So here is a really short update! I got a $100 gift certificate to NYHC Tattoo as a raffle prize during a fundraiser for Jessie Lee a while back.  It was about to expire so I decided I needed to come up with something and I decided that I should get my favorite video game character. And by favorite I mean the only game I really enjoyed growing up. The fact is I hate video games and I haven’t really played any since they added a third button. My parents got me a Wii Fit for my birthday last year because they thought I could use it to work out and I bought a hockey game and quit playing it after one period. I couldn’t figure out how to make it work.

So yeah, Bubble Bobble was my favorite game growing up and it reminds me a lot of my little brother who LOVED video games. Bubble Bobble was his game and if it wasn’t two players I probably would never have played it. I used to just hang out in the basement of my parents house watching him play video games all the time.  But Bubble Bobble was one game I played with my brother all the time and then again in college a friend had an NES so we used beat Bubble Bobble on a weekly basis. Since then I think I have only played once, when I was on tour in Atlanta with the Gaskets. This exciting and breathtaking passage is from my tour diary dated Monday March 14th 2004:

Bean and Ross went to an after party for the Jet show that was on the same night, but Teddy and I were pretty fucking exhausted so we stayed in.  Teddy went to sleep and I played Bubble Bobble with Bean’s roommate, kicking ass through level 71.  I owned that shit.

Also normally when I talk about new tattoos of mine I mention who did them and such but honestly I didn’t even get the guys name. It was sort of a new experience. It’s the first time since my first tattoo that I have just walked into a shop blindly and had the first guy available work on me.  He did a good job and it was cool to get tattooed at NYHC a shop owned by NY Hardcore legends Vinnie Stigma and Jimmy Gestapo (and now Lars from Rancid). I made a pilgrimage to the shop in 2001 as a 20 year old hardcore kid when I was visiting NYC with a friend of mine who was looking to get tattooed. Ironically she got a video game related tattoo too.  Weird.

Oh, by the way, you can actually play Bubble Bobble online for free here! And if you are wondering the green dragon is named Bub. The blue one that I didn’t get is Bob.

A while back I brought you a new site I started called Unseen NYC. Unseen is a street art blog that my friend Rick was doing in Denver and I helped him open a NYC branch. That site is still going strong and needs your submissions! But Unseen NYC is more than just graffiti and street art, it’s a collection of all the small things that make NYC an interesting place to live and to me an important part of that is signage.

I love great signage and sign design.  I love photographing food related items so resturant signage is one of my favorite things to shoot when it comes to inanimate objects.  I also love interesting neon signs and they photograph great I tend to shoot a lot of food related neon signs. I had this idea for about a year to document New York City’s most interesting neon signs but I didn’t really have time to start a project that has almost no potential to drive traffic or make any money. It would be purely a project for my own personal enjoyment and I am pretty busy to be starting large scale projects like that.

Fortunately I have a new intern and so far she has done a great job.  One of the first things I had her do was drive me all around NYC while I took photos of neon signs.  We drove all the way up 2nd Ave from 14th to 42nd and then back down 3rd all the way to Delancey St. I shot over 100 neon signs and she wrote down where they were all located.  Then I had her just start uploading the pictures on to a really simple Word Press template and New York Neons was born!

So thanks a million to my intern Jess Muir and I hope everyone takes a look at my new website NewYorkNeons.com!

Here are a few of my favorite shots so far…

Last night I decided I needed to get out of the house. Since my trip to Austin I think I have only been out once. It’s been a good break but I need to get back into shit.  I have like a half dozen friends that help throw Wolf Party every Tuesday at Le Souk so I figured that would be the thing to hit up last night. Markko Darko, Sam Valentine, Mike De Guzman and my friend Lindsay all host the jam, plus Raquel Reed go-gos and Worm does some sort of crazy light installation thing. They are all rad people and they throw one crazy party.

I have only been there once before and I got there really late. This time it was packed and it seemed like everyone was dressed up. It’s good to see all these young kids totally over the top.  They are probably the cities best chance at a party like Motherfucker existing again.  One of these club kids came up to me and told me he has been reading my site since he was a little kid.   DBB has only existed as a NYC party blog for about 4 years, but to hear that makes me feel old as fuck. But it was cool to hear anyway and I am glad these kids are partying right.

It was a good time and there are a lot of crazy pictures from the night so do yourself a favor and click here to see all the pictures from Wolf Party at Le Souk.

Everyone and their mother on Twitter is talking about how today is the anniversary of Kurt Kobain’s death.  Half of those people probably weren’t even aware of music in 1994. I wasn’t going to just send some comment in a Tweet about it because Kurt Cobain’s death was probably the single most important event of my life.

