Ode to the Common Caricature
INDIVIDUAL: Renée O’Drobinak
GROUP SIZE: 2
NATURE OF GROUP: specimen a and specimen x
INCIDENCE OF SOCIOMETRY: Ode to the Common Caricature
This report was originally published on a tri-fold display at Sociometry Fair 2008 in Chicago. These American Beer enthusiasts are clearly beguiled.
The common urban road draws a parallel line, subdividing the order of passageway into a strip for pedestrians and the central space for vehicles. In some countries and cities, more lines are drawn to indicate a section strictly for bicycles. Segmented into their respective areas, government representatives, cohorts of minions, designers, intellectuals and pikeys all march onward, like a swarm of ants, to their destinations-whether it may be Downing Street or the town center shopping mall in Basingstoke.
So it was a couple of months ago in London, where I happened to be asking around what people thought of American beer. Don’t ask why, I study fine art and therefore get away with the most impromptu of market research antics. Amongst the plethora of quirky responses, here is my favorite:
“Same as what I think of all generalizations.”
A rather sweeping comment for someone on such a rampant opposition to ‘generalizing’, I sit and wonder whether this particular specimen is opposed to politically incorrect stereotyping, or simply all generalizations, which is the ultimate oxymoron if you ask me. Perhaps a fellow American national offended by my earnest pigeonholing of their (our) identity?
I always wondered about those queasy smiles that people flash when I make an overt reference to generalizing groups of people. Oh, those emos. The Sloanes. And how can we forget those lovely head-to-toe TOPSHOP girls who, I imagine, are secretly sniffing around in the new Primark on Oxford Street? Or better, how many times do we admit to hearing a distinctly Vicky Pollard conversation between the stalls in ASDA, wondering if they are in fact from Croydon?
Perhaps the result of a religiously liberal, PC-infested education that lionizes one’s individuality that is now permanently embedded in the psyche those of my generation (I was in my early teens when the Backstreet Boys wanted it thaat-ah way). However, I would suggest this phenomenon of subcultural unification is what the effect of globalization ironically entails; as I could easily find the exact same pair of striped American Apparel leggings on a pair of Chicagoan, Londoner, and Tokyoite legs, taxonomy has reached a new level as a parallelogram, swarms of subcultures clustering around a set of stereotypes, orbiting a distinctly paralleled connection. It is a system of taxonomy vis-à-vis Michel Foucault’s “laughter that shattered…all the familiar landmarks of my thought” (Routeledge, p. xvi), in which he introduces The Order of Things. Now of course my version is a petty reconstruction of an order of specific urban dwellers, but I imagine it is as righteous as an animal that is ordered according to “(m) having just broken the water pitcher”.
I often find myself around and about Brick Lane at lunchtime, for example, as I happen to be working nearby. Obviously, I tend to notice the types that I frequently encounter myself, and hence I present the reader with two species that never fail to amuse me:
Specimen a
Specimen a is a student of the arts. They are caught wearing skinny jeans and fluorescent Converse shoes, outgrown hair wrapped in a scruffy headband. The vintage shirt, I presume, was purchased at Beyond Retro on Cheshire Street. The first years in university are often found around 93 Feet East on Brick Lane, the older ones crossing the street into the Vibe Bar for a dash of Bengali Hip Hop. An interior designer, a fine artist, an illustrator perhaps; in any case the species are regulars at private views in the Old Street and/or Bethnal Green area, aspiring to the day that they themselves will one day be the star of the show. They sip their smoothies and talk of Damien Hirst’s new elaborately garnished skull. One evening I met a particular specimen a: chatting away across a bar, she told me she makes paintings with her menstrual blood. She insisted that she was not a feminist, and invited my friend and I to a squat party on Vyner Street.
Try swapping cities with Tokyo, and find them at a gig in Shimo-kitazawa or a gallery opening in Yoyogi, with their bundled orange hair and Vivienne Westwood socks; or alternatively, spot them at an underground café in Kichijoji with their French roasts. Ask them whether they attend Suido-bata prep school or Bunsai Art College, and if they’re planning to study abroad in the near future. Chicago? Take the blue line up to Damen, I would suggest looking in the Earwax café or any given bar in the area. Just make sure not to confuse an SAIC student with a Columbia College student (as thou shalt not confuse a Goldsmiths with a St. Martins student in London), it tends to infuriate them. By the way, do they happen to live in a shared house in Pilsen by any chance?
Specimen x
Specimen x is a species often found stalking the pubs around Liverpool Street station, raising their pints of Stella Artois to the end of another hard day of work. Meet them at an amateur comedy night in Leicester Square, they tend to be the ones heckling the poor comedians off the stage into their lamentable cloud of misery. Dressed in pinstripe suits, cropped haircuts and somewhat battered leather shoes, perhaps they are workers in finance, juggling sums of money beyond the commoner’s imagination. They tend to be the ones I find coming up to me at a pub in Bloomsbury on a Wednesday night, making some vulgar remarks on my accent (re-electing Bush was not my idea, thank you).
One can easily see the equivalent Tokyoite in Shinjuku, or O-saki perhaps, bowing heads to a raised chu-jokki of draught Asahi Super Dry. The difference being, their vulgar remarks tend to concentrate on one’s breast size. And they favor baseball instead of football. I once met a Chicagoan specimen x near a Rush Street bar/club with screens airing basketball games, bottle of Miller Lite in hand; how they have an apartment on the Gold Coast, how they own a Cadillac, how they work at a big building somewhere in the Loop.
Somehow in my mind specimen x is a secret poet. They would scramble together strings of thought into a carefully constructed text, reiterating its melodic self once voiced. They are the ones that secretly reveal themselves on the odd train journey on a Saturday morning, reciting their poetry to a curious stranger, never to be seen again once the train comes to a full stop. Behind the grim faces they flash on a morning tube ride, could there be a romantic lurking somewhere in there?
I like speculating whether specimen a could be a closet rationalist. Unlike their I-like-to-quote-Hal-Foster postmodernist colleagues, a storm of logical thinking bubbles within specimen a, only finding its way out in a fury at a drunken night when nobody else is really listening? Could they be questioning who they really are, despairing at the idea that two plus two may not actually equal five?
If Italo Calvino can paint a portrait of Venice from a multitude of invisible cities, I wonder whether I could possibly conclude that I am constructing a figure of a single creature. But our vision is skewed with the anonymous mass of uniformed people, and these caricatures that I draw represent the combats between the so-called Same and Other-but oh well, I find these guys entertaining whichever way. Nobody is an exact blueprint of a stereotype, but the ordered observation certainly echoes from somewhere.
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copywritte 2007 Renée O’Drobinak
www.reneeodrobinak.com
Tags: Guerilla Sociometry, Institute of Sociometry, is, is agent, Sociometry Fair