Childish Gambino – 6.26.12

Childish Gambino played the Prospect Park Bandshell yesterday. It was the second of two huge outdoor NYC gigs. Monday’s show was in Central Park. Over the last year or so have become pretty good friends with Donald Glover and the whole Childish crew and they are honestly all really rad dudes. Seeing them kill it in front of such a huge crowd was really awesome. Plus I had great access to the show so I got some nice live shots and some pretty fun backstage stuff.

When I walked in fellow photographer and Donald’s right hand man Ibra Ake was trying to get the proper credentials to bring me and two other girls backstage. The three of us ended up in this little VIP area for a bit and I ended up hanging out with them most of the night. One of those girls happened to be Gabourey Sidibe who you might know from her Academy Award nominated starring role in the movie Precious. Her and her friend were rad people. Actually pretty much everyone hanging out in the Childish dressing room seemed to be good peoples. No rockstar bullshit in that crowd.

Anyway, the show was a lot of fun and I got some rad pictures. Kilo Kish and Donald’s brother Steve G. Lover came out during the encore and killed it. Evidently they had some more fun stuff planned but their set went over and they got cut short. After the dressing room got really wild with fresh pomegranate seeds and working out with medicine balls. Crazy shit.

Click here to see all the pictures from the Childish Gambino show at the Prospect Park Bandshell.

Ps. If you look closely in one of the pictures you can see Ibra & Donald working on the cover to the Royalty mix tape that drops next week. How’s that for some secret exclusive shit…

Childish Gambino @ Prospect Park Bandshell

Childish Gambino @ Prospect Park Bandshell

Childish Gambino @ Prospect Park Bandshell

Gabourey Sidibe

Childish Gambino @ Prospect Park Bandshell

Kilo Kish

Childish Gambino @ Prospect Park Bandshell

Childish Gambino @ Prospect Park Bandshell

Childish Gambino & Steve G. Lover

Childish Gambino @ Prospect Park Bandshell

Childish Gambino @ Prospect Park Bandshell

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These New York Streets Photo Show

So this Friday I am having my first NYC Solo show at Mishka’s Brooklyn flagship store 350 Broadway. I have turned down a lot of “hang your work in my store” type shows before but Mishka is family and I have been to a lot of really fun art openings at 350 Broadway. Plus they let me show whatever the hell I wanted so it was a good excuse to show something no one has ever seen before.

On Friday from 7-10 I will be showing around a dozen of my NYC street photography shots. There are no naked girls, no party pics and it’s all 35mm. There are a bunch of shots of fights but there are also some nice pretty things like neighborhood kids playing in fire extinguishers and bikers barbecuing. Plus if you really need the naked girls I am 100% someone will get naked at the show. I mean I will have my camera and there will no doubt be a bunch of nude models there. So that’s a thing.

Plus there is going to be free booze provided by Sailor Jerry and if you want to buy art I am gonna keep it super cheap. You can get any of the prints at 11×14 signed and numbered out of 10 for $100. You cannot beat that shit. And if that is still too much for you I am doing a special print with resident Mishka artist Lamour Supreme that is gonna be in the $25 range signed and numbered by both of us.

After the party we are going to head over to the amazing new South Williamsburg bar The Flat for an after party. There might be free booze there too but we will definitely have FUROCHE DJing some jams and I can assure you more good times. Still working out the details on the after party but obviously it will get weird.

So come out on Friday! 350 Broadway in Williamsburg from 7-10. It is right by the Hewes JMZ stop but you can also get there from the Broadway G or Lorimer L. (Also the Metropolitan G and Marcy JMZ for that matter). It’s only a couple blocks from the Brooklyn side of the Willamsburg bridge.

Ps. There is a Facebook invite.

These New York Streets

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Go Skateboarding Everyday – 6.22.12

Friday was a mess. It was like 100 degrees out and then it started fucking raining. I had walked all over NYC with my back pack on cause I new I was gonna hit up 99 Attorney St. for the Already Famous Go Skateboarding Everyday party. When I finally got there it was so hot and humid that I thought I was going to die. Luckily Vitamin Water was one of the sponsors and two drinks later I was feeling a lot better. Plus my Sailor Jerry crew was there giving out rum so I dropped by back pack off in their amazing airconditioned airstream and jumped into the crowd of sweat and madness with my camera.

The party was seriously wild. It was hot and sticky and crazy and people were skateboarding between music sets all on a half pipe/stage thing. This rap group Gospels opened up and started fucking shit up and then Flatbush Zombies got on and the place got pretty out of control. They had half the crowd on the half pipe with them and it was raining so everyone was just packed in this small space whiling out. Love seeing mosh pits break out to hip hop.

