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The Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time #223: Cargo Culture
11.6.13
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 the fifth 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.
- Maybe some distance;maybe some hills
- Victory donuts!
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This week:
Cargo Culture
There is a certain mystery to warehouses, as forms within the city. Their blankness and superhuman scale thwart
attempts to connect their workings with our daily lives. We know, in the abstract, that nearly every object we touch
has passed through dozens of these buildings on its way to our hands, but when we look at a warehouse, there
is no sense of recognition. We see only a whitewashed volume, and we are left with just a few scattered clues as
to which particular wares might be housed there: some vague signage; a smell of black pepper; a whir of
machinery. Indeed, some of the buildings are rather sophisticated machines in their own right--enormous
engines of sorting, moving and transformation--but they present themselves as vast opaque boxes, and we may
only guess at what goes on inside.
This week, we tour the land of daunting scale and exhausting vagueness: the spaces perpetually for lease; the -
tecs and -corps and other aspirational portmanteaus; the conglomerates and shell companies; the off-off-brand
clothing wholesalers; the providers of unspecified "services," "solutions" and "applications." All these things and
more. Join us as we find mystery, even mysticism, amid the warehouses.
30 miles; flat; a half-mile stretch of unpaved riding, with potential for an additional unpaved mile, depending on
the time of arrival and the ride leader's mood.
Brought to you by PassageCorp, a division of Allied Yoyogenics.
Talk, talk, talk...
Check out our web site!
(and our tumblr!)
(and join the mailing list!)
The hacienda must be built.
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Ridazz Roulette!
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