I have spent the last few days talking about pretty much nothing but Tila Tequila. It is a weird thing for me since I didn’t know a thing about her before Friday. I vaguely had some sense of who she was, but I had no idea she made music until I saw her on the Gathering of the Juggalos schedule. I still, days later, haven’t figured out why Juggalos hate her so much. Some girl told me it was because she is on MTv but so was Tom Green and the Juggalos loved him.  Tom Green actually came out on stage during her set and no one threw anything at him.  If you look at the picture of him below you will notice that the Faygo bottle flying in the air is actually going past him.

Now let me explain how I got these pictures. I had actually just left Tom Green.  I was hanging out with him before his set at the Gathering. I was a big fan growing up and I love his web TV show, so it was great to meet him and I wanted to see his set. Plus Gallagher was hanging out so the level of surrealness was through the roof. I didn’t want to leave but I was afraid I would miss something exactly like what ended up happening.

I had heard all these rumors that people were going to attack her but I didn’t really believe it. I hadn’t seen any of the Juggalos throw more than a half full Faygo bottle at anyone. Everyone was so nice to us I couldn’t really see them throwing rocks and fireworks and shit and piss at her. Still, if they did and she got kicked off stage it would be something I needed photos of for the Village Voice story I was working on.  I made my way over to the second stage and waited, and waited, and waited….

I didn’t think she was ever going to show up but I was having a pretty good time hanging out on the back of the stage.  I was the only photographer there and I was talking to Sugar Slam who is the star of the Gathering of the Juggalos infomercial which was like talking to Tay Zonday or Chris Crocker or something. I also was flirting with this cute girl with one leg who is an internet sensation of her own. Maybe an hour after she was booked to go on security came by and kicked everyone off the back stage but with my VIP pass I managed to stay on stage.

I was towards the back when Tila Tequila finally showed up. As she played people immediately started throwing things at her. I had already been hit with a glass liquor bottle and I was in the back.  She was getting hit by everything her security guards couldn’t knock down but she kept going.  She was going full steam as the juggalos tried to take her down. She got hit in the head with a rotten egg and just kept on using it like styling gel. At this point all my shots were from the back so I decided to do something stupid.  I walked out on stage.

I asked a security guard if I could come out on stage and he told me that I would be an idiot to try it but he wasn’t going stop me.  So I set up camp on the front corner of the stage while she stayed to the back and started shooting.  While I was on the stage I got hit with all sorts of shit, literally. I got covered in what was probably a mixture of beer, Faygo and urine.  My back hurt for two days from stuff I will never know. I saw on the stage rocks and dildos and garbage and rotten everything. It was so gross and the rocks were so big.  M-80s were going off and I am pretty sure people were intentionally trying to hit me with stuff.  Still, I didn’t care. I was the only member of the media there and I wanted to get my shots of this epic show. (Click here if you want to see a video of the show so you can see where I was shooting from.)

Eventually my editor at the Voice showed up with Tom Green (read her account here) and Tom came out on stage to try to settle the crowd down. It did not work. After he left it became a battle field. A guy tried to charge the stage and security ran into the crowd to take away a huge barrel from an angry juggalo. It was chaos. For some reason she took her shirt off to try to persuade the juggalos that she was awesome.  And she was awesome. She was killing it and taking so much fucking abuse. She needed to be playing in front of chicken wire or something. She is the GG Allin of reality TV or something.  Seriously, I was so fucking turned on by how bad ass she was. I have never seen anyone take that much violence with out even blinking. And she never stopped playing.

I didn’t see what hit her in the eye, I heard it was a brick and I heard it was a fire cracker. Either way she was holding an afghan scarf to her face while she sang.  She looked at me for a second and held it to her head and she played on.  A few minutes later she was hit by something else and was leaking blood out of both sides of her face.  When security saw that they basically carried her off stage, but she never relented and talked shit until the very end. It was so bad ass and I got the only shots.

The juggalos chased her into the trailer and started rocking it and breaking windows.  We left with Tom Green and crew and I didn’t see what happened but she did eventually escape with her life. It was one of the more fucked up things I have witnessed but it was pretty amazing to be part of a national news story like that.  I just want to say that as cool as the juggalos were to me, shit like this is pretty hard to forgive.  Most of the people I talked to thought that bricks went to far, but I didn’t find many people who didn’t think she deserved some of it. That’s pretty hard for me to imagine.

