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

Courtesy of The Wayback Machine, I present Me, circa 2002-03.

Off Camera was the result of two fairly major events happening within a few months of each other: namely, getting properly broken up with for the first time and getting over it, and being introduced to the work of Warren Ellis. The first pushed me further in to music, and then into wanting to write about it, and then wanting to write about everything; the second introduced me to the then-modern shape and potential of the internet as a space to write in. There is a lot more that could be said about both, but the blogosphere is already choked with essays on exes and Ellis' particular influence on the unintiated, and I don't see any real reason to add to them. Suffice to say that if it weren't cranky old Englishman comics writer and a (as of four years ago) beautiful-if-sorta-crazy girl, I probably wouldn't be as far along as I am now.

The high-concept pitch behind Off Camera was "life when you aren't looking," and that's more or less what it ended up being. Updated every Wednesday except for when it wasn't, I started the site as an excuse to keep me writing and to start developing a voice of my own. Over the course of the just-shy-of-a-year run the content and direction of the site wandered across the board, completely at the whim of whatever I was trying to work out for myself that week. There were a lot of ideas growing up in public, and more than a few times it got me gently slapped on the nose by older readers. What started as a writing project turned into something of a Thing - through word of mouth the subscription list grew to nearly three thousand members, and my ability to perform collapsed under the pressure I put on myself measure up each week. It sounds silly, but hey, let's see you keep it up in front of an audience of thousands of strangers when you're still just learning the rhythms.

So it ended, and I let the site payments lapse as I'm bad with money and it was set up to come directly out of an account that didn't exist any more, and that was that. Except here's a chunk of it, tucked away on the internet like a dark secret, far more embarassing than a dozen of Wes Craven's hook-wielding fishermen. I considered throwing it over on the side bar, but then figured no, actually, I don't need to see this every day. While nice to know for sentimental reasons that a year's worth of work isn't totally gone, the lessons that came along with Off Camera have already been learned or ignored, for better or worse, and I've long since moved on. Still, though, some of you are running out of things to make fun of me for.

Most of them aren't very good. All of them are dated, wearing their Ellis-isms and dumb kid logic on their sleeves like a flying W Weezer patch. Only one of them, I don't mind saying now, is completely made up, and even that might have moments of truth here and there. None of them are truly representative of what I consider my current writerly voice, but they do carry that road marker quality of showing the way from nothing to something, and I thnk that earns them a linking, if just this once. Nobody wants to see a tape of their first time played over and over, after all.

So this was Off Camera. Or, put another way, it was me.

Opening Remarks
Where Your Eyes Don't go
Pave Paradise
Just Watch The Fireworks
Revolution Behind My Eyes
Telling Stories
We Apologize For the Inconvenience
Last of the Rocket Men
A Night Out

posted by chris  # 2:33 PM 4 comments

Finally got around to pulling the pictures of Bondphone 2.0. See also the handy sidebar to your right, linking to everything online that I've written and can think of. Mostly everything.

posted by chris  # 11:04 PM 0 comments

This was started weeks ago - it's actually beautiful outside - but I finally got around to finishing it today. There's a clear break before the end, between where I didn't know how to finish it and put it down and where I decided that didn't matter and wrapped it up any way, but I like it for the most part. The end trips over its own feet a bit, reaching further and further out for images, but until that home trepanation kit gets here I'm afraid you'll have to chalk that up as my quirky style.)

It's raining, a mix of spit, drizzle, and torrent that changes directions on whim to work around umbrellas and put out the cigarettes of those still bothering. So, a bookstore.

I haven't been to Strand since they reorganized and opened the top floor to catch the overspill of art books (being a block from SVA and having a staff that just can't say no has made them the orphanage nearest the whore houses, so to speak) and an attempt at a proper Kid's Section. My first visit to the store was in the last throes of what some one, somewhere is no doubt calling the Good Ol' Days: the middle of Summer with no air conditioning, no lighting, no room to spread their dozens of lifetimes worth of books out over and the overwhelming sense that water was leaking, even on bone-dry days. The zen bookstore was still wild, then, the sort of place you went in looking for one specific thing only to find, after an hour spent wandering further and further away from the busy avenue outside, not your one particular book but a stack of things you can no longer live without. And that was if you were lucky. The rest, the tourists and jerks, the children and part-time perverts looking for a fourth-hand Marquis de Sade volume were sent stumbling out again into the too-bright noon day light, feeling mind-stomped and mugged. Real time ideaspace, with the same haunted air of the adult section of a local library when you're five and forbidden to go.

