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What is a Whirl-Mart?
The action is comprised of a group of anti-shoppers ranging in size from 1 to 50 members. The ritual consists of activists/actors arriving at a Wal-Mart, Toys-R-Us or another chain superstore at 12-noon on the first Saturday or Sunday of the month and proceeding to push empty shopping carts slowly and silently through the aisles. Eventually, all of the participants locate one another and form a single-file chain of anti-shoppers which weaves, wanders, and whirls throughout the store for about an hour. It is a collective reclamation of space that is otherwise only used for buying and selling. It is a symbolic display of the will to resist the capitalist ideology.
'Whirl-Mart' is an experiment that can be approached from several different angles. As a work of art, it examines and blurs the boundaries that have been established between performance art, protest, living sculpture, and direct action. As an action of resistance, it utilizes the power of silence in occupying private consumer-dominated space with a symbolic spectacle. As a ceremony, it is a counter-ritual to shopping that transforms the super-store and its wall-to-wall array of products into a surreal and colorful cathedral. And what the heck-- it's just darned fun!
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National & Worldwide
Whirl-Mart Ritual Resistance International Whirl-Mart HQ World Changing Models, Tools, and Ideas for Building a Bright Green Future Critical Mass Critical Mass is not an organization, it's an unorganized
coincidence. It's a movement ... of bicycles, in the streets. Rev Billy's Church of Stop Shopping Lots of great scripts from/for performance interventions
with a heavy focus on Starbucks. Commerce
Jamming Commerce Jamming source page. AdBusters A global network of those who want to advance the new social
activist movement of the information age. Commercial Alert wants to keep commercial culture within
its proper sphere, and to prevent it from exploiting children and subverting
the higher values of family, community, environmental integrity and
democracy. No Media Kings Jim Munroe's guide to doin' it for yourself Booksense.com Internet book search that sends your order to your nearest
independent bookstore. Starbucks Delocator Search that helps you locate locally owned alternatives to Starbucks
Media
The Independent Media Center is a network of collectively run media
outlets for the creation of radical, accurate, and passionate tellings of the truth Project of the Independent Media Institute, a nonprofit
organization dedicated to strengthening and supporting independent and
alternative journalism. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the first to identify
threats to our basic rights online and to advocate on behalf of free expression
in the digital age. Declan
McCullagh's Politech Politech is the moderated mailing list of politics and technology.
Topics include privacy, free speech, the role of government and corporations,
antitrust, and more. MediaChannel.org The global network for democratic media.
PLUS the News Dissector's Weblog. CorpWatch.org counters corporate-led globalization through education,
network-building and activism.
Illegal Art: Freedom of Expression
in the Corporate Age
The laws governing "intellectual property" have grown so expansive
in recent years that artists need legal experts to sort them all out.
Borrowing from another artwork--as jazz musicians did in the 1930s
and Looney Tunes illustrators did in 1940s--will now land you in
court. If the current copyright laws had been in effect back in the
day, whole genres such as collage, hiphop, and Pop Art might have
never have existed.
This exhibit, which opens November 13, looks at copyright law and
its impact on free speech. The website features visual works, music,
films, and videos that have (or could) run into legal troubles due
to ever-expanding intellectual property laws.
How can you miss them? MSN8's ubiquitous launch campaign has their in-your-face
Flash ads on as many sites as possible, and it turns out they've been "guerilla"
marketing, too:
On Thursday, Microsoft plastered hundreds of butterfly decals, measuring 12
to 20 inches in width, on sidewalks, doorways, traffic signals and stop
lights primarily in midtown. The city immediately demanded an end to the illegal
guerrilla advertising campaign. Cocola said Microsoft had offered to cover
the cost of cleaning up the plastic decals, held in place by static electricity.
Microsoft received a single $50 summons, although it could have been fined
for each decal.
Here's Microsoft's Press
Release on the new release. They fail to mention that they're spending US$300
million on an ad blitz campaign that is scheduled to run well into 2003. Thank
goodness they didn't have to pay for those NYC ads! Geek.com
doesn't think it's worth it, anyway.
In its simplest terms, Wal-Mart is a front for the Rockefellers and the Red Chinese
Secret Police. Do not the top honchos at Wal-Mart know that their cheap prices
are based on production by Chinese slave labor, in camps and factories operated
by the Secret Police?
This Person literally
got disabled due to falling boxes at WalMart. This sort of thing, unfortunately,
can happen almost anywhere--but most companies wouldn't be quite so
nasty in return:
Walmart commercials tell
you each customers leaves with more than what they came
for. How true! Contrary to the Walmart commercial which promises "Life is a
wonderful thing if you have your health",
I was bombed by an employee. I got a box to the
head and shoulder. I was left unconscious on the floor.
The witness was told to leave the store. I was left
helpless and alone.
Walmart personnel failed
to tell the paramedics I had been unconscious. They
engaged in an immediate cover up. The hospital
emergency room had no notification from anyone I was a
possible brain injury patient. Instead of the much needed
treatment, I was sent home from the hospital. It would be
determined 18 months later I was still bleeding in the
brain, the brain stem and spinal cord.
Twelve years of explosive growth in Pennsylvania have made Wal-Mart Stores Inc.,
with 114 discount outlets, the largest private employer in the Pennsylvania.
Wal-Mart - which starts store clerks at $7 to $8 an hour -
rose to the top of the employment heap, according to a little-known ranking
by the state's Department of Labor and Industry.
In Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, Oklahoma and West Virginia,
as well as in Pennsylvania, it is the largest private employer, according to economy.com.
Unions have opposed Wal-Mart's expansion in Pennsylvania from the start.
They have said that nonunion Wal-Mart jobs were low-wage and dead-end,
and destroyed higher-paying positions at competing stores in downtown areas and older shopping plazas.
I try to be fair. I usually don't succeed, but I try. However, nobody particualy seems to love Walmart. Hate
it, sure.
I tried to Google pro-WalMart stites, and the results
are pathetic.
This guy, though. I
don't really know.
He's.... odd:
It's been about three years now. For some odd reason, I don't throw
away my shopping receipts, any of them. I just keep them all in an old
toaster box. No indexing, no purpose, no real reason to hold on to
them. Until now.
For the voyeur in all of you, I present nearly every WalMart purchase that I have made since the end of 1996.
Fast Food for Thought
Call me cranky, but I don't like McDonald's.
Eric Schlosser knows why: check out Fast
Food Nation. Or read this interview.
Some straight talk on the health and economic problems caused by our fast
food obsession.
McD's introduced a hot dog recently. This
person doesn't like it..
STREET SPAM
noun. Advertisements posted on telephone poles, traffic lights, and other public
areas. Street spam is an example of a more general scourge called bandit signs.
Citizens
Against Ugly Street Spam
Since its inception in Texas in 1997, CAUSS members have removed and
discarded hundreds of thousands of signs across the United States. They now
have active members in virtually every city in the U.S., with new members
joining the ranks daily.
The folks at Ugly Litter ain't too happy,
either. They advise us: Next time you see one of those pathetic, illegal, white-trash, corrugated plastic
advertisements nailed to a phone pole,
deface it,
destroy it,
or best of all just remove
it.
MediaChannel.org
