Fail
I am in DC. I will be back in New York tomorrow. I will have new updates probably tomorrow night, god willing. I have some good stuff to go up from Philly. Have a preview whist I am slacking.
I am in DC. I will be back in New York tomorrow. I will have new updates probably tomorrow night, god willing. I have some good stuff to go up from Philly. Have a preview whist I am slacking.
My friend Doug Sakmann is at it again… He always throws the most insane parties that involve at least blood or pornography. Last night was a little of both. After a very successful Zombie Crawl in Brooklyn he returned to the city for a Zombie Flashmob/ Canned Food Drive. I had just finished watching the Dolphins kick the hell out of the Buffalo Bills and I was feeling in high spirits. I was dressed in my full Dolphins gear and wanted to go home but I realized the Zombie Crawl was a few blocks away at Union Square. I got there right as they were taking a group photo. I didn’t really have time to take good photos, I just put my camera on automatic and hoped for the best. By that time they were gnashing and wailing their way over to Whole Foods which freaked out all the employees. Seeing hundreds of the dead asking you for caned corn could be a bit upsetting. All the clerks were mentioning Resident Evil. I was told not to shoot in the store and I was tired and dressed in Aqua and Orange so I decided I would go home and meet the Zombies later. 12 hours of zombies is even too much for me. I showed to the Knitting Factory a bit late and many of the zombies had split. I did get to see Cleric play and Nassau Chainsaw tear shit up. Disgraceland Hook Squad was there suspending people and causing ruckus. There was a Strip For Pain with Burning Angel Girls. There was a performance by the Living Dead Girlz and I have to say that right now I that my sleeping pill kicked in so if some of this doesn’t make since thats why. I will just stop the update. And do my best get the photos up. There are a lot of them and they are ghoulish! There are some zombie tits in this set, so be on the look out for nudity and hide it from your boss. Watch and learn. Don’t get bit.
Ps. If I remember any of this tomorrow, I’ll add more links, and maybe fix the errors. until then I need to sleep.
Exxxotica NYC is not actually in NYC. It is in NJ. It was going to be at least somewhere near NYC at the Meadowlands but they got kicked out and they ended up at the NJ Convention center, which was not that far away, but surely not to be confused with New York. This was an adult industry showcase that featured porn stars by the bushel. The event was sponsored by HotMovies, Featured my friend Doug’s Strip For Pain and of course Burning Angel showed up… So you know I had to be there. It was a three day event, but I had to work Friday and watch the Dolphins lose Sunday so I only made it out for Saturday. I think one day was more than enough though. Despite all the madness it’s still a convention. There were a lot of semi nude women roaming about, but they all just smiled and posed with creepy guys all day and signed autographs. I wanted to hang out with my friends who were there, but they all had to pay attention to the fans and stuff. I did have some fun though. I met a girl who knows a bunch of my friends and has a HUG LIFE tattoo which is becoming increasingly common in our neck of the woods. I spent a lot of time talking to her and the Pillow Fight League kids. Steve Prue was there shooting and we talked shop a bit. I found the Bombshell Bratz kids a web designer. And Doug did his Strip For Pain thing like 10 times while I was there so I shot a lot of that.
Another thing about this convention is that it makes me realize how little I know about porn despite having a lot of porn friends. I know a lot about “alt porn” but I didn’t recognize anyone. The only people I knew there who weren’t alt people were Ron Jeremy who I have met several times now, Sasha Grey who is almost an alt girl and Jesse Jane who was on Entourage.
Speaking of Sasha Grey, anyone who mentions Werner Herzog and Monty Hellman among her favorite directors on myspace should be a friend of mine. She has also worked with two of my porn friends Eon McKai and Joe Gallant. I wanted to talk to her at the convention but she had a line of fans that seemed never ending.
