So Monday came and went without me being near a computer. That almost never happens, but I had a doctors appointment in the city and I never came back. I just wanted to do a quick update before I went to sleep and let you know a few things that are probably more Live Journal material than a super professional type blog of DBB’s stature, but unfortunately I don’t have a LJ.

Firstly about the doctors appointment. I got the results of the MRI on my knee. Turns out I have a torn meniscus. The meniscus is the cartilage in your knee that separates your bones so they don’t rub together. I have to get surgery and do rehab, but the good news is its only minor surgery. It only takes 15 minutes and I can walk out. The doctor told me I just have to rest it for a couple days and its pretty much healed in two weeks, with max six weeks of rehab.  Compare that to a year of rehab for an ACL tear and I will consider myself lucky.  The other good news is that in the mean time I can walk on it and I am not going to do any further damage to it. This means that I can go and shoot if I can suck up the pain.  And really the pain is not as bad as the super weird feeling of having your knee feel like it is going to fall apart at any minute. Knowing that my knee cap is not going to slip into my shin has been a big help and being able to put my full weight on it has reduced my significant limp into a pretty sweet pimp walk. Lets just hope I can get it together soon, because I have gained 8lbs since my injury stopped me from walking everywhere.

Next personal note is that I cut off all my hair. I had a dream that my mom cut off my mustache in my sleep and it freaked me out. I just woke up and decided to get a shave and a haircut. My friend Ibi did it and before she really went to work she cut it into a bob which is pretty fucking funny.  I will post a picture below. Let me know what you think of the new me.

Nextly I spent most of Sunday under my covers weeping loudly after my Miami Dolphins embarrassed themselves in a loss to the Atlanta Falcons.  They turned the ball over 4 fucking times and their offensive line played the worst game since they drafted the monster left tackle Jake Long. More successful that the Dolphins was the DolfansNYC the New York City Miami Dolphins Fan Club that I started with my friend Michelle. I have no friends who like football, so it has been really great for me to have a day a week where I can hang out with a bunch of Dolphins fans. I lost my voice from screaming so much.  You would think I was insane if you saw me wearing all aqua and screaming at a television for 3 hours. Even more insane that normal. We had almost 100 people show up and the NY Daily News mentioned our bar Third and Long as a place to go to watch Phins games. We had a raffle and raised over $100 for charity. It was a pretty successful party. Evidently I am a better promotor of sports bars than I am dance clubs. I just wish the Dolphins had won.

On a less personal note two more celebrities have passed on. Jim Carroll is now one of those people who died. and while nobody puts Baby in the corner, the cancer in Patrick Swazye put him 6 feet under.  I am a pretty big fan of Jim Carroll and I fucking loved Point Break dammit. Speaking of celebrities, Kanye West is making me hate that I really dug his first two albums and Jessica Simpson is pretty much the only person who could make a puppy dying funny to me.

Continuing on, this Joe Wilson shit has got to stop. Going after a republican for losing his shit during Obama’s health care speech is just divisive and republican tactics. Democrats should have just let it go. They guy looks like an asshole already, if you make this huge deal out of it, they are just going to make a huge deal out of the fact that one of your appointees is a 911 conspiracy theorist. Another story that has gotten out of hand his the Serena Williams melting down during the US Open. If you some how missed it, Serena told a line judge that she was going to shove a tennis ball up her ass after the judge had called a ticky tack fault a that put her one point away from losing her match. She then got penalized a point for flipping her wig and lost the match. People are talking about suspending her for it. Things like this happen all the time in football, baseball and basket ball and no one cares.  When McEnroe did it he got endorsements. I think a lot of the outrage is about her being a black woman in an almost entirely white sport. I saw message board posts calling her an animal and all manor of borderline racist shit. Fuck that. She owns part of the Dolphins now, so I got her back.

Anyway, I have no blind items for you today, but hopefully I will have pics up from the NY Couture Spring show up later. Until then enjoy these sexy photos of me during and after my hair cut.

The weekend before I moved to New York I was in the city with the band I managed. We had a show and I used it as an excuse to bring up some of my stuff and sign my lease.  At the show was a comedian named Zak Orth who we had just do stand up in VA. We started talking to him and he and his girlfriend ended up sticking around for our set.  His girlfriend Kat loved the band and took us all to some crazy hipster dance party.  That party was Ruff Club.  Other than Motherfucker it was the first time I had been to any sort of party in New York ad it was my last for a while. When I first moved to the city I started hanging out with Kat and Zak and their comedy friends and I started going to see stand up two or three nights a week. I didn’t really start going to parties until January when I had some friends visiting and they wanted to party.  Three months later I had turned Driven By Boredom into a party blog.

