Shopocalypse Now!: Q+A with Reverend Billy
Words: Jesse Ashlock
Photo: Fred Askew
From his studio in Hell's Kitchen, Bill Talen had a front row seat for the tidal wave of gentrification that swept through Times Square in the '90s, papering over what legendary urbanist Jane Jacobs called the "sidewalk ballet" of New York's most notoriously colorful neighborhood. What he saw infuriated him. "My devil was the Disney Store," he says, "and Mickey Mouse was the Antichrist. So I started inventing a theology as a way to defend the neighborhood." Talen drew on a lifetime in theater to become the charismatic, pompadoured Reverend Billy, and with his wife Savitri Darkee founded the Church of Stop Shopping, which she directs while he mans the pulpit. Their gospel is "post-religious," their church conceived in opposition to the "transnational church of spacey consumption" which they believe tramples the First Amendment and destroys communities. You can see the church in action during one of their raucous interventions at retail establishments like Starbucks and Disney. You can read their creed in Talen's What Should I Do if Reverend Billy Is in My Store? or his upcoming Who Will Survive the Shopocalypse? And now you can hear the Stop Shopping Gospel Choir, led by director James Solomon Ben and featuring singing star Derek McGinty, on a glorious new CD on Tomato Records. But to really feel the spirit of the Church of Stop Shopping, head down to St. Mark's Church in the East Village the last Wednesday of the month for an ecstatic progressive revival meeting that will ask you to reconsider the way you live your life.
RES: How do you pursue your writing projects?
Reverend Billy: Well, this [new] book is called Who Will Survive the Shopocalypse? It's for Soft Skull Press. Richard Nash is the publisher, and also our editor, and I say "our" because there are contributions from Savitri D and some members of the Stop Shopping Gospel Choir, written descriptions of actions, and I would say that the actions themselves are the spine of the book.
I know that this is created by time and experience more than anything else. The memoir aspect becomes an action, a political action itself. That's just simply something that Savitri and I have discovered is necessary for ourselves. Everything that we do, we have to be sure that it is politically active. [We're fascinated by] the moment where you do or you don't enter into unsanctioned activity. That moment in which social enforcement by transnationals is keeping us from surviving. We can't control our bodies, we can't control our neighborhoods, and now we're losing life systems themselves. The natural life systems themselves are compromised. There's something that's keeping us in place. So when we say, "It is time for the revolution of exalted embarrassment," we're trying to move people into that moment. We want them to regard that moment as something they can walk into and think about and challenge. Challenging our inactivity right now, thorugh comedy, through brief jail sentences, through performance, through song, basically we've come down to locate a kind of social conditioning... So many Americans cannot act. We have entered into a consensual hypnosis right now, that cannot continue.
RES: I know you've referred this doctrine of exalted embarrassment in your services. What exactly does that mean for you?
RB: Only to say that, just standing up in a Starbucks and saying to the other people in the Starbucks, "This is not fair trade coffee, and this business is making money on how cheaply they acquire their supply of coffee from impoverished people. This is not an economy that we should be a part of." To stand up and say that is to enter the state of exalted embarrassment.
Now the fact is that [it's] a whole complex of things... I just recited to you the informational facet of it. You've [also] seen the actions and the Web site. You have the gypsy dancer, you've got the people making strange hieroglyphic shapes in the air with empty Starbucks cups, you've got people mooning into each others eyes that they love each other, brought to you by Coca-Cola. Sponsored love. We have all sorts of dramatic intrusions into the decorous bourgeois hush of the Starbucks coffee shop. There are many ways to do it, but almost always there's that moment of no return, when you're entering the sanctified inappropriate activity.
RES: Your new Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir CD obviously follows closely the musical format of the service. How will the CD work to disseminate the word of Stop Shopping?
