2021 Metlife Takeover Video & Random Updates

I haven’t updated this site in a minute and I figured it was time to do that. I don’t know how much I have talked about my girlfriend moving in and me moving to a new studio but it’s consumed my whole life and when you add into that my back injury and physical therapy and a few trips to visit my family, I don’t have a lot of content to give you guys. Good news is that once this office is up and running I hope to get a lot more done and be way more productive. 

That’s not to say I haven’t been shooting and planning. I am working on a project that is going to span 15 years of my career and include a ton of new work as well. I have shot about 10 rolls of film for it and I have a lot more planned. The project will be released as a web3/NFT situation, but it isn’t about using that to make money, it’s about using the technology to organize and preserve work in an interesting way. I don’t want to say too much about it, but you won’t have to care anything about web3 to enjoy it. The blockchain is just the medium. But yeah, not really important because it’s a long way away but I just wanted you to know that I am working on something significant.  I am also have a new zine in the works, but it’s been in the works since like 2019 and still isn’t out so it’s probably not worth mentioning. 

If you do want to get a sneak peak at the new project you can sponsor a roll of film and see one of the rolls I have shot recently before anyone else and get a print of your favorite shot on the roll. 

Lastly I gotta mention the thing that’s taking up a ton of my time right now and that’s the Miami Dolphins. I know, I know. But seriously they are actually maybe good this year?  As you may know, I co-run Dolfans NYC the NYC Dolphins fan club and we throw this massive event every year when the Jets play the Dolphins in New Jersey and we raise thousands for charity in the process. It’s pretty amazing. This year we have sold nearly 1300 tickets to the game, all sitting together, surpassing our record for most people ever. 

We finally put together a recap video from last year, and I always share them with you guys, so I figured I would do the same for this one, but I just wanted to update you guys a little on everything that was going on since most of you don’t care about the Dolphins. Still, I think the video is worth a watch. Enjoy!

 

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Remembering Ross Harman 10 Years Later

10 years ago today one of my best friends died. I have had too many friends die, but Ross Harman was like a brother to me. I managed his band, The Gaskets, for six years of my life and when he died I promised myself I would make sure people remembered his music and I sort of think I failed at that. I set up a crowdfunding campaign and we raised a bunch of money and were able to put out three records in his honor. We released his solo album and another compilation of songs that were on his computer when he died as well as a double length LP of other artists covering his music. It was truly incredible, except that after selling the first 100 or so those records have sat in my apartment for the last 9 years gathering dust. 

We built a website to honor him with a bunch of his music that existed up until last fall when my website got hacked and it was easier just to build the site again than fix it. But here we are on the anniversary of his death and the site doesn’t exist. The Gaskets site is down too which now links to a Wikipedia full of dead links. 

Last night I saw someone Tweet about the band Sparks and I went to an old hard drive to see if I could find a video of the Gaskets covering one of their songs. I loved that cover and I was sure I had it somewhere. I ultimately couldn’t find it, but in my search I pulled out the live concert DVD I produced way back in 2006. It is to this day my greatest accomplishment even though I still have a few hundred copies taking up space in my apartment as well. I watched a few minutes of it just to see the beginning and I ended up watching the whole thing. It made me miss that time in my life so much and it made me miss Ross even more. It was such a great feeling to be working with your favorite band every day and seeing how much people loved them again really moved me. 

I didn’t even realize I was watching it 10 years to the day after Ross died.

I woke up to a Facebook notification reminding me today was the day. I am certainly not one to believe in any sort of spirituality but I couldn’t believe the coincidence. It really was incredible. I don’t think I have watched it since Ross died and suddenly I am watching it on his anniversary. I don’t cry very often, but when I went back and reread what I wrote about Ross on here 10 years ago tears spilled down my face. I loved that motherfucker so much. 

Despite my failure as a manager to make the Gaskets a household name or to do more to spread Ross’ music since he passed there are some very good things that came out of the Gaskets. The other member of the band, Teddy Blanks, has gone on to great success as both a graphic designer and a director after blending design and film doing credits for countless movies and TV shows. His first credit sequence? That live concert DVD. His solo music has scored many films including Tiny Furniture, the breakout film from Lena Dunham (who in college directed a Gaskets video) and Red Flag made by his current directorial partner Alex Karpovsky. For me the Gaskets turned out to be the beginning of my photography career. I always thought I would work in music, but I went to school for photography because I thought it would be a good skill to have in the music industry while I as at the same time trying to figure out my place in the world. Music didn’t work out for me but all the first photos I ever published were for the Gaskets. I am not sure I would have ever made it as a photographer if I hadn’t managed that band. 

