I met Childish Gambino aka the comedian Donald Glover at SXSW this year when the web editor of Village Voice Media was writing a story on him for the Village Voice. The Voice ended up having enough time to get Donald into a studio for the cover shoot but they had me shoot some images at SXSW just incase they weren’t able to more shots later. I met Donald again a few days later backstage at the Village Voice / Frank 151 SXSW showcase.  He and Community co-star Danny Pudi spent some time looking though my photos on my iPad before they (with me in tow) got pulled back to Wu Tang’s dressing room. I ran into Donald one other time at SXSW and since then he and I have kept in touch.

Since meeting him I have been listening to his rap EP under the name Childish Gambino and I really love it.  He was playing two shows in NYC in May, one in Manhattan on the 10th and the second in Brooklyn on the 14th. I missed the show on the 10th but I went to the after party with a few friends. He freestyled for over an hour and Questlove filled in for him on drums. It was pretty impressive.  After that he invited us back to his penthouse at the Thompson hotel for an after party. It was a pretty good time so I figured I needed to pay him back by getting my ass to his Brooklyn show and taking some pictures.

On Saturday I showed up to the Williamsburg Hall of Music with several hundred other people ready to see the IAMDONALD tour in action.  Donald came out and did 20 minutes or so of stand up and then played a video that closely resembled one of the old Derrick Comedy sketches.  The video led the audience to his live Childish Gambino performance.  He brought out a full band and did at least an hour set of hip hop jams that rocked the crowd silly.  On one song the band takes a break and a video is played of one of my favorite comedians Reggie Watts crafting a beat for Donald which he raps over live. It was pretty legit.

The whole show was being taped for something and one of my favorite moments of the night was when, before he played his encore, the lights shined on the crowd and it turned out that The Soup host and Community star Joel McHale was one of the camera man and was filming the show from the crowd. The kids all around him went nuts.  Childish came back on, and fucked the crowd up with a killer encore and then I went home and tried to get some fucking sleep.  Good times.

Click here to see all the shots from the Donald Glover/Childish Gambino IAMDONALD tour at the Williamsburg Hall of Music.

Back in jury duty after trying to catch up on sleep and hanging out with a friend visiting from Atlanta.  I didn’t get any real work done but I did mostly clean out my inbox.  One more week of slow updates and jury duty will be over and it will be nice enough outside again that I will be wanting to party daily.  Expect some good rooftops parties and summer time madness coming very soon…

In the meantime I am trying to come up with reasons to post and I decided to post some shots from a sweet 16 party I shot a few weeks ago.  Normally I wouldn’t post shots like this, but it wasn’t your normal sixteen year old’s birthday.  This girl Leaf celebrated her birthday at the Red Bull Space in Tribeca and she had performances from Hyper Crush, Dev and my homie Shwazye. Leaf also performed and is a talented musician in her own right. Oh, and did I mention that Usher showed up and was just hanging out?

I edited this gallery down to mostly just shots of the performances since it’s a little weird to be posting a bunch of shots of 16 year olds on my blog, but I left in a few fun crowd shots and of course pictures of the artists and Usher hanging out in the roped off VIP area.  Why didn’t my 16th birthday party have a VIP area?  Actually maybe it did… I certainly don’t remember it…

Anyway, I should get back to judging people right now, but you guys should click here to see some of the shots from Leaf’s Sweet 16 Party at the Red Bull Space.

A month ago I was a pretty big fan of the TV show Community.  Today I am a pretty big fan of one of Community’s stars Donald Glover. I didn’t really know anything about Donald Glover other than he and his partner in crime on the show (Abed, played by Danny Pudi) were my favorite parts of the show, which is impressive since the show features Chevy Chase and the always hilarious Dr. turned comedians Ken Jeong.  But while I was at SXSW I was asked by the web editor of Village Voice Media if I could take some photos of Donald for a story he was doing on him.

The story was on Donald’s versatility. Not only does Donald do stand up and act, but it turns out he is actually rapper that goes by the name Childish Gambino. When I found out I was going to be shooting him I googled him and listened to a song real quick. I thought it was entertaining enough. I also found out he was one of the main guys in Derrick Comedy a web video comedy team who’s videos I am sure you have seen.

