Don't just sit there!
Bathroom graffiti preview 07/08
EVAN JOHNSON, STAFF
With the new school year starting up again, it’s time to take a look at the current state of on-campus bathroom graffiti. A tour of the campus has convinced me that most toilet stalls have been cleaned up and painted over. What little graffiti I did find was puerile and unpleasant: misogyny and homophobia were constants; as were crude drawings of supine women and disembodied peni. I had hoped at least for a dirty limerick here or there, but in every stall the writing was the same: no esthetic aspirations, no attempt at euphony; just a blunt, vulgar lurch towards the genitals. Where’s the foreplay?
I should note here that I’m not necessarily advocating vandalism. The university has a hard-working maintenance staff that has better things to do than clean up your stupid graffiti, and I want nothing more than a clean, pleasant bathroom stall, free from verbal and visual hostility. But if you must write on the stalls, I have a few suggestions.
This coming year, I would like to see more typed manifestos posted on stall doors. I saw only one last year; some foofaraw about how university students are sexually decadent. I admired many things about this manifesto, not least how strikingly unfashionable it was, with its appeals to abstinence and its sad page of blank lines on which converted apostles were meant to write their names. It reeked pungently of pious condescension, as manifestos often do, but at least it showed forethought and a coherent vision, which is more than I can say for most of the "ideas" bandied about in the university’s bathroom stalls.
What, for example, am I meant to make of "cream blast," a declaration with utterly no contextual information that I discovered in the bathroom under the Russell building? In the name of journalism, I Googled the phrase "cream blast" and exhaustively scrutinized the results, which had primarily but not exclusively to do with ice cream, and a little bit to do with semen.
Initially, I saw promise in this quatrain that I found in a first floor bathroom in Isbister:
"I’m using smarter taktics to overcome the slum,
I won’t become as dumb as some and succumb to scum,
It’s cumbersome I’m trying to do well on this Earth,
But it’s been hell on Earth ever since I fell on this Earth."
Even though I agreed with the cantankerous critic who had scrawled "bad use of rhyme" directly under this poem, I was delighted to finally find some bathroom graffiti with a sense of formal structure, and for that reason I fought the urge to dismiss it. It’s also clearly a hip-hop lyric, and one oughtn’t to dismiss a hip-hop lyric until one has heard it rapped; only then does its peculiar syntax begin to fall into place. Unfortunately, this particular lyric was not an Isbister original, as I was hoping, but had been lifted, word for word, from Eminem’s "It’s Okay."
Let’s look at some of the graffiti prospects for individual buildings on campus:
Favourites
University Centre: As a central hub on campus, University Centre bathrooms will likely see a large amount of traffic and this potential for a large, captive audience will encourage many would-be vandals.
Agriculture: The high-fibre diet of Agriculture students means more trips to the bathroom. On the other hand, these trips will be quick and efficient, leaving very little time for poetical musings.
Underdogs
Engineering: Though engineering students are generally silly people, the large percentage of international students in this faculty will seriously hinder its chances.
International students, according to the casual stereotyping I’ve done, have a number of qualities that make them sub-par vandals: the fact that they’ve chosen to study at a foreign school suggests a certain gregariousness which is in direct opposition to the crude anti-social behaviour of bathroom-scribblers; and the fact that they aren’t, as such, citizens, makes them considerably more wary of damaging public property.
FitzGerald: Home to many fine arts classes, you would expect the Fitzgerald building to come up strong, at least in terms of pictorial graffiti; but graffiti art’s growing acceptance in the artistic establishment means that fine arts students already have an outlet for their self-indulgent doodling.
St. Paul’s: If the students of this Catholic college want to get scribbling, they’ll have to overcome their innate guilt. Also, with a confessional just around the corner, St. Paul’s bathrooms stalls won’t be seeing too many deep, dark secrets. On the other hand, it would be nice to see some serious theological discussions taking place here; I’ve always found the bathroom strangely conducive to spiritual introspection.
