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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.
Diesel Sweeties is a
web-comic that I read most days, and one that has virtually nothing to
do with the subject of this blog. However, The Author posted a couple
of photos and some related notes, this week:
I Told You The House Blend Was Over-Roasted
01/18/2005 - 12:38 AM
I was walking around in Downtown No-Ho (even though my presence made it
such that there was at least one ho in town) to get a hot dog and some
rice pudding today when I noticed the most wonderful thing.
Someone had driven their car THROUGH the local Starbucks, setting
the entire storefront ablaze. I know I should not laugh at something
where people could have gotten hurt, but this is STARBUCKS, people.
(The only place which can brew coffee I do not enjoy.)
The company took out more than 100 full-page newspaper ads across the
country, outlining the wages and benefits it pays its employees and the
good the Bentonville-based company says it brings to communities.
......
"Obviously, it is a defensive reaction to growing community, consumer
and worker concern about the impact of Wal-Mart," Denier said. "The
advertising campaign is designed to cover the reality of their
operations, and they are doing it in a typically Wal-Mart deceptive
way."
Finally too big for their breeches?
Sounds to me like they're on the defensive.
By day, Jeffrey Manchester's spent his six months on the
lam as a generous churchgoing volunteer known as John, who gave toys to
kids and told his new girlfriend and church congregation that he had a
secret government job, police said.
At night, he was a fugitive hiding and playing in a Toys "R" Us, making
his lair in a cubbyhole in the bicycle display, racing remote-control
cars on the roof after hours and riding bikes around the store for
exercise, said Sgt. Katherine Scheimreif of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg,
N.C., police. He even monkeyed with the employees' work schedules, and
his diet included stolen baby food, she said.
......
When the Toys "R" Us where he was holed up became crowded during the
holiday shopping season, he fashioned a secret passageway into an
adjoining Circuit City that had been abandoned, Scheimreif said. In a
cubicle he built of sheetrock under a stairwell, he painted the walls,
put up posters and action figures, mounted a toy basketball hoop and
watched Spiderman and other movies on a DVD player, she said.
Meanwhile, he planned a takeover robbery of the Toys "R" Us, even
installing a baby video monitor in his cubicle to see what was
happening in the store. Police believe he got a gun by robbing a pawn
shop, but when he attempted the Toys "R" Us robbery on Dec. 26,
authorities said, two employees slipped out, forcing him to flee
through his secret door and allowing police to find his hideaway and
the clues that led to their identifying him.
A 65-year-old Wal-Mart greeter has been fired for greeting
customers with a computer-generated photograph of himself wearing
nothing but a Wal-Mart sack.
Dean Wooten was fired in September from his job as a greeter at the
Muscatine Wal-Mart store where he had worked for seven years, state
records show. He was accused of greeting customers with a picture of
himself in which he appeared to be naked except for the carefully
placed sack.
Wooten allegedly told customers that Wal-Mart was cutting back on
expenses and that the sack represented the new employee uniform.
I think this may beat 'whirling' in the creative performance protest category!
"When JP at h-list couldn't find a pair of the Zissou
edition Adidas worn in The Life Aquatic, it was time to make a pair.
Very crafty. The reason JP couldn't find them, apparently, is that they
were never issued."
As a fan of the movie "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou", I have to admit, I find this a cute idea. Certainly more interesting & fun than a lot of other movie merchandising.
A naked man streaked a Wal-Mart in Maryland, and a freelance news
photographer snapped some pics. Wal-Mart sent out a goon who demanded
that he turn over his camera and not take or publish photos of Wal-Mart
without permission."
WalMart, nudity, and freedom-of-the-press issues; what more could you ask for this early in the day!
Armed with a high-pressure hose and a bucket of octopi, hundreds of
protestors in this Mediterranean town pelted a McDonalds restaurant due
to open this week with the slimy seafood.
Between 300 and 500 people gathered on the banks of the Sete canal,
across from the fast-food outlet, playing music and yelling
anti-junk-food slogans across the water, as police barred them from
reaching the restaurant itself.
Aiming the hose across the water, they catapulted fresh octopi -- a
local delicacy, known here as the 'pouffre' -- towards the town's first
McDonalds, which had been set to open on Saturday.
The crowd held up slogans slamming junk food, dubbed 'malbouffe' in
French, as well as work conditions in the fast-food industry.
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