As promised I am finally getting the Teddy Blanks photos from Friday up.  I think one of the reasons it has taken me so long to get these up was because I sort of blame the show on blowing out my knee.  Teddy left his TV in my brother’s car and my brother was at work.  I have the other set of keys so Teddy asked me to steal my brother’s car and drive us all to the show in Greenpoint.  I walked all the way to the car (about a 20 min walk) before I realized I didn’t have the keys on me.  I ran a few blocks to find a cab, then ran up my stairs as fast as I could and ran back down so the cab would wait for me.  By the time I got to the car my knee was killing me.  I took the car into the city for the night before dropping it back off at my brothers and starting the walk home.  I didn’t get two blocks from his apartment before I collapsed and had to call a car service to drive me back home.

Speaking of my injury… evidentially it is not as bad as I thought.  I went to a specialist today who saw me for a total of 90 seconds but he told me that my knee seemed okay.  I have to get an MRI soon, but I have to get approval from my insurance company which could take a week. In the mean time he said to rest and ice it, but that I can walk on it.  That being said, I have never been to the hospital before and I decided this merited a trip to the ER. I broke my finger in high school and didn’t even put a splint on it.  The point is, despite what the doctor deduced in under two minutes, until I get that MRI, I still think I am fucked. I got some pain killers and a pretty sexy brace to wear in the mean time. So, I am going to attempt to shoot some fashion week stuff in the next couple of days, but I am going to be moving… very… very… slooowwly…

Moving on… Here are the pictures from Teddy’s show. I was mostly having fun at the show and just fucking around with the photos.  I was dragging the shutter so the TV was all over the shot.  Anyway, enough with the excuses.  I will be back tomorrow with some surprise NSFW shots and new excuses for why they suck too.  See you then.

So last night my knee finally gave out. It had been hurting since last Friday night, but yesterday it just decided to stop working. I was at a bodega about to walk home when I just couldn’t walk anymore. I spent all day in the Emergency Room today for no reason. They just told me I had to wait until Tuesday to get an MRI. Fucking wonderful. You can read my twitter for my ER adventures but I did wait with this guy who hit his finger on the side mirror of a car while he was biking. Turns out he was the singer from Choking Victim who I was super into when I was like 16. He’s in Leftover Crack now. Him and his friend seemed like good people. Other than that the only thing I learned today was that I never want to get old. That place was full of old people who were just fucked. Anyway, the point of this update is just to say that I am out of commission for a bit. I have a knee brace and I can barely walk in it. I have three sets of photos from last night, and another update which I will get up when I am feeling a bit better, but at the moment I am just feeling really sorry for myself because I am not going to be able to work. I am already getting close to broke due to a super slow summer. I will be in bed all day tomorrow so I guess I will be updating, but for the moment I am just going to watch a movie and try to get some sleep.

In the mean time, here is a picture I took of how my knee feels:

Let’s start by saying that things are slow here right now due to the fact that I am suddenly and old man. In the last week I have hurt my back, my knee and I am very slightly sick. I have not been sleeping well and I am trying to get take it easy a bit. I know I have been slacking off on the party pictures, but it should pick up with Fashion Week and such, plus I have a few events coming up I am excited about. Anyway, on to more important things:

Teddy Blanks show at the Annex got canceled on Monday so a friend of his asked him to join their bill at CoCo66 in Greenpoint. The show starts at 1030. I would guess Teddy will play between 1130 and midnight. Now the important thing about this show is that it is completely free. This is Teddy’s first time playing a free show in the city, so I expect some of you kids to come out. For more information, the Facebook invite is here and the flyer is posted below. See you friday.

Update: The date on the flyer is wrong. The show is Friday, no matter what the flyer says.

Hey guys, I know how you guys hate spending money and all, but Teddy Blanks is playing again tonight and it should be a blast.  I would really like to see you guys out there.  I am leaving for a week or so tonight and I will miss you all. Come say goodbye.

Speaking of, this site is going to be slow moving for the time that I am out of town. I am going fishing with 3 of my oldest and dearest friends for 4 days then off to DC/VA for a day or two and then I might hit up Philly for a night or something.  It is sort of up in the air but I borrowed a car, and I need some relaxation and/or adventure. I will try to update once a day at least, but I can’t promise anything.  I have some photo shoots tentatively set up with some cute girls, so if that happens, there might be some fun stuff up next week.

Until then, come see me tonight and rock out with the amazing Teddy Blanks.

Due to bullshit, photos from Siren won’t be up for a bit, but I am going to use this brief pause to show you this lovely art I put together. The first photo is real, and the second photo someone else made, but using my masterful photoshop skills, I created the bottom two images AND pasted them all together in a square. Fucking brilliant I am.

Rejoice in the potatofacedness of it all!