So I headed down to the Austin Music Hall a few hours before Donald was hosting MTV U Woodie Awards there. The original idea was that I was going to shoot him getting ready for the show or something but when I got there I found out that I had 15 minutes to shoot him outside.  It was super bright out and I had no location so we walked around for a bit and couldn’t find anything good. They told me that I should go find a location and that we could try to shoot again right before the show if I was willing to come back. I told them that would work but I wanted to get some shots just incase so we shot for about 3 minutes up against a fence and then up against a truck. They weren’t very inspired but I figured I would get another chance.

Unfortunately they got behind with the Woodies and I didn’t get to shoot him that day, but he showed up to the Village Voice Media music party and I ran into him back stage. He and Danny Pudi spent like 20 minutes looking at the photos on my iPad and we hung out by Wu Tang’s dressing room talked about shooting again in a few days.  Both of the guys seemed like rad dudes. Plus I got to see Childish Gambino live and he absolutely killed it. Seriously, he was amazing. I was not prepared for that.

A few days later Donald had this comedy show at SXSW and I was going to meet up with him before it. Unfortunately I didn’t get there in time to shoot again but we made plans to meet up later to shoot. Unfortunately that didn’t happen either.  Luckily he was going to be in NYC and it was looking like this article was going to be for the cover of the Village Voice and I might get to shoot it.  Again, luck was not on my side and the art director of the Voice wanted studio shots which is not what I do.  All of this was a bummer.

Now all that aside it turned out to be a good experience anyway.  First of all, Bill Jensen’s cover on Donald came out today and it is really great and they used a few of my photos. You need to read it now. Secondly, I got turned on to Childish Gambino. I understand why he goes by the pseudonym. If you hear about a comedy rapper you might think it’s a joke, but Childish is seriously awesome.  Download his free EP now. Thirdly, Donald and Danny both said they will let me shoot them in the future which should be fun, plus Donald might by a photo from me which I cannot complain about, and lastly and most importantly the shots I took came out pretty great and that is the whole point of this damn post.

Click here to see all my shots of Donald Glover AKA Childish Gambino.

Well, the end of my coverage anyway.  I have finally finished all my South By Southwest posts! And just two weeks later! Luckily I have figured out a better system to deal with shit on the road so hopefully next time I go on a long trip I will be able to be updating much more on the road.  But yeah, this is pretty much the end of my SXSW photos.  In truth I have some portraits of Donald Glover and a mini photo essay on a trip to IHOP with Rocky Business but we will save those for another time. For now I just bring you everything else that didn’t fit into any of the other galleries!

As exciting as that sounds this gallery actually has some pretty cool stuff in it. It’s got celebrities and some nice natural light night time street photography and even a photo of three comedians Permanent Resident ID cards! Pretty exciting stuff. Let’s break this thing down for you a little more even. This gallery starts with a shot of Conan O’Brian in a PRB shirt and ends with a photo of Rainn Wilson jokingly giving me shit for taking his photo.  In the middle are random party photos, street shots, photos from a taping of John Oliver’s New York Stand Up Show, a lot of New Yorkers, shots of Matthew Lesco and a midget Mike Tyson at the convention center, pics from the FourSquare four square court, random pics from the IFC Crossroads House, a portrait of the writer, director and star of Attack The Block and a few photos of Community’s Danny Pudi that I just turned into a hilarious animated Gif.  Good times.

So now that you know what this gallery is all about, you need to fucking click right here to check it the fuck out.

South By Southwest is more than just a music festival. The Interactive part of SXSW is getting bigger and bigger every year but it seems like SXSW Film gets a bit over looked. This is a mistake. The SXSW Film Fest is amazing. I have probably seen 25 movies at the festival over the last few years and I can’t think of one movie I didn’t like and I have seen a bunch that I loved.  This year I didn’t get to see as many as I would have liked to but I saw some great movies. I am not going to write anything up because I went in a lot of this stuff before.  You can read my write up of a few of the 2011 SXSW Films here. But I did want to get up all my red carpet shots for you guys. I know the ladies will be psyched to see the Jake Gyllenhall pics from the Source Code premiere. So yeah, get excited.

Click here to see all the 2011 SXSW Film red carpet shots at the Paramount in downtown Austin, TX.

