So I just wanted to address an Insane Clown Posse video that just came out for their song Miracles. It seems that Twitter is a buzz mocking what might easily be one of the worst videos of all time. The combination of horrible production values with some of the dumbest lyrics ever written are impressive but I think what is making this video so much fun to mock is that this video about the wonders of creation is written by a band who has made a career out of making violent rednecks more violent.

So first, let me tell you a secret.  I was once a Juggalo.  When I was in high school I met this girl named Shanna. She was the first person I ever kissed and I was pretty much in love with her and eventually lost my best friend over her. Losing my best friend in that way is the biggest regret in my life, but the biggest musical regret in my life was being an ICP fan.  I can thank Shanna for that too.  She loved ICP and somehow, despite the fact that I only listened to punk rock and rockabilly my entire high school career she got me into the Carnival.  I was a fucking jugglao. I went to at least 3 ICP shows in face paint. I even used to tag WICKED CLOWNS when I did bullshit like that. To this day I still like their third album a lot.  I like it in the way you might like a cheesy horror film (Killer Klowns From Outer Space for example…) but I still like it.  So when I mock of ICP, let it be known that it comes from the heart.

Now the video speaks for itself. You just need to watch it:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-agl0pOQfs[/youtube]

DJ Jubilee described the video as “The Rainbow Connection with curse words.” Nuff said.  It’s frankly too easy to make fun of. No need.  What I wanted to tell you guys about is the fact that ICP have been a Christian rap group for some time. Seriously. Christian Rap.

ICP built a mythology around murdering and clowns and fucking fat bitches that some how centers around Christian theology.  ICP’s entire catalogue is basically a horrible modern version of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses only somehow less confrontational.  ICP seem pretty inclusive they pitch a big tent as long as you are willing to spend your tithing on clown action figures and ICP wrestling DVDs.  Amazingly They spent 5.9 albums preaching about murdering people before on the last song on their supposed last album they broke the news that all along they were all about the G-O-D.  More impressive is that somehow even after the big reveal they managed to keep their fan base mostly intact. What kinda ICP fan would just accept that their favorite band is now all about Christs Love… Oh wait, anyone cultish enough to follow ICP is certainly cult enough to follow Jesus.

So yeah, the point of this post is really just to show you guys this song called Thy Unveiling, which is the last track on their album the Wraith. It is the final Jokers Card which they had been putting off releasing for years because they said when it came out the world would end.  Clearly it didn’t but I actually went out and bought the album even though I hadn’t listened to ICP in years so in a way, my world sort of ended.  When I put the CD in my car I just started laughing when I heard Thy Unveiling.  If you thought the Miracles video was funny, just watch this until about the 3:20 mark.  It will make you piss your fucking pants.

Ps. I’m down with the clown till Im dead in the ground… or at least I was until I lost my virginity. Woop Woop.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iniW8RcYkbA[/youtube]

Wow. I am finally getting this up.  I wanted to do this blog forever ago and I probably should have considering I passed out my card to some of the biggest social networking geeks on the planet.  The guy who runs all of the web content for Village Voice Media (Including he LA Weekly where some of these photos were already published) asked me to come out to the Mashable party at Buffalo Billiards.  It was really the first party I shot at SXSW and I have to say that it might have been the best one.  When I walked in I told my editor that I didn’t know what I could possibly shoot and make interesting at a tech event.  There weren’t a lot of half naked girls, no fights, no crazy fashion, nothing… but what I soon realized is that these dudes party harder than anyone.

Before I go any further I have to say that if I sound like I am talking down to tech geeks, I am not. Anything I say that sounds patronizing or sarcastic is meant with all sincerity.  I am a tech geek really, at least a web geek.  I spent 8 hours a day online and I have been running websites since 1997.  I read Boing Boing daily, have 6 Twitter accounts own more than 30 domain names. I can hand code HTML and I use both Adobe CS and Photoshop 5.5. Yeah, that’s right, I do all my batch stuff with 5 point motherfucking 5.  And you know what? I still own a 1200 baud modem. Oh yeah, you remember 24k? This is 1.2k motherfucker. I still have a copy of AOHell on floppy disk. What?

