Roxy’s Playhouse – 10.15.09

February 3, 2026

Yesterday I was digging through my archives in the “2009” folder trying to find some classic party pictures to post for you guys. I have some stuff pulled already, but all of them seemed like a lot of work so I was looking for something that didn’t require a 1000 word essay, a bunch of googling and an hour of editing. I saw that in October, 2009 I had a bunch of folders for each day. I guess the CMJ music festival was right around this time. I opened one of two October 15th folder and found a bunch of really fun photos from a party that Pepsi through with my friend Roxy Cottontail and figured this would be the perfect thing to post today.

“The Pepsi DJ Collective at Roxy’s Playhouse” wasn’t part of CMJ and I don’t even know what the fuck the Pepsi DJ Collective was, but I do know they paid me to take photos and I think it was a pretty nice check, so I should probably add Pepsi as a client to my resume, if I had a resume. It’s weird to think of all the huge brands that have paid me to take drunken party pictures in sweaty night clubs… or in this case sweaty Williamsburg warehouses.

If you don’t know Roxy, she’s a legendary DJ who came up with Diplo and the Hollertonix crew out of Philly. By the time I moved to Brooklyn she was already NYC staple and we did a lot of parties together. These days she’s still doing here thing but she also hosts a podcast about those good old days of NYC nightlife. Wait, come to think of it, why haven’t I been on her podcast? In all seriousness, Roxy rules and I was psyched to get the invite to shoot this late night madness care of a corporate sponsor.

As for the event, the DJs were Roxy, Diplo, DJ Drama and Eli Escobar and there was a performance by Maluca who I always had such a big crush on. In fact in this gallery I have a photo of her and rapper Amanda Blank who was my other musical crush back in those days. It was cool to find those photos. Speaking of cool photos to find. I found one of my friends AK Murda and Ease Da Man, both of whom we sadly lost. Two other friends gone before their time, legendary bassist Andy Rorke and one of my favorite models Vicky, are in these galleries as well. It’s crazy how many people I knew back then are gone. I miss them all.

There are so many notable nightlife and music folk in these photos that I can’t begin to name them all but just take a look for yourself. If you were around back then you’ll see so many notable faces. I should mention that OG Major Lazer hype man Skerrit Bwoy was performing with Diplo as was Telli from Ninjasonik who had just dropped a remix of Major Lazer’s Hold the Line. In my original write up from that night I talked about how much fun that was.

Looking back on this it seems like this was a great time, but in my original write up I was so nonchalant about the whole thing because it was just another night back then. Any of those folders from 2009 could have opened up and been something just as legendary. What a time to be alive.

Okay that’s all I got. I spent too much time on this one already but it’s only 600 words so I didn’t get too carried away. Check out all the photos below from The Pepsi DJ Collective at Roxy’s Playhouse.

New Years Eve 2008 – 12.31.07

January 1, 2026

Making some actual New Years Resolutions this year and one of those things is updating this site more, primarily the Vintage DBB stuff. My plan was to drop a new, completely re-edited gallery every Thursday but that is so overwhelming and took so long and I think that’s why I stopped updating as much. A lot of shit happened in my life as well and I should hopefully have a little more time now, but my main plan is just to not edit as much. I pulled over 200 photos from this gallery and I just batch brightened them in Lightroom and then came back and fixed the ones that were way too over exposed. It took me less than ten minutes instead of over an hour. At least they are in much higher resolution now. Here’s hoping I update with Vintage DBB posts at least a couple of times a month going forward.

Anyway, let’s get into it. I used to only drink twice a year (now I drink never), NYE and my birthday, and this particular NYE was a blur. I barely remember it, luckily I have an offline copy of my archives so I can go back and read about that night. Apparently the reason I got so drink is because I took six shots in 45 minutes before I even got to Don Hills for the big Rated X/ Trash/ Burning Angel collaboration party.

If you weren’t there for all this, Trash was my favorite Friday night party hosted by friend DJ Jess (and Alex and Twig) but Jess was the first person to ever pay me to take photos in NYC and he died a decade ago now and I miss him all the time still. Rated X was a Saturday night party hosted by Michael T, Theo Kogan and Peppermint. It was famous for being a “no pants” party where they had a coat check for pants and you could get discounted drinks if you were pants free. They also were home to the infamous hot body contest which we will get to in a second. The party was hosted by the Brooklyn based alt porn site Burning Angel and Joanna Angel herself. She did some burlesque and helped host, but she also brought a bunch of her girls with her including my good pals Jessie Lee and Draven. My friend Apathy did a burlesque performance as well.

The hot body contest was absolutely wild that night thanks to Jessie and Draven. I uploaded all the photos of them to my paysite Girls of DBB. I tried not to post photos of people who looked wasted or were sort of being bashful about it, but there are 80 NSFW photos up there, mostly of the Burning Angel crew. There are some random people also pulling a titty out which was apparently a thing everyone just did back then. In my original notes from that night I said “The next couple hours were pretty much a blur… A lot of boobs and kissing people and trying not to puke.” What a time to be alive.

