a head start on trouble

Noon – 7 PM. After our successful liaison with Mr. Dangerous, a.k.a Myke, Kiyash and I spend the next seven hours scouting the festival grounds, strategizing our game plan for the heist, speculating about Myke’s involvement, and of course taking in a few sets. K-os rocks the Gobi tent, and Jean Grae puts on a show that will surely rank as one of the great live performances I see this year.

Throughout the afternoon, we text message and talk to SMG3er and HitsHerMark via phone. They’re also stalking the festival grounds. We decide collectively that don’t want to be seen together as a group too much before the heist. Better to keep our affiliation on the D.L. for now. We’re pretty sure the Coachella 5 will have a high-enough profile once we start trying to break into the A3 and recover the SD card from the nav system. So we agree to work the grounds separately until sunset.

Sunset. SMG3er and Laura have found each other, and then they find us. The pink wig turns out to be a pretty effective beacon for fellow retrievers.

The four of us compare notes on our earlier meet with Myke. We're suspicious that he might be in disguise, too... his hair is manic enough to suggest a wig.

Since this is our first face-to-face contact, we decide some team bonding is in order to develop the trust we'll need to pull of whatever the night has in store for us. So we psyche up for the mission by syncing up our cell phones and inventing a Coachella 5 cheer. We also create a secret Coachella-themed code to scream if we ever need to covertly alert each other to danger, which we practice screaming several times: "This band sucks!!"

We don’t know what Nisha, Myke, or our other partners-in-crime have in store for us at 10 PM. So we decide to undertake a series of on-site training exercises to practice our special skills for the high-stakes heist.

First, we locate one of the two massive, collective drum installations that allow lots of people to bang together on metal sculptures that offer extreme acoustical affordances. By banging frenetically on the drums together, the four of us practice two of our elite heist skills that we had reported to Nisha earlier in the week: Creating a distraction and making noise to obscure a signal. Unbeknownst to us at the time, Hitshermark had completed the same training mission earlier in the day on her own.

Next, we decide to work on our getaway skills. We head over to the collection of insanely modded bikes put together by Cyclecide. The wheels, steering systems, and grills of the bikes have been hacked to produce extremely wonky rides. No brakes, of course. We practice navigating around the bike rodeo, imagining we're being chased by goons. We think the wonkiness of the rides will help throw the bad guys off our trail, sort of like drunken master fighting. Kiyash masters the meanest machine, a wobbly monster that puts him five feet off the ground.

Earlier in the day, Kiyash and I had both worked on our getaway stamina by powering Cyclecide's do-it-yourself Merry-Go-Round. (You have to pedal bikes welded to the rotating core in order to make the amusement ride work.) SMG3er and Laura work on their stamina by eating concession treats, like a churro.

Laura and I decide that we are the mostly likely targets for interrogation, should Gunter or the goons grab us during the heist. So we strap ourselves into the Aversion Therapy Bike to de-sensitize ourselves to whatever ruthless methods the bad guys might apply, in a Worst Case Scenario. The Aversion Therapy Bike is a stationary bike modded with a whip attached to the back wheel. Each time you pedal a full cycle, the whip lashes you on the lower back. The harder and faster you pedal, the more it stings. Laura and I pedal-whipped ourselves like crazy. When I was done, my back was quite red. Ah, how we are willing to suffer for our art.

Our training exercises were complete. It was time to connect with HitsHerMark in front of the Mojave tent where Secret Machines would be playing. She was there, waiting, and ready to make our final mission preparations.

With the Coachella 5 finally assembled, and two hours to kill before our Tesla Coil meet, you might say we had a head start on trouble.

We had no idea how much trouble that trouble would be.

a pretty dangerous profession

9:30 AM, Kiyash and I head out for the final two hours' drive through the desert to Coachella. Despite our sleep deprivation, we are amped for the heist.

Our meet with Myke, outside the main entrance to the Coachella music festival, goes exactly as planned.

He is easy to ID, wearing the bright red “Hustler” t-shirt that Nisha emailed us a photo of last night. Myke and I make each other at precisely the same moment. My cell phone rings with his (917) area code just as Kiyash snaps a surveillance photo of Myke from 500 yards away. Over the cell, Myke directs us to approach.

I initiate contact using the codeword Myke gave us on the call late last night: dangerous.

“Hustling can be a pretty dangerous profession, you know.”

Myke barely smiles and nods. He has a pretty steely game face on… hard to read

Myke, as it turns out, is a man of few words. He slips us our tickets to the festival without a word. He does not want to discuss any details of the heist. He will not divulge any information about his relationship with Nisha. He does, however, want us to meet him again later that night for further instructions.

We set up a second liaison for 10 PM at the Tesla Coil, which is a freestanding electro-hectic sculpture that intimidates me with its excellent impression of the third sign of the Apocalypse.