Anyway, Tila Tequila is a fucking bad ass in my book. I would go see her any time and I will have her back any time anyone is talking shit.  That girl is a bad ass fucking front woman and she has my respect forever. The juggalos are still mostly cool in my book but this was by far the low point of the trip.

But let’s get on to the pictures finally: Click here to see pictures of Tila Tequilla attacked by juggalos at the 2010 Gathering of the Juggalos. NSFW.

For complete 2010 Gathering Of The Juggalos coverage please check out the Driven By Boredom GOTJ archives.

Just kidding. If you clicked over from Twitter or Tumblr or your RSS feeder you have been fooled! I have no Hannah Montana child porn for you no matter how much you want it. Seriously, that is gross. Why did you click that link? What the Hell is wrong with you?

All jokes aside I have nothing fun for you today. Just a little house keeping and some links.  I just thought Miley Cyrus Naked would be a better title than “Bullshit you don’t care about, and other links”.

Mostly I just wanted to tell you guys that I am going on Vacation. I will be gone Saturday to Tuesday and then as soon as I get back on Wednesday I leave for another few days to cover THE GATHERING OF THE FUCKING JUGGALOS for the Village Voice. That is really happening. I will be sleeping in an RV for 4 days in the middle of nowhere so I have my doubts that things will get updated at all. I don’t even know if I will have electricity. That is for serious.

So things will be a bit slow next week and clearly they are slow right now. I have an update for you tomorrow, and I hope I will shoot some parties either tonight or tomorrow so I have some shots ready to go for the weekend, but like I said, it might be slow around here for a little while.

So to kill time while you are impatiently refreshing my page over and over again to see if I have updated you could check out some new stuff I have online.

Here are some of the Dos & Don’ts I have shot for Vice Magazine recently: Don’t, Do, Don’t, Do, Don’t, Do, & Don’t

Here are some of my naked photos that have showed up on Gawker’s adult blog, Fleshbot, recently (NSFW): Andy, Dana, Shay & Tayte.

Here are some new Village Voice galleries: Naked Art Party, Gallery Bar, Greenhouse, & Trash.

Complex.com wrote and article on Ellen Stagg and I took the the picture of her for it.

I have some stuff in Inked Magazine this month (and most months).

And lastly, here is a picture of the Mario Kart parked outside of my apartment every day. Oh, and sorry again about the Miley Cyrus thing…

When I saw the bill for the 4th Anniversary of Eugene Mirman’s comedy show Tearing the Veil of the Maya I knew I had to be there. When I first moved to NYC I was at underground comedy shows like Tearing the Veil two or three times a week. I hung out at comedy parties and I knew most of the down town comics.  When I saw the bill for the show at the Bell House I realized I used to hang out with every person on the line up except for the Daily Show’s Wyatt Cenac who is fucking hilarious. I knew it would be a good show and a good chance to see old friends.

I had no intention of shooting the show but I happened to have my telephoto lens on me from an earlier shoot so I pulled it out and took about two photos of each comic. I wasn’t really thinking about doing a post about it but I figured I could maybe put a few shots on my Tumblr or something. It was really too dark to shoot anything. The show started out with AD Miles and Leo Allen just completely killing it. Miles told a story about how his wife busted a robber who broke into their home and Leo did a slide show that explained that dogs were funnier than cats, and vomit is funnier than diarrhea. It was joyful. Wyatt Cenac came on next and was fucking great. I had only seen him once before and I am a pretty big fan so it was great to see him get into it. But right after Wyatt finished the night took a weird turn.

