B O N D P H O N E.
Words and pictures by Chris Lamb.

This city is pretty in the rain, reacting like water from the sky is a new idea. Cute indie girls with their faces turned up to meet the weather as their boyfriends try to kiss them; herds of nice suits under black umbrellas cramming into taxis, mutering about morning meetings with Johnson and whether they're fit enough for the marathon. Steam comes off the flooding streets like cold water on a skillet and for a moment there's a chance that this time will see it all washed clean. We'll wake up tomorrow to streets-turned-canals and a second chance.

Dry clothes and dark and stormies now. Tom Waits coming through shitty speakers like a fallen angel telling me dirty stories over stolen cigarettes. Good night by every meaning.

posted by chris  # 2:14 AM 1 comments

Tomorrow I stitch up the neccessary-for-survival second job at Whole Foods, a grocery store in Chelsea whose produce section has a sharper design sense than most shoe ad campaigns. At some point I'm supposed to get a poetry book from Lisa to review for THE STRANGER NYC and spit keywords and numbers at her about the ad kit I'm cobbling together for the magazine.

I didn't know I knew how to build an ad kit.

The promise of financial stability gives everything else something to run on. I'm back to filling bondphone with notes towards dozen thing and jotting first lines of stories on anything that will hold ink. Time to do all the things I'm wanting now will open up eventually, and if not, we'll push on without it. And talk like British royalty. Oh yes.

Amazing what happens when you stop dicking around talking about what you want to do and, y'know, do it.

Listening to Portishead now, so it's a lucky thing I've got cigarettes and whiskey within arm's reach. "Dummy" held my hand on the plane home from San Francisco last December, and hearing it always feels like the middle of the night at 30,000 feet and 400+ mph, trying to sleep over an engine the size of my bedroom. The best bit of sci-fi noir stories is how the dive bar lounge singer never changes; she's always just as smoke stained and razor cool as her detective flick ancestor. Portishead dusts off the old poses and empty words, wraps them around a drop beat and wears them on stage shining like a borrowed cocktail dress. Poor little doomed girl in her mother's make-up, tracing your lips with one finger while the other hand slides a knife between your ribs.

"I'm gonna to give my heart away, leave it for the other girls to play." Exactly. Exactly.

posted by chris  # 12:05 AM 0 comments

Just to get this out of my head:

The street wars are coming to an end in shattered ruins of Manhattan Remains. The future leaders of both sides want an end to four generations of fighting that have left their island city a burned out husk, cut off from the rest of the country by government mandate and a river-turned-Berlin Wall. Getting it means turning on their families and gods: the bitter old men of Non and the electric deity in a bottle of the New Word.

Gangs of motor cycle swordsmen against door-to-door religious zealots in matching white shirts and ties on rollerblades. Gunplay and love amidst the fractured island chain that was Manhattan and the bits that have already sunk. A standoff at the end of the world over a people and place too far dead to make it worthwhile. The devil in God's details and the last stand of triumphalism in a kiss. The most horrible bar fight in history ends four generations later in blood on the pavement and a smile through missing teeth.

Please, somebody pay me to write this.

(copyright chris lamb, 2004)

posted by chris  # 2:44 AM 0 comments

Run on chemicals today, trying to work over the articial push of more caffiene than probably healthy. The zombie feeling of heavy liquid pushing through veins keeps my hands moving over keys and not much else. Exhausted and reeling with a dozen or so new things banging around my head- I think the plan to come to New York to New York and work is actually happening, rude reintroduction to 6:30 in the morning and all.

---

Gary Taylor points out the faults and glories of modern British theatre just when I can use the cheat sheet, neverminding the article is from last FEBUARY. Mostly excellent dissection of the danger in saying you could drop in to any culture and get a clear picture its political mood based on its theatre when your theatre has given up imagination for what works easiest, telling awkward stories about people not having sex. Taylor drifts from the point a few times, but nails the whole thing in the last two lines, making it clear that most of British theatre has as good a clue about its countries political feeling as your Mom does about your Che shirt from college.

The politics doesn't interest me; after a time it becomes so much preaching to the choir. The presentation does. Micheal Frayn's use of railway imagery in "Democracy" is worth it's weight in gold for the argument that manslaughter requires a mind governing the act, and in the corrupt train system (or the bloated corporate entity of your choosing) no such controlling mind exists. It's human potential in negative, greed and the pursuit of power reaching the point where thousands are left dead and there's no one to point the finger at, just the small pettiness of a crowd. To go into the added bonus of turning a symbol of power (the locomotive) on its ear, making it representative of a shaky bad idea thundering towards disaster would take a whole other post I don't feel like writing.