Apparently I left the party at 5am, which was probably hours before Don Hills actually kicked everyone out. I was pretty drunk and it’s hard to take photos when you have a drink in one hand as it is, so take that for what it’s worth. It was also a few months before I got a pro digital camera, but the chaos and the fun still shine though and I think you guys will really dig these despite the mid photography.

So check out the gallery below to see a bunch of photos from the Rated X vs Trash vs Burning Angel 2008 NYE party and head over to Girls of Driven By Boredom if you want to see the really crazy stuff. See you soon, I hope!

Happy Endings – 7.21.09

September 26, 2025September 26, 2025

It’s been a minute since I have done a Vintage DBB post on here, but my life has been in a wild transition. If you missed the recent B-Side post, I bought a 60 year old house with 60 year old house problems and have spent the last three weeks working on it every day and then I was on a slightly too long vacation. These are some real Champaign problems but I got poison ivy from doing yard work and I have to spend $2500 to cut down a tree before it destroys the foundation of my house so I am exhausted. Oh, I also got engaged but I haven’t really told anyone so I guess if you are reading this you know before some of my close friends and less close family members.

So yeah, I wanted to update my NSFW paysite thing, Girls of Driven By Boredom so I started digging for a random night out from back in the day that had some nightclub bathroom nudes and I found just the thing. I met my friend Ginger at tattoo party I shot for Inked Magazine before they stopped paying photographers. We talked about shooting and actually had this idea for a larger documentary project that never happened, but we got diner one night to talk about both things and since it was Thursday night we ended up going over to Happy Endings after the meeting (and yes I know it was called Happy Ending and not Endings but I called it Endings the entire time it was open so I am not gonna change it up now).

Every Thursday you had the party 66Sick in the basement and at that time Disco Down was the upstairs party. Downstairs there were a bunch of rooms you could sort of go hide out in so Ginger and I went down there and took a bunch of topless photos of her which are all now uploaded to Girls of DBB. I was going to head out after that but then my neighbors showed up and the three of them, to quote myself in 2009, “went off on a wild tear through the bar, ending up with them having their own personal bouncer who stood by them dancing to keep creepy dudes away from them… ”

I gotta say it’s great still having all my old archives so I can go pull quotes like that, because I don’t remember any of that shit. So yeah, this gallery is a ton of photos of the three of them mixed with a bunch of photos of the Disco Down kids writing a bunch of shit all over themselves with Sharpie. I was hoping I explained what was going on with that in my original post about the night, but I didn’t.

Anyway, I hope to update with old throwback posts more often, I actually have a few random nights pulled for me to reedit, but I need to make time for em. Hopefully once I am moved in I can get back to posting one of these a week, but no promises. This night was pretty unexceptional aside from the Ginger chaos, but it’s always fun looking back at what we were up to 15+ years ago.

Check the gallery for all the photos from a random Thursday night at Happy Endings back in 2009 or jump over to Girls of DBB for the NSFW stuff.

Another Friday Night – 9.14.07

August 5, 2025

I’ve probably spent less than a year of my life total working you standard 9-5, Monday-Friday job. Between graduating from college and moving to NYC I did some temp work at a few offices and my last job ever before becoming a photographer was digitizing books in a library and I did that for about six months, but other than that I’ve either worked retail/food service, or been a full time photographer. So for me, a Friday night is just like any other night of the week, but back in the late 2000s, Friday night meant two things: Trash & Ruff Club.

Ruff Club, held at the Annex, was the first weekly party in NYC that I ever went to and Trash was probably my favorite weekly of all time. Back in 2007 it was held at Rififi which was by far my favorite of it’s four locations. If I was going to hit only one party that night it would be Trash, but like most nights of the week, I would hit at least two parties. I’d usually start my night at Trash and then end up walking down to the LES for Ruff so I could take the JMZ home or just walk over the bridge to Williamsburg. But Rififi was near the L train so I could always do it the other way around.

This Friday night in September wasn’t any sort of special occasion, and the photos were taken before I had a professional camera, but the night feels pretty representative of that time period. Multiple parties, multiple subcultures, a ton of friends and a bunch of time just spent hanging out in the street outside of bars. It was such a fun time in my life and also still in that full Indie Sleaze era of American Apparel and insane accessories and of course flip phones.

