The Occupy Wall Street Protest reached day 11 yesterday and I finally headed down to Liberty Park in the finantial district to find out what was going on. If you are somehow now aware of the protest it is a couple hundred people living in a park in Wall Street who are protesting all sorts of different things.  There have been a bunch of arrests and problems that have made national news and a bunch of celebrities showing up to offer kind words to the protesters living there.

As someone who is left leaning politically and as a punk rock youth would probably living down there with them I generally support a lot of what is going on.  That being said there is no real focus and it is so overly PC and radically leftist so I don’t think it is going to attract a much bigger following than is currently down there. I think a lot of people support Wall Street reforms and the end of tax breaks for the wealthy but 99% of those people do not want to join a fucking drum circle. Everyone is so nice down there but it’s so nice that it’s almost condescending. Still, there is a lot of great stuff going on there and I think it is worth supporting these people and it’s about time there is a wildly left swinging answer to the Tea Party.

One of the highlights of my trip down there was Dr. Cornel West showing up. He spoke to reporters around 6PM and then stayed down there talking to everyone and just hugging people. That dude is so bad ass and at 7PM he spoke to everyone during one of the public town hall meetings Occupy Wall Street holds daily. I stuck around to hear him speak and then I had to get out of there when they started giving everyone a lecture about what hand signals to use during a meeting in order to be oh so respectful to everyone. I am sure it is useful to organize that many people but it also makes you just wanna rip some hippies dreadlocks off.

Anyway, I got a few nice shots and met some really interesting people standing up and fighting for what they believe in and you have to respect the hell out of that if nothing else.

Click here to see all my pictures from Day 11 of Occupy Wall Street. And click here to find out more info or make a donation to help support the protest.

On September 11th 2001 I was living in Alexandria, VA a suburb of Washington, DC.  I had taken a semester off college and I was living at home.  My parents woke me up to tell me that someone had bombed the World Trade Center.  My father had just canceled a business meeting in NYC that would have put him less than a block from the WTC. I got out of bed and came into their room about the time the second plane hit. About 30 minutes later a third plane hit the Pentagon in Arlington, VA just a few miles from my parents house.  At some point planes were scrambled from Andrews Air Force Base and the sonic boom from the jets shook our entire house.  It was absolutely terrifying.  That night I went out with one of my best friends and we watched the Pentagon from a hill overlooking the city.  There were probably 100 people there and I don’t think anyone said a word.  This moment was extremely powerful and traumatic for me and I certainly will never forget that day.

But I didn’t live in NYC.  I didn’t have any family or friends die that day.  I didn’t have ash rain down on me. I didn’t have to pull anyone out of a burning building. I didn’t have to have my entire neighborhood quarantined.  I didn’t watch the sky fill up with smoke as everyone around me contemplated the end of the world.  2000 people from my community weren’t all murdered on the same day. As scary as it was living in DC on September 11th, it doesn’t compare to the emotions nearly every single person living in NYC in 2001 went through that day.

So when the news hit that Osama Bin Laden had been finally killed I knew that whatever emotions I was feeling were magnified ten fold by millions of people living in the city I now call home.  I watched the news for about an hour and then grabbed my cameras and headed down to Ground Zero. There was a party down there to say the least.  I stayed for hours and witnessed so many different feelings. People were singing and screaming and crying and drinking.  Firemen walked around remembering their brothers who had been killed saving lives.  Frat boys drank beers and chanted “Fuck Bin Laden”.  Hipsters brought out boom boxes and sang country songs about America. Marines carried flags and got hugged by everyone. The Fat Jew and the Hipster Grifter was there, and so was Dan Choi. People were climbing anything they could find so they could wave American flags high above the crowd.  I saw Muslims, Hasidic Jews, Sikhs and Christians all come together to celebrate this moment and finally get some closure. People crowd surfed and bag pipes played Amazing Grace while everyone sang along. It was an amazing moment.

I can’t say too much more about all this. I was just really glad to be there and be part of this city and this countries healing after the attacks 10 years ago. My Twitter feed has filled with Osama jokes and while I rarely think anything is in poor taste, I just can’t find myself contributing to that. This moment is just too important.

Click here too see all my photos from the celebration of the death of Osama Bin Laden at Ground Zero.

