Maine Relations

For the first time in many years I took a proper trip during the annual academic spring break this past March. Obviously the past two years were disrupted by the pandemic, but even before that I had become accustomed to spending that week recuperating at home (or working my way through student papers). But this year I wasn’t just looking to shake off the covid blues, rather I was determined to make good on a promise to visit two of my dearest friends.

These friends are two of my closest relationships from grad school and from Pittsburgh in general, and in addition to having shared a lot of great times they were also a vital source of support when I was struggling through both professional and personal hardships. In March 2020, just days before our school’s spring break for that year, the Covid-19 threat materialized as a true public health crisis. Campuses around the country began canceling in-person classes for the remainder of the semester and our university soon followed suit. We gathered at my friends’ apartment (I was living just down the hill in their same neighborhood at the time) to toast our newly extended spring recess, playing a round of the Pandemic board game which was intermittently interrupted by breaking news reports: Tom Hanks had contracted coronavirus; the NBA season was canceled; President Trump was announcing travel restrictions. For the next couple of weeks I would periodically trek up the hill to visit my friends, my face covered with a makeshift bandana as I surveyed eerily empty streets. As we processed this unfolding new reality and discussed quarantine plans my friends assured me that I would be welcome in their home during the crisis, that I was officially part of their pandemic social bubble. This was tremendously important to me as I would otherwise be braving the lockdown alone in my basement studio apartment.

I ultimately decided to leave Pittsburgh to stay with my family for what I thought would be a fortnight at most. On the day I left I visited one half of this friend pair in the bakery he worked down the street. He gave me some pastries for my drive and I gifted him all the toilet paper I had in my apartment (these were the days of the great toilet paper run, when bath tissue was a highly valued commodity). Before I left the bakery there was a pregnant pause in place of a parting embrace, but there was a new strong sense of maintaining physical distance. My friend said something like, “What if this is the last time we see each other?” I replied something along the lines of, “Don’t worry, it won’t be.”

My stay in Nashville was gradually extended until it became indefinite. I kept in touch with my friends to see how they were faring, and after a few weeks got news that one of them had received a post-doc appointment and they would be moving to Maine. We continued to keep tabs long distance with occasional Zoom calls to catch up. Nearly 18 months later I was moving back to Pittsburgh, and in addition to other reasons this return took on a melancholic poignance in part because my friends would not be there.

In the past year my friends have continued to have major changes in their lives: finishing their PhDs, welcoming a new baby, and most recently the news that would be leaving Maine for jobs in Virginia. With their move coming up this summer I took the opportunity during spring break to see their new family addition and also where they’ve been living for the last two years. After assuring me that I should not feel obligated to visit and that their current parenting duties did not offer much in the way of excitement, I told them I was committed and they were evidently and heartwarmingly excited.

I had already made my Maine travel arrangements when my grandmother died in April. So I would now be going to Tennessee for the funeral and then immediately embarking on my Maine trip. I didn’t sleep the night following the funeral due to my extremely early departure time out of Nashville the next morning, so I was exhausted on multiple levels when beginning the next leg of my journey. I took off from a pre-dawn Nashville and landed in La Guardia on a gray and rainy New York morning. Then it was on to Pittsburgh where I would cool my heels in the airport for several hours.

I was feeling fatigued and nigh delirious as I tried to find ways to pass the time at the PIT airport (I even ate some Primantis). There was a prevailing sense of liminality, being in between journeys, and having arrived back at my point of departure but not going home, remaining in the liminal space of the airport. I started exploring the airport and at one point took an escalator to an area I had never been in before. It turned out to be the location of PIT’s Interfaith Reflection Room. The room was unoccupied so I spent some time taking in the space. Among other religious objects there was a shelf with a selection of devotional or sacred texts representing a variety of faiths. I picked up the resident copy of the Bhagavad Gita and flipped to a random page for some inspiration before leaving.

When I finally departed from Pittsburgh it was back to La Guardia where I had been only hours earlier. Conditions in New York had cleared up since that morning.

I also got to take in aerial views of the New York nightscape when continuing on to Maine by way of D.C.

Upon arriving in Bangor around 1 AM I was reunited with my friend whom I had last seen in the Pittsburgh bakery during the pandemic outbreak. We stood there in the cold remarking on the unbelievable fact that it had been nearly two years to the day since we’d last seen each other, and we finally shared the embrace that had been deferred that day in the bakery.

