Today we are going to take a break from photos and just regale you with stories.  I was thinking about what I was going to update with today and I realized I didn’t really have anything which led me to realize that I haven’t shot many parties or anything really. But I feel like the last week or so has been pretty productive and interesting so I guess I will just tell you a few stories and you will just have to imagine the pictures in your head… at least until I get my film developed.

I think my week of reasonable productivity began last Sunday when I photographed Veruca James naked in public.  Those are the last pictures I took that you have actually seen.  On that shoot I found out that my friend Colin had died two weeks prior and no one had told me. I missed the Facebook invite to his funeral. I was on very little sleep and while I had been expecting his death for some time it really had an effect on me. I had been planning a trip to Virginia to go to his memorial service for a few months ever since he checked into hospice and finding out that he died and I didn’t know about it really fucked up my head.  I wanted to see a movie to get my mind of things so I tried to get my friend Promise to go see Pirates 4 with me because it would allow me to zone out for a while but she wanted to see something with a little more substance so we went and checked out a movie called Blank City about the No Wave and Cinema of Transgression underground NYC film movements of the late 70’s and early 80’s.  The movie was so inspiring and so depressing to me. Here were these people making so much art and collaborating and just living in NYC when it was this burned out shell of a place where you could live for $50 a month. And here I am 30 years later taking photos of drunk people instead of making something relevant or important.

So this post ended up being obscenely long so I need to create a jump. If you want to keep reading click below unless of course you came to this post directly making these instructions just confusing and unnecessary.

(Read the article)

There are two things I know about fans of Driven By Boredom; You guys hate it when I talk about sports and love it when I post photos of naked girls.  I think I have finally figured out a way to use your love of boobs to get you to care at least a little about my sports related blogging. And it’s for charity! It’s so rare these to find a way to make nudity tax deductible…

As you may know I am a huge fan of the Washington Capitals hockey team.  The Caps finished their regular season schedule yesterday and they are getting ready to face my local team the New York Rangers in the first round of the playoffs.  The Caps are the top seed in the East but they are playing the Rangers that kicked the shit out of them twice this year. Living in NYC I can’t stand the fucking Rangers and I am pretty worried about the match up so I have decided to grow a playoff beard for charity.

In the NHL it is tradition for hockey players to refuse to shave during the playoffs as a matter of superstition.  In the last few years the NHL has used this tradition to raise money for charity and I think it’s a really great idea.  Personally I love growing really stupid facial hair so this is a perfect excuse not to have to shave for a while.  The playoffs in the NHL last several months so if the Caps play as well as they are capable I could be looking pretty awful for quite some time!

So if I am going to be growing this beard there needs to be a good reason for it and that’s where you guys come in.  I need you to sponsor my beard! I am trying to raise a bunch of money for the Friends of the Fort Dupont Ice Arena a charity offering free or subsidized skating programs to children.  The Fort Dupont Ice Arena is the only skating rink in the DC area and it gives inner city kids a chance to enjoy skating which is something I loved growing up and took for granted as a kid with parents who could afford to take him skating all the time. I am asking you guys to sponsor my beard and help these kids get to skate!  Now I know a lot of you don’t care about hockey or the Fort Dupont Ice Arena so that’s where the boobs come in!

When I think of beards the first person I think of is Kari Ferrell the Hipster Grifter. To give you a little refresher on the Hipster Grifter she was a girl who made headlines in NYC after she got caught scamming a bunch of Williamsburg hipsters out of money but seducing them and then convincing them to give her money through a variety of cons including a story about how she was dying of cancer.  What made her more interesting than your standard con artist was that she is hilarious.  When the story broke all these people came through with hilarious stories about her including pictures of her now famous tattoo proclaiming her love for beards.  I first heard of Kari when a friend sent me nudes of her. I thought they would be all over the place so I posted them on my site.  Oddly, I was the only person who had them and the nudes generated my site hundreds of thousands of hits.  After Kari did her time in jail she came back to NYC and we actually became friends. She is clearly a little bit insane but she seems to be pretty reformed, is holding down a real job and is a really fun girl to hang out with so I asked her to help support my beard fundraiser!

