Normally when leaving town for two weeks I would throw mini updates on the DBB Road Trip blog and not update the main page but my motel’s internet sucks and other than Ho99o9’s release party I didn’t shoot a ton of photos the first few days I was here. So I decided I would just throw up a little update on life and a music video that people I like a lot made. Seems reasonable…

So far in LA I have photographed Ava Dalush who you guys just met, an old favorite Ivy Diamond and the insanely babetastic Chanel Preston. I also shot a babe that was roommates with my friend Juanito Blanco named Jade Nile. I took some weird 35mm shots of her and her boyfriend which might see the light of day eventually. They are all having a party on Wednesday so hopefully I can get some more weirdness. I also got to see Kimberly Kane (and her dog!) who I hadn’t seen in over a year. I think the only photo I took of her was at a diner but perhaps we will shoot something before I leave town.

Now on to this music video. My friend Teddy Blanks directed his first music video. He is a graphic designer who has designed all my books and zines and he did the design work for the band Tanlines new album Highlights. During the design phase they had a conversation about how Teddy’s friend and actor Alex Karpovsky looks a lot like one of the guys from Tanlines. A few months later Alex and Teddy were directing a video for the song Palace starring Alex and Natasha Lyonne with cameos from Leo Fitzpatrick and that dude from High Maintenance. On my first night in LA Teddy showed me the video and it finally came out yesterday. It’s pretty rad.

Also my brother, who is a tremendous editor, cut the video so it is extra amazing. But then again he’s letting me sleep on his couch this weekend so I guess I would have to say that. Seriously, go watch this video because anything that Teddy and my brother do together has got to be awesome. Plus Alex and Teddy hired me to shoot the poster for Alex’s movie Red Flag which Teddy designed and art directed. So everyone rules.

Okay, I need to go photograph some babes now and enjoy LA for the week I have left. Talk to you guys soon. Check my Tumblr for daily updates.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rorAAsQUfvo[/youtube]

Most of my regular readers know I am a sports fan but I try and keep that stuff to a minimum because I know you guys are here for the photos I take and not my take on the Miami Dolphins and Washington Capitals. That being said, I decided I should probably address what happened the other day since I keep getting texts from people I haven’t seen in years because my face ended up all over the internet this week.

This week has been a pretty awful one. I went to DJ Jess’ memorial where I was served papers for a law suit that I have almost nothing to do with (but still have to hire a lawyer) and on the way home the car that I was borrowing from my parents to help them move got totaled by a guy who was running from the cops. I hurt my back in the accident and had to cancel on a shoot with Indigo Augustine and miss shooting the final Trouble & Bass party for the Village Voice. I went there to try and shoot it but I had to leave after 10 minutes because my back hurt so much.

The next morning I was supposed to go see my Washington Caps play the New York Islanders in the playoffs but with my back so messed up I wasn’t sure if I could go. I woke up that morning in a lot of pain but feeling much better than the day before. I decided to suck it up and go. And that’s when the weirdness began.

My friends and I are loud fans who make up our own chants and are fairly obnoxious but we don’t start fights and we don’t pick on random people. We just go there to have fun and cheer our team. Unfortunately our exuberance made us the target of some particularly awful Islanders fans. Most of them were great to us and bantered back and forth with us and gave us a hard time but in a fun way but there was some shit thrown at us and some vandalism and some stuff said to us that went over the line.

I ended up writing an open letter to the New York Islanders which talked about our day and I sent it to a few local DC bloggers and stuff. I was pissed and I wanted to gripe about my day but I didn’t even put it on the main page of this site. I ditched it over in the rarely updated B-Sides blog. I wanted people to read it but I didn’t expect what happened next.

Within an hour of me writing it it had gone viral. My Twitter handle @drivenbyboredom was the number one trending topic in the DC area. People started writing blogs and asking for interviews. I did a few of them and then started passing them off to the rest of my Caps crew because I didn’t get the worst of it, they did. I didn’t want to be the face of this thing. Today alone I turned down four TV interviews. The whole thing got out of hand.

I got a lot of love from Caps fans and some of the Isles enemies like the Rangers and Flyers fans but I also got message after message from Islanders fans apologizing for the dregs of their fan base. I have no problem with Islanders fans in general – they just happen to be the enemy this week – and it was great how many awesome Isles fans I have met this week.

