New Years Eve 2008 – 12.31.07

January 1, 2026

Making some actual New Years Resolutions this year and one of those things is updating this site more, primarily the Vintage DBB stuff. My plan was to drop a new, completely re-edited gallery every Thursday but that is so overwhelming and took so long and I think that’s why I stopped updating as much. A lot of shit happened in my life as well and I should hopefully have a little more time now, but my main plan is just to not edit as much. I pulled over 200 photos from this gallery and I just batch brightened them in Lightroom and then came back and fixed the ones that were way too over exposed. It took me less than ten minutes instead of over an hour. At least they are in much higher resolution now. Here’s hoping I update with Vintage DBB posts at least a couple of times a month going forward.

Anyway, let’s get into it. I used to only drink twice a year (now I drink never), NYE and my birthday, and this particular NYE was a blur. I barely remember it, luckily I have an offline copy of my archives so I can go back and read about that night. Apparently the reason I got so drink is because I took six shots in 45 minutes before I even got to Don Hills for the big Rated X/ Trash/ Burning Angel collaboration party.

If you weren’t there for all this, Trash was my favorite Friday night party hosted by friend DJ Jess (and Alex and Twig) but Jess was the first person to ever pay me to take photos in NYC and he died a decade ago now and I miss him all the time still. Rated X was a Saturday night party hosted by Michael T, Theo Kogan and Peppermint. It was famous for being a “no pants” party where they had a coat check for pants and you could get discounted drinks if you were pants free. They also were home to the infamous hot body contest which we will get to in a second. The party was hosted by the Brooklyn based alt porn site Burning Angel and Joanna Angel herself. She did some burlesque and helped host, but she also brought a bunch of her girls with her including my good pals Jessie Lee and Draven. My friend Apathy did a burlesque performance as well.

The hot body contest was absolutely wild that night thanks to Jessie and Draven. I uploaded all the photos of them to my paysite Girls of DBB. I tried not to post photos of people who looked wasted or were sort of being bashful about it, but there are 80 NSFW photos up there, mostly of the Burning Angel crew. There are some random people also pulling a titty out which was apparently a thing everyone just did back then. In my original notes from that night I said “The next couple hours were pretty much a blur… A lot of boobs and kissing people and trying not to puke.” What a time to be alive.

Apparently I left the party at 5am, which was probably hours before Don Hills actually kicked everyone out. I was pretty drunk and it’s hard to take photos when you have a drink in one hand as it is, so take that for what it’s worth. It was also a few months before I got a pro digital camera, but the chaos and the fun still shine though and I think you guys will really dig these despite the mid photography.

So check out the gallery below to see a bunch of photos from the Rated X vs Trash vs Burning Angel 2008 NYE party and head over to Girls of Driven By Boredom if you want to see the really crazy stuff. See you soon, I hope!

Happy Endings – 7.21.09

September 26, 2025September 26, 2025

It’s been a minute since I have done a Vintage DBB post on here, but my life has been in a wild transition. If you missed the recent B-Side post, I bought a 60 year old house with 60 year old house problems and have spent the last three weeks working on it every day and then I was on a slightly too long vacation. These are some real Champaign problems but I got poison ivy from doing yard work and I have to spend $2500 to cut down a tree before it destroys the foundation of my house so I am exhausted. Oh, I also got engaged but I haven’t really told anyone so I guess if you are reading this you know before some of my close friends and less close family members.

So yeah, I wanted to update my NSFW paysite thing, Girls of Driven By Boredom so I started digging for a random night out from back in the day that had some nightclub bathroom nudes and I found just the thing. I met my friend Ginger at tattoo party I shot for Inked Magazine before they stopped paying photographers. We talked about shooting and actually had this idea for a larger documentary project that never happened, but we got diner one night to talk about both things and since it was Thursday night we ended up going over to Happy Endings after the meeting (and yes I know it was called Happy Ending and not Endings but I called it Endings the entire time it was open so I am not gonna change it up now).

Every Thursday you had the party 66Sick in the basement and at that time Disco Down was the upstairs party. Downstairs there were a bunch of rooms you could sort of go hide out in so Ginger and I went down there and took a bunch of topless photos of her which are all now uploaded to Girls of DBB. I was going to head out after that but then my neighbors showed up and the three of them, to quote myself in 2009, “went off on a wild tear through the bar, ending up with them having their own personal bouncer who stood by them dancing to keep creepy dudes away from them… ”

I gotta say it’s great still having all my old archives so I can go pull quotes like that, because I don’t remember any of that shit. So yeah, this gallery is a ton of photos of the three of them mixed with a bunch of photos of the Disco Down kids writing a bunch of shit all over themselves with Sharpie. I was hoping I explained what was going on with that in my original post about the night, but I didn’t.