A special guest was introduced. It was Gibby Haynes from the Butthole Surfers. I was pretty excited. This guy has made a career out of doing crazy shit (plus making awesome music) and I was pretty excited to see what he would do.  He came out and did some jokes about child rape and just horrifying shit like that. And people were less horrified than they were confused. Pretty soon it was clear that him telling these jokes was the actual joke.  He then introduced himself and explained that he had been doing cover jokes, like he was a cover band and then he proceeded to do his actual set. It was pretty clear that Gibby Hanes is not a comedian, but he is a showman and as he offended more and more people with his poorly timed totally offensive jokes people actually started laughing and when he pulled out a little plastic doll leg from his bag he almost had the crowd on his side… A least until he referred to it as a “negro leg”. He said “negro leg” about 10 times before some girl in the audience yelled “stop saying negro!” and then “you aren’t funny!” He got on her case and started yelling offensive stuff at her.  The crowd reaction was mixed. It got the biggest laughs but people also started yelling shit out at him in her defense.  At some point he asked to be booed off the stage which he may have been going for to begin with, but people wouldn’t do it and so he told the crowd he had one more thing for them.  He reached in to his bag and was about to pull something out when the girl who started the whole thing jumped on stage and tried to grab the mic from him.  When Eugene Mirman ran on stage to stop her she turned to head back to her seat which is when Gibby shot her in the back of the head with the confetti cannon he was trying to pull out of his bag. He had probably meant to spray the audience, but it was perfect kismet that the the climax of his act just happened to be the perfect weapon.  The crowd was pretty much silent as he walked off stage, but as Eugene Mirman tried to calm down the crowd people started to realize what we had just seen and everyone just started uncontrollably laughing.  I was pretty much crying. The whole thing was so fucked up and so funny and so brilliant. I was almost  hoping the girl was a plant because that would have been some real Andy Kaufman shit right there… Either way it was life changing.

Eugene finally settled the crowd down and the love-of-my-life Kristen Schaal read Taint Monologues from her new Sexy Book Of Sexy Sex. She was amazing and it really got the crowd back into it immediately. Then Todd Barry performed and there are few comedians as good at just talking about what just happened as Todd.  Todd’s material is great but when he is just ranting at the audience and making shit up he is brilliant. Gibby gave him so much material and he fucking killed it. It was the perfect ending to easily one of the best comedy shows top to bottom I have ever seen. And I have seen a lot of comedy shows…

Like I said I barely took any photos and most of them sucked, but I needed to tell this story and there are a few okay images of some really fucking funny people. So you should click here to see all the photos from the 4th Anniversary of Tearing The Veil Of The Maya at The Bell House.

Thursday night was sort of madness. I went down to the Roosevelt pool at about 5pm and I didn’t get home until around 9am. I am just glad I brought my camera with me.  I hung out by the pool with some hot babes and my friend Jason who used to be the editor for Inked but now works for Playboy.  Playboy sent him to LA for E3 but he had some meetings cancled so I hung out with him for two days in his gigantic suite. I guess he hasn’t quite made the switch to Playboy from Inked yet because all the girls we were hanging with were Burning Angels instead of Playmates. I’m not complaining. After the pool we went back to his suite to watch the Lakers game.  When the Lakers won there were riots all over the place, but in Hollywood it was mostly just kids screaming outside.  I kinda wanted to photograph the riots but instead I took a ton of naked photos of Pheonix from Burning Angel who is pretty much just retardedly hot.  I think that was the better move. Those photos should be up pretty soon…

After the shoot we went back down to the pool where there was a huge party going on.  I had no idea Night Swim was a thing but it was pretty much amazingly fun.  The first two people I saw where Franki Chan and Spank Rock so it was great to see people I knew right away. I walked about 10 feet and Todd from Inked had a bottle and was surrounded by a half dozen Inked models.  I walked around the pool and I saw my friend Tyler sitting with Bam Margera (who was maybe as drunk as I have seen anyone ever) and Johnny from Kill Hanna and Ashes Divide.  Later I ran into an ex and the first girl ever to get the Driven By Boredom tattoo.  Right then I ran into my friend Nikki who I built a website for. I turned around and my friend Presely who was one of the first Suicide Girls was tapping me on the shoulder. Later I ran into one of the hottest girls ever who just happens to be my LA crush’s sister who introduced me to this guy Aaron Paul who I realized I had met and sort of hung out with at Sundance two years ago.  He is on the show Breaking Bad which I have yet to see but everyone keeps telling me is amazing.  I also ran into my aforementioned LA crush and met a bunch of fun people and cute girls and even a few fun cute girls.  The whole thing was great.

