Zombie vs. Shark vs. Anthony Ha - Blog

Everybody's doing it, so why can't I?

Sat, 02 Jan 2010 14:34:59 +0700

And by "it" I mean "making best-of-the-decade" lists.

I won't try to defend my obsession with top 10s (or top 50s, or top 100s). But given all the hours I've spent reading end-of-decade retrospectives, it seemed like I ought to throw together my own list of favorites.

The operative words here are my and favorites. Also, yes, there were many good things that I did not get a chance to read/watch/listen to.

Books

1. Pump Six and Other Stories by Paolo Bacigalupi -- The opening story, "Pocketful of Dharma," is a clunker, but the rest of this collection provides models for how someone in 2010 can write science fiction that's personal, political, and awesome.

The best story is probably "Yellow Card Man," which immerses the reader in an overwhelmed/overwhelming future Bangkok, where Bacigalupi seems to tell a familiar character drama about someone who just needs to "get back on their feet" after personal disaster. Then he demolishes that structure and takes a sledgehammer to capitalist/entrepreneurial mythology. As a bonus, it's the only piece of fiction I've read that addresses Malaysia's racial tensions. Its bloody vision of the future of Malay Chinese isn't subtle, but it is vivid and believable.

The first Bacigalupi story I read, "The Calorie Man," is more conventional, but it's probably my favorite in the book -- because of its portrait of an exhausted, depleted world, and because it caps that portrait with a perfect, ambiguously hopeful final image.

2. Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link
3. Happy Baby by Stephen Elliott

Comic Books

1. The Invisibles by Grant Morrison and various artists -- Okay, this one's a stretch, since the series only published six or so of its 59 issues during the '00s, and the main thrust of those last six issues was our anarchist superheroes' attempt to stop an evil end-of-the-millennium plot. But The Invisibles is my favorite comic of all time, and the final issue is a perfect distillation of its themes, as well as a preview of the decade's many other projects from my favorite collaborative team, writer Grant Morrison and artist Frank Quitely.

2. Safe Area Gorazde by Joe Sacco
3. Phoenix by Osamu Tezuka

Movies

1. Ratatouille, dir. by Brad Bird -- The first in Pixar's trifecta of not-just-really-good-but-genuinely-great movies (followed by Wall-E and Up), this one is the most deliriously inventive and perfect. I was so delighted with Anton Ego's first taste of ratatouille that I was literally stomping on the floor.

2. The Lord of the Rings, dir. by Peter Jackson
3. Before Sunset, dir. by Richard Linklater

Albums

1. Super Taranta! by Gogol Bordello -- Gypsy punk that doesn't feel cutesy or exoticized, but rather raunchy, political, and a natural expression of a very contemporary mood. Every song has a quotable lyric, but my favorite is probably "Zina-Marina," which lays a funny lament about man's inhumanity to man over one of the album's catchiest tunes.

2. Kala by M.I.A.
3. The Woods by Sleater-Kinney

TV shows

1. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, created by Joss Whedon -- The decade's highlights from my favorite television show include the brilliant dream episode, the brillaint-er musical episode, and a dead-on portrayal of the pain, confusion, and guilt of suddenly losing a parent. Plus the epitaph, "She saved the world. A lot."

2. The Wire, created by David Simon
3. Arrested Development, created by Mitchell Hurwitz

Hey, so I wrote a comic

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 23:32:12 +0700

As you may have heard, I wrote my very first comic script a few months ago (I finished the first draft at WisCon over Memorial Day Weekend). Well, that script was turned into a real, honest-to-God comic by Anthony Wu, and is now featured in Electric Ant Zine #2, published by good friend/horror manga guru Ryan Sands.

I finally read the issue this week, and it's a blast -- I spend so much time hanging out with Ryan and the other artists in the self-proclaimed Bang Gang that I'd forgotten what a weird, personal project EAZ can be. Issue 2, for example, includes Ryan's article on Takarazuka (the word "heteronormative" comes up several times), recreations of formative scary images, and best of all the insane jam comic, "Planet X Rises (Part 1)." Some of the artists involved in the project are better than others, but there's real energy and unpredictability on almost every page, and Calvin Wong's contribution, in particular, is a little masterpiece of invention and timing.

As for my comic, "Empire," well ... since the bulk of the writing is already months behind me, I can definitely see lots of things that I'd change for improved clarity and rhythm. But hey, it's my first comic, and the only seven-page-comic-biography-of-a-robber-baron-in-space that I know of.

Oh, and apparently there's nothing I can write that Wu can't make 10 times better when he draws it. So there's that, too.

The invisible hand punches you in the face

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 20:18:04 +0700

"In creating this state of unreadiness, the role of free-market ideology cannot be ignored. Many leading economists still have a vision of the invisible hand satisfying wants, equating costs with benefits, and otherwise harmonizing the interests of the many. In a column that appeared in the Times in May, the Harvard economist Greg Mankiw, a former chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers and the author of two leading textbooks, conceded that teachers of freshman economics would now have to mention some issues that were previously relegated to more advanced courses, such as the role of financial institutions, the dangers of leverage, and the perils of economic forecasting. And yet 'despite the enormity of recent events, the principles of economics are largely unchanged,' Mankiw stated. 'Students still need to learn about the gains from trade, supply and demand, the efficiency properties of market outcomes, and so on. These topics will remain the bread-and-butter of introductory courses.'

