Hack the City

Guadalajara, Mexico - Marc - Sunday, April 17th, 2005 : goo

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okay okay no blood for oil and i miss my bike a LOT..

but when you drive in a city you are as burroughs said participating in a secret conversation, the landscape talking at you in a second language beyond english words- everything in the city is telling you something and giving you a common point of reference to your fellow prisoners in these cages of iron and oil. the gigantic cellular automaton that is the traffic grid is one of life's easiest object lessons of the irreducibility of all of the great problems of the universe.. you can't know what the grid will look like in an hour without going thru the next 59 minutes anymore than you can know what the universe will look like in a hundred years- you can't know, but you can figure out some of the rules.

if hacking beyond computers is merely obsessively finding out as much as you can about any sort of system and using it in ways that nobody else ever thought of/intended, then driving in cities is the lowest common denominator lexeme to everyperson's innate desire to hack- not everybody picks locks or programs their tivo, but many people scheme on how to cut minutes off their commute and memorize traffic patterns, sometimes even for multiple cities.

san francisco, where the psychotic boom and bust economy affects manmade and natural creations.. the traffic patterns mimic the sudden salinization of the formerly freshwater Lake Merced- to avoid gridlock, you would never take a highway out of the city in the morning, until a few years ago when that policy mysteriously reversed itself during the dotbomb.. i miss you san francisco- biking up and down your hills for sweat, but usually lazing in the ideal sunny flatopia of the mission district, almost knocking into hottie redheaded bikers while reading the holy grail of the bike coalition bike lane map.. but driving? my old roommate matt was a cabby for luxor and i prided myself in comparing routes with him, laughing at my friends' and family's frustrations as it took them an hour to get to the place it took me 10 minutes to get to, and an hour to find parking when i knew enough to park on the sidewalk.

the city planners, growing up near generations of hacker mindsets that reduced circuit components on silicon wafers, knew enough to leave homage through timed lights, one-way streets, delivery zones- secrets that the city whispered in the ears of the cabbies and gas-powered hackers- i miss my free/cheap cars from san francisco and the tickets that would eventually lead to the cars disappearing from their parking spaces but mostly i miss my view of the highways from the traffic free neighborhoods that i always found myself living in, taking ghetto highways thru bayview and excelsior, and the free parking that accompanied the eerie ghosttown quiet of the streets late at night during the week of burningman.

because nobody in san francisco is from san francisco, the driving style was heterogenous- native san franciscans don't drive anyway, so there was no native driving style. the simplest tool for dealing with this is "routing around bullshit"- that chinese woman is being honked at and freaked out at by the indian java programmer for doing some bullshit left turn in an intersection? pull a uturn or pop the sidewalk and get around that shit.. why honk when nobody's right? when we all come with our own fucked up culture and baggage? the california hippie-dippie aesthetic as expressed through driving- why judge others when they gotta WANT to change, "man"?

half of my friends who moved out to SF from chicago stayed and loved the legal weed and built up the dope noise music scene- the other half couldnt deal with the bullshit where nobody's wrong and nobody's right and hightailed it back to homogenous driving style-land, that snowy prairie megalopolis chicago- algren says it was populated by scheming conmen who kept going west til they found the first settlement without a sheriff. luckily for auto hackers, they burned the whole thing down and blamed it on an old lady's cow so they could land phat road and building construction contracts.

so let's all start over from scratch, eh? build the perfect city grid, then build the perfect drivers.

when i learned how to drive in driver's ed, they'd wait til the icy winter, take you to a suburban mall parking lot and put you into a skid so you'd learn how to get out of it. i would think of this often during san francisco's rainy month, when clearly everybody had different strategies for freaking the fuck out during inclement weather.

99% of people who claim chicago are from the suburbs- and when two midwest megalopolisoids meet, they pinpoint each others exact chicago location and degree of more-hardcore-than-thou through street addresses. the whole thing's a grid/wheel spoke, so 6043 winthrop means right near loyola in edgewater bordering roger's park, and 1048 damen means the post-hipster ukranian, hell practically humboldt park.. a simple grid for everyone to figure out and not fuck it up. if you don't drive like a total thug in chicago, you -will- get the punishment honk. take the sidestreets like a good girl, jump across the grid with the huge diagonal streets like milwaukee or the interstate, and for god's sakes when it's Boot Day in your neighborhood, make your shit scarce. And when you drive in the suburbs? Let them know you are from the city (disregard this last one if you have a melanin count of higher than 1000 cpmm2).

I only drove a few times in new york but from what i remember it's just like walking on the sidewalks there- just close your eyes and trust your immediate neighbors' bumpers.

Driving down to mexico was my favorite driving- road trip driving. 3700 miles in a week. Popping into one reality, hanging out and peeping the scene, then a grueling day of driving oblivion that serves to shake your etch-a-sketch and let you start over in Albuquerque, Austin, Zacatecas.. everybody in the new city has a totally different trip, they all read different books or dont read at all and if you're lucky the radio stations arent all clear channel'd up and they actually play different shit- best to stick to AM.

Now we are in Guadalajara and the car has fallen apart and demanded more money and more knowledge and mastery but it will probably make the trip home. I've gone native when it comes to driving. Everyone drives, so the pollution here is so awful that Ali's childhood asthma came back. In the capital city of D.F., they restrict weekday driving to certain license plate numbers per day- of course the residents that could afford it just went out and bought 2nd and 3rd cars. All this in the most populous city in the western hemisphere (15 million? 30 million?), surrounded by mountains that don't let any of the CO out.

Guadalajara is only a measly 8 million, but the air's still bad and people still drive like maniacs. Learning the new city is amazing- there are turnabouts aka glorietas everywhere (sorta like boston), the tenthousands of buses are all total pricks, and jeeps full of cops driving around with assault weapons apparently don't give a fuck. One way streets are suggestions (like SF) and we have yet to be pulled over for anything, probably due to the aforementioned low melanin count.

Everytime I see some other driver do some crazy shit, like say pull onto a highway through the exit ramp, i almost shit myself "holy fuck! you can do -that- here? Yess!!" another trick added to my oeuvre.. red lights and stop signs? there to color up the scenery. pulling across lanes of oncoming traffic to turn left? i think there's something about it in the national anthem... i saw glimmers and hints of this driving technique back on mission street, like a mural depicting some better mural thousands of miles away.

It's a formidable city to figure out, with no real grid, lying street signs, streets that change names three times during their course across the city, and of course dirt streets with 3 year old children selling chiclets or juggling oranges for a peso or two (9-18 cents). People sell shit at every intersection, and most of the food is delicious- if you're a thick white cow person from the midwest who doesnt eat burritos every day, you get the shits- but if you've lived in SF, your body has developed latino ecoli which make everything okay.

The busses are the most crazy- very cheap although a recent fare increase pissed a lot of people off. Tricked out on the inside with airbrushed murals of hot bitches , christ on the cross, and the omnipresent virgen de guadalupe- pretty much the fastest, if not most reliable then most entertaining mode of transport in the city. These flaming chapels on wheels operate on commission, so they race each other thru the city, blowing past the paltry

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sine: marc welcome to citynoise!!! we love you!

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