In special honor of the brutal yet timely death of Teenage Unicorn, I would like to soften the blow by presenting you with a leetle teeny bear playing the song "that started it all." It's a song called "Teenage Unicorn" from the year of 1994 by a cute, silly band called Blast Off Country Style that I'm pretty sure my friend Bridget first hepped me to back in ye olde indie-rock college days. (Yes, I am old! That is why I am not doing this blog anymore!!) Anyway, I had the 7-inch of this song and I always played it on my stupid college radio show. I guess even after 10 years it stayed stuck in my brain.

I decided not to just post the "Teenage Unicorn" mp3 for you to download because I feel so bad for ripping off their song name for all these years that I hope you all go buy the song from iTunes. 99 cents, man! C'mon! It's the best song! I also really like "Hey Hey I Love You Bitch!" That's a good one to get too. Get them!

I wrote this little essay thing for the Vice Photo Book when it was originally supposed to have a section about photo blogs (the section got axed). I modified it a bit and I wanna post it here cuz I like it and I think it is fitting for the occasion:

WHY BLOGTHER?

 

In January 2004, I, like so many others, started a photo blog. For no real reason, just for giggles. I’m not a photographer or a web guy or anything fancy like that. It just seemed fun and easy and I needed a hobby. Plus, as a writer, I was always envious of photographers—they seemed to have all the fun while I was sitting at home transcribing interviews with dumb rock bands. And I liked being able to write silly stuff and use as many exclamation points as I wanted without having to answer to THE MAN! Right on!!! So I went out and I bought myself an Elph and HTML for Dummies. I don’t think Blogger or Flickr existed yet, or at least no one told me about them, so I did it the old-fashioned way, which is why my blog looks like this. I thought it was funny when I'd see people copy my blog “style”—because it’s not even a style, it’s just poor interweb skills.

 

I don’t know… Maybe there were reasons. Maybe I was partying a lot and I thought my friends were just as cool and pretty as anyone. Maybe I realized that I was in the "twilight" of my reckless partying and goofing-around years (lasting way longer than they should have anyway--but then again I was a late bloomer). And maybe I wanted to chronicle these times since I knew it would all soon be drawing to a close. Who knows. There are a million reasons to put your life on display for total strangers and all of them are pretty embarrassing.

 

When I first started Teenage Unicorn, there really weren’t any other photo blogs chronicling the weird little New York “scene” I was hanging around in. Now there are five gazillion online photos of Ben Cho and there are so damn many new-generation photo blogs that calling someone a “photoblogger” has become a sort of jokey insult, like calling someone a hipster. Bleh.

 

When I started, the only other photo blog I knew about at the time belonged to a wealthy man in his 70s who posted photos of his scantily clad young male companions hanging out in his mansion’s Jacuzzi. He wrote captions about the shopping sprees he would take them on. I was entranced. It was a huge inspiration.

 

Anyway, I’m not trying to make a big deal out of what are essentially online scrapbooks, but they’re fun to look at and kids who live in small towns write you really nice emails about how much they wanna move to New York. Oh, and someone said something to me about how maybe it’s changed the way we look at photography or something so there you go.

 

[The end.]

So what else? You know what... it's just time. I never go out anymore, and when and if I do, it's just the same shit over and over again. Basically this was a place for me to be creative during a time in which I didn't have many forums to be creative and plenty of time on my hands. Now I have too many forums and barely enough time for all of them! If I ever feel like blogging something, there's always the Viceland blog. Not to mention the magazine and I'm still doing The Cute Show and I've also been doing some episodes of Art Talk, which is show where we interview artists. So far I've done Dan Colen, Terence Koh, AA Bronson, K8 Hardy, Assume Vivid Astro Focus, Michele O'Marah, Lizzi Bougatsos and maybe that's it so far. You can watch them all here. And I suppose if I ever feel like blogging something too personal for work, there's always good old Myspace. (myspace.com/teenageunicorn) I will not be joining Facebook however cuz it's just too much for me. I did it for a second and I hated it. The "funwall" is neither fun nor a wall--discuss.

Anyway, I don't know why I am writing all this, I suppose I am having a hard time letting it go! End of an era! Melodrama! Ack. Good thing no one reads this shit anymore anyway!