I had no idea what this blog was going to be about when I started writing it this morning. I actually took a break after the first sentence because it hurt too much to write. I don’t even know what the point of this was, but I had to write something. And I figured I could use this as an excuse to promote Ross’ music again even though not that much of it is online right now. 

First of all Handstand Records still has all the Ross “Ballpoint Pens” records in stock. They also have the concert DVD and even the Gaskets second album. I could not more highly recommend this stuff. 

Secondly, The Gaskets YouTube channel has not been updated since a few days after Ross’ death when we uploaded a fun interview they did with Blender in 2007 but it’s still a pretty good place to see some of the Gaskets music. A bunch of it is on Spotify and things like that but The Gaskets were one of the best live bands I have ever seen so it’s a good chance to see some of that.

Thirdly, please listen to this Teddy Blanks song. It is the only song on the tribute album that isn’t a cover. This song Teddy wrote about Ross using music he found on Ross’ computer. It makes my eyes water every time I hear it and it’s been in my head all day today. 

I also promise that in the near future I am gonna get his website back up and I will do another post about that when we do. His tribute album has never been made available digitally and we need to make that happen. Hopefully it and the Gaskets site will return soon.

Lastly I am going to leave you with a couple of videos. The first is for the Gaskets song Left Hand. Teddy wrote it about Ross’ drinking problem that ultimately lead to his death. Ross never talked about what that meant to him but he spent weeks by himself painting and animating this video. It means a great deal to me. The second video is from the Tribute album by Ross’ favorite artist Matt Mahaffey aka sElf. I couldn’t believe he said yes to recording this when randomly I reached out to him out of the blue. I have no idea who uploaded this but I really appreciate it. 

Please take a second to listen to Ross’ music. He was a brilliant fucked up man who I will never stop thinking about. I love you man.

Ps. I managed to find this Mp3 I uploaded of Ross’ solo song Symphony.

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2019 #MetLifeTakeover Video

Since there is no sports going on right now and you have nothing to do but consume content, it seems like a good time to post the video from the 2019 #MetLifeTakeover. Honestly you probably don’t care about this, but you know what? I can’t just post nudity all day long. I might run out. I do have a new girl update coming soon, but you can see it now if you sign up for my pay site. Just saying… Now let’s get into this football tailgate video thing.

Every time I post about Dolfans NYC I have to do a recap explaining it to people who have no idea I run the largest Miami Dolphins fan club in the world. In 2008 my friend Michelle and I started a Facebook group and Twitter account to organize Miami Dolphins fans who live in NYC so that we could watch games together. That turned into this massive club that is actually a non-profit group that donates tons of money to charity including over $10,000 last year. We do weekly watch parties at our bar Slattery’s Midtown Pub but our main event every year is the #MetLifeTakeover a huge group trip to the Dolphins @ Jets game where we charter busses and buy hundreds (sometimes over 1000) seats to the game. We throw a massive tailgate party and have a blast. 

A bunch of former Dolphins players showed up to our tailgate and the Dolphins presented us a framed jersey for our 10th annual group trip. We had a big party featuring Tropic 2.0 DJing, a live performance from Miami rapper Solo D, a massive all you can eat and drink tailgate from Urban Tailgate, a live taping of a Dolphins radio show, four different community service activations and a photobooth from my old friend Nicky Digital’s new company Out Snapped. We also were sponsored by my friends at Sailor Jerry. 

This video was directed and edited by RizeOptix and hosted by comedian Oscar Collazos. 

Lastly, I should mention that we are raising money for the staff of our bar Slattery’s Midtown Pub who are out of work because of the Coronavirus. If you have any interest in helping you can PayPal whatever you like to dolfansnyc@gmail.com. Thanks so much!

Now enjoy this video if you want to see slow motion videos of me walking and screaming! 