Unfortunately there is a segment of way too serious Islanders trolls who have been sending hate mail and Tweet after Tweet and lying to the media about us. I have heard the craziest rumors about what we were doing and I did some more interviews to address some of that stuff. I don’t mind any of this. I shoot naked people for a living, you cannot even begin to guess how much hate I get. These trolls are fun for me but they are not fun for my crew. So I am gonna stop engaging and stop doing interviews because I don’t want my fellow Caps fans to get shit for me not being able to shut my mouth.

So this is hopefully the last of it, but I just wanted to link all the articles I can find about us for posterity. Enjoy reading about this super weird couple of days and for all the Islanders fans who aren’t drunken mouth breathing trolls I wish you guys a moderate amount of good luck and if you beat us this series I hope you take it to the Pens or the Rags. Cause those teams I actually hate!

To start with here’s my original Open Letter to Islanders Fans.

Here is the interview we did with Caps Radio’s John Walton. We compared it to an old school WWF style promo where we were going over the top with our anti-Isles rhetoric. It was supposed to be funny but in retrospect it has been used to say we were instigating.

Here is the first Washington Post article and here is the second.

The ESPN one was a good read.

Here’s a guy who called me a pornographer. That was a fun one.

And here’s an interview with an Islanders Blog where I tried to explain what happened.

The NY Daily News article has my reaction to the NY Islanders weak statement.

Puck Daddy agreed with my assessment.

Boomer Esiason talked about us.

And the rest:

Newsday – Sports Illustrated – Deadspin – CBS Sports – Outsports – Ted’s Take – NBC New York – NY Post –

Anyway, what a weird week. But hopefully that’s the end of this nonsense and I can get back to posting photos of crazy parties and naked babes and fun stuff like that. Let’s Go Caps!

I got the copies of my new book Dinner With Igor on Friday. They were supposed to come today so that was a pleasant surprise. Unfortunately there was a small print error which and I had to get the books reprinted. Fortunately my printer MGX Copy was great about it and put a rush order on the reprint and the books will be in my hands on Thursday.

On top of that, I will also be getting my 36 page zine “Food Tattoos” from MGX the same day. I am pretty excited about both projects and I can’t wait until you get your hands on them. If you were one of my Kickstarter backers your books will ship Friday, Saturday Monday and Tuesday (hopefully I will get them all done by Tuesday)!

Because of the holidays I am pushing my book release party to January but you can still preorder both Dinner With Igor and Food Tattoos at my Etsy store!

You can get signed versions of them both at a discount if you click right here!

Lastly, I should mention that I am giving a 10 minute talk about the books and some other projects on Wednesday as part of the monthly Bushwick Art Crit Group session. I truly hate talking about my work especially around actual fine artists, but for some reason I agreed to do it, so it should be interesting at the very least. Plus Wizard Skull is talking right after me and that guy spends his days ruining your childhood and that’s worth the price of admission alone (it’s free). So if anyone is bored in Brooklyn on Wednesday come hang out!

Hey guess what kids! It’s 6am and I just finished turning in my final edits for the Gathering of the Juggalos. Tomorrow evening I head back to NYC and then after 24 hours of sleep to get over any sort of juggalo related illnesses I will start uploading my pictures. There are a fucking ton of them. I have over 1000 images to share with you guys so get fucking excited. We are gonna get juggalo crazy around here for a week or two.

In the mean time you can check my Tumblr and my Instagram for a bunch of photos I have posted over the last few days. Also, you can check out this sweet video from the Superchief art show at Culturefix that I had some photos in. You can see my photos in the background a lot and you can see Rosario Dawson in the video so theoretically she has gazed upon my photos which is great since I have had a crush on her since the mid 90’s.

Anyway, the video is cool and I need to go to sleep. Let’s hope I make it back to Brooklyn alive.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPWynpbqoL0[/youtube]

Hey guys. I meant to update yesterday telling you all about the Superchief art show at Culturefix but I have been on a road trip for no reason and I was staying at a random casino in Southern Indiana and I could not even begin to explain why. But anyway, I had two big 20″x30″ photos in the show, as seen below, that you could probably still go look at if you happened to live in NYC and wanted to go see them. Culturefix is a bar too so you could get drunk while looking at them and then get so drunk you buy them. Good plan.

