Mediated Memories & Nostalgic Obsolescence

I spent much of the spring 2020 early pandemic period like many other people, holed up at home binging streaming content. It’s an interval of the past two years that I recall fondly: having nowhere to go and nothing better to do than consume entire seasons or series of television. During that initial period of displacement in which I spent several months living out of a single, hastily-packed weekender bag, I also got to share a lot of valuable viewing time with my family. But once we had exhausted all episodes of Tiger King, and the novelty of lockdown life evolved into an increasingly despondent drudgery, I began exploring the various family media stashed around the house.

We started in on the family photo albums and school yearbooks, scrutinizing snapshots and swapping infrequently recalled stories. It was a refreshing deep dive into forgotten memories; encounters with anecdotes that at one time perhaps seemed so integral to one’s personal mythology as anchor points for a cohesive sense of self. It also signaled the beginning of a pandemic-prompted turn toward introspection and reflection, one that I would continue throughout the following year.

From the photo albums I moved on to boxes of home movies on VHS that I found alongside a dusty VCR in storage. Miraculously the player still functioned and we were able to screen these family films that hadn’t been seen in decades: progressive construction updates on the building of a house; a family outing to tour the fall foliage in central Illinois; my father and grandfather retracing steps in Austria. I was also able to reconnect with my personal media library that’s been kept in my parents’ storage for the past twenty years. First there was my collection of commercial VHS tapes, mostly zombie movies procured during a period in the early days of DVD when these cult horror films were out of print on home video or otherwise in distributional limbo. But the real gold was my collection of mini-VHS tapes representing years of recordings from elementary school through high school when my camcorder was my constant companion.

Reviewing the camcorder tapes required more effort since you need a cassette converter to play the mini-VHS format in a VCR. I was thankfully able to extract a tape that had been loaded into my converter for the past 15+ years, but after that delicate procedure the device gave up the ghost and I had to order a replacement. I also came across my old camcorder itself and saw that there was a tape inside. After several unsuccessful attempts to get the camera to power up I resorted to surgery, prying the camera apart to free the tape. I was able to remove the cassette and respool the tape into playable condition; it turned out to be a tape my youngest sister had recorded sometime after I’d left the camera at home for college.

When we first began going through the home movies in Spring 2020 my family had discussed the prospect of digitizing the tapes or transferring them to DVD. I even researched local video houses and estimated the cost of digitizing our entire VHS collection. But it didn’t go any further than that: based on the effort and cost that would be involved I put the digitization project on the back burner. That winter I learned that an old friend of mine was very seriously ill. We hadn’t seen each other in ten years, and had only been intermittently in contact during that time, but he was one of my dearest friends so I quickly reached out. Six months later when I learned that he was dying and had ultimately passed away I was struck by a sense of paralysis that stretched back retroactively through the preceding months, wishing that I had done more or been able to offer more of a gesture for my friend. Immediately wishing I had been able to share the recently rediscovered camcorder tapes of our high school hijinks as a distraction while he dealt with his health issues, I took that digitization project off of the back burner and set about figuring out the process.

It turns out that I didn’t need to contract the services of a professional video house, or pay expensive fees for digital transfer. All that I needed was some software and a set of USB-to-RCA adapter cables. Oh, and a working VCR: the unit I had taken out of storage the previous spring was no longer functioning. My grandfather generously shipped a VCR that he had lying around the house but it wasn’t working either. However after one trip to the nearest Goodwill store I came home with what turned out to be a fully functioning DVD-VCR combo player.

I wasn’t able to put together a media care package in time for my ailing friend so I started curating a collection to send to the other members of our friend group. This involved digitizing the video recordings I had as well as salvaging audio: my storage boxes included CD booklets filled with burned CDs of favorite albums and mixtapes, and also recordings of Nite Owl, a show on my college radio station that my friends frequently co-hosted with me.

As my friends and I respectively sorted through mementos and ephemera in our grief, there were welcome surprises and reminders in the wake of our loss. For instance, my friend sent me this photograph he had discovered showing me at the radio studio boards getting ready for a Nite Owl broadcast:

The first half of the 2021 summer, as I wrapped up my strange pandemic year and prepared to return to Pittsburgh, it was a flurry of reminiscence and reflection. Not only on the previous 18 months - trying to process the twists and turns of that unprecedented time and what it meant to me - but further back as well, a deeper inventory of personal history facilitated by the mediated memories that I had rediscovered in that place. Those days also had the frantic pace of a futile race against time: hurriedly making preparations in advance of my upcoming move while simultaneously wrapping up that tangential sojourn with some sense of closure. And all the while desperately trying to stay one step ahead of obsolescence, technological or otherwise.

As I sorted out my belongings for transit I made one more push into the curios I had in storage to mine as much nostalgic material as possible. I went through all manner of outdated recording media from CDs to videotapes; I even unearthed a PC that hadn’t been activated ever since the campus network had quarantined it for computer viruses 18 years earlier. After hooking it up to a monitor, mouse, and keyboard I was faced with a Windows XP login screen and was even able to successfully determine the password following nearly an hour of cross-referencing the cryptic hint with my oldest available emails. I don’t know what it’s all worth aside from a cache of dusty data saved to a brand new external hard drive. But at least the effort kept me occupied, and recollecting the memories I left for myself all those years ago seemed like a sufficient reward.

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.

An urban media tour of the South Side

With the weather warming up crowds have returned to the outdoor patios on my block and elsewhere along Carson Street, and I’ve recently returned to the trails and even brought my bike out of its winter hibernation (I’ve continued to be flummoxed by the pervasive road construction and sidewalk closures, however). In honor of the seasonal thaw and with optimistic anticipation for the coming summer I decided to revisit one of my first South Side sojourns. These photos were taken during an afternoon walk I took last July shortly after moving to the neighborhood. A theme soon developed where I was documenting multiple dimensions of the urban mediascape of South Side. Many of these sites have changed in the intervening months so this post is a bit of a throwback (as well as a nostalgic reminiscence of better sidewalk accessibility in the neighborhood).

I’ll start with the billboard in the above photo. I glimpsed the sign while driving in on my move-in weekend, and I assumed it was an advertisement. Revisiting it on foot I found that it was not a straightforward commercial message but some sort of mysterious campaign. Unfortunately the QR code was defunct so I was unable to determine its purpose. Nevertheless it was an intriguing twist on the traditional landscape of urban signage, with the QR code representing the multiple levels of technologically-mediated modalities and ways of interfacing with the built environment in contemporary urban space.

