I have three updates today from the 10th annual Siren Music Fest at Coney Island.  I shot the thing for the Village Voice which incidentally happens to throw the event. I had a blast last year but this year it was really really hot, and I was really really tired and I may have been a little bit mopey. Anyway, other people were less mopey. In fact it seems like almost everyone was having a pretty fucking amazing time. Everyone was dancing and crowd surfing and rocking the fuck out and they didn’t even get the free drinks and shaded VIP areas I was offered. Poor simple bastards….

Hah. Anyway, let’s start with the crowd shots, and the crowd surfing shots and the kids just hanging out having a good time. Then I am gonna go try to see Inception and then I will be back with band photos.  Excited already? Let’s get to it.

Click here to see the kids that make the Siren Music Festival what it is…

So as promised in the last update, here are the pictures of Loli Lux at Trash on Friday night. Loli has Dj’d all over the world but this was her first performance as a pop diva. She sang to promote her first EP, Batteries Not Included, that I shot the cover for. Clearly it was an historic event.

Loli did four songs as part of Trash’s late night cabaret and she pretty much killed it.  You could see her get a bit stiff and not work the stage as much as she could during times, but overall for a first performance it was pretty bad ass. When she gets back from a month on the road she is going to be fucking shit up left and right. The songs are tight as well and she clearly knows what she is doing… Oh and she also happens to be pretty fun to look at…

I am pretty sure I had something else to talk mention, but I think I will just let you look at the photos of her and go to sleep instead.

Click here to see all the hot pictures of Loli Lux perfoming at the Studio at Webster Hall.

This weekend was kinda brutal so I am a bit behind in my updatings. Please bare with me. I am putting this and the next update up tonight and then I should have all the Siren Fest pics up tomorrow and that’s going to bump my planned NSFW update until Tuesday but I am sure you can wait for that, it’s pretty hot.

So yeah, Webster on Friday… I really didn’t want to go out, but I managed because my friend Loli Lux was performing. It was the release party for her first EP and since I shot the cover I figured I should be there. I am going to put those pics up in their own update in a few minutes. But despite not wanting to go out I actually ended up having a lot of fun.  I took pretty bad pictures because I was just trying to shoot enough for a gallery and whenever photography becomes work to me the work suffers.  Still, by the end of the night I was having a good time and I even made it home and asleep around 5am which is a record for me. Plus I think I am almost not sick anymore which means you get to stop hearing about how sick I am!

So as far as info on the party goes… Important things to remember are that Al from MSTRKRFT DJ’d Girls & Boys upstairs and Loli performed downstairs.  She played between two cabaret acts. The first of which was Albert Cadabra who did a pretty hilarious strip straight jacket routine which unfortunately I have seen before… and by unfortunately I mean that normally when I tell you a gallery is NSFW I mean it’s because there might be a topless girl in the crowd, but no… thanks to Albert you have full on human male cock.  Enjoy that kids. After Loli my home girl Lady Rosebud performed and that was freaky as always. I am supposed to shoot her soon, let’s hope that happens.

Okay, anyway, I gotta go. I will be back soon with the Loli Lux pics.

Click here to see all the pictures from Boys & Girls and Trash at Webster Hall.

So I had planned on putting up another hot naked girl from my trip to LA today but I ended up not getting to my computer today until about an hour ago so I haven’t had time to edit or upload any of the pictures. That’s when I realized I had uploaded a second set of Arden Leigh. I forgot to post these ages ago and I still had them in my galleries ready to go making my life super easy right now.

So let’s rehash. Here is the last set of Arden that I shot and you can read all sorts of exciting things about her, but what is most important is that she is a professional seductress and that she just wrote a book that should be out soon on how to get yo self a man. It’s all pretty crazy and exciting.

Also what is interesting to note is that I accidentally deleted all the high res images from the two sets I shot of her, so this is all we have left. That is pretty depressing but I am sure I will shoot her again one day.

