Isle Of Dogs Portraits

I’ve had some amazing opportunities presented to me over the last decade of my professional photography career, but without a doubt the best gig of my life happened last Wednesday. I reached out to my friend Sarah who is the director of national publicity for Fox Searchlight to see if she could get me into a press junket or something because I am working on my first portfolio in years and I wanted some newer celebrity portraiture. I thought she was kindly blowing me off when said “I’ll let you know if I can think of anything” but then a week or two later she texted me “Would you want to shoot the cast of the new Wes Anderson movie holding rescue puppies?” and suddenly I had the best job any photographer has ever had.

In the end we ended up doing two completely different photo shoots at the same time time. Best Friends Animal Society met us at the dog friendly Peninsula Hotel where we had two rooms set up. One for the puppies and one for the photo shoots. I don’t usually use lights, but I bought some cheap LED video lights because I knew we had a ton of setups and I basically had to build photo booths for the puppies.

The first shoot was dressing up puppies in Wes Anderson costumes. We knew this was going to be really tricky so we had some ringers. Fox Searchlight organized a group of six “Instagram famous” pups that we knew would be able to pose well with costumes on. The rescue pups would be much trickier. I spent the morning trying to get these adorable rescue puppies to sit still long enough to get a shot of them in these two little puppy photo booths I set up. Luckily I had the help of the Best Friends volunteers, my assistant Steph and Sarah’s boyfriend Snake (don’t ask). We found that the puppers wouldn’t eat their costumes if they were already eating treats so Steph and Mike kept the pups distracted with food while I kept shooting.

Later in the afternoon the rockstar dogs showed up. They were so happy to be in these costumes and they would just sit there posing for photos. It was so incredibly easy to get them to pose, especially after dealing with wild puppies all morning. We had Quincy Fox dressed up as Fantastic Mr. Fox, Mad Max Fluffyroad dressed as up as Max Fischer from Rushmore, Muppet’s Revenge as Steve Zissou from Life Aquatic, Menswear Dog as Richie Tenenbaum, and Walter Cronkite & Iverson the Labradoodle dressed up as Monsieur Gustave & Madame Céline from Grand Budapest Hotel. Plus Sarah’s dog Cricket Jean got to play Chas Tenenbaum and his kids with a couple tiny rescue pups. All of this was so goddamn adorable and they were so easy to shoot until we did a group shot. All the dogs have different commands to get them to sit still and suddenly it was chaos, but we managed to pull it off somehow.

While we were doing all the doggy dress up I was taking breaks to shoot the Isle of Dogs cast whenever they were ready. I had several shots planned by the windows of the hotel room, knowing that I wouldn’t need lights for those. Liev Schreiber and and Bob Balaban came in and we knocked their shoots out in under five minutes each. I might not be the greatest portrait photographer on earth, but I am very good at getting something usable, very, very quickly.

Jeff Goldblum showed up earlier than planned so I photographed him by one of the windows as well. I had another shot planned for him but shooting him was incredibly easy. He was every bit as Jeff Goldblum as one would expect and sang to the puppy the entire time. I actually got a video of him singing and I have been sending it to my friends all week because it’s so good. Go watch it.

After that I had to switch to my lighting set ups again. I actually shot my favorite Law & Order ADA Courtney B. Vance in one of the dog photo booth set ups. We just raised the lights and we were good to go. The only shot I didn’t have planned out was for the Isle of Dogs human star, Koyu Rankin. I decided I would just figure out when he showed up because he’s 10 and all 10 year old’s love puppies. I was right and I just shot him in this random chair in the room and the only reason it took more than three minutes is because he wanted to play with the puppies so I just kept shooting.

Finally we moved up to the hotel bar. It was the best lit room in the entire hotel and I knew it would be the perfect place to shoot Wes Anderson with his c0-writers Jason Schwartzman and Kunichi Nomura. Wes just wanted to do the group shot and I knew I could shoot all three of them without any lights on this couch right by the window. What I didn’t really consider was how hard it was going to be to get three people and three puppies to pose for a photo. I ended up getting some useable shots but this was the only one I wasn’t really happy about. I also used the same couch to shoot all the Instagram dogs together which I thought would make for a funny Easter egg for anyone who saw both shoots.