In Tennessee it had truly felt like spring, with temperatures getting into the 70s F. But in Maine it was still winter, with cold temperatures and ample snow. It was my first time being in this part of the world (my previous experiences of New England did not extend any further north than Boston) and I had not packed appropriately since I had to pack warm weather and funeral clothing in the same small bag that I was carrying on to Maine with. It was cold but also beautiful: the nights were truly dark in a way that felt like a distant point on the globe, and the days frequently featured layers of fog hovering over the frozen ground. I had been looking forward not only to taking in the general environs but especially to visit some of my friends’ favorite haunts from their time in Maine, and to enjoy some local fare. The first place they took me was the Eagle’s Nest, their favorite local spot for lobster rolls. (In addition to being my inaugural visit it was also the baby’s very first restaurant experience, and he was a trooper.)

The small restaurant features a picture window overlooking the Penobscot river, which was still littered with ice floes this time of year.

Despite the soy face in this photo, I assure you that it is lobster in the roll, and it was delicious.

Our next outing involved a drive out to Bar Harbor, a New England resort town that only existed for me as a vague spatial imaginary in the same vein as Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard. In addition to reuniting with my friends and meeting their baby I was also excited to reconnect with their fur baby who sat with (on) me for the drive.

It was decidedly the off-season in Bar Harbor: streets and sidewalks were mostly vacant, and the majority of shops were closed up with signs posted saying "see you in the summer."

A few places were open for business, including Ben & Bill’s Chocolate Emporium. It was far too cold and blustery for ice cream to be appealing but we popped in to get coffees and pick up some fudge for later in the trip.

The Ben & Bill’s workers were wearing t-shirts that advertised “lobster ice cream” which I assumed to be a cheeky joke. Upon inquiring, however, we learned that it was very much a real offering.

They offered us a sample of the lobster ice cream and of course we had to try it. (In this next photo it’s the ice cream tub with the lobster claw on top.) It was good, with more of a buttery flavor and a hint of lobster aftertaste.

Despite the cold and strong winds it was an otherwise beautiful day and easy to imagine the town bustling during the warmer months.

In any place I’m drawn to reading the local culture as expressed in graffiti tags and stickers on street signs. One of the local voices that stood out to me in Bar Harbor was DADBODY who was well represented throughout the main drag. (When I had been in Nashville the previous week my mom gave me updates on VERN, a graffiti name that appears frequently on highway overpasses and road barriers in the area. It’s a name we had noticed during our travels when I was still living there and so mom likes to give me updates on when VERNs have been painted over or when new ones appear.)

We continued along into Acadia National Park which has been one of my friends’ favorite natural refuges during their time in Maine. It did not feel like a beach day to me (my first experience of New England beaches was cold and did not offer much in the way of shelling or sea life), but we had a picnic lunch on the sand anyway.

My friend has a personal code where if he visits the beach, he doesn’t leave until he has had his feet in the ocean. In his mind, he hasn’t properly been at the beach unless he’s been in the water. In this cold weather I thought his creed seemed extreme but I was eventually won over by his logic. When would I next have the opportunity to take a dip in Maine coastal waters? We doffed our footwear and waded into the surf.

It was frigid but invigorating.

Further into the park we visited the iconic Bubbles.

Back in town my friends took me to some of their other favorite local fixtures, including Mason’s brewpub.

It was an opportunity to enjoy some more local grub and pick up additional merch to commemorate my trip (check out the newly acquired Bar Harbor sweater).

We also stopped by some Bangor landmarks such as Stephen King’s house. I had expected it to be a nondescript residence but was pleasantly surprised.

On the final night of my visit we had a night in where we played a game of darts and also got in a round of Pandemic to commemorate one of our last times together two years earlier.

My departure from Maine was another pre-dawn flight. We said our goodbyes and I wished my friends well with this next chapter of their lives. And we traded admonitions to not let another two years go by before we were together again.

Thanatopsis in Paris, TN

In March I traveled to Tennessee for my grandmother’s funeral. This journey involved convening with my immediate family in Nashville before continuing on for the funeral itself in the town of Paris, TN.