So, now that hat has been said, these nerds know how to fucking party.  It may have been the 2 free Monster energy drinks I chugged in under 5 minutes but this party was so much fun.  I have to imagine that tech people don’t spend a lot of time at night clubs.  The week of South By Southwest Interactive is their time to party and party they did.  The dance floor was like an awkward senior prom at first, but then as the night progressed it morphed into an awkward wedding reception.  It honestly very much reminded me of when I went to my cousins wedding in November and at first everyone was just standing around with a few weirdos dancing until everyone had a few drinks and all of a sudden my parents were doing the YMCA dance.  I had never seen my parents dance before that night, and to the same degree I have a feeling that many in the Mashable crowd had never danced… ever.

I have to give all the credit to DJ Chicken George for knowing how to make awkward white people dance like no other DJ I have ever seen. He went from Rob Base’s “It Takes Two” into Bel Biv Davoe’s “Poison” and then moved straight into “The Humpty Dance” with out blinking.  The guy was on point playing all the 80’s hits that none of these people listened to until the relived their missing youth by downloading 80’s Hip Hop Jams on Napster. It was epic. At one point I was trying to get people to do the electric slide and it would have worked, but evidently it’s pretty hard to do the Electric Slide to “Ain’t Nothin’ But A G Thang”.

Now, as much as I am joking around the party was super fun, I had a bunch of conversations with some extremely interesting people doing things in tech that I could not even imagine. I get emails from time to time from people who tell me that they check my blog to see what the kids in NYC are wearing.  The kids at the parties I shoot are telling the rest of the world what’s cool, what music to listen to, and how to dress, but the kids at the Mashable party are controling the rest of the world.  These people can start a trending topic on Twitter with 140 key strokes. These are the people who are making the future and creating things that you don’t know exist but won’t be able to live without. And it’s good to know, like anyone else, when they get a few drinks in them they can bust a move like any young MC in the club.

I left the party nearly 30 minutes after it was supposed to have ended and it was still packed. I almost can’t wait for SXSW next year so I can attend a lot more tech parties and hand out a lot more business cards…

Speaking of business, if any of the fine social networking super stars and tech wizards I met last month are reading this… How about a quick RT or blog?  Maybe follow me on Tumblr or Twitter? All of that would be really 1337 of you…

 Click here to see all the crazy dance party time from the Mashable SXSWi party at Buffalo Billiards!

Despite being hosted by the hilarious Eugene Mirman, this might be the most boring gallery I ever post on here. It’s a bunch of people you don’t know standing at a podium. That being said, SXSW Film’s theme is “Tomorrow Happens Here” and my guess is that a number of these people will be familiar faces in a few years.

One of those faces will hopefully be my friend Lena Dunham.  Her film as I mentioned before won Best Narritive Feature.  She also won the Chicken & The Egg award which honors the best emerging female director. I went with her to the after party so there are a few shots from that thrown in with the film awards photos.

You can check out the list of winners here and try to dedicate your life to figuring out who the hell is who.  Most of these pictures are of presenters.  My hatred of captioning is why I don’t work for Getty or Wired and instead run a party blog, so you are going to just have to deal with it.

I just want to give a shout out to Travis Senger and his producer who made White Lines & The Fever: The Death Of DJ Junebug. I met those dudes during the music fest and they seem like good dudes. I haven’t seen their film yet, but it’s playing at Tribeca so hopefully I’ll get a chance to see it.

And lastly, I didn’t get a chance to see many of the films that won, but nearly every film I saw at SXSW I loved.  Janet Pierson and her staff did an amazing job of curating this festival and any of the films who won awards are well worth tracking down… especially Tiny Furniture….

Click here to see some extremely boring photos of people standing at podiums accepting and giving awards!

So Duck Sauce played the Fools Gold party at Grand Central and everyone was so excited and it was all crazy and all these people DJ’d and everyone was there and party time rock and roll.  Meanwhile I was on zero sleep and losing my mind.  The highlight of the night was a long conversation with JFK of MSTRKRFT about how this dance scene is devoid of art and no one is going to give a fuck about any of these pointless photos I am taking.  In the process I got called out by someone for being a party photographer, and I was photographed with JFK by a party photographer.  At this point I had been at the party for 30 minutes with my camera out without taking a photo. There were probably 25 party photographers at the party.  The whole thing made me want to quit this bullshit forever.

