If America lived in New York again I would be a much better photographer.  She is one of my favorite people on Earth and without a doubt my favorite to photograph.  She is completely fun and completely photographic and the combination makes her pretty much the only real muse I have ever had. She is completely inspiring and makes me want to take photographs constantly.

I met her in NYC a few years ago but she quickly moved to Florida to go to school.  She has traveled around a bunch and is living in Saint Louis or Kansas City or something exciting like that.  Other than a visit to NYC about a year ago, the last time I really got to see her was right after Winter Music Conference in Miami. I was in Orlando for a few days and she lived there so I hit her up and we ended spending a day at Disney World.  Unfortunately I had just broken my camera in the process of helping trash a penthouse hotel room in Miami and had to make due with little blue plastic cameras that America and I bought at an Orlando flea market.

So fast forward two years and I find out I am headed back to Orlando right after WMC again.  I hadn’t talked to America in a couple of months, so I hit her up to see if she was still living in Orlando.  She wasn’t but she just happened to be visiting her family about an hour away from Orlando at the same time I was going to be there. I was pretty much ecstatic.  The guy who hired me to shoot a party in Orlando also works at Disney so he offered us free passess again.  We decided this year we should check out Disney’s Animal Kingdom.

Our trip got very delayed because the park was packed and they closed of Magic Kingdom. My friend was working there so we had to basically sneak in to get tickets. We pretty much had to lie to a half dozen Disney employees so we could get close to the Kingdom and park for free illegally.  The whole thing was quite the operation. When we finally got there we ended up getting completely lost and ended up on a dead end train ride to an island of goats that we could not escape for about 30 minutes.  Luckily the goats were fucking awesome and they head butted each other with great wrath and furious vengeance.  After the goats we hit up a mediocre Yeti themed roller coaster and we got to go on a safari where we saw hippos and things of that ilk.  Then we hit up a roller coaster for little kids and escaped from the park hungry for a terrible by gigantic Chinese buffet. The whole day was pretty much amazing.

During the day I took roughly two rolls of America with my 35mm camera and I am posting nearly 50 of the pictures and of those 50 I LOVE nearly a dozen of them.  That percentage is insanely unusually high. In a week I might shoot a thousand photos, publish 300 of them and love one or two. Loving 20 percent of the images is phenomenal, but then again so is America.  So, with that in mind, please click here to see all the photos from my trip to Disney World with America; my muse.

So as per my Tumblr, I had no plans on updating tonight.  I have been organizing my computer and my apartment and putting ads on the website and watching Friday Night Lights for some reason.  Because of these mostly productive things I didn’t really have any time to work on a good update for you this weekend.  I mean who the hell updates on the weekend anyway?  Well, I guess I do…

While I was organizing my old hard drives I found a bunch of cool shit including some funny old photos I will be Tumbling next week, some old pictures I took of Lady Gaga in 2007, and this video of me getting my lip pierced.

I got my lip done in 2001 when I was living in Richmond, VA.  Actually now that I think about it, it might have been early 2002, but that is completely not important.  I had the lip ring up until about two years ago when I was at Happy Endings and this drunk model chick punched me in the face for taking her photo.  She was my friends roommate too.  It was really insane, but I guess that’s what happens when you hang out with drunk people every single night.  Anyway, when she punched me the ball from my lip ring popped out and a few days later I lost the lip ring while eating a bagel on the Subway.  I thought about getting a new ring, but I decided that I was way to old to have facial piercings so I took it out.

Anyway, the video is sort of graphic, and very very mildly entertaining.  But if you had the time to read this boring fucking post, you have the time to watch this short and painful video.

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

Married To The Mob had a party at the Thompson LES Hotel yesterday to premiere their Summer 2010 Video Look book. The look book starred one of the hottest porn stars on earth, Faye Reagan and you can watch it here.

I ran out of time today to do a write up about it, so just look at the pictures for now, and I will be back either really late tonight or tomorrow to update this post.

So yeah, the party was on a sort of roof deck on the Thompson and there was Belvedere Vodka and a ton of chocolate candies everywhere which I kept eating because I was starving.  The party started a little bit slow, but by the time I had to leave the place was well over capacity I am sure. They had the video playing on repeat and there was a large balcony for the smokers with a great view of the LES. The one drawback to this smoking balcony was that it had two sliding glass doors and as I was going through one opening, someone else was going through another and slid his door into my door crushing me in between. While hilarious, the whole thing really fucking hurt my spine. The party was DJ’d by N.I.R.E. and DJ Jazzy Joyce who both were both killing it with really amazing hip hop all night. Jazzy Joyce spun like three of my favorite songs in a row, so I have to give extra love to her.

So anyway, I took a ton of pictures and then I escaped to do a photo shoot with a girl in Hell’s Kitchen and then on my way back home I saw a really fantastic fight in a bodega that involved a guy jump kicking the shop keeper in the chest and then getting beaten with some sort of club until the cops showed up. I took a few pictures with my 35mm camera so when I develop them I will let you know.

