"Heisenberg Might Have Been Here"
I read this today while sitting down in a toilet stall. Pretty clever stuff, especially for a toilet stall.
This made me start thinking about the curious nature of bathroom graffiti. I've always been particularly puzzled by this human form of expression: what impulse exists in the human psyche to want to write things on the walls of bathrooms and their stalls? Is it a need to express oneself, even anonymously? Is it a political statement? Is it boredom? Is there some gene in the human genome that leads one toward doing graffiti like, say, drug addiction (let's call it gene Bg)? Why do people do this?
When I lived in Austin, I had a particularly favorite bar that I was a regular at. This bar had a bathroom that was notorious for its graffiti. It was like those famous pictures of the bathroom in CBGB's: layer upon layer upon layer of graffiti. Some of it was ridiculous. Some of it was profane. Some of it was narcissistic. Some of it was cruel. A lot of it was pretty offensive. Most of it was banal.
But some of it was really clever. There was this one regular, a guy I knew named Keith, who could always be counted on to write funny, great graffiti to be found in between the names of bands and the insults to women. It was almost like a meta-discourse on bathroom graffiti. I particularly remember that during the Clinton-Lewinski scandal, Keith went through a period where he could not stop writing limericks on the wall about the situation. This particular one was my favorite:
Lewinski and Clinton have shown,
What Kaczynski must surely have known,
That an intern is better,
Than a bomb in a letter,
Given the option of how to be blown.
This made me start thinking about the curious nature of bathroom graffiti. I've always been particularly puzzled by this human form of expression: what impulse exists in the human psyche to want to write things on the walls of bathrooms and their stalls? Is it a need to express oneself, even anonymously? Is it a political statement? Is it boredom? Is there some gene in the human genome that leads one toward doing graffiti like, say, drug addiction (let's call it gene Bg)? Why do people do this?
When I lived in Austin, I had a particularly favorite bar that I was a regular at. This bar had a bathroom that was notorious for its graffiti. It was like those famous pictures of the bathroom in CBGB's: layer upon layer upon layer of graffiti. Some of it was ridiculous. Some of it was profane. Some of it was narcissistic. Some of it was cruel. A lot of it was pretty offensive. Most of it was banal.
But some of it was really clever. There was this one regular, a guy I knew named Keith, who could always be counted on to write funny, great graffiti to be found in between the names of bands and the insults to women. It was almost like a meta-discourse on bathroom graffiti. I particularly remember that during the Clinton-Lewinski scandal, Keith went through a period where he could not stop writing limericks on the wall about the situation. This particular one was my favorite:
Lewinski and Clinton have shown,
What Kaczynski must surely have known,
That an intern is better,
Than a bomb in a letter,
Given the option of how to be blown.
posted by cc at
3:06 PM
2 Comments:
Ever thought about the fact that the privy, or bathroom, is one of the last truly private places in this country?
It is where people go to get away from the family, "Ask your Dad, I am in the bath".
It is one of the few places people will not follow another.
It is the one room that people are the most embarressed to be found and worked on in, as I work as a medic, regardless the amount of clothing they are wearing.
You, yourself take to the time to read such things in the stall, that you would never be caught dead buying or flaunting in the "outside" world.
Why not let it be a place one can illegally scrawl same petty thoughts and not have to owe up to them? Break the law and write anything you want without being scutinized! Especially after a burrito with lots of onions!
Nice points. The collapse of the public sphere to the bathroom stall: there is a rhetoric paper in that idea. I'll give you credit if I ever write it.
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