Remember when I shot elaborate film screenings of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Back To The Future? Those really fun events were thrown by BBQ Films and since that TMNT screening I have sort of become part of the team. I really love what they are doing so I offered to help out and last week they asked me if I would shoot a fake tech event that they created to announce their newest film screening. Of course I said yes and last night I attended “Start Me Up: Activating Events in the 21st Century” at the Flavorpill offices in Soho.

From the invite: “We’ve convinced some of the brightest, most badass minds in the biz to share their industry-disrupting secrets in a quickfire pitch slam. You’ll learn why native platforms, gamification, cryptocurrency, augmented reality, the quantified self, and the internet of things may be the cornerstones to your next event.”

The event featured actual talks from actual start ups RebelMouse and Ultravisual as well as a talk from Flavorpill Co-Founder Mark Mangan. The event also featured BJ Lomax the fictional son of Bernie Lomax. He announced his new crypto-currency “Bern Bux” with an absurd video and hilarious talk that involved throwing note card after note card and popping bottles of YA’cuvee 23. At the end he invited everyone to a party on July 25th at Playland Motel in Rockaway, Queens where he would be launching Bern Bux and showing a “documentary” about his father called “Weekend at Bernie’s”.

For a fake event it was still a pretty good tech mixer and I met some pretty interesting people and I am pretty interested in using both RebelMouse and Ultravisual in the future. RebelMouse creates websites that pull from a variety of social networks so that you can quickly create a website around a hashtag or key word. Seems ideal for events or a place to put all your social at once. Ultravisual is a content sharing mobile app that is a lot more advanced than something like Instagram, but from my standpoint it’s really exciting because they allow nudity! As long as you tag your content as adult and aren’t posting actual porn you can get away with a lot more than on Instagram or Facebook.

Anyway, the important thing is that tickets for the BBQ Films screening of Weekend At Bernie’s went on sale today! (Update: They already sold out!) The event should be a really great time and I wish I could go but I will be at the Gathering of the Juggalos… Oh yeah, that’s happening again. Get excited.

Now click here to see all the photos of the BBQ Films/ Flavorpill fake tech event “Start Me Up”!

Raven Rockette is one of my new favorite models. I met her at at a pool party in LA with Catie Parker and then I ran into her again at Exxxotica in NJ and we took some pictures in a car. In April finally we got to shoot! We drove to the abandoned water park Rock-A-Hula in the desert between Vegas and LA and took some truly epic photos. The problem is that I like the photos so much that I don’t want to publish them yet. I am still hoping to find a cool place to publish them. (Any photo editors out there get at me!)

Fortunately Raven just happened to be traveling to LA on the last day that I was in town. I somehow convinced her to shoot with me at 5:30am on the roof of Superchief’s new space in DTLA. (By the way, I have a photo in their next NYC show!) I had just shot a girl at their space two days earlier and we went up on the roof as the sun was setting. I realized that it would be so much better to shoot there during sunrise and Raven was totally up for it! Sadly the day we shot happened to be the one cloudy morning in LA history so not only was the light not as awesome as I was hoping but it was actually pretty cold. Raven was freezing but she was a champ and sucked it up for the most part and we got some rad shots.

When the shoot was over I dropped her back off at our pal Andy San Dimas‘ place and I headed straight to the airport returned to NYC having slept less than four hours in the last 60. I was pretty much a shell of a man, luckily I had planned a mini vacation right when I got back and two weeks later I am back to my only mildly sleep deprived self!

Thanks to Raven and Superchief for the awesome 6am photo shoot! Can’t wait to do more awesome stuff with both of you!

Now click here to see all the NSFW photos of Raven Rockette on the roof of Superchief’s new DTLA art space! 

Ps. As always the high resolution shots from this set are available through the DBB Girls App! There are like 10 app exclusive photos too!

Once again I spent my 4th of July in Coney Island taking photos of people eating hot dogs. There is nothing more American than that! The Nathan’s Famous hot dog eating contest is now in its 98th year and for the 8th time in a row Joey “Jaws” Chestnut won. At 61 hot dogs he was nowhere near his record of 69 but it was enough to outlast Matt Stoney who had the lead midway through the 10 minutes of hot dog eating. Chestnut won another way too.. before the contest he proposed to his long time girlfriend and fellow eater Neslie Ricasa.

On the women’s side there was a big upset. Sonya “The Black Widow” Thomas lost for the first time in the history of the women’s competition. She was beaten by Miki Sudo 34 to 28. Thomas holds the record at 45 but with a crazy storm going on it was apparently bad day for eating hot dogs. Sonya is from my hometown of Alexandria, VA so I have been a fan of hers for many years. I hope she can mount a comeback next year!

The storm was pretty insane and Coney Island was empty on what is normally one of the most packed days of the summer. I was pretty prepared for the weather but it still made my job a lot harder. At some point my lens got fogged up but I couldn’t tell because I was shooting through a plastic waterproof case and I thought it was just my screen that was fogged. Fortunately I shot several hundred photos so I think there is plenty of madness for you guys to look at!

After the contest I ran into my friend Olivia and we rode the ferris wheel in the rain which makes the second time in two weeks I have been on the Wonder Wheel. We also went to the beach which was hilarious to see people trying to vacation in the pouring rain. After leaving Olivia and a slightly too long nap I ended up at the  private hot dog eating after party where I didn’t take any photos but did have corn starch poured down my pants by one of the best eaters in the world. And that’s how I spent my 4th of July…

Now click here to see all my photos from the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest at Coney Island!

I am back from vacation! A short fishing trip with old friends bumped up against a week in LA and suddenly I was gone for two weeks and everything in my life has pilled up. But I am in NYC for the next three weeks (theoretically) and I am about to start fucking up my to do list. The #1 thing on that list? Publish some photos from my LA trip that are already a week old!

Remember when I shot Mint & Serf’s release party for their book Support, Therapy & Instability? Well they happened to have the LA release party last Tuesday when I just happened to be in LA. Hanging out with New Yorkers for the few days we were both in town was pretty much the highlight of my LA trip. What does that say?

Anyway, Good Peoples helped them throw a book release party on top of the new Ace Hotel in DTLA. Bunch of graffiti kids were there including my old buddy Shark Toof and they had one of the paintings on display. The owner of the painting showed up to the party as well which was pretty cool. The homie Blu Jemz DJ’d and I flirted with some babes and then I headed off to Nightswim. Meanwhile they got kicked out of their own party because that’s what happens when you throw a party for vandals in a fancy hotel. That’s the pppunk rock shit right there.

So click here to look at all the photos from the LA release party of Support, Therapy & Instability at the Ace Hotel and I am gonna go deal with my life real quick.