I was sitting listening to Mahler last night, sipping an amusing little French wine, and thinking about the embarrassing pretentiousness of some people. Of course, I’m referring to the sort of phony pseudo-intellectuals who continually about blathering on about Strindberg and Noam Chomsky. Personally, I like to consider myself a man of the people, and yet at the same time a true renaissance man. Somebody who can elaborate on the subtleties of Strindberg over a glass of Burrowing Owl one minute, and the next be just as comfortable sitting down and having a nice bottle of Lucky and discussing various groin scratching techniques with the average benighted lunchbucket the next. In think this is why so many of the little people enjoy my company.
On the other side of the coin, there is my infernal neighbour, Cecil Idris Idris Jones. Everything the haughty bombast does is steeped in condescension and patronising snobbery. Just the other night, he showed up – uninvited mind you – to my weekly performance art presentation and haiku reading, with a copy of The New Yorker rolled up under his arm, and began loudly rustling through the pages right in the middle of my piece-de-resistance performance of Ode to Marcel Marceau (an ironic, post-modernist meditation on the confluence of Mondrian’s negative-space capacities and non-homogenized French cheeses). I can tell you that the other audience members appeared to be quite put out by this rudeness, and both of them left during the intermission citing very feeble excuses. I haven’t previously felt the need to hire security personnel for these informal and light hearted get-togethers, but I am now definitely considering it.
To make matters worse, it now seems the pudgy little blighter has begun to fancy himself quite a patron of the arts. For the last few months, monsieur Jones has been hosting showy fundraising events at his house for a variety of arts organizations: a South African wine tasting night for the Opera Society; gourmet dinners on behalf of the Vancouver Art Gallery; dog spaying soirees in support of the Jungian Surrealists of B.C., that sort of thing. I consider myself to be a pretty stable, well-adjusted person, but when I heard about his blatant efforts to buy himself social cache in this way I had the strongest desire to crawl through his bedroom window, murder him with a large flat rock, and bury him in the back yard. I just have to figure out how to make it look like a suicide.
