Highlights from the DEMF photobooth

Still not famous. Kinda full of self doubt watching my friends and peers climb further and further ahead of me while I've been having a slow couple of months. I just got back from Detroit where I was spinning at one of literally hundreds of afterparties for the Detroit Electronic Music Fest. It was the first time I've played outside of Chicago and I was so nervous, I couldn't plug my headphones into the mixer my hands were so shaky. It was a weird crowd, mostly consisting of sports fans there to watch the Red Wings win the Stanley Cup, and the Tigers trounce the Twins by something like 19-3. Almost everyone else was a DJ who's been at it a lot longer than me. At first I was trying to play to the crowd, and it was just awkward. Eventually I went back to my comfort zone, and rocked it, but it was still a bit bummy. Sarah said that parts of the set were brilliant and parts of it were terrible. I asked my friend Qbot if she'd ever had a night that felt like half of it was her best ever and half of it was her worst. She said that, no, if parts of it are terrible, then it's a terrible set, and I tend to agree.



Sarah and I brought the GlitterGuts equipment with us to Detroit just in case there was an opportunity to do a shoot somewhere. We hauled it around to every gig and every party, but nothing felt right until Sunday when we ended up at a place called City Club. I didn't realize at the time that this was a real venue and not something underground, but apparently (and despite the generic name), it's a long running nightclub and a staple of Detroit's industrial scene. The place was like a cross between Neo and every weird loft party I went to in the early aughts (Charybdis, Buddy, Transamoeba...any of them) with it's grumpy old regulars looking for tail, Burning Man hippie ravers, always-on circus performers, and nerdo tough guys who looked like they'd rather be LARPing with broadswords in a field somewhere. As we climbed the steps, my partner in crime DJ Demchuk said under his breath, "Just keep walking, no matter what they say." Our sneak worked, but Sarah (my partner in everything else) was off her game that night and got stuck behind the velvet rope, where a phalanx of security guards were trying to bleed thirty bucks out of her. She wasn't going to budge, and our predicament forced me to do what I'd been wanting to do anyways. I started grabbing official looking people and telling them I had talked to someone about doing a photobooth there. Each time I got bounced to someone higher up on the food chain, until someone just told me it was cool. By this point Sarah just said fuck it and went back to the motel, but I wasn't going to leave so I figured I might as well go through with it.

Eric doing a photobooth in Detroit? The complete opposite of Eric as a DJ in Detroit. I was smooth as shit, confident, making friends and getting hit on. It isn't our best work overall. We only had it set up for a little while before the vibe of the place started to get a little weird (in a good on the dance floor, and full of tension for a half block radius in any direction from it), and we were limited to a one-light setup because of space. Still, I think we got some tight shots of some new beautiful, weird fuckers, and my only real regret is that I didn't stick around long enough to gain the trust of the heavy duty ravers and candy kids, who were decked out like it was Party Monster and the most colorful parts of the nineties.

All know is that this


is the most beautiful couple I've ever goddamn seen

and this

is the most awesome

and I can't get enough of either of them

for the full set and more,
visit the ever-evolving
WWW.GLITTERGUTS.COM

two years ago

I threw a party, had a gun pulled on me, and bought a flickr account!

I'm surprised at what pictures I took, and how unrepresentative they were of the night as a whole. Two years seems like a million years ago, and I'm more than a little bit shocked at how many of the beautiful, idiot kids from that night got fat or had kids of their own in the short amount of time since.

Matt Taibbi is no Hunter Thompson...

but he's damn good sometimes:

"After all these years in public life, the only time Hillary Clinton sheds a tear is when her own political career is on the line? I didn't notice her crying when kids started coming home from Fallujah in rubber bags because of a war she voted."

I hate politics. I've got to throw my vote to Obama, even though he hasn't done shit good for Illinois and he's a huge, boring centrist, just because I hate him less than I hate everybody else, save for Dennis Kucinich (who nobody'll give a chance to) and Mike Huckabee (who I really like as a media personality, but don't jibe with politically at all). I was telling my friend Charlie, that I can at least take solace in the fact that, if elected, Obama, as a black man, would piss an awful lot of people off.