Ruff Club was never my favorite party… I spent most of my Friday nights at Trash, but I had some great times at Ruff.  I miss the packed sweaty basement when the Ruff Kids were spinning George Harrison and I was getting my mind set on some cute girl talking to Sophia Lamar.  I am going to miss Sophia trying to give me drink tickets and telling me some crazy story while I am waiting in line for the bathrooms.  I am going to miss running into 24Court who always seemed so unreasonably happy to see me.  She will be my friend forever when she defended me when one of the Misshapes got in my face at Bleach.  I will miss Danzi’s drunken hugs and 5am rides home on the J train. I miss seeing Brad Walsh trying to make nightlife photography look like the yearbook photo you wish you had in high school. I will miss Felipe making people in line for his photo booth wait while he gets my shot. I am going to miss convincing Spenser and Denny to not hate me after I talked shit about their party on my blog. I am going to miss arguing with Jason about politics and I am going to miss the Annex. I am going to miss the upstairs bathroom where all sorts of shady things have gone down.  I am going to miss Roe help me sneak whatever cute 19 year old girl I was with into the club and talking football with me when I couldn’t stand sweating any more and had to come outside.  I will miss bringing out of town friends to Ruff to show them what a real NYC party is like and Ian for making them feel cool when he would let them skip the line not pay the cover… Then again did anyone ever pay the cover?

Man, I have been up all night and I am rambling and getting all nostalgic. Pretty much everyone I just mentioned I am going to see in the next week. This is getting out of hand and I haven’t even talked about the party last night.  It was really great.  I saw people I hadn’t seen in ages.  I flirted with some models cause it is fashion week and A.R.E. Weapons closed the place like it had to be closed.  After they fucked the crowd up all the regulars new and old hung out way past dawn.  I left pretty early because I had to get an MRI in the morning, but I heard people were there until 7am.  It was a pretty great way to end the party and to close down Annex forever.  At least the LES will have a decent sports bar now.

Click here to see all the photos from the last Ruff Club and the end of the Annex.

And click here to see the Driven By Boredom Ruff Club archive.

My friend Marisa Kakoulas wrote released a 500 page tomb about blackwork tattoo art called Black Tattoo Art: Modern Expressions of the Tribal at Tattoo Culture in Williamsburg on Thursday night. I shot the event for Inked Magazine. I spent most of the evening talking about my knee, which is pretty much the only thing I am capable of talking about these days. It is pretty depressing. It is feeling a bit better and I got a really fun MRI today. Anyway, about the night… Marisa’s book is intense. It weights like 12 lbs. People were dropping them just to hear the noise they made. The affair was well attended and the first thing I have been to in a while where you could actually talk to people without having to yell over people. I also think I found someone to do more cheap Driven By Boredom tattoos, so if anyone wants a free one, let me know… I lost my old list of people who wanted them.

Anyway, check out Marisa’s site Needles & Sins and then check out the photos from her party.

The three block walk from my apartment to Mishka’s 350 Broadway store took me about 20 minutes on my crippled knee.  I had to shoot a for Inked Magazine at the same time as the art opening/ Faux-Fashion Night Out event at Mishka but I stopped in for a few minutes just to say hello and check out the art.  The show was for San Francisco graffiti artist Bigfoot, who coincidently looked exactly like Bigfoot. His stuff was pretty great, I wish I took more pictures of it, but I am sure you can check out his stuff online.  My favorite piece was his Bigfoot character destroying a building with Lizzy and Ralph from the old arcade game Rampage. I was only at the opening for a few minutes but I still managed to embarrass myself by telling a girl I was sure I had met her.  She completely denied this but I was so certain of it.  When I realized how I knew her I was pretty mortified.  I recognized her as a nude model on Suicide Girls.  Jesus fucking christ.

Anyway, check out a few quick pics of the event by clicking here.