Anyway, I hope to update with old throwback posts more often, I actually have a few random nights pulled for me to reedit, but I need to make time for em. Hopefully once I am moved in I can get back to posting one of these a week, but no promises. This night was pretty unexceptional aside from the Ginger chaos, but it’s always fun looking back at what we were up to 15+ years ago.

Check the gallery for all the photos from a random Thursday night at Happy Endings back in 2009 or jump over to Girls of DBB for the NSFW stuff.

Another Friday Night – 9.14.07

August 5, 2025

I’ve probably spent less than a year of my life total working you standard 9-5, Monday-Friday job. Between graduating from college and moving to NYC I did some temp work at a few offices and my last job ever before becoming a photographer was digitizing books in a library and I did that for about six months, but other than that I’ve either worked retail/food service, or been a full time photographer. So for me, a Friday night is just like any other night of the week, but back in the late 2000s, Friday night meant two things: Trash & Ruff Club.

Ruff Club, held at the Annex, was the first weekly party in NYC that I ever went to and Trash was probably my favorite weekly of all time. Back in 2007 it was held at Rififi which was by far my favorite of it’s four locations. If I was going to hit only one party that night it would be Trash, but like most nights of the week, I would hit at least two parties. I’d usually start my night at Trash and then end up walking down to the LES for Ruff so I could take the JMZ home or just walk over the bridge to Williamsburg. But Rififi was near the L train so I could always do it the other way around.

This Friday night in September wasn’t any sort of special occasion, and the photos were taken before I had a professional camera, but the night feels pretty representative of that time period. Multiple parties, multiple subcultures, a ton of friends and a bunch of time just spent hanging out in the street outside of bars. It was such a fun time in my life and also still in that full Indie Sleaze era of American Apparel and insane accessories and of course flip phones.

I went back and looked at what I had written about that night at the time and it seemed the night was kinda a bust. I sounded kinda depressed about the whole thing and not sure why. Apparently the door person at Annex tried to get me to pay $5 which instead of just paying, I apparently made it a whole thing until Sophia Lamar brought me in and then apparently I was super apologetic to the door person for making it a whole thing. (That’s three apparentlys in one sentence, are you impressed yet?) I was working at a busboy at a restaurant at that time so I am sure I could have used the $5, but mostly I think I just wanted to feel important. My site was starting to blow up and right around that time I quit my busboy job and tried to make it as a full time photographer. I only made it nine months before having to get that book scanning job, but it felt like I was really doing it. In December of 2008 after the economy collapsed I got laid off of that job and I never worked another day job again, so I guess I did make it, just not that Friday night…

Coney Island Hot Dog Eating Contest – 7.4.07

July 4, 2025

In the mid 2000s shortly before I moved to NYC my friend Adrianne was in a long distance relationship with a guy who ran a blog called “Watch Me Eat a Hotdog”. The blog was fucking hilarious and it covered all things hot dog including the Nathan’s Famous 4th of July Hot Dog Eating Contest and the world of competitive eating. I was kinda obsessed with the site and competitive eating. I loved an eating challenge. I had won my high school’s Homecoming pie eating contest three years in a row. I remember trying to see how many hot dogs I could eat in 10 minutes to see if I had what it takes. I ate 13 hot dogs in 12 minutes which is both impressive and also 40 less hot dogs than hot dog eating superstar Takeru Kobayashi ate that same year.

At the same time I was managing a two man dance pop band called the Gaskets who were blowing up locally but hadn’t done much outside of Richmond, VA where we all went to art school. Twice a month we were traveling up to NYC to try and change that. I started booking them shows around the 4th of July so I could actually see the hot dog eating contest in real life and I got to witness history in 2006 when Kobayashi broke his own record by one quarter of a hot dog in 2006.

In spring of 2007 The Gaskets got booked to play some small festival in the Hudson Valley. I rarely booked them daytime shows because they were always terrible, but the publisher of Blender Magazine got them the gig, so we weren’t going to say no. At this point I was living in NYC and working as a nightlife photographer while also working the 6am-3pm shift at a hotel restaurant. The only thing I wanted to do in the middle of the day was sleep. So when we got to where we were staying I took a short nap before the show, but for some reason the Gaskets just let me sleep through it. When they got back they told me the gig was terrible (as expected) but they had some good news: One of the handful people watching their set was Richard Shea, the co-founder of the IFOCE – the International Federation of Competitive Eating.

The Gaskets told Richard how obsessed their manager was with competitive eating and how I would always book them shows so I could watch the hot dog eating contest, so Richard offered us a spot to perform before the contest that year. I could not have been more excited. Not only would they get to perform in front of thousands of people at Coney Island, but I would just have amazing access to the hot dog eating contest and I could bring my camera…

I honestly barely remember The Gaskets performance that day, what I do remember is everything else. First of all they got to open for competitive eater Eric “Badlands” Booker who put out a rap album about competitive eating that I was obsessed with. I haven’t heard it in 15+ years and I am positive I could still sing along with it. Badlands goes by Badlands Chugs and his videos of him chugging massive amounts of liquid have gone super viral and he is a legit YouTube star with over 3 million followers. (He also happened to witness the second to last punk show I ever played a decade later.)