"Little Triggers" is a mess of broadcasted problems, the same as any bad relationship is to the peopl aren't in it. A meeting between a woman and the Other Man in her life that teeter-totters between cheap shots and genuine care, it started life as a clever idea and found its feet with a friend describing her relationship as complicated, in the same way that everything is. The connotations of a statement like that reverberate like church bells on New Year's: how much of the complication in relationships comes from not wanting to concede? He wants this, she wants that, so one sweeps the conflict of the other under the rug for the sake of staying together. How much drama is self-inflicted, takenon for the way your sheets smell in the morning or looks over coffee? What are you willing to do to keep from conceding this just isn't working?

First draft or not, there's too much in the finished pages that feels heavy-handed, to the point of putting a neon sign over the actors reading DANGER WILL ROBINSON. Notes for when I go back to them: the strained conversation of a relationship on its last legs is a thousand times more powerful than a witty barb. Realize how much direct abuse your characters will realistically take and substitute accordingly.

---

There's a hypothetical job thing hypothetically involving the sort of writing I've hypothetically wanted to do for two hypothetical years or so. Most of it depends on an email tomorrow when I'm a little more in control of the shit coming out my mouth.

posted by chris  # 12:40 AM 0 comments

Pulp's "Different Class" could have saved me a lot of trouble.

I never got into Pulp during their golden age. At the time, they were that English band that wasn't the Stone Roses, or Blur, or Radiohead, or any of the anthem rock imports making up the bulk of Britian's contribution to American Alt-rock radio. They were that group Catherine Moon loved and wrote stories like; the reason she talked like someone in two places at once with twice the experience of her age. I get that now. She was someone who knew how to listen and dissect having the feeling of being in love and poor and alive beamed at her via Jarvis Cocker's hopeful romanticism. So instead of listening to her and picking up "This is Hardcore" and "Different Class" when we found them classing up a used record bin, I started seeing Jenni and hanging around Susie and went with Blur. Not a regret, just two ways of getting roughly the same place.

'Common People' is introduction to class warfare without the easy key of race, religion, or sex. Rich Girl slums it with Poor Boy, but instead of going the route of Disney Animated it turns into a bitter litany against her (mostly) unconscious condescension and trust fund. It's every dirty look or flicked cigarette at the crowds of NoHo Sex and the City gangs making out with East Village gutter trash and throwing money at the walls to see it stick. What starts as a wink-and-grin tour with hopes of a few free drinks and a one-nighter at the end becomes culture shock, the original attraction lost in translation from daddy's money to pidgin english. Then, it would have been an early warning. Now it's every baffled look at choosing between cigarettes and food and carrying my wallet just out of habit.

I needed 'Disco 2000' five years ago like a long talk with someone older and wiser. The never-ending crush with full romantic comedy trappings that gets fumbled too early or too late, Cocker's shameless confessional is me and half my friends then, pining over our own person The Girl or Guy who never had a reason to suspect. Every twist of the story makes me smile or cringe along, knowing I've got my own parrallel war wounds. His "I never knew you'd get married; I would be living here on my own on that damp and lonely Thursday years ago" to the intrusion of reality in to my own personal Happily Ever After that introduced me to drinking; my still stopping over certain songs to his "We never did it, but I often thought of it."

posted by chris  # 2:09 PM 0 comments

Because I can't go long without new things, becuase I can't afford proper albums, a mix:

Starlight Mints - 'The Twilight Showdown'
Beck's "Odelay!" gave us cool without care, the aloof smooth of lounge in surf rock's clothes playing off to the side at the great parties you'll never be invited to. Starlight Mints take the same tools but with a smile, teaching the art of owning a room you've no right being in. It's dressing exhausted and crumpled, like this is your third or fourth event of the night to cover up not knowing how to tie a tie. It's Steranko spy story and Old West standoffs past their point of relevance. It's pop music, so stop asking questions.

Ex Models - 'Girlfriend Is Worse'
"I lost my place in your line of vision." Ex Models break down all over the stage, picking up the point and dropping it again between cannon fire drums and guitars waiting for their big solo. It doesn't come. After two minutes as your best friend on his worst night with the audience just wrapping 'round their fingers, they collapse in an unceremonious heap, leaving you to guess if it was intentional or not.

