There is a new party at Hugs on Friday that I am shooting. It is a Disco House party thrown by DJ DLNGR & K!O. Our boy VDRK is guest DJing. One of the cuter girls I know who is an adult and still dyes her hair funny colors, Eden Thrillz, is hosting this madness.  And I am going to assume Holly Wood is Eden’s BFF Holly who has one of the most epic asses this side of the Bronx. There is an open Keg of all crazy things starting at 11 and Kill Shop Kill Dance is giving away free shit.  I know they are debuting two new T-Shirt Designs tonight and they are pretty great.  You will just have to show up to see them though.  Also, as payment for my photoging, I am getting a bunch of Driven By Boredom tote bags, so those will be for sale soon.  Get excited.

Oh yeah? Did I mention it’s free?

Most of you can just skip right past this update. In fact, in just a little while I am going to be posting some crazy picutres from the Andrew WK appearance last night at Happy Endings and some info about a new party starting Friday. But until then, once again, I have to talk about football.

Years ago, for the exact same reason that I posted the above statement, I started a Miami Dolphins fan site. I wanted to keep my crazy Dolphins ramblings off this site. Soon after, I was invited by the Miami Dolphins down to Miami for a conference of Dolphins webmasters. As geeky as this all sounds it was a ton of fun. The Dolphins hooked it up and we got to meet with the coaches, personnel people and CEO’s that make the Dolphins one of the most recognized NFL franchises on the planet. 5 years later we are back again, this time for Web Weekend VI.

I was on vacation and trying to have fun, but at the same time I needed to shoot pictures, because really, if I just go down there and hang out, its hardly a business trip and writing it off my taxes would not seem right. I didn’t shoot a TON of pictures over the three day period, but I did shoot some, and I did make a bunch of connections that should help out DolfansNYC. I hung out with Shed Dawgs, I ate a giant burger and I watched the Dolphins beat up on the Tampa Bay Bucs. It was great trip.

I photographed our stadium tour and the locker room tour. I photographed the meeting with GM Jeff Ireland, former player Keith Byars, CEO Mike Dee, Coach Tony Sporano and current player Patrick Cobbs. I also shot photos of the tailgate, pregame shots from the field and a couple shots from our seats. You can check them all out by clicking here.

And for those interested, check out my pictures from Web Weekend IV and Web Weekend V.

As you may know, I am back in NYC at last. And what you may also know, if you keep up with my Twitter, is that whilst I was in South Florida I attempted a gastronomic feat that only four men had ever succeeded in. I tried to take down “The Beast”.  The Beast is a giant cheeseburger that is served at a sports bar near Ft. Lauderdale called Bokampers.  I went there with some of my fellow Miami Dolphins fans to watch the Sunday night football game and celebrate the Dolphins victory earlier in the day. As soon as I saw the Beast on the menu I know I had to take it down.  The Beast consists of 3lbs of hamburger, 4 eggs, 8 strips of bacon, 4 slices of American cheese and an entire loaf of bread for the bun.  It cost’s $30 but if you eat it all in under an hour you get it for free.  You also get your picture on the wall.  Out of around 80 attempts, only four people made the wall.

I ate the eggs first and then ate the meat by itself with a fork and knife. I had my doubts when I saw how big it was, but I was crusin. After 25 minutes all the meat and eggs were gone.  The giant loaf of bread was all that stood between me and immortality.  I was pretty full by this time and didn’t think I had much of a chance, but I was balling up the bread and dipping it in water and it was going down pretty well.  I got up to take a piss and when I came back I knew I had this thing beat.  10 minutes later I wasn’t so sure. I still had nearly 20 minutes left, but I just couldn’t eat it fast enough. Food would just not go down.  The area just below my chest had puffed out in a quite inhuman manor. Everything tasted different. The texture of the soggy bread was suddenly unbearable. I was in trouble.  When there was only 5 minutes left everyone was gathered around me chanting. The manager came over.  I knew if I got close enough I could just shove the rest of the bread in my mouth.  I only had a little bit left.  I tried to just swallow what I had in my mouth. I took another bite.  With 2 minutes left and what amounted a slice of bread left I got dizzy. I collapsed on the table and pushed the plate away knocking over my water glasses in the process. I spit the bit I had into a napkin and fell to the floor trying not to puke. At this I failed. As they say in the competitive eating world, I had a reversal of fortune.
We were on a deck outside so I pulled myself up, got to the edge of the deck and puked over it. Because I had been eating nothing but bread and water for the last thirty minutes, my vomit was nothing but a thick tube of soggy bread.  It was like puking several rolls of raw cookie dough. It almost felt like I took a shit out of my mouth and it was nearly as gratifying. I immediately sat down and finished my bread. Everyone around me was horrified. Most of them had scattered. My friend Michelle was hiding in the next room. I had been defeated.