After the event I went back to the hotel where the BA kids were staying and hung out with the Pop Porn crew. Stoya was there and we know like 1,000,000 of the same people and I feel like we bonded… but then again she was pretty drunk. I also made friends with Lexi Love who seemed very unassuming and adorable until I Googled her. She was pretty rad. She lives in NYC so maybe I will have some photos of her naked on here one day.
There are like two hundred photos here, and I am not really excited about any of them. The light was awful and nipples were completely banned. It is pretty upsetting when it is more likely to see boobs at a bar than it is a porn convention. Sigh… You might dig the photos anyway, I guess there are some pretty funny ones.
Hey. I am back from vacation. While I was on cruise control just posting all sorts of naked photos from the Hot Movies party, all that stuff started getting a lot of press so I figured I would drop those links on you while I get back into the swing of things.
Totally exciting. Also a bunch of the BA Girls that I was hanging out with last weekend are in town tonight, so hopefully tomorrow I will have some more crazy photos. Get excited.
Jada is friends with my friend JessieLee. I ran into them at the Hot Movies party of course, like every other picture up this week. Jada and Jessie had just been arrested hours earlier for something that they had nothing to do with. It was a complete wrong place, wrong time situation. They had little temporary ID’s with their mug shots on it. Jessie gave me hers for some reason. It is pretty awesome. Speaking of pretty awesome, Jada is pretty awesome. Jada is her dancing name, but she told me her real name first, and then for some reason that was not explained to me, my friend Nicole was calling her “Den Mother”. This all got very confusing, and it took her a really long time to get and pay for her sandwich at Wawa after the party. She is pretty out of control and I think everyone had a pretty great time hanging out with her. She guarded my bag while I shot Strip For Pain and she tag team wrasseled with this guy Tim, Nicola and I. It was good times all around. I hope we get to hang out with her more in the future. Here are some photos of her mostly naked, although I probably should have taken more, it was just in the middle of the VIP room and people kept walking by. NSFW.
I posted the Strip For Pain photos first because I was trying to figure out which porn star was which and trying to find links for burlesque dancers and the like… I took 900 photos Saturday so I had to break them up. I posted the Strip For Pain photos already and I have three galleries of girls that I will be posting each day this week. It will be a very NSFW week. Keep checking back.
Anyway, I drove down to Philly for this party at the Transit night club. Like I mentioned in the last update it was for the Hotmovies.com 100,000th movie. The night consisted of basically four things. There was a burlesque performance from Peek-A-Boo Review, then Ron Jeremy brought out some porn stars, played with their tits, and talked about the Hot Movies 100,000th movie: “It’s A Secretary Thing“. And then after that there was the previously mentioned Game Show to end the night. While all this was going on, there was a art exhibit downstairs for Pornsaints.com. I have to say that did not get to spend as much time down there as I wanted to because I was following the Burning Angels around doing that thing. I was also very dizzy and it was pretty hot down there.
I partied with the Burning Angel/Strip For Pain crew until 8AM and then I drove back to New York, so there are a few before/after party pictures in this gallery. These photos are nuts, but I have to say I missed some good shots. I was feeling really sick and spent a lot of time sitting down and there were so many photographers trying to get the same shot that I either was pushed out of the way, or didn’t bother. I cannot stand that paparazzi mentality, especially when photographing tits.
That being said there are still some great shots, far better than the ones below, but I can’t post them on the main page due to the massive amounts of nudity. Speaking of, there are several things in this gallery that I would normally not post on this site, but I sort of had to… it is a porn party for fucks sake. So, be warned, VERY NSFW, and Caution: Slippery when wet.
Click here to see all the madness.
