First of all, happy Mother’s Day! Check out my mom at her wedding in 1978!

Do to one of my best friends weddings and a strange series of coincidences and cancelations I haven’t touched my digital camera in weeks. I couldn’t get into the (first day of the) NFL Draft and I even had a dentist appointment postponed. It’s been a weird month but it’s been a great excuse to start getting my life together. I am in NYC until the end of this month so I am going to use these three weeks to hopefully get a TON of work done.

I have two big projects that I am going to take on while I am in town. I am working on a series of food books as I mentioned way back in November. Finally I am going to really get my shit together. I have a pretty good edit and a great idea how I am going to do it. Hopefully by June I will have at least a layout done.

The second big project is building a damn portfolio site. Not sure why I don’t have one or why you would even care, but hopefully me organizing thousands of photos will end up being good for you somehow. Moving on.

Back in the day on Driven By Boredom I used to post links to websites I thought were cool and things like that. I don’t really do it anymore, but here is one link you should really check out: a group of people are trying to create a road out of solar panels. It’s an amazing project that could completely change the world as we know it. It only took 35 years to build the interstate highway system. If this road actually works there’s no reason we couldn’t see a complete end to gas powered cars in our lifetime. Go donate some money now. 

In other news my Tumblr just hit 10,000 followers. It was my first social network to hit 10k followers and it features a ton of my 35mm work and just random shots from my daily life. Check it out if you haven’t already. My Instagram would have hit 10k if it hadn’t been deleted the first time. Go follow my new one already…

Hmm… What else? Oh! My web series Road Strip has a new episode coming out this week. There are a bunch of good ones coming up so catch up on the whole series already! Very not safe for work!

Last bit of news is that NYC’s own Superchief just opened an art space in Los Angeles and they are having a big show on Thursday for the grand opening. I have at least one photo in it (I gave them a bunch of stuff to choose from) and a bunch of artists I love are in it as well. My buddies (and amazing photographers) Tod Seelie and Brock Fetch are two of the featured artists and other people I dig like Lee Trice, Eddy Segal and Prettypuke are in it as well. So if you are in LA go to the opening on Thursday. If you can’t make it the show will be up until the end of July. Hopefully I will be able to make it out there to see it myself! Really psyched to be in this show!

So check out the flyer for the show and I will be back Tuesday with some photos you do not want to miss…

The famous lower east side deli Katz’s Delicatessen is celebrating it’s 125th anniversary this year. Normally 125 year olds don’t know a lot about pop up art galleries but Katz’s is a bit different. They opened “The Space” a Katz’s pop-up art gallery next to their deli. This month my pals at the Brooklyn based streetwear brand Mishka curated an art show and released a line of Katz’s clothing to go with it. Clearly you can’t be seen this winter without rocking a Salami or Pastrami beanie.

The homies Lamour Supreme, Sucklord & Lee Trice had some awesome work on display with more delicious work by Micah NYC, Katy Ziegel, and Solomon Alexander filling out the space. The Space was packed all night and Nick Hook and Aharaw kept the music going. I assure you that corn beef (and free booze) fueled fun was had by all.

After I hit the art show I of course went next door to Katz’s with a bunch of kids and had a pastrami on rye and a matzo ball soup plus half sour pickles. It was excellent as always and tasted exactly the same is it did a decade ago when I first ate there. Which is exactly what you should expect from a 125 year old New York institution like Katz’s.

Click here to see all the pictures from the Katz’s Delicatessen inspired Miskha art show & pop up store at The Space!

Ps. All the photos were shot without flash on my new 28mm 1.8 lens that I got for christmas. It’s the first plastic lens I have ever been excited about owning!

Infamous vandals, New York natives and corporate shills Mint & Serf released a book last night called Support, Therapy & Instability which documents the creation of several huge paintings they did with Pablo Power, Jacuzzi Chris and the Peter Pan Posse. One of the paintings was shown at the PPP art show but the rest have yet to be seen until the release of the limited edition book.

The book features essays by Carlo McCormick, Cat Marnell (who is one of the only drug addicted socialites with any actual talent) and an essay by “Peter Pan” that addresses the weird world where rich girls from the Hamptons and huge global brands want to give you money for being a fucked up graffiti artist. Interesting thoughts on how to take money from Nike the same week you are getting the shit beat out of you by some cops.