Radio 4 - 'Dance To The Underground'
When Pitchfork crowned The Rapture's "Echoes" best of 2003, it introduced a phrase to the (sigh...) music blogosphere hovering over their every word in a desperate hope of writing for the cool kid's table: "Teaching the Indie kids to dance." as if the shoegazers of the world would suddenly cast down their Buddy Holly frames and Urban Outfitter bags, stop holding up club walls and take the dance floor with a rhythmic fevore heretofore unknown because of someone shouting "HOUSE OF! JEALOUS LOVERS!" over old dance sensibilities with a modern coat of paint.

"Teaching the Indie kids to dance" makes me want to set the entire East Village on fire. Twice.

Anyway, of the resulting glut of electroclash bands to flood the market, Radio 4 stand out as one of the few to not really give a fuck. International Noice Conspiracy's smokey-shouted lyrics without the dodgy politics and a beat-guitar hook that's sexier than the first three girls to show up at your next party. There's no lesson here, nothing to go away with, just infectious dance demanding you move for once. Are you taking notes, Jet? You aren't, are you?

The Fever - 'Ladyfingers'
More of the same, with an odd floater of old-school rock chords and brit-pop lyrics over the mix. Nothing wrong with that.

Hot Hot Heat - 'Get In Or Get Out'
There's no winners or losers, just different teams. You see that, don't you?

Moving Units - 'I Am'
Not as good as when they opened for Blur in Atlanta, but still. Dancing to put off when the lights come up and it's just strangers staring awkwardly. Dancing to put off tomorrow and everything coming with it.

TV On The Radio - 'Staring At The Sun'
Four part harmonies over art school prog rock, building up to a moment that's never coming. What the lads lack in shaving ability, they make up for with condient beauty. The Beach Boys forced to grow up in the Inner City as opposed to sun-bleached suburbs.

Clinic - 'Porno'
Like the name implies: confusing and bored-sounding as any skin flick with every moan and whisper carefully rehearsed and group tested. Takes the smoky romance of Portishead and snaps it in two over its knee.

Spoon - 'The Way We Get By'
Teenage love on self destruct as bar room ditty via player piano. Takes all the importance of that time period and boils it down to story-over-drinks fodder, because Spoon understands.

AC Newman - 'Miracle Drug'
Showing more control over his abilities than on either New Pornographers records, Newman proves there's life without Neko Case by drilling into your skull and fucking staying there. Two or three simultaneous beats before the handclaps bother to show up with lyrics that don't make sense but still work so well. Dear God, get him out of me.

Pretty Girls Make Graves - 'Speakers Push Air'
The importance of your first important record. "Do you remember when you couldn't put it away?" over and over as ray gun guitars fill your entire world. As over the top sincere as the Replacement's 'Alex Chilton' and working for all the same reasons.

Rainer Maria - Ears Ring'
Nevermind the guitar hooks, or the fact that 90% of the rest of their output is horrible emoting garbage desguised as clever noise. After two and half minutes of beating around the obvious and stupid, blind hope, it all comes down to the sweeping realizationfilling the last full minute of song. Hits between the eyes like silence on the other end of the phone.

Kenna - 'Freetime'
A Fuck Off you can dance to.

AC Newman - 'The Town Halo'
Breaking my own rule about repeating artists on a mix, but hey. 'Jaws' cellos designed to tear down music halls over shout-sung accusations of pretty boy self importance. Important as learning to fall properly.

Beulah - 'If We Can Land A Man On The Moon Surely I Can Win Your Heart'
All the dumb promises of crushing hard none of the shame. If the title alone doesn't win you over, we're going to have trouble talking from now on.

posted by chris  # 2:25 AM 0 comments

Worry #1 is covered, mostly: as of today I'm afternoon supervisor of New World Coffee. I've never even looked at a coffee shop from the other side of the counter, but I like telling people what to do. This will work fine.

The pay is kind of...not...good, but it's money, and it's a start. And now I can focus on getting a foot in the door with publishers for freelance work as opposed to running all over Manhattan and Brooklyn looking somebody to give me money for doing something. I walked out of filling out the paperwork and felt the cool blue panic fall back. Now it's Bushmill's and Blur, putting words in new order while the ball in my stomach continues to unwind.

posted by chris  # 10:15 PM 0 comments

Summer's going tp do my head in.

May's soundtrack was NEW ADVENTURES IN HI-FI on repeat through headphones till my ears crackled and rang in my sleep. Lots of nights driving home from Finnegan's or somewhere else with the windows down, letting the wind eat up the last cigarette of the day and shouting along to 'Bittersweet Me.' Laying on the floor with 'Electrolite' playing over and over again, waiting for the sky to come down. It was the right record for the mood; songs born in transit and still about wanting to be somewhere else. A claustrophobic's love letter to any where but here.

