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

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