You probably have seen Bad Brilliance around in his crazy costume showing up to parties and posing for camera phone photos, or in weird videos on the internet, but what you might not know is he actually makes music.  Weird rap music.  Honestly while the music is important I am sure, clearly it takes some sort of back seat to the performance.  He came out with security guards and they put down a red carpet and backed the crowd up. Then they pulled out their guest list and brought those people dancing down the red carpet all while Bad Brilliance did his thing.  At some point more security guards brought this rad chick Emily and her inflatable microphone out on a couch.  She got half naked and made more crazy raps. Emily must have a stage name, but I am an asshole and don’t know it. During their whole set Andrew WK was screaming shit into a mic and people were just doing weird shit all over the place. Amazing.

The whole thing was pretty brilliant and I guess now that you think about it, pretty bad. So I guess the name makes a lot of sense. Andrew the artist and mad man behind Bad Brillance (He does the Girl Talk cover art amongst other things) told me after that as far as the music goes “he’s just trying his best” which is amazingly honest thing to say.  Still, the music gets people fucking going.  Everyone was dancing and having a blast, so while it might not be be the most amazing music you have heard all week, it will probably be the best time you have all week. And for me that wins out in the end every time.

Click here to see photos of Bad Brilliance at the IFC Food Party/ Dinner With The Band Premiere party at Santos Playhouse.

So IFC has two amazing food shows right now and they had a big premiere party for them on Tuesday at Santos Party House.

So the first of the two amazing shows is Dinner With The Band. DWTB is a show created by my friends and oddly similar looking people Darin Bresnitz and Greg Bresnitz (I wonder if they are related?).  I actually met the guys when Greg offered a band I managed a slot on their show when it was just a web series.  The Gaskets couldn’t make the taping and now they are broken up and the Bresnitz’s have their own TV show.  Coincidence? I think not.  Anyway, their show is hosted by rock and roll chef Sam Mason who cooks food with bands, and then the bands play music and eat the food.  Sounds pretty awesome.

The second show is called Food Party. I really have no idea what Food Party is, but it seems like a mixture between Julia Child, Pee Wee’s Playhouse and something weird and Asian that I don’t understand. It is hosted by this clearly insane chef/performance artist named Thu Tran.  I am pretty sure I have a crush on her now. I have watched a few of the videos on her website and it could possibly be the best thing ever.

The party itself consisted of kids dancing to DJ sets by Vega and Au Revoir Simone mixed with Andrew WK yelling things at the audience from stage, mixed with sets from Gators, CX Kidtronik and fucking Bad Brilliance.  The Bad Brilliance performance was so nuts that I am actually going to put it in a post by itself that will immediately follow this one. So, stay tuned for that.

Okay, so yeah, the shows are amazing, the party was fucking insane, and I got to eat free bacon wrapped meatloaf sliders all night. I am not sure how you could beat that for a food party.  Hats off IFC.  You are delicious.

Click here to see the equally delicious photos from the IFC food party.

Finally, we have reached the end of the epic Mog.com SXSW party at Mohawk.  All the band photos are up so all we have left is the crowd shots.  I don’t have a lot to say that I haven’t said yet. There are some shots of the bands and stuff in here, plus you know, the kids, always with the kids. My editors boss at the Village Voice came, and brought his boss.  So there are pics of my boss’ boss’ boss, who is the CEO of Village Voice media. He was cool to meet, and he told me he was a fan of my work.  So that’s something. Also Mary Louise Parker from Weeds was there. She is obviously a babe.  Lastly, if you are wondering why everyone is wearing coats inside in March in Texas, it’s because it was fucking 40 degrees and raining out. Boo.

Anyway, click here to see all the crowd shots from the Mog party at Mohawk at SXSW. Peace.

Sorry for the break in posts. I haven’t been feeling so great the last couple of days so I mostly just watched movies and such and hung out in bed. But let’s pick up where we left off…

Aside from the headlining bands of The Black Keys, Broken Bells, and Demolished Thoughts the Mog.com party had a bunch of other good bands play.  The list of bands included a wide range of interesting bands. Here’s the list: Shilpa Ray & Her Happy Hookers, Freelance Whales, Real Estate, Javelin, Free Energy, Rye Rye, Dum Dum Girls and The Antlers.

I took a bunch of shots of Rye Rye and The Dum Dum girls so they have their own galleries.  The other bands I only had a few shots from so I put them in a gallery together.  It was hard to shoot any band for too long because it was completely packed and there were two stages so I had to run back and forth and shoot crowd photos in the meanwhile. Anyway, check out all three galleries.

Click here to see the shots of Rye Rye.

Click here to see the shots of The Dum Dum Girls.

And last but not least, click here to see shots of the rest of the bands from the Mog SXSW Showcase at Mohawk.

Continuing with my coverage of the Mog.com SXSW party at Mohawk I bring you the Black Keys. I have to take a moment to admit here that I really had no idea who The Black Keys were.  I mean I have heard their name a million times but I had no idea what they sounded like or that people would be so ready to completely lose their shit over them.  I mean seriously, it was raining and 40 degrees out and when I got to the club an hour before it opened there was a line of 200 people waiting to get in.  Unlike me, they were not there to see Demolished Thoughts. It was honestly completely insane.  Mary Louise Parker was there to see them.  Broken Bells seemed more excited about the Black Keys than they did their set. People kept telling me all day how excited they were for it and when the whole thing was over people were talking about it like it was the greatest show they had ever seen. I have to say I thought they were pretty good, but people were like weeping.  It was a strange thing to see.

