Leaving town tomorrow morning for the rest of the month and I am breaking open the Road Trip Blog again. Over there I post daily updates from my travels as it’s a lot easier doing that than clogging up the main page.

I am headed to LA for five days to see my family, friends and of course take photos of some babes. My parents are out there visiting my brother and they offered a free plane ticket if I came with them. I doubled down on the free plane ticket and picked up some work and turning my parents weekend trip into a two week road trip.

I will be Instagraming, Tweeting and Snapchating a lot. I have no idea how to link my Snapchat because I barely understand how it works but my name is drivenbyboredom on there like on every fucking thing.

Now to find out more about the trip and check out my daily updates…

Head on over to the DBB Road Trip Blog!

Hurray! Today is the one year anniversary of the worst day of my life so I feel like we should write about it as some sort of therapeutic exercise and then maybe I can move or something like that. Maybe I should just write this and delete it but I won’t because I have dedicated the last 15 years of my life to oversharing… why stop now?

One year ago today was the memorial service for my good friend DJ Jess. He was one of the first people to hire me as a photographer in New York and had such a huge impact on my life that I could never fully express it. You can read this thing I wrote about him last year if you want to see me try.

I wanted everyone to know about his memorial service so I posted on Twitter that it was going to be at Webster Hall and that I would be there. This might have been a mistake because as I was walking into the club a woman tapped me on the shoulder. She said “Are you Nate Igor Smith?” I told her I was and she said “I am a huge fan of your website.  I have something for you…. You’ve been served.” She handed me a stack of papers and then ran full speed away from me.

Before I even could comprehend what happened a sheriff  tapped me on the other shoulder and told me I had to sign something saying I received the notice that I had been sued. The whole thing was like a scene in a move. I asked the sheriff “Who the fuck serves someone at a funeral?” and he was actually weirdly apologetic.

So I go inside Webster and I start reading this lawsuit. I am not really going to talk about the details of it but basically I was being sued by a former client and another person for something that I had almost nothing to do with. I spent the entire memorial service going back and forth between trying to mourn my lost friend and thinking about how fucked up this law suit was. I don’t think I ever really had the opportunity to mourn Jess but it was one of the most painful hours of my life.

From Webster a bunch of us went over to Beauty Bar for a drink and then eventually we ended up at another bar. When I decided I had to go home I mentioned that I had to go to my girlfriend’s apartment and move my car over to my place. My friend told me to be careful because he thought I was drinking. I explained that I was totally sober and my girlfriend lived walking distance from my place I just mostly needed to move the car across the street so it wouldn’t get towed.

(Quick sidebar about the car… I didn’t actually own a car. It was my parents car that I borrowed because they were moving and I had to get a ton of stuff out of their basement. The car was still half filled with boxes of stuff from my childhood.)

As I was parking the car a man who had stolen a SUV was being chased by the cops. He tried to make it around me but he hit an idling car bounced off it and crashed into the driver side rear of my car. It turned the wheel 90 degrees and snapped the axel in two. He then proceeded to hit several more cars before being caught by the cops a few blocks a way.

The side air bag was the worst part. It felt like I had been punched in the head. I couldn’t hear out of my right ear and I don’t think I noticed how bad the whiplash was. I wouldn’t notice that until three days later when I couldn’t get out of bed. After the ambulance came and the police came I had to get the boxes out of the car before it could be towed. Right as I started getting the boxes out it started pouring rain. I actually started laughing which confused the hell out of the cops.

Two days later I was feeling pretty shitty but I had playoff hockey tickets and a bunch of friends and I went out to Long Island to see our Washington Capitals take on the Islanders. We lost the game in overtime which was pretty awful but we had an even worse experience. I wrote about our shitty treatment at the game and sent it to a few friends and within 45 minutes it had gone viral. ESPN, Sports Illustrated and every local outlet picked up the story. I was getting, no joke, over 100 Tweets a minute at some point that very night. I got death threats and people talking shit to me non stop for a week.

The next morning I woke up and my back had completely locked up. I couldn’t really move. I was supposed to work that night but I had to cancel. I just stayed in bed. Luckily my hockey team was winning so I had a reason to suck up the pain and go watch with my friends.

Less than two weeks later my girlfriend broke up with me via text.

A few days later the Capitals lost in overtime of game 7 against the other local team the New York Rangers.

I am a pretty passionate sports fan, but with everything in my life going so horribly wrong the hockey playoffs were the only thing I had that was positive in my life. When they lost it hit me like no other sports moment ever had. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back and I no longer had a reason to get out of bed.

I spent the next six weeks or so barely leaving the house. Between my back and my depression and the looming lawsuit I sunk into the worst depression of my adult life. Coincidentally that time period was also really slow for work and I wasn’t exactly making an effort to find any new jobs. I gained probably 15lbs and I never really dealt with any of the shit I was going through. I didn’t really have anyone to talk to. I am still not sure I ever got over my ex. We are friendly but to this day we have never really had a real life conversation about the break up.

