Over a year ago one of my best friends Ross Harman took his own life. I managed his band The Gaskets for five years and when he died I decided I had to play manager one more time. I reached out to many of his musician friends and got them to cover songs of his for a tribute album. A year later we had created a tribute album featuring 15 bands and 18 songs.

We were going to just put the album out digitally but the album was so good that we knew we had to do something more permanent so we decided we would try to raise money to put it out on vinyl. We held a fundraiser for him in Richmond, VA and raised over $4000. We raised so much money that now we are trying to raise money to release his solo albums, Calcutta and Symphony, as well.

So we started a Kickstarter fund to raise $2000 of the $5000 or so we needed to really do these albums right.  I put it up late last night and just posted it to Facebook and Twitter and went to sleep. When I woke up we had raised $800 already. It has really been amazing. I sort of feel like we are going to hit our goal of $2000 by the end of the weekend or something crazy like that but I want to keep going and see if we can raise the full $5000.  We could really make something special.

Anyway, I know most of you don’t know who my friend Ross was but he was really an amazing musician. All his music, solo or with The Gaskets, is available for free at TheGaskets.com. Check it out and think about donating to this project.  Plus for those of you who are into my photography you have a chance to get prints of mine on the cheap. There is a bunch of other stuff you can get too. Kill Shop Kill donated some T-shirts and Revolve-CD donated some CDRs for those of you who don’t have a record player.  For just $5 you can get the digital download.  And every dollar counts.

So click here do donate to the Ross Harman tribute album Kickstarter! Thanks!

The Occupy Wall Street Protest reached day 11 yesterday and I finally headed down to Liberty Park in the finantial district to find out what was going on. If you are somehow now aware of the protest it is a couple hundred people living in a park in Wall Street who are protesting all sorts of different things.  There have been a bunch of arrests and problems that have made national news and a bunch of celebrities showing up to offer kind words to the protesters living there.

As someone who is left leaning politically and as a punk rock youth would probably living down there with them I generally support a lot of what is going on.  That being said there is no real focus and it is so overly PC and radically leftist so I don’t think it is going to attract a much bigger following than is currently down there. I think a lot of people support Wall Street reforms and the end of tax breaks for the wealthy but 99% of those people do not want to join a fucking drum circle. Everyone is so nice down there but it’s so nice that it’s almost condescending. Still, there is a lot of great stuff going on there and I think it is worth supporting these people and it’s about time there is a wildly left swinging answer to the Tea Party.

One of the highlights of my trip down there was Dr. Cornel West showing up. He spoke to reporters around 6PM and then stayed down there talking to everyone and just hugging people. That dude is so bad ass and at 7PM he spoke to everyone during one of the public town hall meetings Occupy Wall Street holds daily. I stuck around to hear him speak and then I had to get out of there when they started giving everyone a lecture about what hand signals to use during a meeting in order to be oh so respectful to everyone. I am sure it is useful to organize that many people but it also makes you just wanna rip some hippies dreadlocks off.

Anyway, I got a few nice shots and met some really interesting people standing up and fighting for what they believe in and you have to respect the hell out of that if nothing else.

Click here to see all my pictures from Day 11 of Occupy Wall Street. And click here to find out more info or make a donation to help support the protest.

Our old friend and DBB favorite, Burning Angel Jessie Lee moved to LA and for some insane reason actually seems to enjoy it out there. She is doing great after the car accident that nearly killed her and she came back to NYC to celebrate her birthday with her old New Yorker friends.

The party was of course held at Trash at Webster Hall and there was all sort of madness in store for her there. There was a pretty wild burlesque show featuring Burning Angel cap’n Joanna Angel doing terrible things on stage dressed as a sexy teacher. Joanna’s babelicious sister Sarah Screams did a strip tease while singing opera which straight blew people’s minds and a Michele Bachmann supporter who’s name I unfortunately cannot remember came out of the closet in the most erotically homosexual of ways on stage. All of these things were wonderful and you must see them no matter which way you swing.

On top of that my friend Loki was hosting and she is a total babe and I rolled to the party with another Burning Angel Aria Rae. Hopefully in the near future I will have sets of both of those girls on my site but who really knows…

Anyway, these photos are unreasonably NSFW thanks to Joanna and a butt plug so please be careful flipping through these if you are of the faint of heart.

