I am going to my parents house in DC for five or six days and I almost never take photos when I am there so I have a  feeling I am not gonna update much while I am gone. I do have a tiny update planned for Christmas and some nudes to go up early next week.  I will be updating my Tumblr and Twitter of course so follow those things. I also have an iPhone and an Instagram now. I don’t know how to link to that but my name on there is “drivenbyboredom” obviously.

In the Christmas spirit I will leave you with some holiday cheer featuring my favorite X-mas songs. I hope you enjoy them and I will see you guys in a few days.

Fucking Bullshit played a show at Lit Lounge last Thursday and Coach Mike Pics was there to take photos.  He only took a handful mostly because I told him before the show started to be careful because might try to destroy him in a fit of punk rock violence. Once I started to run out of steam at the end and flop around on the floor he got his shots.

I just wanted to link to these and get up a few photos while I wait for my tire to get changed. I have been in VA all weekend doing a fundraiser for a tribute album dedicated to the music of one of my best friends, Ross Harman, who died one year ago today. I will be back in NYC tonight and then I am leaving again Friday so I needed to get something up so this page isn’t a wasteland.  Pics from the party last night will be up tomorrow, a naked girl for Thursday and hopefully I can get up the party pics I shoot for PBR on Friday. So yeah, there are some heads ups so you aren’t worried about me after I didn’t update for four days. I know how much you care.

Click here to see all of Coach Mike’s pics from the Fucking Bullshit Show.

Right now I am in Southern Illinois in a Comfort Inn an hour away from Cave In Rock, IL and the Gathering of the Juggalos. I have no cell service or internet while I am at the Gathering every day and when I come back to the hotel to sleep I just basically edit photos and sleep. I have no time to update. Right now it is 9:40AM and I have yet to sleep. I have to be back at the Gathering in a few hours.

So here are some updates… for those wondering my Grandmother finally died the other night. It is really upsetting to me but I am so busy I can’t even think about being upset. The funeral is next weekend and I plan on dedicating a post to her and finally having some time to mourn when I get back home.

Nextly, I shot two parties in Chicago that were crazy. Porn & Chicken on Monday and T&A on Tuesday. They were both great and make for totally insane pictures. Unfortunately, I haven’t had time to get them up yet, but I did send pictures from each party to Time Out Chicago. Check out Porn & Chicken here and T&A Tuesday here and then come back here for more, dirtier and bigger photos from my trip…

Lastly, I just wanted you to make sure to check my Tumblr for tons of insane photo updates from the Gathering of the Juggalos. And you can check out this gallery on the Village Voice for some daily updated pictures.

That’s all. Thanks.

Time to dump on you guys the rest of my Lollapalooza shots. These are all the crowd shots and the fun party people and so on and so forth. I found the best partying was going on around the Perry stage which was sort of the rave tent. I spent a lot of time shooting the crowd around Skrillex and Afrojack on the first day. Shot a bunch of the artist lounge on day two and almost no crowd shots on day three. Luckily I shot so much on day one there is a pretty serious gallery for you to look at.

Also, if you missed my Lollapalooza band shots click here.

And lastly before I get to these pictures I should mention that I am headed back to the Gathering of the Juggalos again and if it’s anything like last year I should be pretty much off the grid.  That being said I was told there will be internet access so I would be checking my Tumblr for daily updates.  Either way I will be back by Monday at the latest with the rest of the pictures from my Chicago trip and they are pretty fucking wild.

So click here to see all the crowd shots from the 2011 Lollapalooza in Chicago, IL.

So today I went to the Kings County Brooklyn Supreme Court building to get assigned some jury duty.  Turns out I will be serving on a Grand Jury for two weeks minimum. This seems like it could be really bad for Driven By Boredom for a bit.  Not only will I have to wake up at the crack of dawn every day but I can’t even tweet about the trials or I go to jail or something.  What a fucking bummer.  On the bright side I get $40 a day which is about 1/4th of what I carge for two fucking hours.

So yeah basicly I am probably not going to be posting a lot of updates over the next couple weeks and I am going to have to cancel a bunch of stuff. But I do have to say that my favorite model on earth is coming to visit me next weekend and hopefully I can get her to come out of retirement long enough to make you guys a little bit happy… and don’t worry I have a few updates ready to go next week already.

The end.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A39yUsdlzKk[/youtube]

Tonight around 4AM I will be headed to John F. Kennedy airport and then off to Austin, Texas for the South By Southwest Music, Film and Interactive festival.  I will be covering Interactive and Film for the Village Voice and then shooting a number of parties during SXSW Music.  I will undoubtably take thousands of photos and there will just be tons of amazing content and that sort of thing.  Unfortunately I will be super busy during this time which means a lot less updating. I always think I am going to have time to update but I never do.  During the film and interactive part of SXSW I should have sometime time. I also have a new art project/web site launching next week so you will have that to look at.  But duing SXSW Music, from the 15th – 20th I would, not expect a whole lot from me over here.