Click here to see all the sexy photos of the very sexy Arden Leigh. NSFW.

After the Full Bleed show I was going to go home and try to not be sick. It was early and I had time to get home, do some work and get to sleep early. Unfortunately whenever I leave my house I always end up staying out until it’s daylight and Tuesday was no exception.  I ran into my former intern at Full Bleed and we both were trying to hit up Gallery Bar later so we killed some time by eating terrible food and then getting stuck on a broken subway. We ended up just getting off and taking a cab 30 minutes later and only 7 blocks closer to the bar.  Rando was fucking packed and totaly crazy. I took a bunch of half assed photos because felt totally clostrophobed by the heat and all the people so I escaped to Happy Endings with some people.

I was hoping that Happy Endings would be fun again, but after a very, very long run I think Tuesdays there are pretty much done for. Happy Endings used to have my favorite staff but Frankie and George are gone and Shannon and Erica are long gone and I now get ID’d there and that just doesn’t feel like home anymore.  Disco Down is still killing it upstairs and Kayvon and his crew were hosting so that was okay but downstairs was empty and everyone I was left wanted to leave. We went to Lit but it was even worse and I finally ended up back at Rando sweaty and now exausted. I have no idea when I eventually got home but of course I woke up the next afternoon feeling even sicker and I am still paying the price.

Oh well, at least there are some pictures for you to look at. You should do just that by clicking right here.

And of course a very happy birthday to Swedish A.

Oh and, PPS. I also got punched in the face.

There is a new book out called Full Bleed. It is a HUGE book of New York City skate boarding photography.  Milk Studios Gallery had an exhibition of select images from the book on Tuesday night. It was sponsored by Etnies and Vice Magazine who I occasionally take photos for. Oddly enough I was not shooting for Vice on this night but I was shooting for Complex Magazine instead. Man, this whole paragraph is very poorly written. I am terribly sorry.

Continuing… I headed over to Milk on Tuesday and checked out all the art and hung out with skateboarders and watched people drink really strong drinks from the very crowded open bar. It was all a very good time. I was always very interested in skateboarding as a kid. I skated when I was 8 and 9 but I could never figure out how to ollie so I quit.  In high school I photographed a lot of skaters but they all sucked and my images weren’t that much better.  But I was always more interested in the bands that came out of that culture. For the first 8 years of my photography “career” I shot nothing but bands and mostly punk bands.  One of my photography icons was Glen E. Friedman who had work in the show but I didn’t see him at the party.  I used to keep in pretty good touch with him, but I haven’t emailed him in a while because I am pretty sure he would fucking hate my work as much as I do.

Okay, I am sick so I am gonna try to crank out another update and then go lay down some more.  Sorry I am not my normal exuberant self this week.

Click here to see all the pictures from the Full Bleed NYC Skateboarding show. Oh, and Complex has some captions if you wanna know who some of these people are.

Last weekend my friend, Penthouse Pet and the “Tony Robbins of sex” Ryan Keely held her first Porn Star Sex Life seminar at Velour Lounge.  I was hired to shoot some promotional shots for the event as well as get some shots for the eventual DVD release of the seminar. But as well as shooting I got to watch the entire seven hour seminar and even an experienced sexual deviant like myself learned some tricks.  Ryan had help running the seminar and she was assisted by fellow Penthouse Pet Justine Joli, fetish model Jade Vixen and pick up artist guru Josh Rosenberg.

The seminar started off with Josh teaching a lesson on how to find yourself a girl to practice these techniques on and then Ryan led a lengthy discussion on how to find the clitoris but after that they jumped straight into the proper techniques of fisting. It was full steam from there with some pretty advanced lessons on all sorts of sex.  Ryan gave pointers on oral sex, the best positions, and finally anal sex, the whole time demonstrating, in a more or less safe for work, these techniques on Jade and Justine.  She also went through a number of simple stretches you could do at home to make your sex life dramatically better in just a few weeks. Jade gave a lesson in my specialty – rough sex and Justine broke down STD’s and sex hygene.