Okay, so yeah I am on this random road trip and right now it’s 1:45am I am in Bowling Green, Kentucky which is something I never thought I would say but there is a Corvette museum here and while normally I wouldn’t care, they had a sink hole open below the museum and I want to see it before they fill in the hole. Seriously, it’s just a giant hole in the middle of a museum. I am gonna check it out tomorrow morning and then from there head to Nashville and then the Unclaimed Baggage Center in Alabama, then hit Atlanta and hang out with a Coathanger or two and then try to make it all the way to South Carolina. Five states in one day isn’t bad. I should be back in NYC sometime Sunday and then I head to the Gathering of the Juggalos on Tuesday. Yup, it’s that time again.

In preparation for Juggalos I have some naked juggalette photos I still need to get up from last year. It’s a long story and I will share that with you Monday (or perhaps from my hotel Tuesday night). I also have some lovely Shay Laren nudes that are ready to go but for a reason I can’t quite explain at this moment I can’t quite post them yet.

Also, today I took some insane photos at the Creation Museum and I can’t wait to share those with everyone but I can’t real with that until I get back but I probably won’t actually have time to deal with that until I get back from the Gathering so just be on the look out.

Long story short, I have no idea what’s going on, but I have a lot of stuff happening and a lot of stuff ready to go up but that won’t actually go up quite yet. In conclusion below are the two photos I have int he Supercheif show, one photo of a juggalette, one photo of  Shay Laren and one from the Creation Museum. Just to make everything weirder I am going to post the photos out of order so you are going to have to use your deductive reasoning skills to figure out what is happening right now. The answer mostly involves lack of sleep mixed with sleeping pills.  See you bastards soon.

Last summer I left town for 31 days on a cross country road trip and I came up with the idea of creating a specific Road Trip Blog. It was a way for me to create smaller daily posts that I could get up very quickly from the road. That way there would be constant new updates but I didn’t have to spend all day in front of the computer to get them up. I then brought the blog back when I was at the Gathering of the Juggalos last year because the internet was so questionable. Once again, I am bringing it back.

Today I am in Austin, Texas for my 11th straight trip to the South By Southwest music/interactive/film/comedy festival. I will be here for almost two weeks and starting Friday I will be shooting constantly. The first week I will be shooting mostly SXSW Film related stuff with some interactive or comedy stuff thrown in. On Tuesday night I start work for Sailor Jerry shooting the Sailor Jerry House at Gypsy Lounge all day every day for 4.5 days. The next day I am getting tattooed my pretty much my first tattoo artist every and then I will be heading the fuck home on the 18th. Should be a crazy trip. So follow along!

Click here to view daily updates from South By Southwest!

In February 2001 I was a sophomore at Penn State University. I had recently been destroyed by the first love of my life and I was a straight edge punk kid in a city full of nothing but drunken frat boys. I had a few friends (all of whom I somehow still stay in touch with) but I didn’t have much to do. I had no interest in partying with bros and hitting on these preppy college girls and I was so fucking bored all the time. I spent a lot of time on the internet.

Penn State had broadband internet and my time on it wasn’t restricted by how many hours I had left on my dial up AOL account. Napster was invented and I was downloading massive amounts of music and hanging out in my dorm room coming up with shit to entertain me. I started selling funny shit on eBay, I was re-captioning Family Circus cartoons, I was making terrible music with early versions of programs similar to Garageband, I was making weird videos and I was of course taking photos.

The problem was that YouTube didn’t exist yet. Flickr didn’t exist yet. Blogs didn’t exist yet. I had all this content but I didn’t know what to do with it. I was mostly emailing stuff to friends one by one if I wanted to show them what I had made. Fortunately my brother introduced me to a community of websites called E/N sites which stood for Everything/Nothing meaning they would post about anything they wanted or just ramblings about their everyday lives. They were the first blog sites as we think of blogs now.

On March 1st 2001 I launched Driven By Boredom into the world. By mid 2002 it was an incredibly popular blog and I got emails from fans every day. It was really amazing. Unfortunately my site was hosted by a guy who hosted a bunch of E/N sites. One day all of the sites went down and my site was down for months before I gave up and started over almost completely from scratch. It wasn’t the same after that and when I started managing a band in 2003 DBB took a back seat. By the time I moved back to NYC in 2006 DBB was pretty much dead.