I previously wrote gushingly (and verbosely) about Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas after seeing the film for the first time. The film’s evocative imagery and thematic depth profoundly moved me, but it also struck a particular personal resonance due to my own history with Paris, TN. Like the titular Texas town of Wenders’ film Paris, TN also bears nomenclatural relation with a more famous namesake. The Parisian connection is played up by iconographic allusions throughout the Tennessee town.

In the film, the character of Travis is preoccupied with the town of Paris, TX in part because he believes that he was conceived there, that the place represents the point of origin for his entire existence. Travis also remarks upon the significance of his having been named there by his parents, and there is a throughline in the film relating to the power of naming to fix identity and direct destiny. Paris, TN has played a similar role in my own biography as the place my progenitors hailed from as well as the source for my given and family names. The town thus held special fascination for me growing up by representing both geographic and nomenclatural points of origin for my sense of self.

Paris, TN has always existed as a realm of ghosts in my life, a point of convergence between the land of the living and domain of the dead. This stems in part from its status as a quasi-mythic location in my personal history, a place that was unknown to me but featured prominently in family stories in which I heard my relatives give intimate accounts of people I had never met. It was also the location of family burial plots, a place I seemed to only visit for the purposes of attending a funeral or holding vigil at a gravesite. When I was younger I mostly reckoned Paris as the place where I saw my own name engraved on tombstones.

Paris still is this place, of course, as this most recent visit attested. It is still the place of small hillside cemeteries where I contemplate the grave markers of my forebearers amidst a backdrop of industrial pork processing plants. It is a place for reconnecting with the past, both personal and otherwise. I’ve obviously traveled to Paris for funerals on prior occasions but on this visit my family and I lingered a while after to visit other sites in the town. I’d always known that my southern family roots had instilled in me an abiding love for fried catfish, but I didn’t know how prominently catfish were featured in landmarks and other iconography around Paris, or that the town bills itself as home of the world’s largest fish fry. I also learned about Grove’s Tasteless Chill Tonic, and its outsized role in the area’s economic history.

The eulogies at my grandmother’s service reminded me of all the countless threads that make up the tapestry of a person’s life, and provided me with a poignant recollection that I come from a lineage of teachers and preachers, a recognition that broadened my typically myopic perspective on the daily travails of my professional work to a more encompassing sense of purpose and human endeavor. Of course, this lineage is not exclusively constituted by teachers or preachers but includes also farmers, butchers, and mail carriers, amongst other occupations. I’m grateful for a place (and the attendant times) that provides a space for such reflection and introspection, and thankful in particular that in Paris, TN the landmarks of my family history are not found solely in graveyards.

Shots from the Block: First snow of 2022

My new year started off with some wild weather. I rang in the new year in Nashville where I was visiting my family for the holidays. The weather on New Year’s Day was warm (nearly 80 degrees fahrenheit) and brought the first tornado warnings of the brand new calendar year. Coincidentally this happened to be the first Saturday of the month, which is when tornado sirens are regularly heard in the afternoons for the area’s monthly siren testing. Yet when the sirens sounded on this particular afternoon it was not a test but rather the real deal.

When I first went to ride out the pandemic with my family in March 2020 I arrived just weeks after a tornado outbreak wrought severe damage in Nashville. And just last month the city was skirted by the tornado that devastated communities in Kentucky. So it was a disconcerting start to the year. I helped my mom bring in Christmas decorations and patio furniture that could be turned into projectiles by the high winds. We were watching live weather updates on TV when the tornado sirens sounded, and we sought shelter in a small closet under the stairs. When it felt safe enough I went into the front yard and watched the dark, swirling clouds moving swiftly past.

On the following day the weather turned cold again. I was scheduled to fly back to Pittsburgh that evening and while I was waiting at the gate heavy snow began falling outside the windows. My return flight was eventually scrapped and rescheduled due to staffing shortages, presumably a consequence of the mass weather-and-covid-related flight cancellations that had been wreaking havoc on major airports. I returned to my family’s home to stay the night and enjoy the belated wintery weather. With the new paint job on my mom’s house the nighttime scene looked particularly monochromatic.

The snowstorm that had snarled traffic of all kinds from Atlanta up to D.C. had missed Pittsburgh, so when I finally made it back to the city it was cold but clear. Snow finally began falling this past Thursday evening.

From the alley behind my building I spotted assorted birds of paradise bedecked by the freshly fallen snow.