RB: It's our first record with a real record company [Tomato] and a major distributor [Navar]. We're hoping that people play the album and watch the movie [on the accompanying DVD] and then that they make up their own characters. The counterattack on the corporate narrative, on the corporate imagery that smothers us right now, we believe that the counterattack is basically with our bodies. We believe that's how social change has been achieved almost always, by committing with our bodies. I just think that the advertising and packaging, the highways, the pavement, the SUVs, the architecture of transnational corporate life is keeping us in a hypnotized consumer choreography. We have less and less that we can do with our bodies, that comes from our own native decision-making, our own chaotic freedom. But that chaotic freedom is exactly what will be the source of the counterattack. We will go back at the advertising in our bodies. We will go back at the Starbucks' cappuccino machine with our bodies. With the Lick-a-lujah action in Barcelona, we licked 60 Catalanians, and Savitri D and myself licked and chewed and nibbled an entire Starbucks, on the belief that it was like a foreign organ that had come into the body of Barcelona and that we wanted to eat it to see if our bodies would accept or reject it. We wanted our immunological systems to have a chance to make a decision about this foreign body that had come into the ancient city of Barcelona from outer space. The green Starbucks mermaid just hovers over the old city of Barcelona, really, like a spaceship. It is so from somewhere else. Its presence is so fascistic, where fascism was invented and where fascism was resisted in the Spanish Civil War. So we were inspired to confront Starbucks there with our bodies, and the image of licking that Starbucks from stem to stern, that image is going to help our Barcelona people resist transnational chain stores, I believe. It's a folk story that has some strength. We have to find the right activity in each community. We're going to go back to Barcelona and then our activities will change, but that was last fall and that's one of the chapters in the Shopacocalypse book.
RES: I know there have been actions on a number of different of transnationals, but the first two really for you were Disney and Starbucks. What made them such potent totems of this creeping, pervasive corporate homogeny?
RB: Disney is the great empire of childhood wonder. Many of the Disney characters fly; from Tarzan to Alladin to Dumbo to Peter Pan you've got lots of flight, and the special effects which capture a child's sense of wonder. That wonder has been betrayed during the Eisner era. He has personally pulled more than a billion dollars into his private family from Disney. At the same time that Disney's a famous, famous sweatshop company. In Bangladesh last year they had a union vote in a [Disney] factory and they came back to work the next morning and the entire factory was gone. This is a union busting company par excellence. Some people estimate that the number of sweatshop factories whose main client is Disney numbers as many as 20,000 around the world. So in that sense they're very similar to Starbucks. Starbucks is a little more talented at trying to persuade people that it is earth-friendly. They have an earth day, even! They're one of the biggest creators of trash in New York City and they have an earth day! [chuckling] So they have a different approach, their advertising approach is different.
RES: I think they have a fair trade option, too...
RB: Well, it's a difficult option. We test it all the time, and oftentimes you can't get fair trade. You ask for it and they can't find it. Starbucks has a big advertising budget, and they get a lot of smiling peasants on bags of beans, and they have beautiful little earth-toney machines, but ask what the reality is, ask about how people really are living who bring those beans to market, ask about the child mortality rates in the Guatemalan highlands. How Starbucks is getting away with what it's getting away with, it's one of those things where you just hold your breath and you can't believe it. It's like George Bush -- how can this be?
I think that also they are worthy Darth Vaders. If you're going to tell a story and people are going to know, you have to pick your devil. There's my answer to your question -- pick your devil! Starbucks is a kind of theater. They have a kind of theatrical presence in neighborhoods in which they argue that we will take the rebellious avant-garde tradition of the cafe, and we will mainstream it. You can be a bobo, you can be a bourgeois bohemian. You can come in here, and we will platform you to go into the rest of your day with our liquid desserts and our earth-toney graphics and so forth. We'll give you the buzz, and you can pretend that you're stepping from this door -- it's what they call platforming -- we'll give you a platform for a kind of ersatz rebellion in which you think, somehow, you've taken on the cloak of revolution. You can have that. You can have that buzz and you can walk from this place and go back into our thoroughly regimented society, feeling physically for a moment, for just awhile, you'll at least wear revolution like a style.
RES: How did the choir take shape as a character, and how did the Reverend take shape as a character?
RB: First of all, let's just take the songs. You know, when Coltrane asked Miles Davis, "How do I start?" Miles said, "Well, you can start in the middle." The songs are basically a circle, and you can start at any point on that circle. The "First Amendment Gospel Song" was started in the bus during the Democratic National Convention when we were going up to Massachusetts to perform at Mass MoCA. And we recited the First Amendment in Ground Zero in the PATH Station down there. We did 35 Tuesdays I think, in a row. We had hundreds of people doing it with us during the Republican National Convention and it became a ritual and was on the national news and so forth, and we just fell more and more deeply in love with that single sentence with the five freedoms. Now it's a song. We sang it last weekend at the Old South meeting house in Boston where all the American radicals have spoken and where the Boston tea party originated from. That was just us kind of wigging out in the revival bus together with this sentence that we had memorized. And it's got its [singing], "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof or abridging the freedom of speech, or abridging the freedom of press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble." You know, it's just got its own rhythm. It comes from speaking. And gospel has a relationship to speaking, gospel is a blues form.
