Writing and Stuff by Anthony Chatfield

Last night, after three or four undesirably long stints on the public bus system (of which you may or may not know my thoughts on), I found myself outside of the South Lake Union Naval Reserve. For those in the Seattle area, you might ask the same question I did – where the hell is that? I offer for you this answer – South Lake Union. It’s actually hiding behind some parking lots and in front of some boats and really doesn’t have anything to do with the Navy, and at further inspection resembles a school more than a refurbished armory or reserve.

It was in this hidden white ex-armory that Modest Mouse was putting on a special off-tour show for their Seattle faithful, an extremely rare small show with only a thousand or so people standing on a converted basketball court. As you can see, it’s not much to look at, and according to Modest Mouse’s opening act, Blitzen Trapper, it was the first time a rock show had played the venue. For the record, I could tell. The audio was sketchy at times and the feedback a bit too heavy, but considering it was a gym, I can’t complain too much.

That opening act for the record was pretty good. From Portland, the band of seven played a short 25 minute set with a nice array of appropriate music given the night’s main act. I wasn’t blown away off the bat, but as their set developed, and the array of vocal range and instrumental backup actually got to me. I snagged an EP on the way out and look forward to more from them.

But it wasn’t a new band from Porltand that had me lounging around the Naval Reserve last night. It was Isaac and company from Issaquah with their signature sound of funky, intense, insanity. To tell you the truth, I’ve never been to a Modest Mouse show before. By the time I slid into the city, the crew was already too popular to snag tickets for without stalking ticketswest.com and the presale junkets.

And now, with a library that’s yet one album bigger (an album I’d only heard once or twice since picking it up on Tuesday) the set was predictably heavy on recent material. Luckily I’m a big fan of the recent material, but the crowd let the band know what they wanted to hear, erupting with each opening riff from Sad Sappy Sucker or The Lonesome Crowded West.

And, unfortunately the new album has a definite polished studio sheen to it, doing away with a lot of the raw power of their earlier work in favor of the melodic crooning of most contemporary indie bands. Although the album features a lot of decently rocking tracks of trademark Isaac skitter stepped vocals and the dual percussion beats that have always made most Mouse tracks so infiltrating to their many fans. They’ve slowed down a lot.

And the show reflected that. The new tracks didn’t have the pop and sizzle of the older tracks in their set. The crowd not only didn’t know the tracks, but they didn’t get behind them as much and I had a hard time myself. But, those classics from the early portfolio exploded from their guitars and the incredibly loud sound setup, echoing around that tiny little naval reserve and ignited the crowd.Thankfully, unlike a lot of bands openly touting a new album, Modest Mouse was loyal to their fanbase, playing the faves from throughout the catalog in an intensely satisfying 80 minute set. It’s not every day you see the biggest band in the Northwest up close and personal and share the revelery of their developing career with the people that were in the front rows 5 years ago.

Media Reviews

I’m a music fan. Simple as that, I like music, lots and lots of it. And as a native of Seattle, I’ve got that seed in me, the one that gets me out and about, digging around for the newest, best music around, and an undying loyalty for any band born, raised, or bred in the region. That said, those bands that have already grown out of their Seattle cacoons and taken the world by storm are especially close to my heart, assuming they are good, and very often they are.

Modest Mouse is my best example, besides Death Cab For Cutie, of a band that makes me happy whenever I hear them, regardless of the song, album, or situation. And, because I wasn’t able or smart enough to take advantage of Seattle’s ample music scene and these bands’ habit of playing 30 shows a year in the area before they got big, I’ve yet to see either band in a small venue. I saw Death Cab last year at Sasquatch, and as incredible as that stage with its 20,000 screaming fans was, I will never forget telling my friends ‘no thanks’ when they headed to The Showbox for a Death Cab show in late 2001. I just didn’t know who they were yet.

Anyways, flash forward to today and I have the keenest, most intensely dedicated ear around, constantly scouring for the next big Seattle band so that I don’t miss my chance to hear them on a small stage before BANG!, their shows sell out in 30 seconds.

It’s been 3 years since the last big album from Modest Mouse and today marked the release of We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank. I just picked it up, so my review will be up probably later this week, but the news I’m slowly, twirling my way around to is that I was lucky enough to wake up early yesterday, hear that tickets to a small show were going on sale at 10 am and was on my computer hitting refresh. They sold out in 30 seconds, but the Internet Gods were kind and I have my ticket. For those that don’t care, or just don’t know, it’s not all that easy to snag a ticket to a Modest Mouse show in Seattle anymore. One hour tops and they’re gone. Anyways, I’ll have the glorious concert details with pics on Thursday. For now, everyone go buy the new album. It’s pretty damn good.

