I have been intentionally quiet about politics on this blog for a while.  I felt that we needed a break after all the pre-election posts I did.  And frankly you don’t need a rant from a party blogger to tell you how to think.  But I have been watching clips of that fucking worthless fuck Glenn Beck recently and he makes me want to throw my computer through a fucking wall.  I know he is just being outrageous to get viewers… after someone passed out on his show he gloated about the high ratings it would cause… but I you have to think that he believes at least some of the ignorant bullshit he is spewing.  These crazy right wingers are just saying things that aren’t true.  Like, they are just making shit up.  They are like parodies of McCarthy era red scare types.  They keep screaming about socialism and stuff… Glenn Beck is screaming about how he wishes Obama would just kill him now instead of ruining his life.  I seriously can’t get through 5 minutes of him speaking.

So all these idiots are spending today protesting high taxes and socialism today by holding these tea parties.  I am sure you have read about them… They are trying to remind people of how the American revolutionaries threw English  tea into the Boston Harbor to protest taxation without representation. I would get into how fucking retarded that is, but fortunately I don’t have to because MSNBC’s David Schuster did it for me.  Homoerotic tea bagging jokes aside this video spells out EXACTLY what I have been thinking about these protests.  Thanks David, you are my hero.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8i-OWDjOQfI[/youtube]

I haven’t updated in a minute, but I have spent like the last 4+ hours editing all the rest of the SXSW shots so I don’t have to deal with it any more.  I think my mind melted a little bit.  I just wanted to get something up before midnight.  I am going to follow this up by two SXSW galleries tonight and then three more tomorrow… Think you can deal with that?  Good.  As soon as these things get uploaded I will post.  Give me an hour, I am going to watch Criminal Intent while I wait.

IN THE MEAN TIME…..

Watch the remix to Dan Baxters 3rd Playhouse video.  I think it is my favorite one… probably cause it has the most shots of me in it. Playhouse kills it.  I’ll see you there on Wed… Slo’Barry is in town.  Get ready.


Playhouse – “rockstar ReMiX” from Daniel Baxter on Vimeo.

Due to all the SXSW photos I am trying to catch up on, some things are getting lost in the cracks…. Have them all here in this manageable single serving blog post:

1. WLTF #4 just came out. I have a photo in this issue. The magazine has a lot to do with sex, hence the title “Would Like To Fuck” and the shots I have had in WLTF in the past have been of sexual nature. The one I have in this issue however is not. I think you should check it out. It is a pretty great shot. That being said, even though my image is safe for work, the rest of the magazine is not. You have been warned.

2. I am sure you guys know this by now, but I managed a band called The Gaskets for five years. They broke up about a year ago and due to some weird fluke that I cannot explain their CD’s are selling on Amazon for insane amounts of money. Okay, I am sure no one is actually going to pay $188 for a Gaskets record, but it is for sale for that price. This is pretty amusing to me. If anyone wants to pay $100 for a Gaskets CD, let me know and I will sell you my copy. Save on shipping!

3. I went to a taping of the Colbert Report. I had never done any thing like that. It was a crowd of mostly tourists and all of them were really, really excited to be there. My friend Bailey got VIP passes from her boss. We are both fans, but neither of us have cable so it’s not like we are obsessed. VIP just meant we didn’t have to wait in line and we got seated first. But it is a small audience so there are really no bad seats. When you first come in you have to go through airport like security and then they cage you in this little holding pen. I cannot imagine it passes fire code as there were over 100 people in a room about the size of my kitchen. After waiting for an hour you get brought into the studio which is pretty amazing. A warm up comic comes out and then Steven comes out, people go crazy and then it is all down hill from there. The warm up comic was pretty great, I wish I could remember his name so I could link him. It is a pretty good room to work in, but still he was pretty on point. Then Steven comes out and answers questions out of character to “humanize himself” then you get to watch him put on his make up and set up everything. The first time this happens it is pretty entertaining, but during each commercial break it gets less and less interesting. The high light was watching Steven and Jon Stewart joke around before Stewart does the Colbert lead in at the bottom of his show. It is during the last commercial of the Daily Show and they were pretty hysterical. That stuff is not in character and is pretty great. Then the show starts. The main problem with it is that you want to be watching the monitors the whole time because they have the graphics, which completely defeats being at the taping so you keep trying to watch him live and then you get distracted by the cameras and the graphics you are missing. Then you break for 5 minutes before the next segment. The whole thing is just really distracting so it is hard to get into the show. Still, it was a fun experience to do once, and the interview with Biz Stone from Twitter was pretty interesting. I Twittered about it while it was happening. Anyway, watch the show below, you can sort of see me when the camera pans the crowd at the beginning. Get excited.