All that being said I have been working a long fucking time to make a living working for myself.  I started a business when I was 15 and started photography when I was 16 and started doing websites when I was 17.  15 years later I am just now making a living doing any of it and fuck if I am going to quit now, despite how souless I think all this bullshit is. These photos are all pretty awful, but the party was pretty epic, I just wasn’t feeling it so I took 50 photos and then set next to this really cute girl from Georgia for a while who was as tired as I was and we sat quietly and waited for our friends to want to go home.

Click here to see all the pictures! Spring breeaaakk!!

PS. In my idiocy I forgot to include any of the vertical images in this gallery. I will fix that later. Fixed.

Aside from doing these film portraits, I signed up for some red carpets.  I sort of hate doing step and repeat stuff, but it’s a good thing to have in my portfolio when trying to get jobs at Sundance.  Plus knew the Voice would run it and I quickly found out that it was a great way to get into movies without having to wait in line.  I mean, I had to wait in the press area taking photos for the same amount of time, but at least I was being productive, getting paid and shooting the shit with other pro photographers which is always fun.  Complaining about light and step and repeat walls is one of my favorite things to do.

Cool stuff was getting to shoot Chloe Sevigny who I have had a crush on for 15 years and have never spoken to despite being in the same room with her several times.  I didn’t get to speak with her this time either, but I did shout “look right here!” at her a few times. Clearly the Get Low carpet was amazing. I had met the crew earlier in the day as per my last post, but it was still great.  Robert Duvall flicked off all the camera guys when we weren’t paying attention as a joke.  Not one person got the shot, that guy is a pro.  Sissy hugging me as per the last post was amazing too.  MacGruber was the only one of these films I didn’t attend because I think SNL is horrible. It was cool to see Val Kilmer despite him posing for less than 10 seconds.  Fortunately there was a lot of him to shoot… Of all the celebs who did the red carpet, Will Forte from SNL was the most generous.  After his time on the carpet, he left the ropes and went into the crowds of screaming girls and posed for pictures and signed autographs for another 5 minutes. It was a really classy move.

I shot the red carpets for Barry Munday, Cryus, Lemmy, MacGruber, and Get Low. If you want to see who everyone is, check the Voice gallery for captions.

Click here for the 2010 SXSW Film Red Carpet gallery.

When I got a pretty decent gig working SXSW Music I realized that I could afford to spend another week in Austin and check out the film festival.  To do that I would need to get a film badge.  I asked the Village Voice if they would hire me to shoot SXSW Film and Interactive for them and they agreed. Originally I thought I could just shoot a film party or two and just watch a bunch of movies, but then I got all these press junket invites and realized I could do a pretty cool portrait gallery for the Voice.  The odd thing is that the Voice still hasn’t run these portrait yet, although they tell me they are going to.  A lot of the people in the gallery you might not have any idea who are, and frankly I don’t want to explain it all, but I will link the Voice gallery when it’s up and it will have all the captions.  Also if you mouse over the photos below it will give credits for my favorite shots.

The highlight of course was shooting the Get Low junket.  I got there late due to the cabs in Austin being the worst things ever so I was worried I was going to miss my chance to shoot Bill Murray, Robert Duvall and Sissy Spacek.  Luckily they squeezed me in, unluckily I only had 2 minutes with them and they weren’t so excited about posing for me.  Bill Murray made fun of me, Robert Duvall was mostly trying to just eat lunch and Sissy Spacek was worried about me shooting with a wide angel.  But when I showed Sissy the photo on my camera and she loved it and later on the red carpet for her movie she came over and hugged me and told all the other photographers that I was amazing. Speaking of amazing, while I was waiting to shoot the cast of Get Low I got to shoot Sissys daughter Schuyler Fisk, who is a musician, actress and totally rad girl, not to mention absolutely stunning.

The other thing really worth mentioning was that I went down to shoot portraits at the Tiny Furniture premiere.  Tiny Furniture was directed, written and starred in by my friend Lena Dunham and my boy Teddy Blanks did the score. Their film won best narrative feature and I was so excited for them.  I am going to do a full review of it right before it screens in NYC so you will get to hear more about it, but it was amazing and I am so proud of those kids.

Anyway, I shot people from the movies Get Low, Tiny Furniture, MARS, Monsters, Helena At The Wedding, and fucking Lemmy from the movie Lemmy.  Amazing.  Click here to see all the portraits from SXSW Film 2010.

