I shot two events last night and I am gonna try to get them both up tomorrow and then get the rest of the SXSW Music stuff up on Tuesday and Wednesday. Sunday is a slow traffic day so I bring you my most half assed SXSW gallery… the SXSW Interactive gallery. SXSWi has become a huge part of SXSW. When I first started going SXSWi was barely part of the festival, but now it’s probably the biggest tech conference in the US. CES is boring and stodgy compared to the huge parties and branding events at SXSWi. But the big problem with SXSWi is that it’s really photographically boring. No one wants to see nerds partying so it’s hard to make look interesting.

I hit up the SXSW Trade Show which isn’t specifically just Interactive but it seems to be very tech and web heavy even when it comes to the music side of things. Not much film stuff is represented so I am counting it as SXSWi. I also photographed a Nerdist event that my friend Seth Herzog was hosting. It was a cosplay contest which means a bunch of nerds dressed up as video game characters and stuff. It’s pretty awesome and is worth looking at if you are a) into cosplay b) into making fun of people who are into cosplay. Either way there are some awesome costumes.

And that’s that. Enjoy and I will see you guys tomorrow with some crazy non-SXSW photos!

Click here to see all my photos from the 2013 SXSW Interactive Festival.

My dude Hannibal Buress turned 30 years old yesterday and decided to throw a party at the Knitting Factory. Last time I was there was for the premiere of Hannibal’s Comedy Central  special Animal Furnace. This time there was less comedy and much more hip hop. The night started out with hip hop legend Prince Paul DJing. After that things got real weird with Hip Hop Karaoke NYC taking over. I am not a big karaoke fan but when I do it I am always tempted to do some old school hip hop classic but I have seen people fail miserably when trying to do songs they think they know every word of. Now try that while holding the lyrics in your hand instead of timed out on a screen and you are in for a disaster. It was a pretty amazing train wreck although some people certainly stood out.

Halfway through the hilarious hip hop karaoke Hot 97′s Cipha Sounds showed up. He was DJing after the karaoke but he rolled in with Action Bronson and Questlove. Quest very begrudgingly did a song at Hannibal’s insistance and he kept slowing down the track. “This is why I am a drummer. I stopped trying to rap 20 years ago.” It was pretty epic. Action Bronson enjoyed himself a bit more and did two songs including A Tribe Called Quest’s Scenario with Cipha, Hannibal and Hannibal’s insane cousin Percy. As you can see if you click that link it was epic.

After that Cipha Sounds DJ’d and although he properly killed it the crowd began to thin out as you might expect at 1am on a Monday night but the jobless people who stuck it out were in for a rare treat. Hannibal really upped the weirdness game of his 30th birthday and did a 15 minute version of his 70 second “Gibberish Rap” and invited Mario, Alvin of the Chipmonks fame and Spongebob Squarepants to join him. It was in the top 10 most surreal moments of my life. Oh, did I mention the ballet dancers? Yeah, that too. It was a supremely weird and awesome way to end the night.

Click here to see the bizarre photos from comedian and gibberish rapper Hannibal Buress’ 30th birthday party at the Knitting Factory.

Ps. I gave Hannibal a $5 Arch Card for his birthday. Never say I am not a good friend.

ThingX.tv is a new website, presented by Adult Swim and from the former staff of the Onion. When the Onion moved to Chicago the Peabody Award winning New York staff stayed in NYC and started Thing X. My brother used to work for the Onion so I know a bunch of the new Thing X staff and I was asked to come out and take photos.

It was a pretty amazing event. There was so much hilarious branding everywhere, even in the bathrooms. I took a bunch of photos of the weird stuff they had everywhere so check that out. The performances at the show were pretty great with Cerebral Ballzy and El-P headlining. It was pretty weird seeing them play to a small crowd of TV executives and comedy writers. I think that made it even better of a show. With a giant X mascot named Thingy roaming around the whole thing was really surreal. One of my favorite comics Eugene Mirman performed as did Michael Che. They were both very funny which is important in a room full of comedians. Tim Harrington from Les Savy Fav DJd in between sets and The Jonny Lam Band opened the evening. Oh and Joe Garden hosted and did not get naked as was promised.

Click here to check out all the photo from the Thing X Launch Party at Le Poisson Rouge and for gods sakes check out ThingX.com!

Last night I decided to head down to the brand new Slipper Room to watch my man Barry Obama put a licking on Mitt Romney while comedians entertained me for just five dollars that all went to hurricane relief. This is America at it’s finest. The entire six years I have lived in NYC I have been going to my friend Seth Herzog’s weekly comedy show Sweet. As it happens on Tuesday Seth has done a lot of political themed nights like Super Tuesday Sweet and election watching Sweets. Always a good time because nothing is better than watching comedians make fun of our insane political process.

