09.14.2004

Rene — Reverend Billy's Unholy War

Topic(s): Art/Politics | Comments Off on Rene — Reverend Billy's Unholy War

Reverend Billy’s Unholy War
August 22, 2004
By JONATHAN DEE
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/22/magazine/22BILLY.html?ex=1094189022&ei=1&en=944af983e7a503d2
On a Monday morning in Los Angeles, in a half-empty
strip-mall Starbucks on Reseda Boulevard, two young women
are declaring their love for each other.
”I can’t keep it to myself any longer,” says the one with
the two-toned hair — who, judging by the frowns and
squeamish stares from the other customers, has made little
enough effort to keep it to herself at all. She stands up.
”I love you!” she says joyfully. ”Brought to you by
Monsanto!” Her companion blanches. The standing woman, it
emerges, has obtained an endorsement deal for their love.
Her lover, not surprisingly, has reservations, and an
argument ensues.
In truth, these two women are not a couple at all; they are
putting on a play, one of several being performed
simultaneously inside the store. But this has not dawned
yet on the legitimate customers. All they know is that
their Starbucks routine has been hijacked somehow. They
turn to each other, friends and strangers alike, with
variants on the same question: Is this for real?
Enter, from the parking lot, Reverend Billy.
He is
6-foot-3, impossible not to look at in his white suit,
clerical collar and dyed-blond pompadour. He is also not a
real minister — he is a New York-based performance artist
and activist named Bill Talen — but it generally takes
people a minute or two to figure that out, and this
confusion over the exact derivation of his authority is the
space in which he thrives. ”Hallelujah!” he shouts
through a white cardboard megaphone as he bursts through
the door. ”This is an abusive place, children! It has
landed in this neighborhood like a space alien! The
union-busting, the genetically-engineered milk, the fake
bohemianism! But we don’t have to be here, children! This
is the Good News!”
The ”actors” — many of whom are members of the choir of
Reverend Billy’s church, the Church of Stop Shopping — get
up from their chairs and surround Talen, hands in the air,
shouting, ”Amen!” The manager of this particular
Starbucks outpost is officially beside herself. She may not
know what’s happening, but her first instinct is to try to
prevent people from taking pictures of it.
Talen (pronounced TAH-lin) makes his way to the counter,
where he tries to lead the congregation in a laying of
hands on the cash register. ”We must exorcise this cash
register,” he shouts in his best Holy Roller cadence, ”of
the evil within it!” By this time — as almost always
happens — one customer has taken it upon himself to come
to the corporation’s defense; he wrestles briefly with
Talen, who, in trying to vault the counter (he is an
athletic 52, but 52 nonetheless), gashes his hand on the
register. Things are threatening to spin out of control,
and Talen, who is on a tight schedule while in Los Angeles,
has promised his wife and collaborator, Savitri Durkee (who
is somewhere in the crowd), that he will stop short of
being arrested.
”Let’s leave now, children!” he says. ”Starbucks is
over!” Followed by the choir members and a few other
acolytes, he exits onto Reseda Boulevard and strides toward
his next engagement. As the adrenaline subsides, he looks
down at the palm of his hand, which has now bled onto his
white suit. ”Stigmata,” he smiles.
What has he just accomplished? The one person you can be
sure will never again cross the threshold of the Reseda
Boulevard Starbucks is Talen himself. (In fact, a
subsequent court order enjoins him from coming within 250
yards of any of the 1,481 Starbucks franchises in the state
of California.) But the proper measure for any street
preacher is not the number of souls he saves; it is the
purity of his example. The road is long and hard for an
evangelical, even a fake one.
Can true activism be funny? Talen’s performance would have
to be categorized more as guerrilla theater than as
activism; to the extent that the expansion of a business
like Wal-Mart (another of Reverend Billy’s betes noires) is
ever successfully opposed — as recently happened in
Inglewood, Calif., via public referendum — that opposition
comes from unions and grass-roots political organizations,
not from Brechtian street performers with self-described
”bad Elvis hair.”