In 1990 I found out about Nirvana through my friends older brother. I heard Bleach and I hated it. I only listened to hip hop and hair metal. I was 10 years old. Nevermind came out a year later and I liked it but I always sort of liked Weird Al’s version of Nirvana a little bit better. It wasn’t until 1992 and the release of Incesticide that I really became a big Nirvana fan.  But once it took hold it took hold hard.  By 1994 Nirvana was pretty much the only band I listened to. They at least informed all my musical choices. I liked Hole and I liked the Meat Puppets and stuff but Nirvana was pretty much my world. I was as obsessed as you could be with a band. I never in my life fell half as love with a band as I did Nirvana.

When Kurt Cobain died I was 13 years old, about to turn 14. I would enter high school a few months later so that summer was a pretty important time for me. I was in this guy Mikey Banks’ van when I found out. He had a TV in his van and we were watching MTv. I thought was pretty sweet to be watching TV in a van until Kurt Loder came on and told the world that Kurt Kobain was dead. Cobain had been in a coma a few weeks before and came out of it okay. Somehow I was hoping this would all be okay too. Maybe he was faking his death.  We drove back to Mikey’s house right away. I was never really friends with that guy even though I went to school with him for 9 years. My only real memory of him is sitting at his house watching MTV totally in shock.  My friend Keith went to the bathroom and cried.  I just stared blankly. I didn’t fucking know what to do.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y18okpx0mjY[/youtube]

I was never going to see Nirvana live. I couldn’t fucking get over that. I wasn’t surprised that Kurt Cobain killed himself. He had so many people in his family kill themselves and the Nirvana poster above my bead that said “I hate myself and I want to die” was a pretty big warning sign so I wasn’t surprised. But I was angry. I was never going to get to see Nirvana play and I was never going to have any new music to listen to. I was fucking blown.

The thing about Nirvana was that for a 14 year old kid who didn’t know shit about music outside of the radio Nirvana was underground.  Yeah they were this huge band and all but they were alternative. They were non conformist and as punk rock as top 40 got back then.  So when Nirvana died and everyone in my school acted like they were these huge Nirvana fans it really fucking got to me. When Unplugged came out and everyone was listening to it I was pissed.  These kids never listened to Bleach. They only cared about this watered down acoustic Nirvana.  So I said fuck it.

I was done with Nirvana now. These poseurs could have Kurt. The only problem was I didn’t know what else to listen to.  I had to get some new music.  So I went back and reread Michael Azerrad’s book “Come As You Are”.  I went through it page by page looking up every band that Kurt mentioned listening to in it and I went out and bought CDs. I tried out Flipper, Mudhoney, the Melvins and the Vaselines.  I didn’t like any of it.  I eventually grew to love Mudhoney couldn’t fucking believe how bad the Vaselines were and how much better the Nirvana versions of their songs were. But I kept buying albums and on May 29th, 1994 on my 14th birthday my friend Eric Dahlberg bought me a Black Flag album and it changed my life in an instant.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yJIdLFzatw[/youtube]

That summer all I listened to was punk rock.  Black Flag instantly changed my life but I was listening to bands like the Sex Pistols and the Misfits and Fear and the Circle Jerks. Rancid came out around that time so I was listening to them and some popy shit like NOFX and Bad Religion.  I loved the Descendants, the Dead Milkman and the fucking Ramones.  This new punk rock shit opened my eyes.

My freshman year in high school my friend Tom and I started the punk rock club. We had these meetings at school that were totally pointless because no one else liked the music. It was just the two of us and this senior girl named Mary.  The school made us actually do something so we decided we would start a magazine.  The first issue was the most embarrassing fucking thing ever. But Mary started taking us to shows. My mom would let me go into DC with Mary cause she knew her mom and Mary was 18.  A few months later my parents were letting me take the subway into the worst neighborhoods in DC to see local punk bands.

As we met these bands we came up with and idea to put out a record. We hit up our favorite bands and then borrowed money from our friends and parents until we had raised about $1600 to put out a record. And in July 1996 just over a month after my 16th birthday Raise The Flag: harDCore Volume 1 came out on our very own record label. It sold 900 copies in about 3 months just in DC and with no distribution other than a couple record stores. Pretty much every single copy was sold personally by Tom or I.

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

Over the next two years Tom and I put out four more issues of our zine. We released some tapes and a CD and started booking shows. We were big names in the DC punk scene at 17 years old. I started photography to shoot the bands on our label and it turned out I was pretty good at it.

By the time I graduated high school Tom and I had dissolved our partnership.  We became close friends again later in life but for a while we hated each other. I wanted to skip college and keep working on the record label but Tom spent all our money and my parents were ready to kill me if I didn’t go to school. So I went to school and I majored in photography.

In 2003 I met a band called The Gaskets and I spent 5 years managing them.  I booked their shows, got their music pressed, took all their photos, had their t-shirts, buttons and stickers made and ran their company.  When they broke up I started taking Driven By Boredom seriously and started my own business. And for the last two years I have been making a full time living running my site and taking photos and I couldn’t have done any of that without punk rock.

