Hello and welcome to this week’s Melendy Avenue Review! I did a fair amount of reading lately but it’s all for stuff that I plan to publish extramurally- you’ll see, eventually! But there’s still plenty of good stuff here. There’s a link to a friend’s badass independent newspaper, a video of one of my famed Birthday Lecture, a discussion of the discography of an unjustly non-fabulously-famous rock band. Best of all, there is an excellent Ed’s Corner, where Roomie Ed asks the tough question- Hanna-Barbera, or Disney? Ed is truly in fine form in this one. Sometimes in the next week, Melendy Avenue Review Citizens will probably vote in their second election for what I read! Want to be a Citizen? Upgrade your account! Five bucks a month (or fifty a year) gets you Citizenship and my eternal gratitude! Anyway, enjoy this installment, comment, share, the usual!
CONTENTS
Friend Link-
The Asheville Blade
Video Content-
Henry Adams, Builder of Tombs
Discographies-
The Pack A.D.
Lagniappe-
Ed’s Corner: The Wall of Tough Guys & Have You Ever Really Met George Jetson?
FRIEND LINK
My online friend David Forbes has been kicking ass and taking names for some time. I first became familiar with them through their long essay, The Old Iron Dream, on the deep roots of reactionary thought and writing in science fiction. In it, they display the critical chops and serious, engaged socialist perspective that they would take into the Asheville Blade, the independent newspaper they run covering their hometown of Asheville, North Carolina. If you think about Asheville at all, you probably think of it as a tragically hip utopia. Well, real people live there, working people, and they’re reliably sold out and fucked around with by the local gentry, like people are generally but with an extra soupcon of liberal paternalism and twee bullshit. The Blade cuts like its name indicates through the pretenses and bullshit to lay bare the corruption, racism, and class oppression the dreams of the Asheville promotor class obfuscate. David has been helpful to me in thinking through “the gentry” as a concept in American history, and they deserve a wider readership. You can find the Blade at: http://www.ashevilleblade.com
VIDEO CONTENT
I am working on new video content. I want to do discussions with friends about books and maybe some author videos, but that takes time to arrange. In the meantime, I am recording some of my Birthday Lectures. Whether you were there at my old Brighton apartment in 2012 to see the first Birthday Lecture of modern times and just want to relive it, missed that one, or have no idea what a Birthday Lecture is, this video can help you out! I talk a bunch about Henry Adams, a frequent topic of mine. Enjoy!
DISCOGRAPHIES
The Pack A.D.! Two women from Vancouver who make a big damn sound. Listen- rock and roll is not in its heyday and hasn’t been for a while. The last big innovation was grunge, which came around before I hit grade school. The last time rock — just rock, not a subgenre like metal (which, as much as I love some metal, seems to get less and less “rock-like” all the time to my untrained ear) — felt really vital was when the White Stripes, the Black Keys, and the Strokes and their fellow-travelers in the aughts NYC scene were new. And they were self-consciously derivative, throw-backs- good ones, often, but still.
I’m still a rock guy. I like other genres and will explore them in this space, but rock — especially bluesy rock — is my sound. Moreover, innovation does not top my list of virtues. It’s a virtue, no doubt, but not the only or main one, to me. There’s nothing wrong with classic form done well.
The Pack A.D. does classic rock (but not generally “Classic Rock” as in the Doors or Boston) form better than anyone out there, for my money. I found them on Pandora, an essential tool for opening myself out of the classic rock cul de sac, and was struck immediately by the power of their sound. This would have been the late aughts, when they were doing pretty straight blues rock. No gimmicks, no bullshit, just heavy riffs, a good rhythm, Becky Black’s soulful wail, and wry, thoughtful lyrics- nothing cute or overthought, but real, honest blues from two millennial women who talk mental health, the disappointments of men, and some fun literary/cinematic references. They were often compared to the White Stripes or the Black Keys, and there’s something to that, but they’re rawer than anything those two produced other than maybe the first WS album, and a little more “real,” too, for whatever such a subjective notion is worth.