Still, the notion of politically motivated pranksterism is
enjoying a renaissance: consider the career of Michael
Moore, or the high-wire irony of the fake PAC Billionaires
for Bush. By playing, as he says, ”the politicized Fool,”
by being willing to suffer embarrassment and worse in a
series of hushed quasi-public places, he can, he has
discovered, make these enterprises reveal themselves. At
one of the 30-odd ”retail interventions” (as he terms
them) Talen staged at the Times Square Disney Store, one
manager became so unhinged that he made the following
announcement: ”Anyone who isn’t here to buy something will
be arrested!” Who said irony was over?
During the past seven years, Talen has made himself a thorn
in the paws of Walt Disney, Nike, Home Depot, Barnes &
Noble and any other chain he says he views as casually
destroying the essence of neighborhoods. Just one day
before the Reseda Boulevard Starbucks intervention, he led
40 disciples to a Los Angeles Wal-Mart for a bit of protest
theater known as a Whirl. The participants enter
separately, discreetly, as if they don’t know one another;
each grabs an empty shopping cart and simply circulates
through the acres of aisles without stopping, falling in
line behind other empty carts as he or she encounters them
until a silent conga line of nonshoppers forms, snaking
through the store in a hypnotic display of commercial
disobedience. It gets under the skin of the store managers
in a spectacular way. A spokeswoman for Wal-Mart, while
recognizing Talen’s name, wouldn’t utter it herself,
referring only — and repeatedly — to the corporation’s
general disregard for ”special-interest groups with
specific agendas.”
So what is Talen’s agenda? Just as the God’s Angry Man role
steals back a kind of musty, reactionary archetype (Lenny
Bruce, one of Talen’s heroes, had a right-wing evangelist
persona as well), Reverend Billy claims for the left a
concept usually owned by the right: conservatism. The
reason he condemns Starbucks or Wal-Mart as ”evil”
doesn’t have so much to do with labor practices (though he
mentions those), or any other tropes of the left, as with
the destruction of place. ”We are drowning,” he likes to
say in his sermons, ”in a sea of identical details!” It’s
hardly a fringe idea; in May the National Trust for
Historic Preservation put the entire state of Vermont on
its ”endangered” list and laid the blame explicitly at
Wal-Mart’s door.
In a world where our neighborhoods are reconfigured daily
by the expansion strategies of anonymous businessmen, Talen
has committed himself to the idea that to think locally is
to act globally. He no longer stresses, as he used to,
boycotts of companies he doesn’t like. Instead he is
determined to keep alive the collective memory of those
communities that the chain stores are equally determined to
colonize. ”We remember that this place used to be the
Astor Riviera Diner,” he shouts at passers-by on Astor
Place in Greenwich Village, where three Starbucks now face
each other across an intersection. ”We remember their
famously abusive waiters!”
And now it’s his own community — New York City — whose
collective memory he seems to feel is under attack. Angered
to the point of disequilibrium by what he considers the
Bush administration’s hijacking of ground zero for the
purposes of staging ”an early western,” Talen will be
working hard to, as he says, ”counternarrate” the
season’s chief provocation, the Republican National
Convention. On Aug. 29, the day before the convention
opens, Reverend Billy will ”marry” (or remarry) any
couple who comes to the Great Lawn in Central Park, with
the proviso that the wedding vows must include a recitation
of the First Amendment. He will also protest, somehow, on
behalf of the Madison Square Garden-area vendors ordered by
the police to shut down and move on to make way for the
G.O.P. And in a scheme inspired by a recent trip to
Barcelona — where store owners called the police to report
that Talen was ”agitating” in stores he never actually
set foot in — he promises to unleash an army of some 70
imitation Reverend Billys to preach all over Manhattan.
”The collars only cost five bucks,” he says happily.