The "Thank You" song, which is on the record, is a samba. We just came up with an idea -- let's thank the progressive martyrs. I had a concern that saints were being [forgotten]. Famous right wing people were being remembered, and the left was not remembering its own heroes. We're accused of not having a faith, and I wanted people to look at the tradition of the justice movement in our culture, and remember the people that contributed. So that came out of that. Savitri said, "This can be so simple. I just want to thank you." The emotion of gratitude is best served with simplicity.
The songs come from every direction, and they come from different people.
RES: When you were talking about "Thank You," you mentioned people accusing progressives of not having a faith. It seems to me that there's nothing inherently right wing about the religious persona you've taken on, but that we tend to associate that kind of persona with a conservative view of the world...
RB:Well yes, I'm appropriating a right wing icon of homophobia, imperial wars and so forth --
RES: I know it's not the first time. Lenny Bruce certainly did that...
Reverend Billy: No, no... Lenny had a character and Saturday Night Live always had a character, from Church Lady back to Flip Wilson and the Church of What's Happening Now. So it's an old idea, but I did [Reverend Billy] in response to the Disnification of Times Square. I did it in response to specific activiites. Rudy Giuliani's police were arresting poor people, and people of color, and people who were powerless, just people who had little shops or vendors, and just every day in the press, Giuliani would demonize Times Square, he'd say they're all whores and drug addicts. What he was really doing was rearranging the power, so that the people who had more power got all of it. So the little shops, places that had been there in some cases 30, 40 years were just eminent-domained out of there, and part of it was law enforcement just making extra-legal arrests. Someone had to be there shouting. Someone had to stand there and shout.
RES: And that is a kind of evangelism.
RB: Well, my Devil was the Disney Store, and Mickey Mouse is the Antichrist. So I started inventing a theology as a way to defend the neighborhood.
RES: That was before you met Savitri. How does she ground your public persona now? How does she organize you?
Reverend Billy: [Laughing] I was raised in iconoclastic show biz by Spalding Gray, and Spalding throughout his life had Renee Shafransky, and then Kathie Russo. He had two really strong brilliant women right there with him... Savitri actually makes the shows. She forms the shows, she rehearses us. I would hope that this is not just a case of a strong woman behind a crazy visionary man, the classic sexist situation. I would hope that this is more in the area of Judith Molina and Julian Beck, a real partnership, or Jean-Claude and Christo, or Jo Bonney and Eric Bogosian. You've got people who really are partners. And I know that the more I have given up control to the choir and the more I have given up control to Savitri D, the better Reverend Billy has gotten [chuckling]. The more powerful Reverend Billy has gotten in the culture, the more I give up control. It started out as a solo venture. I know about monologists, I know about being all alone in the world, because I came up with Spalding's help, and I know David Cale and Reno and Carl Hancock Rux. I just know a lot of these folks, I produced them in California before I moved to New York. They're writer-actors, they write for themselves, they write out of their experience, they usually are autobiographical in some sense. [It] has been a fascinating process of going from being a monologist to a part of a community, where people around me are actively arranged in writing songs. I have my little sermon, but even that is subject to interruption. Someone can shout "changelujah" and stop me if they want to, or egg me on. I'm a part of a community performatively as well.
RES: I think that healthy churches are about healing, a kind of ritualized healing. And what struck me was that there was a true, honest, unironic approach to spirituality in your church, that really felt like it was about healing as well as about change. How do you create a space like that, one that feels inclusive and feels like anyone's welcome?
