Nostalgia Trap

Our friend Avi Garelick joins us to discuss his recent piece on the war between Ron DeSantis and the Disney Corporation in Florida , as we explore the longer history of Florida's extraordinary relationship to the Disney brand. Along the way, we talk about Sean Baker's haunting film The Florida Project , the weird politics and aesthetics of " New Urbanism ," and the current direction of housing pol...

This week Justin and I watch the documentary Missing 411: The Hunted and contemplate cryptids, bigfoots, and mysterious disappearances in American forests. How are American history and politics tied up in these stories? What happened to all of these people? And most of all, what the fuck is making these sounds ?    Join up and listen to the whole episode: https://www.patreon.com/posts/livestream-3...

Freddie deBoer joins me to discuss his viral piece on 90s nostalgia, "It's So Sad When Old People Romanticize Their Heydays, Also the 90s Were Objectively the Best Time to Be Alive." This is a raw and honest conversation about what we miss about the era, what we absolutely hate about the 21st century, and how our lament for the loss of a certain kind of analog social reality is yes, old man shit,...

This week Justin and I talk about the Great Chatbot Panic of 2023, leftists in love with Trump's "brilliant" visit to Ohio, and the alleged moral authority of U.S. actions re: Ukraine, one year into the war. Let's do this. Subscribe to listen to the whole episode and access all our bonus stuff, livestreams, and videos:  https://www.patreon.com/posts/livestream-2-24-79161824

In Part Two of my conversation with writer and musician Sean Nelson, we talk about the origins of his band Harvey Danger in the 1990s Seattle music scene, the bizarre rush of having a massive radio hit, and the bleak economic landscape of indie rock in the streaming era. Along the way, Sean offers some hard-earned wisdom and personal reflections on the pejorative concept of the "one hit wonder," a...

Sean Nelson is a writer and musician, known widely as the lead singer of the band Harvey Danger , whose 1998 single "Flagpole Sitta" became a staple of "alternative rock" radio and MTV and an inescapable earworm in 90s pop culture. In Part One of this conversation, we talk about what "alternative" means, tracing a line from the 1960s psychedelic culture that produced insane shit like the Monkees m...

This week Justin and I talk about the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. Are we entering an accelerated era of industrial mass poisonings, or is this just more of the same old industrial mass poisonings?  Listen to the whole episode: patreon.com/posts/livestream-2-17-78840239

Tad Skotnicki is a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the author of The Sympathetic Consumer: Moral Critique in Capitalist Culture (Stanford University Press, 2021). He joins me for a conversation about the common features of consumer activism, from 19th century abolitionism to 21st century Fair Trade movements, which have all based their projects around t...

Carl Freedman is a writer and professor of English literature at Louisiana State University who has written a number of important books on science fiction, American politics, and Marxist critical theory. In this conversation, we talk about his book American Presidents and Oliver Stone: Kennedy, Nixon, and Bush between History and Cinema and go down the JFK assassination rabbit hole. How does Olive...

What happens when three old pals get together to talk about the 90s sketch comedy program Mr. Show with Bob and David? This podcast answers that very question! Welcome to the debut episode of Mr. Trap, a place where me (David Parsons) and my good friends Peter Sabatino and Geoff Johnson can trade ideas, memories, analysis, and even a few laffs about a show that touched our young hearts and forged...

This week Justin and I go all in on Baz Luhrmann's camp masterpiece Elvis (2022) , as we consider the life, work, and legacy of an iconic 20th century artist/product/celebrity/Christ figure. How is Elvis' insane life story emblematic of an archetypal cultural phenomenon, from Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin to Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston? How do we sort out the contradictions of race, gender...

What does it mean to "go underground"? Lara Langer Cohen is an associate professor of English at Swarthmore College. Her latest book, Going Underground: Race, Space, and the Subterranean in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Duke University Press, 2023), explores how subterranean spaces (both real and imagined) animated social, political, and cultural movements in 19th century America, from the...

This week Yasmin and I watch Chinatown (1974) and have a conversation about the film's infamously elegant screenplay, shocking plot twist, insanely dark ending, and wonderfully sleazy cameo from the film's director, Roman Polanski, whose own personal corruption intersects with the film's brutal vision of a corrupted world. What does Chinatown have to say to us now?  Subscribe to hear the whole epi...

