I’ve been having a rough time lately! And I’ve been pretty consistently pissed and depressed and uncomfortable for a week or so, but I’ve been making a big effort to shake it off and try and be nice, or at least neutral, so let me just vent right now and let out a virtual shout and holy shit I need a vacation! I hope my friends can deal with me.

One thing that’s made me feel a lot better has been working on a remix of one of my favorite artists. This time it’s Alan MX, who I am really completely in awe of. He’s become a friend over the last few years, and I’ve been bugging the living shit out of him to get me the track pieces for his song “Captain America Video.” He finally sent everything to me a couple days ago and I dove right in; I’m about half done with it and I can’t wait to finish it and send it off into the world. He’s so awesome. I love it. This remix, I know, Sarah’s going to hear it and be like HOLY SHIT.

Speaking of Sarah, on her rooftop last weekend I took this picture of Kathy while I was doing all the other stuff and Sarah was at Bamboozle. It was almost an accident and I don’t think Kathy even likes it, but I do. So here:

And here are some more of some of my favorite girls. Alana and Kate and Joanna came over last Friday evening to pre-game and dress up and bitch about people. I want to do that everyday with them.

Today Uma Thurman is filming scenes in nerd glasses outside the door and making it hard for people to get in and out of the building. I have grown to hate seeing the Haddad’s catering trucks these days, because it means some famous person is eating better than I am and getting in the way at the same time.

Jose is a dancer and we did some photos on Sarah’s rooftop on Saturday. It threatened to rain but luckily it didn’t. I had some expensive stuff up there. My friend Nancy introduced me to Jose and suggested we do some press photos of him, and since I already had a shoot planned that day we got together while everything was still set up.

Click above to see him break dancing on the ledge of the roof. For real.

I own that plaid sweater now. Isn’t it wonderful? I hope we have just a few more chilly days before summer so I can wear it.

The thing I mentioned yesterday was nothing really serious, but thanks for the messages I’ve gotten. I just am prone to kidney stones (hooray!) and am now experiencing my second, along with some other medical fun. They move slowly through me so I just have to spend a few weeks being uncomfortable and in random stretches of pain. Last time toward the end I was really sick and throwing up blood and being generally apocalyptic so I hope that doesn’t happen this time. But enough about me! What do you think about my body making rocks and then sending them through my guts to cut and get stuck along the way?!

Last night I had to go to the hospital at a bad time, everyone was away so I went alone to the emergency room. I’m okay now, just some pain that’s not gonna go away anytime soon. I got home after a while and felt miserable til very late at night, and then our neighbors woke me up at 7:30 this morning bounding up and down the stairs carrying load after load of something heavy and banging it all around. I’m achy and running on a tiny bit of sleep, so I am in a pretty shitty mood right now!

This weekend I did another shoot for 410BC, using some models hired from Basic. Everyone was really great to work with and I tried some new things to give it all a different feel from the stuff I normally do. I have a lot more to work on, but here’s a preliminary look:

I also have some actually amazing shots of some friends that I did this weekend. I will work on some today to try and take my mind off things. I’m actually in a really crazy brain mood today, don’t feel like me. Don’t really know what to do with myself.

I need some help. What is everyone’s take on this website? It looks legitimate enough, I guess, but… I am paranoid about this sort of thing. How is it so cheap? And free shipping? And free this and that when you spend this or that? Is it an elaborate info-stealing tool or are they actually selling these shoes? Because if they are actually selling these shoes, then I will need to be buying a shit ton of these shoes.

My mom and I hypothesize that most people we deal with for menial day-to-day things spend more time trying to talk their way out of doing their jobs than it would take to actually do their jobs. And they try to make it sound professional and thought-out. Telephone customer service or car repair or a cable company; anything involving a stranger who’s supposed to be helping you because you paid them to… more often than not the reply is that “my job is ____ and someone else I can’t name will help you with ____ and thusly and therefore please shut up for another day.” Is that human nature? Is it just American human nature?

I’m working on some music with someone I was a really big fan of in college, she found me online and we’ve been talking and sharing respect for each other’s songs, and now I’m working on a new production for something of hers that was previously unreleased. She’s one of those singers that plenty of the most legendary living musicians today list themselves a fan of. The song is very different than the stuff I’ve worked on before so it’s proving to be a challenge, but what a great challenge to get to have! I made a horrific mix of one of her songs way back when I was first learning how to do anything, and I think I gave it to her at a show. Bad stuff. Glad that probably went directly into the garbage.

Also, buy a ticket.

I’ve started taking vitamins again, only this time I may have gone overboard. That doesn’t mean I’m going to tone it down, though. I like taking a collection of legal pills every day. I know plenty of people downing handfuls of Xanax and Adderall; what harm can a probiotic and some rose hips do me?