All I can say about shooting Tilda Swinton is that she is the most unreal looking person I’ve ever met. I saw her walking down the street a few years ago and she was like this glowing space alien. She is so stunning looking that she had no choice in life but to be famous. She plays a pug in Isle of Dogs and one of the Fox Searchlight crew has an adorable pug named Elvira so we had to shoot them together. The difference in skin (fur?) tone between Tilda & Elvira was so drastic, but it ended out working perfectly and I kinda want to make this photo into a greeting card or something.

When I first saw the bar on the roof of the Peninsula Hotel I saw it I knew I wanted to shoot Bill Murray sitting there with a puppy next to him drinking out of a bowl. Unfortunately all the bowls we had were way too big so he ended up with a shot glass of water. Bill Murray was one of the first big celebrity portraits of my career. I had shot plenty of celebrities before but it was mostly out at parties so when I shot him with Robert Duvall and Sissy Spacek back in 2010 for their movie Get Low it was the first time I had ever really been star struck at a shoot. This time I was too stressed out about the shoot to be nervous but Bill Murray easily the greatest person who ever lived. I asked Sarah to clear the room because everyone was in the shot at the back of the bar, and she was trying her best, but Bill decided he would get shit done. He just started screaming at everyone to get out as if he was this petulant star like that famous Christian Bale rant, but he was completely joking about it. Still, it worked and I had an empty background to shoot him and the puppy. Every second of shooting him was entertaining and we got probably the greatest photo I have ever taken.

Anyway, this is a crazy long update, but it was my favorite shoot of all time so what are you gonna do. I just wanted to thank Sarah and everyone from Fox Searchlight for trusting me enough to do this thing. Thanks to Steph and Snake for help on the job and of course thanks to Best Friends for providing all the rescue pups. I have actually photographed a benefit for Best Friends before and I hope I can work with them again.

Now here’s the result of all the hard work:

Click here to see the Isle of Dogs cast portraits on Vulture.

Click here to see the puppies in Wes Anderson costumes on Buzz Feed.

And click here to see a bunch of outtakes from both shoots plus a handful of red carpet photos from the dog friendly Paw Prints screening of Isle of Dogs at IFC Center that happened right after the shoot.

Jeff Goldblum

Maxine As Max Fischer

Tilda Swinton

Cricket As Chaz Tenenbaum

Courtney B. Vance

Menswear Dog As Richie Tenenbaum

Bill Murray

Moonrise Kingdog

Bob Balaban Wes Anderson Dogs

Jason Schwartzman, Wes Anderson & Kunichi Nomura

 

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March For Our Lives – 3.24.18

I went down to the March For Our Lives rally in DC to protest gun violence with my mom. I grew up upper middle class in living in the suburbs of DC and still gun violence was a part of my life as a kid. DC was the murder capital of the United States in the crack cocaine era and violence was on the news every day growing up here, but it wasn’t just on TV. Shortly before my first birthday one of my neighbors was shot in the head during an attempt on Ronald Reagan life. His name was James Brady and the bill that requires gun background checks is named after him. When I was six years my pediatrician opened his front door and a hit man, hired by his step son, shot him in the face. While I was on the way to school in the 7th grade a man named Mir Aimal Kasi walked up to the front gate of the CIA and fired 10 shots with a semi automatic rifle into the line of cars waiting to get in killing two CIA agents and injuring three more. The CIA was right down the street from my school and my school bus had to park a few blocks from the CIA while they searched for Kasi. Eventually we arrived at my school and were locked down for the rest of the day and spent recess indoors for a week. Just recent one of my friend’s who had been sober over a year, fell off the wagon and got in a fight with his girlfriend. While she went upstairs to sleep he took out his handgun and shot himself in the face.