But then it was summer, and I was in New York, and the only song still speaking to me was 'Be Mine.' Like several tracks on NEW ADVENTURES, it works by adding cinematic touches to stripped down pop structure (see 'E-Bow The Letter' with it's wandering monolouge looking back on a teenage crush that meant everything but left nothing more permanent than the memory of it's weight Or 'Electrolite,' a letter filled with all the reassurances and longing of any relationship with a measure of distance involved, ending with Stipe abandoning it mid sentence to just go see her). But there's triumph here that most of the others are lacking, if not an assured victory then at least glorious defeat. Where other songs are self-doubting or reflective, unsure about what happens next or just not wanting to admit it, 'Be Mine' is standing in the rain, pulling words out of the air and meaning everyone, taking the heart from your sleeve to offer it without regret. Caling it a love song diminishes it's power - 'Be Mine' is perhaps THE love song, capturing as many sides as possible of the emotion in cold blooded clarity. It's the realization of true love in the way so many think BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S is, it's the dumb headswimminess of your favorite crush and the shimmer cutting through your stomach over the girl that just passed by. You love it for filling all the holes in your head. You hate Stipe for already saying it all back in '96.

So this is a pop summer, and that's no bad thing. After 'Be Mine' there was Bishop Allen at Mercury Lounge opening their set with 'Empire City' like 80's Cusack aiming a boombox at the bedroom window of the world. Walking around with Mike Doughty's 'Sunken Eyed Girl' pushing through my veins, only not knowing the words and just having the feeling of it sticking to my brain like napalm. My Favoritels 'Burning Hearts' coming back into my life in all it's post-apocalyptic glory, love at themoment the bomb hits. Belle and Sebastian's 'Seeing Other People' anda dozen others that keep my head from feeling properly attached. I've been thinking about pop music a lot over the last month; specifically, what makes it work and how well those rules play with real life. Sort of the Strummer Effect trimmed down to three and a half minutes. And like the SE, it will most likely come down to how well it works with girls.

Past three in the morning now and bed calls - the impromptu review above makes it clear I'm in no state to handle communication tools. More on this later, though, with dissection results posted in due time.

posted by chris  # 3:23 AM 0 comments

little triggers.
Benjones' lent me David Ives' ALL IN THE TIMING. Between that and a lackluster performance of Matt Freeman's THE GREAT ESCAPE (which I'm glad of for totally selfish reasons, since it let me focus on the dialouge by thinking of it as a good reading of an amazing script), I think I know what I'm doing with this play thing. I'm four pages in, with another six to go depending on how well the "one page equals one minute" rule holds. There's still the editing and ripping apart process that happens before anything of mine sees daylight, but for now I'm just happy to be moving forward.

The problem I'm hitting so far is sort of a form vs. Function issue: I'm writing it for Third Man Productions Barhoppers series, and it isn't a very happy story. People don't go to bars to see a play in the first place, and they sure as hell aren't going to be depressed, which means working a lot of dark humor in without sacrificing the overall story. The trick seems to be tweaking my characters upa few notches to sarcastic assholes. Which, now that I've got them on paper and talking, seems to be the direction they were heading anyway.

The only rule of playwriting I really stopped to learn was that if there's a gun in the first act, it has to go off by the third. With LITTLE TRIGGERS (name subject to change, if any of you have any better ideas), I'm trying pull off that same build up of tension but with my characters. Girl shows up late for drinks with guy, guy's mad because she was with her husband. Girl doesn't know what she wants, guy's growing more and more jealous and wants her to pick one or the other. The gun isn't important, the explosion is.

I'm playing with the idea of having a gun present on the table, obvious to the audience but invisible to the actors till the end. Lots of traps that way, like coming off to precious or the gimmick over taking the story. I've got two months to work it though, so.

stumbling after.
STUMBLING AFTER is drinks and cigarettes and talking about girls. It's the stupid shit we do for other people, the loss of the difference between "in love" and the real thing. Reaching for something out of your grasp is something I come back to a lot, mostly because I haven't really worked it out for myself yet. I know my limits but I don't care; I make stupid promises that sometimes go off in my face. This is two months told in bits the way memory comes back the morning after, someone trying to keep up with a girl not just out of his league but playing an entirely different sport.

Gosh, that sounds important.

The biggest problem I'm having now is execution, as usual. I need to work on getting over my fuck-I'm-clever impulses faster so I can get on with just telling the damn story.

the stranger nyc.
I went through the test balloon first issue with a black pen and came out with four pages of notes towards massive changes. I showed up late and a little drunk Friday to meet with Frank at Kate's, smelling like dust and sweat from fighting Peter's air conditioner and muttering something about lovely strangers with gin 'n' tonics. And now I'm handling submissions, copy editing, and design layout for issue two.