Observations and Thoughts

I’ve had this sneaky feeling, backed up by a Saturday perusal of the bookstore shelves and five minutes spent reading a random page from Rhonda Byrne instant book schlock, The Secret, that her said secret was a waste of pulp it was written on. Apparently, without having read more than 500 words, I got the gist of what her little secret is…it’s incredibly easy to sell mindless junk to unsuspecting Americans. Janey Harayda posted this from a Newsweek article on the bestselling sensation. The result, a broken attempt to make people think they don’t know how to live their lives that unfortunately, the all powerful Oprah saw fit to shill out (does anyone else keep from wondering why she’s the richest woman in America?).

Jerry Adler had a brilliant evisceration of Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret in the March 5 issue of Newsweek. He devotes five pages to some of the more bizarre claims in this bestseller by a former television producer, who purports to explain how you can get everything you want in life by using a “law of attraction.” The law, Adler writes, is scientifically “preposterous.” (Sample advice: If you want to lose weight, stop looking at fat people.) The Newsweek article says in part:

“You’d think the last thing Americans need is more excuses for self-absorption and acquisitiveness. But our inexhaustible appetite for ‘affirmation’ and ‘inspiration’ and ‘motivation’ has finally outstripped the combined efforts of Wayne Dyer, Anthony Robbins, Dr. Phil and Mitch Albom. We have actually begun importing self-help — and from Australia, of all places, that citadel of tough-minded individualism, where just a couple of years ago, Byrne was a divorced mother in her 50s who had hit a rocky patch in her business and personal lives. It was in that moment of despair, when she ‘wept and wept and wept’ (as she recounted to Oprah on the first of two broadcasts devoted to her work), that she discovered a long-neglected book dating from 1910 called The Science of Getting Rich. In it she found how to let your thoughts and feelings get you everything you want, and determined to share it with the word. She called it The Secret …”

Media Reviews

A lot of words have been written over the years about violence and its effect on the film industry. The amount of violence that pervades today’s (and yesterday’s) films is seemingly gratuitous, a shock tactic of numbing down the senses to allow even more violence in future films. Sometimes it’s unnecessary. Sometimes it’s over the top. And sometimes it’s just plain incredible.

300, the newest Frank Miller adaptation (a name that’s becoming synonymous with top notch comic book adaptations), is one of those films. It’s a bloody violent epic on the scale of the battle that it portrays, a wonderful tribute to exploitation and epic war films. It’s a terribly good trip down an incredibly bloody battle field for the sake of showing that bloody battle field.

300 is one of those films that people will misunderstand. They’ll point out the wooden lines, or the gratuity of nearly every scene, or the single mindedness, loosely plotted characters. I found myself pondering all of these things when the film first started. Why do they all speak in one liners and where’s the true motivation here? I more or less forgot my questions after 10 minutes though and sat back for a damn fine ride.

This is what 300 is. It’s a comic book come to life. Frank Miller did a lot of things for the comic book industry, not the least of which was darken it up and instill a sense of reality among all the ridiculous premises. He doesn’t pretend we’re reading what very well might be the true story of a man dressing as a bat. It’s obviously fiction, but he instills just enough grit and realism into his hyper-stylized slicked back panache that we could almost see this crazy shit happening in the back alleys of our own streets. That’s Frank Miller’s talent.

And in 300, an admittedly short comic book, he does the same thing with the millennia old tale of a single battle in Greece between 300 Spartans and the entire Persian Army. If you haven’t heard the story by now, it’s rather simple. Xerxes’ is the ruler of Persia, a self-proclaimed God, now trying to take over the world. In doing so, he rides through the country side demanding submission from other rulers. Sparta’s King, Leonidas, decides he’ll have none of that and puts the emissaries to death.

Of course, politically he cannot take his army to war, so he suits up 300 Spartans and takes them to the Hell Gate to stop the Persians. The result is a Spartan envoy capable of staving off over a million Persians for three days and long enough to drum up support for a full Spartan army to meet them.

The actual film is about 75% Spartan battle scenes and 25% everything else I listed above, making it essentially one giant climax. Imagine watching Braveheart and taking the battle scene from the end, throwing it back a few hundred years and watching it for 2 hours. That’s essentially what you get in 300.

The true strength of the film though comes in its devotion to the source material. As I said, it’s not a matter of how well the film is acted or portrayed. Zack Snyder did what Robert Rodriguez did so well with Sin City. He took Miller’s comic book and created as loyal an adaptation of the style and frames as he could. The result is the kind of stiff one liners that drive a comic book, and the shattered, explosive single shots that force every comic book reader to turn to the next page and buy the next issue. At nearly every point of the battle, Snyder will slow it all down, giving the reader a good hard glimpse of his sepia and grey washed Greece and the violence that ensues. The world outside of the battle, outside of a fight, outside of a single sword, drains away and all that’s left is a single shot of a single act, magnificently shot.