Belcourt Appreciation & Pandemic Media Memories

For the Thanksgiving break last week I visited my family in Nashville. My parents have only been in Tennessee for a few years, so there’s not much personal history connecting me to the place, but after having lived there through the first 18 months of the pandemic returning this time felt like a true homecoming. That house feels like home to me now in a way it never did before, and revisiting the rooms and spaces where that incredibly surreal and disruptive period of my life played out was poignant. So it was good to be back in the house, and to see my family, and even the ornery dog. I was content to stay in the house for the duration of my visit but we did embark on a few outings including to a local cultural institution that has become a Nashville tradition for us: the Belcourt Theatre.

Movie theaters have always been among my favorite fixtures of urban environments. I lived in the Los Angeles area for more than a decade and the Southland featured a multitude of venues from multiplexes to repertory theaters. I have a great many fond cinema recollections from that time: seeing Donald Sutherland answer audience questions after a screening of Fellini’s Casanova in a small Santa Monica theater; sitting directly behind Christopher Lloyd while watching Back to the Future part III at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood; going to the famous Cinerama Dome for a press screening of Harold & Kumar Go To Guantanamo Bay (as a staff member for my college radio station); seeing a 70mm print of 2001: A Space Odyssey at the Laemmle Royal Theater in West L.A. Even attending concerts in former movie palaces like the Orpheum or Wiltern.

After graduating from college I moved to Austin, Texas. I had never actually been to Austin so my sense of the place was entirely informed by mediated impressions. My arrival to the city first felt real to me while driving down the highway from Amarillo when I spotted an illuminated Alamo Drafthouse sign amid the neon nightscape of urban sprawl rushing past my driver side window (I believe this was the Alamo Village location in North Austin). I had been a regular reader of Ain't It Cool News since high school and thereby knew the Alamo through the site’s reports of film festivals and celebrity screenings that Harry Knowles hosted at their venues. This was also years before Alamo expanded outside the Austin area (save for a couple of San Antonio satellite locations that existed at that time), so the theater chain still possessed an aura of exclusivity. My apartment in Austin was just down the street from the South Lamar location, and while I went to movies at various Alamo locations and attended premiere events at the Paramount Theater downtown, my favorite outlet for cinephilic patronage were the many excellent video stores in the city. I had been surprised that Austin had a more robust independent video rental scene than Los Angeles; in L.A. I was only aware of Vidiots, while in Austin I could patronize multiple locations of both Vulcan Video and I Luv Video.

When I lived in Orlando I enjoyed attending the Enzian Theater, which featured excellent programming but wildly uneven seating and service. One of the first places I visited upon moving to Pittsburgh was the Manor Theater in Squirrel Hill, which remains my favorite movie house in the city. Other film venues in the city are hit-and-miss: the Harris theater downtown is a stalwart location for independent/art house films and documentaries, while the Row House Cinema caters to the hipster clientele evoked by its gentrified environs with an on-site bottle shop, but otherwise squanders any cinephile cred or general goodwill with their uncomfortable seating and predilection for projecting DVDs rather than proper film prints.

My parents have been living in Nashville for the past six years or so, so while I have been visiting them in their new home I have also been exploring the city itself. Much of my appreciation for the area is culinary: my lifelong love of fried catfish has been supplemented by an appreciation for hot chicken and fried baloney sandwiches. But one of the greatest early discoveries in my Nashville explorations was the Belcourt movie theater. The venue opened in 1925 as the Hillsboro Theater, and today the historic building houses one of the premiere independent and historic cinemas in the country. It very quickly became expected that a visit or family reunion in Nashville would include a perfunctory visit to catch a movie at the Belcourt. My family does not have much in the way of long standing traditions, but one of the few things that would qualify is our annual viewings of It’s a Wonderful Life (historically these screenings coincided with Thanksgiving but over the years they have migrated to Christmastime). A few years back we discovered that the Belcourt regularly shows the film around the Christmas season and so we decided to merge these two family traditions into a single event. The first time we went to see Wonderful Life at the Belcourt I maintained a wary skepticism that we might be treated to some digital projection, but I was pleasantly surprised (and immediately won over by the theater) when the film was preceded by a notice that this was to be a screening of a 35mm print.