In terms of more traditional urban media, this July walk was the first time I had been to the WYEP Community Broadcast Center, the Bedford Square home of 91.3 WYEP. WYEP is a great local radio station (and overall community asset) and has been a core part of my personal Pittsburgh media experience since I first arrived in the city. Even when I was temporarily relocated to Nashville during the pandemic I still woke up every day to WYEP’s Morning Mix thanks to the ability to stream the station on my smart speaker. I’ve always appreciated that Pittsburgh has a solid homegrown radio station and am glad that we now share a neighborhood.

Prior to the advent of radio broadcasting, performance spaces and venues constituted key fixtures of urban media. As a major nightlife and entertainment district, South Side has traditionally been strong in music venues and concert spots (the neighborhood is comparatively lacking in my personal favorite urban media places, namely movie theaters and bookstores). One of the most prominent music venues in the area during my time in Pittsburgh has been the Rex Theater, an historic vaudeville house that later became a movie theater before finally transforming into a concert hall. The Rex closed permanently in September 2020 amidst hardships wrought by the pandemic. In July 2021 – the same month as the afternoon walk documented herein – it was announced that the space would be reopening as a music venue under new management and a new name. On the day I took these photos, however, the facade still looked shuttered, with the box office windows plastered with posters and flyers.

Speaking of papered-over windows: on the opposite side of Carson Street the historic Schwartz’s Market featured signs advertising notably anachronistic grocery prices.

The storefront had been made over as a filming location for a League of their Own television show that was shooting that week.

Finally, as I arrived back home, I checked the status of the mural that I had seen progressing since moving to the neighborhood. I didn’t spot the artists this day, but as identified here beside the mural it is a collaboration between Shane Pilster and Max Gonzales, who I would later meet and get to learn more about this specific project.

Beyond Crisis Creativity conference & Carrie Furnace Visit

Last month I was pleased to participate in an exciting un-conference that took place at the University of Pittsburgh. Sponsored by Pitt’s Global Studies Center, the Global Academic Partnership Conference: Beyond Crisis Creativity: Imagining New Futures Through Art and Youth Activism brought together artists, scholars, and assorted urban interventionists from Pittsburgh and around the world for a dynamic international dialogue.

The first event I was able to attend was a screening of Style Wars, a classic documentary on early hip hop culture that provides street-level perspective of the burgeoning graffiti scene in 1970s and 80s New York. This was my first viewing of Style Wars and it clearly belongs in the pantheon of essential visual archives of urban subcultures.

The screening was followed by a discussion with Shane Pilster and Max Gonazales, two prominent Pittsburgh graffiti writers and arts educators. I’ve been familiar with different aspects of their respective works for nearly the entire time I’ve been in Pittsburgh, but this was my first opportunity to meet them. During dinner that evening I had to restrain my overenthusiastic impulses to ask about the Pittsburgh graffiti scene and quiz them about various local writers whose names I’ve noticed over the years. I also got to them that I live next to one of their recent mural collaborations in the South Side that they completed last summer.

The next day began with a panel on the theme “Creative Industries and Urban Development in Global Contexts: Tourism, Gentrification, Heritage Work, and Social Justice Advocacy in Urban Arts.” I was delighted to get to meet my recent collaborator Ricardo Klein from the University of Valencia who was attending remotely from Spain, and to make the in-person acquaintances of Ligia Ferro from the University of Porto and Amanda Boston who joined Pitt’s Department of Africana Studies this year.

That afternoon featured a visit to the Carrie Furnaces, a national historic landmark and relic of Pittsburgh’s industrial heyday that is a locus of post-industrial reuse and arts initiatives. This was another example of a local site which I was long-familiar but had never previously visited. Before touring the grounds our group assembled in a massive warehouse space. Prior to the area’s redevelopment into a historic and cultural site, this space was a derelict and decomposing shell which attracted urban explorers and adventurous graffiti writers. Today the building has been renovated with a new roof and lighting, and the walls are covered in paint from both invited muralists as well as regular contributions from the arts workshops that are hosted in the space.

The rest of the grounds are impressive for the awesome post-industrial relics as well as the variety of artwork that has proliferated on the site.

Before leaving we were invited to try our hands at applying spray paint to the walls in the art workshop space. This was yet another first for me so I gave it a shot. After writing my name a few times I declared that I had exhausted my imaginative capacity. Some of the seasoned writers asked if I ever doodled, and when I replied in the affirmative they recommended that I just try some designs that I would typically scribble on a piece of paper. So I came up with this alien/spaceman figure. (I also painted the heart with arrow seen to the right of my name in the photo below, and was commended on my hand control…I did think the heart turned out well.)

Moving forward in Pittsburgh

The New Year started with a boom in Pittsburgh, and this period of calenderial transition portends more changes than usual. When I returned to Pittsburgh this past summer after an extended absence I had to steel myself for the changes wrought by the pandemic. It seemed unfathomable that a popular nightlife spot like Brillobox would close, or a hallowed neighborhood haunt like Take A Break would go for up for sale (however, the proximity of both these venues to Lawrenceville leads me to wonder how much the pandemic can be faulted, or whether the economic impacts of covid-19 only exacerbated the already established patterns of gentrification, capitalization, and dispossession…see also the massive new development taking shape on the former Penn Plaza site, a project that seems to have shifted from stalemate to speed train after the advent of coronavirus.). The closing days of 2021 saw similarly unthinkable news with the announcement that Pamela’s was shuttering its iconic Squirrel Hill diner location.

The long tail of the pandemic and the pervasive encroachment of gentrification will continue to remake the landscape of Pittsburgh, just as they are shaping cities around the world. But this new year also marks a political shift in the city. Today (January 3rd) Ed Gainey will be inaugurated as the 61st mayor of Pittsburgh and the city’s first mayor of color. Over the past weeks there have been numerous reflections and retrospectives on the legacy of outgoing mayor Bill Peduto. For me, Peduto’s mayoral tenure will always be associated with mobility and infrastructure. Not only did his administration create the Pittsburgh Department of Mobility and Infrastructure, but these were central focal points for my research into neighborhood change and development in the city over the last several years.