So the gallery that got some of the most traffic I have ever posted had a picture of my friend Sarah almost flashing the camera as the main photo. Well on Saturday she won the hot body contest. This means, that her actual nipples are on the internets. Click here and you will get to see them. You will also get to see several Burning Angels naked here including: Joanna Angel, Morgan Mae, January and Apathy. (also a very clothed Daphne). On top of that, you have Doug Sakmann’s Strip For Pain, two very flaccid penii, one hairy asshole and two of the biggest boobs I have ever seen. SO this is NSFW; I repeat; this gallery is very not safe for work. What fun we had…
Years ago I got a screener copy of Troma Films “All The Love You Cannes”. It was a documentary about one of Troma’s yearly trips to the Cannes film festival. It was meant to be an instructional guide on how to promote your independent feature at Cannes. What it turned out to be was an hour and a half of Doug Sakmann fucking shit up. The movie was so funny. This guy Doug who worked at Troma pissed off or pissed on anyone who came near him. He was brilliant. I suddenly was a huge fan. I emailed Doug as soon as I finished watching it to tell him how great I thought it was. He sent me tons of other Troma movies to review for Driven By Boredom, but soon after that he parted ways with Troma to start his own company, Backseat Conceptions. Anyway years later Doug and I have become friends. I have followed his career since the beginning and I have to say I am pretty pleased with his choices. I sat down and interviewed Doug in January on his way back from the Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas. He was with one of his collaborators, Joanna Angel promoting her porn films. Her film Joanna’s Angels 2 had won Best Sex Comedy and her discovery Tommy Pistol had won best male newcomer. But let’s start at the beginning: Doug’s life post Troma.
Doug had spent a lot of time on the Warped Tour touring with the Troma Bus. He met musicians, Warped Tour organizers, and tons of cool people on the way. He loved it and wanted to go again. He talked to the Tour organizers and a bunch of the bands. He decided to write a film with the Warped Tour as the background. He spent a summer in 2003 following the Tour and filming a gory punk rock road movie called Punk Rock Holocaust. The film was such a success that he made a sequel the following year. And this is where the porn comes in.
After Joanna Angel saw Doug’s fucked up film she wanted him to do a Horror-Porn video for her website BurningAngel.com. It was Halloween and she wanted to do something special for her fans. So Doug filmed a short movie called Re-Penetrator. For those of you who have seen Re-Animator, picture that, just with fucking and even more gore. The film was originally meant to be just a web video, but Joanna’s hosting company banned it. Her host (and many others) told her that they could not show sex and violence like that. Porn is fine, violence is fine, but the combination is not. This caused a major controversy and put a lot of attention on both Burning Angel and Doug. They released the film on DVD and since then Joanna has released probably 10 other films based on her website, several of which Doug has assistant directed. Doug’s second attempt at directing porn was another horror-porn this time based on the Exorcist: The XXXorcist! This time his film was many scenes and a much more ambitious attempt. He is currently casting his remake of Evil Dead which will be titled Evil Head. The film will be over two hours long with actual plot and adventure! He is remaking the film completely, just adding a lot of porn. I personally cannot wait. The thing is, I don’t know when he could possibly have time for it.
Doug Sakmann is one of the busiest people I have ever met. When I talked to him, as I mentioned he had just come back from the AVN Awards. During that trip he got drunk and was kicked out of the hotel he was staying in for smashing a coin slot machine with his fist. He paid for the machine, but was asked not to return. He did return in order to crash the Burning Angel party. He wore a fake mustache and sun glasses, but was spotted anyway. He was arrested and barely skipped town with Jack the Zipper. After a week in LA shooting for his photography project, Post-Mortem Pinups, he went out to Ohio to the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame where some Punk Rock Holocaust props were inducted as part of a Warped Tour Exhibit (the sequel will premiere at the Rock Hall in August). He then went back to Philly where he lives to work on his game show Strip for Pain. Strip for Pain works like this: A guy gets on stage. A stripper then tortures him with fire, electricity, whips and so forth. For every pain that he endures, the girl gets naked. Brilliant. He is pitching a PG rated version to several networks, but performs an X rated version live at parties in NYC and Philly. Also his company Backseat Conceptions just held their annual Backseat Film Festival in Philly, which will come to NY and Baltimore in the coming months. And on top of everything else, he is developing Punk Rock Holocaust 3!