And that’s what this film is about, those magnificent single shots. It’s a comic book breathed into live action and as a comic book, it’s superb. Were you to compare it to the great epics of modern film making, Braveheart, Lord of the Rings or any other grand scale battle, you might find it wanting, and that’s because those are larger, more complete films. This is a battle, a punctuated fist to the gut. And that’s all Miller or Snyder wanted it to be. For that, it’s incredible.

Media Reviews

I’m a lazy bastard, so the weekend was spent relaxing and enjoying the first full weekend with no work and freedom to sit around, but it’s Monday, so here you go.

It’s the first full month of spring, easter time, and we’re entering year four of war in Iraq, which for me is a more important event than any amount of glazed over religious holidays.

This month’s prompt: Write a story that is in no way political, without any mention of President Bush, or any of the other mindless figureheads in Washington. And yet, something about Iraq….and the Easter Bunny. You can mention the Easter Bunny though. Anti-war with no President Bush and the Easter Bunny (I’m thinking an ‘Easter Bunny raises the holiday bunnies against the elves of the arctic allegory…eh?)

Freelance Lifestyle

I have to keep reminding myself that it’s not only 500 word, basic articles for minimal payment that I write in my life. Sure those tend to work towards the payment of my bills, but they generally don’t do anything else for me…intellectually. Though, I am gaining a massive stockpile of useless information that bode well if I’m ever on Jeopardy.

My degree is in creative writing, so I’ve got a handful of random projects in the work, fantasy from my childhood, crazy stories from high school, and the “meaningful” and some poetry from college. Everything together I have a nice little collection of random stories and half finished novels that haven’t coalesced to anything of use. I’ve got my fair share of projects continually in the works as well. I’ve got a novel from middle school, two NaNoWriMo novels, and two or three dozen half finished or unhappy short stories that I’ve yet to get the gall up to send off for publication.

In light of all that, I’ve decided to start on yet another project, this time with the thought of collaboration in mind. Here’s the idea. It’s a thought, and nothing too entirely intriguing, save the fact that I’ve spent time on it….which should interest everyone. It is my time after all.

12 months, twelve stories, twelve different characters, with one major theme. The idea is to take the basic ideas and themes from each month, not necessarily the most obvious ones, but the ones I think of most personally and using them to craft a story based on a common theme. that said, I’d like to have everyone else do the same thing with me.

I’m going to post this every month or so, usually mid month and request that any writers out there that cross my site by chance (or thankfully by choice) consider writing a story based on the theme at hand, for the coming month.

This is me blasting my ideas out, but tomorrow I’ll expand and give you a topic and a theme. Everyone should be interested and write their stories. For anyone that writes anything at all, comments included, I’ll post your story and a link back to your site on my page.

To Be Continued…

Uncategorized

Over at John Scalzi’s (a science fiction author that I have a rare level of respect for – mainly for his blogging devotion, but his books are good too) blog, affectionately titled Whatever, I saw this posted, a new collaborative fiction site, Ficlets. While I generally don’t approve of such sites as they tend to devolve into fart jokes and whatnot, I think this looks fairly interesting. I’ll probably donate some of my interesting thoughts and wasteful bits and pieces to the project.

So, in addition to the books and magazine articles and blogging and corporate writing and fighting crime I do, I have another project I want to tell you about, because it’s a hell of a lot of fun, and it’s something you can play with too. It’s called Ficlets, and it made its debut over the weekend at the South by Southwest Interactive show. It’s a collaborative short fiction site.

What does “collaborative short fiction” mean in this case? Simple: You, as a writer, post a very short (not more than 1,024 characters) piece of fiction or a fiction fragment on the Ficlets site. People come to Ficlets to read what you’ve written, and to comment on your piece. If they want to, they can also write a “sequel” to your story or story fragment, carrying the story forward from where you left it. Or, alternately, they can write a “prequel,” explaining how you got to where you are in the story. All sorts of people can write all sorts of sequels and prequels — and of course, other people can write sequels and prequels to those. What you end up with is a story with multiple authors and multiple branchings — lots of possibilities and surprises.

Cool Stuff, Freelance Lifestyle

I can’t remember where I found this but I saw it again in my bookmarks today and had to share it. Dylan Hears a Who is a SPOOF Bob Dylan tribute to Dr. Seuss, and with this year being the 50th Anniversary of The Cat in the Hat, I can’t think of a more fitting soundtrack.