The final year of Peduto’s term saw further inroads in transit policy and innovation. Last July the city launched Move PGH, which was touted as the country’s first transit app for non-car transportation. The new initiative was accompanied by the introduction of e-scooters onto Pittsburgh’s streets, part of a comprehensive approach toward making the city a “leader in car-free mobility.” The fleet of electric scooters soon became an ubiquitous presence in Pittsburgh and sparked a rash of complaints over where the vehicles were being ridden or abandoned on city streets and sidewalks. Local media began covering scooter sightings on highways and in tunnels. As with the introduction of autonomous vehicle testing on the city’s streets years earlier, the Pittsburgh city council had to explore ways of legislating and regulating the new transportation technology.

In August a transit report ranked Pittsburgh the third-best 15-minute city in the country. The 15-minute metric refers to the availability of daily necessities and amenities within a 15-minute walk or bike trip. The study also highlighted the impact of affordable housing on mobility and accessibility, echoing a recent report that linked public transit funds to racial equity. That same month census data revealed that Allegheny County saw its first population growth since 1960, while also providing further statistical support for the much-discussed displacement of Black residents from Pittsburgh.

In September the Peduto administration announced the 2070 Mobility Vision Plan, a framework for the next 50 years of infrastructure investment in the city along with a commitment to “mobility justice.” The announcement of the vision plan was preceded by a host of new and proposed transit initiatives from the Pittsburgh Port Authority. The latter half of 2021 brought numerous other transit-related developments in the city including debate over the impact that a proposed Amazon distribution center would have on the streets of Lawrenceville, and a grant to transform a section of South Side’s 21st Street into a “complete green street.”

The closing month of 2021 saw a final flurry of mobility moves in Pittsburgh. Mayor Peduto announced plans to transform an abandoned road behind Bakery Square into a “living street,” with visualizations of the re-imagined streetscape. Residents of Hazelwood received news of a long-awaited sidewalk improvement, while mayor-elect Gainey announced a pause on the Mon-Oakland Connector that has long featured in debates over the remake-formerly-known-as-Almono that has been incrementally emerging in Hazelwood. Also in December, the city passed new legislation that bans parking in designated bike lanes.

All of these mobility-related initiatives are “on brand” for the Pittsburgh identity that Peduto has promoted during his term, but the bike lane legislation is a particularly appropriate measure for his final days in office. As I’ve mentioned before, bike lanes took on a distinct symbolic resonance in the mayor Peduto era. The newly dedicated lanes and other cycling infrastructure became synecdoches for the generational culture wars: bike lanes were regularly mentioned in letters-to-the-editor and the comment sections of local news websites as Pittsburghers decried a perceived shift away from traditional Steel City values toward the lifestyle preferences of the hipster-millenial-industrial-complex. While my own political values were typically at odds with the spirit in which bike lanes were cited in these cases, there is a germ of truth in what these Pittsburghers were responding to: bike lanes have been mobilized by municipalities as attractors for members of the “creative class,” and the social disparities inherent to “walkability” and “complete streets” rhetoric have long been noted. Indeed, my main contention with Peduto’s tenure hinges upon an overreliance and uncritical acceptance of “creative class” development initiatives (in conjunction with a pervading ethos of hegemonic liberalism that often expressed the right sentiments while falling short of inscribing them into policy).

This inherent ideological antagonism between the residual imaginaries of Pittsburgh’s gritty industrial heritage and the glossy banalized tech-sector landscape that has taken its place was aptly captured in a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editorial published on New Year’s Day. Aside from correctly identifying the dominant contrasting urban identities that characterized Peduto’s mayoral term, the editorial seems ambiguously ambivalent toward the outgoing mayor (the conclusion is that Peduto was good for Pittsburgh but could’ve been better?). The compromised tone of the editorial may indeed be the result of a compromise among staffers: the Post-Gazette editorial board has long been highly suspect if not entirely disreputable due to the nefarious and noxious influence exerted by its right-wing ownership, but it seems that the editorial board will also be changing in the new year.

Mayor Peduto has given several interviews recently, reflecting on his accomplishments in office with a considerable degree of candor (I want to especially recommend this excellent write-up from Public Source). In one such reflection Peduto said that he might be remembered as “a bridge over troubled water.” It’s such a perfect cap to Peduto’s history of on-brand messaging rhetoric, drawing upon the bridges with which Pittsburgh is so closely identified as well as the emphasis on mobility and infrastructure that he foregrounded as mayor. It occurred to me this week that Peduto was first sworn in as Pittsburgh mayor in 2014, the same year that I arrived in the city. I remember watching his episode of Undercover Boss later that year. His approach to governance and vision of the city that he put forth has been integral to my experience of Pittsburgh.

Moving forward, and as long as I remain in Pittsburgh, I will continue to track the unfolding patterns of neighborhood change and development strategies, particularly as they relate to both old and new mobility infrastructure initiatives. Some of the ongoing infrastructure investments I am most interested in are not necessarily driven by transportation. For instance, Peduto’s “Dark Sky initiative” to combat light pollution by replacing 35,000 streetlights with LEDs. And more recently the Pittsburgh City Council approved the designation of six greenways to become city parks, a move that among other things addresses the importance of urban greenways in a post-pandemic world.

Incoming mayor Gainey has reasserted his commitment to a more diverse and inclusive Pittsburgh. As I’ve stated before, I am excited for this new era of civic leadership in the city, while also anxious about the racist rhetoric (whether explicit or implicit) that will surely emerge in public discourse during Gainey’s tenure. I wonder what will replace “bike lanes” as the metonymic signifier for competing cultural values and ideological struggles in the coming years.

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.

Further thoughts on online education

This week I will be returning to an in-person classroom setting for the first time in more than a year and a half. It was evident last spring, and it remains evident now, that students are burnt out on online classes and eager to return to the classroom. My own feelings are a bit mixed. I am surprised to realize that my trepidation on returning to the classroom is not rooted primarily in the health risks, even though coronavirus transmission remains an ever-present public health concern. Strangely, it was the comments and questions from my non-teaching friends that alerted me to this cognitive discrepancy. “Aren’t you worried about catching COVID?” they’ve asked me. In these moments I became aware of being preoccupied not with the lingering virus but rather with how rusty my skills of classroom management had become.

As I’ve discussed previously, the advent of the pandemic and subsequent shift to remote instruction prompted sweeping reappraisals of the value of the college experience in general and the value of classroom education more specifically. The crisis affected me on multiple levels. On an existential level the emergence of the pandemic threw the very future of public institutions and interaction into doubt, higher education included. This uncertainty exacerbated my precarious position as fledgling early career academic, and my anxiety during the summer of 2020 was compounded by global unrest in addition to my ongoing lack of employment prospects.