They developed their sound over the years, but never departed from making rock and roll that can make you rock out and/or dance and/or cry. They got a little less bluesy and more… here my limited musical vocabulary fails me. Some would say psychedelic? But not in the usual tedious way? They had a more washed-out sound, and more slower, gentler songs. The writing got more personal, too. Among other things, they talked about how hard it was to be a band that got to the cusp but never quite “made it” (outside of their dedicated fan base). There’s no self pity there- just an honest reckoning with feelings, especially in their last album, 2020’s It Was Fun While It Lasted. It made for good music, but it sucks. If this was a better time for rock, Becky Black and Maya Miller would be household names.
I can’t really do a worst/best album, especially not a worst, because they are all great. The blues-rock loyalist in me wants to say their first two albums, Funeral Mixtape and Tintype. The guy feeling his mid-thirties during a pandemic wants to say their last two, Dollhouse and It Was Fun While It Lasted. We Kill Computers has “BC is on Fire,” Unpersons has “Positronic,” Positive Thinking has “Gold Eyes,” all major jams. Do Not Engage has maybe my favorite collection of “singles” — “Animal,” “Big Shot,” “Airborne,” “Creeping Jenny,” “Battering Ram,” the transcendently beautiful, sad, and rocking “Rocket”... the middle albums in general are sort of “the best of both worlds,” rocking hard and playing around with formats and feelings. But honestly, if any of that sounds appealing or if you like rock music at all, pick an album or song and go nuts. You’ll be glad you did.
Next installment: Hip hop!
LAGNIAPPE
Ed’s Corner: The Wall Of Tough Guys & Have You Ever Really Met George Jetson?
I hope Peter can forgive me for revealing a bit about his personal life in the preamble to this article. Peter, as some of you may know, is a big fan of the early 2000’s web comic Achewood, which is about a group of various sentient teddy bears and other creatures trying to live their lives while dealing with various mental and emotional disorders, written by Chris Onstad. It’s a good read with a deep archive well worth checking out. While I’m familiar with some of the comic, I haven’t read enough of it to make it the subject of an article. But I can say well enough that the main appeal of the humor in the comic is the characters attempting to come to terms with a complex emotional concept in a way that doesn’t necessarily stand up to a straightforward explanation. The dialogue is very impressionistic, capturing a very particular regional Californian dialect that’s written in such a way that the emphasis in any of the characters speech is more how they feel about what they’re talking about, rather than exactly what they mean by the words they’re saying. If you’re stuck in quarantine with nothing to do, feel free to work your way through their extensive archive still available online.
What all this has to do with the article written here today is that Peter is often fond of making references to the comic in real life. For example, the kitchen in our apartment is a personal facsimile of the “Wall of Tough Guys,” from this comic. This isn’t to say that Peter is cloyingly busting these references out as catchphrases, again the focus on the comic is presenting complex emotional problems and watching characters work through them. Mostly how Peter references Achewood in real life is to pose the same emotional queries from the comic to people to see how they’d answer. These questions seem trivial at first, but expose a bit of emotional depth once you think about them a little, and the one that got me thinking the most was when I was asked whether I preferred Disney or Hanna-Barbera cartoons as a kid. In the comic one of the main characters, Ray Smuckles, holds a grudge against another character named Bensington Butters for secretly preferring Hanna-Barbera’s cartoons over Disney’s, and believes this is an indication, despite appearances to the contrary, that Bensington is a low class failure. At first this seems silly, but you can’t help but feel that there’s some truth to this being a meaningful distinction even if you can’t explain why. The comic certainly doesn’t provide an answer for what shame there might be in liking Yogi Bear over Mickey Mouse. While all of the meanings in the comic are deeply personal to the creator, and a true answer cannot be arrived at with any certainty by any outside observer, I’ll do my best to give an explanation as to what your preference between the two might say about you, and why you might feel you should pick Disney.
