should be able to do this on purpose. We should be able to create an instant, portable commons. We just have to be crazy enough to ask these questions on our own, and not wait for geniuses or tsunamis or some self-help God.
If all the Commons has been tortured into boxes, into pixels, into share-price... if the parks are over-policed and the community gardens bulldozed and anything not tied down purchased by the transnationals -- then we are not commons-less, because we carry The Commons inside us. That’s where the courage to commit actions comes from. Memories of Rosa and Abbie and Marcos, yes - how they reclaimed public space helps us. I think they would tell us, though, that we should look away from their biographies and we might find our own commons. We carry it around as we go about our daily lives,
In the Church of Stop Shopping we sometimes cross into contested space as fierce clowns, singing and waving signs. Often we go into transnational chain stores incognito, disguised as consumers, ready to buy. Most of our actions proceed from that simple premise. They want our money. They want us to approach their product. They will surveil us as we walk in; they’ll limit our gestures and talk; they’ll ask us to leave the moment we break out of the Consumer’s Choreography - but they will let us in for a moment as they eye our wallets. When they hear our unsupervised conversation (our guerilla commons is showing) they will run toward us with their uniforms, but we will have disappeared, as they say, into the civilian population. The Commons will hang in the air, witnesses carry it in their memory.
There never was a revolution where those in power didn’t squawk “Trespassing!” Real social change was never accomplished without the force of an unexpected performance. Do I have a witness?
Beatitudes of Buylessness
Blessed are the Consumers, for you shall be free from Living By Products.
Blessed are the Lonely Believers, for you shall transcend all media and dance in the streets.
Blessed are those stumbling out of branded Main Streets, for you shall find lovers not downloaded and oceans not rising.
Blessed is the ordinary citizen who holds onto a patch of public commons, for you are the New World.
Blessed is the artist who isn’t corporate sponsored, for you shall give birth to warm fronts of emotion and breakthroughs of Peace.
Blessed are those who confuse “Consumerism” with “Freedom,” for you shall be delighted to discover the difference.
Blessed are the advertisers and commercial celebrities, for you have been waiting for the remarkable restfulness of honesty.
Blessed are the neighborhoods flown from and shuttered, for you children shall illuminate the dark economy.
Blessed are the workers in the supermalls, for you shall no longer be surrounded and domed, the town your employers’ killed will come back to life full of memories of you, jobs for you and love by you.
Blessed is the breadwinner with out-sourced dreams who sits wondering in stopped traffic, for you shall find inside your own mind more stories than Hollywood, Bollywood and Babel.
Blessed are the teenage girls in sweatshops, for the real value of what you make will fly you in magic evening gowns to the City of Light.
Blessed are those of us who are pinned under the gaze of supermodels, for we shall escape to accept the radical freedom and infinite responsibility of making love without buying it.
Blessed are those who disturb the customers, for you might be loving your neighbor.
By Reverend Billy
It Didn’t Feel Like A Starbucks Anymore
I walked into the Starbucks on the corner of 67th and Columbus, around the corner from the Lincoln Center. It was after dark, but still early. I sat next to the window. The place was filling up, maybe a performance let out or something. I was in that slow mood you can get into in the city, just staring at a newspaper I picked up from a chair. There’s all the violence in the papers these days, and I was doing that thing of reading the heaviest news very lightly. I’d look up from my massacres, glance around.
A guy next to me had a nice laugh, small fair black man with lively eyes. He didn’t have a computer or a coffee. He was talking to a tall laughing white woman with a strong face, with the bearing of a statue in the park. What were they up to? They didn’t look like students. The two weren’t on a date. The windows with the darkness on the other side mirrored back everyone sitting every which way. The cappuccino machine hissed, the baristas efficiently placing the lattes on the high counter.
I returned to my paper, to some eastern European country with separatists and innocents in shock. The usual official statements gathering around the bloodied bodies. The statements never change at all - same words. Regret and resoluteness. Then I looked up again. The tableau of customers was like a picture of life. People sitting at tables. A couple coffees here and there, but mostly just people sitting talking quietly and then returning to a pre-occupation. Something on everyone’s mind.
Then I heard a very out of place thing - so much so that at first I assumed it was an iPod with volume problems, but no, it was a woman, who was, no doubt about it - she was singing - from across the room. Now there was a lot of chatter and droney sounds in here - so her voice almost felt like a memory of a sound. But I found her, standing there like a diva with her mouth WIDE open. She was over to my left, she had black hair and a dress with a fish on it, she was singing with happy abandon. I think I actually looked back at my massacre at that point, the way you do, because I didn’t want to admit to myself that this was happening. The two at the table near me looked at each other and turned back toward the singer - and now there was second woman singing.