After they kicked us out of the pool I invited about 20 random people up to Jason’s suite for a party that lasted about 10 minutes until the security guards kicked us out.  There were three guards led by one of the bigest humans I have ever seen in my life, so that party ended pretty quickly.  When everyone left we were down to Jason and I, the Burning Angels Jessie Lee and Phoenix and Jorma from The Bronx with his girlfriend and friend. Everytime I hang out with Jorma in LA shit gets crazy but he and his girlfriend needed to go to bed so their visit was cut short.  The rest of us just spent the next two hours laughing crazily about shit for no reason.  I honestly don’t remember much of it, but at one point we were throwing forks at eachother and through out the two nights they drank every thing in the mini bar and orderded about $500 in room service. It was total madness.

Right before we were about to head out we got a phone call from Jorma. Evidently his girlfriend had left her phone in the room. It was on vibrate and the room was a mess of botttles and cans and trash and Playboy magazines so it took us a while to look for it, but after a good search we realized it couldn’t be anywhere. When we told Jorma that he asked us if we had looked in her purse which he said would be right next to her shoes.  What?  Clearly there was no purse or shoes here, we had searched the whole place.  When we left the apartment Jorma and his girlfriend were standing in the hall way and she had no shoes on.  They were so drunk they told us they had just been in the elevator for the last three hours.  We told them we couldn’t find the phone.  Jorma’s girlfriend was worried because there were “dirty” pictures on the phone.  Jorma was like “Who care’s if someone sees your boobs?” and she was like “But baby, they are of you!”  At that point Jessie Lee just lost it and was pretty much crying with laughter.  When we left them they were standing in the elevator even though they didn’t have a key to make it move.  It was sort of a legendary evening. I beleive they amazing eventually found their stuff somewhere on the 5th floor of the hotel.

I then drove Phoenix to Joanna Angel’s house in the Valley and then took Jessie Lee to her friends house in Silver Lake and finally made it home around nine in the morning.  It was noon in NYC and all my friends were just waking up. Good times.

Click here to see all the pictures from Night Swim at the Roosevelt Hotel pool. The rest of the evening went pretty much undocumented… Which is probably for the best.

One of the most trafficked blogs I have ever posted was a few nude pictures a friend sent me of the now infamous Hipster Grifter.  For some reason I was the only person who had them, and when her fameball burned brightest I was getting tens of thousand hits a day.  Well Kari Ferrell is out of jail now and trying to make her way back into the spotlight.  I posted pictures of her at the Webutante Ball and pictures of her at Sway without her shirt on.  She is back in Utah now but she is making the move to NYC soon and is working on a reality show, still writing for Animal and in general doing weird shit all the time.  She is actually rad as fuck but I keep an eye on my wallet at all times.

The other night I got her naked while we were waiting for the J train.  I think you should click here to see all the pictures of Kari Ferrell AKA the Hipster Grifter naked. Obviously NSFW.

It’s Internet Week in New York and you know what that means? Tech parties.  Tech parties are the best because they have open bars and really awkward people get very drunk and start dancing.  But because they aren’t pretentious assholes like most of my friend everyone actually has fun. A NYC tech party is a bit different because they retain some of that NY pretension, but they still get down.

Welcome to the Webutante Ball, held at Marquee of all places.  It was a semi-formal event that was the dance portion of the home coming weekend that is Internet Week. A few web celebs showed up and I took pictures of whoever I could just assuming they ran some powerful web business that could crush me. For example, you know when you see someone you think is your friend and you tap them on the shoulder and it turns out not to be them? Well come guy did that to me last night and I told him that I wasn’t his friend, but I demanded that we become friends instantly and I made him pose for a photo… Well it turns out that guy was Dennis Crowley who created Foursquare and got drunk and told basically Google to fuck themselves in a recent Wired UK article. Good times.

The Ball was held to honor all sorts of internet celebrities and internet wanna be celebrities.  Conan O’Brien and Betty White were named King and Queen of the ball, however they were not there so some sort of honors were bestowed upon fame ball runners up Kari Ferrell (The Hipster Grifter) and Arthur Kade.  Julia Allison was there and was inducted into the fameball hall of fame and Foursquare also won something.  It was all wonderful and exciting.

The whole thing was pretty much just a good excuse for the internets to come together, get very drunk and network.  I had a good time and got to hang out with a bunch of the Gawker crew and of course my new grifting homie Kari.  Oh, speaking of Kari, this guy won a contest to be her date to the ball! Amazing.

