Auth'ing to LJ API?

[squirrelitude]

Has anyone had success recently in authenticating to LiveJournal's API? In particular I'm trying to use the getevents call with cookie auth, but all I get is this:

LJ_USER="..."
LJ_COOKIE="v1:..."
curl http://www.livejournal.com/interface/flat -H "X-LJ-Auth: cookie" -H "Cookie: ljsession=$LJ_COOKIE" -d "ver=1&mode=getevents&user=$LJ_USER&auth_method=cookie"

errmsg
Invalid password
success
FAIL

(I'm trying to write a script to go back through my LJ posts, and for each one replace the contents with the string "deleted" and then delete the post. I stopped crossposting a month or two back and now it's time to clear my history there as best I can...)

ETA: "clear" auth (plaintext username and password) works. Hashtag YOLO. (It's not like any of this was over HTTPS anyhow so whatever. I'll just change the password later.)