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.

City Scenes: Xmas lights at Phipps & PPG Place

The past year saw my return to Pittsburgh after an extended absence that was precipitated by the pandemic. This return has involved much revisiting familiar terrain, but also a great many firsts. For instance, last month I visited Phipps Conservatory for the first time, despite the local landmark having been on my Pittsburgh to-do list for as long as I’ve been in the city. Last week I made my second-ever visit to Phipps in order to view the elaborate lights and displays that decorate the conservatory throughout the holiday season.

The newly-installed lights and Christmas trees are the main attraction, but for me a big part of the excitement comes from being inside the conservatory after dark. In winters past I’ve ogled the seasonal nighttime displays through Phipps’ windowed exterior, and now I finally got to see it from the other side of the glass.

The interior takes on a different ambience at night with darkness beyond the window panels. When I visited in November the conservatory was still decked-out with Fall-centric seasonal flourishes and a pair of trolls greeted guests in the entry. Now the trolls were replaced with trees.

Through the windows of the Orchid Room (pictured above) you can see the golden “victory lights” illuminating the top of the Cathedral of Learning. My trip to Phipps came on the day after Pitt’s football team won the ACC championship, and the victory lights were an ever present sight, especially from outside where the Oakland skyline seemed part of a tableaux with the garden light displays.

After completing our circuit of Phipps we were in the mood for more holiday lights so we headed downtown where I accomplished another Pittsburgh first: visiting the city’s Christmas tree in PPG Place.

The European-style Christmas market in the adjacent Market Square had already closed for the evening, but there was still a large number of ice skaters circling the rink around the tree.

Anthropocene Imaginaries: Climate Fiction as Communication Infrastructure

Early reviews for Adam McKay’s new film Don’t Look Up are out, and they are decidedly mixed. This new movie seems to continue McKay’s trend of real-world-oriented comedies that engage with current socio-political events. McKay has transitioned from broad comedies including notable collaborations with Will Ferrell to a series of based-on-a-true-story/ripped-from-the-headlines entertainments. His films adopt a left-adjacent critical stance even though their output is often ideologically specious (the much-lauded The Big Short recapitulates a narrative of outlier exemplars of greed rather than recognizing the contradictory logics inherent to capitalism, and the otherwise impressive Vice contains a baffling scene where Steve Carell’s Donald Rumsfield laughs off the notion of ideology itself). Don’t Look Up is being received as a thinly-veiled climate change fable, which makes it the latest entry in the growing genre of climate fiction.

Writing for the L.A. Review of Books, Katie Yee outlines the language of climate fiction:

“The landscape of climate fiction is populated by Greta Thunbergs. It features eerily mature kids, left on their own. While our instinct should be to protect and pacify the children, ironically, in these novels they are forced to be the purveyors of cruel truths as the adults around them are lulled into a state of passivity. The roles are reversed. The alarm here is new, electrifying, contagious. Just as Greta Thunberg speaks directly to you in the ads, these characters invite you into the fold of these stories. They warn us not only with the tragedies they face but with the careful words they use to recount them. Climate fiction is just as much about the tales we spin, the way we talk about our actions.”

This past July I watched The Tomorrow War. Attempting to justify my rationale for doing so reminds me of Bill Hicks’ explanation for eating at a Waffle House: “I’m not proud of it, I was hungry.” In my case it was because I was days away from a major move and was eager for distraction as I packed boxes. I had anticipated that the movie would provide some alien invasion schlockery but was surprised when the opening sequence featured the interdimensional arrival of soldiers who announced themselves as “your children and grandchildren.” These soldiers emerged into our present day to deliver a warning of humanity’s imminent destruction. Watching these scenes it was impossible to not think of Greta Thunberg, the climate change activist whose impassioned pleas for her generation’s future have thrust her to the forefront of the climate culture wars. Did The Tomorrow War’s scenes of soldiers interrupting the World Cup to deliver a message of impending doom from the future not evoke a remediated echo of Thunberg’s famous “how dare you” address to the United Nations?

It was an invigorating metaphor for contemporary climate anxiety, and I was interested to see whether the filmmakers would lean in to this angle or if it was an unintentional veneer on this science fiction story. To my surprise, there were persistent allusions to the climate crisis throughout the film. The protagonist, played by Chris Pratt, is an ex-military operative now teaching high school science. When we first see him in his classroom he is trying to engage his students who have lost all interest in their studies in light of the revelations from the future war soldiers. They wonder: why study for exams, or apply to college, or hope for any future at all when they have received confirmation of humanity’s ultimate demise within the next thirty years?

It’s an evocative illustration of climate despair, the pervading melancholia that has particularly affected younger generations who are not only facing the specter of a transformed world, but also reconciling with the associated employment prospects. The scene dramatizes the “eco-anxiety” that may even become a diagnosable condition.