I had plans to return to NYC on Saturday after relaxing at my parents house in DC for a few days after my crazy three week trip.  My plans were instantly changed when I realized just 90 minutes south of DC in my old home town of Richmond, VA they were having Slaughterama. Slaughterama is this crazy bike party thrown by RVA’s rowdiest bike gang, the Cutthroats.  I used to be friends with a bunch of those kids but that was many many years ago.  I haven’t owned a bike since I got a drivers license so I don’t exactly fit in.

Still the party was intense, with bike jumps and bike jousts and mud and violence and vomit and blood and very little clothes. It was hard to shoot a lot of the more fun stuff without destroying my camera but I did my best.  I got there a bit late too, but fun was still had.  I ran into a bunch of kids I really missed in Richmond and went to a series of shitty house parties with them afterwards. I ended up driving back to DC around 3 am.  It was a pretty good day trip all in all. Oh yeah, my friend Alex got the shit beat out of him by some rednecks, that fucking sucked. Otherwise, a good day.

Click here to see all the 2010 Slaughterama madness.

With the first pictures to go up from WMC 2010 I am giving you two galleries in one.  Roxy Cottontail actually hired me to shoot two parties on the roof of The Clevelander hotel on Ocean Drive.  The first night was a pretty big success with DJ SEGA doing his birthday party there, Luther, Excel, Tim Dolla and Tittsworth killed it all night and Jackie Chain did a suprise performance.

I met Jackie Chain in the lobby before we went up to the roof and we were talking about how we had both been at SXSW and how exausted we were.  I told him “I haven’t slept in weeks!” He told me that was what his song was about, but until I saw him play I didn’t realize that was pretty much the exact hook of his song.  Pretty spooky…

The party was full of cute girls and I met two of them that I hung out with all day the next day.  We took some sexy pictures of them which should be up later in the week.  Get excited about that.  The party went all night but I had to leave by 4 so I could meet up with The Overthrow guys because they were giving me a place to sleep.  I am sure you will hear more about that later in the week too…

The next day, I woke up and was ready to head over to Roxy’s day party, when I got a call that it was getting postponed because of rain.  I got over there and just hung out waiting to hear what was going on.  In the end the party got canceled and in the end it never even rained. The big problem with the party was that they had all this free shit to give out to DJ’s and friends and the sponsors wanted that to happen, so Tweets were sent out and we set up a makeshift gifting suite in the lobby.  Now normally gifting suites are pretty boring, but only on this blog do you find product sponsors pulling out their boobs and people moon walking.

Speaking of sponsors thanks to Red Bull, Karma Loop TV, Scion, Socialight, Vain Magazine, Native and Hellz for making sure I got paid and for throwing a great party.

So we have two galleries for you, the main one where most of the pictures below are from was the Roxy Gives You Ears Party.  You can click right here to see all the pictures from that.  The other gallery is a relatively boring gifting suite.  You can click over here to see all those pictures.  I will be back soon with more galleries!

Oh, I forgot, there might be boobs in these galleries! NSFW.

So Driven By Boredom has lost like 40% of it’s traffic since I went on “vacation”.  That is a pretty insane number.  I can get it back quickly I am sure, but I promise never to leave you that long again.  Starting tomorrow I will be uploading TONS of pictures of my trip.  It might be out of control.  I hope to post around 3 galleries a day until I run out of the thousands of pictures I have for you.  I will be posting some other fun stuff (aka n00dz) too because I want my site back to the way it was.  I am also going to be releasing a new print in my web store this week as well as possibly doing some minor tinkering to the site design.

I want to integrate my web store and my Tumblr into the site more and I might add a tiny ad section at the very bottom of the page if this deal goes through. I am pretty picky about ads which is why you don’t see any, but I have something very inobtrusive in the works that would at least pay some of the taxes I am going to owe soon. If you are intrested in advertising on this site, and have something in mind that won’t distract from the site, please let me know.

So, this week, help me get the site up and running again.  When you see something you like, let people know about it. Tweet, Tumbl, Stumble, blog, Digg, Buzz or whatever the kids are doing.  You could even email it or put it on Facebook! Wouldn’t that just make everyone sooo happy? It would make me happy at least.  Let’s do this!

Oh, and since I love you, have some oh-so-magical Happy Easter-time fun videos!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PP8avO4rlMQ[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2OC5Z1Fii8[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mLGzCtlRas[/youtube]