Tour Intimacy Theorem; Liverpool; Glasgow; Pictures

A theorem I’ve been exploring of late: As the amount of time one spends on the road increases upwards toward infinity, the amount of time it takes to feel incredibly close to someone decreases to almost nothing.

Before the Blood Arm existed, I was a sober scholar who spent most of his waking life buried in the library. It would take a great deal of shared experience, deep conversation, and common interests for me to consider someone a ‘good friend.’ Over my lifetime through University, I managed to accumulate perhaps six or seven of these relationships. I wouldn’t have minded more, it’s just that it took a lot effort, and it was difficult to meet persons with whom I was compatible.

Then we started touring.

Perhaps it’s the excess of alcohol, maybe it’s the lack of sleep, but the intensity of the friendships formed in the six hours one spends in a venue and the additional party time tacked-on at the end is almost blinding. Guarding oneself doesn’t seem to be an option, as these bonds are all about bald-faced, fuck-all, I’m-going-to-tell-you-the-truth-so-deal-with-it honesty.

Take Glasgow for example. We spent much of our most recent night in the city drunkenly blabbing with a gaggle of eighteen year-old girls whose faces I only vaguely remember now. And yet they know all about my ex-girlfriend, my intense hatred or certain people, and the testosterone injections I was forced to endure to induce puberty (shhhhhhhhhh). And I know equally painful truths about them. I love those girls. For the eight-odd hours we spent together, they were my best friends in the entire world. It remains to be seen whether we will ever meet again, but if we do, I assume our relationship will pick up right where it left off, though hopefully it will end in nudity and soul kissing then. That’s sort of how it goes on the road, except with more farting and fat jokes.

Liverpool and Glasgow were just as fun as we remembered them being, which is a lot. The show in Liverpool was at the Korova, which we love, if only because it allowed us to meet the fabulous Steve Revo and Crazy Pete of Stealer. (That is not the only reason we love the Ladytron-owned venue/restaurant/café/pub. The food is wonderful, and they have free wireless Internet access as well. And the people! Oh my!)

Glasgow afforded the band an opportunity record an acoustic set at Xfm Scotland with the lovely Stuart, and to hear ‘Suspicious Character’ played on BBC Radio 1, which, for all the Los Angeleans reading this, is kind of like the 102.7 KIIS fm of the United Kingdom. So we were a little excited. The show at the Barfly was epic. We fell in love all over again with the inimitable Flying Matchstick Men, and fell in love with the band Parka for the first time. Then there we partied perhaps a little too much with the boys and girl of FMM, and now we’re in the van driving to Leeds.

Stayed tuned for more party action...

-Ben Lee Handler


Oh! Here are some pictures. The Nathaniel sitting-down-and-performing shots from the Korova and the Barfly are not rarities; the practice has become tradition. It’s fun and easy: When the singer asks you to sit down, you sit down. You can even practice at home before the show if there’s any trepidation.

This is Not My Beautiful House! This is Not My Beautiful Wife!

Perhaps my favorite part of touring with the Blood Arm—forget the fact that we are not really touring per se, as we’ve been rocking London for the duration of the week—are the what the fuck?! moments. These are the moments that make one say, “what the fuck?!” (When I type “one,” I’m typing about myself, okay? I’ve been told it’s more proper than typing “me,” or “you,” even. And regardless, I’m the boss of this page, so one will do whatever the hell one wants here.) There have been a lot of these wtf?! moments this trip.

Cases in point: Tuesday we found ourselves playing penis and eating day-old salmon souffle in Maximo Park’s studio with four Swedes and one French girl, and Paul from Maximo was wearing an XXXXXL Cannibal Corpse t-shirt… What the fuck?! Wednesday we used an arm-wrestling victory over Nick from Intoxica Records as a decisive means of crowning Bruce Springsteen the Best Musician in the World… What the fuck?!

Last night, however, makes all other nights look like little bitches in terms of its what the fuck-upedness. Let’s recount it all down—what one can remember, at least—and lay it to rest, shall we?

-We began the evening at a party at a photo gallery called Proud (which is not a gay bar, by the way… what the fuck?!) to see the dude from the Test Icicles’ new band. Proud has lawn chairs with photos of Carl Barat—who does not look anything like Eric Idle from Monty Python, according to Grandmaster B (who happened to provide the cure to my most recent case of writer’s-block)—emblazoned on them, so one could literally sit on his face... What the fuck?!

-After briefly losing contact with Zebastian and Zachary on Primrose Hill in the rain, I found myself being whisked away to a posh apartment somewhere in Londontown in a Sony BMG company car, which as far as I can tell, the Blood Arm have little to no affiliation with… What the fuck?!

-I awoke topless with a pink polka-dotted scarf draped around my neck. A framed, autographed portrait of Ricky Martin was staring at me. "Bailamos, Ben Lee," it whispered.