Pratt’s character attempts to counter his students’ existential apathy by arguing that science is more important than ever: it will take scientific ingenuity to meet and hopefully overcome this looming challenge. His speech about the importance of science would seem on-the-nose even if it wasn’t being delivered in front of images of polar bears precariously perched on pint-sized ice floes.

Global warming also plays an integral role in the resolution of The Tomorrow War’s plot. Our heroes ultimately realize (spoiler alert) that the spacecraft carrying the alien invaders is not destined to arrive in Earth’s future but rather crash landed more than a thousand years in the past. Initially submerged in ice, the gradual warming of the planet eventually thawed the aliens out, thus precipitating their attack on humanity.

Many reviewers found The Tomorrow War’s climate change metaphor to be wanting. For some, the metaphor fell flat. Others thought the dull action movie trappings failed to live up to the challenge. The discourse around The Tomorrow War reminded me of the chatter surrounding TENET when it was released last year. A brief exchange of dialogue during that film’s climax suggests that environmental catastrophe is the primary motivation for the temporal war that fuels the plot. Many commentators seized onto this brief bit of backstory as the key to unlocking the labyrinthine narrative, with reviewers referring to the film as a climate change allegory, “Christopher Nolan’s statement on climate change,” and a treatise on intergenerational justice. Like The Tomorrow War, critics also derided the fact that TENET eluded the climate crisis rather than confronting it head on.

These commentators are touching upon the potential for climate fiction to shape political imaginaries, and suggesting that these films can elucidate an agenda for addressing the climate crisis. Manjana Milkoreit has written about the potential for climate fiction to influence societal responses to climate change by depicting imaginaries of the future. Yet the imaginaries depicted in these science fictions seem insufficient for addressing political realities. Returning to The Tomorrow War: this film imagines the climate crisis as an alien invasion, and the solution to the problem is to go kill the aliens with guns and bombs. There is something effective in how the film posits that the “war” cannot be displaced or projected to the future, but rather must be fought in our own time, yet the solution it imagines is overly simplistic and individualistic. As Matt Christman noted in one of his CushVlog entries, The Tomorrow War overlooks the fact that everyone is aware of the threat yet lacks the mechanisms of collective action that would enable them to do anything about it.

Similar critiques are emerging in reviews of Don’t Look Up. One largely negative review ended by asserting that “if the movie helps to do something about climate change, such critical objections are unimportant.” The potential of climate fiction to function as infrastructure for political imaginaries seems like a salient area of inquiry, but perhaps we’re asking too much of our entertainments.

Shots from the Block: Duquesne Brew House & Abolition Art Show

This past weekend I went on a walk around my neighborhood with a friend who lives on my block. She had messaged me asking if I had gone outside to take advantage of the abundant sunlight we were having that day. I had been inside grading all morning and was eager to take a break from working and to get some fresh air, so I suggested we take a stroll. We started out along Sarah Street, aimlessly meandering further into South Side without a clear destination. After a couple of blocks we spied an alluring landmark: a dramatic and historic-looking building facade that neither of us had noticed before.

As we approached the building we were able to discern markings that referred to the Duquesne Brewing Company, as well as the designations “Brew House” and “Stock House.” This structure had evidently once housed part of the brewery operations for the local Duquesne beer makers, and I surmised that the building had followed the same fate as many other postindustrial relics and disused churches in the area by being turned into condos. A banner on the side of the building advertising apartments seemed to confirm these suspicions, but we also noticed signs stating “Gallery Open,” so we investigated further.

What we learned is that the former Duquesne Brewery has indeed been renovated into residential properties, but the re-developed complex also includes a pronounced arts emphasis complete with a gallery space and artist residency initiatives. The arts initiatives are overseen by the Brew House Association, and the 2,700 sq. ft. gallery space hosts a regularly rotating roster of exhibitions.

The current exhibition is titled “Empathy is the Seed, Truth is the Water, Solidarity is the Bloomage.” This exhibition is organized by Let’s Get Free: The Women & Trans Prisoner Defense Committee as their fifth annual art show for abolition. Let’s Get Free describes their mission as follows:

“We are a group working to end perpetual punishment, build a pathway out of the prisons back to our communities through commutation reform, support successful possibilities for people formerly and currently incarcerated, and shift to a culture of transformative justice.”

