Adopt Teh Kittehs

So at about 6AM I was walking home and I saw a tiny kitten playing under a car tire by Avenue D.  After looking at him for a few minutes I realized he had a brother a few feet away under the other tire.  I sat down and sort of lured them over to me.  I am super allergic to cats but these things were so damn cute and clearly in not a real good position to be in.  I noticed that there was a box a few feet away and it appears someone had filled a box full of cat food and abandoned them in it.  They had escaped from the box and were hiding under car tires.  I calle 311 but all the shelters were closed.  I couldn’t leave them there so I picked them up and put them back into the box and we caught a cab back to Brooklyn. So I stayed up with them until my roommate got up for work so he could shower then I dried out the bath tub and put them in it and gave them some water and a towel to sleep in.  I got a couple hours of sleep and then got up to check on them.  They seem to be doing fine but the non-black cat seems to be a bit weak.  Anyway, I am going to take them to a shelter this evening if no one wants them, but they are so cute I figured I could find a good home.  So if you want to rescue some of the most adorable kittens I have ever seen in my life, please email me.  I need to deal with this soon because I am doing my 30th birthday party tonight.

So in conclusion, check out these videos I took of the kittehs when I found them, Tweet/Facebook/Share this post and see if we can get someone to adopt these cats, and then come to Webster Hall tonight for my party.  Remember, mention Driven By Boredom at the Studio door and you get in free!

Lolz…

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X64OTFmPmsQ[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfmGb2jFGiI[/youtube]

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My 30th Birthday…

My 30th birthday is fucking Saturday and I am having a party tomorrow. I was going to do something big and awesome for it but then I ran out of time, and it’s on Memorial Day weekend so I knew everyone would be out of town and blah blah blah… So I decided to say fuck it and just do it at Trash again. I have had my last 3 birthday parties there, lets go for number 4. It’s not like I won’t turn 30 again…  Plus I got some old friends coming up on Saturday and I think we are just going to hang out and eat diner and calm stuff like that, so I might as well make Friday night the night for madness.

A few reasons you might want to show up:

1) If you have ever hung out with me, and you figured I was wasted… I wasn’t.  I am just insane. You should see me when I am drunk. It only happens twice a year and things always get crazy.  Be warned.

2) I will have a bottle of Vodka and drink tickets. You can have some of them.

3) There will be nudity.  My friends Arden and Anna are doing burlesque stuff there.  If you saw the photos Anna is the girl who came out once wearing only a meat bikini.  Things will get weird.

4) It’s free.  If you go to the Studio entrance to Webster Halll and mention either my birthday or this web site you will get in completely for free. Just make sure you go to the right door. The front door always has a line but the Studio wont. And it’s 19+ so maybe you don’t need a fake ID.

5) So you can bring me the amazing gifts you brought for me.

So right, the whole thing will be a magical experience for everyone involved. Also Hudson Mowhake and Does It Offend You, Yeah? are upstairs so you can check that shit out too…  So Ill see you tomorrow right?  Here is the Facebook invite and here is the flyer:

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Rando – 5.26.10

I  didn’t want to go out last night. Honestly I haven’t been wanting to go out much at all, but I felt like I needed to force myself to get out of the house.  I am going to try to do that tonight too, but I have just been constantly exhausted lately.  I didn’t really know what I was going to do last night but some girls texted me and convinced me to go to Rando at Gallery Bar.  Dances With White girls does the party there and I had been meaning to check it out but I hadn’t quite gotten around to it.  I figured I would show up for a bit hang out and then find something else to do.  I wasn’t really planning on shooting any pictures but a ton of people I love were there so the camera came out and 20 minutes later I realized I would be hanging out for a while.

That place is so grimy and dark and hot.  It reminds me a lot of when I first started going to Lit.  And when you have a lot of heat and darkness and lockable bathrooms combined with good dance music you know there is going to be trouble.  I had a blast and I took a lot of photos which I have been outlawed from posting.  This is of course terrible and unfortunate, but it only means that the party got out of hand… and that is always a good thing.  I am sure the next time I shoot Rando some more debaucherous things will come to light. It is that kind of scene.