How do shifting ideas about physical fitness, health, and the body reflect larger ideological structures like nation, race, gender, and capitalism? Natalia Mehlman Petrzela is a historian of American culture and politics and associate professor of history at the New School. In this conversation, we discuss her latest book Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America's Exercise Obsession , which trac...

On this episode of Housing Trap, Andrew is joined by Zach Paganini, a Ph. D. student in the Earth and Environmental Sciences program at the CUNY Graduate Center , for a conversation about the effects of water on the political economy of housing in America's coastal cities. Threatened by floods, superstorms, and rising sea levels, cities from New York to Florida to Southern California, known for th...

This week Justin and I watched the HBO Max documentary This Place Rules , which gives us a chance to talk about the weird undercurrents of rape, sexual domination, violence, and pedophilia coursing through 1/6, QAnon, Alex Jones, Proud Boys, Antifa, and even the filmmaker himself . Are we in a unique moment for subconscious urges bubbling to the surface of public politics, or has it always been th...

What is film noir and why does it matter? In the first episode of a series called Shadow Nation , I reflect on the commercial failure of Guillermo Del Toro's prestige noir remake Nightmare Alley (2021) and wonder what makes a movie "noir" in the first place. Is it just detectives and fedoras and femmes fatale? Or is there a way of understanding noir beyond style, genre, and visual aesthetic? Check...

Our series on 1990s/2000s comedy continues this week with a conversation about Seinfeld . Justin and I watched two episodes (S5E5 "The Bris" and S7E4 "The Wink"), and reflect on the show's weird elevated "dream vision" of 90s bourgeois culture.  Listen to the whole episode: patreon.com/posts/livestream-12-30-76564956

This week Justin and I watch Elf (2003) and talk about Will Ferrell's late 90s/early 2000s comic persona in the context of male bodies, George W. Bush, and a particular cultural turn toward "dumb assholes" in the digital era. Listen to the whole episode: patreon.com/posts/livestream-12-23-76298993

What makes disturbing, graphic shows like CSI and Intervention so morbidly appealing? How does our desire for uncomfortable entertainment reflect a larger normalization of fear, precarity, and violence in our everyday reality? Hunter Hargraves is Associate Professor of Cinema and Television Arts at California State University, Fullerton. His new book, Uncomfortable Television (Duke University Pres...

This week Justin and I jump off our previous discussion of Groundhog Day with a look at Planes, Trains, and Automobiles (1987), a deceptively complicated film about class, gender, and the queer social dynamics of American capitalism. We talk a lot about John Candy as a performer and celebrity here, finding lots of unexpected connections with the life and death of Kurt Cobain, another figure who in...

Since clever people are now declaring the end of college education , Ryan and I thought it might be fun to survey the highs and lows of our own respective "college" experiences, from undergrad to Ph. D. What worked for us, and what ruined our lives forever? Like any good academics, we're making a list!  Listen to the whole episode Go read Ryan's Substack   Check out David's grad school rant on You...

Daniel Horowitz is a historian and the author of many books on American consumer culture, economics, and political ideology. In this conversation we discuss his latest book, American Dreams, American Nightmares: Culture and Crisis in Residential Real Estate from the Great Recession to the COVID-19 Pandemic (UNC Press, 2022), which connects the dots of our 21st century housing crisis, from HGTV rea...

This week Justin and I talk about China's Zero Covid policies coming apart as Apple demands MORE IPHONES, which leads to a wider consideration of what it means when a state drives people from the farms to the factories. Plus, we reflect on Ye's new Christofascism in the context of violence against LGBTQ+ communities, as we ponder how to confront an enemy that LOLs at the damage they create. Listen...

On this episode of TRAP TV, we examine a critical moment in the history of the Walt Disney Company, when the tremendous success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937 gave way to a period of rapid expansion and ambitious, ultimately unsuccessful projects that nearly bankrupted the business and ended the Disney era. Then, the war came. This is the story of how World War II not only rescued Disn...