The Last Ruff Club – 9.11.09

March 20, 2025March 20, 2025

When I moved to NYC in 2006 I got my apartment a week before I could actually move in. I had to come up early and sign the lease and get the keys. I remember I was so excited to sleep in my new place I just slept on the floor instead of crashing with friends as planned. I was managing a band at the time and I booked them a show at the same time just to have another to be in New York. At the show we met this couple who loved the band and took us to this spot on the Lower East Side called the Annex for a party called Ruff Club. My NYC nightlife era had officially begun.

Ruff Club was a staple for me for the next three years. Ian Cognito was the door guy who I had been introduced to that first weekend. He was the first person I knew in NYC nightlife. He would always let me in even before anyone knew me. The party happened on Friday nights at the same time as my all time favorite NYC party (at least when it was at Rififi), Trash and I would hit both parties nearly every Friday. I would take the J to the LES for Ruff and then walk up to Trash for late night there, or take the L to Trash and walk down to Ruff.

On September 11th, 2009 the Annex shut its doors and Ruff Club closed the place out. I am not sure if I was going to Ruff Club as often near the end, my friends “the Ruff Kids” had stopped DJing there and Trash had moved a few blocks northwest and it was slightly less convenient to hit both. I was still going to the Annex all the time for the Wednesday night party High Voltage, who was at that time on their third location. The Annex was great because it felt like a nightclub upstairs and a dive bar downstairs and it had lockable bathrooms which were great for NSFW photo shoots… and other things. So obviously I had to be there for the last night.

Going through these photos it’s clear I wasn’t the only person who felt the same way. The party had a tight list of regulars, the flyer read “locals only” and I cannot tell you how many people I love are in these photos. It really hits me in the feels looking through these and seeing how many people I have lost contact with, or don’t even remember anymore. There are so many girls in this gallery that I had a crush on at one point and so many friends who I haven’t seen in 15+ years. Even the people I am still in touch with through social media or whatever I haven’t seen in ages. If you are in these photos, just know I miss you and we should catch up one day.

It’s funny I am getting wistful now but even at the time I was feeling the same way. Here’s a little of what I wrote in my original blog post:

I miss the packed sweaty basement when the Ruff Kids were spinning George Harrison and I was getting my mind set on some cute girl talking to Sophia Lamar. I am going to miss Sophia trying to give me drink tickets and telling me some crazy story while I am waiting in line for the bathrooms. I am going to miss running into 24Court who always seemed so unreasonably happy to see me. She will be my friend forever when she defended me when one of the Misshapes got in my face at Bleach. I will miss Danzi’s drunken hugs and 5am rides home on the J train. I miss seeing Brad Walsh trying to make nightlife photography look like the yearbook photo you wish you had in high school. I will miss Felipe making people in line for his photo booth wait while he gets my shot. I am going to miss convincing Spenser and Denny to not hate me after I talked shit about their party on my blog. I am going to miss arguing with Jason about politics and I am going to miss the Annex. I am going to miss the upstairs bathroom where all sorts of shady things have gone down. I am going to miss Roe help me sneak whatever cute 20 year old girl I was with into the club and talking football with me when I couldn’t stand sweating any more and had to come outside. I will miss bringing out of town friends to Ruff to show them what a real NYC party is like and Ian for making them feel cool when he would let them skip the line not pay the cover… Then again did anyone ever pay the cover?

The night technically ended with a chaotic A.R.E Weapons show, but the bar stayed open until 7am with the old regulars hanging out past dawn. I had torn the meniscus in my knee a few days earlier and apparently I left around 5am because I had to get an MRI in the morning. I never did get the surgery I needed and I am absolutely paying for it as a middle aged man. RIP Ruff Club, RIP the Annex and RIP my knee…

This is only my second Vintage DBB post (Although there are plenty more throwback images on the VintageDBB Instagram) but I am really enjoying going back, reading what I wrote at the time and writing about old memories with a new lens. I pulled 200 photos for this gallery and reedited like 65 of those that were a bit underexposed. A lot of stuff didn’t need it because at the time I was blinding people with an external flash. Sorry about that, but at least the photos look cool. But yeah, I hope you dig the look back and I can’t wait to keep uploading classic parties from the “Indiesleaze” era.