RB: You're asking a question which might be better for you to answer. You're asking a question which wants as its answer the entire complex design of the event. I would say that we believe in the God that people who don't believe in God believe in, and you know, some of us believe in the God that people who do believe in God believe in. But just don't kill me with your God, if you don't mind. I don't know that, right now, the continuous institutionalized Gods have a lot of credibility, because their followers are always killing each other. You know the old phrase, shoot the Buddha. I believe you've got to stop God when God becomes a shopping experience. So we pray to the God that is not a product, and the Goddess that swims in the part of the sky not yet slapped with plastic logos. We use the shouting of the "Hallelujah" as a sort of shared joke about right-wing televangelism, but very quickly we had a joyous gospel choir and we were all carried along on a wave of that joy, the joy that comes up physically through your body when you stop shopping. That is a flat-out, spiritualized happening. It's a spiritual battle. The key fundamentalist church in this country is not the church of Jimmy Swaggart, the key fundamentalist church is the church of spacey consumption, the fundamentalist church of transnational chain stores, transnational product life, the media and the rest of it. That's what really leaves us with a very set kind of set of behaviors and set of gestures and set of language -- meaning, language meaning -- and it's all done in the name of freedom and democracy, but that's just an advertising campaign.
So the Church of Stop Shopping is post-religious, but the real key question for us is not our relationship to other churches. We're post-religious. We want to make sure that we're post-religious. We're not a church, we're not a mosque and we're not a synagogue. We're not an ashram. We're post-religious. We're in motion. We're walking. We're on our way to a Starbucks. When we get there, we're going to do something that upsets people there. So we don't want to stay put, and we don't want traditions to overtake us.
RES: You talk about the way religion can be a shopping experience. Fun in our society has also been defined as a consumer experience. There's a conflation of fun and consumption. How do you persuade people that it can be more fun not to consume?
RB: I think just by example. Embody the fun. It all comes down to the decision, what sort of dance am I involved in here? Where are my arms, where are my hands? How far is my voice reaching, what am I saying? It's all physical. It's the physical-spiritual. It's sacralziing the ordinary. Once you take responsibility for that and you're willing to enter a state of heightened oddness in public space -- or even public space that they claim is private [laughing] -- you're by your example having fun outside their consumer strictures.
RES: Without making it dogmatic? I guess if you're having fun, that makes it less dogmatic, right?
RB: Yeah, I just don't think that ideology is the way to go. I know that some people on the left are looking for a super ideology to oppose late-stage global capitalism. But that's not really our job. Our job is more along the lines of your question about fun. We don't really have a meta-theory to follow anyway. There is no Marxism right now. There's no generalized critique of the world, and I'm not sure we want one after Mao and Stalin. I'm not sure that anybody really wants to have a cure-all theory. If people were able to defend their neighborhoods and towns against the invasion of transnational big boxes and chain stores, that would be huge. What they would replace these kind of super governments that come down out of the sky on them, what they would replace that with is human community. And human community needs the defense of new words. That's one of our struggles. That sense of words that the New York Times Metro section uses to describe neighborhoods, like "unique" and "colorful" and "character," those words are like the kinds of words that upper crust people say about their favorite servants. That kind of language needs to be broken through.
RES: It's a kind of colonialism.
RB: It is. It's an imperial kind of rhetoric, and we have to break through that. A healthy neighborhood is now a radical concept, and a healthy neighborhood has to have its own set of words that are used. The whole thing about the Williamsburg/Greenpoint development battle [over a proposed rezoning project in North Brooklyn that would create condo towers up to 40 stories along a 175-block stretch of the East River] is that the development people really have the high ground rhetorically. They say, "So, we're really interested in environmental reclamation in Williamsburg, which is now polluted," they enter the room and say that they are the environmentalists. And you just say, "Wait a minute, we have been having picnics on the banks of the East River" -- you should see how the Hispanic families gather over there -- and suddenly you're in this position of, "Well then, what do you call what we're doing?" We don't have a name for it. You're calling your 40-story high condo with a fake little park down below, you're calling that environmental reclamation. You made up this professional sounding phrase, or it was written for you by someone who works for you. And that's entered into the record right away, and suddenly you've got a bunch of people standing there being nostalgic about a life that they really like, but they don't have names for it, it doesn't have powerful meaning, it automatically becomes sad, nostalgic, marginalized. And then the Metro section for the Times will come along and write a little article about your neighborhood that's about to be destroyed, and talk about development as if it's inevitable, and say, "Well, it's a unique thing. Old Betsy Mashinsky laments that she won't be able to go down to the river anymore. And they'll have this little sort of human comedy article. But there's no real defense of that sort of life, it's always sort of passing by. It's what I call "sorrow lite."