Click here to see the shots of The Black Keys at Mog.com’s SXSW party.

The band I was most excited about about at Mog’s SXSW party was Demolished Thoughts.  I mean let’s consider: Demolished Thoughts is a band made up of Thurston Fucking Moore, Andrew WK and J Mascis from Dinosaur Jr.  I mean, that right there is insane but when I found out they would be doing nothing but ’80’s punk and hardcore covers I pretty much lost my shit.  I grew up on that stuff, that music was my life.  When I heard Andrew WK was being replaced for the show by one of the dudes from Fucked Up, I was still pretty psyched since those dudes are punk as shit.  Still, seeing them for me had it’s ups and downs.

First of all, no one but me and Mog.com editor Andy Phillips knew any of the songs.  I actually put my camera down and was just screaming along, mostly to the old Dischord shit they were doing.  Secondly I sort of felt like Thurston Moore took the whole thing as some sort of joke.  He was reading the lyrics off sheets of paper and was like parodying punk banter between songs.  Joking about how they were totally broke and been sleeping on people’s floors for weeks. And on top of that they were sort of butchering the songs.  In their defense I know they are doing this project just for fun and that they clearly love this music or they wouldn’t be going out of their way to play it.  But I think they could have shown the music a little more respect and if they did it well maybe they could introduce it to a whole new audience… the type of kids who were there to see Andrew WK and who wear their older brothers Sonic Youth T-shirts.

After the show I told Thurston how much the music meant to me and how cool it was that he was doing it. He was slightly dismissive but he posed for pictures and was certainly very nice. Also someone told me the next day that they talked to him and he said he was so happy that the kids in the front row were singing along to every word.  So, again, I have mixed emotions about the whole thing.  If nothing else it was fucking cool as hell to see Thurston and J Mascis rock the fuck out…. plus their drummer Awesome Allison was fucking amazing.

So yeah, I took a handful of pictures of Demolished Thoughts before I put down my camera and just started rocking the fuck out.  You should click here to see all of them.

PS. One more thing in their defense, I heard their show the night before was crazy with tons of people there singing a long and people making circle pits and shit.  Wish I could have seen that one…

Now that we have all the WMC stuff out of the way we have to go back and put the massive amount of SXSW photos I have up.  I am going to start with Mog.com’s end of SXSW blow out at Mohawk.  I worked for Mog during SXSW Music and they pretty much paid for my whole trip. It was pretty great.  They also threw one of the best parties at SXSW and over the next two days I am going to give you five galleries from that party.  I am going to start with the three headlining bands and then move into everyone else, plus the crowd shots. Get excited.

First up we have the Broken Bells.  I didn’t shoot a ton of shots of them, but people were extremely excited about them.  Broken Bells are a colaboration between James Mercer of the Shins and Brian Burton (aka Danger Mouse). They got the crowd pretty amped up and I met a few of them and they seemed to be good dudes, so I support them.  Danger Mouse evidently is weird about having his photo taken but he wasn’t a dick about it.  Plus the Grey Album was awesome, so again, I am pro Broken Bells.

I think instead of me talking about it, you should just check them out, or at the very least look at this small selection of photos I took of them. It would be the only reasonable thing to do.

This is it! The last party of WMC.  The next night there was a crazy party at a strip club but I had to get on a bus at 6am and I couldn’t take pictures so I just blew it off and slept in all my clothes for 3 hours in basically a storage room. But yeah Trouble & Bass headlined Overthrow’s Saturday night party at White Room.  It was probably the most packed of any day at White Room. It sort of made me realize that these T&B dudes I hang out with all the time are sort of a big deal. I asked Drop The Lime jokingly if he signed any autographs.  His response was a deadpanned “Yeah, all the time, I sign girls butts.”  So for the rest of the night I walked up to kids wearing T&B shirts, told them I knew T&B and asked them if they would like me to sign their butt.  Unfortunately, no one did.

I shot Roxy’s party at the Clevelander most of the night so I ended up at White Room around 4am and left before 6, so I didn’t get a TON of pictures, but I think theres some pretty good stuff, but I guess you will have to check it all out for yourself.

Click here to see pics from the Trouble & Bass/ Overthrow Temple Of Boom WMC party at White Room.

The Annie Mac party at White Room was probably the craziest of the week.  It was packed, the DJ’s were killing it, and it never ended. I was there most of the night and by 5 or 6 am I wanted to curl up in the corner and go to sleep. I hadn’t slept much in weeks, but I had to stick it out because I was crashing with the Overthrow dudes and they were doing the party.  At some point right before the sun came up I just made a choice to wake the fuck up. I started sort of jumping around and yelling a little bit.  I felt like shit was going to get really fun or I was going to fall asleep. It got really fun.  As the sun came up I was in top form.  Dances With White Girls started DJing and I looked around and realized half the people left were New Yorkers.  We had put Miami to sleep.  We raged on as shit got hectic, girls got naked, and people started talking about going to Diddys house.  (Everyone actually did end up going the next day, but I went to sleep instead.)

Anyway, the whole thing was totally epic and the shots were pretty good… and decidedly NSFW.  You should check out all the pictures from the night by clicking here.