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

I threw this in the sidebar but forgot to actually talk about it, for I am dumb. I have a game online.

When I came on with Pop, they were in the early stages of a game for Cartoon Network's Hi Hi Puffy Ami Yumi Show. It's a decent cartoon, nothing special: the animated adventures of the two girls of Puffy Ami Yumi and their zany tour manager Kaz. They travel the world in their van, bring the rock music, the happy fun rock music, to the people. Hijinks ensue. One of my first jobs was grabbing reference material for the artists and animators to build the game with, which is fancy professional talk for watching all the episodes of the show we had with my hands over the appropriate hot keys to pause and screen capture when something came up. Food, furniture, guitars, the girls and their cats, that sort of thing. Four hours worth of show breaks down to eight thirty minute episodes with three shorts a piece. That's a lot of crazy-go-nuts Japanese pop-punk.

So we made the game and turned it in, and CN said it wasn't fun. Which it wasn't, really - it was too much work for too little reward, and way, way too repetitive. But right as they were, it sent us into a kinda sorta four alarm panic, leaving me with an hour or so to come up with two games based on the elements we had. Those elements being dancing food, a handful of obstacles, backgrounds, and rock music.

This is the one they went with, and despite a production time a little less than half of what it should have been, I think it turned out pretty well. It's fun. It's playable. It's hard when it needs to be. I can live with that, for a start.

posted by chris  # 10:35 PM 0 comments

Last night, in rough order: phone call, whiskey, hip-hop; then the long walk home through almost empty streets to dream about running through the city with a huge chorus just offstage roaring through Simon and Garfunkel's "Cecelia." There. There is some sentence structure for you. I see your crude diagrams of proper form and I laugh at them.

It was the sort of night that reminds me why I'm here at all, though that has less to do with the hip-hop show and more with the phone call and the walk. Wandering in a rough diagonal through the lower West Side's boutiques, everything all lit up and still like ice sculpture. Still buzzing off conversation, even more so than what I just saw on stage. Walking along the edges of conversations and fights, of break ups and couples falling into walls and long, slow crying jags slumped over on the sidewalk. Townsend-leaping to the girl closing her shitty coffee shop, screaming some cookie-cutter punk band's lyrics back at them so loud you can make out every word from outside. The sort of night that makes me wonder if the only purpose of living in New York is to pull more people to the city, if these evenings of getting nailed between the eyes are just the city's way of breathing in and out.

posted by chris  # 9:45 AM 0 comments

Woke up to the first snow of the season Sunday, and now we're living in the days of the Weathermen, where every storm is a potential blizzard and the streets become more dangerous with stray Snow-Melt than they ever were covered in ice. Still, it's better than it was growing up in the South where every heavy grey cloud riding a cold front in is a cause for alarm, emptying the grocery stores and shutting the city down. I remember missing school over the threat of snow, the mere idea of it sending the city into a panic to stock up and seal off against the impending threat of frozen water. I think it flurried. Once.

I love snow, personally. Even the melt days when it's dirty and decomposing under the mix of salt and whatever chemical they use that fucks up the soles of my shoes. Dude, it's snow. I missed the heaviest of last year's snow fall - I was sitting on a plane waiting to take off when it started coming down, and it was all over but the melting by the time I came back. Whatever. Sunday's wasn't much - it felt like about an inch scraping off the hood of an SUV and packing into balls - but it was snow, it was still every where and perfect and - if only for a little while - just enough to shut the city up, leaving every one looking up and astonished.

posted by chris  # 10:18 AM 0 comments

It isn't work without these days; without ever sitting in front of a blank screen, just staring when you could be sleeping, there would be nothing to make you appreciate when the words do come. If there was never any frustration, if dodging cliche was as easy as setting your fingers to the the keys, every one would do it. If it was as easy as all that, you'd never bother trying to do it at all.

Another one for the Why Am I Such A Fucking Moron category, I realized a few days ago that (a), I haven't written anything to be published since the Gizmodo fiasco, and (b), I haven't really written anything at all since then. And when you throw in the panic attacks that marked the first few weeks of working at Pop because I was convinced I would be fired at any moment, I think the Gizmodo stuff might be something to get over now. I miss writing, I miss publishing, I miss my hands when they didn't go stiff and cold over a keyboard. Getting all that back is less about coming to terms with a nightmarish working experience and the fickle will of a living god complex with jet-lag and more about doing the work. It's writing, after all: It isn't easy, it's rarely natural, and sometimes the words don't come at all. Or put another way: it's work, and it's time to get to it.

posted by chris  # 8:31 AM 0 comments

"You don't meet nice girls in coffee shops." That's it, that's what the rest of Waits' "Hold On" is built around. It's the line that wedges in my head the most, dwarfing the rest of the song to the point that it's all just window dressing. What's the Hemingway quote? "'The cat sat on the mat' is not a story, but 'The cat sat on the dog's mat' is?" Google says John Le Carre, so there you go. Trust the Google. That one line, that story that comes out it, begins the long creep of November, our long hard slog of getting shit done.

"You don't meet nice girls in coffee shops." If only that were completely true.

Tom Waits led into Luke Haines but only because I finally found a copy of Luke Haines is Dead, the three disc career spanning monster compilation slowly sneaking its way into the import isles. Haines is actually better for working, trading Waitsian lessons learned for perseverance (generally at the expense of every one else) shot through a sneer (generally at every one else.) In the zombie crush throes of level design, turning pictures on a screen into physical spaces to run around in and play with, I keep putting on disc two and starting with the second track, "Everything You Say Will Destroy You." It has an odd zen-like effect, with the crunchy guitars and rough production (most of the disc is made up of BBC sessions, alternate takes, and rare songs) blocking out the rest of world and allowing me to make the tough decisions like whether to place an explosive barrel or the regular old kind in front of the door. After a few weeks of this I've come to the conclusion that Haine's glory isn't his hatred, which there genuinely isn't a lot of, or his disgust, which he excels at. It's the separation, the very clear dividing line between him and and his subject matter. The hinge of each song is that there is You, and there is Us, and that that is all the difference in the world. And after a few weeks of songs like "Chinese Bakery" on repeat, I realize that it isn't hatred or disgust in his voice, but pity.

posted by chris  # 10:07 AM 0 comments