Sunday was my birthday and it also happened to be the yearly Memorial Day weekend Brooklyn Zombie Crawl.  My friend Doug runs NYC Zombie Crawl and they do two crawls a year, one in Manhattan near Halloween and the Memorial Day Brooklyn one. I have shot almost all of them over the last few years and despite my planned birthday shenanigans this crawl was no exception.

I met up with Doug and the zombies at the Knitting Factory where the NYC Zombie Crawl team was doing free make up for everyone for several hours before the crawl began. When I showed up they were doing their last few zombies and a huge crowd had gathered both in and out of the club. As we waited zombies began attacking passing cars and things and as the crawl began the zombie hordes attacked more cars, trucks and onlookers.  Ice cream trucks and even cop cars met their match on the streets of Williamsburg.

The crawl marched through the streets and ended up at McCarren Park where the zombies attacked people playing baseball, volley ball and kick ball. At the park the zombies were treated to a show of blood when Disgraceland Hook Squad performed a flesh pull tug of war that was not for the faint of heart.  There was also fire breathing and other assorted madness.

The whole afternoon was filmed for a scene in Doug’s newest film “Punk Rock Holocaust 3” which will be filmed primarily on the Warped Tour using bands and the crowds as actors in a horror film. He made the first two years ago but with a bigger budget, better cameras and a lot more know how Punk Rock Holocaust 3 should be pretty nuts.

Anyway, after the meet up in McCarren Park the under 21 zombies headed home and the adult zombies headed to Public Assembly for drinks and way more chaos.  I personally got blindingly drunk at the after party and took some insane (and very NSFW) photos that you need to come back tomorrow and check out.

In the mean time check out all the pictures from the 2011 Brooklyn  Zombie Crawl.  They are rated NSFW for a few zombie boobs and a lot of bloodshed…

I cover most of the NYC Zombie Crawl events because my buddy Doug Sakmann runs the things. He also does Strip For Pain, makes porn with Burning Angel and then does totally legit shit like film festivals and commercials. It’s been well documented that I love the dude, but sometimes his events can be a bit much for me.

I hate being sticky and he always smells like fake blood. It’s made with syrup and every time I smell pancakes I think of Doug and his blood. After the Dolphins lost on Sunday I had no interest in doing ANYTHING much less going to Beauty Bar to get covered in fake blood for some sort of insane beauty pageant.  But Doug and his right hand woman Autumn yelled at me for not coming and then my friend Darenzia was hosting and she gave me shit and I hadn’t seen Beauty Bar owner Mike Stewart in ages and Michael T was MCing and Erica Starr produced the whole thing and I knew I would get crazy pictures so the pressures over came me and I relented and got in my borrowed car and I drove to the East Village and pulled my camera out. (How’s that for a run on sentence?)

The Beauty Pageant started out slow and I missed most of the first round so I don’t even really know what was going on but they narrowed the field down to a handful of girls.  They took a break in between rounds and I said hello to everyone and got pulled into the bathroom with my favorite fat naked chick Sammie Sprinkles. I don’t think I had ever seen boobs that big in real life, so I was pretty pumped to shoot them. Round two consisted of girls eating weird eyeball and intestine food and telling the crowd what their favorite zombie movie is. They were all wrong.  Let’s go to the list:

IGOR’s TOP 5 Zombie Movies:

1. Dawn Of The Dead
2. Wild Zero
3. The Evil Dead II
4. The Return Of The Living Dead
5. Dead Alive

I would have also accepted Night of the Living Dead, any of the Living Dead Films, and Zombi. Speaking of zombie movies… Check out this article I wrote a few years ago.

Moving on…

The third and final round of the Zombie Beauty Pageant was the bloody t-shirt contest. It was like a wet t-shirt contest except instead of water (or Faygo) the girls were covered in fake blood.  It was totally insane and horrific. It looked like their had been a mass execution. Beauty Bar will never be the same.

Ultimately, Suicide Girl and burlesque performer Bettina won and everyone went home completely fucking sticky and smelling like a Waffle House.  The end.

Click here to see all the insanely bloody, totally fucked up pictures from the Zombie Beauty Pageant at Beauty Bar.

Oh, and these photos are very obviously NSFW!