If it were up to me, guns would be illegal everywhere, but it’s not up to me. Despite what you may believe I am a proud American and I love this country. Even at the worst of times, seeing this country stand up to it’s abusive leaders is inspiring. I know the vast majority of this country believes that guns should be legal and I am completely fine with that. Let people hunt, let people shoot insane guns at gun ranges and let people own a gun if they think somehow it’s going to protect them and their family. But most people in this country also think background checks should be stricter and modifications that make semi-automatic weapons automatic should be illegal. There are a lot of steps we could take in this country to make things safer and our government is not doing anything about it, and that is a bigger problem to me than the guns.

People talk about politicians being bought by the NRA, but it’s not just about the money. In red districts around the country, politicians know that if they don’t have an A+ rating from the NRA they aren’t going to be able to win a primary election. The NRA holds more power as a voting block than it does as a campaign contribution. Gun owners vote and the only way to fight the NRA is to be just as organized and just as likely to vote. The NRA uses fear to sell guns, but they also use fear to win elections. The best way to get bills passed is to scare these bastards even more than the NRA does. And that’s what today’s march was about.

When my mom and I got to the Navy Memorial/ National Archives Metro stop, several blocks away from the march, we couldn’t even get off the escalator because there were so many people there. I heard estimates of as many as a million people took part in the march. Over 700 marches around the country, including at least one in every state, brough millions of people together to stand up for not just the children involved in mass shootings but the children impacted by gun violence everywhere.

Because my mom is getting older and because it was so crowded we only stayed for about two hours and didn’t get anywhere near the stage or the kids of Parkland, Florida, but it was still pretty inspiring. I used to go to protests all the time when I was in high school but it was usually just a bunch of punk kids mixed in with mostly older people. This march had so many kids of all ages. It also had a ton of people my mom’s age. We met a Vietnam Vet who was a the first protest of his life. He said he wished he was in DC in 1968 instead of Vietnam. My mom told him she was there protesting the war. He thanked her and told her it was because of the anti-war protesters that he got home 45 days early. He thought it saved his life if not his sanity.

I didn’t take a ton of photos or anything because we didn’t really go anywhere and I was mostly just spending the day with my mom, but I still got a small gallery for you guys, mostly just of signs. This day wasn’t really about photos, it was about spending the day with the woman who helped instill in me a belief in the power of activism and the hope of progress. When we got home we sat and watched the rest of it on TV with my father who would have marched with us if he wasn’t recovering from surgery and it just made me really proud to have parents who actually give a fuck about the world and want to see it a better place even if they won’t be around to see it.

Click here to see my photos from the March For Our Lives in Washington, DC.

March For Our Lives

March For Our Lives

March For Our Lives

March For Our Lives

March For Our Lives

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SXSW Slugfest – 3.17.18

On the last day of South By Southwest I got to photograph a boxing match. My friend Keith Underwood is a tattoo artist and a boxer and he started a boxing promotion company called Underwood Promotions. They had this idea of doing a boxing match during SXSW called SXSW Slugfest that would feature both boxing and live music music. It worked out and became an official SXSW event taking place at the Moody Theater the home of Austin City Limits.

I know Keith because of my work with Sailor Jerry. He apprenticed under Mike Malone who worked under the Sailor Jerry himself and took over Jerry’s shop after he died. Keith has continued the legacy and we have done a bunch of tattoo events together for Sailor Jerry.  It only made sense for Sailor Jerry to sponsor the event and the tattooed ring girls wore Sailor Jerry shirts. Musically the event featured a rockabilly band called The Octanes who played before the boxing started. Between matches hip hop artists MC Doughbeezy and Young Jay performed. Zach Blair of Rise Against played the National Anthem before the main event.

As far as the boxing goes, I am just gonna post all the info from the website.  because I don’t know a goddamn thing about boxing outside of watching every movie about sports ever made. I mean, I loved Tyson back in the day but my love of boxing ended right around the time he bit Holyfield’s ear off. I do own a George Foreman grill though…

Carlos Trevino vs Manuel Rubalacava – Manny Mondragon vs Tyler Pacheco – Prisco Marquez vs Tanner Dodd  – Iskander Kharsan vs Richard Munoz

The main event was Reshard Hicks vs Adan Ahumada for the World Boxing Bureau Intercontinental Title. Check out the official results here.

