I am extremely frustrated with my internets right now.  Time Warner needs to get punched. My internet is back up, but it is creeping and I would not be the least bit surprised if it crashed again any minute now.  That being said, I swear, come hell or high whatever, I will get the rest of these damn Siren pics up tomorrow. And after I do that, I have some crazy pics from Happy Endings last night and some other sexy shit for you this week.

Moving on.  Here are photos of Built To Spill at the Siren Music Festival. They headlined the thing.  I guess I had heard of them, but I didn’t know anything about them.  For some reason I assumed they were some sort of Warped Tour hardcore band.  Some guy told me that they were the most influential band of the 90’s which was slightly surprising considering Nirvana existed and all, but what the fuck do I know.  My friend Dana has their tattoo, and there were a lot of people watching their show, so the kids must dig them.  I must have missed that part of the 90’s when I was busy being punk rock and smashing the system and all.  To me they sort of sounded like Camper Von Beethoven who I dig a lot (I coincidentally helped sing gang vocals on their New Roman Times comeback album) so that was cool. I really did think they were pretty good, and they were infinitely better than they were in my head before they show when I thought they were going to sound like Senses Fail. (Please note that I have no idea who Senses Fail are either, again I am just making assumptions based on.)

Anyway, you can check out the photos, but they are pretty boring photos of weird looking old dudes, so you might just want to wait for the Spankrock and Monotonix photos tomorrow, because those are out of fucking control. Till then…

Comments (0)

When I saw the line up for Siren Fest I was really only excited for Monotonix and Spankrock. The rest of the bands I had either not heard of, or didn’t want to see.  I was extremely pleasantly surprised when I found out that Grand Duchy was Frank Black’s new project with his wife Violet Clark.  Not only am I a big Pixies fan but ever since Teddy Blanks did his cover Frank Black’s song Headache I have been getting more into Black’s solo work.  I was actually really impressed with Grand Duchy.  I think it is easy to point at Violet Clark as a just replacement for Kim Deal and it seems Grand Duchy is a little bit of a return to the Pixies sound, I think she stands out as a very solid performer and their chemistry is great.  I also talked to her a bit back stage and she was super nice and I met one of their kids.  Who had just been propositioned by a kids modeling agent. They were all really cute together, as you can see. But for me Grand Duchy was the big surprise of the festival and they were fantastic.

Also on a personal note, I have to say that the Pixies were really a huge part of my musical development.  This neighbor of mine who was older than me and who I had the biggest crush on ever made me a tape of the Pixies Dolittle when I was in the 6th or 7th grade.  They quickly became one of my favorite bands and were really the first band I listened to that none of my friends knew about.  They aren’t exactly an underground band, but they seemed like it to me…

So click here to see all the Grand Duchy photos from the Siren Music Festival.

Also an added bonus; Teddy Blanks cover of Frank Black’s Headache.

Teddy Blanks – Headache (Frank Black)

Comments (0)

Over the past I have no fucking clue how long I have been organizing every photo I have taken since I moved to NYC in 2006. The idea is to eventually have a big fucking folder of images with all the best stuff from the last 8 years and to have things organized so that I can pull images that I need. I also notice I have found a ton of stuff that didn’t stand out at the time, for example just today I found a photo of Adam Scott I took before I even knew who Adam Scott was.

Since I started this project I have done a great job of organizing my 35mm archives. I worked pretty much 10 hours a day on that for a couple weeks and got it done. The digital stuff is a lot harder to do because of the sheer volume of the images. On a slow month I might shoot 4000 photos but during an event like South By Southwest I might shoot twice that many in five days. Getting through stuff has been fun, but I can only do so much a day without going insane.

Just today I finished going through 2009 which is a pretty serious accomplishment because in early 2008 I had a shitty camera so could go through that stuff very quickly and by the end of 2010 I had started shooting a bit less nightlife. In 2009 however I was going out nearly every night and sometimes shooting two or three events a night. So despite having more than five years to go I think I am nearly halfway through my digital archives. The last couple years are pretty organized anyway…

So, in celebration of finishing 2009 I decided a Throwback Thursday post was in order. I have put up a pretty massive gallery (over 300 images!) from 2009 that includes a lot of my favorite shots from the year. It’s probably less than a third of the images I pulled, but it gives you a nice look at one of my best years photographically. It’s amazing to see how far I progressed. The early 2009 stuff is terrible while the late 2009 work is better than anything I am doing now. It’s inspired me to work harder when shooting nightlife and makes me miss how much fun I used to have.

In this gallery you will find mostly party photos although there is some random stuff thrown in including a few old school naked girls in bathroom photo shoots. There are a ton of photos from the party Playhouse at Cain that was a really great party both photographically and on a hot babes I made out with kinda level. Unfortunately they stopped paying me and still fucking owe me money. There are also a bunch of images in here of kinda celebrity stuff or blast from the past images that are noteworthy for whatever reason. They might not all be fantastic photographically but they are cool to look at.

I think the big winner of 2009 was Roxy Cottontail who through two parties that were some of the most fun times I had in ’09. Check out her birthday party that year and the Pepsi party with Diplo that she through that year. Both great events. Speaking of Diplo… I photographed him and Steve Aoki a weird amount of times in 2009. Ninjasonik comes up a lot too and I shot a couple of great shows by Monotonix and Spank Rock who both happened to play the best Siren Fest I ever went to. A lot of girls show up a bunch in 2009 Alex Magnetic, Jocelyn and Chloe are particularly muse-worthy. Since then Alex was my intern and Chloe is a super famous model so that all rules.

Honestly there is way too much in here to cover… tons from Webster Hall when Trash and Boys & Girls were both happening on the same night… a bunch of big events like SXSW, Sundance, AVN Awards… live bands… burlesque… zombie crawls… comedy… fashion… Driven By Boredom tattoos… the list goes on and on.

But lastly I will mention there are a lot of pictures of my good friend Ease DaMan who sadly died recently. I met him in 2009 and took so many photos of the guy that year. He was so fun and so photogenic, rarely had his shirt on and once I showed up to a  party and the cops had shut it down because a fight broke out and Ease fucking bit someone. We all miss you tons Ease. Rest in peace.

I have no idea how I am going to come up with selects since I love so many of these photos, so I am just gonna put some random shit below here. Just make sure you look at the full gallery… and yeah, these photos are significantly NSFW.

Click here to see a bunch of photo highlights from 2009!

Comments (0)