I got a chance to cover Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s Rally To Restore Sanity And/Or Fear for the Village Voice… and that meant press access. I went down there with my brother and two friends and we got there more than an hour before the rally started and they couldn’t get anywhere near the stage. I on the other hand got to hang out in a press area that while still awkwardly far from the stage, was still a pretty fantastic seat to watch history.

This was an historic event. The crowds dwarfed Glenn Beck’s rally and the left’s answer to the Beck rally. People came together from every age range and every race. It was the most peaceful rally I have ever attended and back in my punk rock days living in DC I attended a lot of damn rallies. The Rally was star studded and a lot of interesting people were in the crowd but I think the most important part of the day was the message.  After all the music and the comedy Jon Stewart addressed the crowd with complete earnestness that might be the best speech I have heard since Barack Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. If you haven’t heard it yet click here to do just that.

Anyway, the convention has been talked about ad nauseum and you can figure out who was there by checking out any national media source so I won’t bore you with the details you can find anywhere.  But I did really enjoy the Cat Stevens Vs Ozzy Osbourne Peace Train Vs Crazy Train battle.  It was really amazing to see those guys share a stage. Unfortunately the photographers were cycling to the front of the stage throughout the event so during that performance I was about 100 feet from the stage and couldn’t get the shots I wanted. That being said I got some fantastic shots throughout the event.

So without further ado, please click here to see all the pictures from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s Rally To Restore Sanity And/Or Fear on the National Mall in my home town of Washington, DC.

It’s that time of year again. The 4th of July hot dog eating contest at Coney Island. It has become a tradition in my life ever since I made my way down to Coney Island in 2004 after the Richmond, VA based  band I was managing at the time drove up to NYC to play a show on the 3rd.  I returned the next year, intentionally booking the band a show so I could make the trip.  The year after that the bad actually played the contest and the last three years I have been covering the event as a journalist.  The last two years for the Village Voice.  I have seen some amazing feats.  I was there for Kobayashi breaking his own record with nearly 54 hot dogs in 12 minutes which no one ever thought was possible.  I was there when Joey Chestnut defeated him in a contest which shocked the world and I was there last year when Chestnut ate an impossible 68 hot dogs in just 10 minutes.

This year records were not broken.  It was so hot that eaters across the board had troubles eating.  Chestnut, who ate 72 hot dogs in practice, managed to win the contest eating 54 hot dogs. Five years ago this would have been an incredible feat, but this year people questioned if he wasn’t pushing himself without a serious contender.  You see, this year Kobayashi watched from the stands.

Due to a contract disagreement between Kobayshi and the International Federation of Competitive Eating (IFOCE) the Japanese legend did not compete. Right before the contest started he appeared in the crowd and people began chanting his name.  He was wearing a “Free Kobi” t-shirt but seemed content to watch from the stands. When it was over and Chestnut had one, Kobayashi made a break for the stage.  His translator said that he wanted to eat for the people for free, others said he just went  up there to congratulate Chestnut, the Larry Bird to his Magic Johnson. Either way he was grabbed by police and carried of stage.  He clung with all his might but eventually was pulled off.  He was arrested for trespassing and resisting arrest and spent the evening in jail.

Later at the after party competitors, friends and family were cheering for Joey, themselves and America as the ESPN highlights showed on TV.  They had a big USA, USA! chant going on.  But when they showed Kobayashi being arrested a silence fell over the room until people started booing.  Everyone hated such a thing happen to a man they respected so much. The story should have been about Chestnuts 4th straight victory, but instead, it was a sad day at Coney Island and a sad day for Major League Eating.

Click here to see all the photos from the 4th of July hot dog eating contest at Nathan’s Famous in Coney Island. Pictures from the after party will be up tomorrow. God bless America.

Ps. Just wanted to give a special shout out to Crazy Legs Conti who invited me to the after party and introduced me to a lot of the eaters.

Shepard Fairey wheatpasted a huge May Day mural on the Deitch Wall on Bowery and Houston last night.  I was headed out last night and I saw it going up so I took a few pictures.  When I was looking online for info on the wall I found a video that Animal NY posted interviewing Shepard about the wall and a few other things.  I was standing about 2 feet away from them during this interview so anything I would tell you about this project I over heard from this interview, so instead of typing about it, I will just link you to the video, and post a couple of my shots below.

Also, if you haven’t had a chance check out “Exit Through The Gift Shop” the Banksy produced film about Mister Brainwash and the street art movement.  Shepard Fairey has a lot of screen time in it.  It is a pretty fantastic film, I saw it last Saturday.