Kiyash and I set off to find our fellow retrievers, scout the massive festival grounds, and engage in some pre-mission training exercises.

something of a character

11:30 PM. It’s been six hours on the road, and we’re still an hour out from the place we’re crashing for the night. I get a call on my cell phone. I don’t recognize the number, but it’s starts with (917) … NYC. Nearly midnight is pretty late for a phone call from an unknown number, but I’m sure it has to do with tomorrow’s heist. I pick up.

It’s someone named Myke. He says he’s working with Nisha, and he’s going to meet me and Kiyash at the main entrance to the Coachella Music Festival. He names a 2-hour window of opportunity to find him, tells me what he’ll be wearing and that Nisha will email me a photo to confirm that’s he’s one of the good guys. He gives me a codeword to introduce myself by tomorrow when when we spot him. He’ll hand off a pair of tickets to the festival.

I’ll fill you in on the details of the meet after it goes down. For now, better to keep them to myself. I wouldn’t want to see any other mercenaries intercept this info and pick up the passes on our behalf. Or, make any trouble for Myke.

Once we're in, we’ll spend the afternoon and evening blending in at the shows. We've got a second meet up with the other 4 retrievers, and we'll be making a few other face-to-face connections to set up our local support network. They'll be a handful of good guys on site not officially in on mission, including a couple of really good guys from Melissa’s old crew. We've also got an amazing crew online making sure those of us in the field are up to date on everything going down. They kept me up to speed last night on the road with calls and text messages.

It's good to have allies.

So: We’ll do some scouting on site during the festival performances. Then we wait until the heist goes down… Late. At the afterparty.

Don’t know what our roles will be yet. But you can watch the mission live from a Web cam. 11 PM – 3 AM.

Update: Arrived safely at the hotel. Got the picture of Myke from Nisha. He appears to be something of a character.

He’ll go perfectly with my pink wig.

the coachella heist

Kiyash and I are on our way to the heist.

8 hours from now, we'll roll into Coachella.


I will try not to play it too unstable, despite what my background check may have revealed.

Kiyash is in charge of keeping me out of trouble. Scratch that. Kiyash is in charge of getting me into trouble.

I'm ready for anything.

As my 42 co-conspirator said to me as I left the office: "Good luck with your impending felony."

Updates from the road.

hot pink American quarantine

Saturday afternoon I gave an artist's talk about performance and gameplay at the New Langton Arts Gallery. My powerpoint slides were hot pink, the audience small and intimate, and my comments improvised and heavily flavored with introspective confession. It was one of the most pleasurable and productive talks I've given in ages. I was especially pleased to be able to riff about Twister Cage Match, one of the San Francisco Art Institute games developed in the game design as art practice class I taught last fall. Kiyash was a brilliant partner-in-crime for some live demonstrations of performance gameplay mods, including trash-talking RPS.

A few hours and a cocktail reception later, the New Langton Art gallery was sold out for the evening performance/playtest of Organum. The playtest featured truly l33t g4m3r skills demonstrated by a beatboxer, a Tuvan throat singer and an experimental feminist improvisational opera singer collaboratively playing Organum together. Their collective sound was variously frenzied, sexy, playful, funny, alive and organic. Amazing.

*

After the Organum fest, Kiyash and I stayed out late in the city to go dancing at the DNA Lounge. It was an Orkut party... in other words, an online social network manifesting itself in real physical space. Yay! But of my 57 Orkut friends, mostly SF/Bay Area locals, I only saw one at the party, and he barely recognized me at first. Hmm. This clearly demonstrates something interesting about social network apps, and I am going to have danah boyd write an epic poem further explicating this point. On the other hand I saw two of my Orkut friends at the Organum event, which was really more work than social. Which clearly demonstrates some other really interesting thing about social network apps, and I am going to have ian bogost design a persuasive game to thoroughly elaborate this point.

Despite a lack of social context (Kiyash isn't even on Orkut!), I let my newly blond(ish) hair down (literally) and we found our footing pretty easily during the hip hop set... Outkast, Usher, J. Lo, 50 Cent and Notorious B.I.G... I kept waiting for the 80s set, but alas it was not meant to be.

*

At the Sunday Albatross Pub quiz night, Kiyash and I knew 16 fewer things than we did last Sunday. Alas. (Kiyash improved his Connect Four score, though-- the final tally was Kiyash 9, Jane 3). On our way to a pretty bad score of 28, we discovered that we really do not know much about 1) sports trivia 2) leading ladies of the '30s, '40s, and '50s or 3) so-called general knowledge that is really just more sports trivia in disguise. (Boo) Fortunately, we apparently still know much about 1) early American quarantines 2) music and 3) centrifugal devices. We named our team-of-two "Minimum Score 44" in an optimistic effort to best last week's score of 43. Again: alas.