First of all, can we make a decision about the word afterparty? Is it one word or two? This drives me crazy.  I typed after party as two words three different times in my last post and now I get to this post and look up the flyer for the Gorillaz thing and they have it as one word. Spell check tells me that it’s two words, but I have never been one to use spell check… I just need to make a choice and stick to it.

Moving on… Friday night after Semi Precious Weapons at Iriving Plaza I headed over to Spin New York, which is a Ping Pong spot that The Fader turned into an after party for the Gorillaz Madison Square Garden’s show.  They are in town promoting their newish album Plastic Beach. When I got there the party was a total clusterfuck of people trying to get in and evidently I wasn’t on the list.  I was shooting it for the Voice, but when they confirmed the PR woman never got back to them, and I never got back to the Voice so they didn’t follow up and the whole thing got forgotten about and when I got there I got yelled at by reasonably helpful bouncers who were totally fucking stressed out. Luckily Cornerstone was doing the PR for it and my boy Nick the Duke works there so I got him to start texting people and by the time I found the PR woman she had been texted by 5 different people about me. So I finally got in and she hooked me up with a VIP thing for free Red Stripe & Bushmills for my troubles. I don’t actually drink but I appreciate it anyway.  So yeah, big thanks to Nick and Sonia from Cornerstone.

Anyway, the party was very cool and really hard to shoot.  I am still not used to my new camera and I really need a mid zoom, but I gotta stop bitching about that already.  Even though the party had a big line outside they kept it intimate which made it actually possible to play ping pong and pretty much everyone was.  I didn’t get a chance to play myself, but everyone else was having a ton of fun. Wally Green is a pro ping pong player I met at an equally hard to shoot ping pong related event a few years ago and he was MCing and playing pong.  Rezoud DJd and I heard Juda Friedlander was playing people before I got there.  He was actually walking out when I was walking in.  The Gorillaz guys were all there but I don’t know who was who because they don’t look like cartoons.  I think that Damon Albarn from the Gorillaz was actually playing ping pong with his Blur guitarist Graham Coxon at some point but I am not %100 sure on that.  All I know is someone told me not to take photos of it when it was happening. I took a couple anyway on the sly but they sucked.  I was also not allowed to shoot in the VIP room which I respected. All and all it was sort of hectic but it was a very cool event and I am pretty sure everyone had an awesome time.

Click here to check out all the photos from the Official Gorillaz Afterparty at Spin New York.

UPDATE: Read the comments for some info on who is who….

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