So I am at SXSW and totally stressed out.  Today I missed a photo shoot with Steve James who is one of my favorite documentary filmmakers because of a daylight savings fuck up.  I was rushing to meet him when I got stuck in traffic and had to cancel.  It is slightly fortunate that I did because in my rush I forgot to pack my camera battery.  That would never happen in NYC, but of course it happens on the road.  I got dropped off to shoot the Film/Interactive trade show and realized I didn’t have a battery so I had to take a cab ride back to where I am staying and that is where I am now, my day almost totally wasted, updating my web site.

I told you I had a few tiny things to update while I was gone and this is the first of those.  This is a video Dan Baxter made for DJ Jess of Trash.  It just so happens that the day he filmed this was also the 9th annviersary party for Driven By Boredom.  So here is a pretty rad video of my anniversary party at Trash.  It is Not Safe For Work. Enjoy, hopefully I will be back with more soon.

PS. I put up a couple shots from yesterday on my Tumblr.

In just a few hours I am getting on a plane and traveling to Austin for the SXSW Film and Interactive Festival. I am covering it for the Village Voice and then I am headed straight into the SXSW Music festival the next week to cover it for MOG.com. After 11 days in Austin I am then headed to Miami to cover the Winter Music Conference and then possibly to Orlando for a few days to hang out, shoot a party and hang out at Disneyland for free.  Finally my trip will wrap up with a flight to DC so I can steal my parents car for a few weeks because I need it to pick up shit to build and office in my kitchen.  These things are all very exciting, unfortunately it is going to be hell updating from the road.  I am going to do my damnedest to get you guys amazing things while I am on the road but it is very unpredictable.  I have at least 4 updates planned that have nothing to do with SXSW that I can post quickly if I get bogged down, so you should have some stuff, but if I miss a day, make sure you check out my Tumblr and my Twitter because I will be updating those often during my trip. I hope to get bunch of film stuff up before the Music fest starts and then I will have a lot of stuff up on MOG during the music week, but I probably won’t get any of the music galleries up until at least I get to Miami.  Last year at SXSW I shot 6000 photos and was working 20 hour days. I hope to top that this year.

Time to get serious. Have some cute fucking animals.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0-Sv6YnxEc[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wswE4fFvJ8&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

I know about a billion people are going to blog about the Lady Gaga Vs Beyoncé video, but I just have to blog about it, this video has a place in my heart. It’s not that I am a huge Lady Gaga or Beyoncé fan, in fact, I am not really a huge fan of this song, but the video is fucking amazing and for so many reasons.

Let’s start with the fact that Jonas Åkerlund directed it. He is one of the craziest music video directors of all time. Just search for him on YouTube and see what insane shit you find. I have been waiting for the Director’s Label Åkerlund DVD since the moment I heard about the Palm Picures series. Now I am almost glad they haven’t released it yet so Telephone can be on it.

More importantly, I am a big Exploitation geek.  Exploitation Cinema for the point of this conversation is characterized by cheap very specific genre pictures made in primarily the 1960’s and 70’s that “exploited” things such as sex, violence, race, popular trends etc.  Some of the more popular genre’s are Blaxploitation, Grindhouse Horror, Spaghetti Westerns, and Sexploitation films.  But the genre’s get much more specific with things like biker movies, drug trip films, and one of my favorites, Women In Prison.

There are an insane number of Women In Prison films starting with 99 Women in 1969 and continuing through out the 70’s.  The highlights of the genre are the Jack Hill films starring Pam Grier – The Big Doll House & The Big Bird Cage. (Jack Hill also directed the Greir films Cofee & Foxy Brown.  Quentin Tarantino took the name for his film Jackie Brown from Jack Hill and Foxy Brown.) And this Lady Gaga video is purely Women In Prison.  All it’s missing a shower scene and an escape scene. All the aesthetic elements are there.  On top of that it borrows from other exploitation films.  The key theme of revenge is very important to many of the female led action exploitation films of the ’70’s and the wardrobe while very Gaga, has clear influences from biker films, cheesy sci-fi films and Jack Hill’s legendary Switchblade Sisters.

Clearly you noticed the Pussy Wagon from Kill Bill. This video is an homage to Quentin Tarantino’s homages. It takes elements of these exploitation films that Tarantino loves to steal from and recontextualizes them so it looks like Akerlund is stealing from QT. I mentioned that QT loves Jack Hill so much that he named a movie after him, but he also distributed Switchblade Sisters as part of his failed distribution company, Rolling Thunder Pictures. The references to some of my favorite movies, directors and genre’s makes this video in my mind an instant classic even if I could care less about the song. It’s just that good.