The next 30 hours I felt as horrible I could possibly feel. I thought I was going to pop. I could barely sleep and  the plane ride home was horrible. I still don’t feel great and I have been popping Tums like they were candy. Still, next year when I go back to Florida, I am going to try again.  As my friend told me right afterwards, The Beast is my Apolo Creed, and Rocky will have his day.  See you, next year, beast.

Hi. I am in Miami. Well, closer to Ft. Lauderdale actually.  Am I partying? Hitting South Beach? Photographing models?  No. I am at a conference for people who run websites dealing with the Miami Dolphins. I will explain more about this when I get back in a post that you will no doubt skip on your way down the page looking for naked girls.  Sorry for the inconvienice.  Anyway, they have us up at 8am everyday which is my normal bed time, so I need to go to fucking sleep already and I played football in a pool for the last several hours and my life hurts.  Here are the photos that I took at the last Dolphins game for my Dolphins website. Yeah, I know, you guys think I am weird for being a football geek and they think I am weird for shooting hipster parties.  I guess I just don’t fit in anywhere. I am going to go cry myself to sleep now… or at least just fucking go to sleep.  See you Monday.

“What is the difference between Courtney Love and a porcupine?”
“If you get pricked with a porcupine’s needle, you won’t get AIDS.”

Ahh… Neil Hamburger aka America’s Funnyman returned to NYC last night and I was there to bring you the pictures. What’s that you say? Pictures of comedians are boring? The crowd is 95% dudes? Well, fuck you. If you wanted to see the show you should have been there.

As I mentioned my friend Mike is in town and his band Daiquiri is on tour with Neil Hamburger as of today. They weren’t on the show last night, but Mike was running Neil’s merch and got me into the show. When I got there I was pleased to find that the two guys who introduced me to Neil were there already. I shot some photos of them, a few shots before the show, of the pretty hilarious opener JP Incorporated, and by the time the show was over I was a few shots away from having an actual galleries worth of images to sell to the Village Voice, which means I don’t have to go out tonight. It’s always good to get paid to shoot something I actually want to be at instead of pretty much everything else I shoot.

At the show I met Gavin McInnes who as you probably know was one of the founders of Vice. I had a super awkward conversation about how I now shoot Dos/Don’t for the magazine he referred to as his abortion. If you haven’t already you need to check out his site Street Carnage where he reclaims his Dos & Don’ts in a section called Street Boners. Honestly, he has probably made fun of half the people reading this site right now. Plus the site has ton of TV Carnage videos. I have been a TV Carnage fan for the greater part of this decade so it is good to see them online. If you have no idea what I am talking about, again, just check out the site.

I also met a music reviewer named Mark Prindle who started reviewing records online since before you realized the internet and AOL were two different things. I didn’t know who he was because I am not really into this whole “internet” thing, but some of the kids I were hanging with seemed to be more excited about seeing him than they were Neil Hamburger.

I also met a man named Greg Turkington before the show that seemed to vanish just before Mr. Hamburger went on stage. The Clark Kent like transformation that Greg makes into America’s Funnyman is impressive. Had I met him under any other circumstances I would have never guessed who he was. He walked around the club without anyone recognizing him. I didn’t take any photos of him out of uniform because frankly that would have been just wrong. After the show he was hanging out with comedian Todd Barry. I have shot Todd a bunch of times but it was still pretty funny to see them talking about hotels with Greg in the Hamburger suit but completely out of character. It was like catching a mall Santa smoking… with Todd Barry.

Afterwards I scammed free pizza off of people at Alligator Lounge and then walked home. It was a good night.  Click here to see all the photos from Neil Hamburger at Knitting Factory Brooklyn.