I went back and looked at what I had written about that night at the time and it seemed the night was kinda a bust. I sounded kinda depressed about the whole thing and not sure why. Apparently the door person at Annex tried to get me to pay $5 which instead of just paying, I apparently made it a whole thing until Sophia Lamar brought me in and then apparently I was super apologetic to the door person for making it a whole thing. (That’s three apparentlys in one sentence, are you impressed yet?) I was working at a busboy at a restaurant at that time so I am sure I could have used the $5, but mostly I think I just wanted to feel important. My site was starting to blow up and right around that time I quit my busboy job and tried to make it as a full time photographer. I only made it nine months before having to get that book scanning job, but it felt like I was really doing it. In December of 2008 after the economy collapsed I got laid off of that job and I never worked another day job again, so I guess I did make it, just not that Friday night…

Coney Island Hot Dog Eating Contest – 7.4.07

July 4, 2025

In the mid 2000s shortly before I moved to NYC my friend Adrianne was in a long distance relationship with a guy who ran a blog called “Watch Me Eat a Hotdog”. The blog was fucking hilarious and it covered all things hot dog including the Nathan’s Famous 4th of July Hot Dog Eating Contest and the world of competitive eating. I was kinda obsessed with the site and competitive eating. I loved an eating challenge. I had won my high school’s Homecoming pie eating contest three years in a row. I remember trying to see how many hot dogs I could eat in 10 minutes to see if I had what it takes. I ate 13 hot dogs in 12 minutes which is both impressive and also 40 less hot dogs than hot dog eating superstar Takeru Kobayashi ate that same year.

At the same time I was managing a two man dance pop band called the Gaskets who were blowing up locally but hadn’t done much outside of Richmond, VA where we all went to art school. Twice a month we were traveling up to NYC to try and change that. I started booking them shows around the 4th of July so I could actually see the hot dog eating contest in real life and I got to witness history in 2006 when Kobayashi broke his own record by one quarter of a hot dog in 2006.

In spring of 2007 The Gaskets got booked to play some small festival in the Hudson Valley. I rarely booked them daytime shows because they were always terrible, but the publisher of Blender Magazine got them the gig, so we weren’t going to say no. At this point I was living in NYC and working as a nightlife photographer while also working the 6am-3pm shift at a hotel restaurant. The only thing I wanted to do in the middle of the day was sleep. So when we got to where we were staying I took a short nap before the show, but for some reason the Gaskets just let me sleep through it. When they got back they told me the gig was terrible (as expected) but they had some good news: One of the handful people watching their set was Richard Shea, the co-founder of the IFOCE – the International Federation of Competitive Eating.

The Gaskets told Richard how obsessed their manager was with competitive eating and how I would always book them shows so I could watch the hot dog eating contest, so Richard offered us a spot to perform before the contest that year. I could not have been more excited. Not only would they get to perform in front of thousands of people at Coney Island, but I would just have amazing access to the hot dog eating contest and I could bring my camera…

I honestly barely remember The Gaskets performance that day, what I do remember is everything else. First of all they got to open for competitive eater Eric “Badlands” Booker who put out a rap album about competitive eating that I was obsessed with. I haven’t heard it in 15+ years and I am positive I could still sing along with it. Badlands goes by Badlands Chugs and his videos of him chugging massive amounts of liquid have gone super viral and he is a legit YouTube star with over 3 million followers. (He also happened to witness the second to last punk show I ever played a decade later.)

The contest itself was legendary. Kobayashi had dominated every contest he had entered until that point. His first contest in 2001 he nearly doubled the previous record. For the next six years he was blowing everyone out of the water… Until he met Joey “Jaws” Chestnut. In 2006 Chestnut came within two hot dogs of Kobayashi setting them up for a fierce head to head battle in 2007. In the qualifying round Chestnut had actually taken the world record with nearly 60 hot dogs but on July 4th Kobayashi broke that eating 63 hot dogs. That would have been the world record, if it weren’t for Chestnut eating an insane 66 hot dogs in 12 minutes. Kobayashi had lost and I had witnessed history.

Chestnut would go on to win the contest 16 out of the next 17 years, losing only once to Matt Stonie in 2015. Chestnut would break his record over and over again and owns the current record of 75 hot dogs in 10 minutes in 2021. Last year Chestnut didn’t compete and my friend Pat “Deep Dish” Bertoletti won which was incredible. Now if you are wondering how I became friends with a hot dog eating champion it’s because after taking these photos in 2007, I gave my business card to an eater named “Crazy Legs” Conti who looked at my website and quickly became a fan of my photography. One night I was at a party at Lit Lounge and I ran into him and told him I had watched a documentary about him and told him I was obsessed with competitive eating. He realized who I was and since we were mutual fans of each other we quickly became friends. Crazy Legs also happens to host the 4th of July after party every year which is how I became friends with Pat and his fellow Chicago eater Tim “Gravy” Brown.

Now it has been years since I attended a hot dog eating contest, but I still follow it every year and I have always had this dream of doing a photo project on competitive eating, going to some of the smaller regional festivals and documenting the weirdness that goes on around it. And maybe, tentatively, perhaps I might be working on doing something like that in the not so distant future.

Anyway, enjoy these photos from the day that changed competitive eating forever. It’s a real time capsule of the transition from competitive eating being a bit of a freak show, to the real sport it is today. These photos were taken on a truly terrible digital camera and the quality reflects that, but I think you can enjoy them anyway. Happy 4th of July. Eat all you can.