Punk rock was the best education I ever had.  It taught me so many skills from photography to event planning. It taught me that even a 15 year old kid could run a business and do it successfully. It taught me how to make stickers, buttons, t-shirts, zines and records. It taught me how to talk to people and network and promote. It instilled in me the love of photography. And above all it ingrained in me the do it yourself, DIY or die mentality that has lasted me my entire life.

So Kurt, wherever you are, I fucking love you and your music, but if it wasn’t for your death I wouldn’t be half the person I am today.

Kurdt D Cobain rest in peace.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv96yJYhk3M&feature=channel_video_title[/youtube]

Meet Crystal. She is one of the newest Burning Angel girls and she just happens to live in Staten Island which just happens to be a toll bridge away from Brooklyn. Excluding Wu-Tang of course, Crystal might be my favorite thing from Staten Island. That’s not to say I hate SI or anything, but let’s just say I was pretty happy I could convince Crystal to come to my hood to shoot with me.

Not only did Crystal come all the way to Brooklyn to take naked photos with me but she went to her nail salon right before the shoot and had her nails did in Driven By Boredom fashions. She even made them match the website! Admittedly, the lady who did her nails did an almost embarrassingly awful job drawing my logo on her nails but you have to admit the whole thing is pretty fucking sweet anyway.

Okay so yeah. Crystal is fucking really hot and now you get to see her hanging out naked in Slutlust’s apartment. If you want to see more (and much dirtier) photos of Crystal check out Burning Angel.  But don’t worry, my shots are plenty NSFW too.

So let’s get it on. Click here to see all the naked photos of Crystal!

One night at South By Southwest I was meeting my LA Weekly counterpart Shannon at IHOP.  On the way to meet her I ran into Rocky Business, their tour manager Weez and their documentation Tone.  All of those guys are friends of mine so I invited them with me to IHOP. They were about to get food anyway so it all made sense.  There were now 10 of us going and we sent Shannon ahead to make a reservation. We got there after taking forever to roam downtown Austin but we still had a 20 minute wait at IHOP.  We finally ate and it was delicious. The whole time I was taking pictures but I didn’t have my flash on me so everything was taken without flash but with a wide open lens that causes the lack of depth of field that everyone seems to love so much.  I didn’t really plan on using these shots for anything but a bunch of them came out really well so you get this bonus SXSW gallery.  Get excited.

Click here to see all the photos of Rocky Business’ trip to IHOP.

Now that all the SXSW stuff is behind me I plan on taking a break from photos updates this weekend. I thought this would be the perfect time to post about this interview I did with a website called The Set Up.  I do interviews from time to time (I am actually doing another interview on Sunday…) but I thought I would feature this one because it features some questions I get asked a lot.

The Set Up is a geek interview blog where they ask people from different industries what sort of tools they use to get the job done. I think the site mostly is about tech people and what sort of software and hardware they use but I got to talk about all the camera equipment that I use as well as being self effacing about what sort of computer stuff I am dealing with.

I did the interview a couple months ago so a few things have changed. The main thing is that I have been using a program called Photo Mechanic that I love to do the basic edit of my photos. I don’t mean editing the photos themselves but editing out the bad shots, thumbnailing them and sticking my logo on them. That stuff used to take forever and now it is a breeze thanks to Photo Mechanic. Then again as you will read in the interview my old process was a fucking mess.

Anyway, I might not update for the rest of the weekend. My Alma Mater VCU is playing their first Final Four game in history tonight and I plan on watching that and doing nothing else today. Tomorrow I have an interview and a photo shoot and then if VCU wins tonight I am going to get on a bus and get my ass to Richmond to watch the Rams play in the national championship game on the VCU campus and hope for a riot that I can photograph…

So click here to read my interview with The Set Up!

Well, the end of my coverage anyway.  I have finally finished all my South By Southwest posts! And just two weeks later! Luckily I have figured out a better system to deal with shit on the road so hopefully next time I go on a long trip I will be able to be updating much more on the road.  But yeah, this is pretty much the end of my SXSW photos.  In truth I have some portraits of Donald Glover and a mini photo essay on a trip to IHOP with Rocky Business but we will save those for another time. For now I just bring you everything else that didn’t fit into any of the other galleries!

As exciting as that sounds this gallery actually has some pretty cool stuff in it. It’s got celebrities and some nice natural light night time street photography and even a photo of three comedians Permanent Resident ID cards! Pretty exciting stuff. Let’s break this thing down for you a little more even. This gallery starts with a shot of Conan O’Brian in a PRB shirt and ends with a photo of Rainn Wilson jokingly giving me shit for taking his photo.  In the middle are random party photos, street shots, photos from a taping of John Oliver’s New York Stand Up Show, a lot of New Yorkers, shots of Matthew Lesco and a midget Mike Tyson at the convention center, pics from the FourSquare four square court, random pics from the IFC Crossroads House, a portrait of the writer, director and star of Attack The Block and a few photos of Community’s Danny Pudi that I just turned into a hilarious animated Gif.  Good times.

So now that you know what this gallery is all about, you need to fucking click right here to check it the fuck out.