Judy Garland, in a scene from the film The Good Old Summertime, swings around a pole during her performance of “I Don’t Care,” a powerful, pre-feminist tune sung by one of the most influential entertainers of the twentieth century. I love Judy Garland—she is a hero… She was one of the greatest entertainers of the twentieth century, and like Elvis, brought real emotion and life into her songs and into her acting. She was a strong-willed woman, and I believe part of her appeal is that she always fought for her agency in a patriarchal culture that strove to take it away in its exploitation of her as a talent and as a woman.

But Judy always fought back and succeeded in having many comebacks in her career. The weekend she died tragically, finally succumbing to the pressures around her, the Stonewall bar in NYC was raided by the police. The gay men there, beset by grief from the death of their idol, decided to rage against this oppressive force in the Stonewall Rebellion that gave birth to the LGBT civil rights movement.

Postmodernism, I think if I could put it into a nutshell, it’s about agency being reified into capital… It’s like agency, our spirit, our soul, our position as individuals reified—like flour into pizza dough, being folded into capital… I feel we live in a corporate commodity culture now where a lot of our ideas are decided and contained by committee. Somebody like Judy Garland or Elvis, who is almost like the brother of Judy Garland, in a way, were these people who had incredible talent, were able to feel through the lyrics of their songs the real emotion that made their performances so alive. James Dean, the great method actor was so moved after seeing Judy perform, he was flabbergasted— “How does she do it?!” He wanted to be just as powerful as Judy.

Joseph Campbell’s idea of an artist was that the artist was supposed to tell stories for a culture to understand itself to progress… I feel that these people were like that, they were artists who were able to channel a new way of being for others to follow. Here, Judy is singing “I don’t care,” not wanting to concede to patriarchy and their views.