Infrastructural Improvisation

Choreographies for Spontaneous Movement

Nov 28, 2024

For the summer solstice, MB and I go biking with a crew whose antics we’ve been following online for months. They’ve mapped out a route through the storm drains under west LA, tracing the underside of Culver City and Beverly Hills through the subterranean infrastructure. I bike over from Lincoln Heights to meet everyone on a Ktown sidewalk in the early evening, the lot of us gathered outside a nondescript donut establishment. The pavement is cracked, huge slabs displaced by nearby tree roots and unmaintained asphalt roads, plants pushing up through the seams, lifting up in topographically significant sections to carve out crevices between us, breaking up our conversation and disrupting the path of our bike tires. Someone comes back with a plastic takeaway container of croissants and donuts, we strap on helmets and take off, popping off the curb into the middle of the street.

Group rides facilitate a choreography for spontaneous movement that is both constrained by cooperation at scale and emboldened by size. In critical mass, we operate as a single entity, effectively taking the street, fragmenting and regrouping in turns to direct and redirect each other. The map above traces our route through the storm drains under west LA;1 a typical westside route that rolls out from the corner of wilshire and western on the last friday of every month,2 and a typical eastside route organized by that same group, traversing the sixth street bridge from Downtown to Boyle Heights and back; a solidarity ride last winter in support of Palestinian resistance and freedom3 organized jointly by Cumbia Bike Club4 and LA Food Not Bombs; the feeder ride from Bike Oven that rolls out from Lincoln Heights at 2am, linking with the LA marathon crash ride at Sunset boulevard, tracing the race route early before the runners start and extending further out to the end of the Santa Monica pier’s wooden boardwalk; regular routes retraced most days north on the river through Frogtown, east on the river along the Arroyo; the path of cyclists during a temporary shutdown of the 110 freeway for the first time in twenty years.5

When I first leave LA in my late teens, I trace late night routes across Alameda county with East Bay Bike Party,6 catching the train to a designated meeting point and biking with the group between three different park or waterfront locations — rest stops or short parties, depending on your disposition on a given night. Each stopping point is raucous with music and dancing. Roving bands of teenagers and young adults speak to the kids running around with familiarity, respect, and attention. Even attentive parents partially entrust their children to the collective, to this motley assortment knitted together by a shared love of misusing roadways.

I spend the subsequent years regularly biking across Oakland and Berkeley, commuting the hills of San Francisco daily to work by bike, making my regular grocery run by biking across a literal New Jersey highway, erranding and doing laundromat runs by bike in Brooklyn and West Philly. Back in LA after a decade away, I’m better equipped to rail against its notoriously car-centric infrastructure and culture of atomized individuals in separate vehicles, bolstered by the individuals and groups who have been organizing these efforts toward collectivity and public infrastructure for years, or have simply been living and working in this way, walking, taking the bus, and riding the metro.

In late october one year ago, a group based in the San Gabriel Valley shuts down the Arroyo Seco Parkway to cars. Families with small children in strollers, bands of teenagers on bikes, joggers, and other pedestrians slide up and down the onramps and offramps all morning. Biking the freeway north alone in those early hours, still dark, fairly cold, toward Pasadena, I think about Octavia Butler’s primarily carless life, walking the streets of her Pasadena neighborhood and taking the bus around LA county. Her 1993 novel Parable of the Sower opens on a date this past summer, july 2024, with roving bands of individuals walking the LA freeways, displaced amid societal collapse fueled by extreme social inequality and severe climate catastrophe, exacerbated by the rise of a fascist regime.

I consider the parallels and likely timelines of this societal unraveling while biking with S, O, CH, and LP as the sun comes up over the Arroyo. The absurd violence of building out concrete infrastructure on colonized land under ongoing occupation is so material here — in the paving over of rivers and carving out of roadways for cars, the ongoing impacts of redlining and environmental racism delineated so clearly by the construction of freeways. When cops roll through to kick us off, we all speed up, laughing, refusing to be cajoled into giving up our freedom on the roadway, standing up on our pedals to twerk to Cocteau Twins blasting from speakers strapped to our handlebars, voices reverberating under the concrete overpass. Standing up in the saddle, we take the steep onramp in the wrong direction, where the usual crew with Cumbia Bike Club has set up a dance party in the middle of avenue 26, folks sitting on coolers and skateboards nodding their heads, friends who’ve only just met holding up each other’s bikes to take turns dancing exuberantly.