Now, this songbird was closer to me and I could hear some of the words. “Start stopping, get ready, start stopping.” I want to stop a lot of things, but what are they talking about? The coffeeshop is a big one, and loud sound has that echoey quality, and most of the people were not noticing, or were refusing to register, that these surreal words were coming through us. There was a slow motion quality. Most of the customers did not look up from books, iBooks, magazines, date’s faces or whatever. The body positions stayed put. This is that first wave of embarrassment, or is it hipness - you don’t want to respond. Am I about to have an experience?
By now a good six or eight people are standing, and I can tell they are a group because they are singing the same words. “Stop Shopping! Stop Shopping!” It sounds like an anthem. It has a triumphant quality, and our cafe socialites are coiling into their own fetal positions because this is all just too happy for a New Yorker to accept easily. This enthusiasm! What’s the problem? Are these Christians or what? -- But now there were, I counted, fifteen singers and they were singing harmonies, with insistent chord changes. The Starbucks’ manager can’t help himself - he’s out in the tables trying to talk to first one singer, then another and the tall girl from the next table over, with her friend who was swooping his back and arms to the rhythm - oh they’re in this cult too. The tall woman began to solo in an obviously trained voice, “We’re gonna put those Nikes down and we’ll Stop Shopping, Stop Shopping!” It was an over-the-top, Broadway type delivery. The choir was now up to a couple dozen, the whole place milling around, four part harmonies, and an electric piano was now out on a table with a musician at the keys, he’s beaming like Stevie Wonder.
A maroon-haired woman with bangs swung a saxophone into the air and now a man a tambourine, and the bravura soprano just a few feet from me, after appeals to stop buying SUV’s, smart bombs, GAP shirts, finally lit into “We’re going to put that Starbucks down!” and now, clearly, the manager’s center was not holding. Chaos was loosed upon his world. He ran to the phone shouting and gesticulating back at not only the singers but the mayhem of laughter and regular customers standing up to wiggle their hips and shout. You couldn’t hear the manager. He mimed calling the cops, I guess, then ran through the room to the front door and began to lock it - only to be stopped by one of the singers, who looked like Jesus Christ. This baritone was putting the voodoo on the manager, morally overwhelming him. The poor manager, when he realized that of course he can’t lock people in, started shouting even more vehemently. All I could hear was “I WILL…” “I WILL…”
The singers were now reaching high harmonies, passionately dancing to the song. “We will never shop again, forever and Amen! Allelujah! Allelujah!” The non-singing customers had made their decisions, consciously or not. Some were trying to join the choir, trying to catch the words. Some were angry, refuse-niks back at the seemingly de-legimitized cappuccino machine. I realized that the shiny sort-of-European coffee apparatus was an altar, and now a new church was grabbing the congregation. And that’s when something very interesting took place. Suddenly it didn’t feel like a Starbucks anymore. I remember the moment that happened. We were now a group of people creating a quality in the room, an edgy circus. The colors were vividly shifting and the air itself seemed like a liquid waiting for its wave. I sensed that there was a sense of recognition, as if we had done this before. There was even a kind of calm authority. No-one would leave, even those angry ones. Customers were dancing alone. The organ was pounding. We all stayed because this was like unexpected sex. But it was time for me to leave.
I ducked out the front door and into the lobby of a dot-com motel. I shed my raincoat. Got the high sign from the Action Manager. I snapped on my priest’s collar and vestment and donned a white tux coat. I tested my bullhorn, made sure the batteries had power. Looking at the big Starbucks from the outside, it resembled some post-modern version of the Cotton Club, the gyrating and sailing sounds. Time to open this door and preach.
The Commons
Our stage is “contested space,” a commons that has been privatized. It is a place where the First Amendment's rights of speech and assembly were exercised but in the era of the transnational corporation are seized by pre-emptive architecture or by corrupted law enforcement. You made our Main Street into a mall? -- OK so we go into your mall shouting.
We come from the traditional performance arts of theater, dance, spoken word - but we find that the stages where things happen that might change our lives - such experience rarely takes place before the usual footlights. Mostly the scripts of the traditional arts are depoliticized by Consumerism. So -- we go to sidewalks and streets, parks and subways, and we counter-invade into the endless spatial offensive of the transnational cookie-cutter stores, their cash register altars, their lobbies and advertising frames. Now that’s a charged stage.
The 24/7 activity of American Consumerism is a highly specific set of gestures, phrases, and reward-and-punishment patterns. The consumers proceed through a formal choreography. The much-heralded American prosperity sends most folks from bed to highway to desk to hallway to elevator back to the car to the evening sitcom-sports-reality of TV. The maze of repetitions is re-created from medicated sleep to medicated sleep. Is this hypnosis or happiness? We’re too hyped to be make the distinction.