The Empathy art show features “artists on both sides of the prison walls”:

“This year’s show features 34 artists in prison and 29 artists in solidarity expressing a range of media, from watercolor to cross stitch to sculpture. First-time participant Marilyn Dobrolenski submitted a beautiful piece entitled “Harmony,” which features a lush and verdant wetland scene with water lilies, done in acrylic paint. Marilyn turned 69 this year and is one of over 70 women serving a life sentence over the age of 65. #LetGrandmaGo”

It was an extremely powerful collection of works. We were able to learn more about some of the pieces through artist statements and accounts of the historical context, but the overall impact of the collection in conjunction with the appeals for humanity and social justice that permeate the exhibition was overwhelming. I was particularly glad to have met Etta, a Let’s Get Free member who was also acting as a gallery guide, and to learn about the array of advocacy, outreach, and education initiatives that the group is involved with.
The Empathy art show continues through December 19th. There will also be a Radical Art Market hosted at the Brew House on December 18th and 19th.

What began as an aimless afternoon stroll resulted in eye-opening discovery. It was wonderful to not only learn more about the historic sites in South Side, but also the robust arts and activism work taking place throughout Pittsburgh and right here in my own neighborhood.

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.

Metaverse Madness

Late last month Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company was changing its name to Meta Platforms Inc., or simply Meta for short. The timing of the announcement led many commentators to interpret the re-branding as an attempt by Facebook leadership to direct attention away from the leaked documents and whistleblower testimony that were drawing scrutiny to the company at the time. Zuckerberg himself downplayed the coincidental timing and described the primary motivation of the name change as minimizing confusion that may be generated by the corporate entity sharing a name with one of its many app services.

The October re-branding announcement sparked a deluge of commentary and a spike in usage of the term “metaverse.” Yet the notion of the metaverse has been floated by Zuckerberg and others far in advance of the recent name change. In January of last year venture capitalist and essayist Matthew Ball penned an oft-cited overview of the looming metaverse. Ball’s primer presents a definition of the metaverse and surveys the fundamental characteristics of what the metaverse both is and is not. The primary case study in this account is Epic Games, purveyor of the uber-popular Fortnite. Part of what sets Fornite apart, Ball says, is its role as a virtual gamespace where players engage and interact with an unparalleled range of pop culture intellectual property (IP).

“To this end, Fortnite is one of the few places where the IP of Marvel and DC intersects. You can literally wear a Marvel character’s costume inside Gotham City, while interacting with those wearing legally licensed NFL uniforms. This sort of thing hasn’t really happened before. But it will be critical to the Metaverse.”

The image of gamers clad in licensed superhero regalia while interacting in pop culture themed environments brings the movie Ready Player One to mind, and Ball actually refers to Ready Player One to illustrate how aspects of the metaverse may be reflected in the popular imagination. Last Spring, in the halcyon early pandemic days when I still thought my stay with my family would only last a month or two, I watched Ready Player One with my mom and sister. I had seen the film once before, and the story itself was the same bland trifle that I remembered. However, watching the movie in 2020, in the context of a global pandemic that has sent everyone indoors to more fully interface with virtual fantasy worlds mediated by various screens, the film seemed chillingly vital. When the film concluded I stated to my viewing companions that while the movie wasn’t very good, it might be among the most important in terms of reflecting the zeitgeist.

The not-too-distant future of Ready Player One seemed shockingly more possible in 2020 than when it was first released in 2018. Drones deliver pizzas amidst the ramshackle housing towers comprised of motley stacks of mobile homes. Within these rickety domiciles the inhabitants don VR headsets that enable users to ignore their deteriorating real world surroundings by immersing their consciousness in virtual dream worlds. Furthermore, the film’s emphasis on recognizable pop culture artifacts, decontextualized media signifiers, and reverence for the minutiae of fictional worlds seems highly resonant with our contemporary media and consumer culture. Our cultural landscape is dominated by an endless proliferation of cinematic universes most pervasively characterized by the remediation or reinvention of established franchises or IP, a cynical appropriation of memory and experience where nostalgia is mined for brand recognition. Our collective imagination seems bereft of novel or alternative visions to an extent that does not merely portend a stultifying homogenization of entertainment content but also implicates our very capacities for imagining and the horizons of our possible futures.

Facebook signaled a clear interest in Ready Player One-style VR gaming when it bought virtual reality company Oculus in 2014. Following the Meta name change Zuckerberg talked about research into material for a body suit like the characters wear in the movie, and the company is also working on haptic gloves.

Gaming applications do seem like a ripe avenue for metaverse initiatives. I’ve talked about Niantic on this blog for several years, not only in relation to the role of Pokemon Go in popularizing augmented reality but also regarding their ambitious plans for further AR ventures. Earlier this month Niantic announced that it was launching an AR developer kit designed to support development for a “real-world metaverse.” This news is not interesting in and of itself; what I did find interesting was that Niantic CEO John Hanke’s announcement of the initiative described the metaverse as a “dystopian nightmare.”