But now there are maps, and grids, and an air conditioner; and a sea of florescence greets you when looking out from the mezzanine at that strange bit of air that is both the floor of the upstairs and the ceiling for the ground level. It has the trappings of a proper warehouse-turned-bookstore, like the monsters that used to hunch over the outskirts of Boaz, the outlet store paradise in Alabama. There is a proper staff, not just a collection of strange old men and hollow-eyed children moving like pages caught in a breeze. From standing just inside the door, it looks like the sort of bookstore that all good little Barnes and Noble's want to grow up to be. Having moved to New York just in time to witness the last days and fall of several grand old institutions, the trappings of organization and customer service feel like death knells, like finding the childhood friend you used to shoot off fireworks with and at now drives a sedan and votes Republican. The appeal of Strand was always its terror, the lost-at-sea realization that runs from head to toe at first sight of those paper and print columns reaching to the heavens. It was the feeling that you were sneaking, that you weren't buying books but making off with them, plucking lost tomes from some decrepit, ancient thing's secret library. This helpful grid, these young kids in thick black-rimmed glasses that know exactly where the literary theory section is, it all smacks of grown-up clothes and a proper bed time.

Note to self: If you're going to be wrong, at least do it in a bookstore. Admitting your mistake is one thing, but there's something nice about knowing you could admit it in grammatically-perfect French, if you really wanted.

The suit-and-tie framework that's been laid over Strand hasn't robbed the store of its fangs, but sharpened them. I didn't realize how wrong my assumption was until, three hours and a stack of strange books later, I'm still wandering, still lost, still amazed. Where by accident or design (and even then there's a question of who's design, the owner's or the store's), the chaos that was Strand has been refined into something all the more alluring and dangerous. At first glance it appears the challenge - hell, the art form - of throwing yourself against the store, willing to accept what ever it saw fit to give you has been civilized into the sort of shopping experience we're more accustomed to: that is, quick, clean, and devoid of any appreciation for the building you are in or the contents of its shelves. It isn't until you're inside, until you've sat down to dinner and tried the wine, as it were, that mess you're now in presents itself. Strand feels more organic than ever, a venus flytrap smelling of yellowing paper as opposed to the tangled mass of ivy it was, for the sake of keeping a shaky metaphor clinging to the tracks. The anxiety of before is just as present, only far more subtle, raising the bar from "news reports of kidnappings" to "cold hand on the back of your neck in the dark." Lacking the creepy old man of our childhood library fears, Strand has become its own ghost.

Lost in the store, in the rain, just me and a few thousand pages of strange words. Just haunted and haunting.

posted by chris  # 3:17 PM 0 comments

I'm at Alt, propping up the counter when the I notice my phone's ringing. It stops as I pick it up, and the missed call carries Dad's name and cellphone. Some one's dead, obviously.

I'm all ready to launch in to my speech about how yes, he's my grandfather, but he's also a disgusting wreck of an alcoholic who's stabbed our family in the neck any time we needed him and no, no, I'm not coming to the funeral but is there maybe a place I can send flowers to? when he tells me he's gotten married. Just then, just now, this exact minute only adjusted back an hour due to the time zone difference. I and my younger brothers are the proud recipients of four step siblings, ranging in age from just barely teenage, to old enough to draft, to old enough to be me. Instant family, just add priest, apparently.

Him and The Lady (I never think to ask her name, he never bothers to mention it) have known each other for years, but only started seeing each other last December. It was something they'd talked about and even started planning, when they decided to hell with fancy dresses and bell choirs, let's rock this shit in a park. So they called family and a few friends, and my youngest brother went straight from football practice, still wearing his gear, and they were married as the wind picked up and the sun went down.

There's a pause, just enough space for a breath or two, where every dumb, impulsive thing I've done, every wasted dime on crap I don't actually need or want, every misplaced remark and bad relationship I've been stuck in for saying the wrong thing, they all stand up like metal fillings and point down the invisible phone line to true magnetic North, who at that moment is standing in the parking lot of a buffet-style restaurant with room and plates enough for a gaggle of newly-related kids to tell me the good news.

Congratulations, I stutter, and an hour after putting down the phone, I'm still wondering where my nice August night went.

posted by chris  # 8:15 PM 0 comments

Boredom with the blog's look has at last turned into sickness, and the resulting hospital stay sees the old oh-so-simple layout replaced with the slightly more complicated (this one has a table!) design I whipped up for Anodyne. As for the comics site that never was, Anodyne has gone quitely into that dark night, a victim of reasoning that anything I have to say there is just as easily said here. And besides, if there's anything sillier than having a blog, it's having another one.

Updates coming, etc, etc.

posted by chris  # 12:51 AM 0 comments