Okay, moving on, click here to see all the pictures from the Webutante Ball at Marquee.  And then you can click here if you want to see the same exact photos on the Voice, Time Out NY or the Daily Beast.

PS. When you look through the gallery can you play spot the Suicide Girls? Hint: There are two of them!

So remember the Hipster Grifter?  Her realy name is Kari Ferrell and she is back in NYC and we got in contact and we went to Sway last night for the Smiths/ Morrissey party. I met her in the LES and we walked pretty much all the way across Manhattan to Sway discussing grifting and the internets and travel and giant genitalia. It was an adventure to tell the grand kids about.

Sway was actually really fun. It was a little too packed but everyone was dancing like crazy and my friend Rony from Rony’s Photobooth was in town. He always takes me out when I am in LA so it was good to get to return the favor. Also he has a super hot girlfriend who was really nice and kept him from assaulting some bodega clerks over the price of a bagel.  I am not sure that happened exactly like that, but it was still good to see them.

Other than that I didn’t take a ton of photos, but I did manage to get some cute ones of Agyness Deyn and people seem to get super excited about her.  It’s understandable since she is super adorable and has always been really nice to me.  So kudos to her.

Oh yeah, and the Hipster Grifter got topless and I managed to still have my wallet at the end of the night.  And no, unfortunately I didn’t get a “hand job with her mouth” or “throw my hot dog down her hall way”.  I guess it has something to do with my lack of  beards. I mean everyone knows she <3 beards.

Okay, so that was fun. Click here to see the NSFW pictures from Morrisey night at Sway.

Update: Aside from Ms. Deyn and Ms Grifter a commenter points out that the guy in the very last picture is none other than Noel Fielding from the British TV show the Mighty Boosh. Now I tried to watch The Boosh exactly once and gave up, but some of my close friends are completely obsessed with it and I am surprised they werent the ones to let me know about it. But yeah, that guy is HUGE in the UK.  Cool.

So I get an email from Mishka and they asked me if I would come cover some event they are doing for a launch of some The Process Church Of The Final Judgement t-shirts over at Santo’s Party House with Chronic Youth.  I didn’t recognize the bands or know anything about it, but Mishka gives me a lot of free clothes so I like to help them out when I can.  When I got down to Santo’s it was super spooky in there. It was super goth night or something.  The headliner was Blessure Grave, but I left before then cause I just can’t handle that much goth in my life. These kids dance to beats that don’t even exist. I did catch Passions and White Ring and almost enjoyed Passions. But over all this is just not my scene. I am not sure how it is Mishka’s scene either, but I didn’t see a lot of their normal crowd.

While I was there I got a text from a friend asking me to get her in.  I told her that it was probably not worth coming too, but she told me she NEEDED to see Genesis P-Orrage from Throbbing Gristle who was hosting. I had no idea what that meant, but she seemed very exited about it.  When I was standing outside on my way out, someone introduced me to this girl.  When I told her my name she freaked out.  She knew me, but couldn’t remember how.  She just had seemingly very negative memories of me.  We talked about it for a while and I realized that she was actually one of the first people I met in NYC, but I hadn’t seen her in three years.  She couldn’t remember why she had bad feelings about me, but it had something to do with me hitting on girls.  Well, I am sure I am guilty of that.  She seemed really excited to meet me though and we had a long good conversation. During this conversation she told me she moved to Ashville, NC which is where one of my ex-girlfriends lives.  I asked her why she moved there and she told me it was because Genesis told her to.  I did a double take.  She showed me her Psychic TV tattoo and explained how Genesis asked her to help start a commune in Ashvile or something crazy like that. She seemed super happy about it so I guess that is awesome.

I just did some googling on The Process and The Process Church and it is super bizarre. Based on 5 seconds of reading on Wikipedia the church is an off shoot of Scientology but they worship Satan as well as Christ or something. I really don’t know what I am talking about, but you guys should do some googling for yourself. It is all pretty fucking interesting.