Now it’s a year later and my life is finally back on track. It took over 100 hours of billable legal hours but I got out of a lawsuit that the judge agreed I had at worst “minimal liability”. 2015 was the worst year of my life financially but 2016 has been a lot better. I just this week paid off my credit card debt that had climbed close to $10,000. I am still in a wild amount of debt from my lawsuit but that is manageable. My hockey team is in the playoffs again and while it will be disappointing if they don’t win all the games, I think I will be able to function as a human if they don’t. I lost most of that weight, I joined a new band, my last zine did really well and I am pretty sure Donald Trump isn’t actually going to be our next president.

So yeah, happy anniversary worst day of my life. Here’s hoping today is a good one.

I am home after two weeks away so let’s do a second straight contentless post featuring another video that I had nothing to do with. Really I just wanna update you on some stuff and try and hit you up for some cash cause that’s how I manage to pay my rent which is coincidentally due today. Let’s go.

So yeah, I am back which means I gotta deal with an unreasonable amount of shit I ignored for the last two weeks. That includes a few hundred unread emails and some real fun stuff like trying to fix/ buy a new air conditioner. Party forever. Long story short is that I probably will spend the next three days in front of my computer screen in a slightly too hot living room/ office. Once again, party forever.

So while all this really fun stuff is happening I wanted to hit you guys with some photos from my trip. I have a full exclusive set of Raven Rockette that I uploaded to Girls of Driven By Boredom. Raven is one of my favorite models and so fucking hot. I shot her on top of the Superchief LA roof once and we also shot one of my favorite sets of all time at an abandoned waterpark. When I was in LA we were supposed to shoot on the last night I was in town but we had to deal with an insanely drunk girl neither of us had ever met before and by the time we started shooting it was 2am and Raven was super tired and fairly stoned. So instead of taking good photos Raven just showed me her apartment and we spent about 15 minutes shooting photos of her hanging out on her bed naked. The photos aren’t very good, but they are really fucking hot and amateurish looking which is extra hot. So instead of posting them on my site I decided to post them all on the Girls of DBB

Now that that’s settled DBB Etsy. I shot The Extra Ones I Shot Before I Left… while I was in LA and it costs about $300 to develop and scan them all so go buy some stuff cause I don’t really make any money off my analog work so if you like all the film stuff I put on DBB Tumblr you should go buy a zine or something.

Also in my Etsy store I now have a cheap option as far as buying Instant film for me. For $20 you can now get a random nude Polaroid from me. Actually, you could get a non nude one too, but come on. We know why you are here… Anyway, I have a ton of Fuji Instax laying around and if you order one I will sign that shit on the back and send it out to you ASAP. Everyone wins or something.

Lastly let’s promote some shit I have nothing to do with. The first feature length movie Benjamin Moses Smith edited is Two Step On iTunes. It’s called Two Step and it’s an insane thriller that I really think is going to go down as a classic cult film. It’s honestly fucking amazing and I am only being slightly biased. If you like really fucked up movies, you need to watch Two Step. It’s also way better than the trailer.

Okay, back to work. See you guys soon.

Normally when leaving town for two weeks I would throw mini updates on the DBB Road Trip blog and not update the main page but my motel’s internet sucks and other than Ho99o9’s release party I didn’t shoot a ton of photos the first few days I was here. So I decided I would just throw up a little update on life and a music video that people I like a lot made. Seems reasonable…

So far in LA I have photographed Ava Dalush who you guys just met, an old favorite Ivy Diamond and the insanely babetastic Chanel Preston. I also shot a babe that was roommates with my friend Juanito Blanco named Jade Nile. I took some weird 35mm shots of her and her boyfriend which might see the light of day eventually. They are all having a party on Wednesday so hopefully I can get some more weirdness. I also got to see Kimberly Kane (and her dog!) who I hadn’t seen in over a year. I think the only photo I took of her was at a diner but perhaps we will shoot something before I leave town.

Now on to this music video. My friend Teddy Blanks directed his first music video. He is a graphic designer who has designed all my books and zines and he did the design work for the band Tanlines new album Highlights. During the design phase they had a conversation about how Teddy’s friend and actor Alex Karpovsky looks a lot like one of the guys from Tanlines. A few months later Alex and Teddy were directing a video for the song Palace starring Alex and Natasha Lyonne with cameos from Leo Fitzpatrick and that dude from High Maintenance. On my first night in LA Teddy showed me the video and it finally came out yesterday. It’s pretty rad.