So the point is, Doug is a genius. Watch out for everything he does, because I am sure it will be both sexy and violent, and we all know how good for you sex and violence is. Yum
We have a lot to talk about today. Gonna try to make this post make sense for people who hate/don’t care about NFTs and for people who are deep in it, and that’s going to be tough to do, but before I do any of that and get to the photos, we need to talk about abortion.
These photos would have been up yesterday but I didn’t think it made any sense to post party photos during an historically awful day in American history. We have become a much more progressive country in the 50 years since Roe v. Wade was decided and yet here we are being ruled by a hard right fundamentalist minority. Women should be able to make their on medical decisions and this won’t save lives, it will only kill the poorest women. If someone wants an abortion, they will get one. Well off people will just travel to blue states while the poorest most vulnerable women will be forced to risk their own life to terminate their pregnancy. It’s a fucking nightmare. I donated to two things yesterday and I invite you to do the same. The first is a fund that goes to 92 different organizations, just make sure that if you donate that your phone number is not saved with ActBlue because you do not want hundreds of fundraising texts. The second is Brigid Alliance which does direct action to help women get abortions. They get money to travel and even childcare to look after their kids while they are away. They have a perfect rating from Charity Navigator as well. If you are here for NFTs, I am donating 100% of the profits from this photo to Brigid.
Now, moving on. Let’s talk about Bored Apes.
I have very mixed opinions about the Bored Ape Yacht Club and it’s hard to write about this to an audience that has such a wide mix of knowledge/views about what BAYC even is, but I am going to try. Let’s start with the basics. BAYC is a collection of 10,000 NFTs that are made up of randomly generated traits, giving them different levels of rarity and value. They have become one of the most valuable, and definitely the most recognizable NFT collection, and they have birthed several other collections as well. Because of this popularity and massive value, BAYC has become a symbol for everything people hate about NFTs. They see rich crypto bros with stupid monkey jpgs as status symbols and they think the art sucks and they don’t get it and they write off all NFTs as garbage. And the thing is, they aren’t completely wrong.
I also don’t blame BAYC for this. There are so many garbage NFT projects that have all followed behind BYAC trying to copy their model and have caused so many people to blow so much money chasing the next BYAC. It sucks and PFPs (profile pictures or picture for proof) have made web3 a joke. It’s such a bummer as an artist just trying to make a living with this exciting new technology and people bring up apes and just write the whole thing off.
And yes, there are a lot of awful people who own Apes. The level of privilege to own a $100k jpg and not sell it is astronomical, but I know many people who have had their lives absolutely changed by these things. They bought them cheap and either sold them for life changing money, or held on to them for the rewards which have also been life changing. I ran into someone who I knew 15 years ago and he was able to show his artwork in a gallery all because he was given tens of thousands of dollars of “Ape Coin” just for holding on to his ape.
Okay, so now we need to talk about the claims of racism. There is a professional troll named Ryder Ripps trying to destroy BAYC. I know Ryder a little bit and I actually think he’s pretty interesting as far as an artist. He’s been ripping off NFT collections and changing them a little bit to have a conversation about ownership and copyright and to make some money and PR out of it. I guess you could say he’s the web3 Richard Prince and I am sure both his supporters and detractors would probably enjoy that comparison. He put together a video that went viral recently that was basically a Q Anon video for NFTs claiming that BAYC is a white supremacist organization. It’s really silly and BAYC did a good job of refuting it, and I am sure even Ryder knows it’s all nonsense, but a good troll never admits the troll. They’ve also sued Ryder which is exactly what he wanted and his RR BAYC collection has been skyrocketing in value.
