We've been writing about Reverend Billy and his Church of Stop Shopping for nearly 20 years, tracing his remarkable spectacles of anti-consumerism around the world.
Read the rest Spanish anti-capitalist activists Flo6x8 staged this epic flamenco/rumba flashmob at a branch of Santander. Their excellent dance was too much for the bystanders, and soon 30 of the bank's customers were dancing along. Rumba Rave "banquero" en el Santander (via MeFi)To do in NYC: Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir present Earth Riot
Anti-capitalist rumba rave in a Spanish bank
Many Boing Boing readers will be familiar with the anti-capitalist art-provocateur antics of Reverend Billy and his Church of Stop Shopping. He's today the subject of a New York Times profile, after a theater group in the Netherlands paid him $25,000 to adapt his persona and some of his songs for Dutch Broadway. The NYT piece has an incorrect link for Amsterdam's Stardust theater company, by the way: here's the correct one. Read the rest
Bruce Damer is a technologist, virtual world pioneer, and computer historian. He is the CEO and founder of The Digital Space Commons, director of the Contact Consortium, and author of the book "Avatars".
I talked with him about Burning Man & Katrina, NASA & near-earth-objects, artificial life & his EvoGrid project, and the legacy of psychedelic visionaries...
At the end of August, 2005, you were at Burning Man in a heavily-outfitted RV. News quickly spread of the Katrina disaster. How did you respond from the middle of the Nevada desert?
At Burning Man in 2005 our camp was among other things, running the webcast and helping maintain the playa wifi network, so we knew about Katrina while other burners were in their glorious offline world. One of our camp-mates, who worked for the Pentagon devising "extreme communications" disaster relief hardware and deploying it in places such as for the Asian Tsunami that year, pointed our dishes skyward and tracked the incoming hurricane via some super high-res satellite. He phoned the Pentagon to order up some blackhawk helicopters to take his crew down to New Orleans to help the citizenry but due to government red tape that order was denied. I said at the time "whew, those scary loud black things buzzing the playa would have caused some serious kind of mass panic about a bust by the Bushies or a belief amongst burners that the UFO invasion had chosen Black Rock as its landing pad". Read the rest
Dan sez, "The swell blog 'Isn't Life Terrible' has a small yet perfectly formed collection of non-Disney Disney songs available for download, including an apparently non-ironic ditty about how nifty it is to be a Walt Disney World annual passholder (or, as the Disney cast members will call you, 'passhole'). There are also couple of choir numbers from Rev. Billy's Church of Stop Shopping, spoken bits, and a nice parody of Randy Newman's transformation from a snarky satirist into the sappiest Disney songwriter since Mousketeer Jimmy Dodd."
(Thanks, Dan!) Read the rest
BoingBoing reader Dave says,
Reverend Billy [from the Church of Stop Shopping] leads the faithful in rousing choruses of the First Amendment. A Quicktime clip shows one chorus and the hallelujahs leaving St Marks church in the East Village, New York, a center for organizing this week's demonstrations. (more clips from the street today will be posted this evening). Rev. Billy has been staging public readings of the First Amendment in smart mobs at Ground Zero and other locations, exercising the rights to free assembly and speech.
Link to Dave's blog post, more on Smart Mobs. The read-ins with Reverend Billy continue today. Read the rest
