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

"I'm a sucker for a short-haired girl with a pretty smile,

She gots to have ideas, yeah, and she gots to have style."

posted by chris  # 5:43 PM 1 comments

Notes on Rouge Wave @ Bowery Ballroom. All grammar and song title mistakes entirely the fault of the Rock and Roll music.

BIRD
"Geriatric at twenty." Slow and calculated for proper impact, like the slow reveal of the third act. Stop start refrain like waves meet shore. Stop when it should, stops when you want it to go on for hours.

SEASICK
Rockabilly riffs begging for a handclap. Breaks into pop chords between verses, showing it's underbelly. And oh christ, the breakdown. Into beachboys and back again.

KICKING MY HEART OUT
Marches in on bass line, toys with exploding into something entirely different. Bends over the middle like valentine's day gymnastics. Singing along by the second half, making up the words as you go along. "If music is my lover, than you are just a tease," and the moment never comes.

POSTAGE
Good-bye by weeks old letter. Sweet to sour and back again. More tricks than Cracker and mover clever than a gaggle of Refreshments with none of the drinking problems.

Okay. Maybe some.

SEWN UP
Chase music from the dumbest, greatest years of your life. Sneering at your future on the opposite side of the street. Waiting for the wrong sort of girl to waste the rest of the day with. Summer at Candice's house. "I'm sewn up and waiting on you." That's exactly right.

EVERY MOMENT

STOMPSTOMPSTOMPSTOMP burns like teenage love, hits like punching through pictures and the drywall behind them. Spinning on "I used to think about you and me forever." Triumph in knowing better, pangs at remembering ignorance.

NOURISHMENT
The rawk. Driving music for the sake of driving. Words fail like memory, disolving down to ah-Ohs between mispent nights. Good-bye and good luck, you sad little boozer.

ENDLESS
Echoed lyrics like pushpins on an indie girl's wall. Rolls like a carnival ride, stops like first love.

ON A PLAIN
Pisses all over pretty dead Kurt with a grin and swagger. Back up vocals have more sex than any awkward Seattle mall rat. Nirvana's music as it was meant to be: not for the cynical, not for the teen diarists, a love letter to the Eels and Convention knocked on it's ear.

And yes, everyone covers Nirvana. But no one - exception of Cibo Matto - comes close. When you can fill a volkswagon with people that do it with such care and obvious love while at the same time ripping it's guts out to replace them with crushed velvet interior, you come back and fucking talk to me.

LOVES LOST
Ray gun guitar over high hats before coming out the door like storms breaking. Scribbling letters on bar napkins for all the pretty faces of the last ten odd years before using them as kindling to burn down all your familiar couple places. Closure with war drums.

10 to 1
Guitars chopped into splinters. Keyboards like post-coitus breaths. Us against them triumphalist pop running on maching gun drumming only to fall over and, gloriously, collapse.

posted by chris  # 12:16 AM 0 comments

Sitting in a scrap of park in the West Village, just breathing. trying to will my arms and legs to stop feeling like vapor trails look. The trouble with momentum is slowing down and starting back again. Cigarettes help, lending focus and rhythm to the rest of it. Or so I tell myself.

There's a comics site interested in the column idea mentioned a few posts down; once again the genius of drunk meetings shines through. I'm avoiding saying more out of fear of jinxing myself, really. All my susperstitions I made up just now. Fliers for Submissions to THE STRANGER NYC will hit the town soon, "soon" being when I have a chance to walk around and tape them up. I'll put the text of the one I wrote here soon with the rest of the information.

The shoot, or my part of it, is finished. David Ellis used his go at painting to go all old Japanese cloud - slash - wall mural freestyle, or something better than the words I can come up with. It's hard to describe what I've seen this last week, from the artist's work to the rough cuts to Paul's bit part as janitor turned stop motion performance piece. Those of you with magic television boxes keep an eye out for Labor Day.

Real jobs start now, as the last of the theft-scheme-caper-heist plan unfolds. Back to staying alive and writing in the dark, gulping down coffee and cigarettes on midnight walks to keep my head straight.

posted by chris  # 3:54 PM 0 comments

It's spitting outside, it's trying; the storm was outside the studio today when filming finally wrapped and followed me and the F train back to the island. Now it's just waiting for rush of humidity being sucked up before the storm breaks, giving us all a break from the last few days of pushing through air to walk and the best showers rendered null and void just by stepping outside.