The paintings in the book straddle a similar line between being fine art and just being “a bunch of scribbles” like my mom would say.  As corporate as Mint & Serf have gone, they have always kept to their throw up graffiti style and could never be confused with the “street art” that mom appreciates. The paintings are very raw and could blend in with a lot of walls in the city. They just invited their friends over, got fucked up and covered up each other’s tags over and over again until the paintings were done. The irony is that in a few months the paintings might be hanging in the million dollar loft apartment of a guy who would probably call the cops if he saw someone getting up on his building.

It’s a weird world where graffiti is used in massive marketing campaigns and being sold in art galleries for hundreds of thousands of dollars. This book is a great place to continue the conversation about vandalism, art and commerce. You can get the book from the Mint&Serf store, and while you are there pick up the SGU #WTC issue because I have a photo in it.

Now click here to check out the pictures from the Mint & Serf Support, Therapy & Instability book release party at Neuehouse.

Bonus: For further reading check out Mickael Broth’s “Gated Community” books where he documents his 10 months in prison for graffiti and his switch to fine art career after he got out.

The LA release party for my Route 66 book “Get Your Kicks” was a huge success. It was so humbling to see all the people who came out to support me. I sold some art, a bunch of books, and Mishka LA was packed all night. Art shows are terrifying to me because as much as I think I like attention I really hate it when it’s actually happening. In retrospect it was awesome but during the show I was kinda freaking out. Talking to people about my “art” is pretty much the worst part about this whole process. I was running like a chicken sans head and trying to talk to everyone.

It was such a cool group of people who came out to the show and they well represented the diversity of the things I like to photograph. Two of the stars of the book Charlotte Stokely and Ash Hollywood came out but so did a lot of other adult film stars including Kimberly Kane, Dana DeArmond, Aiden Starr, Skin Diamond, Andy San Dimas, Veruca James, Claire Robbins, Catie Parker, Phoenix Askani, Tommy Pistol and Lee Roy Meyers, plus nude models Alysha Nett and Shay Laren. A bunch of nightlife peoples came out including DJ Skeet and Justin Tranter of Semi Precious weapons. In the tattoo world Oliver Peck and Brooklyn Payne. Comedians Maddox and Steve Agee showed up and so did amazing fine artists Coop & Shark Toof. A bunch of my photographer friends showed up including Rony Alwin, Tyler Curtis, JM Darling, Steve Diet Goedde & Victor Lightworship. Plus tons of my really good friends including my brother and CHIPS the designers of the book!

These photos kinda suck because I was too busy having an art show to take photos. I just sort of mindlessly snapped shots without a flash and hoped they would come out. I think I took better photos on my Instagram but whatever, hopefully I will eventually see some of the photos that other people took. Also, this gallery is NSFW thanks to both the art in the show and Veruca James & Catie Parker taking their clothes off.

Thanks Mishka LA for hosting the event, thanks to Kimberly Kane for helping me hang the show, thanks to Sailor Jerry and PBR for the booze and thanks to everyone for coming out! Oh, and the show is up until late November if you are in LA and still want to check out the photo show!

Lastly, remember that the NYC release party is tomorrow night! Hopefully you can make it out, but if not I just put the book on Etsy! Go order one!

Now click here to see all the photos from the Get Your Kicks book release party and photo show at Mishka LA!

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So Friday’s LA release of my limited edition Route 66 book “Get Your Kicks” was a huge success. Mishka LA was packed all night and I sold a bunch of books. The whole thing was really awesome and there will be a bunch of photos from it when I get back to NYC on Wednesday. I posted a few photos on Tumblr if you want to check that out and there should be a video soon.

But the more important news is that the book release party is coming to NYC! We are doing this all again (minus the photo show) on Thursday at Mishka’s 350 Broadway location in Williamsburg (Marcy or Hewes JMZ train stop). I will be selling the books and signing books if you want. There will be free Sailor Jerry rum and beer and Drop The Lime curated a rock and roll Route 66 themed play list for the event.  There is also going to be a limited edition Mishka t-shirt for sale as well.