In fact… right after I walked out of the door there was a huge brawl outside where a girl got punched in the face and the dude who did it got a bottle broken over his head.  I saw most of it happen but it was far away and I couldn’t really shoot pictures while I was running down the block.  I got off a couple of shots with my 35mm point and shoot but I have a feeling they aren’t going to come out that well. After the fight I ended up partying on the rooftop of the McKibben lofts in Brooklyn until 6 am.  Good God.

Anyway, the party was great and I am sure I will be back at least once before I go on vacation in July so look for that.  In the mean time take a look at the unfortunately tame, but still fun photos from last night’s Rando at Gallery bar by clicking here.

Ps. Shout out to Subdrive.

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All Our Friends Are In Bands…

As Ninjasonik says, all our friends are in bands… and this week three of my friends bands dropped new videos including Ninjasonik themselves. All of these bands are friends and it’s pretty great that they all came out with videos at the same time.

First up we have the Ninjasonik video for Bars which is one of my favorite track of theirs… the lyrics are sort of amazing.  It features a lot of people spitting PBR at each other which is always very significant and important.

The second video is from the new heroes of Brooklyn skate punk, Cerebral Ballzy.  It is a well shot black and white salute to the Subway and all the fine work they are doing over at the good old MTA. The track is called Insufficient Fare.

The last video is for Ready by Radical Outing. It features pretty much every person who is in the crowd at a Ninjasonik or Ballzy show.  The video shows “what it looks like and sounds like” to be at a “Rad Out rager”.  You guys should already know what it looks like considering I took about 25% of the photos in this video.

Anyway, all of this is awesome and amazing and you need to watch all three of these with a friend and then when it’s over give each other and extremely elaborate handshake. And then possibly throw up your 57s.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IM31AMMc97Y[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQRMr7KxZzo[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEdPwQY35M8[/youtube]

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Ellen Stagg’s Melting Flesh – 5.22.10

A few weeks ago Complex Magazine approached me about shooting some art parties or art openings for their website.  They want to expand some of their web coverage so they asked if I could bring them a few galleries every month this Summer.  Other than being glad for the work, I am happy to do it because it gives me a reason to shoot something other than the same old dance parties and since I am working on a show of my own, hopefully it will make for good networking.

For my first event I decided to stick close to home a little bit in shooting my friend Ellen Stagg’s show at Fuse Gallery called Melting Flesh. I have covered a bunch of Ellen’s work and I am sure you know by now that I am a big fan.  Her and I shoot a lot of the same naked people, only she is actually pretty good at what she does.  She runs her own all nude site called Stagg Street, but she also does more commercial work.  One of the reason I like Ellen’s work is because it is very straight forward and simple.  I am not really a big fan of overly photoshopped or weirdly manipulated artsy photography so when I heard Ellen was going to be showing her Holga work I was a bit nervous.

For those who haven’t yet bought the $70 Holga kit at Urban Outfitters, Holga is a plastic camera that used to cost about $12 and takes horrible pictures that people like to call art.  The lens is made of plastic so things get distorted and the cameras have all sorts of light leaks and it takes square medium format pictures so you get weird effects every time and you can feel super pretentious about using 120 film. I have seen some good Holga work but most of it is crap, so like I said, when I heard Ellen was showing her Holga stuff I was a bit worried.

Good photographers can do a lot with any camera and Ellen is a good photographer.  She picked up a Holga for a reason. She used it as another tool to express the sexuality that is in most of her work and she did it well. Very well.  Ellen took advantage of the manual winder on the Holga to shoot halfway double exposed nudes that took up almost the entire roll of film. The warped lens and light leaks and all the weirdness of the camera perfectly lent themselves to creating melty moving images blurring the nude form and creating a wet-dreamlike experience. All of the images were strong but there were more than a half dozen images that I was completely captivated by.

The opening itself was a lot of fun and I got to talk to a lot of photographers and models who came out to support Ellen. I got to meet photographer Bob Coulter for the first time and I got to bug Penthouse Pets Ryan Keely, Justine Jolie and Darenzia bout finally shooting with me. The show was packed most of the night and when I left the after party at Lit was just getting started with T&B’s The Capitan spinning the newest disco record or whatever the kids are listening to these days. It was a very sucessfull opening and I am sure Ellen sold a ton of arts.