Anyone who sponsors my beard with $25 or more will get a personalized photo of a topless Hipster Grifter holding some sort of sign about you which she will make hilarious obviously. If you want her to make it for your website or your band or your company you can do that too. Think of the promotional value!  She will even make the fan sign safe for work if you want to put it on your Facebook page or something. The possibilities are endless really.  And all this can be had for just a TAX DEDUCTABLE $25 donation to a great charity!  And if you donate a lot of money like $100 I am sure we can get her to do something super weird like come over to your apartment and rub exotic oils into your beard. She didn’t agree to that but she does love her some beards.

So check out my personal donation page and sponsor my beard! You can pay with Pay Pal or a credit card.  If you want a fan sign just email me your donation receipt and let me know what you want the sign to say.  If you don’t want a fan sign you can just do the right thing and support my beard!

Oh, and I’ll be updating my picture after every game so you can come back to my page and check out how embarrassing it is that a 30 year old man can barely grow facial hair!  Good times! Go Caps!

Ten years ago I was a sophomore in college at Penn State and I was bored out of my mind. I had spent most of my freshman year dating a girl who lived 5 hours away from me and I would go home every chance I could to see her and I spent a lot of my time hanging out in my room talking to her and sort of hating life. At some point that year I started a very primitive party photo blog of pictures taken on the drunk bus that circled the campus every Friday and Saturday nights making sure people didn’t drunk drive and got home safely. The bus was total madness and it was fun to document but I didn’t make a lot of friends. I had a lot of great 10 minute conversations but I never became part of any social scene. By my sophomore year I had broken up with the girl and grown tired of riding the bus. I had absolutely nothing to do and I was as bored as I had ever been in my life.

I was always someone with a project. When I was 15 my friend and I started a record label and a punk rock zine that we did all throughout high school.  I always was doing something, making something, taking photos, collecting things and just having all sorts of random hobbies.  All of a sudden I was bored out of my fucking mind. I would spend most of my free time online talking to my friends from home and coming up with stupid projects to keep me from going insane.  I was making terrible music using the programs ACID and Fruity Loops. I was making videos of me lip syncing 80’s pop songs way before YouTube existed. I was selling random things on ebay as a joke. And as always I was taking photos. Oh and I had a web cam. I was doing so many things that I came up with this motto that I was driven by boredom.  I had the idea to get a tattoo of the phrase on me and that tattoo eventually became the logo of the website for about 5 years.

So I had all these projects I was doing and I wanted a place to put them all so in February of 2001 I began to build a website that was mostly just links to my photography and the ebay pranks and the lip sync videos and all the dumb things I was doing at the time.  My brother at the time was running a “E/N” site which stood for Everything/Nothing and there was a community of people that were making these sites where they just talked about their lives and linked things in what we now know as a blog format.  I started talking to these people on a chat program called IRC and I started getting ideas for the site and I decided to adopt the E/N or blog format.  I coded the whole thing myself using a combination of Front Page and hand written HTML and on March 1st 2001 Drivenbyboredom.com was launched to the public.

Here is the entirety of that first post. And yeah, you really should take a look at that “information page”

Today is the first day of Driven By Boredom.  How exciting.  Look around read the information page.  Let me know what you think.  You have any suggestions please let me know.  Buy my ebay stuff cause I think its funny.  Um check out my movies my music and the web cams.  I have no idea what to say.  I am bored as hell and I’m trying my best to entertain myself. I’d like to entertain you kids as well, so please, check everything out.  Um… I am going on my spring break today so I won’t be editing the page for a week or so, but come on, I just spent the last month working on this thing… I know you have enough to do for the next week.  Rock most on and tell your friends!

Anyway I had three major things planned for today. I was going to have an art show, but it got canceled. I was going to have a full site redesign but it got postponed and I was going to throw a big party but it never came together.  All and all it was a huge fucking disappointment. But that’s okay. Driven By Boredom is 10 years old today and there aren’t many people on earth who can say they have been running the same website for more than a decade. And it took me about 8 years but I finally do thing full time now so I am pretty fucking proud of that too.

So wish DBB happy birthday.  Send me some presents and take a look at DBB 1.0.  It’s pretty fucking embarrassing at times but it’s my life. And lastly I am going to leave you with the orignal DBB logo. I wish I knew who made it but I have no idea. It’s pretty fucking amazingly ugly.  Enjoy.