“As a society, we can hope that the world doesn’t devolve into the kind of place that drives sci-fi heroes to escape into a virtual one — or we can work to make sure that doesn’t happen. At Niantic, we choose the latter. We believe we can use technology to lean into the ‘reality’ of augmented reality — encouraging everyone, ourselves included, to stand up, walk outside, and connect with people and the world around us. This is what we humans are born to do, the result of two million years of human evolution, and as a result those are the things that make us the happiest. Technology should be used to make these core human experiences better — not to replace them.”

While I remain ambivalent about Niantic’s operations and ultimate goals, it is nice to see Hanke acknowledge how these dominant metaverse imaginaries seem to support a retreat from our physical environments in favor of purely virtual spaces. Zuckerberg’s promotion of his metaverse ambitions arrived shortly after his fellow billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Richard Branson were criticized for their respective vanity space-faring projects, activities that seem like extremely expensive and indulgent rocket hobbies in light of the ongoing precarity and existential anxiety being experienced by people around the world. While the space-faring billionaires seem to have elected to abandon the doomed Earth by escaping to another planet, Zuckerberg offers escape into the metaverse. As James D. Walsh put it in an editorial:

“There are some very uncomfortable things about all of this. We live in a capitalist society — money equals options. The people with the most options in the world, specifically Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg, either want to be off the planet or they want to create a different universe on this planet. It feels like the mother of all abdications. “We don’t want to improve the world, we want to go to a different world.” It seems somewhat nihilistic and strange.”

There are obvious ideological implications here (it is also depressingly unsurprising that Zuckerberg’s demo video announcing the metaverse centered around a work meeting…even after more than a year of the horrors of remote work and endless zoom meetings, Zuck can’t imagine an application of the metaverse beyond what amounts to a Second Life room for interacting with colleagues and being surveilled by your boss.). Some notable differences between these two visions of escape routes from civilizational collapse: the metaverse at least offers greater accessibility in the sense that many more people could realistically gain access to the technology as compared with the elite few who might end up migrating to Mars. However, the rocket jockeys have the benefit of actually having somewhere to go. The metaverse (which, it should be noted, is nascent at best) might promise virtual spaces for gaming, interacting, and (*sigh*) working, but it cannot offer a space to sleep, or food to eat, or air to breathe. In light of the social strains, environmental catastrophes, and other existential threats posed by the ideology of limitless growth meeting its inherent contradictions, the ultimate difference between these two abdications of capital may just be their respective timeframes.

City Scenes: Threadbare Cider House

My trip to the Spring Hill cemetery city view last month was preceded by a visit to Threadbare Cider House, located just down the hill in the same neighborhood. The day featured seasonally-appropriate fall weather, and the cider house itself was bedecked with seasonal accoutrements. There is an outdoor seating area that was inactive at the time due to the cold weather and intermittent rain.

Inside the space was modern and clean, with a bar area and various sizes and styles of tables. Brewery tanks and office areas are visible from the dining area through large interior windows.

I’m not much a cider drinker so I started with a flight to sample some of their various offerings and determine which best suited my palate. We also tried several of their pizzas for lunch which provided much-needed fuel for our subsequent trek up the hill.

Pittsburgh Mayoral Elections Update

The Pittsburgh mayoral election will be held tomorrow, and the result will be historic regardless of which of the leading candidates wins: either Ed Gainey will be the city’s first Black mayor, or Tony Moreno will be the first Republican mayor since the 1930s. The endorsements, campaign ads, and mailers have been out in full force, and now I’ve even seen discourse around the election spilling out into the spaces of the street.

I took the above photograph at the bus stop last week. There are several things worth noting about the handwritten flyer, some maybe more trivial than others. For instance, the fact that Moreno’s name seems to be spelled as “Marino.” More troubling are the racist rhetoric and tropes, including the closing allusion to Chicago. While we could debate just what is intended by the term “safe” another passerby has already contributed a more pressing question: “Who is THEY?”

The Post-Gazette asked the mayoral candidates to select supporters who exemplified their respective visions for a recent article. The themes that emerge across the supporters’ comments have to do with expectations of community engagement and a desire to upend the status quo. The city’s approach to policing is another prevalent topic which has remained salient since last years’ protest movement and the broader conversations they engendered. Meanwhile at the City Paper Tereneh Idia has penned an open letter to Pittsburgh’s next mayor asking the incoming administration to foreground the experiences of Black women in the city.

City Scenes: Spring Hill Cemetery & City View

This weekend I traveled over to Pittsburgh’s Spring Hill neighborhood to take in some of the local fare as well as the killer city views. My roommate had recently biked to this North Side neighborhood to visit the Threadbare ciderhouse, and he returned with rave reviews of the brewery and the panoramas afforded by the nearby hilltop cemetery. Our visit to a graveyard seemed serendipitously timed one week out from the Halloween holiday.