So, I do have some random leftover photos that I might as well post here, as a last hurrah or something.

Here you go!

I love this picture. It's from when I went to a Maltese dog meetup group's Halloween party

for the Cute Show. The barking was ear-shattering and the dogs kept peeing on each other.

It was a great day.

My kind of people.

I interviewed a walrus.

I watch A LOT of television now. (Woo hoo, 30 Rock!) Then I go to dinner parties and

discuss Lost theories on napkins.

Ryan still invites me to fun parties. That's like the only time I ever go out. This was from

when he did a series of actor portraits for the New York Times Magazine. I'm making

some idiotic scrunch face here but oh well. I sacrifice my ego to the blog gods.

They had these amazing things--they're cheesecake lollipops covered in white chocolate!

Whenever they brought out a new "branch," we all fought over them.

As much as I love and adore Ryan, taking photos at his openings has become pointless,

as you can see here. Plenty o' coverage. I ain't fightin' my way through that paparazzi!

The after-parties are still pretty fun though.

And I'm still pretty impressed by some things.

Oh yeah, this was Christmas dinner. That was a weird night.

This was on New Year's Eve. You can't see them all here, but there were like six or seven

girls who were all wearing gold heels. I dunno, I thought it was interesting. I don't even

remember what I did on New Year's. I think I went to Ryan's and watched Superbad for

the millionth time.

Yup!

And then of course there are always work parties.

And the ladies of Vice magazine: Elin, editor of Vice Sweden; Briony, editor of Vice

Australia; and US ed-at-large Amie, who is no longer with us in the office but still tries

to hook me up with boys and I thank her!

This was when the Rock Band video game came out and everyone played it on a big

projection screen. Jesse's gonna kill me for this but I like it. Personally, I suck at the game.

I tried it once at Jesse and Tara's when I was a wee bit stoned and had a total panic

attack.

This is when Thomas broke his headphones and refused to buy new ones. He kept them

on with a rubberband until it started hurting his head. Ah, mem'ries.

We're on iChat all day at work. It's pretty handy for work purposes. You never have to talk

out loud or even move. It's like being in the Matrix! For some reason I started taking

screengrabs of dumb chats that make me laugh.

What else? I'm still buy ridiculous shoes that I'll maybe wear once, like these wedge-heeled

fuzzy rabbit numbers. And of course I spend lots of time hanging out with my #1 Lucky Star

kitty, who is 12-years-young and still a total sillypants.

And I still spend lots of time trying to get

non-blurry photos of her. Unsuccessfully.

(It's just, if I use the flash, she blinks, and if

I don't, she moves so much that it's always

blurry or grainy! I need to get a professional

pet photographer in here.)

Occasionally exciting stuff like this happens, but I was filming it for Art Talk so I think I

hafta save all my pix for the Vice blog.

Ah, fuck it. This was at the Assume Vivid Astro Focus opening at Deitch Studios out in

Long Island City. It's this HUGE former soda factory right on the water and it's so pretty

there. They filled the immense space with a giant hermaphrodite sculpture thing and

just... total... neon insanity!--I didn't get any good pix of the exhibit and I can't possibly

describe it all, you just have to go there. They're gonna have more parties and performances

there later in the summer too. It's out by P.S.1 and a pain in the neck to get to, but we took

a cab from Williamsburg and it was only 10 bucks. Really, It's stuff like this that keeps New

York from descending into total boringness.

The outside of the factory.

The gorgeous view. It's like, literally right on the water. You could accidentally stumble

right into the river if, say, you were on mushrooms.

This guy was on mushrooms. Careful, man!

They filled Snapple bottles with watered-down paint and hurled them at a wall in the

corner of the back room.

Sploosh.

Oh those wacky hula-hoopers. God bless 'em. Promise me you'll go there or at least

watch the Art Talk episode we filmed of it. I'll put a link here after it goes online.

And just for the heck of it, here is a photo of my dad when he was in the navy in 'Nam:

Well... I guess that's it, folks! You can see by now why this is a good time for me to call it

quits, right? Oh, I just wanna end by giving a big "OMG, THANK YOU!" to Tara for making

me the best gravestone an old blogger could ever wish for. Isn't it awesome?

"Peace out, dawgs."

I'll miss you.

xoxo

Heyyyy, that's no way to say goodbye...