Nostalgia Trap

This week’s guest runs the website and podcast The Blockchain Socialist, which seeks to investigate the intersection of blockchain technology and left politics. In this conversation, we talk about the basics of blockchain, crypto, and NFTs, and try to imagine if/how these tools might be used to create a more democratic political and economic system. For full episode, go to patreon.com/nostalgiatrap. 

Joe Clark (author of News Parade: The American Newsreel and the World as Spectacle) returns to the show to talk about the ugly elephant in the room for young academics: the total collapse of full-time teaching jobs at the university. In this conversation, we take on some undeniably depressing realities, but wait! It’s not all doom and gloom. Joe offers a number of different ideas and scenarios for those souls forging paths outside the tenure track, as we game out the landscape of future possibilities for the highly-educated and precariously employed. 

Courtenay Stallings is a writer, historian, and the author of Laura’s Ghost: Women Speak about Twin Peaks. The book explores how Laura Palmer, whose death lies at the center of David Lynch’s epic television series Twin Peaks, became an icon of strength and hope for women who have experienced similar abuse and trauma. In this conversation, Stallings discusses the origins of the project, why Laura’s story resonates specifically with women, the diversity of the Twin Peaks fan community, and the particular ways that Lynch’s work engages challenging ideas about gender, desire, and violence. 

Tom O’Neill’s mind-blowing book CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties sent me down so many unbelievable rabbit holes, made me feel so paranoid and obsessed, that I absolutely had to hear what my friend Justin Rogers-Cooper thought about it. Having now finished the book, he joins us this week for an exploration of O’Neill’s twisted story, as we consider both the content of his investigations and his very Nostalgia Trap-like research methodologies. Was Manson a spook? Did Bush really do 9/11? As we discover again and again, the search for the Truth is a long walk down a hall of mirrors. For full episode subscribe at patreon.com/nostalgiatrap.

Reality Bites (dir. Ben Stiller, 1994) is a film that attempts to condense the entirety of the Gen X experience into a 100 minute romantic comedy in which Winona Ryder faces the unfortunate predicament of simultaneously dating Ben Stiller and Ethan Hawke. Our good friends KJ Shepherd and Bill Black join us to discuss what Reality Bites is really saying about its cultural moment, and how the film’s conventional romantic plot reflects real anxieties about art, selling out, and sexuality that transcend our often narrow generational distinctions. Troy or Michael? Your answer says a lot!

This week Claudia and I watched American Beauty (dir. Sam Mendes, 1999), a film that had a major cultural impact upon its release but hits significantly different in 2021. From the awkward screen presence of Kevin Spacey to the endless permutations of middle class suburban ennui, we explore how American Beauty’s story and characters reflect the zeitgeist of a very specific political and economic moment, one that seems firmly lodged in the late 1990s. So why did we fall so hard for this movie? And does its critique of American society still make any sense? To listen to the whole episode, subscribe at patreon.com/nostalgiatrap. 

Richard Kent Evans is the author of MOVE: An American Religion, a groundbreaking history of the MOVE organization, a black radical group whose founding members were killed alongside their children when the Philadelphia police, working alongside federal agents, attacked their headquarters in 1985. What was MOVE? What were its founding principles? And why were state authorities so intent on violently destroying it? As Evans explains in this conversation, the MOVE bombing, as the incident came to be known, was the culmination of a much longer story that touches on deep, lingering questions about religious freedom, race, and state terror.    

Eric Nusbaum is the author of Stealing Home: Los Angeles, the Dodgers, and the Lives Caught in Between, which tells the story of a neighborhood’s struggle to maintain their community against the tidal wave of powerful forces aligned to seize it from them. In this conversation, Nusbaum explains how the construction of Dodger Stadium in the late 1950s somehow encompassed the entirety of Los Angeles’ political, economic, and cultural history, and offers an opportunity to reflect on the intersection of sports culture, housing rights, radical politics, and popular democracy.  

Tyler Scruggs returns for a talk about the movie adaptation of Nico Walker’s novel Cherry, which follows a young man’s nightmarish evolution from lovestruck college student to opiate-addicted Iraq War veteran and serial bank robber. With Spiderman’s Tom Holland in the central role, and Marvel dudes (the Russo brothers) directing, the film has a jarringly different tone and effect than the book, and Tyler helps us frame Cherry’s function as both pop political cinema and a glossy advertisement for Apple’s streaming service. Of course, all of this evolves into a conversation about making and consuming art in the ephemeral landscape of hyper-capitalist digital pop culture. For the whole episode go to patreon.com/nostalgiatrap. 

Joe Clark is the author of News Parade: The American Newsreel and the World as Spectacle (University of Minnesota Press, 2020). In this conversation, he tells us how the newsreel developed in the 1930s and 1940s as both an aesthetic object and consumer product, as figures like Charles Lindbergh became focal points of an immense transformation in the relationship between current events, entertainment, and an audience increasingly positioned as passive consumers of history.