I thus experienced the availability of distance learning as a boon: it afforded me the opportunity of continued employment, and offered other conveniences such as the elimination of commuting. There were clear benefits that I enjoyed, and even as my students expressed exasperation at “Zoom University” they also identified aspects of remote learning that they wanted to preserve: the online availability of lecture materials, “on-demand’ access to lecture recordings, and an end to the onslaught of class handouts. As an instructor I had developed my own list of perks that I was loath to relinquish, mostly relating to the availability of student names and attendance records (even with the associated discomfort over increased surveillance and privacy concerns).

Last Fall I discussed the merits of online teaching with a distinguished colleague. He has been retired from teaching for some time, but had just participated in a Zoom class session as a guest speaker. He was aghast at the number of students who elected to keep their cameras off, and that some of those who did choose to be visible were in dark rooms with sweatshirt hoods over their heads. I had to wonder how long it had been since he had been in a classroom as his dismay seemed to betray an unfamiliarity with the contemporary classroom setting. I also appealed to his robust background in media ecology: wasn’t he discounting the fact that each of the students now had an equal view of the instructor, as compared with a physical space? What would McLuhan say about the virtual classroom environment? When I discussed this with one of my mentors he pointed out that McLuhan would be honor bound to support remote learning, as that is exactly the sort of unexpected hot take that became part of his public persona and brand of media analysis.

I am aiming to approach the return to classroom instruction with an open mind and an ample amount of grace for my students. I remain hopeful that I will receive the same consideration.

Niantic responds to Pokemon Go players, acquires scanning company

In an earlier post I wrote about how Pokemon GO developer Niantic was rolling back some gameplay changes implemented during the pandemic, and how many players were pushing back against the reversion to the pre-pandemic status quo. Last week Niantic posted a response to the Pokemon GO community:

“We have heard your feedback about one change in particular - that of the PokéStop and Gym interaction distance. We reverted the interaction distance from 80 meters back to the original 40 meters starting in the U.S. and New Zealand because we want people to connect to real places in the real world, and to visit places that are worth exploring.”

Several threads on Pokemon GO-related subreddits featured reactions to Niantic’s statement. Some users dismissed the developer’s message as diversionary corporatespeak and crisis PR. This was echoed in several of the top comments in an r/Games thread:

“tl;dr We heard you. Now shut up and leave us alone. Quit telling us how you should be enjoying our game. But just to make you be quiet, we promise to make an investigative task force who will look into the risks and benefits of increasing the distance and get back to you at a later date.”

“Ah the classic "we need an internal team to decide the best course of action" when the solution is already right there and had been implemented for months. They're not changing anything, they're attempting damage control and hoping it all blows over.”

Over on r/PokemonGo, several users found Niantic’s stated rationale of “encouraging exploration” as dubious:

“This game is like 2% exploration and 98% visiting the same neighborhood pokestops and gyms over and over again, and Niantic knows this.”

“You want to give us exploring? Give us biomes, give us rare Pokemon in hiking areas, give us better pokemon in eggs so we see the benefit of walking. Why the hell would I want to walk any extra to get the same dumb pokemon that is in the wild? Do I really need to "explore" a QFC parking lot? Lies. Exploring has nothing to do with it.”

Many of the comments in the above thread posited that Niantic was appealing to virtues of “exploration” and “exercise” in order to mask their purely financial interest in prompting players to move to Poke stops. Niantic is clearly invested in maintaining their edge in geolocation and augmented reality technology: last week the company acquired a 3D scanning company called Scanverse. As Greg Kumparak wrote for TechCrunch:

“As I first wrote about years ago, one of Niantic’s goals is to build a detailed and endlessly-evolving 3D map of the world — a step they see as fundamental to enabling true, rich augmented reality experiences if/when the world ever embraces something like AR glasses. It’s a rather massive (and never-ending) task, but one made a bit more feasible by way of its ever-roaming player base across games like Pokémon GO, Harry Potter Wizards Unite and Ingress.”

Meanwhile, debates over the gameplay changes have now spawned divisive conversations over Covid and vaccines on the Pokemon Go subreddit. One user asked why Niantic was reversing the pandemic gameplay decisions when the virus is still with us, and the board moderators have affirmed a zero tolerance policy toward Covid denial or anti-vaccine posts.

Shots from the Block: Pittsburgh Highline

Among the many discoveries I’ve made during my initial journeys along the Three Rivers Heritage Trail is the Pittsburgh Highline. I rolled into the open air plaza on a recent weekend morning and was totally caught off guard, wondering if this was a brand new development or I had simply been unaware of the location during my previous years in the city. It turns out that the Highline opened last summer. Press coverage of the August 2020 opening positioned the property in relation to broader reimaginings of public spaces that proliferated during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Along with the general aesthetic and approach to postindustrial re-development at the site, the Highline moniker itself is indicative of the intracity circulation of urban development and branding strategies. News coverage of the opening and the developer’s own description of the property point out that the name is a nod to New York’s famous High Line, which repurposed a disused elevated railway into a pedestrian park.

The Pittsburgh Highline similarly repurposes and incorporates rail infrastructure into its design. The development is centered around a former terminal warehouse, and sits right alongside still active train tracks. There is also a vintage rail car positioned as a centerpiece in the ground-level plaza. The carriage is covered with graffiti, which aesthetically links the Highline with the nearby Color Park, though I am unclear whether this is sanctioned by the property owners as the promotional images I’ve discovered depict the train car sans graffiti.

The plaza also excellently incorporates new cycling infrastructure to connect with the river trail, helping riders and pedestrians transition to McKean St and back to the riverfront. For my fellow aficionados of Pittsburgh filming locations, the upper plaza overlooks the concrete plant where Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s detective character takes out two of Bane’s evil construction workers in The Dark Knight Rises. Below is my photo of the spot and then an image from the relevant scene in the film for comparison.

Pokemon Go & post-pandemic mobility expectations

I haven’t played Pokemon Go since the early days of its release. It was nearly impossible to avoid the buzz surrounding the game’s launch. And as I wrote back in July 2016, the hype around the game was infectious and the game itself offered an exciting new way of interacting with public spaces in your local environment.

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic last year immediately and drastically altered attitudes toward congregating in public space. I had assigned my Communication Process students an assignment to complete during their spring break: spend time in a populated public space and take field notes on the interactions that they observed. When the scope of the pandemic became clear and our university canceled in-person classes during the spring recess I frantically emailed my students to stress that they were no longer required to complete the assignment and to affirm that it was in their best interests to avoid populated public places.

