The Earth Wants You
"You must check out the newest from my favorite transcendent and down to earth preacher."--Laurie Anderson, artist, musician
The Earth Wants YOU is a motivational handbook, filled with inspired visions of a wild, creative, Earth-led cultural revolution. Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping offer up a heady mix of humor, insightful critique, passionate commitment, emotional catharsis, and example after example of vibrant direct action. Stop shopping and feel the love as you sign up for the struggle of our lives! Earthalujah!
Praise for The Earth Wants YOU:
"Singing instructions for joining the Earthalujah choir!"--Jodie Evans, CODEPINK
"My Earthmojis are smiling for Reverend Billy! And that's all the dirt you're gonna get from me. O;"--Justin Vivian Bond, trans-genre artist, Radical Faerie
"Mama Earth will shake us ALL off unless we shake shit UP and shut it DOWN!"--Bertha Lewis, The Black Institute
"This is what makes social movements succeed--it's the big love-slog we have to go through to achieve change."--Andy Bichlbaum, The Yes Men
"Join Rev and his merry band of activists as they imagine ways of arousing concern for the environment and racial justice."--Coco Fusco, creator of Eu Sou Um Consumidor
"When the singing activists hit the high notes in a bank lobby or a DARPA lab or the back aisle of a Walmart, they wipe away the veils hiding the madness of our corporate-controlled, consumer-crazed society."--Annie Leonard, director of Greenpeace USA
"Ssssh, listen . . . let the Church of Stop Shopping exorcise your fear, doubt and burnout, and join the Earthalujah Revolution!"--Jess Worth, BP or not BP?
"This call to action is at once sobering and encouraging. We have fucked up really badly, but the ability to see it--is the first and hardest step toward fixing it."--Douglas Rushkoff, author of Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus
"Reverend Billy's ALL IN! bodies and voices . . . not just clicks and posts, for this small village we call Earth. Preach On!"--Obang Metho, Solidarity Movement for a New Ethiopia
"The Stop Shoppers packs a whoop."--Roberto Sifuentes, La Pocha Nostra
"In between satire and silence, there is a space of penetrating reckoning for all vibrations that flow counter to the balance of Nature. And from this dynamic and tricky space, the Honorable Reverend and his Holified Choir will shout, sing and sermonize a soul-bound love message of Truthalujah!"--John Sims, The AfroDixie Remixes
"The Church of Stop Shopping is in the vanguard of a new movement that challenges this consumer society that is killing our planet."--Mike Roselle, Climate Ground Zero and Coal River Mountain Watch
"Billy, Savi and the choir have love and optimistic humor, and they don't give up on people."--David LaChapelle
"He seems to be writing while his actions are going on, like he can write while he's hand-cuffed."--Benny Zable, The Nimbin Environment Centre, NSW Australia
"The Earth Wants You takes readers deep inside the heart, mind and balls of the activist-artist. Reverend Billy rocks hard!"--Annie Sprinkle, artist, ecosexual sexecologist
"He was a comic act. Now he's evolved into a man compulsively challenging the true extent of the right to protest."--Anohni, creator of the song "4 Degrees"
Reverend Billy and his choir of singing-activists are on the front lines of creative direct action, and here they offer up a distillation of the passion, the inspiration, and the hopes for love and survival that fuel their work. In a mix of essays, polemics, surrealist scenarios and news flashes from the frontlines, Reverend Billy answers the question, "What are we to do?" with a resounding chorus of "Take Action NOW!"
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Talen's chief collaborator in developing the Reverend Billy character was the Reverend Sidney Lanier. A cousin of Tennessee Williams with an interest in avant-garde theater, Lanier was then the vicar of St. Clement's, an Episcopal church in Hell's Kitchen that doubled as a theatrical space, where Talen was working as house manager. Lanier encouraged Talen, who was suspicious of religious figures after rejecting the conservative Protestantism of his youth, to study radical theologians and performers; of these, Talen credits Elaine Pagels and Lenny Bruce as particularly strong influences. Though Talen does not call himself a Christian, he says that Reverend Billy is not a parody of a preacher, but a real preacher; he describes his church's spiritual message as "put the Odd back in God."
Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir is a non-profit organization that includes Talen, director Savitri Durkee (who is married to Talen), a 40-member choir, and the Not Buying It band."
"Welcome, brothers and sisters, to the Church of Stop Shopping in Brooklyn, where the right Rev. Billy Talen rocks his ecopulpit with impassioned performance art and guerilla theater happenings, reminiscent of back-in-the-day 1960s La MaMa Theater and the Living Theater, in service of his clarion call social activism to save our Black Friday-addicted shopping souls and heed Mother Earth's doomsday climate change wail. The gospel according to Reverend Billy can be found in this title, a compilation of short rants, monologues, and sermons decrying our collective crass commercialism, cultural propensity for materialistic gormandizing, and comprehensive ecological rape of the planet. A leitmotif throughout is the concept of 'The Replacement Planet, ' in which everything is a commodity to be monetized and marketed. Monsanto, violence in Ferguson, the annihilation of honeybees, Hurricane Sandy, and the Earth as being r-e-a-l-l-y pissed at us (and letting us know) are favorite pinatas, but the reverend juxtaposes these jeremiads with encouraging stories of humorous and sometimes successful nonviolent protest. VERDICT If Elvis and the Goddess of Greenpeace got together on Match.com and had a bastard child, it would be the Reverend Billy, and while it might be easy to dismiss his theatrical schtick, it would be wrong to ignore the message--brethren, can I get a Earthalujah!"--Barry X. Miller, Library Journal
"Reverend Talen is a warrior whose aim it is to wake the sleeping to the realities of climate change. He is guided by a higher power and fueled by love."--Clayton Thomas-Muller, member of the Mathais Colomb Cree Nation (Pukatawagan, Manitoba)
"I had a dream about the Reverend Billy last night. He came to Harvard Divinity School. People were distraught that no one had authorized him as a reverend to preach, and yet he preached."--Tim DeChristopher, Peaceful Uprising
"The Church of Stop Shopping helps us ready ourselves for the times ahead by finding solace in the persistent force field of living beings."--Severine von Tscharner Fleming, The Greenhorns
"Reverend Billy will have you raising your hands in Hallelujah while the Earth's plight brings you to your knees."--Zen Honeycutt, Moms Across America
"This is a movement that you hold in your hands, which you will then feed back to the wind, to the fire and the water."--Leah Borromeo, The Cotton Film: Dirty White Gold
"This is a new Psalm for the Earth, for her human and other-than-human inhabitants."--Beth Stephens, ecosexual artist, professor
"The Reverend reminds us that we are complicit in the delusion that we are somehow separate from the evolutionary process of Mother Earth."--Alnoor Ladha, The Rules
"This is a kaleidoscopic journey, from disobedient grandma's fighting fracking to rebellious choirs against police racism, from profound animistic prayers on ecological collapse to complex political critiques of the NGO sector."--John Jordan, Laboratoire d'Imagination Insurrectionnelle
"He's hysterically serious."--Andy Shallal, Busboys and Poets
Praise for Reverend Billy
"Combining the situationalist flair of Abbie Hoffman with an evangelist's tireless zeal, Reverend Billy's efforts against mindless consumerism and corporate greed have added the oxygen of publicity to flames of a number of worthy causes, as well as reintroducing a much-needed sense of fun to Manhattan's somber and overregulated plazas."--Publishers Weekly
"[Reverend Billy has] the zeal of a street-corner preacher and the schmaltz of a street-corner Santa.--The New York Times