Wanna help me test out my new ReTweet button? I am going to post a bunch of fun internets videos for the viral minded in you. Now this is entertaining and exciting content that you clearly need to share with everyone you know. So the way to do that, is to press that button to the left there and it will send out some sort of Twitter Signal into the dark and your friends will think you are cool for knowing about such wacky and cute videos. Plus it will let me see how this thing works. So yeah, wanna help me beta test my new button? I’ll never ask you to press something you don’t wanna ever again baby, I swear it. Daddy loves you. Now press that motherfucking ReTweet button!! And then please enjoy these lovely viral videos.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Psfn6iOfS8[/youtube]
Auto-Tune The News just keeps getting better. John Boehner & Michelle Bachmann may be hate filled lunatics, but they sing like fucking angels.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxJLUZWPEb8[/youtube]
This is one of the last Onion News Network episodes my brother is ever going to work on. He is moving on to new and exciting career opportunities. He has been with the ONN for their entire existence and this is one of their best yet.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrjmfqrHhZk[/youtube]
These people might be fast, but they aren’t easy.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdLVLPoRXR4[/youtube]
Clearly we can’t do a viral video update with out some cute animal doing something only a person would do!! Oh, she’s sooo like people!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVJVRywgmYM[/youtube]
I guess we can’t do a viral video update without a flash mob either… or a Michael Jackson reference… I know! Let’s kill two birds with one stone!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfBlUQguvyw[/youtube]
Lastly, I really think this video is going to be shown in classrooms 25 years from now. While this is sort of stupid and silly, it is completely showing the full potential of Web 2.0 to make collaborative web based art.

Thanks to my amazing friend and part time webmaster Thadd Williams DBB has gotten a very minor touch up to make it slightly more social networkable…

There are now some little buttons below each post where you can send the post to Digg or Facebook or Stumble Upon or what have you.  Whatever the kids are doing these days… I used to have a button that just said Share This and you could do similar things, but I think these little buttons work better.

Secondly, we added the Retweet buttons at the beginning of each post.  Now you can press the Retweet button and this post will automatically be sent to your Twitter.  I hope people will use this to show friends the party they were at last night, or to promote whatever event they hired me to shoot.  God willing when I do a real design update all the gallery pages will have a similar button so you can easily Tweet and/or Facebook your individual pictures.

Speaking of Twitter, there is now a feed of my latest three Tweets.  Now you can see what sort of bullshit I am getting into without even owning a smart phone.  The installation actually fucked up my side bar a little bit, but we are working to fix that. Hopefully that will be taken care of ASAP.  My guess is it is some sort of CSS issue, but I don’t even know what CSS stands for, so I think I will leave that up to Thadd.

Lastly, I think we fixed the problem with my RSS feed in Google Reader.  If you don’t use Google Reader or you don’t even know what an RSS feed is, please ignore this.  If you do use Google Reader, let me know if things are working better.  In fact, if anyone sees anything wrong with this site please let me know.

I just talked to some people about doing a more major touch up on the site, so hopefully that will be happening sometime in the next 20 months. I want to redo the side bar, add more links finally, add a place for minor site updates and a place where you can see just the photo updates without having to scroll through my ramblings.  I am also considering measures to make this site load a bit faster.  Let me know if you have problems with the site speed generally.  Also, really, any advice on how to make this page easier to use for you please let me know.

Thanks a bunch. Oh, and just for contents sake, I have been listening to the Dramatics while I have been working on this site.  Their song Shake It Well might be the best song I have ever heard.  Listen to it while you browse this site and everything will look that much nicer.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QYBoaI0ypE[/youtube]

As you may or may not have noticed, or may or may not have cared, I have been updating this site less often than normal.  There are quite a few reasons for this (Less paid work, nightlife burnout, broken equipment, thieving intern, sleep problems, an attempt to enjoy the summer, writers block etc…) but I don’t really love writing blogs apologizing for my slack. Really I need to be embracing the slack.  I think I am going to just try to update this site when it needs to be updated.  So the slow trickle of posts may continue until some of the above issues are resolved.  That is not to say I am not being productive, as I am scheming constantly, it is just that none of the projects I have been slowly working on have come to fruition.  That in itself is reasonably frustrating, but I am taking stepts to improve my diligence in such matters.

I have had some recent bouts of inspiration and productivity.  I have teamed up on an art project with graffiti artist DAZE that you will hear about soon.  I am also as we speak organizing a book to show to gallery owners in order to get a non-nightlife (gasp!) show together.  I also hope to one day come up with some sort of portfolio site for my event work but the thought of somehow organizing the last 2 years of party photos gives me nightmares.  I really want to be taking more day time photos, more natural light stuff, and more documentary and editorial stuff.  So I am going to put this little classified ad out there. I want to be more productive and I want your help.  If you can help with any of these bullet points below, please contact me.