Hicks pretty much destroyed Ahumada and only the first match went the distance but all of the matches were pretty entertaining. I had never photographed boxing before and honestly I had a blast. I was so close that a couple times I got hit with the ropes when the boxers would crash into them. I had some blood spatter less than two inches from my arm which was pretty great too. I mean as long as didn’t get in my face right?

I took so many damn photos and I edited them down to just over 100. I don’t think I got any shots that were the perfect boxing shot that I imagine when I think about boxing photography but I got a lot of shots I was pretty happy with. I would love to shoot more boxing. I think if I knew the sport better and had more experience shooting matches I could get pretty good at it. Sports photography in general is so specialized but with boxing you sort of have to just “spray and pray” a bit because you never know when that big punch is coming. I feel like those big moments would be a little more intuitive if I watched more boxing.

Anyway, the boxing was a blast and I hope I get to do it again. I hope you guys click through this gallery because some of this stuff is really fun.

Click here to see all the photos from Underwood Promotions: SXSW Slugfest at the Moody Theater in Austin, TX.

SXSW Slugfest

SXSW Slugfest

SXSW Slugfest

SXSW Slugfest\

SXSW Slugfest

SXSW Slugfest

SXSW Slugfest

SXSW Slugfest

SXSW Slugfest

 

 

 

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Brooklyn Bowl Family Reunion

This is going to be a massive post. In one single update I am going to be posting over 400 photos from six parties over a three day period that account for nearly everything I did at South By Southwest. I thought about breaking it up with a separate update for each party or each day, but I am exhausted after a week in Austin and I have one of the biggest gigs of my week tomorrow and then I am headed out of town to see my family so I wanted to get everything up as soon as possible. So let’s break this down!

Every day from Wednesday through Friday Brooklyn Bowl threw two parties at the Scoot Inn on Austin’s east side. The parties started at 1pm and went to 1am every night. The whole event was sponsored by Harley Davidson and Sailor Jerry who just happened to be my clients for the event. Aside from photographing the bands I was on hand to photograph people getting free haircuts from local barber Teddy Sloan thanks to Sailor Jerry and free air brush tattoos from Harley Davidson. Harley also had a bunch of bikes on hand and a training bike so you could learn how to ride a Harley. I should also give a shout out to High Brew coffee who sponsored the “Roadie Lounge” which was air conditioned and had free coffee. They aren’t a client of mine but I am pretty sure I would have not survived without all that caffeine.

Now let’s go through this party by party! Day one featured the Brooklyn Bowl party during day and the This Song Is Sick party at night. R&B artist Son Little and indie/folk Hop Along were the highlights of the day party but I honestly enjoyed all of the bands. The night party was mostly DJs. The absurd Party Pupils were, if nothing else, highly entertaining. They got the crowd both dancing and laughing. Louis Futon brought out a trumpet player to play along with his DJ set and Classixx headlined with a DJ set of their own.

Day two had the Consequence of Sound party during the day and the Brooklyn Vegan showcase at night. The Consequence of Sound party was actually my favorite event even though I am not sure the bands made any sense together. A band called Hinds from Span opened up and they were on their 7th of 14 SXSW shows. That is madness and it’s the kinda thing that leads to some terrible shows, but even for a 2pm set they were really enjoyable. Even their soundcheck was fun when they started covering Beatles songs they didn’t know the lyrics to. Chicago rapper Kweku Collins played next and put on a great show, but I was just happy because he dropped his beer so I ran and got him another drink in a Sailor Jerry cup so I could get some good branded photos. Is it weird that nailing a branded shot is a highlight? Sunflower Bean were really fun to watch. It’s weird that I don’t even remember what they sounded like, but I really liked photographing them. Photography has broken my brain. Headlining was Dr. Octagon which is the alter ego of legendary rapper Kool Keith with music by legendary producer Dan the Automator and legendary DJ DJ Qbert. It was really amazing to see them all together on stage. I remember my friend Keith shoplifted Dr. Octctagonecologyst from Tower Records for me when we were in high school and I had that CD in my car for years. Also, I got a shot of Dan and Just Blaze together which was pretty iconic even if it’s just a mediocre party photo. The Brooklyn Vegan party was headlined by Ted Leo and Wye Oak but the highlight for me was this band Bully who gives me a nostalgia boner for every female fronted band I listened to in the early ’90s i.e. anything with a Deal sister in it.

