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The Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time #137: The Surface
02.22.12
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).
See how we move.
On the third year of this bike ride, you might expect:
- more inconvenient passageways
- more full moon picnics
- perhaps more "cover" versions of other people's rides, performed with amateurish enthusiasm
- certainly more amateurish enthusiasm
- disorientation
- reorientation
- pool halls
- bowling alleys
- dance parties
- karaoke
- imaginary histories
- scavenging for fun and sustenance
- more geocaching
- more oblique strategies
- more Oulipian constraints
- traffic median tea parties
Furthermore:
- A medium pace (maybe not for beginners; certainly not a hustle)
- We're not in a rush; we don't need to run every light.
- 25-ish miles; pretty flat.
- Victory donuts!
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This week:
The Surface
Los Angeles has a reputation, earned or not, for superficiality. The implication behind such criticisms is that the
surface is a false front, a facade that hides a much emptier interior, and perhaps this is true more often in a city
built upon (or at least fashioned around) entertainment.
Those of us who live here, of course, know that there is more to the place than mere surface, but maybe it's
best not to object too quickly. Perhaps our buildings, so adorned with aspirational symbols and even
aspirational language, express our values more truly than we let on - ornamented, textured and embossed with
symbols that tell not what we are, exactly, but what we _wish_ to be. Perhaps it's no accident that we sit at the
edge of an ocean, its surface a vast curve of equal gravitational potential, transformed now into a symbol of
endless personal potential - a surface of dreams. Perhaps the concrete tells a story more nuanced than we've
been led to believe.
What are we to do with these surfaces we're given? Well, for one thing, we can ride bikes on some of them
(more of them than one might suppose, even). So let us start there, as we explore the surface of the city -
manifold, elaborate and infinitesimally thin. The sky above, the earth below, and we in between.
Talk, talk, talk...
(and join the mailing list!)
The hacienda must be built.
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