Also my brother, who is a tremendous editor, cut the video so it is extra amazing. But then again he’s letting me sleep on his couch this weekend so I guess I would have to say that. Seriously, go watch this video because anything that Teddy and my brother do together has got to be awesome. Plus Alex and Teddy hired me to shoot the poster for Alex’s movie Red Flag which Teddy designed and art directed. So everyone rules.

Okay, I need to go photograph some babes now and enjoy LA for the week I have left. Talk to you guys soon. Check my Tumblr for daily updates.

Most of my regular readers know I am a sports fan but I try and keep that stuff to a minimum because I know you guys are here for the photos I take and not my take on the Miami Dolphins and Washington Capitals. That being said, I decided I should probably address what happened the other day since I keep getting texts from people I haven’t seen in years because my face ended up all over the internet this week.

This week has been a pretty awful one. I went to DJ Jess’ memorial where I was served papers for a law suit that I have almost nothing to do with (but still have to hire a lawyer) and on the way home the car that I was borrowing from my parents to help them move got totaled by a guy who was running from the cops. I hurt my back in the accident and had to cancel on a shoot with Indigo Augustine and miss shooting the final Trouble & Bass party for the Village Voice. I went there to try and shoot it but I had to leave after 10 minutes because my back hurt so much.

The next morning I was supposed to go see my Washington Caps play the New York Islanders in the playoffs but with my back so messed up I wasn’t sure if I could go. I woke up that morning in a lot of pain but feeling much better than the day before. I decided to suck it up and go. And that’s when the weirdness began.

My friends and I are loud fans who make up our own chants and are fairly obnoxious but we don’t start fights and we don’t pick on random people. We just go there to have fun and cheer our team. Unfortunately our exuberance made us the target of some particularly awful Islanders fans. Most of them were great to us and bantered back and forth with us and gave us a hard time but in a fun way but there was some shit thrown at us and some vandalism and some stuff said to us that went over the line.

I ended up writing an open letter to the New York Islanders which talked about our day and I sent it to a few local DC bloggers and stuff. I was pissed and I wanted to gripe about my day but I didn’t even put it on the main page of this site. I ditched it over in the rarely updated B-Sides blog. I wanted people to read it but I didn’t expect what happened next.

Within an hour of me writing it it had gone viral. My Twitter handle @drivenbyboredom was the number one trending topic in the DC area. People started writing blogs and asking for interviews. I did a few of them and then started passing them off to the rest of my Caps crew because I didn’t get the worst of it, they did. I didn’t want to be the face of this thing. Today alone I turned down four TV interviews. The whole thing got out of hand.

I got a lot of love from Caps fans and some of the Isles enemies like the Rangers and Flyers fans but I also got message after message from Islanders fans apologizing for the dregs of their fan base. I have no problem with Islanders fans in general – they just happen to be the enemy this week – and it was great how many awesome Isles fans I have met this week.

Unfortunately there is a segment of way too serious Islanders trolls who have been sending hate mail and Tweet after Tweet and lying to the media about us. I have heard the craziest rumors about what we were doing and I did some more interviews to address some of that stuff. I don’t mind any of this. I shoot naked people for a living, you cannot even begin to guess how much hate I get. These trolls are fun for me but they are not fun for my crew. So I am gonna stop engaging and stop doing interviews because I don’t want my fellow Caps fans to get shit for me not being able to shut my mouth.

So this is hopefully the last of it, but I just wanted to link all the articles I can find about us for posterity. Enjoy reading about this super weird couple of days and for all the Islanders fans who aren’t drunken mouth breathing trolls I wish you guys a moderate amount of good luck and if you beat us this series I hope you take it to the Pens or the Rags. Cause those teams I actually hate!

To start with here’s my original Open Letter to Islanders Fans.

Here is the interview we did with Caps Radio’s John Walton. We compared it to an old school WWF style promo where we were going over the top with our anti-Isles rhetoric. It was supposed to be funny but in retrospect it has been used to say we were instigating.

Here is the first Washington Post article and here is the second.

The ESPN one was a good read.

Here’s a guy who called me a pornographer. That was a fun one.

And here’s an interview with an Islanders Blog where I tried to explain what happened.

The NY Daily News article has my reaction to the NY Islanders weak statement.

Puck Daddy agreed with my assessment.

Boomer Esiason talked about us.

And the rest:

Newsday – Sports Illustrated – Deadspin – CBS Sports – Outsports – Ted’s Take – NBC New York – NY Post –

Anyway, what a weird week. But hopefully that’s the end of this nonsense and I can get back to posting photos of crazy parties and naked babes and fun stuff like that. Let’s Go Caps!

I got the copies of my new book Dinner With Igor on Friday. They were supposed to come today so that was a pleasant surprise. Unfortunately there was a small print error which and I had to get the books reprinted. Fortunately my printer MGX Copy was great about it and put a rush order on the reprint and the books will be in my hands on Thursday.

