Coming up at RADAR: JACK HALBERSTAM!

You either saw Jack Halberstam  read from her latest brain explosion, The Queer Art of Failure, at City Lights last month, or you did not. If you did, you are like AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH I want to hear all that again only with visual projections, and also MORE! If you didn’t you’re like, Fuck, I can’t believe I missed that reading, everyone is rubbing it in my face what an AWESOME event I missed, I’m sick of it! Either way, we at RADAR are here to help you out. The Queer Art of Failure is the  RADAR Book Club selection of the month, which means a) You can get a copy of the book RIGHT NOW for 40% off if you buy online from the publisher and enter RADAR at checkout – http://www.dukeupress.edu/Catalog/ViewProduct.php?productid=19523 and b) You get another chance to hear Jack’s super fun and engaging read on pop culture, revolution, queerness and failure, this Friday night at charming Viracocha at 998 Valencia, with extra special guests Falling in Love . . .  With Chris and Greg. Doors at 7:30, $10, Modern Times will be on hand selling books and RADAR will be on hand selling lovely bottles of Gilda, the perfume especially crafted for Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories. A perfect holiday gift? Duh.

Now let’s get a sneak peek of what’s to come with Jack Halberstam’s

OWS and the Pixar Way of Life

The occupation movements that quickly spread around the country this fall were easily explained in terms of a bad economy and the increasing gap in this country between the rich and the poor. The naming of the gap as the 1% versus the 99% represented in simple arithmetic the relation between the expanding wealth of the few and the spreading destitution of the many. While regular people lost homes, bankers, realtors and money managers made big bonuses. While colleges raised their fees, teachers picked up pink slips and while students took out more loans, education administrators gave themselves a raise. For the first time since the 1960’s young Americans have a critique of capitalism and are willing to risk being called liberals and commies to articulate it.

 

While to some the critique of capitalism and the use of anarchist organizing tactics may seem to have come out of the blue, in actual fact, some of the young protestors may have been primed to embrace the critique of capitalism by an unlikely source. Have they all been reading too much Marx in their humanities classes? Not exactly. Have they all finally woken up to the exploitative realities of a free market economy? Perhaps. But they have certainly all been raised on a generation of wacky animated films, especially Pixar films, that deliberately link social inequity to the excesses of big business and that often offer solutions in the form of bands of righteous animated creatures, multitudes really, rising up to fight off the bad, greedy few. Just think of A Bug’s Life, one of the earliest Pixar marvels – ants are preyed upon by grasshoppers, who use their size to bully the ants out of their food. The ants finally realize that they can only stop the grasshoppers by working together and using their numbers to even the playing field. They drive off the grasshoppers and everyone eats! In fact, Pixar films are precisely representations of the 99% who win out by casting out the 1%!

Pixar films, as we all know now, was one of the many brainchilds of the recently departed Steve Jobs who believed in the possibility of 3D computer animation and put money into early versions of the Pixar studio in 1986. The new CGI films that resulted from his collaborations with animators revealed a very different animated universe than those of Disney or Warner Brothers. These three dimensional worlds had depth, perspective, and perhaps most important for our purposes, the algorithm for representing crowds, masses and multitudes in all of their complexity rather than as a single figure repeated across the screen. The algorithm for multitudes may in fact turn out to be the quantum leap that enabled a generation to stop thinking in terms of singularity and self and start thinking in terms of the many and the collective!

 

And so, while there are many different explanations that one could give for the almost spontaneous, nearly convulsive force that has propelled people into collective action –rage, desperation, the Tea party, Sarah Palin – and while there are many excellent documentary films like The Inside Job and Capitalism, A Love Story that have exposed the banks and insurance companies, neither rage nor education would have led so clearly to the ludic and even whimsical tactics deployed by OWS and other occupations.

Like the woodland creatures of Over the Hedge ( Dreamworks, 2006)who wake up to find their pristine environment fouled up by suburban McMansions, SUV’s and junk food and who find a huge hedge erected between the wasteful humans and themselves, the OWS’ers  refuse to be walled out of Wall street, and, just as the animals tore down the hedge that encroached upon their woodland sanctuary, so the protesters today sit down in the middle of the city and refuse to move or be removed. Like the chickens in Chicken Run (Dreamworks, 2000) who “get organized” to rise up against the farmers who take their eggs and fatten them up to become chicken pot pies, the OWS’s refuse to contribute anymore to their own exploitation – on Nov 5, people were urged to withdraw their money, their eggs if you like, from the big banks and the week before in Occupy Oakland, the protestors tried to jam the route of capital by closing down the ports.

Still not sure? How about Monsters Inc. (Pixar, 2001) where the monsters fight the corporation that uses children’s screams to generate energy? AT OWS and Occupy LA, the monster/occupiers redirect the nation’s attention away from fear and insecurity and towards pleasure and the power of collectivity. Or how about Bee Movie (Dreamworks, 2007) where the bees fight the humans for stealing their honey? At OWS, we are all fighting the bankers for stealing our money! Or, think about Robots (Fox Studios, 2005) where the robots protest the replacement of the old and worn out with the new and the shiny and they argue for recycling? The occupation movements are not only about money but also about natural resources that are being used up without any care for recycling or replacement. Or, finally, what about Finding Nemo (Pixar, 2003) for pete’s sake, where the fish led by Nemo, the little disabled fish, his father and Dory, a queer blue fish, swim down to break free from the fisherman’s nets and to disrupt maritime profiteering? The lesson there was that while one fish/bee/chicken/monster/human can do little to obstruct the process of profiteering, many creatures together, all swimming in the same direction, all oriented to stopping the pillaging of the ocean, can break free. The fish in Finding Nemo, the bees in Bee Movie, the monsters and the robots may not necessarily have an elaborate plan for what follows, they may not have a list of demands or a clear manifesto for progress, but they all know that change depends upon rupture and rupture depends upon new tactics, new forms of protest and different methods of engaging the imagination.

It seems whimsical and possibly a little crazy to attribute so much political action to animated films that kids watch when they are barely walking or talking; and yet, whimsy and spectacle actually sets these protests apart from the pious marches on Washington of the Bush years. Many people have described the occupation sites as carnivalesque, and photographs show protesters in masks, costumes, and in drag. This is a political movement born of eclectic combinations of anger and imagination, camp and clout, improvisation and action. Could it be that a generation raised on fantastic spectacles of collective action have learned well how to say no, how to stage loud and effective forms of refusal and how to animate revolt?

 

RADAR Book Club presents Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure with special guests Chris Vargas and Greg Youmans with Falling in Love . . . With Chris and Greg. Friday, December 9th at Viracocha, 7:30, $10