You should make the effort check out Ellen’s show sometime this month at Fuse Gallery. It is located in the back of Lit Lounge on 2nd Ave between 5th and 6th Streets. The Gallery is open Wednesday – Saturday from 3 to 8pm. And check out more of Ellen’s less ethereal nudes at Stagg Street .

So here is the gallery of photos on Complex and then you can click here to see those shots plus a number of other outtakes on my site from Ellen’s Melting Flesh art show at Fuse Gallery.  The pictures are all safe for work, but some of the art in the background is a little racy. You have been warned.

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The Lovely Francesca

I met Francesca years ago at High Voltage when it was my favorite party in New York.  I had a huge crush on her and her sister. After High Voltage ended I hadn’t seen a lot of either of them.  I probably hadn’t seen Francesca in over a year when I ran into her at The Shank.  We got to talking and she told me after all this time she would consider doing a photo shoot with me.  I was pretty excited because as you can see she is a total babe.  Still, over the next several months we couldn’t manage to set up a shoot until one day I saw her on Facebook chat and I asked her what she was doing right that second.  She had nothing planned so I just grabbed my camera, jumped in a cab and 20 minutes later we were listening to old rock and roll and shooting pictures in her living room. It was great shooting with her and even better hanging out with her and her sister again. These photos are a bit more modest than a lot of photos I shoot, but they are still super fucking hot.

You should click here to see all those super fucking hot photos of Francesca hanging out half naked in her apartment. Mildly NSFW.

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Anthology Film Archives 40th Anniversary Benefit – 5.19.10

Wow. What a crazy evening. I got a chance to cover the Anthology Film Archives 40th Anniversary benefit “Return To The Pleasure Dome” at the Hiro Ballroom for the Village Voice.  It was honoring the legendary Kenneth Anger and featured performances by his band Technicolor Skull, Jonas Mekas performing with Now We Are Here, plus some other bands… the Virgins, Sonic Youth and Lou Reed. On top of all that Moby DJd, actor Ben Foster hosted and we were treated to appearances by Phillip Seymore Hoffman and Julian Schnabel. It was a pretty crazy night… and for $500 a seat I am pretty sure it had to be…

I really wanted to attend because while I have enjoyed his films, I really appreciate Kenneth Anger as this sort of legendary film icon.  Aside from making some of the most ground breaking experimental films in history the guy wrote two amazing books, Hollywood Babylon and Hollywood Babylon II.  I am a big movie nerd and his tales of old Hollywood have prominent spots on my bookshelf.  When I heard that not only he was going to be there, but that he would be playing a theremin I had to be there. Music in his films is so important I needed to see what he was going to do for himself.

I got there a little bit late and unfortunately I missed most of the Virgins’ set.  There guitarist is a friend of mine, and I hadn’t seen them so I was pretty excited about finally seeing them. Like I said, I didn’t catch most of their set but I feel like the toned it down a little bit for the film benefit crowd.

After the Virgins Sonic Youth played. It was the second time this year I have had a chance to shoot Thurston Moore but last time was with his punk band at SXSW.  I have never been a very big Sonic Youth fan, but they are a band I have always greatly respected and their documentary “1991: The Year That Punk Broke” was a pretty important film in my musical development.  It was great seeing them live. Kim Gordon was awesome.

Between sets Moby DJ’d and played a lot of weird spacey avant gaurd music which seemed to be the theme for the night. I guess I should point out at this point that the bands all played behind silent experimental films that the Anthology Film Archives has restored.  I noticed films by Maya Deren, Jonas Mekas and of cours Kenneth Anger.

When Lou Reed played everyone was amazingly excited.  Philip Seymore Hoffman gave him a bit of an introduction after asking everyone to donate money to the Archive. As soon as he got on stage we were told that we were not allowed to even dare to photograph him or he would walk off stage.  Now I have to say I am not a huge Lou Reed fan, and I am not even really a Velvet Underground fan, (I know, I’m sorry) but even I was pretty excited to see the great Lou Reed… At least until he started playing.  He just played feedback while he watched Maya Deren’s Meditations On Violence. Another guy was distorting his feedback from the side of the stage. He played in the back in the dark and didn’t even address the crowd. This, combined with his anti-photo decree, makes Lou Reed a total dick. I’m sorry, but I have been to a lot of terrible noise shows in my life, but at least guys wrapped in tin foil playing Game Boys and yelling into toy megaphones is at least entertaining.  People paid $500 a seat to see Lou Reed, the least he could do was say something to the crowd.