When the pandemic disrupted business-as-usual last Spring it prompted an existential crisis for movie theaters as we know them. The double-whammy of social distancing imperatives and the explosion of streaming video services called the continuing viability of traditional movie exhibition into question. While movie distributors and exhibitors considered how to adapt to the new reality the temporary covid closures became permanent for some businesses. In April I was heartbroken to learn that Vulcan Video was shuttering its doors after 35 years of operation in Austin. The news came with another sad realization that the Elizabeth Street location – my neighborhood store when I lived in South Austin – had previously closed five years earlier. Former employees penned tributes to Vulcan and I recalled the young video clerks I had known in my time, occasionally running into them at the South Congress H.E.B. while they executed a beer run for the other staff working the store on a late Saturday night. Then in September I Luv Video also closed for good. The store had tried operating curbside service during the lockdown measures but found that the experience of perusing a video store did not translate to pick-up ordering in the way that getting food from a restaurant might. Following the closure announcement the company owner sought a new home for the massive video archive.

One of the more positive developments in that early period of pandemic adjustment was the resurgence or reemergence of drive-in theaters. The shift toward social distancing suddenly made drive-in movies a viable business option; existing drive-ins benefited from increased attendance, and new venues opened to take advantage of the new environment. I had relocated to Nashville by this time and so for my birthday that summer we traveled out to the Stardust Drive-In Theatre in Watertown.

That visit to the Stardust came just days before I realized that my stay in Tennessee was going to be more long-term than I had initially anticipated. When I knew that I would be staying indefinitely, one of the first things I did as a newly-minted Nashvillian was purchase a Belcourt membership. In those early days of the pandemic the Belcourt adapted by first offering programming tie-ins with boutique streaming platforms, as well as offering online panel discussions with film scholars and experts. Later in the summer they began a drive-in film series utilizing an inflatable screen in their parking lot. Their inaugural lineup was a selection of Hitchcock films, and I made it out for showings of North by Northwest and Vertigo. A later lineup was organized around music on film and I returned for a screening of Stop Making Sense.

Those were fun, memorable times and I was glad both to have a welcome distraction amidst the chaotic uncertainty that distinguished those days as well as to be supporting a vital cultural institution. By the time Christmas rolled around that year the Belcourt had resumed theater screenings but my family did not venture out for It’s A Wonderful Life that season.

As I was preparing to leave Nashville to return to Pittsburgh this summer the Belcourt announced that they were going to be screening 2001: A Space Odyssey. 2001 is one of my favorite films and also personally significant, so I try to take advantage of any opportunity to see it on the big screen. It is also a film that seems to manifest in my life at times of transition or realization. For instance, last Fall I had settled into my isolated pandemic existence by immersing myself in esoteric academic study. The intellectual threads I was tracing lead me to consideration of Kubrick’s use of symbolism and imagery in 2001. While in the midst of these theoretical investigations I happened to switch on Turner Classic Movies on a whim one evening only to see the channel host introducing that night’s showing of 2001. Naturally I watched the film in its entirety. The very next day a series of articles triggered my news alert for “Kubrick”: a strange monolith had been discovered in Utah. Over the following months there were similar monolith sightings all over the world.

So it seemed appropriate that 2001 would appear at the Belcourt at this most recent point of transition in my life, just as I was preparing to leave Nashville, as if to commemorate the end of my pandemic exile and the personal transformation that the period entailed.

I was glad to be back at the Belcourt this Thanksgiving. In conjunction with the general spirit of revisiting and recollection that characterized this recent trip it offered an opportunity to reflect on all that has happened in the last year, as well as a reminder of the myriad things – large and small – that I am thankful for.

City Scenes: Back at the Ballpark

Within a week of returning to Pittsburgh I attended a Pirates game at PNC Park. It was my first time back to the park since September 29, 2019, which was the last day of the Pirates’ 2019 season and therefore also the last time fans were in the stadium until the pandemic attendance restrictions were relaxed this past spring.

Following the Pirates has become a significant part of my experience as a Pittsburgher, and both PNC Park itself and the various views of the city it affords represent some of my favorite places around. So christening my return to the city with a bus ride downtown, a walk across the Clemente bridge, and panoramic views from the upper bowl provided a sense of familiarity and stability in the midst of an otherwise tumultuous time.