We weren’t cycling this time around so that meant walking up the neighborhood’s steep streets toward the summit. Pittsburgh is of course famous for its vast network of public steps and stairways. We saw some impressive (and intimidating) examples of Pittsburgh steps during our walk, and even got to make use of some.

The undulating topography of Spring Hill results in some unique neighborhood layout, and we passed a few houses with fantastic mosaics and designs laid into their facades.

We had been referring to the graveyard as the Spring Hill cemetery, but it is actually the St. John’s Lutheran Cemetery.

The city views from the hillside were indeed worth the trek. Looking toward downtown we had a panorama stretching roughly from the 16th Street Bridge to the West End Bridge.

One of the things I especially appreciated about the perspective was that it allowed one to view the headstones and memorial monuments as if they were on the same level and scale as the skyscrapers of the downtown skyline. This perceptual shift enabled a rather philosophical vista where the towering buildings seemed like more funereal markers in a vast and sprawling cemetery.

There was evidence of some nocturnal seance or occult ritual having been recently performed among the tombstones: three red x’s scrawled on the backside of a grave marker, along with a candle emblazoned with an image of Santa Muerte.

From the hilltop we also had a great vantage point to watch the Goodyear blimp flying toward downtown ahead of the Pitt football game at Heinz field.

It was an awesome location and great outing overall. I’ll have some additional info from our Spring Hill trip in the near future.

Pittsburgh 2021 Mayoral Elections

On November 2nd Pittsburghers will elect a new mayor. Whatever the results, it will mark a post-Peduto era for the first time since I’ve lived in the city. I was completely caught off guard when Ed Gainey won the democratic nomination earlier this year. I had assumed that Peduto was a shoo-in for a third term, though admittedly I had not followed the primaries closely. Since I had relocated outside of Pittsburgh in the midst of the pandemic I was also not in touch with how the local political climate had been impacted not only by the public health crisis but also by the social justice uprisings and reckonings with racial disparities that unfolded across the country last summer. Indeed, the national discourse on policing was cited as a significant influence on the Pittsburgh mayoral race. In the wake of Peduto’s loss commentators situated the surprising results in relation to a nationwide trend against incumbents. 

Peduto had branded himself as a progressive mayor who promoted policies based around modernizing Pittsburgh’s postindustrial economy and infrastructure through technological innovation. He acknowledged legacies of unequal development in the city even though his responses to rampant neighborhood gentrification were underwhelming. In contrasting himself against Gainey, Peduto was firmly established as part of the old guard of mainstream democratic liberalism, with Gainey representing the new spirit of social progressivism. With Gainey’s primary win he also became the presumptive first black mayor in Pittsburgh’s history. This historic milestone took on greater salience not only in relation to national discourse on racial injustice but also in light of the specific disparities faced by Black Pittsburghers. Pittsburgh has long promoted itself as a “most livable city,” but the city’s own research has confirmed that this “livability” is often not available to its Black residents. The disparities are particularly pronounced for Black women in Pittsburgh, with many Black women talking about leaving the city. This accords with broader demographic trends of Black residents leaving Pittsburgh. 

The election is now framed as a contest between Gainey and Republican candidate Tony Moreno. The two have debated their differing visions for the city, and while policing remains a salient talking point they have also debated affordable housing and neighborhood revitalization. The prospect of a Gainey administration is exciting, although as the Moreno mailer I received demonstrates (pictured above), the rhetoric around his policies will inherently be racialized in both overt and covert ways. During Peduto’s administration bicycle lanes became one of the most hotly debated topics in local politics. Peduto foregrounded a robust approach to mobility and infrastructure, but the bike lanes became a stand-in for a particular inflection of the culture wars as they manifested in Pittsburgh, a signifier of progressive cultural policies that signaled being out of touch with “old” or “authentic” Pittsburgh residents and values. If Ed Gainey becomes Pittsburgh’s first Black mayor then I expect that the fixation on bike lanes will be replaced by more distinctly racially-coded exemplars of development agendas and priorities. As of now I remain optimistic that the discussions have shifted to more explicit concerns with unequal outcomes in urban governance.

City Scenes: Cycling to East Liberty, Oakland, and back again

Ever since my roommate got his new road bike a couple weeks ago he’s been tearing up the road and trails. He rode 12 miles out to the town of Duquesne this week just because he had the afternoon free. And he’s now completely switched from commuting via public transit to cycling. I had been pleased with my modest outings after arriving in South Side this summer, and especially just enjoying going out on the river trail just for the hell of it. But now my friend has a fancier (and faster) bike, he’s putting in significantly more miles in the saddle, and he’s thrown down the gauntlet regarding daily commuting via bike. So for the past two weeks he’s been asking me nearly every day if I’m going to ride into campus with him, and I’ve replied that I don’t feel up to it yet, that I still don’t feel confident riding in traffic, that I want to build my stamina up. But this past Sunday I decided to finally bite the bullet: when he asked if I wanted to ride into Oakland, I said “OK.”