Charlie put things in perspective though, as he often does:

"Sure the racists will be pissed, but that's nothing compared to what we'd see with a President Hillary: Republicans would be disemboling themselves in the streets, there'll be a conservative hanging from every lamppoast."

I can't do it though. I can't vote for another Clinton. All I know about her is that she's pro-war, pro-censorship, and that there's a good chance that she isn't either one, but she'll vote that way to ingratiate herself with Republican moderates.

Sigh. Only eleven more months and I don't have to hear about it anymore.




[Currently reading The Savage Dragon Archives]

a new candidate for the worst dream ever

I always thought that the worst dream anyone could ever have was the one where they just went to work, had an uneventful day, woke up and had to do the whole damn thing over ago. Then, about a year ago, I had a new, even more pathetic dream pop up to remind me just how mundane and routine life gets sometime. In that dream, I logged onto myspace and started denying friend requests and flagging spam. Just like the work dream, I had to wake up and do it all over again.

The other day, I had a dream top that. Sarah got up to go to work and in a semi-coherent morning haze I kissed her, said good bye, and fell back asleep. What wonders were waiting for me in this new dream world that I was entering, a place that is governed by neither time or space, nor the conventional laws of physics, where the possibilities are limitless and literally anything can happen?

In my dream I woke up, on our bed, pulled her laptop onto my chest, and searched her computer for porn to jerk off to...and didn't find any.

That shit is inexcusable.

Dream-Me put way to much thought into his search when, if our dream apartment is anything like our real apartment, I could have just gone into the other room and gotten my laptop and where I knew there would be porn, or gone onto the internet where I could easily have found porn, and worse yet, my brain could have given me anything, the goth girl in the vintage dresses who works across the street at the sex shop, grade school girls I've recently reconnected to through Facebook, Thora Birch, an nude army of Thora Birches and Diablo Codies, a world of tits and pussy the likes of which I would never experience in the waking world, and you know what my brain channeled all of it's unbridled creative energy into?

Thumbnails. A search page full of thumbnails for non-pornographic .mpeg files that do not even exist in the real world. Boo.

Highlights from the Looptopia photobooth

Last Friday glitterguts was asked to set up a photobooth for the MF Chicago/Red Eye party at Looptopia. All of the elements of extreme awesome were there: a good setting, great DJs and VJs. The party was going down in the retardedly opulent Palmer House Hotel. The place was built by Holabird and Roche and at one time was the largest hotel in the world, with just about every room in the place named after one of Potter Palmer's friends, each and every one of them, someone who was instrumental in building this city after the Chicago fire. Maybe that's why the security was so obnoxious, and the whole thing a little less fun than it could have been. The place was fancy, and the organizers were all closeted old ravers who would've happily pounced on the fancy bar at Potter's Place bar if I spread out a dash of ketamine.

There was an RSVP list that was closed early, even though the fierce storms that raged on and off all day should have nullified it, in that the type of people who are responsible enough to RSVP to an event early, are the type of people who are likely to say fuck it when the weather gets hairy. And then there was something about wristbands, which I still don't understand. So they set up a velvet rope, and were real dicks about letting people through it.

It was weird to be on the other side of that rope, and we were right on the other side of it. As part of the glitterguts project, I want to get as many portraits of as many beautiful weirdos as possible, and this fancy ass hotel was full of weirdos, from what seemed like a lounge karaoke party for cast members of Wicked, to the wedding party for what looked like a Hispanic biker gang, to the Underground Art School, another Looptopia party with similarly tight-assed security, thrown by slightly less closeted raver hippies.

Still, we got a lot of good shots of a lot of beautiful weirdos. Props to MF Chicago and the Chicago Tribune for making it happen. You can check out the full set, along with all of our previous sets at the ever-evolving glitterguts.com.

















































Stay tuned for more in the future from glitterguts.com. If you'd like us to rock a photobooth somewhere (anywhere) or if you'd like to collaborate, drop me a line wherever you find me... because everyone loves our glitterguts