For everyone else click here to see crazy pictures from Jessie Lee’s birthday at Trash at the Studio at Webster Hall!

For the last eight years I have been going to Miami to attend a convention of Miami Dolphin webmasters. Yes, you heard me right, a convention of people who run Miami Dolphins fan websites. Eight years ago I was blogging about the Dolphins a lot on Driven By Boredom and people got really sick of it so I started a seperate section of my website where I put all the Dolphins posts that way my fans could avoid the Dolphins stuff if they wanted to. (Sorry that you no longer have that option.) I had only been doing the site a few weeks when I was contacted by the Miami Dolphins. They wanted all of the sites come down and get together.

This has become a yearly tradition for me and I ended up becoming friends with some NYC Dolphins fans and together we formed Dolfans NYC the official fan club for NYC Dolphins fans. Yeah, I know.

This year I didn’t really feel like taking a lot of photos. I was trying to use the trip as a vacation as much as anything. Every time I travel I work constantly so it was nice to get away for a bit. I took a few snap shots on the training facility tour with my digital point and shoot but that was about it. I did pull out my real camera on game day because I ended up heading down to Sun Life Stadium a few hours before the game and I figured I could get some tailgating shots… I did.

So really most of you can just ignore this gallery, but if you are interested you get a mixed bag of bad point and shoot pictures of random Dolphins crap and some nicer pro shots from game day including some shots of the Phins warming up before the game.

Click here to see all my shots from Miami Dolphins Web Weekend 2011.

One of the quickest ways I can tell if someone doesn’t know what the fuck they are doing when it comes to photography is when they don’t know how to white balance shit. It’s usually when photographers are shooting with their camera daylight balanced in tungsten light. For the non-photo nerds that means that everything looks orange for no fucking reason.  An experienced photographer can see color in light that most people can’t and will either adjust his camera (or film) or filter the lens (or the flash). So when you look at these photos of Shea it’s pretty clear that I don’t know what the fuck I am doing.

This is the second of two shoots I did with Shea a couple months ago. You can see the other set here. Both of them are poorly white balanced and while the last set is purely the result of laziness and deciding to take photos at 5am for no reason, this set is a bit trickier. For whatever reason every other photo I took came out a different color and I have no idea why. Seriously. It drove me fucking insane. There were so many photos that were just ruined because they came out weird colors for no reason.

Anyway, most of you don’t care at all about any of this so I should instead talk about why the hell Shea is dressed like a clown and pouring Kool Aid on her head.  No Shea is not a Juggalette (although this is pretty close to Juggalette porn). She wanted to do a shoot where she covered herself in food. “Sploshing” is the proper fetish term for it. Personally that shit creeps me out and is kinda gross so I told her I would only do it if it was really fucking weird. I saw that she had Kool Aid and I was like “I will shoot it if you dump that whole thing of Kool Aid on your head. For some reason she agreed. On top of that Shea runs a company called Rubber Fucker that makes crazy latex outfits and she had just made this weird clown outfit. She did her make up to match and we put her in a bathtub with the bottle of booze she had been drinking and for some reason, boxing gloves. All of this made very little sense at the time and it makes no sense now but I did get to squeeze chocolate sauce on her which was fucking hilarious to me.

These are up there with the weirdest NSFW photos I have ever taken and I am sure you will either love or be horrified by them. Either way I hope you can get past the awful color balance that I have no real interest trying to fix in photo shop.

Click here to see all the uncensored photos of Goddess Shea dressed as a clown, topless in a bath tub pouring Kool Aid on her self for no possible reason.

Last night HTC threw a delicious party for the release of their new phone the HTC Rhyme. They had amazing food served by some top NYC chefs – Frank Falcinelli and Frank Castronovo of Frankies, George Mendes of Aldea and Philippe Chow of Philippe. The party was DJ’d by Harley Viera-Newton and my homie Ana Calderon.  It was hosted by a massive bunch of hip motherfuckers and had to be the most fun I have had at a party thrown in honor of a cell phone.