We rode down Carson and crossed over the river on the Hot Metal Bridge. We went through Panther Hollow into Oakland but my friend wanted to get breakfast first, so we transitioned onto Ellsworth and traveled through Shadyside into East Liberty. East Liberty–and in particular the Highland/Centre nexus–remains one of the significant neighborhoods for my experience of Pittsburgh. Not only as a major hub when I lived in Friendship and Bloomfield, but also through my research in urban change, and all the transformations I’ve seen and studied in and around East Liberty in the past seven years. As we locked up our bikes I expressed relief that Patron was still there. It’s not the greatest restaurant, not the greatest Mexican food I’ve had, but it is truly one of my comfort spots in the city. There was a time I went so often that the wait staff recognized me, and would even ask where I had been if I missed a week. It was my go-to location for both celebrating good times and getting through bad times. It was where I went after my dissertation defense, and one of the first places I went this summer when I came back to Pittsburgh.

My roommate and I were both gobsmacked at the scale of the development going up at the former Penn Plaza location in East Liberty. It is massive: totally out of proportion with the existing neighborhood. Our destination was another marker of change since I had last lived in the city: Square Cafe, which took over the location previously occupied by the stalwart local restaurant Spoon.

It was a beautiful Fall day, clear and cool. We had to wait out front for nearly half an hour before getting a table and the rays we were soaking up had me wishing I had brought sunscreen. It was my first time to Square, although I had patronized the former restaurant. We were seated by a window with a view of our bikes locked up across the street. Overall I was super impressed by the Square menu, and although I was faced with a lot of good options I decided to stick with the Fall vibes and ordered some of their seasonal specials: pumpkin walnut pancakes and a Jack-o-lantern latte.

The streets in the East End neighborhoods were mostly easygoing on this Sunday morning. The most excitement involved coming upon a car accident at Ellsworth and Aiken: two cars had collided in the intersection with one ending up rolled over on its side, the horn persistently blaring. Soon we were at the base of the Cathedral of Learning. Bigelow Boulevard between Forbes and Schenley drive was blocked off for Pitt’s Fall Fest; as we locked our bikes to the rack we heard the soundchecks coming from the temporary stage.

I spent most of the afternoon working in my office and I assumed that my adventure for the day was mostly finished. But my friend got a wild hair to go see the Riverhounds game that evening, and suggested that we might as well just ride down to the stadium after crossing back over to the South Side. So that’s what we did.

This was my first time cycling to a sporting event, although this summer I did walk to Highmark Stadium as well as to PNC Park for the first time. It was a great capper to a beautiful autumn day; a Goodyear blimp drifted overhead amongst cotton ball clouds, and the downtown skyline glimmered with the fading final rays of daylight.

After the game it was nice to avoid all the chaos of the parking lot and the lines of traffic as cars headed for the exits. We took the river trail east to go home; it was my first time riding on the trail after dark, because it is unlit. I followed my friend because he has bike lights and I don’t. It was sort of exhilarating: in the darkness of the evening, exacerbated by the overgrowth and trees lining the trail, the only thing I could see clearly was my friend’s silhouette against the small cone of path and trees illuminated by his bike lamp. I pedaled hard to keep close as that was my only hope of getting my bearings amongst the tangle and murk. We made good time through the shadow and dusk until we hit the train tracks at 18th st and were delayed by the passing of a CSX Coke Express freight. All-in-all a rather welcome expenditure of energy.

City Scenes: The Summer Ends (again)

The official first day of fall came two weeks ago, and the weather in Pittsburgh has changed accordingly. But I feel that the summer doesn’t really end until the regular baseball season comes to a close, and due to MLB scheduling this year the Pirates’ final homestand fell on the first three days of October, giving us a tiny taste of Buctober baseball.

The Friday evening game was cool, even chilly in the latter innings. It was not nearly as cold as previous early-season games I’ve attended but it was cool enough that I was able to wear my Pirates starter jacket. Saturday was warmer, and on my way to the stadium I noticed several telltale signs of summer’s end: the pool at the Ormsby rec center has been drained, and the Allegheny Overlook pop-up park has disappeared from Fort Duquesne Boulevard.

The Clemente bridge was closed-off to vehicle traffic giving the ballpark-bound crowds full reign of the street. I was glad to be able to partake in this ritual one last time this year, especially since the bridge will be closed for refurbishment next season.

