First of all I just wanted to say that it has been pretty exciting today and yesterday because my pictures of the Donnell Library have been posted all over the internet.  I have received quite a lot of traffic from this Boing Boing post, which was then picked up on Metafilter.  Lovely.  Thanks for coming.  Anyway…

I am exhausted constantly these days.  A few months ago my job moved from the Donnell to a mansion in Jersey City.  Now this means a longer commute, which means waking up earlier and getting home later.  I only have to leave 10 min earlier, so that’s not the issue.  The issue is getting home at 1am every night.  I used to get home at midnight, I would come home, work on my site for a bit, and then go out around one.  Now I pretty much have to go straight out or I am too tired to move.  Combine this with the fact that I returned my car and have to take subways everywhere.  The combination is either me not going out at all, or going out and getting about 4 hours of sleep and starting over again.

So when I committed to going to Cain the other night, I deeply regretted it when I was walking from 34th and 7th to 27th and 10th Ave.  It took me a while to wake up, but once I  did,  I had a great time.  I love parties with mixed crowds, and Cain is perfect for that on Wednesdays.  You have the young hipster kids, the queer set, and the bottle service types.  There are a bunch of models hang out, the crowd is a lot more ethnically diverse than most of the downtown spots, and they have a fleet of hot go go dancers to get people dancing.  The point is, it is a good time, an interesting time and a lot more fun than you will have at most bottle service spots where dancing is discouraged and everyone sits at their tables sipping their $400 vodka.  Also the DJ’s are good too.

You can see all the photos that I managed to take before I fell asleep here.

I normally don’t spend a lot of time at Meatpacking District bottle service clubs, but I was hired to shoot at Cain on 27th last night for a party called Playhouse.  I was a bit concerned at first when the door people looked at me like a leper when I walked in in a hoodie and high tops, but it turned out to be a blast. There was a really good mix of people from the night club types you would expect at a club like that mixed with the Michael T set of Amanda Lepore, Andre J and Cazwell, mixed with a lot of cute 19 year old FIT students set off by a sick DJ and team of super hot go-go dancers called Raising Cain. Plus some of the Retro Kidz showed up, which is always fun, especially for someone like myself who wears Starter jackets and listens to Public Enemy daily. Anyway, I had a gay ol’ time and then I went with some Brazilian girls (not THE Brazilian girls) to get them tattooed at 4AM but all they did was speak Portuguese the entire time and then they went to meet up with a Brazilian tattoo artist and I had no idea what anyone was saying. Still, it was a fun time.

Check out all the photos, there are some good ones, including WAY too many photos of the sexy gold dressed go-go team. Speaking of their gold outfits, they were intensely amazing and I talked to the designer of said outfits and she may have possibly been the most attractive woman in the whole place.

Today is the 22nd anniversary of Driven By Boredom. Before there were blog platforms and YouTube and even reliable image hosting, I wanted a place where I could put all of my projects so I wouldn’t have to email them to my friends individually. I was taking photos, shooting video, doing other random projects and just whatever I could do to keep myself entertained while I was in college.

The site became a very successful early blog until I started managing a band and I barely updated the site for a couple of years. I was still getting a surprising amount of traffic and when I moved to NYC in 2006 people kept asking me where I was putting my photos. I figured I still had my site so I might as well use it. My friend’s Adam and Thadd helped me build a new WordPress template and sometime in 2007 DBB was born again and was updated very consistently until the pandemic and a back injury and the fact that my site is barely functional (as it was last redesigned in 2007) has slowed my updates, but we are still here!

Over the years I have celebrated the anniversary in a lot of different ways, from wild parties, to free tattoos, to NFTs, to completely forgetting about it, but in 2009 I really went overboard. I had just started doing photography full time, my site was popping and I even had an intern (who got arrested for stealing someone’s purse during one of the anniversary parties). When that 8th anniversary showed up I had to do it big. 

I started by offering free Driven By Boredom tattoos, threw three parties, and released a t-shirt that I gave away for free at the events. Two people took me up on the tattoos (if you include myself, 14 people have gotten DBB tattoos over the years), we probably gave out 100 shirts and all three parties were a blast. 