All that being said… I will be updating my Tumblr every day with highlights from the fest. If you don’t have Tumblr you should be following me on Twitter because I post all the good Tumblr stuff to my Twitter. Then again during SXSW most of my Tweets are just name dropping, eating BBQ and bragging about cool shit I am doing in Texas. So I will probably lose more followers than I gain next week.  But such is life.

Today in the interest of actually updating my site with content instead of just me giving you a bullshit post explaining why I am not going to be posting I am going to give you links to some highlights of past SXSW trips.  This will be my 8th SXSW trip in a row, although several of those trips were when I was managing The Gaskets and I wasn’t shooting photos so these high lights all come from the last few years.  If you mouse over the photos it will tell you about them and clicking them will bring you to more photos from that day or event.

And for all of you who will be at SXSW this year… I will see you mother fuckers in Austin.

Ten years ago I was a sophomore in college at Penn State and I was bored out of my mind. I had spent most of my freshman year dating a girl who lived 5 hours away from me and I would go home every chance I could to see her and I spent a lot of my time hanging out in my room talking to her and sort of hating life. At some point that year I started a very primitive party photo blog of pictures taken on the drunk bus that circled the campus every Friday and Saturday nights making sure people didn’t drunk drive and got home safely. The bus was total madness and it was fun to document but I didn’t make a lot of friends. I had a lot of great 10 minute conversations but I never became part of any social scene. By my sophomore year I had broken up with the girl and grown tired of riding the bus. I had absolutely nothing to do and I was as bored as I had ever been in my life.

I was always someone with a project. When I was 15 my friend and I started a record label and a punk rock zine that we did all throughout high school.  I always was doing something, making something, taking photos, collecting things and just having all sorts of random hobbies.  All of a sudden I was bored out of my fucking mind. I would spend most of my free time online talking to my friends from home and coming up with stupid projects to keep me from going insane.  I was making terrible music using the programs ACID and Fruity Loops. I was making videos of me lip syncing 80’s pop songs way before YouTube existed. I was selling random things on ebay as a joke. And as always I was taking photos. Oh and I had a web cam. I was doing so many things that I came up with this motto that I was driven by boredom.  I had the idea to get a tattoo of the phrase on me and that tattoo eventually became the logo of the website for about 5 years.

So I had all these projects I was doing and I wanted a place to put them all so in February of 2001 I began to build a website that was mostly just links to my photography and the ebay pranks and the lip sync videos and all the dumb things I was doing at the time.  My brother at the time was running a “E/N” site which stood for Everything/Nothing and there was a community of people that were making these sites where they just talked about their lives and linked things in what we now know as a blog format.  I started talking to these people on a chat program called IRC and I started getting ideas for the site and I decided to adopt the E/N or blog format.  I coded the whole thing myself using a combination of Front Page and hand written HTML and on March 1st 2001 Drivenbyboredom.com was launched to the public.

Here is the entirety of that first post. And yeah, you really should take a look at that “information page”

Today is the first day of Driven By Boredom.  How exciting.  Look around read the information page.  Let me know what you think.  You have any suggestions please let me know.  Buy my ebay stuff cause I think its funny.  Um check out my movies my music and the web cams.  I have no idea what to say.  I am bored as hell and I’m trying my best to entertain myself. I’d like to entertain you kids as well, so please, check everything out.  Um… I am going on my spring break today so I won’t be editing the page for a week or so, but come on, I just spent the last month working on this thing… I know you have enough to do for the next week.  Rock most on and tell your friends!

Anyway I had three major things planned for today. I was going to have an art show, but it got canceled. I was going to have a full site redesign but it got postponed and I was going to throw a big party but it never came together.  All and all it was a huge fucking disappointment. But that’s okay. Driven By Boredom is 10 years old today and there aren’t many people on earth who can say they have been running the same website for more than a decade. And it took me about 8 years but I finally do thing full time now so I am pretty fucking proud of that too.

So wish DBB happy birthday.  Send me some presents and take a look at DBB 1.0.  It’s pretty fucking embarrassing at times but it’s my life. And lastly I am going to leave you with the orignal DBB logo. I wish I knew who made it but I have no idea. It’s pretty fucking amazingly ugly.  Enjoy.

In the coming months Driven By Boredom is going to get a make over. The facelift is tentatively scheduled for April 1st but knowing how these things work, and on my limited budget, it could be 2015 before it really happens.  Part of that redesign is going to give the party photos their own part of the website so that I can do more blogging about other things without bumping the photography down to the bottom of the page.  This is going to let me do a lot of shorter blogs and do posts on videos, music, events and other things that I usually just post on my Tumblr account. I really want to do a lot of shorter posts like I was doing when DBB 3.0 first launched and soon I will be able to do that.  I mention this for two reasons, one is to keep you updated on things on DBB, and the other is because I am about to do one of those type of posts right now… (This actually ended up being a lot more substantial than I thought it was going to be…)

Hulu Plus announced recently that it has worked out a deal with the Criterion Collection to stream their films uninterrupted.  Criterion owns the digital rights to over 800 films and over 150 films are available now.  The films will be shown with commercial before the movie so that you don’t have to have unnatural breaks while watching.  Some Criterion films will be available on a rotating basis with commercial breaks as part of Hulu’s basic service.