One of my best friends goes by the name of Barry Gamble. He is wondrous man that I met when I was eleven years old. In fact my four closest friends in the world were all in the same 5th grade class with me. Considering the class probably had about 16 students that is pretty fucking impressive. But back to Barry.  Barry is a weird dude. He is one of my favorite people on Earth but he does not really make a lot of sense as a human. He has some of the strongest opinions of anyone I have ever met but most of them contradict each other. His fashion sense is unexplained borrowing elements of punk and hip hop culture mixing it with exclusively Old Navy T-shirts that he buys off the $5 rack. He is a fitness fanatic and at 6’4″ he is kinda an imposing dude yet he has never been in a fight and the only sport he has ever excelled in is bowling which he has a 200+ average. He was the capitan of the varsity cross country team  his senior year in high school despite never running a varsity race. He was one of the slowest members of the JV team yet he was beloved by all that they bestowed upon him the honor of captain which was probably as funny to them as it was to me.  He is not just a slow runner, he is an unreasonably patient man and does everything with purpose and intern is one of the slowest mother fuckers I have ever encountered.  This trait as earned him the nickname Slo’ Barry which I will personally carve into his tombstone if I somehow manage to outlive him.

On top of Barry’s physical gifts he is also quite the showman.  He is a pianist and singer and we once started a 1979 style rap group called The Party Rock Three. Together with a group of three other gentlemen came in third place in our high school talent show for our rendition of Soft Cells rendition of Tainted Love. Barry won the male beauty pageant at his collage three years in a row making him the only three time Mr. Lynchburg College in school history. He was robbed of his fourth crown purely because he was the front runner. I drove several hours to witness him defend his title and he was the clear winner despite losing in the end. But above all, Barry is a friend.  A friend who dedicated a song in my honor for some reason.  I have no idea what gave him the idea to write a song about me to the tune of Elton John’s The Measure of A Man, but he did and I thank him dearly for it.

Below the video I present annotated lyrics.  Click the highlighted links to learn just a little more about me than you ever wanted to know. God save us all.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APA3AR5073U[/youtube]

He’s taking pictures every night
Which he then shares on his website
He gets the ladies in the mood
So that they model in the nude
Join him in the bathroom for a shoot.

Take off your clothes, untie your shoes
Show him your boobs
You’ll see Igor is a man

He downs hard liquor twice a year
Best of the best at chugging beer
His appetite a god did make
I’ve seen him eat 5 lbs of steak
He drowned his beef in A1 and cleaned his plate
He seldom drinks, he’s a good dude
Eats lots of food
He is a mountain of a man

It’s the warmth of his voice, the touch of his hand
Tattoos you’ll never understand
Heart on his sleeve, reluctance to dance
That’s why Igor is a man

He’s always got time for his friends
And his baby brother Ben
Obsessed with football in the fall
I hope his Dolphins win it all
His posture sucks, he never stands up tall

One of a kind producer of work
Sometimes a jerk
You’re the measure of a man

So I got a Ronald Reagan dressed as a pimp tattoo. You might ask why the Hell would I do something like that.  I might tell you it is an indictment of the irresponsible fiscal policies and the theory of trickle down economics. It is satirizing of tax breaks for the wealthy and Reaganomics.  Or I might just tell you that I got it because I think it’s hilarious. Cause it is.

Really I just wanted something by Mitch O’Connell who is a favorite artist of mine and when going through his book of tattoo ideas I realized my favorite images were his series of presidents dressed as pimps.  The Reagan stood out to me because when I was a kid I loved Reagan before I understood politics can because it just happened to fit in the spot where I wanted to put a tattoo.

I was born in 1980 a few months before Reagan was elected president. He was with me for all my formative years and as a child obsessed with both Family Ties and jelly beans he seemed flawless. If Alex P. Keaton loved Reagan, you can be damn sure I did. If you are younger than 25 and have no idea who Alex P. Keaton is you need to watch this right away.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCiRuJ8fWYs[/youtube]

Moving on, I photographed this amazing pool party that was held for my friend and tattoo artist Betty Rose. She asked me to shoot it and as payment she offered up this sweet Reagan tattoo.  She did my Aloha Monkey and she killed it once again with my man Ronnie here. She had to make his head and hands a bit bigger than they were in the original drawing for detail, but I think it looks pretty sweet anyway.  So go get tattooed by her already and if anyone else wants to trade photos for tattoos… let a brother know.