So no, BYAC is not a secret racist organization, but I do think there is something a little problematic with anthropomorphizing apes, especially when you have traits that are generally associated with black culture. When I first saw BYAC I almost minted one, just because of the Driven By Boredom association, but two things kept me away, the fact that I had just lost some of the first ETH I ever made on a 10k project, and because I thought the apes with grills thing was a little gross. I clearly regret this decision and while I still think Apes are a little corny, the community around them is very impressive and nearly everything Yuga Labs has done as a company has been impressive.
Which finally brings me to Ape Fest.
Ape Fest is a festival that takes place around NFT NYC. This is the second one and the first one since the line for Ape Fest 2021 went viral for having a bunch of white dudes making ape noises in line. This year they made the very smart decision to allow plus ones (which is how I got in) and there were a lot more women, and even some non-white people there. A revelation. Web3 clearly skews towards a certain demographic but there are a lot of people trying to fix that and NFT NYC did feel a lot less broy compared to last year.
I went to Day 4 of the fest, which takes place at Pier 17, down in by the water in the financial district. They had a massive inflatable ape at the entrance and a pirate ship just hanging out with BAYC sails. The party itself was on the roof of a building but the massive amount of money they spent on the surrounding area was not unnoticed.
The event was pretty impressive and well run and the acts were pretty impressive. There were a lot of real goofy motherfuckers around, but everyone was super nice. As much as I would like to make fun of it, I really did appreciate the invite from one of my NFT collectors who goes by Freecard. He’s a great dude and it was a real experience.
The party started with an NFT themed rapper named Spottie WiFi. I honestly expected him to look like his Crypto Punk since that’s how I know him. I am not sure his music is for me, but I have been in Spaces and Discords with him and he seems like a good dude. It was very cool to see him perform on this huge stage in front of his people.
After that Lil Wayne performed and as much as I used to love him, I am not sure that getting the rapper most associated with the MAGA movement is an ideal way to let people know that you aren’t a secret white supremacist group. I still like a ton of his music though so it was at least enjoyable. Towards the end of his set my hurt back started killing me so I sat down and then someone managed to drop an entire whiskey drink on my from above. So that was fun..
After that Snoop came out with Eminem and they debuted their new song which isn’t about NFTs, but features the Apes that they each own. It’s actually a pretty good song & video and the comments on it make me feel that most people don’t even know what BAYC is. Eminem didn’t perform but Snoop did. He mostly was just DJing but he rapped some too. He had a song about Ape Coin which was a little cringe, but otherwise it was pretty fun. I think I’ve seen Snoop 4 times now and you can’t go wrong with that. That being said, he did have a couple strippers on stage with him, and despite most of my friends being strippers or former strippers, I still think it’s kinda a bad look for BAYC when they are trying to let people know they aren’t just a bunch of pale dudes.
Lastly, and maybe most importantly outside of the whole Handmaid’s Tale situation, is that I didn’t shoot this like it was an event. I didn’t have press access so I didn’t shoot any of the music except a couple wide shots. I didn’t bring my flash so once it got dark I didn’t really shoot. I really just took my camera out because I didn’t want to carry it on my back anymore. My spine is completely fucked so it’s much less painful to hold my camera than carry it on my back. I also was rocking a terrible plastic lens because it’s way lighter than my normal one. So yeah, there aren’t many photos. I took a few of people I met, and some photos of people taking photos because I am working on a phone themed zine. I took some photos of a limbo contest but it was pretty dark at that point and a few other shots randomly here and there. It’s not great coverage of the event, but it did give me a chance to write this 1600 word article about all this stuff.
So TL;DR, abortion should be a woman’s choice, NFTs aren’t all animal jpgs, BAYC is a little bit corny and a little bit problematic, but they have changed lives, have done a lot of great stuff and threw some amazing events.
Now click here to see a couple dozen photos from Day 4 of Ape Fest 2022 at Pier 17.
Ps. Something is fucked up with my gallery system because my website is archaic, so until I fix it I am using a Flickr gallery like it’s 2007.