Day three was all about Relix Magazine. The magazine started out many years ago as a Grateful Dead newsletter so it’s day party “Tribute to Jerry Garcia” makes a lot of sense. Aside from the bands that played, the day party featured a bunch of exclusive clips from a documentary about Willie Nelson’s roadie Ben “Lovey” Dorsey called King of The Roadies. Willie Nelson’s daughter Amy Lee Nelson co-directed the movie and was on hand to show the clips and talk about the film. There was also an auction to raise money for Live Like Lovey, a charity that helps roadies founded after the death of Ben Dorsey by the fellow roadies who took care of him late in life. The afternoon ended with the Texas Gentlemen doing a Grateful Dead cover set with a bunch of guest musicians stepping in to play. It may come as a huge shock to you guys that I am not a huge Grateful Dead fan, but I did own Skeletons from the Closet when I was 10 and I was totally singing along to about a half dozen songs.  Bonus: My friend Sam and I sang Truckin’ karaoke at a fair when we were in the 5th grade. The parties ended with another Relix event that featured Hiss Golden Messenger and headliners Okkervill River.

Okay, that’s all I got. The rest of my SXSW was spent eating BBQ & mexican food and trying to avoid going downtown. I did photograph And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead for Rolling Stone, but I didn’t take enough photos to justify a post.  The only other post I will have from SXSW is a great one and should be up tomorrow: SXSW Slugfest! Until then go look at this massive gallery from the Brooklyn Bowl Family Reunion!

Click here to see all the photos from the SXSW Brooklyn Bowl Family Reunion at Scoot Inn in Austin, TX.

Bully

Brooklyn Bowl Family Reunion

Kweku Collins

Texas Gentlemen w/ Nicole Atkins

Dan The Automator & Just Blaze

Brooklyn Bowl Family Reunion

Hiss Golden Messenger

Brooklyn Bowl Family Reunion

Hinds

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Off To SXSW

Once again, I am leaving for South By Southwest in Austin, TX. Between the last decade covering it as media and the years I was going as a music manager I have been roughly 15 years in a row. I thought it was 14 actually but if you include 2004 and this year that’s 15 right? Who cares? Anyway, I love Austin but SXSW is kinda a shitshow now, but at least the food is good, I get to see a ton of old friends and I am working my ass off while I am there.

If you happen to be in Austin for SXSW you should RSVP for the Brooklyn Bowl party that I’m shooting. It’s at the Scoot Inn on the East Side and it’s sponsored by Sailor Jerry and Harley Davidson who also happen to be the people who hired me so go buy some rum and a motorcycle but not at the same time. I am also shooting this boxing match mixed with music because of course on Saturday that should be pretty interesting. I’ve never actually shot a boxing match before which should be fun.

Also if you are in town you should go see the movie Wobble Palace which my brother edited. It’s in the film festival and I really enjoyed it. Here’s the RogerEbert.com review if you want to know more about it. Quick tangent, my brother also edited the TV show Take My Wife and both seasons are now available on iTunes. It’s about a queer couple trying to make it in comedy together while also trying to make sure their relationship doesn’t fall apart. It’s really, really fucking good and totally relatable despite me being a straight white dude and all. Here’s a review of that too…

Okay, since I probably won’t update this again until next week let me plug stuff as always. You can get my books and zines here . And since I am gonna be gone for a while I uploaded a mini gallery of my friend Meg to Girls of Driven By Boredom. I did a shoot with her yesterday and at the end fucked around with my new LED lights. I will post the real shoot on here eventually but the mini shoot at the end is up on Girls of DBB now.