What Talen and Durkee now refer to as ”the Reverend Billy
project” began in 1997. Talen — a Minnesotan by birth,
raised by Dutch Calvinists — had lived for many years in
San Francisco, where he founded, and occasionally performed
in, a respected avant-garde theater called Life on the
Water (best remembered for producing the work of Spalding
Gray, whom Talen can still barely discuss without crying).
When the theater lost its financing in 1994, Talen moved to
New York to join its legion of actor-waiters. From his new
home in Hell’s Kitchen — a reconditioned church, in fact
— he had a front-row seat for the extreme makeover of
Times Square.
It outraged him, and as he watched the area’s businesses
and residents being relocated to make room for what he
calls ”an outdoor mall,” he noticed that the most
resistant were the street preachers, whose profound
eccentricity still commanded a certain respect. Though
there was a rather glaring difference between him and them
— they were, in Talen’s words, ”flamethrowing right-wing
fundamentalists,” while his own politics are somewhere
left of liberal — he had the basic fiery-eyed look, and
the stature, and the voice trained to make itself heard in
the last row. And so, with a collar bought at a
clerical-supply shop and a white dinner jacket left over
from a catering job, he hit Times Square to preach against
its destruction.
Around the corner from his makeshift pulpit on Broadway sat
the flagship of the effort to make Times Square safe for
tourism, the Disney Store, and before long Talen decided to
take the fight right to it; he entered the store and began
thunderously commanding consumers to back away from the
smiling stuffed Mickeys that he condemned as the products
of sweatshop labor. These semi-regular visits soon
attracted the attention of the police. In turn, Talen’s
lonely crusade attracted aficionados of both fringe theater
(at the 1999-2000 Obie Awards he won a ”special citation”
for his Reverend Billy work) and of left-wing resistance.
Talen started working with a director and put together a
choir, and the Church of Stop Shopping was born.
The choir, let it be said, is no joke. Numbering 25 or so,
rehearsing several hours a week and performing for no pay,
they sing Talen’s politically inflected lyrics with genuine
gospel chops that flatten irony. They are a diverse group
in terms of age and race. Some are professional musicians
on a kind of busman’s holiday, some are lapsed
fundamentalists happy to offend certain sensibilities and
some are genuinely religious — they just feel that their
own churches neglect the antimaterialist spirituality that
the Church of Stop Shopping, in its oddball fashion, keeps
alive. (Two choir members are actually former Starbucks
employees.)
Talen met Durkee four years ago in a theater elevator. She
was a dancer and playwright who, like Talen, had a strict
religious background (Muslim, on her father’s side). They
live in a modest railroad apartment in Brooklyn, on a
tree-lined street of two-story houses with nary a
transnational chain store in sight. They get by primarily
on fees paid by colleges where Talen takes short
residencies and guest-lecture positions. She’s the
organizational spirit and the emotional ground wire for
Talen, who, as he gets deeper and deeper into character,
can’t always be relied upon to act in his own best
interest.
In fact, ”Reverend Billy” may finally be less a character
than a mode of expression — one that, he has discovered,
people will pay attention to. When Talen speaks in his own
voice on the subject of, say, Donald Rumsfeld, he can
become quite strident; whereupon, perhaps catching the
didactic note in his own voice, he will suddenly punctuate
his remarks with a loud, startling and yet somehow
tension-lightening ”Hallelujah!”
Talen and Durkee’s romance preceded their working
relationship by a year or two; she gave up her day job to
help him sophisticate the somewhat crude iconography of
those early days (nailing Mickey Mouse to a cross, for
example). Talen soon began broadcasting a sermon
fortnightly on National Public Radio. He sent his disciples
into various chain stores to perform the scripted public
arguments he calls Spat Theater. He tormented Starbucks to
such a degree that in 2000 a memo was circulated to all its
Manhattan employees, answering the question ”What should I
do if Reverend Billy is in my store?” Later, Talen
gleefully appropriated the phrase for his own book. ”In
the Church of Stop Shopping we believe that buying is not
nearly as interesting as not-buying,” Talen wrote. ”When
you back away from the purchase, the product may look up at
you with wanton eyes but the product dies quickly back onto
the shelf and sits there, trying to get a life. The product
needs you worse than you need it, remember that.”