All the girls were extremely knowlagable and talked a lot about the biology of sex in a way that would have made sex ed classes in high school a lot more interesting.  And while I an experienced pervert, former Love Line addict (in the Riki Rachtman days) and self proclaimed sexpert, there was a lot of stuff I am pretty excited to try most importantly Justine Joli’s pattented move the “pussy massage” which sort of blew my mind.

You guys should probably sign up for the next seminar or at least check out the DVD when it comes out.  The whole thing was pretty awesome even on zero sleep and I was lucky enough to get paid to be there.  Sure beats working at Starbucks.

Now, you should probably click here to see all the photos from the event. Technically they are safe for work, but um… they probably aren’t at all. Enjoy.

So last night I got to photograph Iron Maiden’s The Final Frontier tour date at Madison Square Garden for the Village Voice. In the late 80′s when my friends were listening to Maiden I was mostly listening to Run DMC and Young MC. Then by like 1991 I was mostly listening to goofier metal bands like Warrant and Poison and of course Motely Crue.  I never got around to listening to Maiden.  Still, I was pretty excited to shoot it because I knew the shots would be cool, I would get to use my telephoto lens that I almost never use and most importantly I would get to be on the floor at Madison Square Garden.

I have never actually seen a concert there, but I have been to two or three Caps vs. Rangers games and it’s obviously a legendary place.  Once I was down there infront of the stage with these crazy metal heads behind me and this legendary metal band running around in front of me it was a pretty cool experience.  I have shot thousands of bands on some big stages but this was the first time shooting an arena rock show.

Oh yeah, and Iron Maiden fucking ruled. Seriously they were amazing. Their lead singer Bruce Dickinson ran around stage like a maniac and he kept just leaping off of things. My editor at the Voice Camille Dodero talked a lot about it in her article. You should read it. He did this jump about four or five times in the three songs I was allowed to shoot. I kept missing it so I spent almost the entire last song following him and finally at the very last second of the third song I caught him mid air. It was an amazing shot and an amazing show.

After the three songs were over I was escorted to a great seat but I hadn’t slept in 3 days so I only watched another thirty minutes before taking off. I went home and took a handfull of sleeping pills and passed out for 12 hours.

Oh, and one other thing. Before the show I was photographing the Iron Maiden fans coming into MSG and Terry Richardson was out front doing the same thing. I don’t admit it often, but Richardson really is one of my favorite photographers and clearly an influence in my 35mm work.  I bought my first Yashica T4 many years ago after seeing it in one of his photos. I have seen him around a bunch I talked to him for the first time and he seemed extremely nice and much less villainous that he is made out to be. We took photos of each other and then I went around to the other side of MSG so I could let him do his thing.

Anyway, you should click here to see all the pictures of Iron Maiden and their fans at Madison Square Garden.

On Friday before I went to Webster Hall I went to see Winnebago Man. It was pretty awesome. But before that I went to another awesome thing: the Pint Size Paintings show at Sacred Gallery.  I covered the one night exhibition of teeny tiny works of art for Complex Magazine. The work was amazing the gallery and tattoo shop were very impressive and I got to flirt with cute tattooed girls. It was all pretty on point. I actually bought the Pint Size Paintings book that went along with the fine arts.  They are already working on a second series of paitings for a second book and second show.  I can’t wait to see what else people come up with.

Now I still have an insane headache which probably has a lot to do with the fact that I haven’t had sleeping pills since Thursday so I have been sleeping about 2 hours a night for the last 4 nights. I can’t bare looking at my computer screen any longer so I am going to leave you with this short post, check out the links below for some further reading.

• Pint Size Paintings
• Sacred Gallery
• My Photos On Complex.com

And now most importantly you should click here to see all the photos from the Pint Size Paintings show at Sacred Gallery.