 

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Website Update

Hey, so you may or may not have noticed that my website was totally fucked up and was redirecting to spam. It turns out that another site on my server had an out of date version of WordPress on it that had some exploit and some shitty humans got in and fucked up every site on my server. All because of a site I forgot about in 2015. Fun.

I reached out to my old webmaster Thadd, who no longer does web stuff for a living, he is now the director of programing for a real fun & nerdy YouTube channel called Collider, and he thought he could help. Unfortunately after a week of trying we realize that he wasn’t going to be able to to it by himself so I had to spend a ton of money hiring some people to clean all the malware off my site. 

So currently the malware is gone from this site, and all of my sites except for one. For whatever reason they haven’t been able to get access to that part of my server and I am not even going to try to explain it but hopefully by this time tomorrow that will be cleaned too. 

Once all the sites are cleaned, we are moving everything onto a brand new server that isn’t 10 years old. Apparently once we start that process it’s going to take another two business days and I still don’t know what that is going to cost so please buy some shit from me, or pay for my pay site. Anything helps!

So whatever the case we should be back to normal by Monday, and in the meantime Thadd cleaned up some stuff on my site so things should actually look better going forward. At some point I am going to have to pay for a proper redesign of the entire website but in the meantime I can’t afford that so keep enjoying this design from 2008.

Meanwhile I have updated Girls of Driven By Boredom with an upcoming shoot so you can get a preview of what’s coming whenever my website is once again fully functioning. 

Lastly here’s the trailer to Hackers just because I want some sort of content down here and Hackers rules, the movie, not the motherfuckers who fucked up my life this month. Be back soon…

 

 

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61 Photos I Don’t Hate Kickstarter

If you are a regular reader of this website you are probably aware that I have been organizing every single photo I have ever taken. It’s taken me so damn long to do it and part of that reason is that I hate everything I do and I just get depressed looking at photos that I have decided I hate for whatever reason. I have been working on a portfolio for months now and figuring out how to make a few dozen photos reflect my entire body of work is the most frustrating thing I have ever done. It’s easy to edit a million photos down to a few hundred that aren’t awful, but almost impossible to get that edit down to a few that I actually love.

While I was doing all that I had this idea to go through all my 35mm work, which is my personal work, and pull every single image that I don’t hate that isn’t in another book or zine. When I was done I had an edit of 61 images and I decided I could make a decent zine out of that stuff, but it was just another folder full of photos in my endless collection of bad ideas I have for books and zines and art shows.

But then I realized the Kickstarter Make 100 project was coming up again. Every January they encourage makers that have used their platform to do a one off, short run project just for the point of creativity. This is the third year they have done it, and I really loved the idea but in 2017 I was in the middle of my Instaxxx book and last year I just didn’t have anything ready to go, but this year I had the perfect thing.

So I am going to make a book of 35mm photos I don’t hate. It’s going to be from the edit of 61 photos (probably much closer to 30 photos) and there are only going to be 100 copies made. Every one of them will be signed and numbered and the book is going to be square which I think will be a fun format to play with. 

There is also a limited edition of 25 books that will come with a 7″x7″ print (5 prints, each signed/numbered out of an edition of 5). It will have a variant cover and will have some additional photos and come in a fancy envelope! 

I just thought this project would be really fun to do, and super easy to execute. Shipping out hundreds of huge books was a nightmare last time I did a Kickstarter, but doing 125 small books will be a lot of fun and really simple to deal with. But don’t worry, I got a much bigger project in the works. My juggalo book is still coming soon!

Lastly, I wanted to give a big thanks to my photographer buddy Steve Prue for helping me film my Kickstarter video. It’s truly terrible, but that’s because I am awful on camera and I gave up editing after 30 minutes and just added ridiculous wipes and absurd sound effects so that my terrible editing would just look like a joke. 

Now go help me fund this book project! Even donating $1 helps my project in Kickstarters algorithm so even if you are broke even a tiny bit helps a lot. Thanks a ton!

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2018 #MetLifeTakeover Video

Don’t worry folks, this is going to be my last Dolphins related post of the season. I mean, I guess there is a tremendously small chance that the incredibly subpar Dolphins could somehow win their next 4 regular season games, make the playoffs and then win several more games after that and I would have no choice but to do a post about my trip to the Super Bowl, but let’s just say that’s unlikely. 

