An Argument for Class Warfare

Dear Roberta and Chris Hanley, who live at Eleven Brooks Street in Venice (and whose phone number is still in my posession and I would post it if I were home), a block from the beach, in a large industrial-looking loft space with modernist furniture and several Basquiats leaned up against the walls:

You are evil, evil, evil. The only positive thing to come from going to your stupid party was that the absolute revulsion I feel at you and your awful peers reminds me, by contrast, of how many genuinely nice people are in the world. You wanted us to play avant-garde sound collage IDM, and you handed me several cd's, but when I asked you which tracks you liked you told me you had not listened to the albums. Or you wouldn't deign to talk to us at all, instead sending your little personal assistant trotting over to tell us what Madame wished to hear: "something you can dance to," even tho we'd been spinning dance music all night. I was disgusted with the video projections you had on the walls, which were shot with someone's hi-8 videocamera and featured either midgets hanging out on the set of some midget-related movie, like they were wacko po-mo curiousities; zooming in on the tits of the women midgets, filming as a beautiful 19-year old model-type girl (of normal stature, in a tight black dress) shimmied and danced in the middle of all the midgets...then you flipped to shots that the mystery cameraman, so obviously present even tho he wasn't in the shot, took of a bunch of young model / actress types as they chatted, zooming in on their crotches and their breasts; the teenage girls giggled and fluttered their hands as they talked, and tried on different designer outfits, the camera lingering in on their legs, trying as much as possible for an upskirt shot. Oh, and video of you two at parties sitting around and talking with other presumably important people, as if to say, Look, we're important enough to hang out casually with other really rich people! And how no one in the entire party full of Hot Young Actors whose faces I recognize but names I don't know, and Beautiful Young Things and Rich Middle-Aged Fashionista Types even watched, they just tittered and nattered on to one another, the volume in the room rising so hugh that the gossipy voices drowned out the music, as though to watch this disgusting spectacle would prove they were interested, and to be anything but jaded and disaffected would be crass, so no one looked; and then you switched to hours of close-up video projections of Vincent Gallo and Julia Delpy just talking. Sitting, and eating, and talking. Your fawning fascination disgusts me. There was no sound; it wasn't about what they were saying. You didn't give a shit. You just wanted to show everyone that you'd had lunch with these people. You're fucking disgusting and the way you treat people is abhorrent. You fucked with the schedule at the last minute, forcing Joe to spin for two more hours than he'd prepared for, and then you tried to pay him less than you'd originally said you'd pay, telling him you were on a budget as you stood in front of a large Basquiat--a work costing near millions of dollars. When I tried to engage you in a discussion about the piece, hoping for a vague flutter of humanity, you shrugged and said that you weren't too sure what the painting was about, but that it was "okay."

I hope you enjoy your brutal isolation in your minimalist fortress with your bouncers at the door who made us take our shoes off when we walked in. I hope you atrophy and crumble to dust in your tiny tiny little world, a world you have the money to make wide and huge and wonderful but instead fill with vapid and meaningless pantomimes of material and social success.

Fuck you. Thanks for reminding me how lucky and how rare my friends and I are to feel deeply, and to think deeply, and to fully inhabit our lives.