Lastly, speaking of tattoos, on Tuesday more people are going to be getting the Driven By Boredom logo tattooed to them.  I have two people confirmed but we could always use more.  My friend Jess is going to hook everyone up proper. If not Tuesday then we can do it soon… So if you want a free Driven By Boredom tattoo on Tuesday or any time in the near future let me know and you can join the ranks of these amazing people who already have Driven By Boredom tattoos!

Ronnie Reagan he’s our man! If he can’t do it nobody can!

In trying to find things to update this site with while I am waiting on a new camera lens to appear in the mail I have noticed out of the last four updates two are naked girls and one is a video girls making out.  Well, I guess we can keep my page nice and classy with this Craigslist M4W personal ad I put up at 3am. Things like this happen when you are totally losing your mind from lack of sleep.

For the record I only received one response and I am pretty sure it was from a prostitue.  But everyone on Twitter thought it was funny so now you guys get to read it. Click here to see the ad (with pictures!) at least until they take it down next week.

Ps. Clearly this is a joke, but I am still taking applications from any and all rad insomniac babes.

I feell like we just did one of these posts where I talk about bullshit you don’t care about and offer no content… Well it’s time already time to do it again. Sorry.

You may have noticed that I haven’t updated this site in several days.  There are three reasons for that.  The first and most important reason is that I was putting together a package for a watch advertisement that I am hopefully going to shoot this month.  I had to cast models and locations and then just put the damn thing together so that took up a lot of time.  Secondly, if you notice the last update was about Monday Night Football.  Well that MNF game was one of the most crippling moments of my life so I had to sleep all fucking day the next day an mourn for the Miami Dolphins. The last reason was because of camera issues.

As you may know I bought a new camera and a few other accessories. The Nikon D700 is an amazing camera and I thought it would inspire me to go out and shoot a lot, but the camera is actually so similar to my D300 that I actually didn’t feel the need to play with it that much.  It is much better in the dark, and it has a full frame sensor, but other than that for practical reasons its pretty much the same camera.  I also was waiting on my new lens to go with said camera (17-35mm 2.8).  When I got it I hated it. I shot two events with it and midway through the second one I realized it was WAY too wide for me. The distortion is awful and I just don’t feel right with it. On top of that I got it used and the lens sticks when you zoom and I missed a bunch of shots. I am going to try to return it, not because I hate it, but because it sticks and is in way worse condition that the ebay auction led me to believe. Unfortunately they are not responding to my emails and until I can get my money back I can’t buy a new lens. In the mean time I think I will be shooting with my fixed 20mm lens.

All that being said, I did shoot nearly 2000 photos since I talked to you guys last including two parties (Rando & Big Top), a Gods Girl, two corporate type events, and a bunch of press photos for The Death Set that featured some hot naked girls.  You will be psyched about the updates I have for you over the next few days.  I spent several hours editing the images down and they are almost ready to go, but in the mean time they are uploading and I am uploading images for clients and the whole thing is taking way too long so you get this super boring post about why they aren’t up yet.  But in just a few hours I will get up those Death Set pics and you will realize they are well worth the wait.

Since I have you all here I wanted to give a shout out to my boys Semi Precious Weapons who are in town tomorrow night at Irving Plaza. I am going to be there and I hope to see you fuckers out. You get a discount on tickets if you say “Semi Precious Trash” at the door.  I am not exactly sure what the discount is, but who gives a shit, you should be lucky you don’t have to pay $100 to see them at Madison Square Garden.

Also, if you are interested in online gambling for some reason you should look at this link. I had to write about that in order to cash a check. Sorry about that, but I gotta pay for these fucking new lenses and cameras and stuff. Don’t judge me. At least I tried to make it slightly funny right? Right?

What else can we talk about? Did you know I am listening to Elton John right now? What the fuck is up with that? I feel like I had something to talk to you about.  You could vote for my friend maybe? He is trying to win a car, in hilarious fashion, but I think the contest is going to be over by the time you read this. Hmm… We should plug my Tumblr again because there is always good shit going on over there even if I am not updating this site. Speaking of my Tumblr, yesterday I posted on there about how I paid someone $40 to sharpen a pencil for me. I love the idea of artisanal pencil sharpening plus the guy who did the sharpening (David Rees) was the guy responsible for one of the all time most fantastic comics, Get Your War On.  Speaking of…

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nhYAOWEKxE&NR=1[/youtube]

Well evidently it’s already Sunday and for whatever reason I haven’t really updated in two days and I haven’t really taken any pictures.  Well, that is not actually the case. I have shot a few naked girls and I spent all Saturday taking photos of locations for a shoot I am doing for for a Swiss watch advertisement.  But I have admittedly been slacking a little bit.  Part of that is because I got a new camera and I was waiting for a new lens to arrive, but I got that lens and now it should be time to rock.