Plus the party was overrun with celebs which always gets people excited. There were probably more than I can name but Charlize Theron, Olivia Wilde and Questlove were some of the highlights. Personally it was really cool to meet Jeffrey Wright. Jonah Hill was there but wouldn’t let me take his picture but he was pretty nice about it. He lost a ton of weight, it was pretty impressive actually. Also I found out that the Olson Twins have a sister, Elizabeth, who was dancing her ass off all night.

Anyway, the party was a blast and since I know you are all star fuckers I am sure you will enjoy taking a look at all the pictures.

Click here to see all the pictures from the HTC Serves Up NYC event at the Highline Stages!

Twenty four hours ago I was at the Vice.com Launch Party at One Hanson Place in Brooklyn. Currently I am in South Florida and I have not slept since the party. I got on a plane just a few hours after Rick Ross headlined the Vice shindig and he was actually on my flight. I gave him a card. So if you are reading this Mr. Ross…. hello sir, your show was great.

Since I haven’t slept in days I am just going to leave you with photos  but quickly a few highlights. The party was totally wild the guest list was insane and shit was just off the hook all night. There was a basement party in a bank vault and upstairs people were dancing and moshing so hard that the barriers were getting pushed back and the bouncers were having a hell of a time holding the crowd at bay. Death From Above 1979 played before Rick Ross and killed it even harder than they did when I saw them at Lollapalooza but probably not as hard as when I saw them start a riot at SXSW.

So yeah in conclusion, wild party, amazing times, Rick Ross ruled, DFA fucked shit up and all is well in the world of Vice.com.

Click here to see all the pictures from the Vice.com Launch Party at One Hanson Place.

For those of you not aware yesterday was an historic event. Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth and Anthrax got together at Yankee Stadium and played a most legendary of concerts. As a metal head in my pre punk rock years I would have lost my mind had this show been played in 1992, but as an adult I was still pretty psyched about it. That being said I did not have a ticket and the Village Voice sent me up to the Bronx to take photos of people hanging out outside, not inside the venue. Besides, my own band had practice and everyone knows that Fucking Bullshit is by far more important than a twice in a lifetime meeting of the Big 4.

I had yet to take a trip to the new Yankee Stadium and despite a few walks around the place I couldn’t really find anyone legit tailgating Heavy Metal Parking Lot style. I am sure there was a parking lot somewhere full of wild partying but I didn’t come across it. Instead I just talked to people waiting in line to get into the event which started about an hour after I got there but people were lined up anyway. I hung around for a couple hours and met a lot of awesome metal heads who could not possibly be more excited about anything. I talked to one guy who said that he was more excited about this than his wedding day.

I actually had a really good time just hanging out and I almost bought one of the many tickets I was offered but I finally just got back on the train and headed back to Brooklyn for band practice. We worked on a Body Count cover which I think is pretty fucking metal.

Click here to see my shots from outside of the Big 4 concert at Yankee Stadium.

I have been a fan of comedian/musician Dave Hill for a long time. When I first moved to NYC I was very involved in the comedy scene because some of my first friends in New York were comedians and girls who liked banging comedians.  Stand up comedy is pretty boring to photograph so I would usually just go to the shows and then go shoot parties after. I never really did much comedy photography although I always talked about it.

Over the last few months I have been wanting to do more editorial work but I don’t really have a portfolio for it so I hit up a bunch of comedian friends of mine to try to do some photo shoots. None of them happened because both comedians and I travel constantly so it was hard to find a good time. I kept trying and finally Dave and I had a chance to meet up.

I went over to his place in the West Village the other day and we just hit the streets to find something to shoot. We didn’t really have any ideas until I remembered their was a pet store near his house. He suggested we walk a bit further and see if a place called Citipups would let us take photos of Dave with their puppies. Citipups were awesome and they let Dave and I play with an adorable Westie puppy and the most awkward looking dog I have ever seen, a cross eyed Boston Terrier.

We shot a bunch of photos of the dogs in this awful mixed light that they had in the store and then we went out and hit the street for some just standard portraits.  We eventually ended up at Teen Vogue’s Fashion Night Out event which is even funnier if you knew Dave’s history when it comes to reporting on fashion week.

After you check out all the photos you need to check out Dave’s website because it is fucking hilarious.  But before you do that click here to see all my photos of comedian Dave Hill.