Shopping Carts in Ravines

James Howard Kunstler’s 2004 TED talk “The tragedy of suburbia”
…AKA The End Of Suburbia in 20 minutes.

When I reference Urban Hiking, what I’m thinking of in my mind is occasions where I’ve walked long distances through unfamiliar areas to reach a far-off destination (say, across a city) without ever having felt a sense of being lost but instead retaining a sense of exploration and enough focus to be charting the previously unfamiliar territory between my position and my desired destination. Part of my ability to do this is a keen sense for cardinal points, but honestly they sell that in stores and it fits in your pocket.

Here is an example from Aug 2, 2006 when I decided to walk home after a windy thunderstorm from Bloor downtown to Northern Etobicoke just using continuous course correction based on an awareness of directions and always choosing the path less familiar when presented with a choice.

Urban Hiking is fun, educational and exploration-based but has some more practical direct applications than the modern sport of Urban Exploration in places like warehouses (which is wicked) and storm drains (which seems to me like an unpleasant place to spend your time).

Urban Hiking is about assessing the often unfamiliar immediate environment for information (paths/potential paths) while remaining anchored in the broader geography.

With cardinal points, a sense of adventure and the ability to evaluate your surroundings for opportunities on the fly, it becomes irrelevant if you are unacquainted with your immediate location. You can avoid ever being lost yet still be constantly getting acquainted and discovering areas and experiences.

By retaining a conscious and lucid mind about your surroundings you can master their layout and choose routes through areas that avoid pollution (proximity to busy roadways), potential crime or physical obstacles. This allows you to choose your experiences-en-route as being as scenic or shortcut-quick as you desire.

Indian Rd north of Bloor St W, outside the eastern exit of Keele subway station, Oct 11, Toronto

Earlier this year, Toronto played annual host to the CONTACT photography festival, with venues around the city showing a variety of photography and even video in some cases.

I checked out a random smattering of CONTACT showings, finding them through digital and print listings or encountering them by chance on a walk. One in particular, though, caught my attention in a less typical way, piggybacking on the exhibit’s subject matter itself.

I found out about this particular facet of CONTACT 2008, titled ‘Making My Mark’, via a sticker placed on a Canada Post box in the Junction. Surrounded by marker scrawl, the sticker called out to local writers to come see their tags and art compiled together via photography.

The actual ‘exhibit’ was only a couple frames hanging on a wall inside Wallace Studios amidst a number of other CONTACT pieces. It was underwhelming in person, especially since each photographed tag was thumbnailed in the print, but a DVD was offered and the video is better:

(The sticker faces with the shades are a part of The Crisis Project, a suburban graffiti thing that is worth checking out.)

An associate of mine, we’ll call him Mr. Kismet, was a fairly prolific writer, especially around the Junction. He expressed to me that there was no way he’d turn up at any event summoning him on account of his graffiti. This might’ve been partly paranoia, but was also partly real firsthand awareness of which city/police resources are actually dedicated against him and his peers.

Ohh, crimes of art and passion… the cop-criminal dynamic becomes so much more romantic.

I’ve noticed what seems to be (here’s hoping) the birth of a new political thread, the idea of distinguishing detrimental vandalism of private property from illegal street art.

Lance Cumberbatch (really), director of investigations for municipal licensing and standards, said “graffiti is defined as any lettering, marking, pictures on a structure or building that’s not there to beautify the building.”

Councillor Howard Moscoe added: “I think most people can tell the difference between a tag and artwork.”

Now, this is clearly bomb-ass art. But………

Beyond even the piece/tagging divide, is there perhaps value [as expressed by the CONTACT exhibit] in the raw tags, minimalow on creativity but high on meaning to the writer?

It’s easy to be set strongly against tagging when it has nothing to do with you beyond taking up space on your walls and in your visual field, but people often dismiss the whole phenomenon of graffiti and its various subcategories as equivalent to someone smearing gum on a wall, and being able to do that requires totally overlooking how much meaning this stuff really does have to the many people practicing it.

Are superstrict private property divides really what is most important?
Or is there something worthwhile to be found when dispossessed youth reach out into the world and stake even a partial claim to a tiny piece of their community, trying to establish that “this is me, this is where I am”? Something that, taken all together, shifts from “this is mine” to “this is ours”?

Today’s youth often feel incredibly unempowered and anything that means anything to them is a step away from apathy, a step that I think is desperately needed, extraordinarily messy as the results may be.

At the same time, I sure wouldn’t mind seeing “books” written a few less places in this town.

My man in the MidEast IdiotTheWise has taken up a particularly charming bit of anti-anti-graffiti lately as part of his very diverse set of street artistry.

Every person in any city around the world touched by street art has also been touched by the ugly grey-square-leaving smear/buff “clean up” jobs the city spends our money on afterwards. Not only is this unappealing aesthetically, but (as demonstrated here last summer) it’s totally futile, and is really just about creating an image of control over the populace.