Many aspects of public life had to adapt to the new social-distancing realities of life under coronavirus, and Pokemon Go was no different. Pokemon Go developer Niantic announced in March 2020 that it was instituting changes in its games in light of the emergent public health imperatives:

“We have always believed that our games can include elements of indoor play that complement the outdoor, exercise and explore DNA of what we build. Now is the time for us to prioritize this work, with the key challenge of making playing indoors as exciting and innovative as our outdoor gameplay. We are adding to our product roadmap so we can enable more ways to play inside and around the home in the coming days and weeks, when the world needs it most.”

One of the changes implemented to Pokemon Go was an increase in the interaction distances for players to engage with location-specific game activities. These changes effectively doubled the distance from which players could interact with GPS-fixed game locations. In November 2020 Niantic provided updates on the changes and stated they would remain in place “at minimum through June 2021.”

Well, Niantic held to this prospective timeline, and last month the developer announced that it would be rolling back the increased interaction distances:

“Previously, PokéStop and Gym interaction distances were increased, to enable people to engage from further away. After this change the distance will revert back to the standard distance, when it makes sense in different places, though may be increased during future events and as part of certain features.”

Many players responded negatively to the reversion. On one of the most prominent Pokemon Go subreddits, The Silph Road, users explicated the immense quality of life improvement that the increased interaction distances provided. As redditor pogo_enthusiast explained:

“Increased interaction distances should stay, if only for reasons of safety and accessibility. Like many others, I was dismayed to see today's announcement concerning the reversion of pokestop and gym interaction distances. Beyond being a (much needed) quality of life feature, increased interaction distances made playing PoGo much safer and enabled disabled individuals in my community to more fully engage in the game.”

pogo_enthusiast outlined several specific ways in which the increased interaction distances improved accessibility:

1. Crossing the street less to engage with stops/gyms

2. Being able to interact with stops/gyms from safer (or more permissible) locations.

3. Being able to raid more discreetly from further away and avoid harassment from other players

4. Being able to keep walking at a normal place while playing, rather than abruptly stopping, slowing down, or moving off pathways to let others by

5. Being able to mitigate the issues of drift and not move around erratically to get in range of a stop/gym

The entire reddit thread regarding the revised interaction differences is fascinating to read. The comments astutely highlight myriad ways in which the gameplay experience was made safer and more accessible by the pandemic-era updates. So far the gamemakers have remained firm in their decision in spite of the outcry from the player base. A Niantic spokesperson justified the decision thusly:

“Last year, we increased the interaction distance to nearly the length of a football field. It’s tough to discover new places at this distance. We’re going to revert the expanded interaction distance in countries and regions where it makes sense to help restore the focus of the game on exploration and discovery. Going outside and spinning PokéStops and Gyms is important to our mission because it encourages exploration of the world.” [emphasis added]

This official explanation raises a question regarding the imperatives of Pokemon Go. How is the promotion of outdoor exploration weighed against the imperatives of profit accumulation inherent to a commercial product? How are these imperatives to be differentiated or disentangled? Around the start of this year redditor jdunham_ritxniantic posted to the Pokemon Go subreddit asking “How has the pandemic affected how you play?” User TheDeviless responded that:

“I stopped giving Niantic money because of their lack of concern for those during a pandemic.”

I think this response changes the inflection of the earlier question. Commercial profit motives aside, how would any initiative formed around the goal of promoting outdoor exercise and exploration responsibly respond to the public health imperative of social distancing? Despite the prevalence of post-pandemic and reopening discourse in our present moment I suspect that this question will remain relevant.

Shots from the Block: Back in the Burgh

After an 18 month residency in Nashville I have returned to Pittsburgh. I had mixed feelings about coming back to the city where I lived for the six years prior to the pandemic. It’s not the move I was hoping to make. I treated my time in Tennessee as a temporary detour, an opportunity to take stock and reorient myself. I gave substantial consideration to where I’ve been, where I’m at, and what direction I want to go in the future. I worked as hard as I could to gain some traction and build a foundation for forward movement. The results I hoped for failed to materialize, and in many areas of my life I felt I was spinning my wheels more than ever.

I’ve always had an ambivalent relationship with the notion of a hometown. Growing up I had difficulty responding to the question “Where are you from?” The implied pinning-down of origins was not as simple as the question seemed to presume. My parents moved to a new city two weeks after my birth, so the place where I was born was unfamiliar to me. My family moved again the summer after I finished elementary school. Unlike many of my childhood friends I didn’t have the experience of growing up with grandparents or other relatives living in the immediate vicinity, or a strong sense of hometown rooted in emplaced community relationships and memories that endured change over time. This early experience of uprootedness also instilled in me an association with geographical movement and personal progress. Subsequent life events further cemented this connection between physical relocation and the milestones of one’s personal journey. Moving to a new city after college provided an ersatz semblance of progression in lieu of the meaningful employment or career opportunities that eluded me after graduation. And that’s what moving to Pittsburgh for graduate school represented to me seven years ago: an exciting new chapter and evidence of forward progression. But most importantly it was always understood to be a temporary home. Pittsburgh was a place of transition, a stepping stone on my way to bigger and better things, with a built-in time limit established by the intermediate goal of completing the degree.

So now, seven years later, moving back to Pittsburgh felt like backsliding, a tangible manifestation of my failure to make meaningful progression in my life. For a while I resigned myself to rejecting any possibility of coming back to the city, treating a potential return trip as a line in the sand that I would refuse to cross. But I ultimately decided to view the return through the lens of the “upward spirals” model of personal progression rather than the “endless cycles” prism of total stagnation. When I entered Western Pennsylvania last week, for the first time in a year, the Appalachian environs evoked a fond familiarity. I didn’t want to find myself back in Pittsburgh but I’m grateful for the opportunity that’s been offered to me, and the city feels more like home than any other place I know.

As an intermediary concession to my migratory impulses I decided to settle in a part of town I haven’t lived in before. My previous Pittsburgh residences were all in East End neighborhoods. I’m now living across the river in the South Side flats. The neighborhood has a distinct and dynamic vibe. Yes, there’s the noisy nightlife scene that tends to keep more mild individuals (like myself) in quieter neighborhoods. But there’s also an abundance of fantastic architecture and street art. I may be most excited about the easy access to the Three Rivers Heritage Trail. In my first week here I’ve been on the trail several times walking, running, and cycling. Aside from getting to explore a new neighborhood there’s some exciting things happening in the city including a new mayoral administration and interesting policy initiatives. I’ve also been assessing how the city has changed during the past year and a half. A saddening number of local businesses shuttered during the pandemic, and the ongoing redevelopments in the East Liberty area seem to have continued unabated. So here’s to new beginnings, second chances, upward spirals, and the resolution of unfinished business.

