2012 DISINHIBITIONS: JESS HEANEY

Music:
Rocky Rivera, Bambu, and 6Fingers and Topkat. Badass artists on the Beatrock Music label. Beatrock shares loads of free downloads here, which are icing on the cake. Favorite albums of the year are Bambu’s …one rifle per family and 6 Fingers and Topkat’s Mercury Retrograde.


Best shows of the year:
- Beatrock Music 3rd Anniversary at Brick & Mortar in SF (Dec 20), where all the label’s artists and bay area lovers threw down til 2am. favorite moments…Rocky Rivera rockapella version of GIRLS (yep, riffing off the Beastie Boys) and Bambu cutting it up with Prometheus Brown of the Blue Scholars). Sharpest 3rd world left politics alive and burning bright into 2013. hell yea.
- Xandra Ibarra (AKA La Chica Boom)’s Fuck My Life (FML) burlesque performance at CounterPulse. “In an era rife with rampant Mexiphobia, a foul-mouthed cockroach maps the journey of a queer burlesque performer named La Chica Boom. After 10 years of performing Spic-tacles on and off stage, La Chica Boom is forced to interrogate her method for insurrection. Inspired by the original Mexican spitfire Lupe Velez who purportedly died with her head in the toilet, Chica spends night after night pacing her bathroom floor and staring into the porcelain bowl.”


Graphic novels:
- Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel
- Maus by Art Speigelman. finally read it. couldn’t put it down.


Favorite political reads:
- Revolution at Point Zero, an essay collection by Sylvia Federici. Spanning from the Wages for Housework Movement to what she terms the “New International Division of Labor” between the “first” and “third worlds” at this moment in global capitalism
- Capital by Karl Marx. Thanks feminist materialist anarchist Mills College reading group. COuldn’t have got through it alone.
- The Long 20th Century by Giovanni Arrighi. Not yet finished, but I’m loving the shaping of the history of capitalism into the waves of accumulation and overlapping, successive hegemonies.
- Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon. Always good to reread the discourses around violence/non-violence and remind oneself of the political efficacy, necessity and historical theories around violence as an anti-colonial/imperial tactic. and why ‘non-violence’ is an impossible framework [of resistance, of power] in the trajectory of capitalist imperialisms.
- Meditations on Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth by Yaki Sayles
- Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland by Allen Feldman


Prose and poetry (not new things, but new to me…):
- Rosy Medallions by Camille Roy. Bought this from her after the lovely Steve Orth, Lindsay Boldt, Camille reading at the Long Haul back in February. I just fell into Camille’s smooth prose, hearing her voice release every lovely phrase into the atmosphere with perfectly sealed paragraphs: “It tasted like clouds.”
- One With Others by CD Wright
- Wild Seed by Octavia Butler. Just devoured this novel while on vacation. Science fiction, fantasy, capitalist US slavery and parallel colony development. Shape shifting, race, desire, and bodies. Can’t wait to read more by her.
- VIA soundpiece by Caroline Bergvall. Stephanie Young called out to this piece at the December Long Haul reading, which sent me on the search. Beautiful.
- (dis)Orient by James Thomas Stevens


Calling out gentrification:
- “NOBE: Neighbors Outing Blatant Exploitation” video from Phat Beets and allies http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JneAYdmDGCE. A well-organized response to structural gentrification that generated a lot of news articles and stifled the real estate agent to take down their insane video and be publically roasted. A conversation starter.
- Hitler Gentrifies Oakland (youtube). The sharpest meme.