This is it. I started with an idea I had two years ago of driving all of Route 66. I finally got my self organized in May and decided basically to try crowd fund a vacation. I figured if I made a zine or something out of the road trip I could get people to give me money and amazingly it worked. I raised some outside funds and took off on a 31 day road trip, the bulk of which were spent traveling Route 66.

I started out in Chicago and spent a day with Caprice Capone and then spent three days driving to St. Louis (a four hour drive if you take the highways) with one of my favorite models Sidney Scarlet. Once I got to St. Louis I spent the day hanging out with my girl Theresa Manchester, a St. Louis native. From there I flew in my muse of muses Charlotte Stokely and spent three days driving her to Oklahoma City, OK. I had lunch with my friend Heidi there and she ended up jumping in my car and going to Amarillo with me. In Amarillo I met Annalee Belle who I got to photograph in front of the famous Cadillac Ranch (as seen on the cover of my book!). I then took off towards Albuquerque, NM where I picked up the amazing Ash Hollywood and drove her to Vegas which is just two hours north of 66. In Vegas I spent two days in a nice hotel after a two weeks on the road and ran into Coco Velvett. She decided she could use a ride to LA and we drove back down to Route 66 and spent maybe 10 hours driving the short trip from Vegas to LA. Once I got to LA I only had one spot left to hit and I took Miss Crash down to the Santa Monica pier and photographed her naked on the ferris wheel.

The entire trip was life changing and I was so lucky to have such amazing models willing to get naked in public all across the country for basically nothing. When it was over I had coincidentally shot 66 rolls of film (well I shot 67 but one of them sadly got lost) and had a body of work I was truly proud of. Instead of just making a black and white photo copied zine I really stepped up my game and ended up spending a ton of money self publishing a limited edition book. It is hand numbered out of 250 copies. It is 85% color and 120 pages long. It really looks incredible. I am so happy with this thing and I can’t wait until you guys see it.

Originally I was going to plan a low key book release in NYC but I started thinking about how great it would be to do the release in LA where Route 66 ends. I was going to be out there in October anyway and I thought maybe I could throw something together last minute. I started texting some friends and Greg from Mishka got back to me immediately. I was thinking maybe I could do something small in their LA store since they do in store events in their Brooklyn store all the time. Turns out they just opened a new gallery above their LA Location and they were looking for an October show. He asked me if I could get a show together in time and I jumped on it.

So on October 11th I will be doing the book release in LA and there will be a huge photo show to go with it. I printed over 4o photos including 11 massive 20″ x 30″ prints. Not sure what I am going to hang until I get there but Mishka’s gallery is pretty big and I should have room to hang most of it. It’s going to be awesome. The book release is from 7-10 on the 11th but the photo show will be up for 6 weeks. There will be free Sailor Jerry rum and beer if you need a reason to go. There will also probably be a bunch of porn stars there if that’s your sort of thing… just saying.

There will also be a NYC event at Mishka’s 350 Broadway location as well but there won’t be a photo show. Just some free booze and an opportunity to buy the book.  I think the date is going to be October 17th but it’s not 100% confirmed yet. Just a heads up. Assuming they don’t all sell out (100 of them are already owed to crowd funders) the books will be available in late October.

I hope to see some of you in LA!

I got a bunch of random small things to mention to you guys so I figured we would do it all in one post. It’s not very exiting content wise but I gotta get the word out. Let’s do this.

The big thing I need to mention is that my site works again. This site does massive amounts of bandwidth. This site gets around 100k visitors a month but the average visitor tends to spend a lot of time on the site and looks at a lot of photos so we are talking of MILLIONS of page views every month and every one of those page views has at least one picture on it. I was on a shared server and when I would get a big link or something my site would just stop functioning or move really slowly. On Monday my awesome host Constant moved me over to my own server so the site is super fast now and hopefully we won’t have any crazy errors popping up any more. They really hooked it up on the price but it’s still nearly twice as much as I was paying so if you dig the site and want to support it you can help me out by signing up for my app, buying me some film or you can email me about advertising or buying prints. Any of that would be awesome.

Secondly I should be announcing the release info for my Route 66 book tomorrow. I am just waiting on a flyer. I can give you some of the info now though. The book is called “Get Your Kicks” and the book release will be in LA at the new Mishka art gallery above their LaBrea location. There will be a big solo show to go with it. There will be a smaller NYC release at the Brooklyn Mishka store with free booze and stuff but no art or anything. I am so excited for this I can’t even tell you.  A few books will be available online after the releases and if you donated to the fundraiser they will be in your hands by the end of the month!

Thirdly I threw a big party at Slattery’s Midtown Pub on Monday for this DolfansNYC thing I run. It was Monday Night Football so we went big on it.  I know people hate it when I post Miami Dolphins photos on Driven By Boredom so I am only going to mention it in this post in case anyone is interested. The Dolphins got killed but we raised over $1200 for charity through raffles and ticket sales. It was pretty amazing and my dude DJ Tropic killed it DJing during breaks in the game. You can check out all the pictures here! 

I also wanted to mention the B-Sides section of my site. I launched it a while ago but I haven’t really promoted it. I thought my site would be redone by now and the B-Sides are going to be a major feature of that, but we are way way way behind schedule on this thing and the B-Side blog has taken a back seat. I did update it the other day though with a really weird video from my friend Teddy Blanks that was directed by SXSW Film darling M Blash.  Check it out.

I gotta leave you guys with SOME content so rewatch this video about how awesome  and important I am. It’s the right thing to do.

[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/30523163[/vimeo]

Sunday night my friends The Coathangers played Santos Party House and they are awesome and adorable and they had a little kid play a song with them and that was totally sweet. They even have a rad new split 7″ out that you can listen to. But my love for The Coathangers has been well documented. So this write up is going to feature one of the most awesome bands ever to exist on the planet earth… Guitar Wolf!

After The Coathangers were totally fucking awesome Guitar Wolf took the stage. Okay, that’s not exactly true… before they went on the played like 6 music videos in a row. You need to understand that Guitar Wolf are not like other bands… they are from Japan. As far as I can tell everything in Japan is completely insane and fantastic. Okay, wait. We need to back up for a second.

We need to talk about how in 2001 my friend got a bootleg of a movie called Wild Zero. This movie wasn’t out in the US yet and the subtitles were clearly done by someone who has very little understanding of the English language. It was about zombies and aliens and rock and roll and gun runners and transgendered love, lots of explosions and a Japanese rock and roll band named Guitar Wolf. It’s the weirdest most amazing movie I have ever seen. Seriously, it is my favorite move. The first time I saw it my friend was watching it and I watched from the middle and watched it over again. It didn’t make any sense but every minute of it was fucking amazing.  Years later it made it to the states and you can buy it everywhere so you should do that immediately. I even wrote about it in 2008 for this very site.

Anyway, when I found out Guitar Wolf were playing I of course had to go. So after they played a series of music videos they went on and rocked everyone’s face off. Their music is really loud rock and roll. It’s kinda Ramones influenced but way way harder and way way weirder. At some point the front man (Who is also named Guitar Wolf) thumb wrestled several members of the audience and then brought someone on stage to play the guitar while he crowd surfed. They did SEVERAL encores. The last of which was just Guitar Wolf by himself after most of the crowd had left thinking they were over after two encores. I would say that their set time was actually shorter than their three encores. The 2nd encore involved them building a giant human pyramid and playing on top of it. Fucking amazing.

I was so excited to see both of these band and they 100% did not disappoint. My hearing is still fucked up but I have “a wallet on my ass with a rock and roll license”.

Click here to see all the pictures of Guitar Wolf and the Coathangers at Santos Party House!