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The Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time #82 - Butterfly Subdivision

01.26.11

One or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives
for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities,
and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the
encounters they find there.

It's a bike ride.

Started by user nathansnider and user theroyalacademy.

It meets every Wednesday at 8:30pm
at California Donuts #21.
We ride at 9pm.
We'll endeavor to return before the last red line trains (around midnight).

On this bike ride, you might expect:
- full moon picnics
- inconvenient passageways
- "cover" versions of other people's rides, performed with amateurish enthusiasm
- amateurish enthusiasm
- disorientation
- reorientation
- pool halls
- bowling alleys
- karaoke
- geocaching
- oblique strategies
- Oulipian constraints
- traffic median tea parties
- rivers that no longer exist
- smell tourism
- Couchwick v2.0

Furthermore:
- usually 20-30 miles
- usually some hills
- a medium pace (maybe not for beginners; certainly not a hustle)
- few stops, short stops
- but we're not in a rush; we don't need to run every light
- victory donuts!

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This week:

Butterfly Subdivision

While the history of every city necessarily involves a process erasure and
renewal, Los Angeles has often seemed especially callous in its willingness
to bulldoze vibrant neighborhoods in the name of progress. And then,
typically, we have been given another highway, or some office towers, or
sometimes a school or a shopping center; once, we got a baseball stadium.
The "civic" always trumps a "community."

This week we visit a place where the neighborhood was removed and we
received -- nothing. Well, at least nothing in the sense of, "Look, there, at
that monument! That's a fine monument, isn't it? A very picturesque and
sturdy monument indeed." Nearly 700 buildings were razed but the land they
stood on was left empty. The grid of roads remains, like the neighborhood's
ribcage pushing through the ground, its body having been buried in too
shallow of a grave. Otherwise, the only signs that there was ever life there
are a few streetlights, a row of palms, stone steps leading up to the
nonexistent front door of nothing. Mostly one notices, surrounding the plot,
the chain-link fence topped with barbed wire.

But, if we look closer, we might also see a butterfly or two. Or 50,000.
For, while all other plans to develop the land eventually disappeared like
the neighborhood itself, the one thing that remained was this: a butterfly
sanctuary. And, apparently, all they need is space, no structures and
no people: a field.

If a community is going to be erased, it is at least nice that we can do
something for our insect friends. Much better than some lame freeway.

-

The road to butterfly town is long and winding, so this week we leave on
time: 9pm sharp. Nonetheless, we will need to keep up a pace a little faster
than normal & will still likely return later than midnight. Please plan accordingly.

Very flat; only a tiny, tiny bit of off-roading.

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For the latest information about each week's ride, join our mailing list:
http://groups.google.com/group/the-passage-announcements

For more information about past rides, visit our website:
http://www.ThePassageRide.com

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"The plan is no plan at all."

Certain shifting angles,
certain receding perspectives.

Posted by theroyalacademy

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