Punk rockers Cerebral Ballzy headlined and really destroyed the place. 100 Spongebob Squarepants balloons fell from the ceiling during their set and the mosh pit was pretty violent. Around their third or fourth song I decided I had taken enough pictures, I put down my camera and ran up the side of the half pipe and jumped off into a crowd of people who had backed the fuck away from the pit. They were not exactly psyched about a 185lb man jumping 10 feet on to them so they quickly dropped me onto my back. Two songs later I got one of the pointiest shoulders I have ever felt to my eye and during the last song an extremely large man tackled me for really no reason.  It was a lot of fucking fun but days later I still hurt. Still, it was nothing compared to how I feel the day after a Fucking Bullshit show, so I guess I did okay.

These pictures are nuts and there was actually that topless photographer girl who shows up to events from time to time so you even get some unexpected boobs. The rest is just really sweaty people whiling out and skating the fuck out of a makeshift stage. Good times, good times.

Click here to see all the pictures from the Airwalk Already Famous Go Skateboarding Everyday party at 99 Attorney St.

Ps. Shout out to my girl Jasmine Solano who hosted/DJd and the Harold Hunter Foundation who took all the proceeds from the door. RIP HH.

Cerebral Ballzy

Already Famous Go Skateboarding Everyday

Flatbush Zombies

Already Famous Go Skateboarding Everyday

Gospels

Already Famous Go Skateboarding Everyday

Already Famous Go Skateboarding Everyday

Already Famous Go Skateboarding Everyday

Already Famous Go Skateboarding Everyday

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Steve Aoki & Duran Duran – 6.20.12

When Steve Aoki asked me to come shoot his show at Terminal 5 I was not quite prepared for the weirdness that was his show Wednesday night. Trident gum sponsored an event called “See What Unfolds Live” with Steve Aoki and a “special guest” which turned out to be Duran Duran for some reason. I guess Trident has this multi-flavored gum so bringing Aoki in to do a live remix of “Hungry Like The Wolf” somehow makes sense. All I know is that the whole thing was pretty awesome.

Aoki did his thing and as per all his shows everyone went nuts. Very few DJ’s know how to turn what they do into a good performance and Steve is probably my favorite DJ to shoot cause he puts on a show. I haven’t seen him DJ since he started throwing cakes at people and crowd rafting people all over the place so this is some other level shit now. Unfortunately I got the wrong pass and they would only let me shoot a few minutes of his set. Luckily right at the end of his set I saw someone from his team and finally got back into the photo pit for Duran Duran live remix. Aoki brought on Duran Duran and they performed a mashed up version of Hungry Like The Wolf which you can download for free here. The whole thing lasted about 10 minutes and was intensely surreal. Finally Steve left and Duran Duran closed out the night with a short set.

I think the best part about these photos is trying to pick out who the Duran Duran fans are and who the Steve Aoki fans are. Whatever the case I hope some of these 16 year old ravers came with their Duran Duran loving parents cause someone should be looking after these kids…

Click here to see all the photos from the See What Unfolds Live Steve Aoki/Duran Duran concert at Terminal 5.

Steve Aoki & Duran Duran

Steve Aoki & Duran Duran

Steve Aoki & Duran Duran

Steve Aoki & Duran Duran

Steve Aoki & Duran Duran

Steve Aoki & Duran Duran

Steve Aoki & Duran Duran

Steve Aoki & Duran Duran

Steve Aoki & Duran Duran

 

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Introducing The New DBB B-Sides Blog

This is the first of many changes that are going to be happening to Driven By Boredom over the next few months. I have been hinting at a site redesign for a long time and my hope is that it is actually on it’s way. I am supposed to have a new draft of the design in a few days and once it gets pretty close to where it needs to be we are going to start implementing it. That is going to be a huge process because it means reuploading 30+ gigs of photos one gallery at a time but once it’s done everything is going to work so much better.

One of the big new features to the site is what I am calling B-Sides. B-Sides is a separate blog that will show up on the main site right under the newest photo gallery and will feature a variety of content from site news and events to videos and music. It will give me a chance to update the site as often as I want without bumping important content down the page.  If I am out of town and don’t have time to get up full galleries I can still post my friends new music video or let you know about why the hell I haven’t updated. It’s going to lead to a lot more content and I am pretty excited about it.

I want to get people used to the B-Sides now so I will be posting on there a couple of times a week just to get a bit of content on this blog before the new page launches but once the site does launch you should see me updating it a lot more. I hope you guys are at least 15% as excited about this as I am. It should be fun.

By the way, since this B-Side content is not going to show up on my main site until the redesign you should be following me on Twitter and/or “like” my Facebook page since I will be sending this stuff there. Or you could just bookmark the B-Side blog home page.