I don't understand how things work. I never shot through the axis of college and career because I couldn't afford to, or I was lazy, or something about it never jived with me. I started Off Camera instead. I pitched to Bleedmusic and stuck around for the launch of New Noise. Somewhere along the way I'm sure there's a proffessional side to all this, complete with memos and teleconfrences and backstabbings that I can't keep ducking forever. In the meantime there's this thing, and the difference between wanting to and actually doing it apparently is just a matter of wording.

Ameliah asked how I got where to be where I am right now - New York from Huntsville, the magazine, etc - and I almost had to draw a map on the kitchen counter. I don't know. I taught myself to say yes and not fall down so much. I started talking and after a while, people started listening.

TSNYC #2 is going to be a hundred pages of words and full color photos, a slab of new culture for less than a McDonald's value meal. Give us two months and me not fucking up too terribly.

...
And when the sun goes down and the traffic slows to a trickle, when there's nothing on the street but me and a headful of crush songs, none of it matters. There's the slow panic need of a day job, the drama walked out of halfway through the second act on the opposite end of the country. There's the bullshit print turf war that's already building with a release date yet to be announced. None of it is real, none of it matters. Street light hits pavement, turning it gold as the Undertones drift out of a bar. Teenage kicks last all through the night.

posted by chris  # 11:33 PM 0 comments

THE LIGHTS OF THREE THIRTY IN THE MORNING.

These pictures don't get bigger with clicking. Go here for some that do.

posted by chris  # 5:55 PM 0 comments

TELEPHONE CALL FROM ISTANBUL.

This is something that happens: silence on the telephone for minutes disguised as hours, broken only by the crackle hiss of so-so connection stretched over a thousand miles. And yeah, it sucks; there are a dozen things you feel like saying but even the ones you mean don't fit, so you um uh around the obvious until one of you comes up with an excuse to hang up. It's a shame and a loss, something in you shudders at the acknowledgement and you move on. The operation was a success but the patient diedj people ask me if the transition between Huntsville and here was hard and I say no, but I'm starting to understand the word "transplant" now.

I'm writing a play. A one act, maybe ten minutes long, but still a play, something real people might act out in front of a real audience. After weeks of swinging and missing I think I know what I'm doing again. Writing is like possession: when it works, when the characters start talking, when you remember how to give yourself over as a vessel; just as scary and twice as fun. Gimme gimme gimme words.

I'm putting something together for The Stranger, something short and sweet about playing out of your league. Prose fiction is hard to get back into, and I haven't bothered since NaNoWriMo last November. I once asked Steven Page how much of his songs were true, and he gave me some of the only advice I've been smart enough to take to heart: blend fiction with truth until not even you know the difference. So a huge chunk of me goes into whatever comes out and I have to get over being embarassed before writing anything worth keeping. Which brings us to another life lesson courtesy of Richard Kadrey: When you can't make the words happen, bleed flowers.

Fahrenheit 911 works better than expected. Moore manages to keep focus while pushing through a nearly endless berth of subject matter, making his case essay style by following each piece from its beginnings up to present times. Most impressive is the editing, flowing from images of heart breaking cruelty softly back to jokes exactly when you need them. While Moore's public persona is farther left and much more of a raving jackass than I feel comfortable aligning myself with, I will always have time for his films and the rational, competent way he gets his point across. I went in a believer and came out galvanized.

Aimee Mann at St. Ann's Warehouse was everything I didn't know I needed. It's easy to forget how many moments of my life are defined by her slow storytelling and biting lyrics until I hear them told back to me with the air of talking over cigarettes outside a bar with an old friend. 'Driving Sideways' is a letter written at three in the morning last Spring. 'Deathly' is just before leaving for New York, all the unsaid bits of a last conversation. 'Stupid Thing' my first real break up and so on and so on. Mann from the perspective of someone older and wiser than you who still hasn't quite learned better. I remember first hearing her years ago, hitting like a message from the future screaming No, it doesn't get any better, so work with what you got. Seeing her live, making stage banter and guarded laughter, it's clear the only people who would qualify her as depressing are those who've already given up.

Three in the morning and I'm walking through the scafolding leading up to ninth and first. She comes around the corner with headphones on, skipping oblivious to the world along with some amazing song and I can't walk any more. A flash of green eyes, a smile to end the world and she's gone; I can't imagine living anywhere else but now.

posted by chris  # 11:19 PM 0 comments