Nostalgia Trap

Bertrand Cooper joins us to discuss his latest incendiary piece in Current Affairs, "Who Actually Gets to Create Black Pop Culture?," which argues that the elite class composition of many Black creators reveals deep contradictions in the politics of woke Hollywood. Listen to the whole episode: patreon.com/posts/episode-288-we-w-55434030

Jenni Olson is a historian, archivist, and experimental filmmaker whose two feature-length films The Joy of Life (2005) and The Royal Road (2015) combine dreamlike urban landscapes, the dark history of California, and deeply personal reflections on queer love and desire. In this conversation, we talk about the origins of her aesthetic and the particular challenges of both creating and exhibiting historical material in non-traditional form. To hear more about queer and radical cinema, see Episode 281 with Donald Borenstein: patreon.com/posts/ep-281-at-new-we-53149916.

On Episode 6 of NAM-TV, we cover events in 1964 and 1965, as American involvement in Vietnam finally made the move from distant meddling into a full-blown military invasion. We trace a direct line from Lyndon Johnson's disturbing sociopathic fantasies and stunning political cynicism to the sickening acceleration of violence unleashed in late 1964, after a questionable series of events in the Gulf of Tonkin and a hasty congressional resolution give the president a blank check to wage war in Vietnam. Listen to the whole series at patreon.com/nostalgiatrap.

Who are "the people"? Erik Baker joins us to discuss his latest piece in n+1, a review of Thomas Frank's 2020 book The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism. Baker takes on Frank's New Deal nostalgia and romantic vision of a monolithic, left-leaning American working class, a set of distorted perspectives that still hold weight for a significant portion of the (extremely online) left. In this conversation, we explore what's the matter with Frank's analysis, and how to move past the ahistorical assumptions that continue to animate progressive discourse. For more on left populism and angry white dudes, check out this week's bonus episode: https://www.patreon.com/posts/ep-285-party-its-54555603

Full episode: patreon.com/nostalgiatrap. Kyle Riismandel returns to the Trap to discuss the abysmal HBO documentary Woodstock '99: Peace, Love, and Rage, a film that, despite its shortcomings, gives us plenty to chew on about a weird era in American cultural politics. From Alanis Morrissette to Kid Rock, from Girls Gone Wild to Monica Lewinsky, we talk about the jarring social landscape of third-wave feminism, frat rock backlash, cynical corporate cash-grabs, and lots more heavy, angsty riffs straight from the late '90s.

What do Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy, and the rest of the gang have to tell us about the staggering loneliness at the heart of the American experience? Blake Scott Ball is a professor of history at Huntingdon College and the author of Charlie Brown's America: The Popular Politics of Peanuts. In this conversation, we trace the history of Charles Schulz's iconic comic strip alongside the history of the late 20th century, as we see how Schulz's characters navigated the Cold War, civil rights movement, Vietnam War, and other epochal events of the era, creating an emotional throughline that continues to permeate the American cultural imagination.

Kyle Riismandel, author of Neighborhood of Fear: The Suburban Crisis in American Culture, 1975-2001, returns to talk about the idea of generations, both as useful historical dividers and as complicated, constructed cultural identities. Are you Gen X? Boomer? Millennial? Zoomer? Does any of this shit matter? In this conversation, we reflect on what makes this generational stuff so powerful (hint: it makes a lot of money), and think about both the utility and limits of this brand of temporal categorization. To listen to the full episode and access all our bonus content, subscribe at patreon.com/nostalgiatrap.

On Episode 5, we take a look at the period 1956-1963, when the United States attempted to create an anti-communist state called South Vietnam, with a well-connected Catholic-Confucian politician named Ngo Dinh Diem as its president. When JFK takes over in 1961, Diem's violent repression of the Vietnamese population accelerates, and a homegrown resistance called the National Liberation Front begins organizing a military and political movement to oust Diem and unify Vietnam. For full episode subscribe at patreon.com/nostalgiatrap.

Elizabeth Becker is an award-winning author and journalist; her latest book, You Don't Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War (2021), profiles three journalists whose groundbreaking work rearranged the history of the Vietnam War. In this conversation, Becker explains how Kate Webb, Catherine Leroy, and Frances Fitzgerald each developed critical journalistic practices that brought new insights to the conflict, and offers some jaw-dropping stories (spoiler: she met Pol Pot!) from her own extraordinary career.

Donald Borenstein is a freelance video director, editor, and one of my favorite online friends, whose posts on politics, culture, and media have been a highlight of my feed for years. This week we finally get to meet face to face (on Zoom) and talk about two of our respective favorite films, Lizzie Borden's Born in Flames (1983) and Slava Tsukerman's Liquid Sky (1982), both of which are essential viewing for anyone interested in radical politics and radical filmmaking practices. As works of sci-fi queer punk feminism, Born in Flames and Liquid Sky occupy a totally unique territory in the history of American politics and culture. In this conversation, Donald and I reflect on what makes these films "important" but also what makes them feel so fun and alive, and how they reshape the aesthetic and narrative boundaries of "political cinema." For full episode subscribe at patreon.com/nostalgiatrap.