Okay, that’s all I got. Make sure to check out my Twitter and Instagram while I am gone for a ton of stuff from SXSW. And hopefully I will see some you guys at the Brooklyn Bowl Party in Austin.

Brooklyn Bowl Reunion @ SXSW

 

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Best Of 2013

So, I am headed to Austin, TX tomorrow to cover something like my 14th South By Southwest in a row so I wanted to get some stuff up before I left. I think I am gonna try and get one more post up before I leave because my flight isn’t until 6pm but if I don’t here’s fair warning that I might not update the site much until I get back.

As I continue to slowly crawl through every photo I have ever taken we have reached the end of 2013 and I bring you another Best Of update. I have now gone through every single digital photo I have taken since I got my very first digital camera in 2001 up to December 31st 2013. The good news is that since 2013 I have been way more organized so 2014-present should go a lot faster. 2013 was also the last year before my life completely fell apart in April of 2014 so I was working my ass off and there’s a ton of stuff for you to look at here.

Let’s give you guys a little run down of some of the highlights of 2013. Since I am headed to SXSW tomorrow that seems like a good place to start. I got to shoot SXSW Film portraits for the LA Weekly & Village Voice. I always loved doing this and my favorite shot that year was of Brie Larson and John Gallagher Jr. for the movie Short Term 12. The picture got even better when Brie won a Oscar a few years later. I also got a really fun group portrait for the launch of the YouTube channel JASH featuring Sarah Silverman, Tim & Eric, Michael Cera and Reggie Watts. I had the opportunity to meet Paul Walker before he died and talked cameras with him which was surprisingly cool. After the Film Fest ended I covered a big week long party for Sailor Jerry and got some really fun stuff as well.

In 2013 I got to cover some other really stuff like the Indy 500, Hannibal Buress’ 30th birthday party,  Friday the 13th tattoo fest in Dallas and another music festival in Austin, Fun Fun Fun. Fun Fun Fun is probably my favorite festival of the year and I got to see Flag and Body Count and Sparks and a bunch of other stuff I actually wanted to see. I covered my usual stuff too like the AVN Awards, Gathering of the Juggalos and Fool’s Gold Day Off where I shot some great stuff of Migos before they took over the world.

I obviously shot a ton of babes as well. I started shooting for Hustler in 2013 and shot some great stuff of Stoya and Charlotte Stokely for them. I also shot some hilarious portraits of Chuck Palahniuk in a sex shop. But more importantly than all of that was my Route 66 trip that started out as a small Kickstarter to pay for some of the trip, to a 31 day adventure that ended up as my first book, a web series, and my first LA solo art show. That trip and the resulting book was a big life highlight.

Okay, I am gonna stop talking now and pack for Texas. Enjoy the gallery.

Click here to to see the HUGE gallery of my best digital photos from 2013!

Hannibal Buress Turns 30

Trash Party - RIP DJ Jess

Brie Larson & John Gallagher Jr.

Slayer At Fun Fun Fun

JASH

Migos

Route 66 With Theresa Manchester

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Warriors Fund Art Show @ Three Kings Tattoo

On Friday night I stopped by Three Kings Tattoo in Greenpoint to check out the art benefit they were doing for Warriors Fund. The Warriors Fund is a charity set up to raise money for the Wounded Knee School District in South Dakota. The money goes to “stock the school’s food pantry and fund specialized counselor training for suicide prevention”. You can read more about the artists involved, the charity and what it does here.

A bunch of great tattooers had art in the show and the event was packed pretty much all night despite the storm. I am not sure how much they raised but I know a ton of the art sold and people were buying raffle tickets all night. I had a ton of fun and I also am getting a tattoo out of the deal so I am pretty psyched about that. Great event all around. Thanks for having me out!

Click here to see all the photos from the Warriors Fund art benefit at Three Kings Tattoo.

