Great moments in pretension!

In My Humble Opinion
1

After looking around the SMDB looking for info on New York, I came across this thread , wherein Eve mentions one of the most pretentious things I’ve possibly ever read. She supposed she had met the most pretentious human being alive after hearing how he was channeling his liberal angst in a detective story about Oedipus Rex.

After having read a few other stories, I decided to start my own thread instead of hijacking/resurrecting the old one. What was the most pretentious thing you’ve ever seen? I’ll give mine here. It’s very easy to find these in New York, by the way.

I was at some kind of hipster bar in New York. This is probably one of the few places I knew that had PBR on draft, and it was full of your hipster types. I see a guy with a copy of a magazine folded up in his back pocket. This was, of course, a copy of the Economist. It was folded lengthwise where the top half was sticking out of his back pocket. Interestingly enough, the economist is one of the few magazines where the title only takes up the left half of the top of the front page. Oh yeah, it was also four o’clock in the fucking morning. Obviously this guy was trying to make a statment. Maybe something like, “Okay look. I may look like one of these Vice Magazine-reading hipsters who has a very dim view on what is going on in the world and with an equally ignorant view of things in general, but I’m not! I read the Economist, in case you’re wondering. Not only can I diss you for saying you like the Rapture (much better before they were famous, and trust me, the Strokes are such sell-outs now too. I saw them when they were pratically homeless) but I can also hold my own in a discussion about the dangerous situation of China supporting the American trade deficit”

I really felt like vomiting, and I nearly had to leave the room when my astute friend commented, “You know…there are eight ways he could have folded that magazine and put it in his pocket, and only one of them would result in the name of the magazine being prominently displayed like it is.”

If, by some freak chance he was innocently reading the economist on his subway on the way out (who doesn’t?) he could have possibly folded it just so…by accident. But I’m not buying it. So that’s my entry. A faux-punk, hipster wearing the economist as an accessory in a desperate effort to appear a bit more deep. Or maybe just as a signal saying, “Hey I’m smart! That’s reason enough to give me more consideration than the next guy!”

2

I’ve been in a few writer’s groups where Pretention were some people’s middle name. I remember one guy who called any little vignette he wrote “another section of my autobiography.” It was just awful stuff – unpublishable except in the most incestuous of small presses. I mentioned at one point that I had had things published and you could see him turning green with envy.

This was in a graduate program, and I came to the conclusion that he was going to get his degree and then get a job teaching at a creative writing program without the slightest evidence he had any writing ability.

Earlier, we were running a writer’s group and decided to put a notice for new members. A bunch showed up, led by this one guy who was certain he was God’s gift to writing. He let drop several times that he had had a book published and that he was considered one of the best in the business as a creator of titles. His book was titled, “You can Save a Bundle on Your Car Insurance,” so you can judge that claim.

Now we were a small, friendly group, mostly made up of women who were trying to write. We had our first person read, and, after about five minutes, he stood up (as she was reading), mumbled, “this is way below my talents,” and left the room.

For several months, people in the group were writing stories with characters based on this guy – who had only been there about ten minutes.

I ran into him a few months later in the unemployment office. He asked me why it was that the editorial assistants followed him around when he visited publishers. I said nothing, but thought, “because they need to characterize an asshole for the book they’re working on.”

Incidently, three people in the room that day subsequently have had novels published. He was not one of them.

3

Oooh, look at me! I read The Economist!

note: the original page isn’t working, so the link goes to the Google cache.

4

That’s because it was just the cover of the Economist, wrapped around the latest issue of Juggs. Or Cat Fancy. Or Fancy Cat Juggs.

5

I have an enormous number of these kinds of experiences to share, mainly since I made the huge mistake of graduating from a theatre program in university.

My favourite was in first year, when we were doing a completely pointless exercise. The T.A. had us outside, and the exercise was: one at a time, we will all make a noise and a movement to go with it, while walking around in a circle together. After one person makes their noise and movement, we all repeat that noise and movement.

Whatever. I can see the purpose as a warm-up, I suppose. So we all did this. Naturally, many of the people in the class were making the most of this opportunity to be in the spotlight, and as such, we somehow all ended up, ten minutes later, rolling around in the grass, in a circle, all making bizarre noises, ending with a whisper-whooshing noise and us laying still. Sooooo artsy.

So we all sit up, and the T.A. says, “So what did you get from this?” I sit there baffled. What did I get? I got my clothes dirty by rolling around on the ground. But of course, the whole class raises their hands, eager to share their mind-blowing experiences.

One girl says, “I felt really connected to everyone, and to nature!”

One guy says, “I really felt myself becoming one with everything around me.”

One girl says, (I swear I’m not making this up), “I could feel the spiritual unity between us all, and Mother Earth.” She was serious.
I nearly threw up, I was so aghast.

6

I was sitting on the steps of a skyscraper in downtown Chicago, trying to paint some of the buildings in front of me as the workday ended and the city emptied out.

A fancy silver sportscar parked right in front of me, very low and sexy. Guy hops out - he’s muscular, big arms, long black ponytail. Black muscle t-shirt. Puts on his black leather jacket. Adds his black sunglasses. Quite the dude. Reaches in, pulls out his shiny silver high-tech briefcase.

He gets a few steps away, sexy stride and all, when a gust of wind must’ve shaken his car or something -
HONK HONK HONK.