 The New York Premiere of Zombieland was Thursday night and Columbia pictures hired Doug Sakmann and the New York Zombie Crawl team to paint and deliver several hundred zombies to Times Square for a free screening to anyone wearing Zombie makeup.  I think the amount of people was a bit underestimated because there were lines around the block waiting to get their makeup done by Doug and his team at The Mean Fiddler.  After two straight hours of doing zombie makeup they had given out 600 tickets to the undead and Doug led them on a crawl to  the Times Square AMC.  The crawl turned into a run as they realized things were running late and Doug started charging down the street.

I am not sure if you have ever seen well over 600 zombies running down Broadway a 8PM on a Thursday, but I can tell you this… the police hadn’t.  There is a police station in the middle of Times Square and there were cops everywhere.  They had no idea how to handle this.  They would arrive on the scene, pull out their batons, and then sort of put them back, looking confused.  The mob almost got out of hand when zombies started attacking cars and knocking over chairs and tables, but after several cop cars with sirens blazing started escorting the zombies down Broadway, things calmed down a bit.  That did not stop a limo driver from punching a zombie or stopping a 16 Wheeler from crashing into a Lexus outside the movie theater.  How does he explain a zombie attack to his insurance company?

Once we go to the theater it was sort of madness getting everyone inside.  Even with 600 tickets tons of zombies didn’t get any.  The movie theater played it on three screens and from what I could tell, they packed them. When I walked in all these press photographers were lined up behind a red rope ready to shoot Woody Harrelson standing in front of the Zombieland poster.  They were furious because zombies kept getting into their shot.  Luckily I had free reign and I grabbed Doug and got shots of him and Woody as well as getting a better shot of Woody and the poster than any of the pro guys did.  It was pretty funny.  They even let me in the movie with my camera even though most people had to check theirs.  It pays to know the undead.

The movie itself was way better than I thought it would be.  I was expecting some dumb horror comedy, but it turned out to be a really great dumb horror comedy. It was very violent, very funny and the romantic subplot was only slightly lame and cheesy.  I don’t really like the idea that zombies can run, but the amazing Bill Murray cameo made up for it.  I am not going to tell you anything about Bill Murray’s cameo because I don’t want to ruin it, but it might be the best of his career, and I have seen pretty much every film he has ever been in. That’s fact.

After the movie I had an entirely different adventure.  I rode the train home with a friend of a friend and he didn’t have a metro card on him.  I didn’t want to wait, so I convinced him to go in at the same time with me.  He didn’t want to but he did anyway and the cops stopped us.  I didn’t really know why but when they stopped us he started losing his shit. He didn’t have his ID on him so they took us to the Subway police station while they ran my ID and tried to find him in the system.  Turns out he had just been arrested for having a knife on him.  When they searched his bag they found crack, heroin and a fucking crossbow.  So this time, while he had no Medieval weapons on him, he did have two bags of dope and was on probation.  When they weren’t looking he pulled them out of his pocked and fucking swallowed them like we were in a cop movie.  It was nuts.  We ended up just getting tickets and it was the happiest I have ever been to pay a $100 fine.

Anyway, it was a crazy evening and here are the pictures to prove it.  NSFW for gore and a zombie nip.

The Zombie Bar Crawl on Sunday was pretty nuts.  And I want to go into the whole thing in detail but I haven’t been sleeping at all and when I started typing this all the letters went sideways and nothing was making any sense.  So when I wake up next which will probably be in like 3 hours I am going to finish this post, but in the mean time I will just leave you with the pictures.  Rated NSFW for both nudity and adult situations.

UPDATE: Okay, let’s do this.  I am wide awake now…

So after a late brunch at Moto I made my way over to the Charleston on Bedford where the zombies were turning themselves into zombies.  My man Doug Sakmann and his Backseat Conceptions crew were reading the troupes and applying horrifying amounts of gore to people. Outside the zombies grew rowdy.  On my way up the block just about everyone I passed was wondering what the hell was going on. The zombies were attacking cars and buses and filling the streets.  As they were mobbing the bus a cop showed up and tried to get the crowd to disperse.  As I looked again I realize he didn’t have a gun and his ironic mustache didn’t look quite right.  Okay, so it was a fake cop, but he had a real uniform on and I think he kept people from calling the actual cops.  Because despite the zombies blocking off all of Bedford and doing all manor of horrible things in the park we only saw one cop car all day and they just drove slowly by looking very confused.

