double trouble

i can't remember when this one was taken. i'm going to guess at the East End somewhere around 2002. miss hanging out with those two.

zen guerrilla at UD

I found this shot of zen guerrilla recently, even though i took it probably in 2000. It's crazy I even got a picture like this because this show was so bluesy and mellow, and Marcus was sitting down most of the time. I only remember this because this show was the opposite of the one they played the night before at the East End where they killed it with the rock, including the Iron Maiden and Rolling Stones covers. Probably the best show i ever saw at that place. Of course, no photos from that night because I was too busy drinking and rocking out. Now I regret it a little.

old newark bands

I dug through the crates and found a bunch of old photos from Newark bands from the late '90s and early 2000s. I never claimed to be a good music photographer and going through these negatives was pretty embarrassing and funny at the same time. First of all my composition sucks. I'm always cutting some shit off in the dark. I also realized I CANNOT shoot drummers at all for some dumb reason, so I'm going to apologize in advance for not having any good shots of Steve Hollis or Rif. If I have a single decent photo of a drummer I'll build a time machine. Anyway, some of you might remember these shows because they weren't *that* long ago. They're old but not like Fire Tribe old. All photos via the Nikon F4, and I thankfully didn't use the 14mm fisheye on any of these.

Unleash the Bastards at Girls Inc.
I know I still have this tape or cd somewhere...




hey look, it's that guy from Dr. Dog

Miles to Failure at Girls Inc.

in case you didn't know, Allen Hitchens was straight edge back then.


and emo. Sorry Allen, haha.

Trailer Park Riot and The Bureaubrats at East End Cafe
These were two of my favorite bands to see toward the end of my time in Newark. I still have that 7" and a tape Rif gave me. Trailer Park Riot was Ken Adams, Nate Eggink, Scottie Curran, and Steve Hollis. Bureaubrats was Dave (Aaron Watkins), Lee Dickerson, Jon Riffenburg, and some metal dude; I don't know his name. They also had one of my favorite songs of all time called "Grave Digger." When I was in seventh grade, Aaron was one grade above me. We went to this tiny Catholic school in Maryland and there was this custodian we called Mr. Wally and he had been at the school forever. A couple years earlier Mr. Wally got cancer and he died around the same time Aaron got in trouble at school and was suspended, only instead of making him stay home from school the nuns sent him across the street to dig Mr. Wally's grave. Fucking incredible.









again, no pics of Steve or Rif. sorry dudes. i suck.

1997

I found this photo while I was back in Delaware going through a big crate of film and random terrible pictures. This is the first friend I made at the University of Delaware. I have a very strange sense of memory of this time period in which I remember really mundane details and yet other more vivid experiences meld together with a haziness of late morning dreams and memories rehashed and recited and pitched together into a cloudy intangibility. I say this because I remember I first saw Sally on my second or third day at UD in Anthropology class, and when I finally talked to her it was in the library on the third floor. We were studying for some Anthropology test or quiz, separately. She was wearing a Batman T-shirt, I remember that very clearly. I got an A on the test.

A year later I dislocated my ankle skateboarding and was hobbling around on crutches for most of the summer and I went to go visit her in Smyrna or someplace just south of there. Here's where my memory becomes unreliable. I remember walking around some redneck town where she's from: a girl with a mohawk and a China-man on crutches. We went to go eat pizza. We went to the video store to rent "Better Off Dead." We went to this empty, dilapidated pier to sit by the river. This part I remember so vividly that I have to be making this up: I remember there was a breeze at our backs so there weren't any bugs. Across the water I could see the river widening and opening into the ocean, and above that the sun was setting in a deep, humming orange behind these huge ominous dark clouds and lightning was flashing intermittently making them glow and appear to creep across the horizon. See? It was so hauntingly beautiful there's no way I could remember all of that, but that's the memory I have most about that day. That and riding shotgun in Sally's pickup truck listening to Action Patrol. And her high school graduation picture in which she looked like such a normal, nice girl in a white summer dress.

Not that she was anything but nice. She was pretty awesome, highly intelligent, and very sweet to talk with. I'm pretty sure I had the hots for her at one point, but then I saw all these dead animals she kept in her freezer. We were friends until she graduated from UD and I don't think I've seen her since. I probably took this photo with either a really old Nikkormat with a 50mm, 1.4f lens or this Canon Elan IIe I bought a couple months before I went to California then sold shortly after I got back to buy a Nikon N90s. Yeah, blah blah blah. It must have been on the lawn near the Pencader dorms.