between birth and death, we are encouraged by our parents, then our peers, to mark the passing of time with celebrations, mostly undeserved, of the day of our being delivered into this world. appropriately named birth-days, they are spent taking stock of the successes and failures of the past in order to adjust the present and better divine the outcomes of the future drinking swill until the body can take no more and rejects you as a host.

now, this past friday was my dearest friend, english-born ceylon beauty natasha chetiyawardana's birth-day. i have known her less than a decade but in that time have learned to appreciate her as an artist, a designer and a humanitarian bring her to near-orgasm with nary a touch while watching Lost. or at least, i used to... see, a few months ago, she left back to her native england in order to pursue a career that evidently did not have to include near-orgasms. this is a woman whose friendship, as previously documented here, is hard for me to live without, a woman whose brain i most possibly share, a women whom my wife, in a feat of understanding, seems to feel no bitterness towards. what to get such a women to celebrate the 30th year of her appearance on this, our earth?

vivienne westwood wallpaper to finish her new london flat?
25 films by akira kurosawa because she never saw 1?
a new suitcase for her many travels?
ceramic centerpieces for her obsessively glorious cooking?
or the topless bikini for obvious reasons?

well, none of these really hit gina or i as the perfect gift. no, instead, we chose humiliation... i slid over the piano, gina to the legal pad and we soon would be in possession of exactly that in the form of a ditty and accompanying visuals written and directed expressly for her. of course, for the rest of you, it might make little sense and readily catapult us in the internet's deepest, darkest corner but if you read these pages on a regular basis, you know that we have little dignity left to lose.

so here it is, natasha, ladies and gentlemen, i give you (and do yourself a favor, fullscreen and crank that shit to 11) ...

"brown girls"

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it was on this date 10 years ago that i first packed my bags to fly away to the famed salone internazionale del mobile, an event of gargantuan proportions in the club i had just feigned membership into with the opening of the apartment design store. i was told that i could not miss milan's design fair if i wanted to be significant at all within the ranks of said elite community. these were good times, like the ones i'd heard about from france, during which entrepreneurs like myself granted ourselves permission to "invest in our growth" as we called it so as not to alarm the accountants. and so on we went, from first class alitalia, and discovering it was no better that coach delta, to our first taste of melt-in-your-mouth bufala, the trip became much more than a matter of mere trade show attendance, but rather a pilgrimage to a land where quality of life was not a pursuit, just the way. from lunching and shopping at 10 corso como to nighttime debauchery at plastic, the journey soon became a blur. supposed to focus on designers and their wares, our time was rather quickly filled with the golden triangle and the myriad restaurants and other places of capitalistic sin previously listed in this here column from last year.

but you know what? it would probably be much better to actually see it happening instead of reading me telling you how amazing it used to be. well, as luck would have, it, i just unearthed my very first travelogue, heretofore never seen by anyone but its participants. it was only our second year in the italian design capital and it was quite a treat. it would be my first foray in committing audiovisual to digital memory so the pace is slow, the editing tentative (in iMovie 1!) and the storyline is approximate at best but here it is...

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filmed entirely on a canon copier, memories of a scanner is a cute office story that will, if history serves, probably get its makers signed to a three-picture deal at universal.

am i missing something? i think i am. this new gaga/beyoncé video should have been the next landis' thriller, or at least scorsese's bad, but turns out just to be ĺkerlund's telephone. the thing is that i am getting the feeling that there is a host of jokes that i'm not getting in this thing which could enhance my enjoyment of the aforementioned madness. is it because i'm 40? is it because i'm fat? i don't know... sure, it's nice to see the *spoiler alert* pussy wagon make a comeback but that just seems lazy. i liked this conversation better when it was held on a videophone...