So the zombies walked all the way down Bedford to McCarren Park where they crossed the park to a shady spot under some trees.  During this trek across the park all the hundreds of people standing around had a great time laughing and pointing at the zombie hoard.  There were at least 200 people strong staggering through the park.  When they got to the baseball fields they walked through the outfield that separated two softball games in progress. The people playing on the southern end of the park were making jokes and didn’t seem to mind the less than 5 minute delay in their game while everyone walked through.  The teams on the northern side started yelling at the zombies and eventually started hitting balls into the crowd.  It was insane.  They hit between 5 and 10 balls at the zombies.  One came inches from my head.  Another ball hit a girl in the leg knocking her to the ground and giving her a huge welt. If one of those balls had hit someone it could have been deadly.  Doug grabbed one of the balls and held it up to the zombies and poured fake blood on to it.  When one of the outfielders saw this he started yelling and tried to get his ball.  After almost having my head taken off and seeing this 100 lb girl get nearly crippled I had had enough and started getting in this guys face.  I am not sure what the hell the baseball players were thinking but there were 20 of them, 200 of us and we had the DisgraceLand Hook Squad with us and they are a bunch of motherfuckers I wouldn’t mess with.

After that drama was over it was time for DisgraceLand to put on a show.  I have shot these guys a bunch of times before and if there is one thing they are good at it is scaring the hell out of old people and children.  They picked a far off corner of the park, but I have to say everyone felt pretty bad when we noticed families watching in horror as DisgraceLand put suspension hooks in their back and began their bloody game of tug of war.  It was zombie VS human.  Fortunately for humans like myself, our contestant was much bigger and took the zombie to task whipping him about the park.  Doug and other DisgraceLand members tried their best to help the zombie win the flesh pull tug of war but the blood covering their hands made it impossible to hold on.  I didn’t post any of this stuff on the main page because it was pretty graphic, but there is plenty of it in the gallery so you have been warned.  If this image doesn’t make you vomit, then you are probably okay moving forward.

After the flesh pull there were zombie games like zombie Red Light, Green Light were the zombies had to crawl instead of running.  The winner got free porn from Burning Angel.  Classy as always.  Backseat Conceptions makes horror films as well as all the other madness they do, so they had a blood cannon on hand and fired a few rounds at people.  We took a group photo and got ice cream and relaxed for a bit and then headed back to the Charleston for beer and free pizza.  Andy Rourke from the Smiths was at the Charleston and after taking photos of him being bitten by a sexy zombie I ate pizza with him and my friend Ole and some kids we met from Asheville, NC.  At this point I was thinking about just shooting the shit with them and going home to sleep.  You see, I had been awake for 30 hours at this point and was a bit tired after chasing zombies around in the sun all day.  But Doug is one convincing guy and dragged me over to the metal bar Duff’s for an after party.

Duff’s is a few blocks from my house so I figure I could just stop by for a second and then go home, but I didn’t end up leaving until after three in the morning.  I am not sure if it was just the zombie crawl, but Duff’s is amazing.  I am not a huge metal fan, but my hair is finally long enough to head bang properly so I was enjoying the music.  The bartenders were both super hot and covered in blood.  They, along with another lady put on quite a blood filled show for my camera on the bar.  Doug wrote DBB on one of the girls chest in fake blood and everyone was slipping all over the place. Not many people made it to the after party, but the people who did and an amazing time.  We were doing sing a longs and Jimmy Duff was there and got quite the kick out of zombie boobs (again, NSFW) and shit just got wild.  This weird gypsy band from New Orleans called Ruby Ruby Ruse played and everyone danced and fell about the place like mad men. The bar was playing Deadly Weapons which is this amazing Dorris Wishman sexploitation film starring Chesty Morgan who kills people with her freakishly huge breasts.  I lectured these two cute girls on the history of exploitation cinema which was super fun to do because I rarely get to rant at people about Mondo films or the oeuvre of Jack Hill.  After that I pulled this crazy punk rock chick into the bathroom for some dirty photos.  I had met her at past zombie crawls and we had talked about shooting her naked before, but in more of a studio setting, not in the bathroom of a metal bar.  Still, that is always fun.  Those shots will be up later tonight (here they are!), so just hold your horses.  After that I went home and slept for about 4 hours before waking up for absolutely no reason.  Insomnia is even worse than zombification.

