I’ve been killing a bit of time this morning, organizing and tagging a bunch of photos on my flickr site. I take a lot of photos of concerts (some good, most of questionable quality; I’m not a photographer, you know) and organize them into their own individual sets. I go to a lot of different shit, but the overall trend is Metal, be it Doom, Black, Drone, Death…you name it. So, for the Hell of it, I’ve organized a set of only Metal shots for anyone’s enjoyment. Destroy! \m/[(>.<)]\m/

It’s been a at least a few months since I’ve posted some of the photosets of concerts I’ve been to recently. If you know me (really, you don’t), I go to a fair amount of shows here in New York City, mostly metal of the Doom, Black, Stoner, Drone and occasionally, Death varieties. I like Metal; I like getting pasted and snapping a shitload of photos and uploading them to Flickr with minimal editorial discretion.

So, here’s a mess of them for you:

• Mouth Of The Architect / Wetnurse / Total Failure / Psyopus
• Fu Manchu
• Tombs / Plows
• Estuary
• BloodHorse / Disfear
• Howl
• Earth / Kayo Dot / Zaïmph
  

The cool thing is that today, the band Wetnurse emailed me to ask if they could use one or more of the photos I shot of them for the liner of their new CD. Of course, I’m more than happy and honored to oblige.

I love last.fm. If ever you want to completely geek out on your music statistics, that’s the site to use. Since it’s the new year, I was looking at some of my listening habits have been and whatnot and noted that in the past year, I’ve attended twenty-three live shows. I like drinking; loud Metal madness and taking photos of bands. It’s my thing. I dig it.

For this new year, I think it’s safe to say I intend and will be able to double that amount.

It took a hell of a long time, but I’ve finally finished uploading the photos I took while in Hawaii to a set on my Flickr account—all 748 of them. I still have some tagging and naming to do, but feel free to check them out. A lot of them are overkill, but I think I did manage to get a few really cool shots here and there. Hawaii is an incredibly beautiful place. It’s hard not to go apeshit with a camera.

There’s this huge-ass dry-erase board in my newly-built office that I share with four other people. Together, with a cubicle buddy from back in the day, who is similarly graced with a fat-ass whiteboard, I have created a Flickr group dedicated to all things taking place on a dry-erase board.

“Dry Erase Yer’ Face” has only one rule. All images must consist of dry-erase markings on a whiteboard. It can be art, a cartoon, scribbles, notes, graphs, flowcharts or semi-realistic radioactive-orange vulvas—I don’t give a shit, as long as it’s dry-erase.

If you have access to a dry-erase board and a camera, join and post to the group today!

I like to keep shit interplanetary and ever since I was a kid, I’ve been fascinated with the surface photos of Mars. This morning, I find myself apeshit-agog at the largest Mars image repository I have ever seen or heard of that’s publically accessible. 1.7 terabytes—over 1,100 high resolution images and counting, each averaging a gigabyte in size! There’s a nifty gallery viewer, offering up several down-sized versions of images so you can browse to your heart’s content. Each image has it’s own description and relevant information. There’s even an RSS feed to keep you in the loop as new photos are added to the database. Awesome. It’s a great way to kill a few hours, geeking out or looking for that sweet alien desktop wallpaper you know you must have in order to concentrate properly.

Check out this image of what’s thought to be a cavern entrance or sinkhole in an immense lava plain. Fucking unreal. Fucking interplanetary—just the way I like it.

A friend of mine recently pointed out that of all the public photos on Flickr that are tagged “bastard”, 5% of them are of my cat, George. This morning, I checked it myself with a calculator. As of right now, there are currently 2403 public photos tagged “bastard“. 392 of these images are of George. That’s 6%! All hail the fuzzy, fat bastard!
While I am very pleased, George has mixed feelings. He does enjoy being looked at and admired by many strange people, but he really doesn’t like my camera, especially the flash. Personally, I could care less. I feed him and give him shelter, hence I will pimp his fuzzy belly on Flickr all I want.

Tonight was the dreaded bath night for my two cats, George and Gracie. As expected, it was more than sufficiently scarring for them and I’ve no doubt that some form of revenge is undoubtedly around the corner.

Naturally, photos were taken and I’ve posted them to a set on my Flickr account. All the carnage is there. However, when bathing Gracie, she really did not enjoy the water and completely flipped the fuck out, so there’s not too many photos of her ordeal and what there is to see is pretty blurry since she was freaking. She was flopping and flailing all over the place so after a point I took pity on her, made sure the soap was off and just let her be lest she get hurt with her flinging about.

All in all, it was so traumatic for them, that I doubt they’ll be getting another bath for at least six months. It makes for funny photos, but they’re going to kill me in my sleep if I do that again to them too soon.

I’ve been bed-ridden, sick as fuck all day long. After sleeping for far too much, I started going through some old archive discs from years ago as I sweated out a fever. Most of them were damaged or corrupted, but I did find some shit I’d pretty much forgotten about.

One of the discs I found was an archive of photographs I’d taken of the World Trade Center area on September 27th, 2001. Some of the photos had been corrupted, but I was able to recover the majority of them and post them to my flickr account.

It was still a complete and total fuck-zone went I first went down there and I remember walking around with my camera, everything around me covered with a thick layer of ash and feeling like I was walking through a ghost town in winter only in reality it was September and the “snow” was actually pulverized concrete and God knows what fucking else. It’s disturbing to think I inhaled some of that stuff.

All kinds of items, hats, shoes, umbrellas, briefcases and other sorts of things were lying around, neatly stacked and out of the way, in case someone might return to reclaim them. Messages were written in the dust on the walls and everywhere possible were notes scribbled on paper, photos and desperate pleas for information on missing people. It was an extremely surreal experience.

When the planes had hit the towers, I was working on 28th Street. After watching from the roof of my building, I’d headed straight down there, mainly because I had nothing to do and didn’t know how to get home, having lived in New York for only a couple of months, but I was turned back at Canal Street by the police. I was living in Williamsburg at the time, but aside from the fact that it was located in Brooklyn, that was about as much as I knew. It took me six hours to walk home. I crossed the Manhattan bridge on foot with thousands of other people. I was hot, tired and hungry. I had no money and could find no working ATM. My cell phone didn’t work. Nothing fucking worked except my feet.

I’ve been back there several times since but I’d almost forgotten that first visit, alone and pretty fucking bewildered. There was this one jewelry store, completely abandoned and trashed. The doors must have been open when all the shit went down, because inside the place everything was covered with almost two inches of ash. Peering through the store window made me feel like I was looking into a crypt.

Anyway, here’s the link to the images:

World Trade Center photo set

Have a peek.