Last night Seth had his mom, who I love dearly, co-host. She was actually one of the funnier co-hosts he’s had and as always it got really awkward. Seth brought out Jordan Carlos doing a great Barack Obama impression. Rob Cantrell was up next and told a story about how he saw Run DMC, Whodini, Grandmaster Flash and the Fat Boys in 1986. It was hilarious and all but I was mostly just thinking about how jealous I was. Holy shit that would have been an epic show. Finally Driven By Boredom regular Hannibal Buress showed up and killed it as always.

After the jokes, shit got serious as we watched election results. Thanks to my near obsession with Nate Silver I knew Obama had it sealed up as soon as they called Wisconsin so I headed home early and by the time I got to my apartment CNN had called the election for Barack. I spent the rest of the night making fun of republicans on Twitter and then got an email about how my flight to Miami tomorrow got upgraded to first class. It was a fucking perfect day. God bless America.

Click here to see all the photos from the Sweet Election Party Special at The Slipper Room.

One of my favorite part of the Gathering of the Juggalos is the comedy tent. They actually get some really amazing (and sometimes awful) comedians and you get to see some great stand up sets and you get to see them react to the juggalos which is pretty funny in itself. The weirdest night of my life involved Tom Green & Gallagher at the Gathering and I met my homie Hannibal Burres there before his set. This year there were four comedians scheduled to play the Gathering. I skipped Ralphie May and Jamie Kennedy showed up three hours late so they told him to go home.

I did get a chance to see two, pretty awesome acts. The first was Cheech & Chong which seemed to be one of the most anticipated things at any Gathering I have ever been to. There were hundreds of people waiting in the comedy tent hours before they were supposed to go on. They went on late and people didn’t even care. They were just psyched to see Cheech and Chong.  Tommy came out first and they made him take hits from the biggest bong and biggest joint I have ever seen. After that Cheech came up as some hillbilly character and they switched on and off doing different characters while juggalos screamed things at them. It was a little dated but honestly hilarious and I wish I could have seen the whole set but I was off to something else.

On Saturday night I got a chance to see Bobcat Goldthwait which I was really excited about. I am a pretty big fan of both him as a comedian and him as a director. I met him on a press junket for his film World’s Greatest Dad and he seemed like a great dude and it was amazing to hear his signature voice when talking about serious things like scriptwriting. I was expecting him to be good, but not as good as he was. He delivered the best set I have seen in three years at the Gathering and everyone in the press area stayed for his whole set and the guy mixing the sound was laughing so hard he was crying. He was well researched and did a lot of great juggalo material, picked on some people in the audience and no one said shit or threw anything. At the end he put on an Insane Clown Posse shirt that Upchuck the Clown gave him. It was sort of perfect.

Check out all the pictures from comedy at the 2012 Gathering of the Juggalos featuring Bobcat Goldthwait and Cheech & Chong.

The Gathering of the Juggalos is a yearly music festival in Cave In Rock, IL created by the Insane Clown Posse that I have now photographed three times. Every year it produces some of the best photos I have ever taken. To see my complete GOTJ archives please click here.

Sunday night Comedy Central premiered Hannibal Buress’ first hour long stand up special “Hannibal Buress Animal Furnace”. Hannibal decided to throw a party at the Knitting Factory in Brooklyn to celebrate the special.

The sold out party opened up with Hannibal hosting an amazing stand up show. Amy Schumer opened up and although I had never seen her before she absolutely killed it. My boy Donald Glover went on after her and did what he said was his first stand up set in like nine months. He was brilliant as always and talked a little about his role on season two of Girls.  I mention this only so I can plug my cameo on Girls next episode. I play “Mustache Guy”. Get excited. After Donald Morgan Murphy came up and I have had a fake crush on her for like the last 7 years. I saw her about a month before I moved to NYC and I’ve run into her a half dozen times since and she is always fucking hilarious. Aziz Ansari headlined the comedy show and proved why he is one of the biggest comedians to come out of the NYC downtown comedy scene. Years ago, before Aziz was on TV or hanging with Kanye I think a lot of people knew he was going to make it. He would kill it every time he hit the stage and I think he’s only gotten better and better. I was close to crying during his set.