Okay, so it was a long crazy adventure. I was shooting zombies from 4pm to 3am and I took about 800 pictures of sex, violence (both real and imaginary) and rock and roll.  It was a great day and I can’t wait for the next one. Click here to see all the pictures.

PS. For more information on the next New York Zombie Crawl check them out at their website or follow them on Twitter.  And as always, you can follow me on Twitter here.

This event at Supreme Trading was soooo long ago. I shot it on spec for the Village Voice and they bought it from me. I got the check today. I was waiting until they posted it to post the photos, but it has been weeks so it needs to go up. I thought now was a good time, because my next post is going to be a plug for ANOTHER zombie party. So yeah. Look above this post for fun party times tonight. Anyway, I don’t want to go into the whole thing, because it was a while ago, but it was nuts and the pictures are fucking crazy and not safe for work…. but for once not because of nudity (although there sort of is a bit) but because of gore and bloodshed! There were suspensions and hooks and fire and blood and madness. REAL blood. Not just zombie blood.

Here are the troublemakers involved:

Doug Sakmann: Ringleader Extraordinaire.
New York Zombie Crawl: Zombies Like Brooklyn Too.
Nassau Chainsaw: Band + Weapons = Amazing.
DisGraceLand HooK Squad: Suspentions, Hooks And Violence
Zamora Torture King: Putting The Sideshow In Zombie Sideshow
Burning Angels: Half Naked Zombie Whores!

 Okay okay, check out the fucking brutal photos already.

The New York Mets held “Zombie Night” on Friday to celebrate Friday the 13th. Of course they got the NYC Zombie Crawl people involved and since I decided recently  I want to try to put together a book of my NYC Zombie Crawl photos I figured a zombie takeover of a Mets game would be perfect for the book. Unfortunately right as I left my apartment to head over to Citi Field it started pouring rain. By the time I got to my subway transfer in Queens it was raining so hard that water was leaking through the ceiling and on to the escalator. I was pretty sure the game was going to be canceled.

When I got there it was still pouring and I ended up getting drenched trying to get my ticket from head zombie Doug Sakmann. When we finally got in we found a small group of zombies, many of whom had already lost their makeup due to the rain. Doug set up a quick zombification station and hooked people up with some extra blood and guts. Still, the hundred plus zombies they were expecting was down to about two dozen and I am honestly surprised that many showed up. When the rain delay finally ended I went up to my seats and noticed that nearly no one was even in the upper deck of the stadium. There were probably only a couple thousand people in the whole place and instead of one big section full of zombies everyone just sort of snuck into way better seats around the stadium.

Essentially I traveled 45 minutes and got stuck in pouring rain to eat at Shake Shack and take handful photos of a dozen zombies. I watched two innings before getting the hell out of there. Not only is baseball tedious, but I have no investment whatsoever in the Mets or the Padres and it was nearly 10pm and I figured I could do something better with a Friday night. I did see a home run before I left which was kinda cool but not as cool as say eating a fried chicken sandwich with a cute girl which is what I did shortly after leaving the game.

So click here to see a few photos of the New York Mets Friday the 13th “Zombie Night” promotion at Citi Field.

Back in May my punk band Fucking Bullshit played at Public Assembly after the Brooklyn version of the New York Zombie Crawl. It was probably our best show and I can’t tell you how much fun I had singing to a room full of zombies. A few months before the show a guy named Daniel Huskey hit me up about doing some video editing for me and I knew this would be a really fun show to get on video. My friend and juggalo photographer Dan Cronin was in town and I asked him to video tape some of it. My friend Chris Carr just happened to be there and taped some of it as well. On top of that Backseat Conceptions who put on the zombie crawl video taped some of it. So in all we had four cameras running for at least parts of the set. We ended up with six pretty awesome videos from the concert featuring seven songs from our set. We do all covers so if you dig punk at all you will probably know at least a couple of them. I posted our cover of Black Flag’s Nervous Breakdown over on the B-Side Blog and you can see all of them on the Fucking Bullshit Vimeo page. Below I am going to post a few of my favorites.

“Alcohol” is a Gang Green cover and our set opener. I jump into a hoard of zombies and possibly ruin a few lives. Next we have a delightful medley of 7 Seconds “Young Til I Die” and Cro-Mags “Hard Times”. Young Til I Die is a bit too straight edge for Fucking Bullshit so we changed it to “Drunk Til I Die”. In this video I choke myself with a mic cable and nearly knock myself out jumping off stage. I am just dazed enough to fuck up the lyrics. Lastly we have a cover of the Misfits upbeat ditty “Last Caress”. I was losing my voice at the point in the set, luckily Zombie Glen Danzig was there and helped me sing it. Good times.