At the end of the bridge lines for entry to the ballpark snaked around the block. It was by far the longest lines I’ve seen at PNC Park this year.

I know it’s not really Buctober, and I remain hopeful that I will get to see actual post-season baseball at PNC Park, but I still relished the opportunity to take in fall evenings at the ballpark.

City Scenes: Peloton Pair at Point & Pitt Cathedral Fireworks

This past Saturday afternoon my roommate entered our apartment wearing a bicycle helmet and announcing that he had just impulse-purchased a new cycle. “Wanna go for a ride?” he asked me.

He had stopped by a renowned bike shop in our neighborhood and picked up a new ride, one that puts my entry-level hybrid from a sporting goods store to shame. I asked if my 2 AM cycling joy ride last week had finally motivated him to pull the trigger on the new bike but he assured me that it was some recent commuting frustrations that had forced his hand. Even though his new wheels greatly outclassed my own, I couldn’t refuse a spontaneous afternoon bike ride. So I took the lead as we navigated our way down the riverfront trail and over to Point State Park downtown. Fall arrived in Pittsburgh this week in undeniable fashion: cooler weather, longer shadows, the whole shebang. So it was a great, crisp ride to inaugurate the season.

This weekend was also Homecoming weekend at the University of Pittsburgh. That Saturday evening was Pitt’s annual homecoming fireworks display which includes pyrotechnics being launched directly from the Cathedral of Learning. From our South Side apartment my roommate and I have a fantastic view of the Cathedral over in Oakland. So after our bike ride we got dinner then headed back to the apartment to catch the fireworks.

I have been fascinated by the annual fireworks display ever since I moved to Pittsburgh, in part because the elegant-yet-imposing edifice of the Cathedral helped draw me to Pitt in the first place. I always wanted to stakeout a spot in the student union building across the street for an elevated front row perspective of the show, or hideout in the Cathedral to get a view from inside the building itself. None of my previous apartments in the city had clear line-of-sight of the Cathedral, although in Bloomfield I did once watch the Homecoming display from the top level of the West Penn Hospital parking garage. But even that vantage point pales in comparison to the view from my current living room.

The fireworks started just after 9 PM and we were treated to an even better-than-expected perspective. These photos here aren’t great quality and clearly don’t do the display justice (photos of fireworks rarely do...although my roommate captured some video that did a better job), still I have included a few here.

AOC invokes McLuhan with “Tax the Rich” Gala dress

Last week congresswoman and media-discourse-lightning-rod Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez kicked off a firestorm of hot takes by wearing a ball gown emblazoned with the message “Tax the Rich” to this year’s Met Gala. The annual super-exclusive social event and big money fundraising soiree typically attracts buzzing commentary over its dramatic displays of eye-catching haute couture. The buzz over AOC’s dress hinged on the fact that she tied her fashion statement to an explicit political statement.

As is common in our highly-polarized sphere of social media discourse, reactions to the dress tended to fall on either end of a spectrum from adoring commendation to cynical derision. On subreddits that are more favorable toward AOC users posted images of the dress with comments that she was “staying true,” remarking that she “had the balls” to wear the dress, and calling her “the hero we deserve”. More critical users commented on the perceived hypocrisy of brandishing a class-conscious message at an ultra-elite event. Commenters on a TrueOffMyChest post called the dress “cringey asf” and the “definition of cringeworthy.”

So what to make of the “Tax the Rich” dress? Is it based or cringe? AOC herself weighed in with an Instagram post of the dress. The accompanying text begins with the statement: “The medium is the message.”

The invocation of McLuhan’s immortal dictum led me to consider just how exactly AOC was conceptualizing “the medium” in this instance. Is it really, as much of the online reaction seems to suggest, all about the dress?

For the past year I have been teaching a course titled Media and Consumer Culture, and some of the most interesting case studies that have come up in class discussions are from the world of fashion. Students are particularly interested in the symbolic exchange value of designer brands and in the world of fashion more broadly as a salient but oft-overlooked aspect of the media-consumer-culture continuum (students have also evinced a strong interest in sustainable or eco-fashion initiatives). In this case, however, AOC’s dress is not a consumer good, but rather a one-off fashion item. It would be another thing altogether if we were discussing a commercially-available mass-produced article of clothing that was branded with “tax the rich,” and it is likely that not nearly as many people would be talking about it at all.

So clearly the “medium” in this case cannot be separated from the public persona of AOC herself and the particular context of the Met Gala. First, regarding AOC’s personal “brand,” she has become the face of what constitutes the “radical” or “progressive” arm of what passes for leftist politics in the United States. In this sense, the “tax the rich” message is decidedly “on brand” for the political identity that AOC has established for herself. It goes without saying that most people’s intrinsic reaction to the Gala dress will inherently be colored by any preconceptions they hold regarding AOC.