An now here is an important video about a crow and a kitten becoming friends.

 

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Django Unchained: Tarantino’s Spaghetti Western

Just saw this trailer for Django Unchained the new film from Quentin Tarantino. It’s been out for a minute but I wasn’t aware of it until last night. Since 95% of people have never seen any of the Django films let me give you some info about this film and why I am fucking exited about it.

I am a film nerd but it’s kinda under cover these days. I actually moved to NYC mostly so I could see films that I couldn’t see when I was living in Richmond, VA. I pride myself in having an eclectic taste and watching the Hollywood blockbusters as well as the underground indie stuff and all the film classics but my specialty is exploitation film.

I could give you 100 pages on exploitation film but let’s try to make it simple. Exploitation pictures were generally low budget films that exploited things like violence, nudity, etc to make a profitable fim cheaply. My personal favorite subgenre is Blaxploitation which “exploited” the previously untapped African American filmgoing market. Before 1971 there were pretty much no films catering to a huge American population. These films were made cheaply and often featured sex and violence to sell the picture.

As you probably know Quentin Tarantino is a huge exploitation fan and pretty much every film he makes is a reference to a bunch of them. Jackie Brown is actually named after exploitation director Jack Hill and his Blaxploitation classic Foxy Brown. His Grindhouse film Death Proof is just his own attempt at making a Carsploitation film and Kill Bill is just one reference after another.

Okay, so let’s get to the point cause this is beginning to drift. Tarantino is remaking Django. It’s been made 30 times and the original was pretty much a remake of a remake. Four years ago I reviewed Sukiyaki Western Django, the Takashi Miike remake of Django which actually featured Quentin Tarantino in an acting roll and I am going to quote that to you for some important background…

Let’s start with answering the question: What is a Spaghetti Western?

Spaghetti Westerns were Westerns made by Italian’s shot in Spain, primarily in the 1970?s. They used Italian actors to play Mexicans in the west. They also employed international actors and had them all speaking different languages to each other. The most well known of these movies were the Leone/Eastwood “Man With No Name” films… A Fistful of Dollars, A Few Dollars More and Good The Bad And The Ugly. In these films Clint Eastwood spoke English to the Italian actors speaking Italian. When the film was released in the States, Eastwood’s dialogue remained his own, but the Italian actors had their voices dubbed into English. This was reversed for the Italian releases. These films were generally low budget, but often ultra violent making them especially interesting to American audiences. These movies gained significant influence in the world of American filmmaking.

So the next thing we need to talk about is Yojimbo. Yojimbo was a samurai film made in 1961 staring Toshiro Mifune made by the legend Akira Kurosawa in 1961. It was about a samurai who comes to a small town that is stuck in a war between two rival gangs who run gambling houses. Yojimbo convinces one gang to hire him for protection and then plays the two gangs against each other, getting money on both ends. Despite my love for Kurosawa and Mifune it is not one of my top 5 favorite Samurai films… however two of it’s remakes are two of my favorite movies of all time.

The first of these was the previously mentioned A Fistful of Dollars in 1964. This put Spaghetti Westerns on the map and made both Eastwood and Sergio Leone famous. Only 2 years later a bad ass motherfucker named Sergio Corbucci decided to remake A Fistful Of Dollars… only this time he added more blood. You know that scene in Reservoir Dogs when Mr. Blonde cuts off that cops ear? Well he stole that from Corbucci’s remake 1966 Django. Corbucci, while not as well known as Leone, is probably just as amazing, and definitely way more fucked up.

Okay so now Tarantino is finally doing is proper remake of the Django story and I could not be more excited. By the look of it Tarantino is not only referencing the original Django film but other Corbucci films as well. Specifically I see references to my favorite Corbucci film “The Grand Silence” which featured Klaus Kinski as a bounty hunter. The choice to cast the German actor Christopher Waltz seems as a bounty hunter seems like a direct homage to Kinski’s roll. The Grand Silence also features a lot of amazing snow scenes which you don’t see a lot of in westerns and you see a lot of great snow shots in the Django Unchained trailer.

This write up has become long and confusing and is a perfect example of why I started writing about film on my site but I hope this gives you some background about the movie and I hope you search out some of these amazing Spaghetti Westerns. Anything by Leone or Corbucci is very worth picking up. Lastly here are a few clips from some films so you can see what the hell I am talking about.

