Category Archives: Pointless Nostalgia

Pointless Nostalgia

Requiem for the Fightin’ Room

I once wore your clothes. This thought would not leave me alone when I heard what happened to you, I repeated it over and over in my mind, at once a memory and a means of drowning out what I didn’t want to hear. A coping mechanism, a form of denial. No, see, you can’t be gone because I once wore your clothes. So goes the logic of grief.

I thought you were cool, before I knew what cool meant or had developed my own definition of what represented it. At first I felt you were cool because of all of your Older Kid stuff. Seven years my senior, your bedroom dominated by a drum set, posters of Ozzy and the Dead on the walls, a closet full of toys you’d outgrown, more Atari games than I could ever hope to play. You had so many cool things, and since I had so few, I pined to live in your world.

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Pointless Nostalgia, Politics Schmolitics

Goebbels’ Babies

Nostalgia is a powerful drug and outside of a lobotomy there’s no option to kick it completely, but it is possible to maintain a safe nostalgia habit. As someone who has trucked heavily in nostalgia over the years, I try to ground my own appreciation of the past by visualizing nostalgia as a rapid that is 100 miles wide and one foot deep: powerful currents easy to get swept up in, but without much depth. Once the remembering is done, you’re left with little more than the interview questions from The Chris Farley Show. (“Remember when you…used to watch Nickelodeon?”)

Of course, it’s fun to play “remember when…” and sometimes the practice can be restorative—for instance, when I share some obscure thing I half-remember and discover that other people half-remember it too, which assures me, if for only one brief moment, that I am not insane. The danger of a trip down memory lane comes when the remembering fools you into thinking everything was much better Way Back When. Yes, most things are terrible at the current moment, but a cursory flip through the pages of history will inform you that most things have always been terrible. 

Nostalgia tends to pool around times when we were young and carefree—most typically childhood—and so what we often interpret as a “simpler time” was one in which the adults in our lives were dealing with the heavy stuff while we were too young to realize just how complicated and painful the world really was. (At least this is how I imagine many people see their pasts; my own childhood was fraught with all sorts of complication, but that’s a tale for another time.)

All this being said, there’s nothing inherently wrong with celebrating the relics of your youth, or even arguing that these things are superior to what culture offers us today, provided you don’t take such a debate too seriously. Some people do take that debate seriously, however. Very seriously. Like, trying to say “I heart the 90s” with 14 words seriously.

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Baseball, Pointless Nostalgia Video

21 Seasons of Joe Buck’s Fox Promos

Friday night brings us the start of the American League Championship Series. This means Friday night also brings us the return of Joe Buck to the airwaves.

Since 1996, Buck has been the voice of MLB’s postseason on Fox. When I think of Buck—and I think of him often—I don’t hear him calling a game-winning home run or series-clinching strikeout. For my money, the most indelible audio memory of Joe Buck is him being forced to read promos for Fox programming. And I do mean forced, because his android-like delivery of said promos suggests there is someone offscreen with a gun pointed at his head.

As baseball’s playoffs coincide with TV’s traditional season premiere season, Fox has always used its coverage of those playoffs as a vehicle to promote its brand new or soon-to-return shows. Each year Joe Buck has led these broadcasts as their lead play-by-play man—which he has since the last time Ross Perot ran for president—he has had to break away from the exciting playoff action to tell us all about these impending debuts. He knows as well as the anxious baseball fan watching at home that the vast majority of these shows will disappear without a trace three weeks after their birth. He also knows that even the “hits” he’s had to flog are either depressing monuments to fabricated culture (American Idol) or testaments of America’s disturbing flirtation with fascism (24). At least I like to believe Buck recognizes this task as the joyless death march it is, since he reads these announcements in tones that make Mike Francesa’s ad recitations sound like Marlon Brando.

In tribute to this autumn tradition, I’ve assembled a supercut containing Joe Buck promos from every postseason he’s been on the air so far, 1996-2016. You will hear and see him flog programs that I guarantee you have no memory of unless you personally apeared in them (and even then, you might struggle to come up with a name). You will also hear him blame Fred Savage for a power outage and linger a little too long on the charms of Zooey Deschanel. It is a testament to Buck’s dedication that, even when mooning over a pretty young actress, he still sounds as if he gobbled a fistful of Xanax.

Enjoy?