best of 2013 by mimi thi nguyen

The 2013 standout releases for me include the 45-track survey of Portland’s all-female punk band Neo Boys, called Sooner or Later (K Records); the West London anarcha-feminist art-punk band Androids of Mu’s Blood Robots (1980), reissued by Water Wing Records; Dark Entries’ compilation from Icelandic post-punk Q4U called Q1 Deluxe Edition (1980-1983); the dreamy Elaines 12” from Brooklyn’s post-punk Household; The Younger Lovers’s latest bouncy LP Sugar in My Pocket (Southpaw) and of course, Shopping’s Consumer Complaints LP (Milk), featuring the ever-amazing Rachel Aggs from Trash Kit.

Nyky Gomez may be one of my favorite people I met in 2013. During the week I was on the POC Zine Project tour this October, we shared inappropriately timed jokes and over eleven hours’ worth of trivia and revelations on the drive from Los Angeles to Oakland (Nyky drove the entire stretch, with me co-piloting). This bad bitch bruja runs the brand-new Brown Recluse Zine Distro, boasting a catalog made up of zines written mostly by indigenous peoples and people of color. BCZD is currently fundraising to help support itself, and to furthermore make the entire catalog available to prisoners for free, and to send one copy of every zine in the catalog to existing zine libraries or those starting zine libraries nationally and internationally, especially in indigenous communities and communities of color. Nyky also does the zine Skinned Heart, and her latest issue is by far one of my zine favorites in recent memory. Buy everything from her.

From two of my other favorite zinesters, Anna Vo and Osa Atoe put out the interview-heavy fourth issue of Fix My Head in Fall 2013, just in time for the second POC Zine Project tour. This issue of FMH, like the last, documents punx of color in scenes all over the globe, historically and contemporaneously. This issue includes interviews with Mars from Aye Nako, Textaqueen, Melting Pot Massacre, Daighila, and the amazing Taquila Mockingbird about the early days of punk in Los Angeles. I have to say, however, that Osa’s interview with Golnar Nikpour is my runaway favorite interview. Golnar talks about her all-female QPOC hardcore band In School, her time coordinating Maximum Rocknroll, and her genius thoughts on “punk studies.”

Rosi writes Not Straight Not White Not Male, a text-heavy (literally, there is no layout) zine about being a genderqueer Vietnamese punk kid in Southern California – a zine after my own heart, sniff sniff. The zine was published in December 2012, but I read it in 2013.

Margaret Thatcher died. All our enemies from the ‘80s are dead!

I did a lot of great readings this year, but my favorite has to be the Guillotine Press release of PUNK at WORD Bookstore in June 2013. PUNK is the product/process of a years-long conversation between Golnar Nikpour and me about punk (of course) and race, politics, and historiography. I got to read with Jenny Zhang, a brilliant poet and essayist I first met from the blog Fashion for Writers. Jenny and I both read pieces inspired by Wendy Davis’s all-day filibuster of the Texas State legislature against some of the most restrictive anti-abortion proposals in the United States (which ended in the wee hours of the morning of the release). Novelist and all-around star of smart shit Sarah McCarry, who publishes the Guillotine chapbook series, hosted the release and started us off with a champagne toast to Davis.

My graduate school friend Steven Lee sent me a video of Helen Slater from The Legend of Billie Jean, one of my favorite movies of all time, saying, “Fair is fair, Mimi!” I totally cried with happiness.

In December 2013, I co-organized (with Ruth Nicole Brown, Karen Flynn, and Fiona I.B. Ngô) the Hip Hop and Punk Feminisms conference at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. We wanted to put hip hop and punk feminisms in conversation, especially since all the “third wave feminism” retrospectives seem to somehow ignore the emergence of hip hop feminisms concurrent with riot grrrl feminisms in the same decade. (From our statement: “This symposium stages productive conversations across hip hop and punk feminisms, including questions about the genealogies and as well multiple origin stories for hip hop and punk across diasporas and the globe (against a wholly distinct and discrete genealogy, or singular origin story, for each); about the theories of aesthetics and value that emerge from hip hop and punk cultures, including forms of immanent critique as well as political polemic that imagine futurity or negativity, and the uses and challenges to them from women of color feminisms; and about the ephemeral and haptic qualities of hip hop and punk performances, including the events, actions, and encounters between bodies that shape social and cultural formations within hip hop and punk cultures.”) The highlight for me has to be hosting the intensely powerful, and fiercely generous, Alice Bag in my sleepy cornfield-cornered part of Illinois, and otherwise bringing together some of my favorite zinesters –Nyky, Osa, and Anna—in my college town. Osa and Fiona also played with Alice for an electrifying performance, and may actually become a real band, so I feel I accomplished something this year.

Best of 2011 by Mimi Nguyen

A lot of my bests from this year are about remembering how I totally had a productive and fulfilling creative and intellectual life before I started my tenure-track assistant professor position at a large, but isolated research university, surrounded by Midwestern GM corn- and soybean fields."

MISC BEST OF 2011, IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER:

-- Seeing Grass Widow and the Raincoats at the Double Door (Chicago)

-- Seeing Janelle Monae at Foelinger at the University of Illinois

-- Participating on the panel at MEET ME AT THE RACE RIOT: People of Color in Zines from 1990 to Today (co-organized by POC Zine Project, Barnard Zine Library, and For the Birds Collective) at Barnard (watch the whole event here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqoW-uhC7W8)

-- Crazy Band, FUCK YOU LP

--Shotgun Seamstress 6, and eager anticipation of the collected zines from M’Lady Records

-- Relatedly, finally meeting Osa Atoe and Mariam Bastani (at MEET ME AT THE RACE RIOT), and otherwise connecting (and re-connecting) with smartass punks in still-crucial conversations about punk histories, punk archives, and punk theories

-- Finishing my freaking manuscript almost sixteen years after I first thought to write about the “gift of freedom” and liberal empire in a graduate seminar (out in 2012, with awesome cover art by the inimitable illustrator Hellen Jo: http://helllllen.org/)

-- Putting the Race Riot compilation zines back into circulation (POC Zine Project, For the Birds Collective, Stranger Danger Distro)

-- Seeing Wild Flag at the Highdive (Champaign, IL)

--The spread of global revolts beginning in Tunsinia at the start of 2011 and ending in Russia at the end, and all those in between that identified transnational capital, authoritarian regimes, and the liberal empires that support both, as radically unfree forms of social organization

-- The Shoppers, Silver Year LP

-- Household, Items (household.bandcamp.com)

-- Finally, all the amazing scholarly books that were published this year, including Dean Spade, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law; Jodi Byrd, Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism; Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse, eds., Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and Death; Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick Ferguson, eds., Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization; Helen Jun, Race for Citizenship: Black Orientalism and Asian Uplift from Pre-Emancipation to Neoliberal America; Nhi Lieu, The American Dream in Vietnamese; Ruby Tapia, American Pietas: Visions of Race, Death, and the Maternal; Chandan Reddy, Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State; Lamia Karim, Microfinance and Its Discontents: Women in Debt in Bangladesh; and lots more I can’t remember!