Cool Stuff, Writers and Authors

It’s day one of the biggest, baddest, coolest sports event of the year, the NCAA Basketball Tournament, the Big Dance, the Field of 64. It’s a haven for rabid sports betters and college males, and as a recent member of the latter, I’m just as excited. I filled out my brackets on Monday, set up my accounts with in browser bookmarks, and have spent more time today watching the games than actually working. Hence, my presence at almost 10 o’clock still on my computer (games ended forty minutes ago).

Only one upset today though makes for a field of 16 fairly ho-hum games. Davidson/Maryland was almost interesting but fell apart at the end. However, VCU/Duke was a great game and since Duke is one of those teams I think we all get bored with after a decade of seeing them in the sweet sixteen, it was no dirt off my shoulder to see them go (and only 1 point from my bracket).

Regardless, I’ll be ranting, exploding and babbling about basketball for the next few days as the tournament pushes on, likely ignoring the literary and freelance worlds in favor of hardwood and tourney upsets (please let there be more upsets). And the best part is, when the tourney’s over, it’s baseball season. Sport lover’s sweet, orgasmic bliss, it’s spring.

Observations and Thoughts

Janice Harayda posted her winners of the Delete Key Awards today, a beautiful savage removal of three books’ gooey insides that don’t deserve the paper they’re printed on. It’s a good day when I read someone’s utter disdain for the prose of Mitch Albom, a good day indeed.

The Second Runner Up

The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud

How did this pretentious novel end up on so many best-of-the-year lists? Who knows? Every year there’s at least one book that earns praise far out of proportion to its merits. (Remember the great reviews Mitch Albom got when he started writing books? How hollow does some of the praise seem now?) The most overrated book of 2006 was The Emperor’s Children, a windy and cliché-infested novel full of repulsive characters who move in eddies around an aging New York journalist.

So why didn’t it win top honors in the Delete Key Awards competition for the year’s worst writing in books? Tedious as much of this novel is, The Emperor’s Children picks up steam in the last one hundred or so pages, when it borrows some drama from the events of Sept. 11, 2001. How many readers will stick with it until then?

The First Runner Up

For One More Day by Mitch Albom

Yes, it may seem unfair to give an award to a novel that’s already been named one of the five worst books of 2006 by Entertainment Weekly www.ew.com. Why not spread the embarrassment around? First, because most other bad books aren’t written at a third-grade level, according to the readability statistics on Microsoft Word. (You can learn how to find the grade level of Albom’s and other books, or your own writing, in the Nov. 16 review of For One More Day, “Does Mitch Albom Think He’s Jesus?”, archived with the Nov. 2006 posts.) Second, the bad writing in other books at least makes sense. For One More Day teems with inane lines like: “A funeral is no place for secrets.” At no time do secrets have a more respected – and needed – place than at funerals, where common decency requires us to withhold the truth to avoid causing further pain to the mourners. Bury this one with all those classics of pseudoprofundity like The Bridges of Madison County and Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

And the Grand Prize Winner…

Toxic Bachelors by Danielle Steel

C’mon, you’re probably saying, this one was too easy. Sure, Danielle Steel writes at a fourth-grade level (technically, grade 4. 8), according to the readability statistics that are part of the spell-checker on Microsoft Word. But don’t we all know how bad her writing is? Not if you haven’t read Toxic Bachelors. You may not be surprised to hear that this novel has plenty of unintentionally comic lines like: “‘Yes,’ he said succinctly.” But it’s worse than you think.

Nobody expects social realism from Steel, but it’s still shocking to find Jews portrayed as monsters in this novel. Toxic Bachelors is about three men single men, each of whom represents a spiritual as well as social type. Charlie is WASP-y, Gray makes a religion of art, and Adam is Jewish. Guess which one has a weak father, a mother who is “a nagging bitch” and a spoiled sister? That’s right, Adam. His parents are cruel enough to make the Portnoys look like candidates for a lifetime achievement award from Parents magazine. And he has a special contempt for a sister who committed the ultimate sin: “She had never done anything with her life except get married and have children.”

Steel gets away with this because most critics have written her off and no longer review her. Why review somebody, the thinking goes, who writes only mindless romances? Toxic Bachelors presents an answer: If nobody holds her accountable, she’ll keep serving up nasty stereotypes, masquerading as a fairy tale.

All I can say is bravo. I absolutely agree and hope to the highest literary powers in the library heavens that Mitch Albom’s fingers swell up and go numb whenever he comes within fifteen feet of a keyboard.

Cool Stuff, Writers and Authors