There’s the daily Vitamin C, Calcium with Vitamin D, Vitamin E, Iron, and a multi-vitamin. Lately I’ve been getting sore throats in the morning so rather than wait to get really sick I’ve also been taking Echinacea and Zinc. Top it off with Hoodia an hour before meals and Culturelle (“to stimulate the immune system and support overall health and wellness”) in the afternoons, and the odd Ibuprofen here and there, and I am a walking over-the-counter pharmacy. At least there’s no Vicodin in there. I have noticed that my skin seems to be healthier, my verge-of-sickness is already retreating, and various other things seem to be improving. I’ve also been thinking of adding a daily fish oil pill, which helps you Get Ur Omega-3 On; anybody have any advice on that end?

Yesterday I was wearing my new favorite sweater. It’s white with a big Ben Sherman blue and red target on the front. I would very much love to pair my new favorite sweater with my new favorite shoes – those absolutely killer Alexander McQueen for Puma “Scythe” pointy black mids down below – but alas, I don’t yet have them. My birthday is June 15, people. And I am easily e-mailed for chit-chat, shoe size, and mailing address.

It was kinda warm out in the afternoon so I wasn’t wearing a jacket. Kathy and I were leaving Russo’s on 7th Ave in Park Slope – which is our favorite place to buy homemade pasta and crab cakes and bread because everything there is so good and pretty cheap and maybe I have a crush on one of the Italian guys working there – when some young guy passed us and pointed finger guns at me and my target sweater and went “pshooo.” I didn’t know him. Other strangers like to pretend I am a target as well when I wear that sweater. This was one of those times I tried to think about my life prior to New York.

If some dude I didn’t know pointed finger guns at me and made a shooting noise before I moved here from a smaller city, or before that from smaller towns, would I have thought it was as weird as I did yesterday? How is it possible in New York that we both ignore and notice everything? You can be on the subway with a mariachi band playing, some woman screaming at you for quarters, and a guy feeling himself up under a pair of baggy sweatpants… and have no reaction other than to flip the page of that People Magazine like you were sitting in a salon in Westchester. But, without ever having looked up, you can get off that train and detail every piece of clothing the masturbator was wearing when you tell your friend about it later.

Last summer I got a new phone, still a flip-phone and still a piece of shit despite it looking sorta nice. By the spring it hadn’t even been a year and already it was basically a paperweight that sometimes trembled. I wanted an iPhone but since I am under a Satanic Sprint contract I had to find something that would work with Sprint, lest I be charged One Testicle for breaking my Blood Union with them. After months of bitching, an HTC Touch fell into my lap from the heavens and I am thrilled. It’s like an iPhone plus a Blackberry plus a real good quality phone and camera with video and sound. Only thing it doesn’t have that the iPhone has is YouTube, which… I mean, who cares?

I currently have it set so that I don’t type things in; when I enter text into a text message or an e-mail or something, I hand-write it with the little stylus pen that tucks into the side, and my scribbles are converted accurately into text! It’s like living in the future! Or some weird distorted version of the past. It’s actually not any different than writing on a notepad, I guess. Kind of like in 1996 when I started instant messaging on AOL and I told my grandfather all about how you could “talk in real time with anyone” on the computer, and he came back with “yeah, you can do that on the phone, or how about in person.” And then I’m sure I was told to get off the computer and go outside, but I didn’t, I listened to more Tori Amos and closed the curtains and read Alternative Press and stewed.

Since apparently today is the day that everybody goes crazy over the return of Gossip Girl, I offer you a pure sugar post of photos I took of Chace Crawford, Penn Badgley, and Jessica Szohr last October when they visited Ruff Club.

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My favorite two songs from Madonna’s forthcoming Hard Candy are (1) “Give it to Me” and (2) “Miles Away.” While these both sound musically like the hands of her producers, they’re still very much her and recall past signature Madonna songs. Most of the rest of the album banks on tired stereotypes of last year’s radio and edges on gimmicky. But these and one or two others are great.

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The other day on the subway I saw the hottest couple I think I have ever seen in real life. The girl was in a simple black skirt and t-shirt with metallic blue flats that had big poofy metallic blue explosions on the end, and the guy had on a white t-shirt under a perfect flannel and holey-kneed gray jeans with raggedy white Adidas sneakers. They were both Asian and had dark hair. His was perfectly shaggy and big and looked like a million bucks without looking like he spent a lot of time on it, and hers was straight and swoopy. They both had really angular, beautiful faces, and looked like they were embarrassed by all the ugly people (me) staring at them. Then they got off the train and Sondre Lerche sat down.