On that storm drain ride at the end of june, MB and I note the summer solstice full moon, roadways bright under our tires headed west. We trace north through the Cheviot Hills neighborhood to the entry point of the storm drain, down a steeply sloping ravine and into a concrete channel cordoned off with fencing and low-lying chaparral. Wheeling our bikes or hoisting them above our shoulders with one arm, we pick our way through the detritus and plant residue strewn across the concrete floor of the channel, the tunnel walls and ceiling pressing tighter and lower above our heads as we descend. Pitching more steeply down, the channel floor separates into two parallel tracks, one four feet lower, with inch-deep groundwater running continuously. We take turns lowering each others’ bikes and bodies down into the stream, our mouths agape, water washing over our shoes and spokes.

Biking near the center of the undergrounded storm drain, four miles in and two miles out from where the sky breaks through at the far end, we all start singing, our voices overlapping and harmonizing, reverberating off the thick concrete walls, sonically insulated by close-packed dirt on the other side. Entirely encased in concrete with hundreds of meters spanning between us, our voices echoing off the walls of the drain, undergirded by the running water, we sound like goddamn monks. It’s a brutalist dreamscape. The violence of this concrete infrastructure is evident, choking out plant life and species interdependence, destroying living landscapes, habitats, and ecosystems, to build out dense urban centers that service a few affluent human inhabitants at the expense of all other inhabitants. I resent these structures, and I find them compellingly, hauntingly beautiful.

Somewhere in the channel, the sky opens briefly above us. We pass through a suburban neighborhood at the subterranean level, the concrete walls extending meters above our heads. Knee-deep in river muck, I get a spectacularly explosive flat tire, and assume it could only have been broken glass — likely a beer bottle tossed into the channel by some kid at the park. MB hangs back, “I’ve never changed out a flat in a storm drain!” When we catch up to the rest of the group gathered up ahead, we eat grocery store pies and drink cheap champagne, set off several rounds of fireworks under string lighting hung just below the waterline from the rainy season, an ominous but faded line just visible in the low light. It roots my corporeal form in appreciation and awe at the power of water, something like being in the ocean, to look up at the waterline two feet clear above our heads and imagine flash floods.

The palms of both hands are seriously bruised for days after this ride from bracing myself going downhill through the drain, tires kicking up groundwater, algae slime in the spokes. Recalling the imprint of that sensorial, embodied memory, it strikes me that describing the dynamic choreography of group rides is similar to writing about dance; words are insufficient for capturing exhilaration and improvisation. With Coyotl + Macehualli7 for the Takaape’ Waashut lunar bike ride along the Paayme Paxaayt — the LA river, S, O, DI, SB, and I link with a group at the metro station rolling up from Bike Oven. We pause at a midway point on the short ride and Gabrielino Tongva elder Tina Calderon prompts us to each share our name, where we live currently, and something we noticed along the ride. Several of us look around conspicuously, incredulous at this long, drawn-out exercise among the 60 to 100 of us gathered in the park that night, but in retrospect, I recall the sharing as surprisingly succinct, connective, and generative.

In late october two years ago, EL and I go biking on the river to listen to the electricity crackling under the telephone lines spanning across the bowtie parcel. We see abandoned shopping carts and those clearly in use by folks nearby, making a place for themselves on the banks of the river, perched above the concrete storm drains and building out makeshift gardens under the scrub brush. Tooling around in the fading daylight, it’s dark when we take the river path toward Chinatown, swooping up and over the bridge to pass back again over the river for a second time further south. Later, we learn this was the night Mike Davis died. Most days, excerpts from City of Quartz and other essays remain front of mind for me, and it’s no coincidence that my friendships with S, O, LP, and SS were forged principally through a book club specifically devoted to Mike Davis’s work on the inequities and infrastructures of LA. It seems right, EL and I agree, to have been investigating the city at this slower pace, as pedestrians and cyclists inhabiting the infrastructural margins, on the night that he transitioned on.

This year in mid-november, J and I are at the park when we run into CR, JU, and LY sprawled on blankets amid a larger group of friends, colleagues, and comrades to whom we are all variously connected through a tangled web. After we’ve left the park, we link again to talk about the aftermath of this circus of electoral politics, the long, slow work of community organizing, the necessity of making shared space for disagreement as well as for consensus. We speculate on the absence of spirituality from our rituals and routines and practices of placemaking, our hatred of organized religion, yet fascination with the church and its practices in mutual aid. Cultivating ways to misuse all the urban infrastructure at my disposal to the greatest degree possible at all times, I consider other mechanisms for purposefully misinterpreting larger structures for the benefit of the collective, forging new and different forms of simultaneity, movement, improvisation, and spontaneity.

drafting curbside

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