After the show is over I will put the book on sale for those people who couldn’t make it out to the release parties. The books also should continue to be on sale at both the Mishka LA and Brooklyn stores.

Anyway, I hope to see a ton of my friends out at Mishka’s 350 Broadway on Thursday, I know it’s CMJ fest but stop by and say hi, get a free drink, buy a book and get on to whatever hipster buzz band you are going to see.

So today I am headed to Los Angeles for the release of my Route 66 book “Get Your Kicks”. If you somehow missed it I traveled all of Route 66 from Chicago to LA with a bunch of hot naked girls taking photos of them and roadside Americana and them in front of roadside Americana. I am doing a big photo show and book release party at Mishka LA this Friday. There will be another smaller event at Mishka’s Brooklyn location on Oct 17th. If you want to know more you could read my original post, or check out write ups on Animal New York, AVN.com, and Fleshbot. 

In honor of the book release I am going to post this set of Annalee Belle at the famous Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo, TX. The Ranch is a Route 66 classic built by the eccentric oil billionaire/ artist Stanley Marsh 3. It was one of the main attractions I really HAD to see on my road trip and I wanted to shoot a naked girl in front of it. Unfortunately I didn’t have a model for that leg of the trip so I went to the internet to find someone. I only managed to find two possible models in Amarillo and I emailed them both. Annalee Belle hit me up and not only was down for the shoot but was actually a fan of my work. I was pretty psyched.

I picked her up and we headed to the ranch and she kinda ruined my excitement when she told me Stanley Marsh was a child molester and was currently  on trial for sexually assaulting several teen boys. Despite this awful news we headed to the Cadillac Ranch and despite insane winds, dust and tons of people spray painting the Cadillacs we managed to shoot a few photos including the cover of my book! On top of that we only got caught like twice and I had Annalee home in less than an hour from when I picked her up. It was a pretty successful trip.

But yeah, check out these photos and get excited for the release of my first of what will hopefully be many books.

Click here to see Annalee Belle naked in public at the famous Cadillac Ranch near Route 66 in Amarillo, TX!

This is it. I started with an idea I had two years ago of driving all of Route 66. I finally got my self organized in May and decided basically to try crowd fund a vacation. I figured if I made a zine or something out of the road trip I could get people to give me money and amazingly it worked. I raised some outside funds and took off on a 31 day road trip, the bulk of which were spent traveling Route 66.

I started out in Chicago and spent a day with Caprice Capone and then spent three days driving to St. Louis (a four hour drive if you take the highways) with one of my favorite models Sidney Scarlet. Once I got to St. Louis I spent the day hanging out with my girl Theresa Manchester, a St. Louis native. From there I flew in my muse of muses Charlotte Stokely and spent three days driving her to Oklahoma City, OK. I had lunch with my friend Heidi there and she ended up jumping in my car and going to Amarillo with me. In Amarillo I met Annalee Belle who I got to photograph in front of the famous Cadillac Ranch (as seen on the cover of my book!). I then took off towards Albuquerque, NM where I picked up the amazing Ash Hollywood and drove her to Vegas which is just two hours north of 66. In Vegas I spent two days in a nice hotel after a two weeks on the road and ran into Coco Velvett. She decided she could use a ride to LA and we drove back down to Route 66 and spent maybe 10 hours driving the short trip from Vegas to LA. Once I got to LA I only had one spot left to hit and I took Miss Crash down to the Santa Monica pier and photographed her naked on the ferris wheel.

The entire trip was life changing and I was so lucky to have such amazing models willing to get naked in public all across the country for basically nothing. When it was over I had coincidentally shot 66 rolls of film (well I shot 67 but one of them sadly got lost) and had a body of work I was truly proud of. Instead of just making a black and white photo copied zine I really stepped up my game and ended up spending a ton of money self publishing a limited edition book. It is hand numbered out of 250 copies. It is 85% color and 120 pages long. It really looks incredible. I am so happy with this thing and I can’t wait until you guys see it.