While my trip to PNC did cap off my first week back in Pittsburgh, it was not my first trip back to a ballpark. That was actually two weeks earlier when I attended a Nashville Sounds game (pictured above). In both cases it was still strange to be around large crowds, particularly in light of the relaxed social distancing and mask guidelines to which we’ve become accustomed. It also still feels like a temporary reprieve rather than a full-blown reassertion of the status quo, but while attendance is back to full capacity I remain excited to finally watch October Pirates baseball in person at the end of the season.

Smoke Signals: Buda’s Wagon and Infrastructure Terrorism in Nashville

“The car bomb, in other words, suddenly became a semi-strategic weapon that under certain circumstances was comparable to air-power in its ability to knock out critical urban nodes and headquarters as well as terrorize populations of entire cities. [...] It is the car bombers’ incessant blasting-away at the moral and physical shell of the city, not the more apocalyptic threats of nuclear or bioterrorism, that is producing the most significant mutations in city form and urban lifestyle.” - Mike Davis, Buda’s Wagon

When the sun dawned over Nashville on Christmas morning the day’s first light illumined dark tufts of smoke above downtown. Like many other Nashvillians my Christmas morning began with local news coverage of a powerful explosion on Second Avenue. Some aspects of the initial details seemed familiar and inherently plausible (an RV transformed into a Vehicle-borne Improvised Explosive Device), while others strained credulity (early rumors of an audio countdown message emanating from the vehicle smacked of Internet hoaxery, though these reports have since been confirmed).

Indeed the early morning attack does seem to have included a warning message that prompted people in the area to evacuate. Remarkably it appears that no one but the perpetrator was killed in the blast. The bombing site in downtown Nashville was in the proverbial shadow of the city’s iconic AT&T skyscraper -- colloquially known as the Batman Building as the tower’s twin antennae somewhat resemble the pointed ears on the caped crusader’s cowl -- yet more significantly the RV was positioned directly in front of an AT&T switching station. This is a building dedicated to housing telecommunications infrastructure; the 15-floor windowless red-brick structure in Nashville bears some superficial resemblance to 33 Thomas Street in Manhattan, the AT&T “Long Lines” building whose 29 stories of windowless brutalist concrete have long sparked observers’ imaginations. 

Considered as an instance of infrastructure terrorism the bombing was quite effective. The explosion didn’t seem to jeopardize the overall structural integrity of the switching station, yet enough damage was done to disrupt critical services. Many areas around the city -- including here in Brentwood -- lost 911 emergency phone services. The Nashville Airport ceased all flight operations due to the telecommunications issues, and the city’s COVID-19 community hotline was also knocked out of commission. Communications were affected throughout the region including in Knoxville, Chattanooga, and Louisville. 

Infrastructure terrorism became a key concern for U.S. authorities following the 9/11 attacks. In 2003 the Department of Homeland Security published a National Strategy for the Physical Protection of Critical Infrastructures and Key Assets. The report details the vulnerabilities inherent to maintaining national and transnational networks supported by critical nodes:

“The facilities, systems, and functions that comprise our critical infrastructures are highly sophisticated and complex. They consist of human capital and physical and cyber systems that work together in processes that are highly interdependent. They each encompass a series of key nodes that are, in turn, essential to the operation of the critical infrastructures in which they function. To complicate matters further, our most critical infrastructures typically interconnect and, therefore, depend on the continued availability and operation of other dynamic systems and functions.” (DHS, 2003, p. 6)

The Nashville bombing thus reveals in spectacular fashion the intrinsic vulnerabilities of infrastructural networks. This vulnerability is not just a threat to urban centers: the use of car bombs to terrorize city populations has a long history, and recent attacks in New York, Toronto, and Nice have demonstrated that a vehicle doesn’t need to be equipped with explosives to cause mass destruction and death. Rather, the apparent target of the Nashville bombing and the subsequent communication disruptions that resulted illustrate the oft-invisible yet overlapping infrastructural entanglements of our networked world. An attack centered on one building in Nashville can produce institutional breakdowns not only throughout the entire city but also in neighboring states. Network resiliency and redundancy was of course the primary goal of ARPANET, the technological foundation for the modern Internet.