Okay, that’s it, enjoy all the photos, and as always, feel free to reach out if you don’t want a random 15 year old photo of you partying back on the internet.

Brynn Michaels In A Minivan

March 11, 2025

Back in January I was in New York for this big charity event I help run every year and I needed to rent a minivan for it. I was only gonna be in Brooklyn for one night before heading to New Jersey for the event (and my friend’s 40th birthday party which he held at an NJ mall for some insane reason). I don’t have any models to photograph in North Carolina for some reason, so I hit up a few people in NYC to see if they wanted to shoot. My pal Brynn Michaels was down but had dinner plans. My flight was delayed and by the time I would get back to my place it was going to be too dark, but I had an idea. I would drive directly to her from the rental car place, and we would shoot in the minivan.

If you are a long time reader of this blog you might notice that I don’t use studio lighting and I don’t use flash very often for my portrait work, so when I got to Brynn’s and turned on just the car lights I was deeply concerned at how dark it was in the van. I knew I could take some flash photos, but it was too dark to do anything else. Fortunately Brynn had a little mini video light and we shot the whole thing with that. It turned out it was absolutely perfect for the job. I have nearly the same light and I normally bring it with me as a backup for exact situations like this but I didn’t think I was going to have time to photograph anyone since I only had that night. Luckily it all worked out.

I ended up really loving these photos and glad I could get Brynn some photos she likes as well. This is the third time we have worked together and the second time I managed to delete the photos off my memory card before backing them up. That is literally the only time I have ever done that in the 24 years that I have owned a digital camera. So I owed her some good photos… I should mention, just as a quick aside, that Brynn was still healing from a breast augmentation so she’s got some red scars that are healed now. I don’t edit scars and blemishes because I like to think of myself as a documentary photographer, even when I am shooting nudes in the back of a minivan. Luckily Brynn respects my dumb vision and is letting me post all the photos unedited so shout out to her for that. Personally scars and blemishes just make photos feel more real/raw to me and I think that’s what a lot of you guy appreciate about my work too.

Anyway, while I was photographing Brynn I heard back from another one of the models I had hit up. I had mentioned the minivan to my friend Gia as well and she was down. She met up with me at my Brooklyn space right as I was parking. I knew it was going to be too dark in the van and I didn’t have a light for this shoot. We took a few photos at my spot but honestly the lighting there sucks so much I don’t even want to post those photos. We tried to shoot in the van after that and it really was too dark, but we tried. At the end I just used my iPhone light and those came out okay so I probably should have done more than that. After brightening them as much as I could in Lightroom, I ended up with 14 decent photos in the minvian that I uploaded as a little bonus.

So, as we move forward with this new site, all the NSFW images are going to be exclusively on Girls Of Driven By Boredom. This site is just going to have previews of shoots and then you can pay a few bucks a month to see the other shots. Fortunately Girls of DBB has tens of thousands of images on there. Everything that has been deleted from this site is still there, behind a paywall. Sorry, but blame the US government for the FOSTA/SESTA bill.

So click over to Girls of DBB for 55 minivan photos of Brynn, 14 minvan photos of Gia. They each have another full shoot on there as well. In the meantime you can check out this preview gallery below…

PS. I there’s also a 2 minute long video I shot of Brynn in the minivan. You can buy that alacarte without signing up Girls of DBB, but it’s free for members.