Before we get to the videos I need to mention that we are going to be playing at Don Pedro’s in Brooklyn this Friday August 3rd at Midnight. The show is only $5 and it’s gonna be a lot of fun. Last time we played Don Pedro’s they gave me a 50 foot mic cable and let me climb on to the skee-ball machines there. You have been warned.

http://vimeo.com/video/46653726

http://vimeo.com/video/46653923

http://vimeo.com/video/46657097

So I am at the Fun Fun Fun Music Fest in Austin, TX right now (follow my Tumblr for pics from that) but I still have a bunch of photos from the Voodoo Music Experience in New Orleans last weekend. I don’t have time to do a post for each band so I am gonna do some group posts starting with today’s old school punk rockish bands, Social Distortion, Fishbone and X. None of these bands are exactly punk rock but all of them are listened to by punk rock kids so that counts.

I had a Social Distortion poster on my college dorm room wall and X is one of my favorite bands of all time. I never listened to Fishbone back in the day but a lot of my friends did and I saw them at SXSW and they were fucking amazing. I hung out with Angelo a bit during the Zombie Crawl and then I hung out with the rest of the guys in the band at Voodoo so I am a big fan of that band now. I have had a crush on Exene from X since I was 14 and I saw Decline of Western Civilization. I still have a crush on her now even though she is looking a bit grandmotherly these days…

So that is my pointless rant about these three rad bands and I am gonna go back to my new life in Austin at a totally different music festival. While I do that, you should go look at photos.

Click here to look at the photos of Social Distortion.

Click here to look at the photos of Fishbone.

And click here to look at the photos of X.

I finally finished organizing another year of my massive photo archives. Last night I went through all the 35mm as well and today I pulled a bunch of my favorite digital shots for this update. I have already started on 2018 as well so I am pretty damn close to organizing pretty much every photo I have ever taken, although my phone photography is a mess, but I don’t care about that. 

Anyway, looking at 2017  it’s pretty clear why I am so broke right now. I raised $22,000 on Kickstarter for my book Instaxxx and I thought that would be more than enough money to publish the book, and it was, the problem was that I spent months working on the book instead of working paying jobs and I didn’t really think about it because of all the money I had raised. That was stupid.

So, 2017 there are a ton of girl photos because I was working on a nude polaroid book, and then there are a ton of photos from events like AVN and Exxxotica where I was working those events pretty much just so I could be in places with a bunch of nude models so I could work on my book and then of course there are photos from the two  book release parties. So that accounts for like 80% of these photos and that is of course why my credit card bill is out of control. My bad, buy my book. 

There are of course a bunch of non naked people related images in here and I figured I should mention a few of the highlights. SXSW was cool. I was working for Playboy at the time and I did a couple of other jobs but it was pretty relaxing otherwise. I shot the Tisch Gala for NYU which also happened to be Alec Baldwin’s birthday so that was pretty great. I shot a few Trump related protests that were pretty boring photographically but there’s a few shots in here. There’s a few shots from my failed trip to the Galapagos and a few headshots for friends. I shot some tattoo stuff as always including the 20th anniversary of legal tattooing in NYC. I went to Florida and hung out with Mike Busey at his weird ass house. Oh and of course I shot the Brooklyn Zombie Crawl and my band played it as well and then we broke up which is a bummer because I really miss it. 

And then there were the juggalos…. My next book is going to be juggalos god dammit and I have now photographed the Gathering of the Juggalos 9 times but 2017 was the worst of em. I also went with my now girlfriend so I might have slacked off a little bit. Still it was cool because it was a totally different environment in Oklahoma City which will add some new scenes to my book. ICP also played in Brooklyn so I got a ton of ironic hipster juggalo photos which I feel like has to be good for something. And then finally we have the Juggalo March on Washington which I am not gonna even explain. Go read the post so I don’t spend 500 words repeating myself. 

Okay, that’s it. One step closer to organizing my life and one more giant update for you guys to waste some time clicking through. Time to start putting together my next book edit and finally building a damn portfolio site for the first time since 2008!

Click here to see a bunch of my favorite photos from 2017.