The bombing also indicates one of the central paradoxes of our increasingly interconnected technological apparatuses: as the infrastructures of our daily lives become “smarter,” more integrated and networked, they also become more vulnerable to distributed disruption and systemic failure. The implementation of “intelligent” infrastructures in urban environments is often motivated by official imaginaries of omniscient visibility and pervasive control, and accordingly produce attendant anxieties over authoritarian encroachment and the specter of a stifling panoptical security state. Yet the increasing complexity of administrative infrastructures and technologies simultaneously gives rise to greater systemic precarity and emergent opportunities for breakdown.

Mike Davis charts some of the interplay between vehicle-based terrorism and urban governmentality in his book Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (2007/2017). Echoing the DHS quote above, he situates the spread of car bombings in an “open source” era of terrorism marked by “a seamless merger of technologies: the car bomb plus the cell phone plus the Internet together constitute a unique infrastructure for global networked terrorism that obviates any need for transnational command structures or vulnerable hierarchies of decision-making” (p. 11, emphases in original).

Davis also notes that car bombs are “‘loud’ in every sense,” as these explosions are “usually advertisements for a cause, leader, or abstract principle” (p. 9).

“In contrast to other forms of political propaganda, from graffiti on walls to individual assassinations, their occurrence is almost impossible to deny or censor. This certainty of being heard by the world, even in a highly authoritarian or isolated setting, is a major attraction to potential bombers.” (ibid.)

Davis cites Regis Debray’s observation that such attacks are “manifestos written in the blood of others.” Yet the Nashville bombing has thus far failed to yield an explicit political motive or ideological agenda. The Christmas-day confusion was compounded not only by the revelation of the audio warning announcements, but also by the lack of any corresponding media manifesto or claims of responsibility. The volitional vacuum prompted news and social media discourse to project possible motives onto the perpetrator: perhaps the bomber was a right-winger who targeted the AT&T building because of the 5G-Coronavirus conspiracy, or maybe a leftist seeking retribution for the telecomm company’s complicity in domestic spying programs? Personally, I felt the technological elements of both the target and the weapon evoked Unabomber vibes, although the preliminary evacuation notice evinced a greater concern for collateral damage and human life than Kaczynski’s methods.

The impulse to apprehend an underlying motive behind an act of mass violence is understandable, yet ultimately no explanation for terror or mass murder can ever be satisfying or even elucidating. Our current political climate produces knee-jerk responses to inciting events that seek to assign ideological complicity to the “other side,” casting preemptive blame to our imagined opponents (i.e. “this is surely the work of a MAGA anti-masker,” or “this must be a BLM assault on the police” ) such that our own ideological position is affirmed and our cognitive maps cohere. Rituals of scapegoating have long provided essential support for both group and personal identities. Yet no declaration of intent can truly explain wanton destruction, just as no ideological rationalization can justify mass murder.

In recent history the Las Vegas massacre perpetrated by Stephen Paddock epitomizes the unfulfilled search for an explanatory motive. The question of what circumstances led up to Paddock raining bullets on a crowd of concert-goers has fueled futile speculation and conspiracy theory. When police photos of Paddock’s hotel-suite-turned-sniper’s-nest appeared online, viewers seized upon a piece of paper visible on a side table as a critical clue. Surely this was the killer’s suicide note, or personal manifesto, some explanation for the attack! It turned out the paper bore only mathematical equations for calculating trajectory, the killer’s calculus for maximizing mortality.

The lack of a clearly defined motivation can be experienced as a secondary shock to the initial trauma of the attack itself. It seems to deny some semblance of resolution or closure. So far no underlying explanation for the Nashville bombing has been unearthed. It remains an explosive enigma rendered all the more inexplicable by the bomber’s choice to broadcast a warning message prior to detonation. Yet the police have revealed that the vehicle-based speaker system not only conveyed a verbal countdown notice, they also played music:

“Police in the area moments before the blast said the speakers also played the wistful 1963 song ‘Downtown’ by Petula Clark. The lyric, about going to the city to seek refuge from sadness, echoed down Second Avenue just before the blast: ‘The lights are much brighter there.’”

Without reading too much into the song choice as a potential clue, the reported musical selection does seem to suggest that the perpetrator saw some significance to the location of his attack beyond the mere tactical position of the apparent target. The use of the song “Downtown” conveys a striking concession to the particularities of place in comparison to the considerations of extended networks and distributed effects offered earlier. And while the ramifications of terror attacks may resonate across geographic distance and within virtual spaces, every ground zero occupies material as well as mental territory.