In the mean time click here to see the pictures from the Married To The Mob Summer Video Premiere party at the Thompson LES.

I am taking the day to enjoy the fact that I don’t have any photos I need to get up today. It is really quite wonderful to have the burden of a million pictures waiting to go up. I do have a few things I could post, but I think I’ll hold off on them until next week. I am shooting tonight so there will be pictures tomorrow, but today I am going to take a little break and possibly put some more Ikea furniture together. My kitchen office is almost complete. I just need to build a desk and a book shelf and two mini DVD shelves that sort of attach to the bookshelf. It’s all pretty exciting to me and extremely boring to you, so instead I will leave you with three exciting music videos… with Muppets!

Oh, and just for the record, if I could dance like Leo Sayer my life would be complete.

Ps. Did you know muppet is recognized by my spell check but not muppets? Shenanigans.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyreul5Cvsw[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nA2UF1xwGP4[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JruqUIjl5Sw[/youtube]

One of my first regular spots in NYC was the Slipper Room. I used to go there to see Seth Herzog’s stand up comedy show Sweet every week. But other than the occasional comedy show Slipper Room has mostly been home to a variety of Burlesque and Cabaret shows over the years.  I have attended a few of those, but never Metal Monday.

Metal Monday would be celebrating their one year anniversary next month, but unfortunately Slipper Room is closing down for a while.  Next month they are tearing down part of the building and adding a few extra floors.  I talked to a bar tender and he told me they could be closed down for 6 to 9 months, or knowing NYC and construction, even longer.  So for the foreseeable future Metal Monday is dead and I am glad I had a chance to check it out.

Metal Monday is a heavy metal themed burlesque show hosted by Mini Marilyn Manson impersonator and bad ass dude Nik Sin. It features a bunch of hot girls (and one dude) taking off their clothes to metal music.  It seems like a pretty good idea if you are into that sort of thing…

A quick rundown of the acts so you can figure out who is who.  Juliet J. dressed as a goth school girl, read some goth poetry, and sang about Black Sabbath. Victoria Privates did a sexy strip tease on a chair. Magician Albert Cadabra escaped from a straight jacket and made his penis magically appear. Velocity Chyaldd did an extremely NSFW routine involving blood, a knife and her vagina that I saw her do at Rated X on Halloween nearly 4 years ago. Anna Evans may have been the highlight of my night when she came out in a bikini made of raw meat. I talked to her immediately afterwards about letting me do a photo shoot of her covered in steaks. Coney Island legend and huge crush object of mine Insectavora did a pretty impressive fire act to end the night with an explosion. And last but not least my friend Arden Leigh jumped around in some crazy white undergarments.  Arden was the one who convinced me to come out because she was celebrating her signing her first book deal. Arden is a professional seductress, and that is not even a joke, and she may or may not be releasing a book about how to pick up chicks. Amazing.

Now while this was the last Metal Monday, Slipper Room isn’t closed yet, so you still have a chance to check it out in all it’s glory before they tear it down. If you want to go down there I have some recommendations. There are three more shows of Seth Herzog’s Sweet. His show is every Tuesday starting at 9pm. It’s only 5 dollars and you can from time to time see some amazing comedians. I will 100% be at at least one of those shows.  And on the last Sunday of the month (May 30th) my friend Kiki Valentine will be hosting one of the very last burlesque shows at the Slipper Room. Her show is called the Sunday Show and I have photographed it twice. It’s always crazy and always very NSFW. You should check it out.

And in the mean time, you should check out all the NSFW photos I shot at the last Metal Monday at the Slipper Room.

Ps. Just wanted to give a little shout out to Veronica Varlow who is a super babe and made me talk to her for like 2 hours after the show. Evidently she likes to make out with 15 year old girls or something; I wasn’t really paying attention. I was too busy staring at her um… dress made out of rubber.

Easily the worst part about running a website for a living is having to figure out new widgets and aps and plugins and all this other bullshit that makes more people come to your page.  You see, I want people to come to this page. It makes me happy, and soon it will make me money, but getting people here is always annoying. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of people come here without me having to do anything but post quality content, but several hundred people a day come in from Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook, so I have to be on top of all that shit.  I try to make my Twitter as funny and interesting as can be, I try to post interesting content to my Tumblr and I used to have it set up on Facebook so that all my blog updates would show up there, but now that doesn’t work anymore.  I am trying to get that fixed but in the mean time I need to make sure I am on top of other bullshit.

Number one on that list of new bullshit, is the Facebook like buttons.  I don’t know why people have so much need to like things and give thumbs up to things or whatever the kids are doing these days, but putting the Like buttons on your page seems to more than double Facebook traffic, so guess what? I have a fucking like button at the bottom of each post and you guys need to be fucking pressing it.  Now and often. Maybe not this post so much, but older posts you like, and new posts you will like in the future.  That would help me out, and show all your Facebook buddies how rad you are.