Someone on my street is leaving books outside, stacking them neatly along a wondow sill for anyone to take home. I've adopted four so far. One from nineteen-seventy about surviving the future shock of an ever-changing world, one on WW2 spies from both sides of the fence, one on ghost photography and another dissecting popular expressions for their meanings. This is the best way to find things, and the reason karma-as-selling-point Strand Books with its miles and miles of used volumes works so well: not knowing what you need till it finds you by accident, patiently gathering dust and waiting for you to look the right way.

Every few days, the make-shift shelf refills, and by morning it's empty again. To small, too precious to question; it's just something that happens.

I'm spending the day part of this week ina warehouse turned studio, sitting in the shadow of a fourteen foot tall Absolut Vodka bottle. A woman crawls around it with a ladder and paintbrush, covering it in pinks reds, white lines to make the colors crystal shaped and costume jewelry pretty while a camera snaps pictures every ten seconds and feeds them into a laptop. On the screen I'm babysitting, Maya looks lilliputian, a pocket-sized graphitti kid defacing another poster ad glued to a wall on Bowery. Watching the bottle covered and then cleaned is like a slow motion coin trick that smashes depth perception in two over your head. And it's completely analog, no digital trickery involved except for superimposing the hand-painted effects the other team is working on over our bottle. I watch the laptop and swap stories with the rep from Stockholm over cigarettes and smile a lot for fear of someone realize I really have no business being there and taking full advantage of their catering. Man oh man, let me always say yes.

Flowers and camera film are rediculously cheap here: I picked up two packs of black and white Kodak Proffessional for eight bucks last night and started shooting with my Fed 5 again. At least one roll is going to be sacrificed to the God of Remembering as I relearn the f-stops and timer settings, but I can afford good film for the first time in a while in a city built to be seen from odd angles. Results as they come.

And here's the rain. Going to flip through the poetry book I'm meant to be reviewing for THE STRANGER NYC, pour a drink and put on REM's "Monster." Nice night for knowing what you want without the first clue of how to get it or what it actually is.

posted by chris  # 12:46 AM 0 comments

Lots to talk about, like the insane run around Manhattan that left me with a handful of jobs to pick from and has me sitting on a sound stage opposite a fourteen foot tall Absolut Vodka bottle at present. I'll go into it more when I can get the events in order and on paper in a way I'm happy with.

Fuck it, let's do this now: Thursday was saying yes to everything, hitting a groove in the city and not skipping once. The lessons of the last two months met with a dozen loose ends to produce day jobs I actually want to cover rent and food and a gig baby sitting a laptop on a commercial shoot for the rest of this week. It was scooping Strummer Effect directly into the vein; a broad daylight bankrobbery cementing everything I had hoped for in moving. This is real life, this is what I do; this is just a radio song.

Bringing us up to last night, and a real-time email talk about the recent update to Ninth Art and the place of online commentary on comic books and culture. The question was raised, what would I talk about if given the column space? Say something bi-monthly, or even weekly?

Okay, then: I'd want to do something on what works in comics that doesn't - or at least not to the same extent - in other mediums. Take a maximum of five titles from the week's new books and tear them apart in search of the elements that keep me reading and could be used as bait to get new readers in. Joe Casey summed up the sort of thing I'm looking for in this week's Basement Tapes: Comics have more tricks up its sleeve than movies, meaning even when the summer blockbusters catch up there's a way to distance ourselves again. Film is bound bycertain laws - physics, for one, and in the case of special effects trickery, audience-demanded realism - that sequential art just strolls past. I would do something that looks for proof of the Harvey Pekar line about comics being just words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures. so why not prove it?

My case was clearer last night, when there were drinks and smoking involved, but I digress. The reply comes back, across the ether and the ocean: not bad, why not pitch it? Attached to a list of comics webzines actively seeking contributors.

Bastard. Now I'm walking around with this homeless idea and half of the first installment in note form, and I have to either do something with it or forget the thing entirely. I'm mailing you snakes instead of CDs, next time. Big poisonous snakes.

Something to come back to later, after I upgrade to a proper keyboard and the job things have a chance to settle into patterns.

posted by chris  # 7:24 PM 0 comments