Over the past few months I launched VintageDBB on Instagram. It’s a flashback to these days, primarily from 2007 to 2009 right now, but I am slowly moving forward in my archives and occasionally pulling newer and older stuff. It’s been so much fun to do, and people seem to love it, but I have soooo much stuff on there that I will never get to it all. So I had the idea of doing throwback posts on here where I go pull whole events and post them on this site, in higher resolution and without my old giant MySpace era watermarks. 

I figured today would be a perfect start so I went through all three 8th anniversary parties and pulled some highlights, about 15 photos in total. The parties included were, Disco Down at Happy Ending, Playhouse at Cain and Trash at Webster Hall. All three were pretty insane so I hope you enjoy this flashback.

My site is still broken, and will probably never be fixed so photos are on Flickr until I find a better solution. 

Click here to see the highlights from three parties celebrating the 8th anniversary of DBB in 2009.

Ps. Go follow @VintageDBB!

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!

Prince Terrence hit me up a few weeks ago about his Wednesday night party the roof of the LES hot spot The DL. The party has the really creative name of “Wednesdays”.  He told me it was a crazy event and I should come check it out. I didn’t make it out for a couple weeks but last Wednesday it was my birthday and I had to do something so I showed up there and managed to drink about 15 drinks and not try to fight anyone. So it was a good night.

So THIS Wednesday I came back and I brought my camera. I really like mixed crowds and The DL has a lot of different types of people hanging out. It reminds me of “Playhouse” which was one of my favorite parties until I got screwed out of $650. I think you will get the idea when you see the pictures, but the best parties bring different subcultures together and mix ’em all up and I think “Wednesdays” has that going for it.

The highlight of the night was seeing a bunch of old friends and partying like it was 2008 and the lowlight was forgetting I am borrowing a car and leaving it at the club and taking the Subway home. Whoops.

Now I am going to go back to convincing people that they should give me money to go on vacation and you should go look at the pictures!

Click here to see all the pictures from Wednesdays At The DL.

So these are really the firs photos I am putting up from this whole trip, mostly because I didn’t have a client who needed them first. I went to Orlando, FL after WMC for two reasons.  One of them was to shoot the party Carnival which I did on Wednesday night, and the other was to go to Disney World with my friend and muse America.  We spent all day at Disney and I was falling asleep on the Monorail on the way back to the car.  I thought I was going to pass out as soon as I got home. Fortunately my friend Vegas had other ideas.  He brought me to a club in Orlando called Roxy which I guess is some horrible guido club 6 days a week, but on Tuesday’s Smile For Camera “takeover” and throw a hipster party.  All the bar staff wear Roxy shirts with TAKEOVR scrawled over them.  It’s pretty cute.

I am a big fan of clubs that mix crowds so having a hand full of guidos mixed in with hipsters and just random Orlando kids made for a pretty good party.  People got naked, girls danced on poles, Vikki Blow’s cousin bit my tongue until it bled and I met a ton of cool kids and had a blast.  The party was still going 30 minutes after last call when Vegas and I left.  I would hit it up all the time if it were a party in NYC.  It sort of reminded me of Playhouse at Cain but with slightly less pretention and a lot more randos.

Click here to see the NSFW pics from TAKEOVR at Roxy in Orlando, FL.

Since Playhouse at Cain has ended I needed some new work.  Fortunately my friend Andie Cassette is throwing a new party upstairs at Rebel with her partner Count RockuLA on Fridays.  Electro Chris will be there too. The party is called Masquerade and its free if you wear a costume.  It’s free if you RSVP too, and its 18+ so you young kids can get in too!   Come hang out and get you photo taken.

The first of a few Trash Yourself shows I helped booked went over very well at Webster Hall last night.  They played 4 songs as a special late night set at Trash.  I was super sick (I am slightly better now) and I just came, shot their set and then went home.  They are playing Wednesday at Playhouse at Cain next week.  I hope you guys will come out for that.  These kids need your support, they are way fun.

Check out the Trash Yourself photos at Trash here.

I did everything in my power to bring Trash Yourself to NYC.  It worked.  They are playing a short late night set tomorrow and then again at Playhouse at Cain on Wednesday.  Get excited.  I’ll post the Playhouse flyer when I get it.  TY is great, check out the photos I took of them at SXSW here.