Also if you use Stumbl or Digg or any of that crap, I updated that plug in so all those buttons at the bottom of each post are once again working properly.  You should Digg my Sumbls asap. Or Rededit, or whatever.  I don’t know…

Lastly when I was looking for plug ins, I came across a bunch of weird, ugly and ineffective bullshit. One that seems to be just weird and ugly is the Meebo tool bar.  It is at the bottom of my page now (unless you use one of the several browsers it doesn’t work on). With this bar you can use all sorts of instant messaging programs directly from my website. It’s pretty cool because now you can use AIM from here instead of having to be logged in or whatever.  I don’t know.  The real reason I like it is because you can now drag and drop photos into social networking sites really easily.  And you can still copy pictures but you have to right click to save as now instead of dragging and dropping, at least from the main page.

Now, given all that, the Meebo plug in is really fucking ugly, and could possibly be really annoying.  So please give me some feedback about that. If the thing is driving you nuts let me know, but if you are digging it, let me know that too.  I need to make some decisions on it soon.

And lastly, and I am sure I will mention this again in a future post, I started a Facebook fan page. Pretty soon all of you who follow me on Facebook will get one of those annoying “Igor is a fan of Igor and wants you to be a fan of Igor too” emails that I get 400 times a day and make me want to stab people.  I have a Facebook group, but my web guy tells me that is not good enough now, and that Fan Pages are the new thing and I need that. So sure, whatever. Let’s see what that does before I even spend another 15 seconds even thinking about it. I have already spent my entire afternoon dealing with this madness. Just look at it and tell me what you think.

Now, to apologize to you for reading this necessary but boring fucking post, here is the new Purple Crush video. I love these kids and the video is pretty funny and I am sure if I could even hear music anymore I am sure I would like the sound of it. Too bad my brain has turned off any ability to enjoy sounds.

PS. I perhaps might be slightly stressed out that I am turning 30 in two weeks. Sorry.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zp4-wNlPYUY[/youtube]

My Anti-Muse is back.  Burning Angel Kate Hate is one of my favorite people on Earth to shoot.  I went to Philadelphia a few weeks ago to shoot her roommate Kylee Kross and her other roommate Emmy Elliot. Kylee is one of my favorite porn stars, and Emmy is super cute, but the photos that came out the best were of Kate.  Kate walked in the apartment while I was getting ready to shoot Emmy.  She had just gotten off work after 10 hours of stripping. She looked like a complete mess. She was wearing this gross pink Guess hoodie and if I saw her on the street I would have expected her to ask me money to buy meth with.  So when Kate asked me what she should do to get ready for our shoot, I told her to basically do nothing. I wanted to her to look  like meath head. We call this look “meth chic”.

I love shooting Kate because she can somehow make looking like a drug addict who is dead inside from years of sex work look sexy.  And as insulting as all this sounds I really do mean it in a good way.  Also, Kate pretty much rules as a human too.  Love ya Kate…

Click here to see all the very NSFW photos of Kate Hate.

Another night at Webster Hall.  I feel it’s been a while since I have really photographed there.  I am so glad I am finally done with all the SXSW and WMC pictures and I can just get to shooting my favorite NYC parties.

I meant to shoot both Girls & Boys upstairs and Trash downstairs, but I ended up spending most of the night downstairs in The Studio.  I went up to check out Dave One from Chromeo DJing, but I got a text from DJ Jess asking me to come downstairs to shoot the burlesque stuff (and a performance from Zuzuka Poderosa who killed it) and I never got back up stairs again.   The burlesque stuff is Not Safe For Work (Thanks to Madame Rosebud) and there is certainly some questionable stuff throughout this gallery.

For the second night in a row I hung out with Kayvon Zand and his crew of miscreants (evidently they are called the Zands). They are good for a few photos… After I went to get breakfast with about 20 people and by the time we left the diner it was day light and people were walking by on their way to work looking horrified at the table of freaks wearing no pants.  It was a lovely site to see.  A homeless guy walked past three or four times to check out Anna Evans ass.

It was all a pretty fun and weird evening and I ended up going to sleep at about 11pm.  You should just click here to look at all the NSFW photos from Trash and Girls & Boys at Webster Hall.

I feel like it’s been a long time since I have been to Lit and even longer since I have taken pictures there. It makes me miss when I was first living in NYC and everything was super exciting and every night was fun just by virtue of it being new and meeting new people and things. Lit was the first place I really ever danced in public but that was a couple years before I even moved here.

Anyway, Thursday night was a lot of fun. There were a lot of people I haven’t seen in ages there. My friend and Burning Angel Nova was dancing about naked looking crazy and sweaty and um… naked. And I had a 25 minute conversation with fetish legend Darenzia about why she has been avoiding doing a photo shoot with me for the last three years. Um… Kavyon Zand and his team of weirdoes showed up and made for some good pictures (although better ones of them are coming in the very next post) and Fancy and Dimitry DJ’d up stairs. I think I got some good photos too. All in all a successful Thursday even if I didn’t actually get paid for any of it.

Click here to see all the madness of NC-17 at Lit. NSFW.