For a while Reverend Billy was, in his words, ”this
month’s flavor.” Then came his own time in the wilderness.
Among the thousands of deaths on Sept. 11, 2001, was one
that proved to be temporary — the death of irony — and
yet when Talen went to the spontaneous village that arose
in Union Square in the days following the catastrophe, he
did so, for reasons mysterious even to himself, in
character as Reverend Billy. He wasn’t trying to be funny.
He had 30,000 hits on his Web site on Sept. 12, and
President Bush was on TV urging all true patriots to go
shopping, and, Talen says now, he knew he had some role to
play; he just didn’t know yet what it was. Something
inspiring was happening on that site, he believed,
something that, however dismal its cause, resembled the
unearthed spirit of community, of unmediated talking, that
Talen had been summoning for years. Then one morning Talen
showed up at Union Square and everything — the temporary
shelters, the art, the fliers that kept alive the
”missing” — had been collected overnight by the Parks
Department.
In terms of Reverend Billy, Talen says, ”we were back at
Square 1. The choir fell apart, for one thing. The choir
leadership was troubled by our political message at that
time. They had so many friends that died.” Nevertheless,
Talen and Durkee patiently rebuilt the project. They
reassembled the choir, and they found new spaces in which
to perform; and as they did so, they found that something
unexpected had happened. For performers and audience alike,
the whole Reverend Billy experience, born in parody, was
becoming less and less distinguishable from an actual
church service — a reaffirmation, in a ritualistic
setting, of a common core of spiritual values.
It sounds like a whole new frontier in sacrilege, but
anyone who goes to a Reverend Billy service these days
expecting a high dose of camp is in for a confrontation
with a profoundly odd sincerity. Talen performs several
services a year at the famously left-leaning
St.-Mark’s-in-the-Bowery Church in the East Village; a
recent one, a benefit to fix the church’s leaky roof, took
place on Mother’s Day before a crowd of about 300. Several
yellow-robed choir members circulated in the minutes before
the show with rolls of duct tape, with which they
good-naturedly covered any visible logos on the
congregants’ clothing — the rejection of worldliness, as
Durkee points out, being a theme common to most religious
experiences.
Soon the reverend entered, shaking hands, working the crowd
(”Thank you for coming to church today”), as the choir
sang and the three-piece band played. He went through a few
signature bits — a James Brown moment in which he
collapsed and was brought back to his feet by the
exhortations of the choir; a ”credit-card exorcism” —
and people were laughing, for a while. But by the time he
got to the recitation of the original (and politically
pointed) 1870 Mother’s Day proclamation by Julia Ward Howe,
and of the First Amendment, and of the reasons that George
Bush must be denied a hero’s welcome when he returns to
ground zero this summer, there was nothing about the
responsive amens that wasn’t 100 percent on the level.
”The political climate makes people want to be joyous even
more,” Durkee said later. ”I would say we have enough
people who come to every show that there’s a regular sense
that people are going to church. Strangely enough.”
What’s wrong with preaching to the converted? Isn’t that
what any church does? As Talen, the wayward son of
religious parents, asked the congregants to let their
spirits rise communally into the night sky high above that
leaky roof, as he led them in prayer to ”the God that is
not a product,” your first thought, perhaps, might be that
a psychiatrist would have a field day with this guy. But
given the amount of time he spends putting himself in
harm’s way for the sake of his convictions, it’s hard to
begrudge him a little worship. And if one or two newcomers
are still smirking a little as they shout ”Hallelujah”
for the first time in their lives, Talen is untroubled,
perhaps because he knows from his own experience what’s
happening to them. Act as if you have faith, and faith will
be given to you.
Jonathan Dee is a novelist and a contributing writer for
the magazine. His most recent article was about a
video-game mogul.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/22/magazine/22BILLY.html?ex=1094189022&ei=1&en=944af983e7a503d2