The Night Michael Jackson Died – 6.25.09

March 6, 2025March 6, 2025

I don’t have a great system for how reuploading old content is going to work. Unless someone pays me to dig up a specific event, so far the idea is just to open a random folder and see what’s inside and if it’s good, post it. For this first ever Vintage DBB post I decided to dig into the 2009 folder because that’s the earliest time period when I thought my event photography was actually good. I have a ton of earlier photos that I will post eventually, but I figured we should start out with some technically sound photos. The first folder I opened was today’s date, but it was sort of an atypical night, so I picked a date randomly, 6.25.09. Until I opened the folder, I had forgotten that I have that exact date tattooed to my leg.

It turns out, 6.25.09 was the day Michael Jackson died. Now it’s pretty clear at this point that he was a monster, but when he died Leaving Neverland hadn’t come out and while there were allegations, I still loved his music, not enough to get a tattoo of him, but he was the first artist I ever listened to that wasn’t forced on me by my parents. Thriller was the first album I ever owned. When he died it didn’t really have any impact on me, I don’t really like any of his music written since 1987 and it’s not like he was putting out new stuff. But for some reason I just though it would be funny if I got a Michael Jackson tattoo that day. I was kinda joking about it, but when a friend from the NY Post hit me up asking me if I knew of any memorial parties she could cover, I told her I might get a tattoo and she told me she would cover it if I got it, and suddenly the joke wasn’t a joke anymore. I went over to Fine Line Tattoo and got a dumb Michael Jackson tattoo while a photographer and writer from the NY Post watched. They never ran the story…

After I got tattooed I went over to Anchor bar because my friend Josh, aka The Fat Jew, hired me to shoot a party he was throwing. Kid Cudi was there for some reason. I don’t even remember what the party was exactly, and honestly what I wrote at the time gives me no additional information. I do remember that he never paid me, but we made it square when I had him play santa for my Christmas card that year. In my post at the time I said I didn’t really know anyone at the party, but I found a bad photo of my friend SERF before I knew him and a few photos of my buddy SAME who we lost back in 2020. Going back through my archives I keep finding photos of friends before I met them, and photos of way too many friends who are no longer with us.

Speaking of no longer with us, after Anchor Bar I went over to Lit Lounge and the very first person I photographed there was my old friend and roommate Alex Magnetic. Alex was one of my all time favorite humans and was living with me when she died. Her death impacted my life in such a profound way and it was just a few months before the pandemic, which also altered my life in such a profound way. I feel like I am an old man now and I didn’t feel that way before she died. I think her death was the official end of my youth, even though I was 39 at the time.

I don’t have a ton of shots from Lit. I think it was for the party NC-17, but not 100% sure. Jeremy Bastard was DJing, but maybe it was just a special MJ night or something. My blog gives no indication. The only real thing of note that night was that I went home with twin sisters, and when I say I went home with them, I just mean they crashed at my place so they didn’t have to drive to New Jersey or wherever they lived. What’s wild is that forever I had one of their bracelets in a bedside table drawer, hoping that I would figure out who left it there. Well 16 years later I finally figure it out but I finally threw it away when I moved, and I am not in contact with those girls anymore.

Lastly, I should mention that future throwback posts probably won’t be this long, but I just felt inspired since it’s the first post and I had a lot to say, but I am excited to go back and tell old stories and relive some of these memories. Also, I should mention that I registered vintagedbb.com which will just redirect to the Vintage DBB posts on website, in case you ever want to see what new old stuff I have posted. You can also check the @vintagedbb Instagram account as well. Now go check out the photos from the night Michael Jackson died below.

Vintage Driven By Boredom

February 27, 2025March 1, 2025

If you’ve been paying attention to my social media for the last couple years I have been posting throwback party photos from the “Indie Sleaze” era over on my VintageDBB Instagram account. I’ve been having a ton of fun doing it and part of that has been going back to old parties and finding photos I totally forgot about, sometimes finding photos I never even published because they didn’t seem interesting to me at the time.