Warrior Fun Art Show @ Three Kings Tattoo

Warrior Fun Art Show @ Three Kings Tattoo

Warrior Fun Art Show @ Three Kings Tattoo

Warrior Fun Art Show @ Three Kings Tattoo

Warrior Fun Art Show @ Three Kings Tattoo

 

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Riley Nixon & Pig

Driven By Boredom anniversary week is coming to a close with photos of Riley Nixon and her adorable puppy Pig! It’s crazy that I managed to lose these photos of Riley and Pig because they are pretty great. Not in any skilled photographic way, but in the way that Riley is fucking incredible and her dog is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever seen and I of course mean that in the best way.

Riley also helped me a ton with the Instaxxx book release party in LA. She hung out topless at the party taking photos with people and signing books and all that fun stuff. You can actually get a copy of Instaxxx signed by her and a ton of the other girls at the party here. They aren’t cheap but they are signed by a bunch of porn stars and I made my own Certificate of Authenticity which is really dumb in the best way.  I should mention that Pig is also in the book because how could he not be?

Speaking of trying to sell you things, there are a bunch of extra dirty photos of Riley on Girls of Driven By Boredom. These photos have been on there in high resolution for a couple of days. Sign up for that shit already. I’m not asking for much… Oh, and I made another t-shirt with naked girls on it. I actually took this photo the same week as these Riley photos.

What else? Since this is the last day of anniversary week I should remind you that I wrote a way too long history of Driven By Boredom that you can read over on Medium if you didn’t catch it yesterday. Oh, and I am shooting an art opening at Three Kings in Greenpoint tonight if anyone wants to come. I will have photos up this weekend, you should be in them.

In conclusion, Riley rules, Pig is cute, buy some shit, happy 17th birthday to my website and I’m out.

Click here to see all the NSFW photos of Riley Nixon & her puppy Pig.

Riley Nixon

Riley Nixon

Riley Nixon

Riley Nixon

Riley Nixon

 

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Driven By Boredom Turns 17

I had something planned for today but it didn’t work out. Such is life. But the site turns 17 today and I told you guys I was going to do a post so here it is. I figured I could tell you a story about the history of Driven By Boredom.

Before Driven By Boredom was a website it was a motto. I hated being bored and have always needed to be doing something with my spare time. When I was 14 I started a music magazine and when I was 15 I started a record label and then I started taking photos of punk bands for the label and the magazine and punk rock was my entire life. Around my senior year in high school my partner in the magazine and label quit and I didn’t have something to consume my life with anymore. But around that time I also started fucking around with web design.

It was the late 90’s and I had been on the internet since 1992 or something like that. I was a kiddie hacker and for that era I was fairly knowledgeable when it came to tech but it wasn’t until my sophomore or junior when I started my first Geocities site. By the time I was a senior I knew basic HTML and had made a couple little websites and would check the hit counters every day and was blown away when a handful of people would check out my site in a given week.

I went to Penn State University in 1999 and realized immediately I had made a huge mistake. I wanted to run a record label for a living so I was a business major but before I even took my first class I said fuck it and became a photography major. Punk rock was all about DIY and I figured if I was a photo major I could take it easy and figure out the music shit in my free time. The problem was Penn State had no punk scene.

I quickly became good friends with my Penn State roommate but outside of him and a couple other people I didn’t really have any friends. I was a punk kid and I didn’t drunk and I didn’t exactly fit in at a giant party school in the middle of nowhere Pennsylvania. I spent a lot of time talking to my friends online and meeting new people on the internet, but one day I decided to ride the Loop Bus around campus on a Friday night and it changed my life forever.

The Loop Bus was a free bus that drove around campus from about the time classes started until bars closed at night. During the day it was a way for people to get to class or to get downtown but on Friday and Saturday night it became a way for people to get to bars and parties without having to drive a car.  It was affectionately called “The Drunk Bus” and it was always a complete fucking shit show.

So one night I am with my roommate and a few people and we are trying to figure out what we should do. We didn’t know of any parties and it was way too fucking cold to do much anyway, so I had this idea that we should just ride the drunk bus around. For some inexplicable reason I grabbed this stuffed animal monkey that a girlfriend had given me and we rode around the bus. Before one loop around campus was over I had been approached by a half dozen girls wanting to talk about my monkey and suddenly I had an idea.