I actually just quit my Hulu Plus subcription. Many of the TV shows I wanted to watch weren’t available to stream on mobile devices. It seemed totally pointless. I have no real interest in watching every episode of Cougar Town or The Dick Van Dyke show. I am pretty sure the addition of Criterion Collection is going to get me to sign back up. If you aren’t familiar with the Criterion Collection you probably have no business watching any of their movies anyway (although they do have a couple of Michael Bay films in there…) but they have one of the largest libraries of film classics around.  All their films are amazingly restored and are usually the best (and in many cases only) versions around.  Criterion DVDs run between $30 and $40 for a single film so being able to watch them all for $7.99 a month seems like a steal.

I am a huge film nerd and one of the main reasons I moved to NYC was so I could watch movies. I was driving 6 hours to NYC from Richmond, VA every month just to watch films that I couldn’t get in Virginia. When I was living in Richmond I was watching more than 30 movies a month and amassed a DVD collection of well over 1000 films (Including 36 from the Criterion Collection). Unfortunately when I moved to NYC I had much less time and much less money to devote to my film habit. I watch maybe 5 movies a month now and usually they are Hollywood films because I don’t devote the time to figuring out what is playing at Film Forum or the Angelka.

I just wish that Netflix streaming and this Hulu Plus Criterion thing existed when I was living in Richmond. I probably would have watched 50 movies a month and had an even deeper understanding of film history.

Anyway, here are the trailers to 3 of favorite films in the Criterion Collection.  More than 20 of their films are in my top 100 list so it was impossible for me to pick my three favorites so I picked 3 films that you may not have seen before that are also easily accessible.  I understand that not everyone has the patience to sit through hours of silent Stan Brakhage films.

My first pick is Man Bites Dog which is in my top 10 films of all time for sure. It is a French mocumentary about a serial killer that is unflichingly realistic and one of the most brutal, and often funny, films I have ever seen.  My second selection is The Harder They Come. Another one of my all time favorites, it is about a Jamacian guy who can’t make it as a musician so he turns to crime.  But after he becomes famous for his crimes his record becomes a huge hit and he becomes a folk hero.  The movie was made entirely in Jamacia and features Jimmy Cliff in the starring role. The soundtrack is one of the best Reggae records of all time.  The last film I chose was F For Fake. It is a documentary about art forgery directed and hosted by Orson Welles. The movie is a documentary unlike any other I have ever seen and has an amazing twist ending.  If you haven’t seen it you need to.  Enjoy the trailers.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcPhaieTg4o[/youtube]

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

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n52q_BywGuY&feature=related[/youtube]

I cannot express to you how annoyed I am right now. I have 7 new galleries waiting to be uploaded for you guys and yet the program I use to upload these galleries keeps freezing.  Tomorrow I have a meeting with a design firm to talk about a new design for Driven By Boredom and the first order of buisness is going to be dealing with my galleries. I hate everything about them and hopefully in a few months problems like this will be a thing of the past.  Currently I am talking to people in web forums trying to fix this issue and god willing this problem will be solved by tomorrow.  If not I am going to temporarily upload the galleries to Flickr or something until I solve this issue.

Now my plan was to post this video a little bit later in the week because I had so much photography to get up but since I am just sitting around waiting for my problems to be magically solved I figured this was the perfect time to get this update up.

I have talked to you many times on this site about my friends Teddy Blanks and Ross Harman. The two of them made up the band The Gaskets that I managed for about 5 years. They broke up in 2008. Since then their names have come up on my site because Teddy has been making his own music that I have shared with you and because tragically Ross took his own life in September.

Recently Teddy was interviewed by The Mixed Tapes which “through a series of casual conversations with unsigned and independent musicians, Mixed Tapes explores new artists’ early influences, their struggles, their shifting conceptions on making music, and the challenge of living and working in New York City.” Teddy was interviewed for 3 hours to get the nearly 10 minutes of footage for this interview. It is really well done focuses on his solo music as well as the music of the Gaskets.  And of course a significant section of the interview talks about his relationship with Ross, Ross’ death and how Teddy has been collaborating with Ross one last time.  It is really moving for me as someone so close to both of the guys but I think it’s very much worth watching for anyone.  At the end Teddy performs a cover of Sinead O’Connor’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

I hope you take the time to watch this and enjoy it.  If you would like to hear more music from Teddy Blanks or The Gaskets click those links.  Also Teddy just joined Twitter. You should follow him and maybe he will actually post something. Thanks.

Mixed Tapes: Teddy Blanks from Michael Melamedoff on Vimeo.