Recently I started doing posts that consisted of images from just a single night or event and writing a bit about it in the caption and with the launch of Driven By Boredom 4.0 I want to expand that. As we start from scratch with this website and start moving forward, I also want to be moving backwards by reposting old images with new context, new edits and most importantly larger files without giant watermarks on them. Back in the day I wanted my logo to show up on people’s MySpace Top 8s so I made my logo take up like 15% of the image. I also posted so many terrible photos that I didn’t edit at all and they were all 750px wide which is way too small for modern screens. I still don’t do a lot of editing these days, but at least I am not posting images that are underexposed by three stops.

Going back and doing this is going to be a lot of work for no financial reward so I have come up with a bounty system where people can pay me to see old photos again. For $150 I will track down the party or event you want to see and reupload it in high resolution with new edits and all of that. I am happy to shout you out as well in the post if that’s something you are interested in as well. Perhaps your old band from back then has a new album out and you want a little bonus promotion, I got you. I just need to come up with a way to justify all the time I am going to be spending digging through the archives, and maybe you guys can help. If you want to see an old gallery, just reach out.

Lastly I should mention that one of the reasons that I am starting all over again is because 2025 is not 2007 and I know there are a ton of middle aged people out there who would prefer if there old drunken photos don’t exist anymore. As I reupload old content I am sure I will be unearthing some not so great memories for people and images they wish disappeared with MySpace, so as I go through this stuff I am going to 1) Try and not post the drunkest of photos 2) I will be presenting everything with new context instead of whatever fucked up thing I said about the photos at the time and 3) as always I will be removing any photos that people don’t want up. Again, just reach out. The last thing I want to do is upset anyone. I will be posting some old NSFW content, but all of that will be paywalled, so no one can accidentally stumble on that so if your boss sees it before you can ask me to take it down you can ask him why he’s on my pay site.

We are currently building a private archive of the old site so that I can go back and see what I wrote at the time so I might not start uploading Vintage DBB posts until that is ready to go, but in the meantime go follow VintageDBB on Instagram. See you guys back here soon…

35mm Photo Dump

February 27, 2025March 1, 2025

This is technically the first post of Driven By Boredom 4.0. I need to upload a few posts before the actual introductory post so we have to begin somewhere. I had originally planned on uploading the most recent DBB 3.0 posts to the new site, but I changed my mind. I want to start from scratch, but also I don’t want to drop any new content when the post wouldn’t be featured, so the solution is just a dump of recent 35mm photos.

These photos were taken primarily in December and January and hint at a bunch of projects I am working on. My life has changed quite a bit since moving to North Carolina a year ago, and it’s pretty obvious from the photos. Most of the interesting photos were taken on my two recent trips to NYC, but I moved to the beach so photos taken during the winter here aren’t exactly going to be exciting. Honestly I really like it here, but it is not as inspiring as I would like it to be, which is why I am forcing myself to work on a handful of projects.

Project 1) Photographing strangers. I am trying to force myself to photograph 200 strangers and I am slowly posting them on my 35mm Instagram account. I have been slacking a bit on that one recently, but I hope to start working more on that one as it gets warmer.

Project 2) A photo documentary on a local fiberglass artist named Hubert Graham. I have visited Hubert three times so far and planned on going back a bunch more times. I am such a huge fan of roadside attractions and not only is his place a giant roadside attraction but he’s the person who makes roadside attractions for other people.

Project 3) License plate zine. I am working on a new zine called Vanity that I promise will be more interesting than just photos of vanity plates. That’s my next project after Project 4.

Project 4) Nothing But Flowers. I have been working for nearly a year on a book with a bunch of other people featuring man made structures that have been overtaken by nature. There’s actually no examples of that in this photo dumb, purely because I am done shooting for it. I just need to finish laying out the book and actually publishing it.

Aside from those projects this photo dump has some sports related photos, some mildly NSFW photos, some street/mall photography and even a trip to Medieval Times for my friend’s 40th birthday. It’s all pretty exciting.

Okay, let’s just move on with our lives and test out the new gallery system. I have more posts to write to get ready for the launch of the new site.