So a lot of people sent me emails, texts, Twitters, Facebook and Myspace messages concerned about how my website got hacked for April Fools day.  Well… I “hacked” it myself.  If you missed checking out DBB yesterday, after the page started loading, the site was immediately redirected to THIS IMAGE.  I wanted to make my site look exactly like one of those Myspace spam pages.  It looked pretty great I think… probably too good since everyone thought it was real.  I got an email from someone who is working on trying to get some good advertising on the site and he and his boss looked at my site  yesterday only to find that someone had hacked it.  Oops.  If you guys had just clicked the porn spam you would have been directed back to the site, but alas… not everyone figured that out.

I was pretty into it, but it was pretty spur of the moment.  I had some other ideas for April Fools jokes but they didn’t really work out.  I think my joke last year was the best so far.  I had a TON of people think I was actually stabbed… Some people even blogged about it.  I even went as far as wearing a bandage over my stomach the first few days I went out after the 1st last year… Although the most time I spent on an April Fools joke was when in 2002 if you tried to go to my site you ended up on this one instead.  I spent quite a bit of time crafting that beauty, so I hope you will take another look.

Lastly, we are taking a break from SXSW coverage to bring  you party photos from Tuesday and Wednesday and I will be getting to those in about 10 hours when I wake up.  In the mean time, enjoy the embarrassing media coverage of one of my favorite April Foolers…. Improv Everywhere.  You would have thought that at least their fans would have been in on the joke… Jesus people are gullible.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvOvlmT4Oi0[/youtube]

Dan Baxter has made another crazy, way too fun looking video documenting the Wednesday night party at Cain, Playhouse.  Playhouse is currently my favorite party of the week and if anyone wants to come out let me know.  Just watch this video and you will see for yourself how crazy it is.  Look for shots of people in Driven By Boredom T-Shirts and DBB Tattoos because one of the nights Dan shot was my 8th Anniversary party there.  So this has to be my favorite video by him so far because it makes me look good.

Also, on my fucked up computer front, I have a appointment with a “Genious” at the Mac store tonight, so hopefully I will be back in business soon.

Playhouse – “freshycakes” from Daniel Baxter on Vimeo.

Due to Clicksor Advertising being the worst company I have ever worked with, we had to take a short break today to completely rebuild my entire web galleries.  You see, I wanted to put small banner adds on all my gallery pages due to the fact that I get between 700 and  900 thousand page views a day and I thought maybe I could make a little bit of money that way.  I ended up making pennies a day and my site started freezing up and playing audio from sever commercials at the same time.  I am not sure if you noticed this, but it has been happening.  I rebuilt the gallery and got rid of them all, but evidently I didn’t save it and my site tried to put them back.  Now I have to start all over again, but in the mean time there should be no ads. If anyone out there wants to pay me a reasonable fee to put banners that don’t make noise and don’t advertise for pornography or online dating, please let me know.  In the mean time, while we wait for my gallery to rebuild itself so I can upload new photos, let us take pause to honor those engaging in the sacred holiday of Mustache March. I completely forgot about it this year, but those who did not, I give thanks.  So dear comrades, please watch this video from last year, when the hair on my head was short, but the hair on my face was long (well, relatively speaking).

Good night and good luck.

PS. I have two posts ready to go up the very moment my gallery has pulled itself together, be warned.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5l-DZVYrPg[/youtube]

If you have been to Cain on a Wednesday in the last couple months you might have seen Dan Baxter hovering around with his video camera. He has been making videos from his collected footage. This is his second in a trilogy I believe. (First one is here.) Evidently the next one has a lot of shots of my anniversary party. This footage makes my life seem really fun I think. I shoot this party every week, but I am not sure I take a lot of time to enjoy it. It is a pretty crazy scene. Check out my photos from Playhouse and come out tonight. It is at 27th between 10th and 11th. It’s a good time.

Also, just FYI, I am still editing 5500 images I shot at SXSW. The updates will start tomorrow… I swear…

Playhouse – “The Sequel” from Daniel Baxter on Vimeo.

As far as I can tell Vampiro: Angel, Devil, Hero hasn’t really played much in the United States.  Most of their press quotes are from Canada and a lot of them are out of date.  When I saw the film at the Backseat Film Festival I was one of only four people in the audience and I got in for free.