PS. Not sure if I mentioned this, but the show was funny. Also Neil threw a drink at the Asian guy below for heckling. Fantastic.

Last night it was DJ Krames birthday at 66Sick so I headed down to Happy Endings.  It was also my friend Daniele’s birthday too. So yeah, that was good. It was a bit slow but my friend Mike from Daiquiri was in town doing shows with America’s funny man Neil Hamburger.  I have known Mike online since the late 90’s but I had never met him until last night. It was pretty awesome to finally meet him. He is good friends with Tom Green and regaled me with stories of Canadian antics. I was a huge fan of Tom Green growing up and as I mentioned before his web-o-vision is pretty epic. Yeah, evidently I really don’t have much to say about last night but there are some photos you can look at. Happy birthday to everyone.

NYU has been good to me. I wanted to go there in high school but my parents didn’t want me to go to school for photography. They came around eventually but I never even applied. I ended up in business school at Penn State before switching my major during orientation and eventually transferring to a decent art school after two years of bullshit at PSU. Anyway, I feel like now I am finally part of the NYU family as Tisch School of the Arts keeps hiring me to shoot their parties which I am very grateful for. I shot for them the first time at Sundance when they needed a photog last minute and I happened to be there. Since then they have hired me several times with the most recent party being the biggest.  Tisch throws a huge gala every year to raise money for scholarships. The gala honored several people including Marcia Gay Harden Ron Howard and producer Brian Glazer.  They asked me to cover the reception and the dinner after the event. They had two rooms for the dinner, one for students and faculty which I covered and one for the celebrities and big donors which was covered by nightlife photog icon Patrick McMullan.  It was pretty cool working with him and I got to shoot a few celebs during the reception anyway. Tisch gave me permission to post my photos from the event on DBB which was pretty great of them.  Most of the celeb shots are below, but you can click here to see the rest of the shots from the party.

So when I was in Austin last week people kept asking me if I was in town for Fun Fun Fun.  Fun Fun Fun is a big music fest in Austin that had a ton of bands I actually wanted to see, and I sort of hate seeing bands. Unfortunately it was on Saturday and Sunday and I had a wedding Saturday and I left on Sunday.  I did get a chance to enjoy the festivities a little bit. Beauty Bar Austin threw three after parties Friday, Saturday and Sunday. I guess Friday was more of a pre-party.  I saw that Totally Michael was playing, and I saw him at SXSW and that was really fun so I decided to check it out. When I got there he was on his last song so I got about three photos.  After that instead of shooting the party I just shot my friends and then a few random shots.  Nothing really exciting happened and it was over at 2 so it sort of flew by. There was an after party after that I ended up youtube Djing and some dude threw a girl on the ground in dramatic fashion but I have no photos of that. I got dragged to the worst after party I have ever been and I got stuck in the middle of nowhere. I ended up dropping $15 on a cab and ending back at my hotel at 6am with a wedding to go to. I also found out that this girl I know is super shady after her sisters boyfriend called me to yell at me for texting her after she told me to text her 10 times. Not sure exactly what happened, but it was super weird.  It was a pretty strange night in all. There are only 25 photos here, and most of them are pretty bad, but if I didn’t post SOME photos from Austin I would be doing everyone a disservice.  Actually, I have some photos of my old roommates band Shells and a super cute Gods Girl that will be up sooner or later, but these are the only party pics from ATX.  Click here to see them.

Hey! Good news! I was just given the go ahead by XXL Magazine to publish the photos I shot for them last week at their issue release party.  The party was thrown by them and Remy Martin to celebrate their newest issue which features photos and interviews with tons of people from the last 25 years of Def Jam’s history.  I was looking at their discography and it surprised me how many Def Jam Records I own.  The party was at M2 the Mansion franchise on 28th St.  It was pretty crazy and the VIP area upstairs had an open Remy bar.  The party was hosted by Angie Martinez and featured a bunch of hip hop icons like Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, Red Man and Busta Rhymes.  I heard Method Man was there but I never saw him.  Also on my way out I spotted Jamal “Gravy” Woolard who played Biggie in Notorious.  Overall the party was pretty awesome.  I think I need to hang out with rap legends more often. I mean, it couldn’t hurt right?

Click here to check out all the shots from the XXL Def Jam 25th Anniversary party.