After the comedy show Hannibal showed a documentary he made leading up the taping of his special. I was running around a little bit while they showed it but the parts I saw were funny and at times touching. The documentary is a special feature of the Animal Furnace DVD and is going to be available online.  After the documentary screened Hannibal finally played his Comedy Central special. Hannibal is one of the funniest comics in New York and Animal Furnace was fantastic. People had been standing up for hours before the special even started and everyone was glued to the screen watching and laughing their asses off.

Sunday just happened to be the premier of The Eric Andrew Show on Adult Swim as well and Hannibal is the co-host so at 12:30am he played that live. Adult Swim is known for their insane programing but the Eric Andrew show is one of the weirdest things I have ever seen. It reminds me of the Tom Green Show before Tom Green was om MTV. It is filmed like a cable access show and is bizarrely funny.

Lastly the homies Ninjasonik closed out the night with a live performance. Most people there came to see comedy and had been standing up for nearly five hours and bounced before the Ninjas went on but there was still a good group of friends and fans left and they put on a great show with guest  spots from Johnny Nelson and Starcity.

Overall I cannot tell you how psyched I was that Hannibal thought of me to shoot his party. He even tipped me (he was possibly drunk) but I would have shot this show for free. Despite it being a really long night it was one of the better events I have been to this year. So go buy Hannibal’s awkwardly named special or just watch it however one might go about doing such a thing. I assure you it is funny.

Now click here to see all the pictures from Hannibal Buress’ Animal Furnace premiere party at the Knitting Factory.

Five years ago my SB-800 flash came in the mail. I had an old manual flash and my camera came with a flash but without the high tech lasers that shoot out of flashes these days it’s really hard to use auto focus in the dark. When I got the flash my photographs got a lot better and when I relaunched Driven By Boredom as the version of the site it is today I only uploaded the galleries that I photographed post SB-800.

A few months ago when Tyga was blowing up the charts with his Top 40 hit Rack City I went back to my archives to pull a photo of him that I knew I had from 2007.  When I opened that folder on my 2007 hard drive I realized that not only was it the first night that I got the flash but it was also just a really great night.  I realized that the 5th anniversary of the night was coming up and I planned to reedit the pictures and repost them today.  So let’s get into it.

Back in the day pretty much every Wednesday I would go to two events, Invite Them Up at Rififi and High Voltage at Sutra. Invite Them Up was a legendary night in downtown “alternative comedy” hosted by Eugene Mirman and Bobby Tisdale. On April 25th, 2007 they were hosting a comedy auction to raise money for the show because Rififi was falling apart and they needed new lights and things. Looking back on that night it was a pretty amazing crowd with a lot of comics that were big at the time and a lot of comics who have blown up since. I remembered getting in a bidding war with now reasonably famous Nick Kroll over a theme song written by Stella member and director David Wain. I ended up losing, but I did win Jon Benjamin’s fake mustache who now has his on TV show. Jenny Slate was looking adorable that night and she went on to make a name for herself as a Saturday Night Live cast member who accidentally said fuck on the air in her very first episode. Kristen Schaal was there and I had a crush on her at the time and she went on to steal the show regularly during the two seasons of Flight of the Concords and pretty much everything else she’s been in. I had no idea who Hannibal Buress was back then and now he’s one of the funniest comics in NYC. And I still haven’t mentioned Michael Showalter, Todd Barry, Morgan Murphy, Brett Gelman, Kurt Braunohler, Leo Allen, Jon Glaser, Seth Herzog, Joe Mande, etc, etc… It was a pretty amazing party.

After that I headed to High Voltage at Sutra which was one of my favorite parties in NYC ever. I met so many friends at that party and made out with so many girls and got so many people naked in bathrooms there. It was awesome. The party then moved to 200 Orchard where it got a little bit worse and then to Annex where it got a lot worse Dimitry finally pulled the plug on it after a few months there. I showed Dimitry these pictures recently and he told me that he had to sneak Tyga in because he was underage and he rolled to the party with Travis McCoy who was at the time in the Gym Class Heroes. I remember Travie being there but I didn’t know who he was at the time so I didn’t take his photo because he had a camera with him and I pretty much never take photos of photographers unless I know them. Looking back at these pictures there are a ton of people in there now that I didn’t know at the time but I later became good friends with (and perhaps saw naked) later.