Reflections on a year of Zoom University

The spring semester is drawing to a close, bringing an end to a year of remote teaching and distance learning. For me, it’s been a fascinating and often challenging experience. The sudden shift to mediated modalities prompted by the pandemic forced a reckoning with questions about the continued relevance of traditional higher education.

For years I’ve posed the following proposition to students in my Argument classes: “It is important to get a college education.” In their initial response students can only affirm or negate the proposition. During subsequent discussion we unpack the implicit variables and ambiguous terminology that complicate any simple or straightforward “yes/no” response: how is “importance” being defined, and just what exactly constitutes “a college education”? Every time I have conducted this exercise it is the economic valuations that win out: the interrogation of the proposition tends toward a cost-benefit analysis of the price of college tuition weighed against projected lifetime earnings. 

In arguing against the importance of a college education students occasionally cite famous examples of entrepreneurial outliers who made their fortunes after abandoning their collegiate studies. Another common talking point is the widespread availability of free information. The classical model of university organization developed in an era of information scarcity. The vestiges of this model have provided an implicit justification for tuition as the price of admission for exclusive access to specialized information and instructors. In an era of information abundance, access to information no longer seems like sufficient justification for exorbitant tuition and years of student loan payments. As my students have rightly pointed out, the knowledge commodity is less “valuable” when specialized information is readily available through web sites, YouTube videos, or free educational platforms like Khan Academy.

In these exchanges with my students I have attempted to gently undermine the premise that the “value” of college as represented by tuition costs is not linked to the “value” of information or knowledge. I’ve suggested that their propagation of the “value of education” line was hollow lip service to an ideal that they didn’t truly hold, an almost ritualistic recitation of an interpassive belief that no one really believes (sort of like my own semester abroad experience in college when I feebly tried to convince my parents that my interest in visiting Amsterdam was solely motivated by a profound desire to visit the Van Gogh Museum). No, the students’ implicit yet unstated understanding of the “value” of a “college education” was closer to the truth: a social experience tied to expectations of lifestyle affordances and class status.

This is the underlying reality that Ian Bogost elaborated last fall in an article discussing how the pandemic had revealed that the dilemma facing universities was not about providing education, but sustaining the college lifestyle:

Without the college experience, a college education alone seems insufficient. Quietly, higher education was always an excuse to justify the college lifestyle. But the pandemic has revealed that university life is far more embedded in the American idea than anyone thought. America is deeply committed to the dream of attending college. It’s far less interested in the education for which students supposedly attend. [...] Joe College and Betty Co-ed became archetypes, young and carefree models of American spirit and potential. Going to college, Thelin writes in his book A History of American Higher Education, “was a rite of passage into the prestige of the American upper-middle class.”

From an instructor’s perspective, I was grateful that the transition to remote learning was as readily available and easily implemented as it was. From the perspective of May 2021 -- bolstered by the benefit of hindsight and the preliminary reassurance provided by the vaccine rollout -- the anxieties over a forever-changed public life that pervaded in the early days of the pandemic seem overblown. It now seems that most campuses are prepared for a return to normal (or at least the “new normal”) this fall, but a year ago the fate of higher education (along with many other institutions and spaces) seemed very much in doubt. Last summer I was deeply appreciative for both the continuity of employment for myself and other staff as well as the broader educational continuity for students that distance platforms provided.

I’ve now taught both synchronous and asynchronous mediated courses. My synchronous Public Speaking classes were relatively well-suited for a video-conferencing format; the audio-visual medium could easily accommodate the fundamental activities of speaking and listening. Yet the “space” of the Zoom room presented certain restraints and affordances that led me to reconsider the inherent limitations of a traditional classroom space.

Virtual Horizons & Futurology for 2021: Žižek on The Great Reset

With much ballyhoo and bellyaching about the absurdly miserable year of 2020, our collective calendars have finally turned to 2021. The year-end was marked by effusive declarations of relief and hope, even though these admissions of optimism were often tinged with cynical self-awareness reflecting the continuing complexities of our current moment (i.e. coronavirus vaccines are officially being rolled out, although infections are currently exploding in the U.S., and a new strain of the virus has been discovered; and it remains likely that Trump will leave office soon, despite ongoing efforts to delegitimize the election outcome, and nevermind what sort of policies we can reasonably accept from a Biden administration). 

In an essay published on New Year’s Eve by Jacobin, Slavoj Žižek considers the prospects of the immediate future in terms of a dichotomy between a socialist reset and a corporate “great reset”:

“When we try to guess how our societies will look after the pandemic will be over, the trap to avoid is futurology — futurology by definition ignores our not-knowing. Futurology is defined as a systematic forecasting of the future from the present trends in society. And therein resides the problem — futurology mostly extrapolates what will come from the present tendencies. However, what futurology doesn’t take into account are historical “miracles,” radical breaks which can only be explained retroactively, once they happen.”

The phrase “great reset” has proliferated through think-pieces and professional publications to describe the ways in which the effects of the pandemic will shape social reality and rearrange policy priorities for the foreseeable future. It is also the title of a proposal by the World Economic Forum for how the global economic recovery should be directed. The proposal thus represents the dissemination of managerialist and technocratic visioning statements on the behalf of an aristocratic elite who assume the mantle for guiding civilization’s progress. Žižek addresses some of the most visible exemplars of this group:

“The human face of this ‘leading with transparency, authenticity, and humanity’ are Gates, Bezos, Zuckenberg, the faces of authoritarian corporate capitalism who all pose as humanitarian heroes, as our new aristocracy celebrated in our media and quoted as wise humanitarians. Gates gives billions to charities, but we should remember how he opposed Elizabeth Warren’s plan for a small rise in taxes. He praised Piketty and once almost proclaimed himself a socialist — true, but in a very specific twisted sense: his wealth comes from privatizing what Marx called our ‘commons,’ our shared social space in which we move and communicate.”

[...]

“We are thus facing a horrible false alternative: a big corporate reset or nationalist populism, which turns out to be the same. “The great reset” is the formula of how to change some things (even many things) so that things will basically remain the same.”

