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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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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.
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.
MediaChannel.org