My friend Robyn is an amazing photographer and has been a fan of Driven By Boredom since the very beginning. Well, that’s not exactly true, she probably doesn’t give a fuck about my site these days but she was a big fan 10 years ago when we first started corresponding. She was from Canada so the first time I met her was in 2006 or 2007 when she visited NYC for the first time.  I drove her to Philly to visit the Mütter Museum and I took her to an underground comedy show because she was a huge stand up fan. Amazingly one of her favorite comics David Cross was the suprise guest and she was really fucking excited.  A few short years later Robyn is one of the best photographers I know and she specializes in shooting comedians. She has had posters all over NYC so you have seen her work even if you don’t know it. (She also shot my Twitter avatar.) She even got to shoot David Cross for the Comedy Death Ray 2010 calendar.

That gets us to the point of this damn post.  Comedy Death Ray.  CDR is a comedy show held every Tuesday at the UCB theater in LA.  It features amazing comedians every week and Robyn has taken me to it a few times while I have been in LA and I have always had a blast. So when I got the press release from IFC about Comedy Death Ray doing a special South By Southwest edition at the IFC Crossroads House I knew I had to show up.

The show was held in this tiny studio inside the IFC Crossroads House which was a pretty weird thing.  The Crossroads House was a place people could go and get free pretzels and beer all throughout SXSW and they brought in bands and actors and things to do interviews or play music in the studio. They would let a very small group of press and guests into the very small studio but most people had to watch from outside the sound proof room on TV screens or through glass windows.  As a member of the press I was let inside the studio and it made for a very surreal experience watching all the people outside looking in like we were in some sort of fish bowl.  Every single comedian made a joke about it and they were all very funny.

The line up was pretty stellar. It was hosted by Scott Aukerman who created CDR. He did a bit that wasn’t exactly laugh out loud funny, but was disturbing and sort of amazing. There was a method to his madness but I think the result was better than explaining the whole thing, so all you need to know is that by the end of his bit he had a random audience member shirtless, wearing a wig, with lip gloss all over his face on the floor mooing like a cow. It was pretty nuts.

Thomas Lennon from the State and Reno 911 was up next and did a lot of gay jokes which is justified by bringing up his GLAAD Award for his role as Lt. Jim Dangle on Reno. I think they were more easily justified as just being really fucking funny. (For the record when you do a google search on Thomas Lennon as soon as you get to Thomas Len google prompts you with “Thomas Lennon gay”.) I am a huge fan of Thomas Lennon from the State days, maybe the most underrated TV show ever Viva Variety, and of course Reno 911. I even saw Taxi on a plane because he wrote it although I still don’t have the guts to sit through “The Pacifier”.

Next up was New Yorker and hilarious Russian Eugene Mirman. It was actually Eugene’s show Invite Them Up that I took Robyn too those many years ago. I met Eugene at SXSW in 2005 and kept running into him randomly up until I started attending Invite Them Up every week and my run ins with him became decidedly less random. Eugene is always hilarious and always very, very weird and his CDR SXSW performance was no exception. His best bit involved him showing off actual Facebook ads he placed for things ranging from helping you love eye contact with disabled people to blatant extortion. Good times.

Next up was Dave Foley from the motherfucking Kids In The Hall. Robyn as a Canadian was the biggest Kids In The Hall fan I have ever met and she was also a huge fan of DBB so she once stalked Mark McKinney outside of a show and got him to hold up a fan sign for me. I too being a big KITH fan was fucking psyched.  I was also fucking psyched to get to meet Dave Foley which happened not once, but twice at SXSW and on top of that I got to see him do stand up. His stand up was great but there was a short period where it seemed he had lost the croud, but he came back from it with a solid joke and then asked how much time he had left. IFC informed him he had two minutes so he proceeded to just stand on stage silently for two straight minutes. It ended up being possibly the funniest part of his act. Brilliant!

After Dave Foley came Thomas Lennon’s State and Viva Variety co-star Michael Ian Black.  “MIB” as the kids call him is most famous for doing fucking Sierra Mist commercials which is probably a travesty since he has been part of a million brilliant things. Equally tragic is his show Stella getting canceled after one season on Comedy Central. MIB also owns the distinction as the first celebrity I ever talked to via social networking as we once exchanged messages on Friendster about how exactly Stella got the dick on the fish. (The answer: a lot of fishing line.) At CDR he did a comedic monologue about sky diving with Thomas Lennon that involved vomit and his wife calling him a pussy. It was lovely.