[...]

“So is there a third way, outside the space of the two extremes of restoring the old normality and a Great Reset? Yes, a true great reset. It is no secret what needs to be done — Greta Thunberg made it clear. First, we should finally recognize the pandemic crisis as what it is, part of a global crisis of our entire way of life, from ecology to new social tensions. Second, we should establish social control and regulation over economy. Third, we should rely on science — rely on but not simply accept it as the agency which makes decisions.”

The distinction that Žižek makes between relying on science and delegating agency to techno-scientific forces is a crucial one. This past November I participated in a workshop organized by the Communicative Cities Research Network on the topic of urban communication in the pandemic era. My brief contribution to the proceedings comprised my musings on urban responses to the pandemic in light of prevailing trends in “smart city” policies. The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic initially seemed to reinforce ways of envisioning cities and urban space that characterizes “smart city” urban imaginaries. The propagation of smart city frameworks, particularly those promoted by corporate firms and technology vendors, has been characterized as a “techno-utopian policy mobility” and expression of a “technoscientific urbanism” in which infrastructural packages are sold to beleaguered municipalities as technical “solutions” for intractable urban problems.

One of the problems with these approaches is that by foregrounding technological formulations of urban life, these programs function to depoliticize practices of city planning, obfuscate the social inequalities inherent to urban development, and foreclose opportunities to formulate an emancipatory or oppositional urban politics. The smart city imaginary of transposable technical solutions as promoted by technology vendors has emerged from the conditions of entrepreneurial urbanism and neoliberal policy approaches. The technoscientific tenor that characterizes many smart city discourses is especially amenable to neoliberal applications as it addresses urban problems through a veneer of objectivity, neutrality, and ideological agnosticism. These technocratic approaches attempt to depoliticize what are in actuality politically charged development and governance programs.

The COVID-19 pandemic makes clear the need for science, technology, and engineering to solve urban problems and maintain quality of life. However, it is crucial to be wary of the ways in which a technocratic veneer obscures the ideological underpinnings and inherent value judgments that direct policy programs, as well as the ways in which technocratic imaginaries limit the scope of our potential urban futures.

Žižek concludes his article thusly:

“Futurology deals with what is possible, we need to do what is (from the standpoint of the existing global order) impossible.”

In regards to urban futures and imaginaries, my response to Žižek’s distinction between the possible and impossible draws on a particular notion of virtuality understood not as absent or imaginary but as the potentiality for change, as the as-yet-unrealized. 

The emancipatory potential of virtuality in urban imaginaries is deeply implicated in the Lefebvrian right to the city. Lefebvre's call for a "right to the city" extended beyond access to housing and public space to advocate for spontaneity, sociability, and the utilization of urban environments based on use rather than exchange value. While the formulation of “the right to the city” is effectively an empty signifier, it signals the struggles of urban denizens to exert influence over the shaping of their built environment, to exercise autonomy in their communities, and to realize the use value of public space as a common good in the face of homogenizing capitalist development that aims to render and remake space only on the basis of exchange.

A common rejoinder to urban rhetoric invoking the “right to the city” is to ask for examples of cities or communities that have successfully realized the right. While the phrase has been adopted as a by various activist groups, and has appeared in certain government policies, there are no obvious examples of how the right has been actualized. Yet the virtuality of the right to the city is essential to its continued functioning as a rallying cry of radical urban politics.

The right to the city represents a virtual horizon of urban life and a radical vision for the city to come. Lefebvre’s call has been taken up by urbanists and activists as a rallying cry for expanding urban imaginaries beyond the actual to the possibilities offered by invention and processes of becoming. The right to the city therefore renders the realms of imagination and virtuality as key battlefields for urban struggles. Among the many crises facing cities today - ecological catastrophes, yawning social inequality, infrastructural breakdown, etc. - we might accordingly refer also to a crisis of imagination.

City Space as Projective Medium: From Coronavirus Quarantine to Urban Uprisings

The current confluence of the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic and popular political demonstrations has provided strikingly urgent examples of how city space may be actualized as a projective medium. By “projective medium” I mean to describe a repurposing of urban environments wherein public space serves as a canvas not only for the circulation of artistic representations or political slogans but for the staging of interventions of imagination, a testing ground for potential futures. Within the past few months we have seen dramatic and unprecedented reconfigurations of public space: first in the widespread “lockdown” and “stay at home” measures designed to mitigate the viral transmission of COVID-19; and secondly with irruption of mass protests against police brutality and extrajudicial killings of people of color. Both of these “moments” have offered profound illustrations of the social production of space, as well as ways in which the physical infrastructure of the built environment is an inherently politicized terrain. 

In the early days of the Coronavirus quarantines reconsiderations of urban space focused on absence and withdrawal. Photographs of unoccupied Los Angeles freeways and deserted downtown districts circulated widely online. At the end of March the New York Times published a photo essay documenting quietude throughout the five boroughs with the title “New York Was Not Designed For Emptiness.” The fascination with emptied city spaces is certainly linked to visual tropes of apocalyptic fiction and representations of humanity’s end depicted so often in popular culture: the silent streets and vacant plazas served as visual confirmation of the otherwise “unseen” virus, and visceral reminder of our ultimately precarious civilization. The allure of these images may also be linked to a desire for (psychological) distance from the biological threat. Writing in the Verso Books blog, Rob Horning credited such photographs with reinforcing a sense of “exemption” from the vagaries of the natural world and from the virus itself:

“Our ability to appreciate these images doesn’t underscore our ultimate harmony or interconnection with the natural world and the life that purportedly re-emerges when the highways are finally vacated. Rather it lets us use mediation (our ability to consume representations) to rearticulate our exceptionality. We can assume the subject position of the camera and pretend that makes us immune to being objects in the world.”

The onset of “social distancing” induced an attitudinal shift in how we related to the shared spaces of everyday life. The withdrawal from public places to the atomistic dwelling of self-isolation created a sort of vacuum, opening up a space in which new meanings and relations could be introduced. In many cities around the world residents rediscovered the balcony as a link between the individual and communal worlds. Balconies have always served as liminal spaces between the publicity of the street and the privacy of the home. During quarantine these sites gained renewed significance as spaces for performance and communication. Neighbors socialized from across their respective railings, and a new routine developed where residents would gather to applaud medical workers from their balconies at appointed shift-change times.