I do need to wrap this up quickly because I am ranting but there are two other small things in the video I should mention. One is the line that I am sure will be talked about on all the blogs – “I told you she doesn’t have a dick.” Lady Gaga quite literally shows her critics her womanhood by taking off her pants and revealing once and for all that she doesn’t have a dick.  (Unless of course they used CGI…) Finally confronting these stupid rumors in a video like this takes some balls, which clearly she doesn’t have.

And lastly, my boys from Semi Precious Weapons make a cameo playing exquisite corpses. At least Cole and Justin do.  I didn’t notice Dan or Steve.  I am continuously proud of those guys. You know you have made it when you have been killed off in a major pop video.

Anyway, sorry for the rant but it is 3am and I have been getting ready to leave town for three weeks all day today.  I think might be losing my mind a little bit. I am headed to SXSW and then to Winter Music in Miami where almost exactly 2 years ago I photographed a barely known pop singer’s birthday party. Oh right, that was Lady Gaga.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ95z6ywcBY[/youtube]

In my senior year book they had these things that predicted what all the seniors would be doing  “In 20 years…”. In the original draft of it my “In 20 years…” read “Playboy Photographer”.  The censors at my school made them change it which is good because they lacked the foresight to realize that Playboy will not be a magazine in 2019 and that they will just be pushing video content on a website and publishing stills from that.  Anyway, just 11 years later I have finally made a step towards my goal by having two photos published in Penthouse.  That give me just 9 years, or until Playboy goes under to become a Playboy Photographer. Anyway, the photos aren’t what you are probably thinking, the girls have all their clothes on.

When I was in Vegas in January I covered the AVN Red Carpet for the Village Voice and my friend Jennifer who works at Penthouse asked me for some images of Penthouse pets for an article she was doing.  The photos kinda suck, as all Red Carpet shots do, but it is still a pretty funny milestone in my life although not quite as great of one as when I  had sex with a Penthouse Pet., but career wise it’s pretty good.

Anyway, here is my page in the April issue of Penthouse. It comes out March 16th.  If you click it you can download the .PDF file if you want to “read the article”. Although, now that I think about it, half the article is on the previous page, so I guess you are pretty much fucked unless you want to buy a copy.

Any party named after a Spinal Tap album has to be pretty great. I headed over to St. Jarome’s late last night to check out my friend Matt’s new party Smell The Glove.  It is an all rock and roll and metal party which to me is a fantastic change of pace from the dance music I have to listen to all night every night. My homegirls Amber and Apathy were Go-Going and another Go-Go friend Debbie was having a birthday so that was awesome.  And to show her support a fourth Go Go friend of mine Abby showed up.  It was like a go-go and metal dudes only party. Because of this the gallery is NSFW and full of sweaty rock and roll types and a lot of smoke machine fog.  I was only there for about 90 minutes but it was pretty out of control from start to finish. If you are trying to get laid next Tuesday you could do worse than to head to St. Jarome’s and start buying PBRs.

Check out the hot shots from Smell The Glove last night.  Rock most on.

Hey. It’s Monday night at Sway.  Roxy Cottontail asked me out again and it looks like I took a bunch of photos. I feel like I had a really weird night.  If I am not mistaken it was 11am or something when I got home.  At some point I ended up in an office for a model management company.  They had all these head shots on the wall so I took a picture of me and I put it in one of the head shot frames.  So I think I should get signed as a male model any day now. I don’t know if it’s lack of sleep or what, but I have almost no memory of Monday.  I am sure things happened, I am just not exactly sure what those things were. I am 90% sure there was some drama that I am just avoiding talking about. That might have happened. Oh yeah, and Star City and Bianca hosted, so like, that was good.

Anyway, the party was fun as always and there are some pictures. You should click here to look at them. My apologies for the weird update, but I am super stressed about leaving town in two days for three weeks. I have to do my damn taxes before I leave.

The Bottle Report series I photographed and co-wrote for Vice released the second episode today.  This episode includes action, adventure, and xenophobia! Amazingly I spelled xenophobia right the first time without using spell check. Things are looking up today.