He reaches for his keys
HONK HONK HONK

Fumbles, drops them
HONK HONK HONK

Briefcase under this arm, under that arm, sets it down
HONK HONK HONK

Can’t figure out which button to press
HONK HONK HONK

It’s this one - no, it’s that one
HONK HONK HONK

The man finally had to GET INTO HIS CAR AND START IT in order for the honking to cease so he could go about his business.

His second departure completely lacked mystery and allure.

7

I live in DC so I got lots, but I knew this friend of a friend who had made up this complete identity for himself. He had changed his name from something like Fred to “Hunter” he spoke in a fake English accent, he called playing pool “shooting some stick” and getting a beer “grabbing a pint.” He was so over the top, that I kind of admired the tenacity with which he kept up the delusions.

8

When my family and I were walking in downtown Sarasota around 1990 there was a couple dudes who got out of their fancy sports car and started walking down the street. We told them they had their lights on (cause they did), and one of them turns around and yells something like “Hey, boy! C’mon, boy! C’mon, sport!” And the lights turn off.

Well, it was obviously one of the recently-introduced devices that automatically turn off your lights when your car shuts off. It didn’t wow us or make us think he was teh K3wl. It just made us think he was an asshole for trying to make us look like a fool for trying to help him.

9

I remember being in a bar once with my girlfriend and another girl. Some guy had started chatting up the “other girl”. She asked him what he did for a living and he goes, “I own stuff.”

That can either be really funny or really pretentious. It was the latter.

Mainers tend to really recoil at pretension. Whenever something was said in my Mom’s presence that was slightly pretentious, she’d say, “well ahn’t you special?”

10

Oh, Lord, this takes me back to the Interpersonal Dynamics class I took as an undergrad. Apparently it was a contest to see who was the most connected and self actualized. I lost.

11

The most pretentious guy I ever knew was also one of the poorest.

He’d been born into a semi-wealthy family. (His grandfather was the inventor of some sort of mechanical heart valve or something like that.) I don’t know if they fed this guy Snob for breakfast but he thought he was a cut above the rest of humanity. Unfortunately, he didn’t have anything to back it up-- no talents, no brains, no charm and no sophistication.

I heard from a friend who worked with this guy that he had sent out some kind of a “newsletter” to the other employees at his job when he bought a house. She says he went on and on in it about how fancy the house was and how huge it was. She said he noted (punctuated by triple exclaimation points) that he didn’t know what he’d do with all of that space. I’ve been to that house. It’s about 1200 square feet. He has nine kids.

He also bragged that he owned eight cars. Technically, he did, but seven of them were wrecked-- totalled cars he had bought from a junkyard with the grand scheme of fixing them up and selling them. (He never did. I drove by the house a while back and eight years later, those cars are still in the front yard.)

12

I was in a bar one time a few years ago, and caught sight of this stylish, good-looking young guy with a cigarette in his hand. I don’t know why I started paying attention, but I realized he wasn’t actually smoking the cigarette. He was using the hand holding it to make lots of gestures as he talked. When the person he was with was talking, he’d start to bring the cig to his mouth, but just before it got there, he’d start talking again, and have to use that hand to gesture with. Bring the cigarette to his mouth, almost get to inhale, then more with the gesturing, exactly the same over and over and over. I watched him for 10 minutes or so, and he never once actually inhaled, just let the cig burn all the way down by itself. I still get a chuckle out of how patently obvious the whole thing was, even years later.

13

We have this one guy who has been hanging at our dive bar for some time now. He has no problem sitting on a bar stool, talking on his cellphone and saying stuff like, “yeah, put the ten g’s in escrow today if you want me to facilitate this deal” and basically being a self important fuckstick.

Dude, you work for your dad! You LIVE WITH YOUR DAD! You’re 50 years old! We ain’t BUYIN’ IT! We all KNOW BETTER!

Plus he plays the jukebox all the time (really crappy shit, too) when we want to watch Jeopardy.

Douchebag…

14

I probably have a lot of stories, but rather liked this one. I was having dinner with an acquaintance. We sat down with wine glasses we carried over from the bar, and then decided to order a bottle of something better when the waitress came over. We made our selection, whereupon this cute little waitress starts hopping up and down in a fit of mania. Seems she can’t wait to get the ‘ordinary’ red wine glasses off of table so that she can bring over the ‘Bordeaux’ glasses more – eh em - appropriate to the bottle we selected. So she pleads with us to finish up, and hustles the glasses away saying, “Ick. Ick. Just forget these were every here. Yuck. They’re going. They’re gone. Gone.” I’ve never seen such a wretched display of wine snobbery.

15

Way back when, when I was single, I used to do this with an unlit cigarette. I wasn’t trying to be pretentious, I was just trying to pick up guys. :smiley:
Cute chick in a bar, unlit cigarette, see how long it takes for a guy to offer me a light, buy me a drink…
Never mind.

16

OK, I have to ask . . . Did it work?

17

Yep.

18

Obviously only for a certain sector of the population. My reaction would have been along the lines of, “She’s cute. Oh, wait. Smoker. Damn.” If you actually didn’t smoke, I would have been puzzled and angry.

Probably just as well I don’t go to bars much.

19

Don Snyder talks about that, particularly in praise of his wife, in The Cliff Walk. Fantastic book.

20

Well, it was years ago when I smoked and smoking was allowed in bars.