Finally Aziz Ansari closed the night out doing almost all new material. I used to be decent friends with Aziz but I haven’t seen him since he got super famous and started hosting awards shows, stealing scenes in Judd Apatow films, and starring in maybe the funniest show on TV that’s not about the weather in Philadelphia. I actually met the guy at SXSW years ago and then he started coming out to parties I was shooting. I was pretty active in the comedy scene when I first moved to NYC and Aziz was one of the few comics who actually liked to go to hipster dance parties. He moved to LA but he is back now so hopefully he will be showing up on DBB more often. His set killed it as always but the craziest part of the whole night was when I tried to talk to him after the show. A huge crowd swarmed around him and he took photos with about, and I am not even exaggerating, 50 people. It was nuts, it was like he was a very patient Beatle getting mobbed by awkward indie rock nerds instead of screaming 15 year old girls. I got to talk to him for a few seconds but I let him get the fuck out of there before he had to pose for another 50 photos.

So yeah, there is a crazy long, oddly personal account of the show. You should click here to see all the pictures from the Comedy Death Ray SXSW show at the IFC Crossroads House.

As I mentioned before the Village Voice and Frank 151 showcase at Austin Music Hall was one of the best shows at South By Southwest. With headliners Wu-Tang, Fishbone and Yelawolf with a stand out performance by Rocky Business and a surprise performance by Childish Gambino this was the show to beat of the festival.  I took 1100 photos at the event so I am going to be breaking this down into four posts and ten galleries. WuTang and Rocky Business are going to get their own posts and then all the rest of the photos are going to be broken up into two posts, this being the first.

This first post we are going to focus on the party photos and not so much the bands.  I shot a bunch of random crowd shots earlier in the night, but at some point I convinced the bouncers that it was a good idea that I had backstage access despite me not having any legitimate credentials.  So I broke that stuff down into two galleries, crowd shots and backstage photos.  The crowd shots are pretty self explanitory although I guess I should remind you that it was St. Patricks Day which might explain some of the drunks wearing green.  The back stage shots probably require some commentary.

Ultimately I probably should have had backstage credentials since I was working for the Village Voice at their showcase, but my editor told me I couldn’t get them.  Fortunately for me I am pretty good at getting past bouncers and after showing him my Village Voice SXSW badge and pointing up to the big Village Voice banner I was let back stage. I hung out mostly in Rocky Business dressing room and used my access to shoot the bands from on stage. But right before Childish Gambino played I left the back stage area and was told that since the headliners were going on they were kicking everyone out of the back stage area and I couldn’t get back in. Meanwhile I watched someone bribe a bouncer as he was telling me to fuck off.  I quickly ran up two flights and convinced another bouncer to let me onto the VIP side balcony and then I worked my way down to the back stage area.

By this time Childish Gambino AKA comedian Donald Glover was off stage and hanging out. I had met him a day or two earlier because my editor was working on a story on Donald/Childish for the Voice. I took a few photos of him, but while I was setting up he checked out a bunch of my photos on my iPad. He loved the shots and told me he might want to buy one of them. So when I saw him back stage we started talking and I broke out my iPad again. Donald was with his Community co-star Danny Pudi and the two of them just sat there checking out my photos for about 20 minutes.  While they were looking at the photos one of Wu-Tang’s entourage told them he was a big Community fan and brought the back to the Wu-Tang dressing room.  Donald still had my iPad so I went with them.  The whole thing was pretty surreal.  Later I got stuck in a small stairwell for about 10 minutes with Erykah Badu while security tried to lock shit down before Wu-Tang. On top of that Bam Margera was back stage and there was an insane amount of weed being smoked back there. It was a pretty good party back there.

So yeah, you should take a look at all these pictures.  Start by checking out the general crowd shots from the VV Media/Frank 151 SXSW showcase by clicking here. And then if you want to take a look at all the back stage happenings from the party you should probably click here.  And then come back soon for more pics from the event.

Friday night at Webster Hall was packed. I heard it sold out but it didn’t seem as crazy as some other nights but it was still very clearly out of control in there. Skrillex and Tommy Lee with DJ Areo were all upstairs for Girls & Boys and people seem to really care about such things.  I was a huge fucking Motely Crue fan when I was 10 so I can understand.  Other than the sort of surrealness of the dude from the Pam Anderson sex tape standing next to you the highlight was clearly Skrillex.