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Sailor Jerry Day Tattoos – 6.12.12

Norman “Sailor Jerry” Collins the legendary tattoo artist died 39 years ago on Tuesday. To celebrate “Sailor Jerry” day Three Kings Tattoo in Brooklyn gave out free Sailor Jerry anchor tattoos for six straight hours starting at 10pm. Over 200 people were on the list and a HUGE line formed in the pouring rain outside the shop when it opened.  Luckily once you got your name on the list you could head over to Matchless across the street for free Sailor Jerry Rum and some absurd karaoke.

Speaking of karaoke, one of the highlights of the night was when Oliver Peck of “Ink Master” fame did “You Might Think” by the Cars. Another highlight was getting Alex from Three Kings to tattoo a Sailor Jerry badger on me when he got bored of doing anchors. He put it right between the Sailor Jerry bunny Oliver did on me at SXSW and the Aloha Monkey Betty Rose did on me.  I have a pretty nice Sailor Jerry zoo going on down on my party leg

It was a fun event and a ton of people got tattooed. You should probably look at the pictures.

Click here to see all my shots from the Sailor Jerry Day anchor tattoo giveaway at Three Kings Tattoos.

Three Kings Sailor Jerry Anchor Tattoo Giveaway

Three Kings Sailor Jerry Anchor Tattoo Giveaway

Three Kings Sailor Jerry Anchor Tattoo Giveaway

Three Kings Sailor Jerry Anchor Tattoo Giveaway

Three Kings Sailor Jerry Anchor Tattoo Giveaway

Three Kings Sailor Jerry Anchor Tattoo Giveaway

Three Kings Sailor Jerry Anchor Tattoo Giveaway

Three Kings Sailor Jerry Anchor Tattoo Giveaway

Three Kings Sailor Jerry Anchor Tattoo Giveaway

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Vivid Vivka

I got to do an old school naked in a nightclub photo shoot when I went to Bar Sinister in LA on Saturday. I met a Suicide Girl named Vivid Vivka who as it turns out I had actually met like three years ago. We have a bunch of mutual friends and she is from Detroit so we talked a bunch about how I want to buy a cheap hotel in Detroit and start a commune.  We decided to do a quick topless photo shoot right on stage at Bar Sinister with everyone watching. It was a lot of fun we took some nice pictures for a nightclub shoot. I have her contact info so next time I get to LA hopefully we can do a real shoot and she can get a little bit more naked. Until then, enjoy these…

Click here to see all the topless pictures of the lovely Vivid Vivka.

Vivid Vivka

Vivid Vivka

Vivid Vivka

Vivid Vivka

Vivid Vivka

 

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Bar Sinister – 6.9.12

Last time I was in LA I photographed Jay Gordon of Orgy for an interview my friend Arden Leigh did for Auxiliary Magazine.  Due to complete coincidence I was back in LA for the Auxiliary Mag release party at Club Bar Sinister, a goth/industrial/fetish party that has been happening in LA for more than a decade. Jay Gordon was DJing the party and Arden was co-hosting and doing two burlesque pole dance routines during the night. I got asked to shoot the party and things got nice and weird.

The party has several rooms including a no photos allowed area upstairs, a big dance floor and an outdoor area with a stage. There were a bunch of hot go go dancers and all the wildly dressed people you would expect from a party such as Bar Sinister. I brought my girlfriend/porn star Kimberly Kane and her friend/porn star Aiden Starr (who I had just done a photo shoot with that morning) and of course I got them to take a couple topless photos. Arden and her friend got a little wild and I did a full shoot with a Suicide Girl named Vivid Vivka on stage with everyone watching. That shoot should probably go up tomorrow but I left in a few shots from it in this gallery. Let’s just say the whole gallery is pretty NSFW.

I should also mention one funny story that happened is that when Arden went to an ATM to pay me she had to leave the club and walk down Hollywood Blvd to get out money. She was pretty much just in her underwear and everyone kept gawking at her. I took a few shots of her taking out money and then she decided to get topless right there on the Walk of Fame. Right before she was about to take her top off a cop drove by but she opened her top anyway right as two guys were biking by. One of them turned around to see her tits and crashed his bike onto the sidewalk. She actually caused an accident. It was pretty hilarious, plus the guy turned out to be a juggalo which is amazing as well.

So yeah, I am headed back to NYC today so I should wrap this up and get packed. Lastly wanted to give a quick shout out to Kent Kaliber the host of Bar Sinister. Now enjoy the damn pictures.

Click here to see all the shots of Club Bar Sinister!

PS. Check out the June/July issue of Auxiliary Mag for my pics of Jay Gordon.

Arden Leigh, Jay Gordon & Kent Kaliber

Malice McMunn @ Bar Sinister

Vivid Vivka & Kimberly Kane

Bar Sinister

Bar Sinister

Bar Sinister

Bar Sinister

Aden Leigh On Hollywood Blvd

Bar Sinister

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