RES: This fight, along with the Atlantic Yards fight, the West Side Stadium battle and others, remind me of the gentrification battles in San Francisco in the dot-com era. The fact is it's the nature of cities to change, so the question becomes how you promote healthy change, recognizing that the change of cities is shaped by the flow of capital, because that's the God we live under. How do we promote healthy change, how do you manage change so it doesn't undermine the integrity of a neighborhood?
Reverend Billy: Once again, it just comes down to individual stories. People shouldn't have to work full time for developers. I'm not going to build up my neighborhood and spend 70 or 80 hours a week in my little independent shop here and raise the value of the ground on which I'm standing, just so that the developer can flip my building and sell it at a profit and move on. So basically the power balance right now is so extreme that a lot of people in New York are kind of letting go. They're deciding it's not worth opening a small shop. If your labor increases the value of the neighborhood, you'll lose that shop and have to move on and start a whole new world. And that's not the sort of change that we should allow to take place. There has to be some sort of commercial lease protection. The government of New York is so in the hands of developers, it's so per se corrupt. Now, especially in Europe, some of the old cities, you have small shops, independent shops that have been there since the 1800s in some cases, that are considered partners with the government. They bring money to the government, and their stability becomes something the government wants to invest in. But in New York, the bell curve on the chart when you get to a shop that?s six or seven years old and they come to the inevitable lease renewal, many of them go under at that point. It's pretty hard to keep a shop going in New York on the ground.
So that has got to change. That's a change we need. The inevitability of the sun-blocking ugly buildings [is] not change that we should be concentrating on right now. The human situation is the thing to study right now. What are people doing with their time? How are people rewarded for investing in the community right now in New York? That's the question.
RES: It does seem there's such a clear-cutting approach to change in neighborhoods, and it's such an American value. Just raze it!
Reverend Billy: Urban renewal has been discredited. Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities is the book that we have to go to right now. Unless someone can argue successfully otherwise, Jane Jacobs remains our great defender against Robert Moses. And we're drifting back toward Robert Moses now. We're drifting back toward the abuse of eminent domain.
RES: What do you say to someone who values eccentricity, but will go into a big box store or a Starbucks because they're everywhere, and hence convenient?
Reverend Billy: As we say in the Church of Stop Shopping, convenience is not convenient. How many questions would you arrange there to ask yourself if what you're doing is the right thing? At the top of them is "Am I going to get a good buzz?" And then the other 19 questions might never be asked. If you've got to get a good buzz within the next four minutes, the high-caffeine, high-sugar, genetically altered milk content of Starbucks will give you a buzz in the next four minutes. But down the list, among the questions would be, "Who was kicked out of this building when Starbuck's moved in? What does this company do around the world?"
Convenience is not convenient. Oftentimes the transnational church of spacey consumption is sponsoring emotions. They say, "You want to be happy? Well, we have these antidepressants here. You want to be sexy? Well, we have this car. You want to live a long time? Well, we've got Viagra." They're trying to mediate between you and every possible emotion. And one of those emotions is convenience. "Are you in a hurry? Need a buzz? Come in here." But the fact is that very quickly, you realize that you can't hurry up. Very quickly you realize that you're sitting in traffic. Very quickly you realize that because the MTA can't keep the subways running, you're in a tunnel with a bunch of people. You're not in a hurry! You're stopped! 'Cause the corporate culture is clogging up the transportation system.
Which brings us to the final point. We support Critical Mass. These are extra-legal arrests. The landscape is overrun by cars. They're killing pedestrians every week. We're inhaling the effluent from these automobiles and trucks. And they're all in a traffic jam all day long around here, because there's too many of them. And the entire culture goes over to the car, the entire consumer culture is designed with the car as one of its gods. Well, people on bicycles should be able to create their own traffic jams. They should be able to create their own traffic jams, like cars do --
RES: For ten minutes, once a month! That's all!
Reverend Billy: Come on! You can't just steal bikes. They were impounding bicycles, they didn't know who the owners were, this last time. They were stealing bikes. The police now are willing to be illegal in public, on purpose. That's their level of impunity. They can't do that. So the First Amendment has been weakened, not just by Bush but by Bloomberg. And once again, like we say on the record, it comes back to your body. What are you gonna do? You're gonna get on a bicycle. What are you gonna do? You're gonna go to jail. What are you gonna do? How am I going lend support to justice and peace in this city, how am I going to get us back to a regard for the United States Constitution. I'm going to do it with my body. I'm going to be willing to do this with my body.