The mass migration indoors prompted rediscovery of the built environment as communication medium in other ways. I am particularly fond of the various projects that involved projecting films onto the sides of buildings. In Rome the cinema organization Alice nella Città began scheduling regular projections of classic films, and encouraged any citizens with the ability to do so to implement their own screenings. In Berlin the Windowflicks project hosted screenings by projecting movies on the walls of residential courtyards. (On a somewhat related note, I was disappointed to learn that Vulcan Video, a beloved DVD rental business in Austin, TX and one of my most frequented locales when I lived in that city, did not survive the Coronavirus outbreak.)

At the end of May the insular isolation of “stay at home” measures reversed into a dramatic reclamation of the streets. In the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands police, residents of Minneapolis turned out en masse in the neighborhood where he was killed. The initial days of the demonstrations saw vandalism and destruction of corporate businesses in the neighborhood beginning with an AutoZone store. (In addition to semiotically presaging the eventual advent of “autonomous zone” in popular discourse and U.S. urban imaginaries, the prominence of the AutoZone and other automotive businesses in the subsequent unrest throughout Minneapolis and St. Paul testifies not only to the dominance of car culture in U.S. spatial design, but also to the legacy of highway expansions and car-centric development that decimated predominantly Black urban communities throughout the 20th Century.)

During the first two days of protests a Target store nearby the site of Floyd’s death was thoroughly looted and vandalized. In addition to the store’s interior being effectively gutted, the exterior walls were blanketed with spraypainted messages. In the days that followed political graffiti and anti-police slogans became a ubiquitous visual element of the demonstrations unfolding in cities throughout the United States, even occupying part of the backdrop for Donald Trump’s infamous bible photo-op in Washington D.C. Here again the latent potential for the built environment to serve as a projective medium was dramatically actualized. The pervasive presence of political graffiti messages recalled the spraypainted slogans of the May 68 demonstrations in Paris, just as the scenes of civil unrest evoked the 1968 U.S. urban riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

Over the past three weeks the urban uprisings have continued to spread throughout the U.S., perhaps reaching their temporary apogee with the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ). The CHAZ designation refers to the occupation of a six-block area in central Seattle centered around the vacated East Precinct police headquarters. Since it’s emergence in popular discourse the message and meaning of the CHAZ has been the subject of public debate. Authoritarian discourses have demonized the occupation as a terroristic takeover, while more amicable readings of the space have characterized it in terms of a festival atmosphere with arts and music. Several early accounts featured images and accounts of a film screening in the CHAZ: participants watching Ava DuVernay’s “13th” on a projection screen set up in an occupied intersection.

As with the aforementioned outdoor cinema projects implemented under Coronavirus quarantine, the urban reimagining of the CHAZ features film screenings in urban space, a repurposing of city streets as movie theaters. It thus offers another opportunity to consider the built environment as a projective medium. Again, this sense of “projective medium” extends beyond merely repurposing urban infrastructure as a material support for communication. Yes, the occupied urban space of the CHAZ features murals, spraypainted slogans, and other forms of artistic and political representation. But the greater “message” of the occupation is a radical rethinking of the logics underlying the organization of urban life itself. The various artistic interventions launched in response to the COVID-19 outbreak similarly call into question certain unspoken assumptions undergirding collective dwelling.

 (In distinguishing between the “form” and the “content” of these creative repurposings of urban space it is important to recognize that the content in the respective cases is obviously significant. The CHAZ occupiers were screening a documentary about racial inequality in the United States, a subject clearly connected to the broader socio-historical context and political intent of Black Lives Matter protests. Would we interpret the scene differently if the CHAZ audience was watching “The Wizard of Oz,” or “Trolls 2”? Similarly, how would our understanding of the outdoor screenings in Rome and Berlin be altered if the organizers were projecting political documentaries instead of classic films?)

Both the Coronavirus pandemic and the urban demonstrations have prompted a reimagining of the structures that shape our daily lives. Rather than idle speculation or “mere” philosophical musings, the emergent issues underlying these provocations present themselves as urgent and unavoidable. They reveal the necessity of the radical reassessment of social reality.

Most of the questions prompted by the Coronavirus have to do with resuming “business as usual” in a way that will prevent another outbreak. What will work and schooling look like after the lockdown? Will telecommuting become the new norm? Should theaters and concert venues reopen to full capacity? Will any area of life return to its pre-pandemic state? The questions and demands voiced in the ongoing anti-racism protests feature a different focus, but they also call for sweeping structural reforms. Calls to “defund the police” have been explicated as a “reimagining” of what public safety and community-oriented state initiatives can look like. These twin crises thus raise awareness of infrastructural and social failures (of the healthcare system, of adequate preventative measures, of policing procedures, of systemic racism, etc.), but they also draw attention to failures of imagination. Questions about what kind of world we want to live in are increasingly superseded by questions of what kind of world will enable us to survive.

While the twin events represented by the global pandemic and anti-oppression uprisings therefore share significant similarities, they may be productively differentiated by the directional orientation of their respective inciting elements. The shock and disruption of the Coronavirus outbreak can be characterized as a movement inward driven by an outside impetus, whereas the protests represent an outward movement compelled by inner antagonisms. Social distancing and “safer-at-home” self-isolation measures were restrictive responses to an outside foreign force (foreign or alien in the sense that the virus is not human, not in any sort of xenophobic or Sinophobic sense as conveyed by the “Chinese virus” and “kung flu” dysphemisms). The mass occupations of city streets and other urban spaces was an expansive outwardly-directed response to failures and contradictions within the society itself, including inherent racial injustice, class antagonisms, and a generalized precariousness engendered by neoliberal capitalism. The two movements thus represent two imperatives to reimagine our world: one compelled from without, the other incurred from within. (There were, of course, many interrelated and exacerbating factors connecting the pandemic response with the protests, such as the economic disruption, soaring unemployment, disproportionate health outcomes along racial lines, etc.)

One way to interpret the sudden transition from vacant, socially-distanced public spaces to massively occupied city streets is to view space as a blank slate onto which various forces or groups project their politicized messages. However, it would be misleading to consider the urban as an empty signifier, or city space as a neutral container subject to contestations over who gets to fill it with meaning. The built environment is always already a politicized terrain, shaped by value-laden design decisions and governed by policy and force. Urban space emptied of content does not reveal the material landscape as a merely objective fact or value neutral background for social life. Instead, both the images of emptied city streets in the time of Corona and the scenes of massive demonstrations in public space attest to a fact that the urban form shares with all communication media: the medium is the message.