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Reverend Billy's Starbucks Invasion

by Bill Talen

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Bill Talen, created the character of Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping. His anti-corporatism message centers on Starbucks and Disney; he says that Starbuck's earth-tone touchy-feeliness masks corporate ruthlessness. New Yorkers have been exposed to his live performances for the past several years. Recently, he launched a new round of invasions into New York Starbucks cafe's in order to preach to patrons about the unsavory practices of the company he calls "FrankenBucks". What follows are his words. He gave this work to us and the Utne Reader.

The Plan

On Saturday, April 6, we announced the NEW YORK INTERNATIONAL THEATER FESTIVAL INSIDE STARBUCKS. This was timed as a part of Citizenwork's "National Big Business Day." By "We" I mean Reverend Billy, the character I inhabit, and The Church of Stop Shopping, a New York group opposed to neighborhood destruction by transnational chain stores. We performed in a number of Starbucks on Saturday, but as a public gesture, to kick off the festival, we invaded the devil's cafes in the Astor Place area, the historic intersection in downtown New York. A heated rally followed immediately by a march on the three Starbucks that sit there staring at each other across Lafayette Street -this was our afternoon's work. Meanwhile folks were downloading our "invisible comedies" from REVBILLY.COM and performing, Augusto Boal style, in other cities as well. I hope the readers of this journal will consider using Starbucks as a theater and consider joining us inside Starbucks in Washington on the weekend of April 20-22.

The idea is to re-narrate these watering holes of low-level amphetamines, to introduce new rhetoric into the suffocating environment of 80 or 90 graphics/decorating decisions and appropriated Bob Marley muzak. Posing as customers, we are in fact actors who improvise along the plot lines of such classics as "Starbucks Correctional Facility (a play about Starbucks' use of prison labor)," or "Sex in the Bathroom (fake Bohemia)," or "My Love is a Monsanto Product," and so forth. We have called these short two-or-three actor comedies "Spat Theater" because they come in the form of a high-volume argument.

Reverend Billy outside Starbucks

Fake Communities

New York police agencies have privatized our parks and sidewalks. We are forced into fake communities like $tarbucks, where our activities could never have political impact. Then, with the marketing plan of creating a romantic connection to the cafe culture of Paris in the '30s or Zurich or Vienna back at the birth of the avant garde, they let people just sit there. Well, OK, thanks, we'll hang out. But while I'm here you don't mind if I decline to buy that $5 latte with the bovine growth hormone in it, do you? And while I'm at it, let me find a way to get everyone to leave and re-create real public space again.

We started out well enough. Some of us just got there from the march in support of Palestine, crossing the Brooklyn Bridge on a sunny spring day. We had a battery operated organ with the gospel vibrato and a great singer in Brother Derrick McGinty. He roused passersby and suddenly we had a crowd. We handed out our signs--the Mermaid logo with the diagonal red slash. I began to preach in the character of Reverend Billy, at a portable white enamel pulpit. I ticked off the Starbucks issues: the union-busting, the mono-culture farms, the hiding of the Fair Trade coffee, the real estate practices, the "DROWNING US IN A SEA OF IDENTICAL DETAILS!!! Can somebody give me an AMEN!!!"

The World View

But we wanted to make common cause with the violence of the last half year. We believe that mall-izing IS bombing. NO SHOPPING TILL THE BOMBS STOP DROPPING!! One overlooked characteristic of bombing is that it makes us stupid. We die, or we become damaged, or we become beaten psychically like consumers. The explosive statement is only useable in the most brutish conversation, like the great belch of a murderer that invites a return belch from the adversary. Language outside of violent nation states or corporations, with that complex tenderness that is the individual human, is rendered mute by bombing. In the Church of Stop Shopping we have always explained the invasions of chain stores, with the fluorescent boxes full of products and the listless, alienated workers, as a kind of violence.

New York City, like all great cities, is great because of its neighborhoods. You can argue that George Gershwin and Duke Ellington and Babe Ruth and all the other heroes make New York special, but really, it's the neighborhoods. And that's about unmediated talking. Talking and listening. Three people talking on a streetcorner is the essence of original this-moment culture. Completely surprising stuff rises out of our laughter, the way we cuff each other affectionately. As Jello Biafra says, "We become The media." We are our own entertainment.

When Starbucks' scouts enter a new neighborhood, they listen for the laughter. They find where culture is still original, not corporatized, and that is their opponent and prey, for Starbucks is a jealous God. They approach the landlords of the community, whether it's a diner or a restaurant or a bar. They offer far more than the traditional tenant can afford, because Starbucks arrives with its Nasdaq funny money. They arrive from a completely different economy, and evict the business that native residents have built for years. This is a famous Starbucks tactic and has been repeated throughout the country and abroad. It is a kind of bombing. It is violent. READERS. DO I HAVE A WITNESS? STOP THE BOMBING!!

Now suddenly we had the police with us. They were surrounding my pulpit and started asking me about my intentions. I couldn't tell them that at this moment our invisible comedies were going forward, that voices were rising, in the three Starbucks surrounding the traffic island on which we stood. We try not to judge them. They listen as a the head deacon of the church, Bishop Basem Aly, explains National Big Business Day ("Ralph Nader, huh?") The New York International Theater Festival Inside Starbucks drew screwed up faces behind the badges.

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