Vampiro is a bad name for a documentary film about a Canadian born wrestler who became a star in Mexico.  It happens to be the name of the wrestler, but I would venture that with a name change, and a better publicist this film would be the talk of the town.  This should have played at Sundance.  Vampiro was easily the best film I have seen in 2009.  It was completely depressing that they couldn’t sell a few more tickets.  People need to be talking about this movie so I figured I would start.

Did you see the Wrestler?  I did.  It was great right?  Mickey Rourke was amazing…  Well you know who else was amazing in a film this year?  Ian Hodgkinson.  He is the man behind the make up.  He is the former drug addict, former stick up kid, former Milli Vanilli bodyguard turned Mexican Wrestling Superstar.  The movie is the story of Hodgkinsons attempt at starting a new promotion company on the eve of their first televised event.  As the film moves closer to the telecast it flashes back to the last year of his life that is setting up this one big night.  Also inter spliced are interviews with friends and former friends.  The story tells the tale of a man who despite a history of sexual abuse and living on the streets as a criminal and drug addict through sheer determination became one of the biggest stars in a country thousands of mines from his home in Canada.  He gave up a possible pro hockey career to try to make it as a wrestler which led him down a long strange path from Canada, to the streets, to Los Angeles and finally to the country he now calls his home.  22 years after he began, he is on the verge of retiring, trying to get into promotions so he can stop brutalizing his body night after night.  Not unlike in the Wrestler his doctor has told him he needs to retire or face an early grave.  Not unlike the Wrestler his family life is in big trouble.  But unlike Mickey Rourke’s character, Vampiro finds time to spend with his daughter and some how perseveres.  I would be very surprised if the Wrestler was not in some way inspired by either this film or just Vampiro’s life story.  There are too many similarities.  And as much as I love Mickey Rourke (Anyone have Barfly on DVD? Netflix hasn’t had it in two years.) I think Ian Hodgkinson could have had just as moving performance.  When the first tear drops from Vampiro’s face there was not a dry eye in the house…  All 8 of them.  This movie needs to be seen, it is a tragedy that it hasn’t been so far.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97clJGSHfD0&feature=related[/youtube]

I am busy at work on editing photos, working on a possible show or at least portfolio site, and getting ready for my SXSW trip. I am also trying to find work for Winter Music if anyone need a photog. (I might have time to shoot a party or two at SXSW as well, hit me up.) So long story short is that I am just going to throw some links at you. These are things I wanted to blog about, but haven’t really thought they justified a full post. So… here are 5 links, that I dig:

1. My friend Leah Taylor did some investigative journalism at Virgin Records the other day for the Flavorwire blog. She and a friend decided to check out all the cheap deals in store for us all. Her findings made me lough out loud twice. Seriously, I am sitting alone in the dark laughing at my computer screen. That does not happen often. If nothing else she gets you hip to the 10% sale on Christmas Gremlins. Only $24 after discount!

2. Street Boners & TV Carnage. I haven’t seen TV Carnage in years but when I saw some traffic coming to my site from a link posted in the comments section for a Street Boner post I rediscovered TV Carnage. TV Carnage were these DVD’s that just had hours of TV edited into hi-larious montages of bad television. But now they have all sorts of clips and you can still buy the old DVDs I think, rereleased and what not. My favorite was a montage of like 20 cops being asked to turn in their gun and their badge. Classic, yo.

3. What could possibly be better than LOL Cats? Rol Cats. I am not sure if these are found Russian LOL Cats then incorrectly translated into english, or if the whole thing is made up from the get go, but either way they are brilliant. I asked a Russian friend to translate the actual text and she just started laughing and asked me how I find such weird shit. I guess it is like the secrets of a Tootsie Roll Pop, the world will never know.

4. My brother came over to watch Lost last week and we had a conversation about TV we had been watching. I was convincing him to start the Wire and he demanded I watch the live action Tick show. I loved the cartoon, but when the live action Tick was on in like 2001, I tried watching one episode and gave up. I am pretty sure everyone else did too because their are only 9 episodes. That being said, we were all wrong, this show is fucking brilliant and it is now online for free.

5. The Huffington Post comedy section is pretty on point usually. I have been checking it ever since in the post election world they abandoned their original content site 23/6. I was a big 23/6 fan, but they still have some original stuff, and the stuff the aggregate is usually pretty top notch. But my favorite post of late has been their list of the 9 Weirdest PSA’s. I am going to post my favorite for you down below. After you watch it, read the article. And remember, EVERYBODY IS ON COCAINE!! EVERYONE!!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dN_Wp0uF_B0[/youtube]