As I mentioned a while ago, I organize this big event when the Dolphins play the Jets in New Jersey. We do a pre-party the night before, we do a huge tailgate party on game day and then we sell tickets to the actual game. I have to imagine we do the largest away game event in the country for any football team, we certainly own the largest several group ticket purchases in MetLifeStadium history (and they have two NFL teams playing there). This year we sold 1100 tickets and raised several thousand dollars for charity since we (DolfansNYC) are a non-profit. 

Anyway, the game was way back in September, but the video is finally out now. Go watch it if you want. I am pretty proud of it.

Oh and don’t worry I promise I will post some nudes or something fun next week. 

 

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2017 #MetLifeTakeover Video

I am gonna make this post super short because I know most of you don’t care and I just posted an update about the #MetLifeTakeover event I throw every year. You can read about it over there if you want to know more but I know most of you could care less about my obsessive Miami Dolphins fandom.

I will just say that I am really proud of this video we made and this event we throw every year. This season already our non profit group Dolfans NYC has donated over $13,000 to charity and we plan to hit $15,000 at a minimum by the end of the year.

And a real quick description. This video is the recap of our #MetLifeTakeover event where we bought over 1100 seats for the Dolphins Vs. Jets game in New Jersey. We had a bunch of former Dolphins show up to the huge tailgate party we threw and most of them did interviews with us for the video. It’s hosted by comedian and Dolphins fan Oscar Collazos and it was directed by RizeOptix. Also have to give out a shout to Sailor Jerry for sponsoring the event like they do every year.

Lastly, the Dolphins got killed at the game in Jersey so the video kinda ends on a down note, but we beat them yesterday in Miami so it seems like an ideal time to post this. Enjoy.

 

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AVN Awards Video!

When the AVN Awards aired I happened to be at my parent’s house in DC and I actually got to watch it. Back in NYC I do not have cable much less fancy things like premium channels. What I do have is the internets and I managed to get a clip of my segment from the awards if you wanna check that out.

The video is really about Jillian Janson who was nominated for Female Performer of the Year but I got to do a shoot with her for the video. They interviewed me and Jillian about our first shoot which I should probably publish sooner rather than later. It was under the Santa Monica Pier and was a ton of fun. Jillian is great as I have probably mentioned before.

This video also features some truly terrible acting from myself and features a misspelling of the word Boredom in Driven By Boredom which happens all the time. I really wish I owned drivenbybordom.com but some asshole bought it and put spam there so please learn how to spell boredom everyone.

Sadly the video does NOT feature the part where we snuck into the kitchen at the Hard Rock for a shoot and got kicked out by security. It would have been amazing but they didn’t have release forms and things so they couldn’t use the video. Tragic.

Anyway, watch this video and don’t forget to look at the photos Jillian and I shot for it if you haven’t already. Also thanks to Scott and Jeff and the crew who filmed this thing for including me!

 

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Introducing My Third Book: Instaxxx

When I was 19 my girlfriend gave me a Polaroid camera and let me take naked photos of her. They were some of the first naked photos I ever took and 17 years later I am still photographing friends, lovers and of course naked models and porn stars on instant film.

I have spent the last 6 months or so working my ass off on my third book “Instaxxx” and the Kickstarter just launched.  This is probably the biggest project I have ever worked on and I hope at the end it’s the best thing I have ever put my name on.

If you have ever been a fan of anything I’ve ever done this is the best possible way to support my work. The early bird reward for the book is only $20 and there’s so many other things you can get like prints and discounts of my zines and even my actual Instax Wide camera. Even donating $5 will help.

Still looking to shoot more for it and I am gonna be working on it through February. Going out to Vegas and LA at this month to work on it as well. I have spent so much time on this book and I have so much left to do but this is the biggest step.

The video for it is pretty amazing as well. It features 20 topless babes talking about the project. My friend Ronen V helped me a ton with it so thanks to him for that and of course thanks to all the girls for helping too!

Oh, and I uploaded over 100 of the photos I have scanned so far to Girls of Driven By Boredom if you wanna check out more of the work.

Now please click here and back Instaxxx: A Book Of Nude Instant Photography!

Instaxxx: The Photo Book!

Instaxxx: The Photo Book!

Instaxxx: The Photo Book!

 

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