The Yes Men are at it again, and all this week.  Their movie The Yes Men Fix The World opened at the Film Forum yesterday and they decided to make the screenings slightly longer than 87 minutes.  After each screening they are leading the viewers on actions around the city.  The have almost no advertising budget so hopefully these viral actions will help make change, but also promote their film.  After the screening last night they led the crowd to a random Chase bank to do a mini action to protest JP Morgan Chase’s funding of mountain top removal coal mining.  They handed out coal to everyone and had them let Chase know how they felt. I have no intention of getting into a discussion of the financial and environmental issues behind coal, but you should check out the Yes Men blog if you want to know more about the action.  They are doing this stuff all week, so make sure you check their film out soon! It is really good.

Check out my shots of the Chase protest here. It is clearly not my best work, but I had a lot of fun anyway.  I would never vandalize private property in anyway ever, but if I did, it might look something like this.

PS. Shout out to my friends Scott and Liz who I saw for the first time in ages last night. Their company Evil Twin handles the bookings for the Yes Men and other entertainers who “think and act”.

Well at least for the moment my gallery software seems to be working properly. I have a feeling there are going to be more problems when I try to get up the photos I took on Tuesday. The main thing I need in life is to figure out a new solution for my photo galleries. Jalbum was just not built for a site as big as mine. If nothing else I need a better template so it at least looks slightly like my site. I get tons of traffic to the site galleries, but probably very rarely does that traffic come back to the main site.

Anyway, the Dolphins gallery and the two Yes Men posts now link to the correct gallery pages instead of Flickr. I also will be getting up a bunch of stuff from the last few days in the next few days. I am hopeful to get two more posts up today, but I might take a nap instead. Let’s see what happens.

I wanted to say that the two day break away from Driven By Boredom allowed me to get some stuff done that I had been putting off forever, and I did a pretty sexy photo shoot yesterday. I got a second opinion on my knee and I am going to have to get surgery soon. I also resigned my lease and have a new roommate moving in on Monday. I am not sure you care about any of that, but it is what it is. I will get some photos up tonight, at very minimum the pictures from Trash last friday. While you wait, check out this video of the Yes Men passing out the papers I blogged about on Monday. I show up in the background a few times. I fucked up and slept through their Tuesday prank where Andy evidently got arrested because of an outstanding ticket for riding his bike through a park, but you can read about that here.

Again, my site is still not letting me upload image galleries, but I wanted to get these shots up asap.

Today a large group of environmental and political activists came together to create a fake NY Post that they handed out all over New York. This issue addressed climate change and was timed with a global summit on climate change at the UN. Last year they came out with a fake New York Times that showed a world 6 months in the future where the war had ended and progressive causes had been championed by the world. This issue was less optimistic with a big “WE’RE SCREWED” headline.

I went out with the Yes Men today, one of the groups behind the paper and photographed them handing out the special issue. I am not sure anyone even realized it was fake since “We’re Screwed!” is not that inconceivable for a NY Post headline. I think people are much less shocked by bad news than they are good news.

Watch out. The Yes Men are not done with their climate change shenanigans. Just be on the look out for some really big balls.

Check out the photos from today on my Flickr account until I have my site up and running again.

Update: The above link now goes to my site and not the Flickr.

The Yes Men are at it again. If you don’t know about them, you should. They are left wing pranksters who protest big corporations using some highly entertaining methods. I have a history with them, as you can read here, and heard about their newest prank and asked them if I could come down and shoot some photos. Other than their people, I was the only photographer on the scene for their test launch. Tomorrow they are launching hundreds these balls at the UN to address the climate week meetings*. Today they had a test run down in DUMBO and we gathered in the sun to watch it all go down. Tons of people gathered to watch, but most of them happened to be part of the wedding that was taking place at the exact same time on the exact same mini beach. It was pretty funny. I would love to see their wedding pictures.

Anyway, this is going to be an exciting week for hilarious radical activism so keep your eyes open, read the papers and check back here. I should have some interesting photos if I manage not to sleep through them.

Lastly, my gallery software is giving me fits right now so I uploaded the shots to Flickr. Hopefully they will be up on DBB soon. Click here to see all the pictures.

*hundreds may be a slight exaggeration.

Update: The picture link now goes to my site and not Flickr.