After High Voltage I headed over to Manor for the short lived Misshapes spin off Bleach. The party got shut down because they constantly let in underage kids and I was really psyched it got shut down because the week after this they told me they would kick me out if I took any photos because the Misshapes are super serious people. Whatever, the party was a lot of fun and there are so many pictures of people here I didn’t know at all at the time and am friends with. I had just met Sophia Lamar and Raquel Reed and the band VIP was hosting and there is a pretty funny shot of Johnny Makeup wearing a Mouseketeers and holding my business card in his mouth. There are some Ruff Kids and Misshapes in this gallery and a bunch of cute girls who I may or may not have made out with at some point in the next two years. I think I might have gone home with a girl I met that night. Those were the days…

Anyway that was five years ago when I loved doing this shit and I did it for free while I was working as a bus boy at a hotel in midtown. I am old and jaded now and won’t leave my house unless you are paying me five times what I would have been psyched to make back then. But this is life: you get old, you stop enjoying partying with college kids downtown and then you die. See you all in Hell.

Click here to see the photos I took five years ago today on a really fun Wednesday night.

This is post one of a series of photo posts from the Fun Fun Fun music fest in Austin Texas that was held last weekend. I was asked to cover the crazy three day party for Sailor Jerry who seemed really happy with my work at the Voodoo fest the previous weekend. They did tattoos and passed out free drinks and I documented at all but I also got to have fun fun fun at the fest and I shot a bunch of bands and a bunch fun times and a bunch of Ryan Gosling.

This first intro post is just full of the crowd shots I took that don’t fit into any specific galleries. These photos are from all over the fest but most of them were taken in the artist/media area that I spent most of my time in because I needed to stay close to the Sailor Jerry trailer. Plus most of my friends are pretentious VIP types and they don’t like to pay for drinks or venture out into public with the unwashed masses.

Also since this is the intro post of Fun Fun Fun I should mention the Ryan Gosling thing.  He was filming a Terrence Malick film called Lawless during the fest and he was there all damn weekend and then he was at all the after parties. I ran into the guy 50 times and EVERYONE was talking about it constantly. Yesterday when I was in Chicago I felt like there was a hole in my life and I didn’t know what it was… I realized that no one had mentioned Ryan Gosling to me in the last twelve hours. So in the next three galleries will be full of “RyGo” as people kept calling him (seemingly just to intentionally make my skin crawl). After that we will move into band photos and this website will once again be a Gosling free zone. So enjoy your Gosling while you have it ladies.

Anyway, I am about to get on a plane so let’s get it on.

Click here to see all the crowd shots from the 2011 Fun Fun Fun Fest in Austin, Texas.

Okay, this is it. The last post of the Voodoo Music Experience in New Orleans and we are going to pack a lot into it. I have four galleries of images for you in this one post because I gotta start getting up Fun Fun Fun fest pics later today.  In this post we have mini galleries of Snoop and Kreayshawn and then a mixed gallery featuring live shots of Cheap Trick, Z-Trip, Star Eyes and TV on the Radio. And then finally we have all the random crowd shots I took at the festival. Those probably deserve their own post but I don’t have the time for it…

Snoop Dogg and Kreayshawn were pretty much playing at the same time at opposite ends of City Park in New Orleans. Snoop was supposed to go on a few minutes earlier than her but he ended up going on late. When he did go on his stage lights shined right into my lens and most of my shots had crazy lens flare. As much as I love Snoop I have shot him before so only shot one song and booked it down to Kreayshawn. I know a lot of my friends hate her but I really do love that Gucci Gucci song and I kinda think she is adorable. I also think that the argument that she is racist is bullshit. Whatever the case I had been wanting to shoot her for a while but I only got to shoot about 45 seconds of her set before they kicked me out of the photo pit. My photos were mediocre at best and I only got a few of them. I only got one song to shoot Cheap Trick and TV on the Radio as well and that accounts for why there is only a handful of shots from those sets.  As far as Star Eyes and Z-Trip… well shooting people DJing is just boring so I only took a few shots of them.

Lastly in this post we have the gallery of crowd shots. Most of them are shots of people drinking either out of Sailor Jerry cups, people in crazy halloween costumes or the occasional cute girl. There were a lot of great costumes but it wasn’t really my job to be taking photos of concert goers so I only shot a few photos while I was in between bands. There are also a few random back stage shots like the photos of OFWGKTA members Tyler the Creator and Left Brain.

Anyway, it’s time to put the Voodoo Music Experience to bed and move on to Fun Fun Fun so click below to check out one or all of the four galleries I have left. Thanks.

Click here to see photos of Snoop Dogg at Voodoo Music Experience.

Click here to see photos of Kreayshawn at Voodoo Music Experience.

Click here to see photos of Cheap Trick, TVOTR, Star Eyes and Z-Trip at Voodoo Music Experience.

Click here to see some random crowd shots from Voodoo Music Experience.