The next weekend I went back on the bus. I was by myself this time but I had the monkey and a camera. If anyone talked to me about the monkey I would take their photo with it. I spent a few hours Friday and Saturday taking photos and on Sunday I dropped the film off to get developed. On Monday I picked up the film and started working on a website. A few days later “The Loop Monkey” was born.

Almost instantly the site became a hit. Hundreds of people were visiting the site every day to look for their photos and the photos of their friends. The school newspaper even did a front page story on me. I was getting stopped five times a day by people wanting to talk to me. The problem was that I hated that. I quickly realized I was not cut out for being famous, even on that micro level. I would have someone try and talk to me at 8am and I would kinda blow them off and by the time I got home from class they would have written some post about how awful I was on my message board. The head of the bus company found out about me and had the bus drivers kick me off after one lap around campus. It became a whole thing. I decided to quit and a few months after it started the Loop Monkey was no more.

I wanted to drop out of school but my parents convinced me to give it one more year. The problem was that by the time they convinced me to go back all the dorms were filled up. I got stuck in temporary housing in a study hall with seven other roommates. I had just broken up with my first serious girlfriend (she cheated on me with my first girlfriend and a random dude the day before I left for college!) and I was depressed as hell. My old roommate and his friends moved off campus together so I spent a lot of time in my room.

I started all these dumb projects to keep myself entertained. I was doing photography still and I was making really terrible electronic music with early EDM programs like ACID and Fruity Loops. I didn’t even like electronic music but it was fun to do. I had some terrible site on Mp3.com. I started making these really absurd videos with my roomates where we would lip sync to 80’s pop songs and record these mini music videos using the super early webcam I owned. I started making prank listings on eBay just to entertain myself and my friends.

When I say friends I am of course talking about my friends back home, but I was also talking about my new online friends. There was a scene of people popping up making these websites about their lives. Blog wasn’t a word back then and LiveJournal wasn’t really popular yet. It was mostly just nerds in their parents basement making these sites that were a collection of everything they thought was cool on the internet and nonsense about their lives. The sites were called Everything/Nothing because they were about everything and nothing at all. E/N was also used to talk shit about the sites saying they meant everything to the author but nothing to everyone else.

At some point I got sick of having to email my photos and videos to people and decided I needed to start my own E/N site. YouTube didn’t exist back then and there weren’t many options for sharing photos with people. I wanted to put all my dumb projects in one place so that everyone could see them. I didn’t want to use Geocities or Tripod or any of the other hosting sites back then because I wanted to host all my own content. Fortunately I had friends in the E/N scene running their own servers and I got some space on a friend’s server and bought my first domain name. I bought drivenbyboredom.com because this was going to be central home for all the projects that I created when I was trying not to lose my mind from boredom.

Building the site took months. I did a lot of the HTML by hand but I also used a program called Microsoft Front page. Everyone at Penn State got a bunch of the Microsoft Office type products and Front Page was the web design program. I wasn’t great at it, but I built a separate page for all of my projects. I built a webcam portal into the main page that would refresh every 30 seconds with a new photo if I was online. I built a journal into the site so I could tell people when there would be new updates to the different sections. And most importantly I built a links page.

These days there’s way too much shit on the internet, but back then finding quality content was hard and the way you would do it was by going to a site like mine to find out about other cool sites. I went on mIRC and asked all the webmasters I knew if they would link me and I got a couple girls I knew to pose topless with popular websites written on their skin. I knew how to get people naked and topless fan signs were a prized internet currency back then. By the time Driven By Boredom was ready to launch I had a dozen sites ready to tell everyone about me.

On March 1st, 2001, Driven By Boredom launched…..

If you want to read the rest of the story check out The History Of Driven By Boredom over on Medium

Here’s now some random old DBB related shit to make this post look prettier.

Driven By Boredom

Driven By Boredom

Driven By Boredom

Driven By Boredom

Driven By Boredom

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