older and colder

my birthday is coming up and i'm not trying to turn the direction of this blog into some stupid personal diary, but i wanted to let people know that i get exponentially more ornery, grumpy and depressed when it gets this close. also, bad, ominous things tend to happen the day after my birthday, so stay indoors if you can. maybe this year my luck will change, though. anyway, i'm trying not to be a huge asshole about it since my friend susan from SF is in town this week and i want to rock out and have fun.

i finally put up my article on national missile defense (title: "god bless you, kim jong"; subhed: "a short critique of the political wank that is the symbiotic relationship between national missile defense and north korea") for Fanzine. took me a while to do the research on it, and even still i couldn't get all the technical info up on there. meant more as a column piece, though if north korea tests another taepo dong-2 missile i want to do a more in-depth piece. for now, i think it's just ok.

also, i met the guys from Celebrity Skin magazine last night at that shitty bar Beauty Bar. actually, the one in NYC isn't that bad; it's way better than the other shitty Beauty Bar in SF next to where Mission Records was. celebrity skin is this porno mag that susan's friend frank works for. somehow this magazine has been around since 1979 and they charge $9 an issue to look at video stills of famous actresses getting nude in sex scenes from movies we've all wanked it to before or saw on the Internet. or paparazzi photos of lindsay lohan at the oscars with just a tiny peek at what might be a nipple or a mole, or a 3/4-angle photo that makes her tits look like they're not even in her dress. photo-magic. yeah we've all been there. anyway celebrity skin's circulation is an amazing 650,000 and the editor-in-chief is this guy james, who kind of looks like a shorter, less robust ron jeremy. frank is like a skinny cowboy, and they were both pretty cool. i might want to talk to them about a potential article on porn magazines, pseudonyms and publishing, but then i got distracted by this while searching for the magazine's url, and will most likely be my next piece. oh yeah the whole reason i was there was this ghetto beauty pageant that wasn't much to write home about.

i took this picture in berkeley, i think... or maybe one of the many office buildings i used to deliver stuff to when i was messaging in sf. also today is frances's birthday, so happy birthday, frances.

i started making a bday playlist the other day too, but it took a sort of morbid turn. still pretty good so far though...
boris - when we is thrown away
iggy - death trip
tom waits - cold cold ground
catpower - we all die
new order - leave me alone

it just kind of goes on like that...