Also, let me use this blog to remind you of some stuff.  I am going out of town for nearly three weeks starting on Friday.  I will be at SXSW shooting the Film. Interactive and Music festivals for the first 10 days and then I am headed to Winter Music in Miami to cover that. It should be an insane 3 weeks of sleeping on couches and photographing thousands of pictures a day.  Updating will be probably sparce while I am gone but if I have reliable internet hopefully I will be able to get galleries up.

Also I wanted to remind you about my Web Store.  A bunch of stuff has sold already, I hope you wanna buy something too.  Especially one of my prints. They are super cheap at $50 and its the first print I have ever released like this so it is sure to be a collectors item when I become famous for dating a celebrity.

Anyway, I have pics from Sway to go up hopefully today, and I am shooting a rock and roll party at St Jaromes tonight.  It should be fun. Come say hello.  Talk to you guys soon.

More than a year later I return to the Shank.  Actually I have been a few times but I haven’t shot since one of the first ones.  The Shank has moved locations and now it’s just a few blocks from me and it goes all night.  That combination pretty much means that I will be hitting up the Shank way more often than I have in the past.  And if it goes all Summer, I am gonna be really happy about that.

Saturday night was sort of a disaster for me.  I went to meet up with a Burning Angel who wanted to shoot with me.  We had an idea for a location but that got fucked up so we walked around Williamsburg trying to find a good location. We eventually broke on to a roof and tried to take some photos but it was so fucking cold that they didn’t come out that great.  I got a late start and headed to the Whorehouse party in Bushwick but it got shut down by the cops before I got there.  I joined a bunch of people going to another party but made a quick stop off at some bearded hipster party with Anton Glamb and his girl.  That was a bust so we headed over to Party Expo but Anton took us on “short cut” that involved us climbing a 10 foot fence.  We finally got there and I had to pay $2 to get in a warehouse with no cell reception and a bunch of dudes. After that failed I got into more trouble cause I told my friend to come by and I gave her the wrong directions.  Her and her friends took cabs to the complete wrong spot and I got yelled at.  In the end I went home early and was pretty annoyed with the evening.

At that point Prince Terrence called me and told me he was at Lit hanging out with a football player named Ted Ginn Jr. who plays for my Miami Dolphins.  As a huge Dolphins fan I was pretty excited and when he told me they were going over to the Shank, mere blocks from my house I decided I had to make the trip.  When I got there I immediately realized that Ted Ginn was an impostor. Instead of calling him out on it, I took his photo and posed awkwardly for pictures with him.  At one point he thanked me for not telling anyone.  I just thought it was pretty funny, although I wish that if he was going to impersonate someone on my team that he not do coke with people.  I don’t want rumors flying about my boys.

Despite fake Teddy Ginn I had a blast at the party although I almost fell 20 feet from the loft when someone burned me with their cigarette. A ton of my friends were there including two kids I know from Virginia and a girl I used to have a crush on 3 years ago. I was only there for an hour so I didn’t take a ton of pictures, but I think you can tell how fun the party was from them.  I also finally had a conversation with Johnny from the Death Set.  I saw them play once and it was a blast and I run into that kid weekly but we never talked until last night.  Dude is funny as hell. Can’t wait to chill with the whole Death Set/Ninjasonik/ Cerebral Ballzy crew at SXSW.

Lastly, since this might be my only update today I just wanted to remind you guys that I am shooting Sway tonight.  You should come by, there is a really great flyer.

Okay, now, without further bullshit ranting, here are the pictures from Saturday night at the new Shank.

So I don’t know if I mentioned this or not, but I threw a little party over at Webster Hall for the 9th Anniversary of Driven By Boredom.  Well, okay Trash threw the party, but I invited a shit load of people and it seemed like they all came. In fact so many people came, most notably girls I am “friends” with, that it was insanely stressful.  My ex that I haven’t seen since we ended shit was there, and that pretty much made me want to die all night, and the fact that I was in a bad mood to begin with didn’t help.  That being said, by the time I left at 5 am, I had a pretty good night.  There was nudity and craziness and a lot of cute girls and a lot of good friends and I gave away some DBB merch that can now be found in the fantastic Driven By Boredom Store! I guess I shouldn’t complain to much.  Still, I am not really that excited for the madness that is going to be my 30th birthday party in May.  Good fucking God.

Anyway, click here to see the madness from the Studio at Webster for yourself.  NSFW as always when I throw a party.