A few weeks ago I dropped some of my friends new music videos on you in a lovely post such as this one.  Today I got three new videos from bands that feature members that I love. I already Tumbled about some of these and I mentioned two of them on this blog, but here they are in living color.

First up is the Hussle Club video for “Good Morning Midnight”.  I have Tumbld about this and I might have linked to it when I blogged about their release party for it.  Second up was also released that at that party but it was not online yet. But the Death Set’s video for “Far Weathered Friends” is online now. And you need to love it. And lastly we have another video I Tumbld, “WTF You Doing In My Mouth?” by the lovely and hilarious Tayisha Busay.  I feel like you need to see them vomit glitter right away.

Anyway, I got things to accomplish. Go watch these videos for the rest of your night, or at least until you find something better to do…

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYg0Qr97MQg[/youtube]

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

Project Fathom put on a party on Wednesday at the Knitting Factory to celebrate the release of new music videos by the Death Set (Far Weathered Friends) and Hussle Club (Good Morning Midnight).  They also premiered the Knife Fight No  Rules documentary and of course Hussle Club and The Death Set played some rock and roll.

I was feeling really sick because there are kittens living with me and I am horribly allergic to them.  Lack of sleep combined the terrible decision to shotgun a Monster energy drink combined to destroy any enjoyment I might have had from what was an awesome fucking show.

Hussle Club went on first and did their dark wave dance to the delight of everyone in the crowd.  During their set I Iced Prince Terrence and he was forced to get down on one knee and chug a Smirnoff Ice.  He drank few swigs of it and then spit it all over the crowd creating a sticky mess and some blurry photos. Still, it was pretty fucking funny.

After that the Death Set went on and got the crowd moving.  There was stage diving and moshing and that whole thing.  I was just trying to cling to the stage because I felt like I might pass out any minute. They were awesome, but I wanted to die.  Near the end of their set the brought the entire crowd on stage for two songs.  Suddenly the show got so much better. The Death Set need to be surrounded by the people.  It took the show to an epic level…. plus I got much better photos from on stage… After that they kicked everyone off, closed with a Nirvana cover and Johnny smashed his guitar on stage. Fucking awesome.

So now what you need to do is to click here to see the photos of Hussle Club, and then click here to see the photos of the Death Set and then click over here to see all the photos from the party. I know that is kinda confusing, but go fuck yourself.  This is my blog and I’ll do what I want.

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…

Update: Gavin McInnes is now the leader of a violent sexist racist organization called the Proud Boys. It probably should have been clear to me in 2010 that he was a garbage human but he really represented to me the Vice that I loved growing up and the shift away from “fun Vice” to “corporate Vice” is something that even today in 2018 bums me out. I am sure in retrospect a bunch of the stuff I loved as a 20 year old is probably pretty shitty and the move towards a more progressive society is exactly the kinda thing Proud Boys and MAGA hats are fighting against. There is a part of me that understands their “the world is too PC!” rage, but that part of me sucks. Being PC is just not being shitty to other people for no fucking reason and there is no part of me that thinks that the answer to an overly PC world is to become violent trolls is a good idea. Fuck Gavin and the Proud Boys, but if you still want to you can read about this party that got shut down by the cops two days before I turned 30. 

After a lovely three day weekend that involved me getting cripplingly drunk and celebrating my 30th birthday we return to this site with renewed vigor.  I have a ton of photos to go up today and tomorrow and there will be a ton of content in general this week because I am working on supplying a backlog of party pictures for a new party photo website that hopefully will not destroy my brand in spectacular fashion.  Either way it is going to pay for the two week vacation I am going on in July so either way… fuck it.

So let’s start this week off with the Street Boners book release party at Party Expo.  If you don’t know about Street Carnage, and in turn know about Street Boners and TV Carnage you need to check yourself.  Street Carnage is a combination of TV Carnage, Street Boners and just a relatively amusing blog.  TV Carnage is a collection of crazy commercials and weird programs taped off of TV in the 80’s and turned into fantastic arts for your viewing pleasures. My friends and I used to watch the DVDs all the time back in the day. They were epic. But none of that is relevant to today’s post.

Today we are talking about Street Boners.  Street Boners are what Gavin McInnes did when he left Vice and couldn’t do Dos and Don’ts anymore. They are pretty much Dos and Don’ts only slightly different somehow.  He rates them out of kitty heads.  He put out his first Street Boners book full of jokes at oddly dressed hipsters expenses.  Pretty much everyone in this book you have seen on my site at some point.  Fucking Jah from Ninjasonik is on the damn cover.

So the party was at this warehouse in Brooklyn called Party Expo.  I have been there a few times and it always gets shut down by the cops. Thursday night was no exception.  10 minutes into the first band (the reasonably awesome Wyldlife) the cops shut the place down and we had to have a party on the J train headed back towards the city.  Luckily before the cops shut it down I got to watch Gavin do live Street Boners which was hilarious.  I have been a fan of Vice for nearly a decade and the consistently best thing in there was Gavin’s Dos and Don’ts.  I am one of the main Dos & Don’ts photographers for Vice now, but I am pretty sure they are never quite as funny as some of the old ones… Gavin actually once suggested I start sending him Street Boners, but never did because I didn’t wanna piss anyone off at Vice (or in Gavin’s words his “abortion”).

The funniest part of the night though had to be when I overheard some kids asking what the hell was going on with Gavin doing his thing… One of the kids replied “it’s some sort of Look At This Fucking  Hipster thing…” These damn kids today!

Anyway, the party was fun while it lasted and I got some decent shots of some kids just dying to become future Street Boners, Dos & Don’ts or Fucking Hipsters… You can look at them all by clicking here.