For my own answer I said that due to their ubiquity I definitely saw more Disney than Hanna-Barbera cartoons as a kid, I thought that there was “more to” the Hanna-Barbera cartoons than their Disney counterparts. I say this now with the benefit of hindsight, but I think maybe if you asked me at the time, just out of sheer familiarity I might have said I preferred Disney. Obviously in terms of sheer technical artistry and production value the Disney cartoons were by far the better in comparison, they had the money to spend on the animation budget after all, but in terms of what the cartoons were about, even as a kid I always thought that Hanna-Barbera cartoons were more interesting of the two. Not that I think that Disney cartoons aren’t highbrow enough for me to take seriously, or that Hanna-Barbera cartoons ever transcended the inspiration they took from classic TV shows from the 50’s and 60’s, but it’s a difference in subject matter that makes me more interested in the latter over the former. Disney cartoons tended to focus on issues of finding your place in the world, either through finding love, or the struggle of coming of age, or achieving some measure of professional success. Hanna-Barbera characters, on the other hand, already had a place in the world when we were seeing them. Fred Flintstone and George Jetson have a family, Yogi Bear has lived in Jellystone National Park for years, and has his cave set up to his liking and isn’t about to go anywhere anytime soon. Even the young characters in Hanna-Barbera cartoons know what they’re on about, that gang of meddling kids from Scooby-Doo are living their best life traveling around the country in the Mystery Machine, they’re not trying to find out what they want to do with their life, they’re already busy doing it. Similarly the kids in the band with Jabber-Jaw have been together for a while and are just going about their touring life.
Further, while the circumstances differ from one cartoon to another the ending and moral of nearly every Disney cartoon can be boiled down to overcoming some antagonist through self actualization and achieving some sought for success by doing so. In contrast, many of the more famous Hanna-Barbera cartoons either don’t have a villain, or if they do, like those rubber mask wearing scoundrels from Scooby-Doo, the protagonists don’t go on to a more fulfilling life of self-actualization, they just go back to what they were doing before. The final major difference between the two cartoon styles of storytelling is one of setting. Disney of course sets its action in magical kingdoms, or fantastical cities, where yes problems do occur, but everyone would be more or less satisfied with their lot in life if not for the problems caused by the influence of some malevolent villain. Hanna-Barbera cartoons by contrast eschew the idea of a magical society as their settings. Despite their fantastic or even comical nature, these settings have inherent issues and contradictions that must be worked through enough that characters express dissatisfaction with their lives, even absent a villain to pin the blame on.
Let’s take a look at a few of the more famous settings from the Hanna-Barbera side of things, and the social issues inherent within those settings, to better explain the distinction. Let’s start with the most well known of the settings, the town of Bedrock from the Flintstones. Right there in the name you can catch a glimpse of the societal issues that the Flintstones is trying to come to terms with. The series is set in a prehistoric setting, but comically assumes that life back then was much like life at the time of the shows production in the 1950’s and 60’s, with an emphasis on consumer culture and “modern” convenience. Even though the action takes place near the very beginning of human history where there’s no farther back left to go, many of the show's characters, especially the show’s protagonist Fred Flintstone express a nostalgia for a time before the current age when things were better. Essentially, Bedrock’s setting in prehistory helps draw out the societal commentary the show is trying to make, that you can go on wishing for the good times of ages past forever, and you’d still be dissatisfied even if you went all the way back to the beginning of time. The setting’s other running gag, the use of various dinosaurs or prehistoric animals to stand in for the technology of modern conveniences, is a bit of a softball critique of the world of yesteryear. None of the creatures filling in for modern technology seem to enjoy their work, any greatness achieved in the previous golden age before all this modern technology was built off the back of exploitation of thinking and feeling people, or in this case, a sentient pair of hedge clippers by way of pterodactyl.