After that it was Kenneth Anger and Technicolor Skull’s time to shine.  They played super weird music that you would expect from any band with a theremin combined with smoke machines and Kenneth Anger films in the background.  The whole thing made for a very weird experience that while not exactly pleasant was certainly a lot more genuine an interesting than Lou Reed’s seven minute set.  The one problem I had with the set was that because of the smoke and the lighting it was very difficult to photograph, but when I later looked at the shots I had, it reminded me a lot of stills from an experimental American New Wave film, so I guess that seems extremely appropriate in the end.

After Anger’s set Jonas Mekas came up and gave Anger an award for life time achevement.  Mekas spoke of how no living filmmaker had done more for cinnema than Anger.  He then asked the crowd to take up arms and attack the NEA and the Library of Congress and demand they create government run faclities to make film stock to preserve movies on film instead of digitally.  After his impassioned plea he recieted some sort of poetry over music as Now We Are Here played behind him.

The whole night was completely surreal and I think I would need an advanced film or music degree to understand it all but it certainly made for an interesting night.  From Julian Schnabel getting on stage to yell at the people in the back for talking to the guy who kept calling Thurston Moore “big guy” as he got off stage, it was a very weird fucking night.  I am very glad I was there.

If you want to see pictures from Anthology Film Archives “Return To The Pleasure Dome”  at the Hiro Ballroom click here to see it all…

And please, if you want to help preserve important works of cinema that are slowly turning to dust, please donate to the Anthology Film Archives… or at least go see a movie there… it’s only three block from Lit on 2nd and 2nd…

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The IGORR

Check out The IGORR.

The IGORR is some sort of Frankensteinesque version of a Converse Chuck Taylor All Star made by Steve Madden.  While the shoe is completely hideous it does have one main feature that makes me have to buy a pair: it is named after me.  And not in any sort of coincidental way… the shoe was actually named after me.

Last year I had a roommate named Kara.  She was pretty much the best roommate I have had since my freshman year of college.  When she moved in I figured she would be around for ages, but she snuck out in the middle of the night to move in with my good friend and now next door neighbor OJ.  Seriously, they moved less than 5 feet away from me.  As a going away present Kara, who happens to be the male shoe buyer for Steve Madden, named a shoe after me.  That was in September so I figured it would have been out ages ago (and it probably was since they are on sale) but she just sent me the link today.  I am pretty excited about it.  It’s not quite a shoe colab with Etnies, but I’ll take it.

Now the real question is… Which color should I get?

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Sway Smiths Sunday – 5.16.10

It has probably been over a year since I have been to the Smiths/Morrissey party at Sway and it has been almost exactly three years since I last shot it. It happens every Monday and everyone goes and everyone loves it so much.  The problem for me is that Sway is so damn hard to get to. It is so far west and not really near any trains, and the trains it is near don’t come anywhere near me. It is the same reason I never go to Don Hill’s. I just don’t want to spend the money on a cab unless I am either close to it already, or getting paid.  I get paid to shoot it sometimes on Mondays and I always make sure cab fare is added on top of my payment.

Anyway, despite all this, and my hatred for Morrissey, it is still a really fun party and tons of my friends were there.  I went to see a girl I am kinda crushing on and I wasn’t planning on shooting they party, but I had a lot of fun and so my camera came out. It is DJ Fancy’s fault really. I had to show him that my new camera pouch is made by a company called Fancy, and so I had to take a picture of him and then it was on.  The night ended at like 5 am after I spent an hour with about 20 people sitting on the curb hanging out outside the club. I then got into a cab on the way to an after party but it drove right past my apartment so I jumped out and  made a run for it at the light.

All and all it was a fun time, and nearly NSFW but the girl with the boobs decided they were best not on the internet.  Fair enough, and besides it gave me a chance to put a hilarious lens flare on her boob.

If you wanna see a bunch of fun time photos from Sway on Sunday, click here…

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