The primary role of a fundraiser is to manage rich people. Rich people are hard to manage. I’m exhausted after working on a gala and award ceremony for months. Regular people have to control their whims, desires, and thoughts. Rich people do not. They are like badly behaved children. Rich people trust and like their [...]
Archive for the ‘Class’ category
This little Marxist goes bourgeois
Pt. 1: Class conflict(ed) I’m an angry flyer. But it isn’t the poor service, cramped seats, or high prices that raise my ire – you know, the kinds of things that get normal people’s blood boiling. For me it’s the way that most airlines shamelessly highlight the delineation between the haves and have-nots. First class [...]
Crack House Diary Entry 03: Squatting in Someone’s Home
There are no ‘abandoned’ houses in South Central. If a house or building is left unoccupied long enough someone will eventually make unofficial use of the structure. HUD foreclosed houses are no exception even though HUD officers visit them a couple of times each week looking for evidence of occupation. Our future house, for example, [...]
It’s a crime
Susan Atkins, the member of the Manson family who stabbed the pregnant Sharon Tate, and smeared the word “pig” in Tate’s blood on the murder scene wall, recently made an appeal for a compassionate release from prison. For those not up to speed on her health, Atkins is suffering from the final stages of brain [...]
Crack House Diaries: The realtor shows us the house.
The first time we visited the house, we pulled up to find our real estate agent attempting to jimmy the lock on the front door with a $2 hammer and a bent screw driver. He had already mangled the lock so badly that the key would no longer fit, so the hammer and screwdriver were [...]
Crack House Diaries: Part 1
The first nights in the crack house were the worst. It was late August, still pressing ninety degrees at eleven o’clock, the kind of late temperature where even a thin bed sheet would stifle. More oppressive than the heat were the panic attacks, adrenaline pumping fits induced by slight sounds; a honking horn or a [...]
Emigration intérieure
I’ve told several writers for this site that a perfectly acceptable post would be a paragraph or two from something that caught their fancy plus a bit of commentary. So, in the spirit of finishing my taxes, allow me to demonstrate: This weekend I needed something to read while waiting for my copy of The [...]
Straddling offense
Imagine you teach literature (not a stretch for many of you). Now imagine you have a student who’s super pious and often writes about how the texts you select feature filthy, immoral women who aren’t following God’s laws and instead choose to “spill into the volatile meaty mire of raunchy, distasteful choices” and “dip their [...]
A country for old men
In college I became so angry with the outrageous acts my government has commited, ostensibly on my behalf, that I researched renouncing my United States citizenship. This research was not merely about youthful anger, it was also guiding my honor’s thesis. My basic thesis was that the nation state was a problematic construction that didn’t [...]
A couple of things I did last week
Sometimes a blog is just a blog, right? And it can house a collection of fragments? And have lame post titles? Like LiveJournal? * * * I got to go to the opera last week, completely unexpectedly. My boss ended up with an extra ticket to the Kirov’s production of Die Walküre at Lincoln Center’s [...]