That’s not to say Hanna-Barbera believed that the answers lay in the inexorable progress of the future. The Jetsons’ Googie-styled Orbit City was not the paradise that Bedrock failed to achieve, even with all of its wonderful push button technology of the future. Even though technology is such that George Jetson need only go into work at Spacely Sprockets one hour a day, two days a week to press all of one button, the same dissatisfaction pervades Orbit City that was found in the town of Bedrock in prehistory. The joke is that we’re so far into the future, and yet the Jetson’s are still waiting on the next futuristic advance or labor saving device to finally satisfy all their desires. In fact, a running joke is that the technology may have overshot itself in being so efficient, being of such advanced design, that in the rare instances it does go wrong with them the average consumer can’t really figure out the complex machines to fix these technological marvels themselves. Further, each of these houses of the future exist in their own little domes, literally separated from everyone else and providing a never ending stream of novelties and distractions that preclude such things as people talking with one another. The technology of the Jetsons has solved the problems of society only insofar as it has utterly dismantled social interaction. Despite how far advanced the world of George Jetson may be, he’s exactly as dissatisfied with his lot in life as a modern man might be. It’s rather telling that as the end credits roll on each episode we see George get caught up on a treadmill, a device where no matter how far you move forward, you always remain in the same place.
So if neither the simplicity of the past nor the possibilities of the future is the answer, is it merely a matter of living a simple life out in nature? Perhaps, but as we see from Jellystone National Park, the setting of Yogi Bear, our relationship with nature according to the worldview of Hanna-Barbera isn’t as simple as we would like it to be. Yogi, as a bear, is clearly part of the natural world that Jellystone National Park is meant to put on display for the modern people looking to escape the pressures of modern society. He clearly didn’t build the park himself, the humans came to him. However his “pic-a-nic” basket stealing and other zany schemes are not him acting in accordance with natural instincts. In fact the joke of most episodes is that Ranger Smith struggles in vain to get Yogi to behave “like a bear should,” only to be frustrated every time. It’s not merely because Yogi is “smarter than your average bear” that he acts how he does, but rather he is reacting to the appearance of humans, and specifically modern humans with their wood paneled station wagons and their mass manufactured camping gear, and adjusting his behavior accordingly. Even if we all collectively abandoned society and returned to the “simplicity of nature,” by doing so we’d fundamentally change what that nature was as the elements within it reacted to our presence. Yogi, although a creature of nature is also the product of the society he finds himself in. Ranger Smith’s self appointed task of having Yogi act more bear-like is a futile one, because his and the other guests at the park mere presence changes what it means to be a bear in relation to them.
This is what I think is the core difference between Hanna-Barbera cartoons and Disney cartoons. Disney cartoons are about how the characters within them stay true to their own selves in the face of challenges put forth by the world, but Hanna-Barbera cartoons are about how the pressures of society affect the people within them even under the most ideal of circumstances. Even in the realm of the mystical “good old days” of the past, or the highly convenient world of the far future, the problems of society remain because the fundamental relationships within society haven’t been addressed. Fred Flintstone still feels inescapable pressure to pursue society’s ideal of success, and George Jetson is still tormented by his boss. No set of circumstances, from idyllic yesteryear to perfect chrome-coated future, can banish the trouble of society so long as these fundamental relationships remain the same. The problems don’t merely disappear with time or place, but are inherent to the human condition unless specifically addressed. Exactly how you go about addressing these problems is covered by the most famous of the Hanna-Barbera cartoons, Scooby-Doo- but that’s its own topic for later.
The character of Ray, from Achewood, rejects these notions and feels shame should be cast on Bensington Butters for liking Hanna-Barbera cartoons more than Disney, thus admitting to believing in a world where he can be changed by the forces of society. By sympathizing with such characters Bensington Butters fails to live up to values of self actualization and rugged individualism that Ray tries to exemplify, although funnily enough Ray probably acquired those values from the Disney cartoons themselves. The character of Ray views himself as a success, and a self-made one at that. In his mind he’s the protagonist of one of those Disney cartoons and not someone who would allow themselves to be molded and shaped by the forces of society. But this might be a delusion similar to the ones Fred Flintsone, George Jetson and Ranger Smith are all caught up in, that the forces of modern life can eventually be abated, if only we retreated into the past, the future, nature, or the storybook fiction of the worlds of Disney.
Whoof! That was a hell of an Ed’s Corner! Mithra is impressed! So impressed she offers one (1) kitty peet in tribute!