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.

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.

Girl Talk – 8.23.09

April 30, 2025

I want to start this throwback post with an even older tangent. It’s 2004 and I am going to art school in Richmond, VA. In my free time I am managing this two man dance pop band called The Gaskets. They are one of the biggest bands in Richmond, but they have just about zero following anywhere else. So when we got a slot on this electronic music showcase in NYC we couldn’t have been more excited about the opportunity.

We drive up to NYC the night before the show and stay with my friends in downtown Brooklyn. The next day we jump on the subway and see some movies or whatever we did, it was 20 years ago, my memory is a bit hazy. But what I do remember is that when we get back to Brooklyn, our car is gone. Apparently we parked too close to a hydrant and got towed. We have to be at this show and their one instrument, a Yamaha RM1X sequencer, is locked in the truck of the car. Turns out our car is at the impound lot at the Navy Yard and it’s gonna cost $250 to get it out, and that doesn’t include the ticket. The lot closes in in less than an hour. We don’t think we are going to make it but we get on the Subway and get down there as soon as we can. I can only imagine what it looked like to locals when they see three hipsters absolutely sprinting through a pretty bad neighborhood trying to get there before the lot closes. I think we actually got there slightly after it closed but we somehow managed to get it out anyway.

When we get to the show it’s in the basement of the Delancey. There might be 25 people there max. The show was pretty fun anyway. These days when you hear electronic music you are probably thinking EDM, but this was a lot of supremely weird noise acts and the kind of rappers that are more influenced by jam bands than hip hip. The Tom Tom Club because their son was performing. My friend Luca, aka Drop the Lime/ Curses also played that night, but I didn’t we didn’t become friends until years later. There was another artist there who would hit play on his laptop and then just kinda run around the crowd. I didn’t get it at all. He went by the name Girl Talk.

A year later The Gaskets get asked to play this big art party in Richmond. Half gallery, half show at one of the bigger venues in the city. Not a lot of local acts could headline there, maybe us, Municipal Waste and Avail so we just sort of assumed The Gaskets were the headliner, but when the flyers went up, Girl Talk was headlining. I was legitimately pissed. Not only were we not headlining, but we were opening for some guy who played other people’s music and just ran around the club. I didn’t get it. We almost dropped off the bill. But when that night came I finally understood what Girl Talk was all about.

Girl Talk doesn’t make sense when there are 20 people in the crowd, but when there are hundreds, it is absolute chaos. I have photographed him a half dozen times and his shows are more fun than probably any other DJ although he used to have t-shirts that said I’m Not A DJ so maybe I shouldn’t call him a DJ. But whatever the case he’s so much fucking fun live.

Okay, now, after all that, we finally get to these photos that I am re-uploading. We go back in time to summer 2009 and the infamous Jelly NYC Pool Parties are on the Williamsburg waterfront, which I guess is now Domino Park. These parties were always a blast, but they also brought out a bunch of randos and as someone who was very serious about being a hipster, they were a little to basic or something for me. I pretty sure that’s a joke, but I would always rather be in some small bar than outside at festival or something. That being said the Jelly parties were legendary.

Going back through my original blog post apparently it started raining in the middle of the show and that’s why I started shooting the crowd more than the actual performance. I was trying to protect my camera a bit and there was as much chaos in the crowd as on stage. People were pushing through trying to get on stage to join the fun. A bunch of photographers were up there too, ruining my shots so the crowd was the better option anyway. Nothing annoys me more than photographers getting in the way of the show. Stop making that shit about you. The only exception if if you are working directly for the artist or the event, and even then, get your shots and get out of the way.

Anyway, the show was still a blast and after the show I ran into a bunch of friends. Man I miss just knowing people wherever I went. RIP Curtis. A few of us went over to Brooklyn Bowl for the after party. I honestly just went because Brooklyn Bowl had pretty damn good food and I wanted some BBQ but I did take a some photos there too that are at the end of this gallery.