Later that day I was walking to get some food with Kathy and I got a text message from a Canadian number I didn’t know that said “I’m so stalking you in Soho right now.” And I did the whole Jennifer Love Hewitt thing and looked all around at every person walking by. Everyone who made eye contact was a possible stalker. Almost pulled my shirt open and screamed “what are you waiting for?!” I’ve had weirdly obsessive people before, but lately there are a couple of guys who are really in actual stalking territory, and it’s making me super paranoid. I’m not worth that kind of time and effort, I don’t understand what goes on in peoples’ brains.

After that we ran into Agyness on her way to the corner store having just woken up at lunch time, looking as always like the cover of a magazine despite being at her most groggy and disheveled. At my worst I look like the cover of a magazine, too. Perhaps a magazine on which every cover is a corpse with one eye half open. Rachael Ray knows what I mean.

Have a listen to Northern State’s “Better Already” (1) and the JD Samson remix (2) below. It’s a new sound for them, off of Can I Keep This Pen?, their new album produced by Adrock of the Beastie Boys and Chuck Brody of Shitake Monkey. I really love this song, and the whole album is great. On June 3, I am playing a show with them at Knitting Factory, and I’m going to debut some new music and make a big deal out of the whole thing. It’ll be my first live show in over a year, so buy tickets (on sale tomorrow) and see us both!

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I shot Sam at Izquierdo Studio, where he works on costumes and elaborate outfits for all sorts of things. Movies, events, the gigantic wings that the models wear for the Victoria’s Secret runways… basically I seem to know more than my share of people who make things that Heidi Klum puts on her body.

As we walked in he told me not to mind Wes Craven, which I took to be a metaphor for all the dark masks and wings all over the walls. But seconds later we were setting stuff down and getting situated in a room where Wes Craven was sitting in the corner, looking over and approving some things for his next project. Kind of humbling to have my rinky-dink little camera and light bulbs on stilts in the presence of a guy known around the world for his cinematics.

My favorites are the first two below. And he’s wearing Tyra’s wings in the last one. They must have some lingering mojo because he sprouted a heavy mane of stick-straight brown extensions and a monster ‘tude the moment the wings touched his body. And no matter what anybody was talking about, he found a way to bring up some unrelated story about himself.

I just had an incredible weekend with some of my favorite people in the world. My boyfriend and my friends are such good people. So in love. I wish Kathy and Jes had been able to come. Christian was a judge on Miss USA in Vegas, so we went for a few days and brought along Sarah and Geneva and some of his friends from LA. Melissa was supposed to come and booked her own flight and everything, but couldn’t go at the last minute. Suck city. We stayed the first couple nights at the Planet Hollywood Hotel, where the pageant was. This was our view:

We then moved to the Venetian where Tao threw Christian a party. After dinner at the Tao restaurant (which had the most amazing sea bass I have ever had), Sarah made some calls to friends and soon we were joined by Oohlas and Killers and the night was a blast. Ollie and one of the dancing girls made a serious spiritual connection, I think maybe they are married now. The Kardashians were gorgeous and Khloe was really nice. Chris Evans was apparently there as well, but unfortunately I didn’t see him. Well, maybe fortunately, because I’m not sure I could have kept composed, or even upright.

Lots of really amazing photos coming later in the week.

Out the window on the flight home to New York last night I was studying the city lights, and I found the Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges. With my eyes I followed the Manhattan Bridge up Flatbush and over the Brooklyn avenues, and found the big dark jagged spots of land that were Prospect Park and Greenwood Cemetery across the street from my apartment. I was able to pinpoint my exact block, and look at the streetlight outside my building from miles up in the air. It meant a lot to me, I don’t know why. Planes still amaze me, looking down at how tiny everything humans do really is. From the ground these huge buildings in this huge city are overwhelming, but from up there it’s just toys and Christmas lights.

Listen to this. Lifelike remix of The Presets’ “This Boy’s in Love.” The new album is very good, very much their sound but lots of new directions.

Since it opened a year or two ago, I have been into the Spring Street Ben Sherman store a few times and only ever found a couple of things I liked. So I went in yesterday with the lovely Dana Dynamite looking for something and to my surprise I kind of love the entire spring collection. There was a lot more black and white than I think they’ve produced in the past, and anyone who has ever seen me out knows that my apparel rainbow is pretty much grayscale. Perfect. So she helped me find some amazing stuff that I’m bringing with me to Vegas. Without Dana I think maybe I would have been showing up to Tao in holey underwear and a poncho.

Yesterday was Geneva’s official birthday so we had dinner at 24 Prince, and as usual, I basically died. I want them to cater my afterlife. Finally introduced Nikki to Christian, and they had lots to talk about, obviously. When I get back next week I’m going to do some awesome photos with her. (more…)