ITW, writing around Tel-Aviv under the name Inspire, has started framing up these sorts of urban scars, decorating them with the simplest power of street art (to beautify the dull and mundane) as well as having the potential to directly engage passersby by tempting them to create themselves, perhaps one of the strongest things about street art.

Now if only the city crews would start covering up graffiti with that instant-blackboard chalkable paint…

Big scandal, some poor folk living in a middle class area (no, NOT the building pictured above!):

The quiet street that runs off Danforth Ave. near Broadview Ave. has been in the news since it was revealed that three houses there, valued at nearly $500,000, are owned by the Toronto Community Housing Corporation and are rented to low-income families.

The issue is that Case Ootes feels taxpayer money could house more people for less cost in ghetto highrises, while others argue that healthier communities are built out of better integration.

Neighbour Tom Allen said that he had no idea his neighbours’ home was TCHC-owned social housing, and would not have otherwise found out. The difference between The Bridle Path and Jane & Finch, on the other hand, is pretty immediately apparent to anyone from either.

Just like the difference between the horrible building pictured above, located in a miniature ghetto between Spadina and Bathurst on the south side of Sundad, and these TCHC-owned homes that so tastelessly camouflaged their residents’ worthlessness amongst the fantastically-moneyed citizenfolk who belonged on the street.

Simply dumping all the city’s poor in hidden areas, like the anti-grid Regent Park now under reconstruction, is one thing… but in areas like Weston, that low-cost housing specifically replaces industrial employment on a mass scale, and the huge numbers of penniless people are left choosing between working at Tim Horton’s or drug dealing and gun crime (those are literally the only sort of employment options left in the area).

Weston’s food bank is closed more often than not and lacking pretty much always, Weston has more jobs-for-youth services than jobs to give those youth, and if people in this and similar areas weren’t isolated from the rest of the city, it would’ve been damn obvious a long time ago that we need to do something!

I lived in Toronto’s Weston neighbourhood for the past several years and have, in the past, described Weston as “Toronto’s most long-forgotten neighbourhood.” The area is about a 50/50 combination of rich historical background and contemporary assimilation into the northwest’s ghettos.

For the past few months, I’ve been putting together a profile on the area’s businesses, culture and precarious social situation, and my Weston neighbourhood profile is now up on blogTO.

Have you ever read The Conscience of a Hacker, AKA The Hacker’s Manifesto?

I mean, for me, it’s such basic internet reading that it’s not even worth speaking of… but an awful lot of the folks on the ‘Net are much newer to it than I, despite our mutual mass assimilation.

There was a time, telneting around bit by bit, that just the act of finding, collecting and sharing text files like this had an unspeakably powerful feeling to it. We were on to something BIG, and every tiny step in any direction was a wild breakthrough simply because it was into another unknown.

Well, if you haven’t read it, here it is… and yes, this is required reading for comprehension of the digital age and the people who drive it. 21 years later.

The Conscience of a Hacker

by
+++The Mentor+++
Written January 8, 1986

Another one got caught today, it’s all over the papers. “Teenager Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal”, “Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering”…

Damn kids. They’re all alike.

But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950’s technobrain, ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker? Did you ever wonder what made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him?

I am a hacker, enter my world…

Mine is a world that begins with school… I’m smarter than most of the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me…

Damn underachiever. They’re all alike.

I’m in junior high or high school. I’ve listened to teachers explain for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction. I understand it. “No, Ms. Smith, I didn’t show my work. I did it in my head…”

Damn kid. Probably copied it. They’re all alike.

I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it’s because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn’t like me… Or feels threatened by me.. Or thinks I’m a smart ass.. Or doesn’t like teaching and shouldn’t be here…

Damn kid. All he does is play games. They’re all alike.

And then it happened… a door opened to a world… rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addict’s veins, an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought… a board is found. “This is it… this is where I belong…” I know everyone here… even if I’ve never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again… I know you all…

Damn kid. Tying up the phone line again. They’re all alike…

You bet your ass we’re all alike… we’ve been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak… the bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We’ve been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to teach found us willing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.

This is our world now… the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn’t run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore… and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge… and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias… and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it’s for our own good, yet we’re the criminals.

Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.

I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can’t stop us all… after all, we’re all alike.

It’s not so much about an approach to computer network usage as it is an approach to life in general, and I’m greatly saddened to watch what was such a respectable information-seeking elite largely devolve into pure-money cybercrime.

The dude I grabbed the manifesto copy from is much more the type of thing I like to see having come out of all of our chaotic K-r4d “wild west” sort of Internet upbringing… his site clicks through to say, “This page is completely out of date. I’m at Stanford working on my PhD now.”

I like the definitions of the word hacker that are posted on his site, in particular the highlighted one:
“One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations.”

It’s awfully nice to be able to be living in a time where my personal computer is a beautiful, friendly and tight UNIX implementation (it’s called a Mac), and all this Web 2.0 stuff is just fabulous, super-colourful and twice as melodic… but to be honest, I miss the feeling of simply being at a prompt, of feeling like I’m actually inside a computer.

Especially a remote one.