By the end of 2006 I had been shooting parties with a point and shoot digital camera just for fun and people kept asking me what website I was putting them on. Last Night’s Party and Cobrasnake had just come out and everyone thought I was a party photographer. So I said fuck it and brought DBB back from the dead. On April 25th 2007 I bought a flash and started taking nightlife photography seriously and on December 23rd 2008 I  got laid off from my last job became a photographer and blogger full time.

It’s been a long and exciting 13 years for this blog and it’s amazing that it still exists and is somehow my actual job.

To celebrate DBB’s 13th anniversary I am having a party tonight at The Flat! There will be free DBB tattoos, cheap booze and naked babes. If you live in NYC you should come out! But if you don’t live in NYC I have something for you to look at anyway.

As a present for my blog I created a new Tumblr site called Fuck Yeah Driven By Boredom! It’s a Tumblr compiling fan signs and Driven By Boredom tattoos and sightings of my stickers and anything fun I can think about that has to do with this blog! It’s probably of marginal interest to anyone who is not obsessed with me or this blog, but I think it’s going to be a lot of fun to catalogue all this stuff. I hope you dig it!

2013 was a pretty good year for me. I went on an epic 31 day road trip, published a book, launched an app, didn’t loose any important clients and picked up a couple new ones. I now have photos in nearly every Hustler Magazine and at the same time just shot one of my biggest commercial gigs of all time. I photographed a million plus dollar fundraiser honoring Oliver Stone in LA on the same weekend I shot a bunch of strippers in Vegas. I threw a 750 person tailgate and raised thousands of dollars for charity through DolfansNYC. I photographed my fourth Gathering of the Juggalos and had a photo in a show a the Museum of the City of New York. I had a big solo show in LA and my book all but sold out in a month.  I worked for Rolling Stone, shot the cover of the River Front Times and had photos in print in four continents. And I did all of it without running out of money and not getting arrested (although I did get five traffic citations despite not owning a car). It was good year.

There were some low moments as well, I lost my grandmother and my friend Ease DaMan, but that’s how life works and you just gotta keep moving. I want to take my grandmother’s work ethic and empathy and Ease’s passion and lust for life and use that to make 2014 even better than 2013.

In 2014 I hope to publish SEVERAL new books and keep my eclectic photo work moving forward. I hope to shoot some big budget ads, juggalos, corporate events, porn stars, editorial pictorials and documentary work. My road trip web series will be out early next year and I hope 2014 is the year I FINALLY redesign my website. Hope I can lose the damn weight I gained on my road trip and start a new punk band. I want to write more and read more and take photos every day. I want to fuck shit up in 2014. What’s your plan?

Tonight I am gonna go out and hopefully hit a bunch of parties and get into some crazy shit. New Years Eve is one of the few times I drink and I tend to end up at some wild parties. I recently went back and looked at old NYE photos and there are some fucking out of control photos. I decided in celebration I would take the craziest 125 NYE photos over the last 6 years and upload them to my app. There are photos on there I can’t believe I ever published on here. Unbelievably NSFW stuff from some Burning Angel parties. You need to see this stuff so make your New Years Resolution to sign up for my damn Girls of Driven By Boredom app. You will be glad you did.

See you guys in 2014!

Christmas is almost here and once again I am doing Christmas cards! I have done Driven By Boredom Christmas cards twice before and they are pretty infamous. Even the people at my post office ask me about them. If you haven’t seen my cards before, take a gander at the last two. Check out the 2008 card featuring a younger me with two sexy elves, but let’s be reasonable, my ass is all you can look at. I got the notorious Fat Jew involved and he played Santa in my 2010 card. That is the one my post office employees keep talking about.

This year I figured it would be hard to top the last two cards but I wanted to do something. Luckily I had a very lovely holiday themed image just waiting to get in your mail box. It’s a bit more PG than the last two cards but I think you will enjoy it.

There are three ways to get my Christmas card!

• If we are actually friends, like you have my number in your phone friends, just send me an email at igor@drivenbyboredom.com with your postal address.
• If we aren’t friends you can pay $3 for my Christmas card via Etsy.
• You can buy Driven By Boredom a Christmas present! If you buy me film you will get a signed print or Polaroid, PLUS a card!

Lastly, if you are looking for a Christmas present for yourself or a creepy friend, the girls of Driven By Boredom App is on sale! 20% off today and tomorrow only with the code “bootyweds”. For the record I did not come up with the code!

Happy Holidays and stuff!

Ps. Look how adorable and tattoo free I was in 2008!