Americans Observing 9/11 By Trying Not To Masturbate

I met a girl named Bob on a bus.  Bob Bland and I were headed to DC on a DC2NY bus and we sat across from each other with a table in the middle for people who need to use their computers during the ride.  I am not sure either of us ever turned ours on and we ended up talking the entire trip.  More than a year later Bob and I are friends and when she opened up her new art space in Williamsburg I photographed the party.  So when she had a fashion show for the Spring ’10 line of her company, Brooklyn Royalty, she asked me to come by.  At first I didn’t think I would make it because I am on injured reserve and all… but the Arsenal is in my neighborhood and it has an elevator so I figured I could make it.

When I got there no one downstairs knew how to work the freight elevator so I had to walk up 4 flights of stairs.  When I got there I sort of wanted to die, but I managed to tough it out and see the show.  It was quite a lovely affair and I was glad to be there.  After I spent 30 minutes waiting for someone to help me with the elevator but it wasn’t working so I had to hobble back down the stairs.  5 cab drivers pulled over only to ask me if I was going to the city and then the drove off.  I managed throw some crumpled up paper in one of their windows, but I was still fucking pissed off.  Finally a cab driver saw me hobbling about and drove past me only to do a U-turn and come back for me.  He was an Italian dude named Frank and probably only the third native speaking cab driver I have had in the exactly three years I have lived in New York. He was pretty amazing and bitched at me about the price of sneakers.

Wow. I just realized today is exactly the 3rd year anniversary of me living in Brooklyn.  Happy anniversary NYC.

Click here to see all the pictures from the Brooklyn Royalty Spring 2010 fashion show at the Arsenal.

Annika had a friend in town last Friday at Trash.  We were all talking and some how Annika and I convinced her friend Rio that he only thing to do while she was in NYC was to get naked on my web site.  She is slightly more modest than Annika was but we snuck into the emergency exit and took a few quick photos.  During the 3 min photo shoot it was pitch black and we couldn’t see anything.  I took a ton more photos but they were all either horribly composed or someone had their eyes closed or something.  It was like shooting in the dark… so to speak.  One funny thing that happened was that we got caught, not once, but twice by security guards on both sides of the door.  They were ready to bust us for something until they saw us shooting.  The first time they just laughed and let us keep shooting, and the second time the guy asked me for my card.  So guys, if you are reading this, thanks for not giving us shit.

Anyway, click here to see the NSFW photos. Fun times.

As promised I am finally getting the Teddy Blanks photos from Friday up.  I think one of the reasons it has taken me so long to get these up was because I sort of blame the show on blowing out my knee.  Teddy left his TV in my brother’s car and my brother was at work.  I have the other set of keys so Teddy asked me to steal my brother’s car and drive us all to the show in Greenpoint.  I walked all the way to the car (about a 20 min walk) before I realized I didn’t have the keys on me.  I ran a few blocks to find a cab, then ran up my stairs as fast as I could and ran back down so the cab would wait for me.  By the time I got to the car my knee was killing me.  I took the car into the city for the night before dropping it back off at my brothers and starting the walk home.  I didn’t get two blocks from his apartment before I collapsed and had to call a car service to drive me back home.

Speaking of my injury… evidentially it is not as bad as I thought.  I went to a specialist today who saw me for a total of 90 seconds but he told me that my knee seemed okay.  I have to get an MRI soon, but I have to get approval from my insurance company which could take a week. In the mean time he said to rest and ice it, but that I can walk on it.  That being said, I have never been to the hospital before and I decided this merited a trip to the ER. I broke my finger in high school and didn’t even put a splint on it.  The point is, despite what the doctor deduced in under two minutes, until I get that MRI, I still think I am fucked. I got some pain killers and a pretty sexy brace to wear in the mean time. So, I am going to attempt to shoot some fashion week stuff in the next couple of days, but I am going to be moving… very… very… slooowwly…

Moving on… Here are the pictures from Teddy’s show. I was mostly having fun at the show and just fucking around with the photos.  I was dragging the shutter so the TV was all over the shot.  Anyway, enough with the excuses.  I will be back tomorrow with some surprise NSFW shots and new excuses for why they suck too.  See you then.

Format Magazine had a booth at SLATE at the Magic trade show in Las Vegas over the weekend.  They asked a group of night life photographers to submit a few images for a mini pop up art gallery at the trade show. I had four images in the show including in the photo below the big image of Steve Aoki wearing an indian head dress. Also in the show were NYC party photogs Antwan, Jeff & Tone.  As well as my friends from Chicago Clayton and both Darkroom Demons. Anyway, stop over at Format to see more pictures and get more info on the show.