The charged stage that we seek interrupts all this like homages to the lives of Rosa Parks or Abbie Hoffman or Subcommandante Marcos - all we can call these scenes are actions. The stages in the case of these three teachers? There is Rosa’s famous bus; with Abbie - the streets and parks and courts of the sixties and; in the case of the ski-masked and piped Chiapas leader -- the air force attack on the Mexican government’s army, but with paper airplanes and laughter. The three re-entered the grand bluff of entrenched power in public space. The three re-took their “Commons.”
Time was that there was a field in the center of town, where people dismounted and loafed, hitched wagons, fools and music yawped, vision uncles winced, cads seduced, traders saved, and everyone but the tax collector cursed the King. Most importantly, there was a kind of talk and a kind of hearing that took place outside of power. Nowadays, we catch our culture-making on the run, because a hologram of the King sits in the center of the park covered with surveillance cameras. The King can’t be alone! He’s copped The Commons.
But The Commons keeps coming back - we have seen, for example, the community come to life in times of extreme joy or tragedy. Ever meet everyone in your neighborhood at the three alarm fire? Those of us at 9/11 remember how downtown Manhattan that September was a promenade, no cars. It was breathtakingly radical that neighbors could slump into their bodies and approach each other. The variety of emotion in the foreground, the weeping and laughing, the ad-hoc help that was offered. It was a heady experiment for those of us in the business of neighborhood-defense. Suddenly we were taking care of each other, no money down. It would have made Rosa and Abbie and Marcos smile.
The Commons can re-assert itself very quickly. The air can be cleared of cars, advertising and other corporate distractions in the exhale of a “What is this?” and some laughter. It can happen in a moment. Suddenly, right there, in the anything-can-happen moment we might be able to ask basic questions about our hypnotizers the corporations. And we should be able to do this on purpose. We should be able to create an instant, portable commons. We just have to be crazy enough to ask these questions on our own, and not wait for geniuses or tsunamis or some self-help God.
If all the Commons has been tortured into boxes, into pixels, into share-price... if the parks are over-policed and the community gardens bulldozed and anything not tied down purchased by the transnationals -- then we are not commons-less, because we carry The Commons inside us. That’s where the courage to commit actions comes from. Memories of Rosa and Abbie and Marcos, yes - how they reclaimed public space helps us. I think they would tell us, though, that we should look away from their biographies and we might find our own commons. We carry it around as we go about our daily lives,
In the Church of Stop Shopping we sometimes cross into contested space as fierce clowns, singing and waving signs. Often we go into transnational chain stores incognito, disguised as consumers, ready to buy. Most of our actions proceed from that simple premise. They want our money. They want us to approach their product. They will surveil us as we walk in; they’ll limit our gestures and talk; they’ll ask us to leave the moment we break out of the Consumer’s Choreography - but they will let us in for a moment as they eye our wallets. When they hear our unsupervised conversation (our guerilla commons is showing) they will run toward us with their uniforms, but we will have disappeared, as they say, into the civilian population. The Commons will hang in the air, witnesses carry it in their memory.
There never was a revolution where those in power didn’t squawk “Trespassing!” Real social change was never accomplished without the force of an unexpected performance. Do I have a witness?
Beatitudes of Buylessness
Blessed are the Consumers, for you shall be free from Living By Products.
Blessed are the Lonely Believers, for you shall transcend all media and dance in the streets.
Blessed are those stumbling out of branded Main Streets, for you shall find lovers not downloaded and oceans not rising.
Blessed is the ordinary citizen who holds onto a patch of public commons, for you are the New World.
Blessed is the artist who isn’t corporate sponsored, for you shall give birth to warm fronts of emotion and breakthroughs of Peace.
Blessed are those who confuse “Consumerism” with “Freedom,” for you shall be delighted to discover the difference.
Blessed are the advertisers and commercial celebrities, for you have been waiting for the remarkable restfulness of honesty.
Blessed are the neighborhoods flown from and shuttered, for you children shall illuminate the dark economy.
Blessed are the workers in the supermalls, for you shall no longer be surrounded and domed, the town your employers’ killed will come back to life full of memories of you, jobs for you and love by you.
Blessed is the breadwinner with out-sourced dreams who sits wondering in stopped traffic, for you shall find inside your own mind more stories than Hollywood, Bollywood and Babel.
Blessed are the teenage girls in sweatshops, for the real value of what you make will fly you in magic evening gowns to the City of Light.
Blessed are those of us who are pinned under the gaze of supermodels, for we shall escape to accept the radical freedom and infinite responsibility of making love without buying it.
Blessed are those who disturb the customers, for you might be loving your neighbor.
