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

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