The contest itself was legendary. Kobayashi had dominated every contest he had entered until that point. His first contest in 2001 he nearly doubled the previous record. For the next six years he was blowing everyone out of the water… Until he met Joey “Jaws” Chestnut. In 2006 Chestnut came within two hot dogs of Kobayashi setting them up for a fierce head to head battle in 2007. In the qualifying round Chestnut had actually taken the world record with nearly 60 hot dogs but on July 4th Kobayashi broke that eating 63 hot dogs. That would have been the world record, if it weren’t for Chestnut eating an insane 66 hot dogs in 12 minutes. Kobayashi had lost and I had witnessed history.

Chestnut would go on to win the contest 16 out of the next 17 years, losing only once to Matt Stonie in 2015. Chestnut would break his record over and over again and owns the current record of 75 hot dogs in 10 minutes in 2021. Last year Chestnut didn’t compete and my friend Pat “Deep Dish” Bertoletti won which was incredible. Now if you are wondering how I became friends with a hot dog eating champion it’s because after taking these photos in 2007, I gave my business card to an eater named “Crazy Legs” Conti who looked at my website and quickly became a fan of my photography. One night I was at a party at Lit Lounge and I ran into him and told him I had watched a documentary about him and told him I was obsessed with competitive eating. He realized who I was and since we were mutual fans of each other we quickly became friends. Crazy Legs also happens to host the 4th of July after party every year which is how I became friends with Pat and his fellow Chicago eater Tim “Gravy” Brown.

Now it has been years since I attended a hot dog eating contest, but I still follow it every year and I have always had this dream of doing a photo project on competitive eating, going to some of the smaller regional festivals and documenting the weirdness that goes on around it. And maybe, tentatively, perhaps I might be working on doing something like that in the not so distant future.

Anyway, enjoy these photos from the day that changed competitive eating forever. It’s a real time capsule of the transition from competitive eating being a bit of a freak show, to the real sport it is today. These photos were taken on a truly terrible digital camera and the quality reflects that, but I think you can enjoy them anyway. Happy 4th of July. Eat all you can.

Smiths Sunday – 6.6.10

June 11, 2025

Back in the day I didn’t go out on Sunday nights that often. There were some monthly parties or special events that I would hit up but usually that would be my one day off because there was only one place worth going to on a Sunday: Sway. Smith’s Sundays aka Morrissey Night at Sway was always a great party and the longest lasting party I can think of running from 2003 to when the club closed in 2015. When Smith’s Sunday founder Paul Sevigny opened Paul’s Casablanca the party just continued there. Truly a great party… the only issue is that I don’t like the Smiths.

Okay, there was one other issue, which is that Sway was a huge pain in the ass to get to from Brooklyn. A party had to be really good to get me to go Sway or Don Hill’s and Smiths Sundays was a really good party. But yeah I never got into the Smiths or Morrissey. I mean I enjoy dancing to the hits but the deep cuts aren’t exactly for me. Fortunately seeing all my friends made it worth it… just maybe not every week like some of my regular spots.

Anyway, this night in June 2010 wasn’t of any particular note. I was just looking for a party that looked pretty fun to reupload and these photos had some fun stuff in them. I went back and looked at my notes and apparently it was the first night I hung out with the Kari Ferrell formerly known as the Hipster Grifter. I recently finished reading her book (go buy it!) and this must have been right after she moved back to NYC after a short vacation in prison. Her and I apparently met up in the Lower East Side and just walked all the way across the city which is the kinda thing I miss so much since I moved to a place with no sidewalks. We then met up with my old pal Rony Alwin aka Rony’s Photobooth who was in NYC visiting and then we went to Sway.

This was just a random Sunday night like a million other Sunday nights a Sway but there was an appearance from Noel Fielding and his long term partner Lliana Bird who according to the internet he had just met. I had no idea who he was until I posted the photos and a bunch of people told me about it, but as a massive Great British Baking and Taskmaster fan I would for sure know who he was now. Aggy Deyn was there which was awesome because I hadn’t seen her in ages and honestly it was probably the last time I ever saw her. That’s one of the weirdest parts of this Vintage DBB project is realizing that all these people I was friends with, I just never saw again. I would see them every night and then one night was the last night and that was it. It’s extra tough when you didn’t see those people ever again because they died. This gallery has photos of two different friends who both happened to be named Dylan who are both gone and my guess is they aren’t the only people I photographed that night that have passed. Getting old is the worst.

Anyway, that’s all I got for today. I really do want to reupload stuff more regularly but it just takes a lot of time and while it’s a lot of fun, it’s rarely a priority. I am working on a couple of projects at the moment so they have been taking my attention, but hopefully a big one will be wrapped up soon.

Okay, now go look at some 15 year old photos from Smiths Sunday at Sway!