• I am looking for any paid nightlife work as always.
• I am looking for any editorial, fashion or documentary print assignments which I would be willing to shoot at a one time reduced rate.
• I am looking for interesting looking people or any sort of pseudo celebrity type that would let me shoot some portraits of them so I have some portrait work that isn’t naked girls.
• I am looking for naked girls who do not flake on shoots.  Preferably ones that are willing to do fun stuff like break into construction sites and shoot in public.
• I am looking for art shows, magazines, art based sites that would be interested in my non-party work.
• I am looking for gallery space to show my non event 35mm work.
• I am looking for anyone who would pay me to go out of town to shoot anything for any reason.  I need adventure.
• I am looking for weird shit to shoot.  Do you have a fight club? A weird sex party? Smoking crack out of a light bulb?  Let me know, I will come take photos.
• I am sort of looking for work shooting your band.  I used to do a lot of band portraits and live work but I sort of hate it.  That being said, I am reasonably good at it and I will do it for money.  Same goes for head shots, press photos and anything like that.
• I am looking for press. Want to interview me for something? I don’t know why you would want to, but sign me the fuck up. I need to be getting out there more.
• I need more traffic.  I think I have plateaued a bit.  I think you should link this site already.  When my traffic is going up, it makes me want to work on the site more.
• I am looking for excuses to write.  Got any ideas?
• And lastly I am looking for anyone who does web design who would want to do some free work to build there portfolio.  I have a site that needs to be built and I have no money to do it and my friends are all flakes.

Okay, I am not sure what the hell the point of this blog was, but I enjoyed writing it for some reason.  It was probably good to slighly organize my thoughts or something.  I just need to be doing stuff other than taking photos of drunk people and naked girls.  That being said I like doing those things too, so if have any ideas let me know.  I just need to stay on point.  You would think that not having a job would make it so I got more done instead of less, but since I have been doing this site full time, I have found it harder and harder to work.  Help a brother out, let’s make some art.  Or at least some money.

Ps. While this site may be less populated with posts, I do Twitter a lot.  I am even sometimes entertaining and I try not to blog about the food I am eating unless that food is fried chicken.  I fucking love fried chicken. So follow me already.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qt9MP70ODNw[/youtube]

So, I am catching up on life, so we are still slow around here for a few days. I am going to try to get something sexy up tomorrow and then some local party photos up over the weekend and hopefully we will be back cruising by Monday, with LA galleries going up ever day that week plus new local stuff. I have a controversial interview coming out this week too which should be a fun read. I am getting my ass handed to me already in the RVA Mag comments and it is not even out yet. Fortunately the more level headed people seem to have my back.

Anyway, on to the photos. The last night I was in LA I went and saw my friend Tom’s band Magic Mirror. He place bass in them and guitar in Lower Heaven. They are both pretty psychedelic. I am not a huge fan of stuff so jammy usually, but Magic Mirror are super tight, pretty rocking and I was never bored, which is surprising when it comes to me and most “pretty” music. From the people I talked to who listen to a lot of psychedelia they are pretty fucking amazing. Tom has been in probably 20 bands in the 18 years I have known him and I am pretty sure Magic Mirror is his favorite. I actually had a great time at the show.

Tom and I met in the 5th grade. He was just starting to play guitar and we had some other friends playing stuff so we started a band called No More Freedom. And while they never actually existed, I like to say it is the first band I ever managed. The second band I ever managed was in the 7th and 8th grade when Tom had a band called Manley Stanley who did grunge and metal covers. The flyer said they knew EVERY Nirvana song. I think they played a couple of talent shows and a school fund raiser. In high school Tom and I founded the punk rock club and started both a zine and a record label. Our zine, Nervous Breakdown went from a total joke to a pretty legitimate magazine in its 4 year run. The record label was less prolific, with only 2 tapes, one CD and one record ever released, but the record was probably the most successful DC punk record of the mid 90’s selling out it’s first run in a month with no distribution. Tom and I sold every one of those records by hand. The record was a 7″ called Raise The Flag harDCore Vol 1. One of the bands on it, No Credentials, was fronted by Tom and during our record release party I had to play bass due to a missing band member. Unfortunately I do not play bass, so I plugged in my friends bass into a card board box with the word AMP written on it in black marker. It was pretty legendary. I also sang a bit in a rockabilly band that my friend Jamie started that Tom played guitar for and I booked a few gigs for Tom’s later college bands The Strap Ons and the life changing Captain Kick Ass.

Years later, Tom lives in LA making a successful career working in the art department on huge budget TV commercials. When I asked him if he had any in the Super Bowl last year, he said something a long the lines of “most of my commercials were played during the Super Bowl.” As far as I can tell he is close personal friends of Mr. T. That may be a lie. He is also playing in 2 bands and the last time I was in LA he was so busy doing both I didn’t get to see him. Luckily he has a small break from work and I got to hang out with him a bunch. We went to some really weird parties and managed to not get arrested. It was a good time.

Lastly, I have a tattoo on my arm that reads NMF, NB and OCR. People ask me what they mean all the time. That tattoo is a tribute to the 10 years I worked in the music industry in some way or another. And where it started was with No More Freedom, Nervous Breakdown Fanzine, and Outcider Records. Everyone of the projects I did before I was 20 I worked with hand in hand with Tom and I am pretty sure we would be completely different people without each other.

But enough with the sappy life story, check out Magic Mirror right fucking now, and then check out the photos right here. There are some nice ones with available light, and then a few at the end where I was just fucking around with my broken flash.