Bailamos…

(let’s wait for this one, okay?)


Okay.
What the fuck?!
Ahhhhhhhhhh.

-Upon returning to the Travelodge (our lodging of choice), Dyan and all of our belongings were missing from the hotel room, and the walls, beds, and ceilings were stained with red wine… What the fuck?!

(And this one truly knocked my knees out from under me, stopped my heart, and repeatedly kicked me in the stomach, albeit for only one comical photographical interlude.)


(okay, maybe two photographical interludes.)


I called Chalkie, tour manager of champions (us). Chalkie says, “we’ve moved to the Jury’s Inn up the road, come back and I’ll tell you all about it, everything’s okay.” But there was a tinge of worry in his voice, and I was scared. I walked up the road to the new hotel. Chalkie answers the door to his room, clad in boxer-briefs and a hand-rolled cigarrette, nothing else.

“Have a seat, Ben Lee,” he says, looking grim. I fear the worst. “Apparently the kind folks at Travelodge did not approve of my playing bartender in the bar last night, and they threw us out.”

But the empty room… the wine on the walls… what the fuck?

It seems Dyan, Chalkie and Nathaniel returned to the hotel with with four bottles of wine no means of opening them. The hotel bar was closed, so Chalkie hopped over the counter to nic an opener. While he was behind the bar, he thought he’d help himself to a pint. Then another. And another.

The Travelodge staff did not take too kindly to this. They threatened to throw the threesome out. But our cheery threesome believed their infractions to be smooth-overable. Nathaniel tried to get the staff back on the winning team by belting out the lyrics to the new single ‘Suspicious Character’ (which will be out September 18). Chalkie offered them wine and tea. The staff was unimpressed. They called the cops.

So, under the watchful eye of Britain’s finest, a beyond-intoxicated Dyan, Nathaniel and Chalkie packed up all of our stuff, managed to spill wine all of the entirety of their empty hotel rooms, and relocated to the Jury’s Inn........................
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That’s a pretty-big what the fuck?! right?

The MacBeth is tonight. Let’s do it!

xxxooo,

Ben Lee

P.S. Pictures from the entire trip will be posted as soon as we return to Los Angeles tomorrow!

It's Good To Be Back

So I’ve neglected my TBA diary duties as of late. Please forgive me, and trust that there have been a variety of reasons for this.

For one, I’ve been busy pursuing another flat-out failure of a project that very nearly ruined my life. Have you folks been keeping up with your pornography? You know, the super-amateur, produced-via-camcorder, fathers-teaching-sons, younger-men-with-older-women, obese-men-wearing-jockstraps-while-worshipping-the-feet-of-women-with-longish-toenails… that kind of stuff? Well, I spent much of the last month trying to carve out a niche of my own in this market. I came up with Puppy Porn.


Puppy Porn was basically younger couples going at it on-camera in rooms filled with thousands and thousands of puppies. Some of the puppies would watch the couple, some would lick them and try to join in, and some would simply scratch themselves, go to the bathroom and nap. It was sexy, and my investors were thrilled. Well, they were thrilled until the lawsuits, lawyers, and warrants-for-arrest started pouring in.

Apparently, my business model violated a number of laws, building codes, and pornography guidelines for the ethical usage of animals on film (there are ethics in porn? who’d have known?). I went deep into depression and deeper into debt—both monetarily and morally. Wife left me. I whored myself for drugs and food, and contracted more viruses and bacterial infections than I ever knew existed. I routinely contemplated suicide.

But there was a light at the end of the tunnel, and that light was the Blood Arm.

Four hundred thousand dollars in fines, 600 hours of community service, and about 165 ounces of black-tar heroin later, I decided to return to my position as Master of Ceremonies.

My rebound has been sweet. There have been parties, tons of parties. Birthday parties in honor of Dyan aging, pool parties because it’s been too hot for clothes in Southern California, knitting parties because sometimes we swing that way, etc, etc.

And at these parties there’ve been celebrities. Tons of celebrities. Celebrities including, but not limited to:

Ian Thorpe and the Grates


Richard Simmons



Dyan, Nathaniel, and Jim Morrison


(In fact, it was Richard Simmons himself who instilled me with the chutzpah to get up and blogging again. Cheers for that, Richard!)

Anyway, it’s good to be back, and myself plus the Blood Arm cannot express how excited we are to see you all again in the coming months. There’s a new single and album to eagerly anticipate the releases of, and thousands of yet-to-be-made friends to look forward to meeting… Life is grand!

It is so good to be back.

Ben Lee Handler

Great Depression

Please forgive my lack of updates recently, I have been stuck in a Great Depression.


Fortunately, I eventually noticed the stairway out, and things have been better ever since.

Stuff that has happened lately:

- Summer

- Wife got older

- Wife became a Jewish Woman

- The Blood Arm became a Jewish Woman



xxxooo,

Ben Lee