Beyond the predictable ad hominem attacks directed toward AOC, many critical comments focused on the affluent and extravagant context of the Met Gala itself. The Gala is designed as a spectacle, both for the elite attendees and for the general public via the circulation of images in the media (in some sense the mediated aura of the gala and attendant commentary has become an annual event in its own right). The mediated nature of the highly publicized event thus affords a prime opportunity for an image event, something that AOC obviously understands and is likely alluding to in her citation of “the medium is the message.” The complete picture of the Gala as “medium” is therefore entangled with its extended mediation through social media images, shares, and comments.

I think the notion of “medium” in relation to the AOC Gala dress is legitimately complicated and entangled with issues of media spectacle, political celebrity, and modes of online discourse. The divisive reactions to both the dress and its wearer displayed the sort of performative indignation that characterizes the contemporary attention economy, and the debates over whether AOC was being righteous or hypocritical by wearing the dress at the event eluded engagement with the “tax the rich” message. The larger and looming question seems to be: just what is the appropriate medium and channel for addressing class inequality?

Some online commentators asserted that the copious amount of social media discourse that the dress generated proved that AOC’s message had succeeded in its ultimate goal of bringing attention to wealth disparity and taxation policy. This is a dubious proposition: as I already mentioned, the vast amount of online chatter that the dress prompted stayed focused on the surface level or “optics” of the spectacle. But the notion that the virality of the dress images serves as self-evident proof of the message’s success offers another potent parallel to McLuhan’s legacy. The continued circulation of McLuhan’s adage -- independent of its original meaning or explanatory context -- is a testament to its own truth: the aphorism, the sound bite, the fragment, the meme, etc., is the primary unit of informational currency in the electronic age.

The medium is the message.

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.

2021 Pittsburgh Negro Leagues Commemoration at PNC Park

This past week marked the 50th anniversary of the Pittsburgh Pirates fielding the first all Black and Latino starting lineup in Major League Baseball history. The historic game -- played September 1st 1971 at Three Rivers Stadium -- made the Pirates the first franchise to start an all-minority lineup in the major leagues. While all indications suggest that the decision was made without any deliberate intention to make history, the major league milestone quickly sent shockwaves throughout Pittsburgh and beyond. The Pirates organization commemorated the anniversary with special events including a panel discussion at the Heinz History Center featuring members of the landmark lineup.

The anniversary events came one week after the Pirates dedicated a game to commemorating Pittsburgh’s Negro Leagues baseball history. On Friday August 27th the Pirates presented a Negro Leagues remembrance night while hosting the St. Louis Cardinals at PNC Park. The game featured a Josh Gibson-themed Grays t-shirt giveaway for fans and the Pirates took the field wearing replica Homestead Grays uniforms.

As with similar commemoration games during previous seasons the event also included an historical exhibit beneath the outfield bleachers. In addition to uniform and memorabilia displays relating to Josh Gibson and Pittsburgh’s Negro Leagues teams, the exhibit also featured photographs from the Carnegie Museum of Art’s Charles “Teenie” Harris archive.

During the pre-game festivities the Pirates presented a $15,000 check to Sean Gibson, Josh Gibson’s great grandson and head of the Josh Gibson Foundation. I was pleased to see Sean and his foundation singled out for recognition at the game: he was extremely generous with his time when I interviewed him about his commemoration initiatives for my chapter in the Urban Communication Reader vol. IV, and I know that the breakout of the pandemic last year interrupted various plans for celebrations. I was also glad to see that the banners in the Legacy Square stadium entrance featured Negro Leagues players. I recall that in 2019 the banners only highlighted Pirates players. The return of Negro Leagues history to the corridor was a welcome sight, even if it doesn’t quite make up for the removal of the statues and history exhibits that previously occupied the space, as I discussed in my aforementioned book chapter.

The Legacy Square banners were not the only indication of increased Negro Leagues commemoration by the Pirates. The August 27th game was officially promoted as a Negro Leagues remembrance night for the first time in several seasons. During the past five years I’ve noticed that the annual commemorative game had gone from being billed as a “Negro Leagues celebration” to “African American Heritage night” and most recently simply a “Heritage Night.” I found a poster of this season’s promotional schedule that retained a reference to the indefinite “Heritage Night,” but I was glad that the promotion listing when I purchased my tickets was more pronounced. Even a seemingly minor gesture like this can take on greater resonance in light of ongoing efforts to commemorate and reckon with legacies of injustice, particularly in light of MLB’s decision late last year to officially recognize Negro Leagues records within major league baseball history.

City Scenes: Pittsburgh Riverhounds at Highmark Stadium

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.