Despite taking photos of and being friends with tons and tons of DJs I don’t actually listen to dance music so unless I know the dude I usually have no idea who anyone is. People kept being like “It’s Sonny Moore from From First to Last”, but since I am not at all emo or whatever I would have to be to listen to what Wikipedia calls “post hardcore” I had no idea who he was.  Clearly about 1500 people at Webster Hall did know who Skrillex was and he rocked the fuckers. Since I can’t tell the difference between one DJ and the next all I can do is judge stage performance and how crazy the crowd gets and Skrillex passed with flying colors. He put on a great show and got these kids going nuts and that’s all you can ask as far as I am concerned. Also I feel like I have hung out with this Sonny Moore guy before but I can’t place where.  Maybe SXSW or WMC or something but I am 99% sure I have taken his photo before. If anyone can figure that out let me know.

Moving on… Downstairs my homegirl Andie Cassette was DJing Trash and celebrating her birthday.  Fat Shain was also celebrating his birthday.  My love for those kids was why I showed up to Webster in the first place.  Andie rocked the crowd that wasn’t flooding the upstairs and Shain just caused a bunch of trouble.  Suicide Girl Bettina did a burlesque number and Albert Cadabra did things with a balloon I best not speak of.  Apathy and Dangrr Doll did some topless go-going as well so the whole gallery gets a NSFW stamp on it. Whatever the case it was a fun night.

Click here to see all the pictures from Trash and Girls & Boys at Webster Hall.

So it’s time to start getting Vegas pictures up. I hope you are excited. I have four galleries and I plan on posting one a day although if I shoot more stuff tonight or tomorrow I might double up and I might always fuck up and not update at all.  That being said, the tentative schedule is AVN Awards pictures today, pictures from CES tomorrow, AEE on Wednesday and finally saving the insane Burning Angel party pictures for last. They are pretty epic, you don’t want to miss that. So let’s get it on…

The AVN Awards for those not in the know are the Adult Video News Awards and they are pretty much the porn oscars. I shot the red carpet last year and honestly it was more trouble than it was worth so this year I tried to change things up. I made sure I got photo access in the actual awards and then I decided to show up late for the red carpet and just catch the very end of it. The carpet was scheduled from 6:30 to 8:30 so I figured if I showed up at 7:30 I would be good. The problem is that the press check in was at 5 and when I got to the Palms Casino at 7:30 I had no idea where to go and there were fans everywhere watching the red carpet and I couldn’t even get near it. The Jets/ Colts game was on and I hate the Jets so I watched the end of it screaming in agony when they kicked a last second field goal to win. At this point it was 8pm and I figured I should probably get on the red carpet, but I still didn’t know where to go. I followed the fans up stream of the red carpet until I got to some security and they let me pass even though I was at the wrong end of the red carpet. They told me to walk down to the other end but I realized that by the end of the red carpet I could be away from all the photographers, the last photo they take before they enter the casino and I wouldn’t have to shoot on a step and repeat wall. It worked out perfectly. I also happened to be the only photographer around when Andy Dick got kicked out…

Meanwhile my friend Tom had come down from LA to hang out with me but couldn’t get into the awards so he was just going to play penny slots until I got out of the awards.  He was up $30 when some random guy came up to him and handed him a ticket to the awards.  The tickets cost $300 each and there were hundreds of fans trying to get in, yet somehow he was just handed a ticket.  He texted me that he was inside so I made my way into the show and actually ended up walking up the red carpet myself which was pretty funny.  I shot a bunch of people in the loby and in the auditorium itself. I ran into Justin from Semi Precious Weapons who was with Pauly Shore of all people. That was pretty great. After that I made my way to my seat and I found that there was an empty space next to me so I texted Tom to see if he wanted to come sit with me.  Turns out the ticket he got was a 7th row ticket in the very middle of the stage. He was sitting with all the big porn stars and stuff. It was pretty funny.

The awards themselves were pretty entertaining for a while but there are so many awards that it drags on a bit so I shot a bunch of photos at the bar throughout the night. Lisa Lampanelli was the host and was pretty funny. The highlight was probably when she called Michelle Bombshell a nazi skank without realizing that Michelle Bombshell was actually at the awards. I am not sure if you care who won what or not… I know I don’t but I do want to congratulate a couple of my friends on their big wins. My homie Andy San Dimas won the best actress award for her roll in the porn version of Glee and my friend Joanna Angel won for best porn star website. Congrats girls!  If you want to know who won stuff you can click here.

So I think that’s all I got for you for today. There are a bunch of highlights down below and then you can click here to see all the photos from the 2011 AVN Awards.  And while most of the porn stars kept their clothes on I can say pretty certainly that this gallery is NSFW.