Originally I was going to plan a low key book release in NYC but I started thinking about how great it would be to do the release in LA where Route 66 ends. I was going to be out there in October anyway and I thought maybe I could throw something together last minute. I started texting some friends and Greg from Mishka got back to me immediately. I was thinking maybe I could do something small in their LA store since they do in store events in their Brooklyn store all the time. Turns out they just opened a new gallery above their LA Location and they were looking for an October show. He asked me if I could get a show together in time and I jumped on it.

So on October 11th I will be doing the book release in LA and there will be a huge photo show to go with it. I printed over 4o photos including 11 massive 20″ x 30″ prints. Not sure what I am going to hang until I get there but Mishka’s gallery is pretty big and I should have room to hang most of it. It’s going to be awesome. The book release is from 7-10 on the 11th but the photo show will be up for 6 weeks. There will be free Sailor Jerry rum and beer if you need a reason to go. There will also probably be a bunch of porn stars there if that’s your sort of thing… just saying.

There will also be a NYC event at Mishka’s 350 Broadway location as well but there won’t be a photo show. Just some free booze and an opportunity to buy the book.  I think the date is going to be October 17th but it’s not 100% confirmed yet. Just a heads up. Assuming they don’t all sell out (100 of them are already owed to crowd funders) the books will be available in late October.

I hope to see some of you in LA!

Last night I hit up the opening of #PPP: None Of Us Is Greater Than All Of Us at Rox Gallery on the Lower East Side. The show was curated by NYC graffiti champs Mint&Surf and featured the work of their crew the Peter Pan Posse and other friends. My next door neighbor and one of my favorite humans Slutlust is a founding #PPP member andd had some work in the show so I hopped in a cab with him and his lady and we headed over the bridge to the show.

It’s not often that I am at an art opening for more than 15 minutes but I stayed at Rox for a few hours. Every time I tried to leave the space another group of people I was excited to see showed up . Plus Rox is a great space and there was a lot of great art on the walls. I don’t want to leave anyone out so here is the huge list of artists involved:

Arab Parrot, Bast, Baron Von Fancy, Bob Waltzer, Cat Marnell, Clayton Patterson, Curtis Kulig, Dirty Shaun, Dylan Kraus, Erik Foss, Harry McNally, Jacuzzi Chris, Lance De Los Reyes, Mark Ferkul, Michael Anderson, Mint&Serf, Norman Seeff, Osvaldo Chance Jimenez, Pablo Power, Peter Sutherland, Pj Monte, Sean Kinney, Wyatt Neumann and Beni Zooted.

On top of that you hat Pablo Power cutting all his hair off in the middle of the show, spraying shaving cream on people and bleeding out the side of his head. It was a pretty good scene. Now I got shit to to so just go look at the photos.

Click here to see all my shots from #PPP: None Of Us Is Greater Than All Of Us at Rox Gallery.

If you don’t know who Molly Crabapple is, you should. She is a bad ass painter, writer and all around artist and she is behind “Dr. Sketchy’s” a drawing party where you get to draw hot naked ladies and drink booze. Because of our mutual love of nudity Molly and I have a ton of mutual friends and have known each other via the Internets for ages. I think we have only actually met in real life two or three times, but I am a big supporter of her work. So when she was raising money on Kickstarter for a political art show called “Shell Game” I was happy to donate to the project.

As part of my donation I was invited to a backers only pre-opening of her show at Smart Clothes Gallery on the Lower East Side. My friend Stoya was going to be hanging out mostly naked in a bathtub full of money so obviously I had to bring my camera. Molly’s show was pretty amazing. Her art is so detailed and it’s incredible to see up close. The paintings were so much bigger than I imagined. It was pretty impressive.

The paintings deal with the financial melt down as well as the different revolutions and crisises that happened in 2011 as a result of the 2008 crash. Molly was doing a lot of work for the Occupy Wall Street movement and decided to do a bigger project on these themes. My two favorite paintings were the one about health care and the one dealing with the uprisings in Greece. You can check out all of them and read more about the project here.

Oh and if you are wondering who the pink haired lady performing the music, that would be Kim Boekbinder who wrote a song for Molly’s project.

Click here to see all the photos from Molly Crabapple’s Shell Game at Smart Clothes Gallery.