These photos really capture a moment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. You can just see the beginning of the end of the short time period where it was the center of cool. The waterfront is still there but apartment buildings were going up where there were factories. The Jelly NYC parties were still happening but they were no longer at McCarren park pool. The crowd was becoming less hipster, and more finance bro. You can just see it changing in these photos.

Okay, once again I have written 1000 words for no reason. I need to make these shorter and sweeter so I can do them more often, but I like writing and hopefully a few people are getting something out of this stuff. Hopefully I will be back soon but in the meantime enjoy some photos from August 2009.

The Night Michael Jackson Died – 6.25.09

March 6, 2025March 6, 2025

I don’t have a great system for how reuploading old content is going to work. Unless someone pays me to dig up a specific event, so far the idea is just to open a random folder and see what’s inside and if it’s good, post it. For this first ever Vintage DBB post I decided to dig into the 2009 folder because that’s the earliest time period when I thought my event photography was actually good. I have a ton of earlier photos that I will post eventually, but I figured we should start out with some technically sound photos. The first folder I opened was today’s date, but it was sort of an atypical night, so I picked a date randomly, 6.25.09. Until I opened the folder, I had forgotten that I have that exact date tattooed to my leg.

It turns out, 6.25.09 was the day Michael Jackson died. Now it’s pretty clear at this point that he was a monster, but when he died Leaving Neverland hadn’t come out and while there were allegations, I still loved his music, not enough to get a tattoo of him, but he was the first artist I ever listened to that wasn’t forced on me by my parents. Thriller was the first album I ever owned. When he died it didn’t really have any impact on me, I don’t really like any of his music written since 1987 and it’s not like he was putting out new stuff. But for some reason I just though it would be funny if I got a Michael Jackson tattoo that day. I was kinda joking about it, but when a friend from the NY Post hit me up asking me if I knew of any memorial parties she could cover, I told her I might get a tattoo and she told me she would cover it if I got it, and suddenly the joke wasn’t a joke anymore. I went over to Fine Line Tattoo and got a dumb Michael Jackson tattoo while a photographer and writer from the NY Post watched. They never ran the story…

After I got tattooed I went over to Anchor bar because my friend Josh, aka The Fat Jew, hired me to shoot a party he was throwing. Kid Cudi was there for some reason. I don’t even remember what the party was exactly, and honestly what I wrote at the time gives me no additional information. I do remember that he never paid me, but we made it square when I had him play santa for my Christmas card that year. In my post at the time I said I didn’t really know anyone at the party, but I found a bad photo of my friend SERF before I knew him and a few photos of my buddy SAME who we lost back in 2020. Going back through my archives I keep finding photos of friends before I met them, and photos of way too many friends who are no longer with us.

Speaking of no longer with us, after Anchor Bar I went over to Lit Lounge and the very first person I photographed there was my old friend and roommate Alex Magnetic. Alex was one of my all time favorite humans and was living with me when she died. Her death impacted my life in such a profound way and it was just a few months before the pandemic, which also altered my life in such a profound way. I feel like I am an old man now and I didn’t feel that way before she died. I think her death was the official end of my youth, even though I was 39 at the time.

I don’t have a ton of shots from Lit. I think it was for the party NC-17, but not 100% sure. Jeremy Bastard was DJing, but maybe it was just a special MJ night or something. My blog gives no indication. The only real thing of note that night was that I went home with twin sisters, and when I say I went home with them, I just mean they crashed at my place so they didn’t have to drive to New Jersey or wherever they lived. What’s wild is that forever I had one of their bracelets in a bedside table drawer, hoping that I would figure out who left it there. Well 16 years later I finally figure it out but I finally threw it away when I moved, and I am not in contact with those girls anymore.

Lastly, I should mention that future throwback posts probably won’t be this long, but I just felt inspired since it’s the first post and I had a lot to say, but I am excited to go back and tell old stories and relive some of these memories. Also, I should mention that I registered vintagedbb.com which will just redirect to the Vintage DBB posts on website, in case you ever want to see what new old stuff I have posted. You can also check the @vintagedbb Instagram account as well. Now go check out the photos from the night Michael Jackson died below.