Run For Your Life: Appearance on The Nostalgia Trap
The Nostalgia Trap was one of the first podcasts I regularly listened to, way back in 2016 or so, and now I’ve made my first appearance on it.
What is the show exactly? Impossible to describe. It’s a casual vibe-fest covering current events, but quite often it relates to what’s going on through cultural objects—Gen X movies, the politics of bands like Nirvana, the alienation of middle-class kids who grew up being Mall Rats and now have no place to go.
Above all, the show both indulges and cautions against the siren song of the nostalgia trap—letting ourselves be lured into a fondness for the past we knew, only to come out with a critical recognition that nothing was quite as we remember it. It taps into nostalgia not to escape from our present, but to reassess both past and present.
I love the show because it appeals to my all-over-the-place sensibility that sees everything as connected; sorting through the entanglements and causal processes of life without any particular method in mind. Also, the show’s host, David Parsons, is just a fun guy who figured out how to be melodic and entertaining in the talk, talk, talk format.
In typical fashion for the show, our episode together is heavy on free association—we boom-bap our way from American fascism and professors getting disappeared off California streets to why manufacturing isn’t coming back to America to the white supremacist vision of MAGA’s leading voices to the relationship between Jeffrey Epstein and Ukrainian weapons to the erasure that allows our own security state to colonize us to what all of this mess looks like from my perch in New Zealand.
Something for everyone!
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