As Ninjasonik says, all our friends are in bands… and this week three of my friends bands dropped new videos including Ninjasonik themselves. All of these bands are friends and it’s pretty great that they all came out with videos at the same time.

First up we have the Ninjasonik video for Bars which is one of my favorite track of theirs… the lyrics are sort of amazing.  It features a lot of people spitting PBR at each other which is always very significant and important.

The second video is from the new heroes of Brooklyn skate punk, Cerebral Ballzy.  It is a well shot black and white salute to the Subway and all the fine work they are doing over at the good old MTA. The track is called Insufficient Fare.

The last video is for Ready by Radical Outing. It features pretty much every person who is in the crowd at a Ninjasonik or Ballzy show.  The video shows “what it looks like and sounds like” to be at a “Rad Out rager”.  You guys should already know what it looks like considering I took about 25% of the photos in this video.

Anyway, all of this is awesome and amazing and you need to watch all three of these with a friend and then when it’s over give each other and extremely elaborate handshake. And then possibly throw up your 57s.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IM31AMMc97Y[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQRMr7KxZzo[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEdPwQY35M8[/youtube]

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…

I am taking the day to enjoy the fact that I don’t have any photos I need to get up today. It is really quite wonderful to have the burden of a million pictures waiting to go up. I do have a few things I could post, but I think I’ll hold off on them until next week. I am shooting tonight so there will be pictures tomorrow, but today I am going to take a little break and possibly put some more Ikea furniture together. My kitchen office is almost complete. I just need to build a desk and a book shelf and two mini DVD shelves that sort of attach to the bookshelf. It’s all pretty exciting to me and extremely boring to you, so instead I will leave you with three exciting music videos… with Muppets!

Oh, and just for the record, if I could dance like Leo Sayer my life would be complete.

Ps. Did you know muppet is recognized by my spell check but not muppets? Shenanigans.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyreul5Cvsw[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nA2UF1xwGP4[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JruqUIjl5Sw[/youtube]

Easily the worst part about running a website for a living is having to figure out new widgets and aps and plugins and all this other bullshit that makes more people come to your page.  You see, I want people to come to this page. It makes me happy, and soon it will make me money, but getting people here is always annoying. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of people come here without me having to do anything but post quality content, but several hundred people a day come in from Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook, so I have to be on top of all that shit.  I try to make my Twitter as funny and interesting as can be, I try to post interesting content to my Tumblr and I used to have it set up on Facebook so that all my blog updates would show up there, but now that doesn’t work anymore.  I am trying to get that fixed but in the mean time I need to make sure I am on top of other bullshit.

Number one on that list of new bullshit, is the Facebook like buttons.  I don’t know why people have so much need to like things and give thumbs up to things or whatever the kids are doing these days, but putting the Like buttons on your page seems to more than double Facebook traffic, so guess what? I have a fucking like button at the bottom of each post and you guys need to be fucking pressing it.  Now and often. Maybe not this post so much, but older posts you like, and new posts you will like in the future.  That would help me out, and show all your Facebook buddies how rad you are.

Also if you use Stumbl or Digg or any of that crap, I updated that plug in so all those buttons at the bottom of each post are once again working properly.  You should Digg my Sumbls asap. Or Rededit, or whatever.  I don’t know…

Lastly when I was looking for plug ins, I came across a bunch of weird, ugly and ineffective bullshit. One that seems to be just weird and ugly is the Meebo tool bar.  It is at the bottom of my page now (unless you use one of the several browsers it doesn’t work on). With this bar you can use all sorts of instant messaging programs directly from my website. It’s pretty cool because now you can use AIM from here instead of having to be logged in or whatever.  I don’t know.  The real reason I like it is because you can now drag and drop photos into social networking sites really easily.  And you can still copy pictures but you have to right click to save as now instead of dragging and dropping, at least from the main page.

Now, given all that, the Meebo plug in is really fucking ugly, and could possibly be really annoying.  So please give me some feedback about that. If the thing is driving you nuts let me know, but if you are digging it, let me know that too.  I need to make some decisions on it soon.

And lastly, and I am sure I will mention this again in a future post, I started a Facebook fan page. Pretty soon all of you who follow me on Facebook will get one of those annoying “Igor is a fan of Igor and wants you to be a fan of Igor too” emails that I get 400 times a day and make me want to stab people.  I have a Facebook group, but my web guy tells me that is not good enough now, and that Fan Pages are the new thing and I need that. So sure, whatever. Let’s see what that does before I even spend another 15 seconds even thinking about it. I have already spent my entire afternoon dealing with this madness. Just look at it and tell me what you think.

Now, to apologize to you for reading this necessary but boring fucking post, here is the new Purple Crush video. I love these kids and the video is pretty funny and I am sure if I could even hear music anymore I am sure I would like the sound of it. Too bad my brain has turned off any ability to enjoy sounds.

PS. I perhaps might be slightly stressed out that I am turning 30 in two weeks. Sorry.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zp4-wNlPYUY[/youtube]

At this point I don’t even really know what to say.  I am fucking free of the burden that was thousands and thousands of pictures that I took during a three week trip which I averaged less than 4 hours of sleep per day.  I really have one special gallery to go up in the future, but I am saving that one. It’s all 35mm and not pictures of bands.  Ignoring that, this is it. This gallery is just full of pictures that didn’t have a place anywhere else. This is the crowd shots and the people hanging out.  This is what SXSW is all about, the friends and the people you meet.  You can see these bands anywhere, but what I remember most about my trips to SXSW are the people I have met.  A lot of them I see every year there and only there. Its my 6th or 7th year in a row but it feel like I have been making the trip my entire life.  As much greif as getting these pictures up has caused me, I can’t wait to go back.  See you in March Austin.

Click  here to see the very last pictures from my SXSW trip.  There are some fun ones in here.