Let’s talk about the new camera.  I got a Nikon D700 so I finally have a full frame sensor which means I can take advantage of some better lenses which would be pointless with Nikon’s DX cameras, such as the 17-35 2.8 Wide Zoom lens I just got.  I am pretty excited about that thing although I don’t normally shoot that wide so my party photos might look pretty different from now on.  I got the lens used for about $700 less that it is new and it looks like it’s in pretty good shape other than some cosmetic damage.  Now, I know most of you aren’t camera geeks and you don’t give a shit about any of that.  All this should mean to you guys is that I will probably be using my flash a little left because the D700 with a 2.8fstop can pretty much shoot in the dark and it means that my shots will be a lot wider than you are used to. Also with sharper glass I won’t need to sharpen my images so that might effect the way they look as well. But I guess we will find out in time.  It also means that if you rob me walking home from a club you can pawn my camera for more now than you could have a week ago.

Okay, now that that’s out of the way I gotta plug a few projects that don’t directly have anything to do with me but are project that I sort of worked on and I figure I should promote them.

The first is the debut of the first half of the Ruffeo Hearts Lil Snotty (RHLS) movie called “**** CAN’T WAIT.. (ANY LONGER)”.  If the name sounds weird just wait till you see it.  RHLS is a super weird clothing company and the movie is sort of a video look book for their new line. It’s a stop motion animation featuring music by Das Racist producer LE1F and noise artist Driphouse. It stars Anna Barrie from These Are Powers.  I shot three or four scenes of the 8 part series but they haven’t edited my parts yet so they won’t be in the first half of the video. But you should watch it anyway so when you see my parts it will make sense (it won’t make sense).  Anyway, the video debuts on Monday at 10PM on the World Wide Internet.  For all the details check out this magical Facebook invite.

The second thing I need to plug is a porn film. Classy right?  Well several years ago I met a guy in Las Vegas named Joe Gallant.  We had a mutual friend and we hit it off and I partied with him one night at some crazy fetish party after the AVN Awards.  At the time he was living in NYC and when he needed some people to play paparazzi in a porn film he was making about celebrity vampires he asked me to be in the movie.  The film was called Hell’s Kittens and I am an extra in it for about 2 seconds. You can see the back of my head and my camera and briefly hear my voice.  Pretty exciting. After the scene was over Joe asked me if I wanted to come back and hang out on set where they shot actual porn scenes.  I had never seen a porn being shot so I figured I couldn’t pass this opportunity up. I hung out for one evening of shooting and shot a bunch of behind the scenes shots.  Anyway, the production company that made the film folded before the movie was ever released and the only reason I even got to see it was because Joe hooked me up with a bootleg copy when I ran into him in Vegas last January.  I figured that would be the end of it until Joe emailed me a few days ago to let me know that the film had been released after all under Club Jenna in May.  He asked me to do a little plug for it on my site to get some press as they gear up for awards season.  So yeah, check out my old photos from Hell’s Kittens (NSFW) and read this write up on the release of the film.

Lastly, totally unrelated to anything I just got back some 1600 ISO black and white film that I shot recently. I posted one of the shots today on my Tumblr but I shot a few pictures at parties so I figured I would show you some of what my party pictures would look like if I was shooting nothing but black and white film all the time…

I have done several Post Office live blogs on my Twitter and people have seemed to love them so a few weeks ago when I did one I took screen shots of my Tweets and then instead of posting about them I totally forgot about them.  Yesterday I had an actually almost positive experience at the Post Office and it reminded me that I never posted the last live blog.  So guess what? You get to enjoy this shit today.  Hip hip hurray.

Here are a few things you need to know before reading this. One is that my post office is the Williamsburg Post Office. I have never been to a worse Post Office before but I hear that there are actually worse ones in NYC.  I find that hard to believe. Secondly the blog mentions two photos, one of them is a blurry picture of people standing around so you can just imagine that one, the other is a man sitting in a folding chair that he brought with him.  I have uploaded that for your pleasure so click here if you want to see it.  And lastly, remember to read these from the bottom to the top because that’s how Twitter works or something.

Enjoy.