"Note the phrase 'the efficiency properties of market outcomes.' What does that refer to? Builders constructing homes for which there is no demand? Mortgage lenders foisting costly subprime loans on the cash-strapped elderly? Wall Street banks levering up their equity capital by forty to one? The global economy entering its steepest downturn since the nineteen-thirties? Of course not. Mankiw was referring to the textbook economics that he and others have been teaching for decades: the economics of Adam Smith and Milton Friedman. In the world of such utopian economics, the latest crisis of capitalism is always a blip."

-- from "Rational Irrationality" by John Cassidy, in the Oct 5., 2009 issue of The New Yorker

Oh, right, that's why I love Dollhouse

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 20:26:55 +0700

Like any television show, Dollhouse has some weak episodes -- and given the unpleasant, real-world stuff it tries to address, a mediocre episode (a description that applies to most of the current season) can be so offensive it's hard to sit through.

But the show's latest hour, "Belonging," is a reminder that when Dollhouse hits its mark, it's as good as anything I've seen.

Hey that's me

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 02:06:24 +0700

Noah Buhayar, a journalism grad student at Berkeley, wrote a fun article for MarketWatch that combines a profile of me (specifically my job at VentureBeat) with an overview of blogging as a profession. Naturally, my inner fameball is just thrilled to see people writing about me (they should do it more often!), but I also think Noah did a good job capturing the sense that the field is still figuring itself out.

I asked a friend if my quotes sounded defensive, and he said, "No, you sound smug." Which seems about right.

A naive and puerile desire

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 00:09:39 +0700

From "The Face of Seung-Hui Cho," an essay by Wesley Yang published in the winter 2008 issue of n+1:

I had come to New York five years earlier, to create a life for myself there. I had not created a life for myself there. I had wanted to find the emerging writers and thinkers of my generation. I had found the sycophants, careerists, and media parasites who were redefining mediocrity for the 21st century. I had wanted to remain true to myself as a writer, and also to succeed; I wanted to be courageous and merciless in defense of the downtrodden, and I wanted to be celebrated for it. This was a naive and puerile desire and one that could not be realized -- at least not by me, not in this world.

This is a depressingly accurate description of my aspirations, circa age 18 -- and yes, in moments of weakness, circa age 26.

All Art is Propaganda

Mon, 11 May 2009 23:59:56 +0700

I finally got around to reading James Wood's wonderful essay in the April 13 New Yorker, "A Fine Rage: George Orwell's Revolutions." Since the article is locked up behind a paywall, I figured I should post the two quotes that I can't stop thinking about -- you know, for posterity's sake. The first one articultes how I respond to a lot of art. The second one needs no justification beyond its inherent awesomeness.

1: So Orwell was contradictory: contradictions are what make writers interesting; consistency is for cooking.

2: To level an Orwellian emphasis, what is remarkable about British society today is not how much bigger the middle class is but how little the upper classes have given up. The working classes got richer; but the rich got much richer. Next year, it seems likely, Britain will elect its nineteenth Old Etonian Prime Minister -- a Conservative, of course. The Orwell who wrote about the playing fields of Eton would be shocked to discover that, for all the transformations that Britain has undergone, the lofty old school is still there, much as it always was, educating the upper classes to govern the country, wreck the City, and have lovely house parties.

Ego stroking moment of the day

Sat, 18 Apr 2009 18:15:47 +0700

When you check out the BloggerBoard of the top tech writers for the past 30 days, guess who you see at number 16. Aw, yeah.

Failure is the only option

Sat, 14 Mar 2009 13:44:04 +0700

Here's what I've been up to:

* I spent an afternoon at O'Reilly's Etech (emerging technology) conference in San Jose, and while I found the talks themselves kind of underwhelming (despite some promising starts), this Bicycle Built for Two Thousand project looked pretty cool.

* Alice and I sent several long emails back and forth on the subject of RaceFail 09 (with welcome guest appearance by Ryan), and while I don't think my thoughts are valuable enough to share publicly (better to foist them on friends!), I will say that Mary Anne Mohanraj's two-part essay on the subject at Whatever was super-valuable. I expect to return to her posts again and again as I think about these issues.

* Did I mention that the Watchmen movie was not very good?

* Yay. And yay.

I swear to God, I am not a lazy blogger

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 00:56:01 +0700

And yet I haven't updated this, my own personal website, in weeks. I do believe many cool people, including my favorite living writer, are really bad about updating their websites, so at least I'm in good company.

Anyway, here are some links that show you what I've been up to recently.

* I moderated a panel at a totally ridiculous resort in Palm Springs, but apparently forgot to shave or get a decent amount of sleep the night before (hence the puffy eyes).

* I met Dave Gibbons, the certifiable genius artist of Watchmen, and he was charming and awesome. (Yeah, too bad about that mediocre movie.)

* I am curious (snuggie).