Anyway, go ahead and look at the pictures from Love Sex Fear Death at Santo’s Party House.  I gotta keep moving on, I have so much to do today…

Wow. What a crazy evening. I got a chance to cover the Anthology Film Archives 40th Anniversary benefit “Return To The Pleasure Dome” at the Hiro Ballroom for the Village Voice.  It was honoring the legendary Kenneth Anger and featured performances by his band Technicolor Skull, Jonas Mekas performing with Now We Are Here, plus some other bands… the Virgins, Sonic Youth and Lou Reed. On top of all that Moby DJd, actor Ben Foster hosted and we were treated to appearances by Phillip Seymore Hoffman and Julian Schnabel. It was a pretty crazy night… and for $500 a seat I am pretty sure it had to be…

I really wanted to attend because while I have enjoyed his films, I really appreciate Kenneth Anger as this sort of legendary film icon.  Aside from making some of the most ground breaking experimental films in history the guy wrote two amazing books, Hollywood Babylon and Hollywood Babylon II.  I am a big movie nerd and his tales of old Hollywood have prominent spots on my bookshelf.  When I heard that not only he was going to be there, but that he would be playing a theremin I had to be there. Music in his films is so important I needed to see what he was going to do for himself.

I got there a little bit late and unfortunately I missed most of the Virgins’ set.  There guitarist is a friend of mine, and I hadn’t seen them so I was pretty excited about finally seeing them. Like I said, I didn’t catch most of their set but I feel like the toned it down a little bit for the film benefit crowd.

After the Virgins Sonic Youth played. It was the second time this year I have had a chance to shoot Thurston Moore but last time was with his punk band at SXSW.  I have never been a very big Sonic Youth fan, but they are a band I have always greatly respected and their documentary “1991: The Year That Punk Broke” was a pretty important film in my musical development.  It was great seeing them live. Kim Gordon was awesome.

Between sets Moby DJ’d and played a lot of weird spacey avant gaurd music which seemed to be the theme for the night. I guess I should point out at this point that the bands all played behind silent experimental films that the Anthology Film Archives has restored.  I noticed films by Maya Deren, Jonas Mekas and of cours Kenneth Anger.

When Lou Reed played everyone was amazingly excited.  Philip Seymore Hoffman gave him a bit of an introduction after asking everyone to donate money to the Archive. As soon as he got on stage we were told that we were not allowed to even dare to photograph him or he would walk off stage.  Now I have to say I am not a huge Lou Reed fan, and I am not even really a Velvet Underground fan, (I know, I’m sorry) but even I was pretty excited to see the great Lou Reed… At least until he started playing.  He just played feedback while he watched Maya Deren’s Meditations On Violence. Another guy was distorting his feedback from the side of the stage. He played in the back in the dark and didn’t even address the crowd. This, combined with his anti-photo decree, makes Lou Reed a total dick. I’m sorry, but I have been to a lot of terrible noise shows in my life, but at least guys wrapped in tin foil playing Game Boys and yelling into toy megaphones is at least entertaining.  People paid $500 a seat to see Lou Reed, the least he could do was say something to the crowd.

After that it was Kenneth Anger and Technicolor Skull’s time to shine.  They played super weird music that you would expect from any band with a theremin combined with smoke machines and Kenneth Anger films in the background.  The whole thing made for a very weird experience that while not exactly pleasant was certainly a lot more genuine an interesting than Lou Reed’s seven minute set.  The one problem I had with the set was that because of the smoke and the lighting it was very difficult to photograph, but when I later looked at the shots I had, it reminded me a lot of stills from an experimental American New Wave film, so I guess that seems extremely appropriate in the end.

After Anger’s set Jonas Mekas came up and gave Anger an award for life time achevement.  Mekas spoke of how no living filmmaker had done more for cinnema than Anger.  He then asked the crowd to take up arms and attack the NEA and the Library of Congress and demand they create government run faclities to make film stock to preserve movies on film instead of digitally.  After his impassioned plea he recieted some sort of poetry over music as Now We Are Here played behind him.

The whole night was completely surreal and I think I would need an advanced film or music degree to understand it all but it certainly made for an interesting night.  From Julian Schnabel getting on stage to yell at the people in the back for talking to the guy who kept calling Thurston Moore “big guy” as he got off stage, it was a very weird fucking night.  I am very glad I was there.

If you want to see pictures from Anthology Film Archives “Return To The Pleasure Dome”  at the Hiro Ballroom click here to see it all…

And please, if you want to help preserve important works of cinema that are slowly turning to dust, please donate to the Anthology Film Archives… or at least go see a movie there… it’s only three block from Lit on 2nd and 2nd…