On top of that, I will also be getting my 36 page zine “Food Tattoos” from MGX the same day. I am pretty excited about both projects and I can’t wait until you get your hands on them. If you were one of my Kickstarter backers your books will ship Friday, Saturday Monday and Tuesday (hopefully I will get them all done by Tuesday)!

Because of the holidays I am pushing my book release party to January but you can still preorder both Dinner With Igor and Food Tattoos at my Etsy store!

You can get signed versions of them both at a discount if you click right here!

Lastly, I should mention that I am giving a 10 minute talk about the books and some other projects on Wednesday as part of the monthly Bushwick Art Crit Group session. I truly hate talking about my work especially around actual fine artists, but for some reason I agreed to do it, so it should be interesting at the very least. Plus Wizard Skull is talking right after me and that guy spends his days ruining your childhood and that’s worth the price of admission alone (it’s free). So if anyone is bored in Brooklyn on Wednesday come hang out!

Hey guess what kids! It’s 6am and I just finished turning in my final edits for the Gathering of the Juggalos. Tomorrow evening I head back to NYC and then after 24 hours of sleep to get over any sort of juggalo related illnesses I will start uploading my pictures. There are a fucking ton of them. I have over 1000 images to share with you guys so get fucking excited. We are gonna get juggalo crazy around here for a week or two.

In the mean time you can check my Tumblr and my Instagram for a bunch of photos I have posted over the last few days. Also, you can check out this sweet video from the Superchief art show at Culturefix that I had some photos in. You can see my photos in the background a lot and you can see Rosario Dawson in the video so theoretically she has gazed upon my photos which is great since I have had a crush on her since the mid 90’s.

Anyway, the video is cool and I need to go to sleep. Let’s hope I make it back to Brooklyn alive.

Hey guys. I meant to update yesterday telling you all about the Superchief art show at Culturefix but I have been on a road trip for no reason and I was staying at a random casino in Southern Indiana and I could not even begin to explain why. But anyway, I had two big 20″x30″ photos in the show, as seen below, that you could probably still go look at if you happened to live in NYC and wanted to go see them. Culturefix is a bar too so you could get drunk while looking at them and then get so drunk you buy them. Good plan.

Okay, so yeah I am on this random road trip and right now it’s 1:45am I am in Bowling Green, Kentucky which is something I never thought I would say but there is a Corvette museum here and while normally I wouldn’t care, they had a sink hole open below the museum and I want to see it before they fill in the hole. Seriously, it’s just a giant hole in the middle of a museum. I am gonna check it out tomorrow morning and then from there head to Nashville and then the Unclaimed Baggage Center in Alabama, then hit Atlanta and hang out with a Coathanger or two and then try to make it all the way to South Carolina. Five states in one day isn’t bad. I should be back in NYC sometime Sunday and then I head to the Gathering of the Juggalos on Tuesday. Yup, it’s that time again.

In preparation for Juggalos I have some naked juggalette photos I still need to get up from last year. It’s a long story and I will share that with you Monday (or perhaps from my hotel Tuesday night). I also have some lovely Shay Laren nudes that are ready to go but for a reason I can’t quite explain at this moment I can’t quite post them yet.

Also, today I took some insane photos at the Creation Museum and I can’t wait to share those with everyone but I can’t real with that until I get back but I probably won’t actually have time to deal with that until I get back from the Gathering so just be on the look out.

Long story short, I have no idea what’s going on, but I have a lot of stuff happening and a lot of stuff ready to go up but that won’t actually go up quite yet. In conclusion below are the two photos I have int he Supercheif show, one photo of a juggalette, one photo of  Shay Laren and one from the Creation Museum. Just to make everything weirder I am going to post the photos out of order so you are going to have to use your deductive reasoning skills to figure out what is happening right now. The answer mostly involves lack of sleep mixed with sleeping pills.  See you bastards soon.

Last summer I left town for 31 days on a cross country road trip and I came up with the idea of creating a specific Road Trip Blog. It was a way for me to create smaller daily posts that I could get up very quickly from the road. That way there would be constant new updates but I didn’t have to spend all day in front of the computer to get them up. I then brought the blog back when I was at the Gathering of the Juggalos last year because the internet was so questionable. Once again, I am bringing it back.

Today I am in Austin, Texas for my 11th straight trip to the South By Southwest music/interactive/film/comedy festival. I will be here for almost two weeks and starting Friday I will be shooting constantly. The first week I will be shooting mostly SXSW Film related stuff with some interactive or comedy stuff thrown in. On Tuesday night I start work for Sailor Jerry shooting the Sailor Jerry House at Gypsy Lounge all day every day for 4.5 days. The next day I am getting tattooed my pretty much my first tattoo artist every and then I will be heading the fuck home on the 18th. Should be a crazy trip. So follow along!

Click here to view daily updates from South By Southwest!