Sarah Palin Quits
Beware of Blind, Gargantuan Cyclists Roaming City Streets
Photo du Jour 448
Happy 4th of July!
SFist Drinks: The Rio Grande Cocktail at 15 Romolo
As you walk around and see stores decorated for Christmas before Halloween, it’s hard not to think that consumerism has gone out of control in this country. Unlike other problems, there’s a relatively simple solution to this. Bill Talen, aka the Reverend Billy simply says: “Stop Shopping”. Part performance artist and part social activist, the Reverend Billy and his gospel choir tour the US performing exorcisms on Walmart’s corporate campus and liberating shoppers at the Mall of America. “What Would Jesus Buy?” captures last year’s stop shopping tour. In addition to being entertaining, it makes you think about consumption and production—both good topics this time of year. The Reverend Billy answered a few questions for us-- think of them as both a movie preview and some basic indoctrination in the gospel of stop shopping.
"What Would Jesus Buy?" Is currently playing at the Lumiere Theatre in San Francisco, Shattuck Cinemas in Berkeley, and opens this Friday at the Camera 12 in San Jose.
What are some easy ways for people to shop less?
There are four preliminary steps that are possible when facing an actual product on a shelf. 1) Pausing in your grab at the product and then feeling the initial tremors of the-sex-of-no-products. 2) Stepping back from the product and feeling the wanton eyes of the product following you as you try to boldly file for divorce 3) Turning your back on the product and entering the multi-channel universe of what-the-product-sees and what you yourself may see, for instance, a thousand other products clawing for your attention and behind them a parking lot traffic jam and 4) The confusing loss of patriotic affirmation, the sound of being scolded by George Bush, when you declare your personal freedom from shopping and embark on a successful escape past the cash register, through the car-scape and out into a new world beyond, which could feel disorientingly authentic – too much TRACTION OF THE REAL - for a while. You might be on a personal journey with pockets of tough boredom, post-addictive longings, the return of memories and dreams you thought were gone forever. And then, of course, here come the new people and all the surprises that come when words gets out that you have freed yourself from Consumerism. Oh, Life After Shopping becomes, finally, “easy.” It’s a joy.
How is the Bay Area's relative level of consumerism?
The Bay Area drowns itself in cars and trucks just like cities that seem less sophisticated. iThises and iThats are stuck in the heads of SFites like everywhere else, with computers and TV’s and other media platforms sucking the life out of neighborhoods, in the manner of dead cities and suburban lakes of Monocultural Hellfire. San Francisco must resist gentrification and must do it on purpose. Gavin Newsom must declare the any person who dares to resemble a 28 year old stockbroker and likes unheard-of European beers must declare his or her identity at the border. Such a person must sign an agreement to avoid posing on balconies with white sails tilting below, on punishment of a thousand hours of community service in a bar in Gallup, New Mexico. Such a person must report to parole official and get on his knees before the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. San Francisco must be Dioneysian, rather than Apollonian. Zoning regulations must reject chain stores and protect public spaces of confusion and funk.
Are there things it's ok to buy? Businesses you support supporting?
Ask the question from the positive side. Are there things that are OK to give? Then ask, with giving, not buying, the basic unit of economic life – then ask what businesses can be supported. Burning Man culture starts with giving, and then the buying follows when necessary. People who can’t buy enough provisions, or transportation, or the ticket to get in – find a way to get there in the general economy of generosity. So give first, buy last. When I’m asked the question, “What Would Jesus Buy?” – the answer is – he would buy less and give more. He would give first. This notion can be important in our lives even if it begins in very ordinary ways, around the house and up and down our neighborhood streets. Trading services, volunteering and solving problems by asking for volunteers help from neighbors whose name you’ve taken the time to know… an economic shift can start by “magicalizing the foreground.”
What was your favorite part of making the film?
I’m enjoying this moment, this community that is coming together in the audiences. The old lefties, the young no-money goth kids, the earnest anti-sweatshoppers, even the evangelicals… There is a wave of change, people reaching to each other, reaching around the “other-making” tribal labels. We seem to be stopping our shopping together, and shaking up our old traditional defenses. Something about the vaunted the modern retail life puts us into these stores together, where we seem to be mixing. Then again - we have become isolated also somehow, and at the height of the world’s dedication to the globalized retail life, we have lapsed into hatred, war, violence against immigrants…
What was the most unexpected part of making it?
The interest in the film by evangelical Christians has been a surprise to us, even unsettling at first. I was hurt by Christians as a child, right wing apocalyptic Christians called “Dutch Calvinists,” centered in the Western Michigan of Grand Rapids and Holland. I started the Reverend Billy project with not a little parody in it, vamping on the late-night televangelist as Elvis impersonator. Now I don’t think of myself as parodic at all, but still we do address god as “The God who isn’t selling me anything,” or “the Fabulous Unknown.” Even with these names for god, evangelicals have supported our movie. I am not a Christian, although we do have practicing Christians in the choir, along with Hindus and Jews and Catholics and Buddhists. Most of us have some kind of fundamentalism in our past. But most of us have thought of the fundamentalism of the Demon Monoculture as controlling and inhumane and addictive, like any bad religion. And yet, large numbers of evangelicals are coming to this film and supporting it.
What should people expect from the film?
Shopping is a pocket of our lives where we are in a dream-state, we’re bubble-boys, we’re lost in an unconscious ceremony walking around grabbing shiny things and caressing shapes. This movie “What Would Jesus Buy?” may puncture doorways into this cul-de-sac of hallucinating Santa Clauses, lost in space with his non-organic reindeer. It’s time to take the notion of giving, which is the seed of our economy – take it back out of the absurd Valley of the Shadow of Debt – take it back to our streets, to the porch and the stoop, to the neighborhood of in ma and pa stores, farmers’ markets, and most of all back to our own creative love. You don’t have to buy a gift to give a gift. What Would Jesus Buy? - He
Would Buy Less And Give More!
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