Paul Christensen's Blog, page 2

Why AC/DC Matters

Why AC/DC Matters by Anthony Bozza

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


The short answer is - they don’t. In another two generations, rock and roll will be seen as degenerate clown music, as quaint as Victorian music hall or Tin Pan Alley, only funnier.

Rock won’t outlast Bach and Wagner, but someday even Bach and Wagner will be forgotten, perhaps sometime after the death of the sun. For nothing lasts forever except forever (see The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson) as Bon Scott might have agreed, perhaps on his way back from the gonorrhoea clinic.

This entire book seems to have written, in 2009, as a rejoinder to hipsters who take the White Stripes seriously but despise AC/DC as bogan music.

But in 2018, hardly anyone remembers the White Stripes, yet ‘Powerage’ and ‘Back in Black’ are still widely listened to, so who cares what hipsters think?

Hipsters are dumb anyway…they latched onto black metal ten years after it lost its relevance, then pretended it was a rebellion against the ‘right wing church’, when in fact it was a rebellion against the left wing church and PC death metal bands like Napalm Death.

Also, if music critics called Altman and Fine despise AC/DC then it says something in the band’s favour, n’est-ce pas? ; )



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Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & the Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream

Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & the Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream by David McGowan

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


A popular revisionist work implying that the Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles, music scene of the late 1960’s was engineered by the CIA to divert rebellious youth from the anti-war cause.

I found much of it unconvincing, however there are two points in the author’s favour:

1. The sheer amount of musicians in the Laurel Canyon scene whose parents worked in military intelligence. Jim Morrison’s father was literally the commander behind the Gulf of Tonkin ‘incident’ that was the casus belli for America’s entry into Vietnam, and in fact most of these ‘L.A.’ musicians were actually from northern Virginia (home of the Pentagon, CIA etc.)

2. The uncanny, lightning-fast speed with which the L.A. scene (starting with manufactured group The Byrds) were promoted by the corporate media.

Outside these points, however, everything is very murky and nebulous, and as the book lacks footnotes it’s hard to check McGowan’s sources.

Also, he seems to labouring under the misapprehension that hippies were all Gandhi-style pacifists, and that when a musician owned or enjoyed guns there’s some sinister double standard at work, meaning they’re not who they say they are.

In reality, the ‘pacifism’ of the hippies is itself a media fiction…many genuine hippies believed in violence in self-defence. My novel ‘Greybeard’ concerns an elderly hippy who goes on a killing rampage in Germany when his grandson is murdered by Merkel’s hordes, which isn’t exactly a far-fetched scenario.





Much of McGowan’s writing reads like some kind of dark gossip column, whereby he delights in showing what degenerates most of these people were.

Admittedly, most of the music is forgettable. With the exception of ‘Californa Dreaming’, Love’s Forever Changes, and ironically, Charles Manson, it’s dreary stuff. Only the most slovenly, beer-gutted boomer crying demented tears of nostalgia over the memory of his first joint could possibly find pleasure in the likes of Frank Zappa, or Crosby, Stills and Nash.

If the scene really was engineered by the CIA, they could have picked better songwriters, lol.

NB - McGowan's essay ‘Wagging the Moondoggie’, (https://centerforaninformedamerica.co...) is better reasoned and structured than this rather rambling book.



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Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music

Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music by Rob Young

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Folk music (= volk/blood and soil)
vs.
Pop music (= populace/bread and circuses)

In some periods there was overlap between the two, however, as Rob Young shows in this chronicle of mainly British 1970s music.



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Black Metal: European Roots and Musical Extremities

Black Metal: European Roots and Musical Extremities by Troy Southgate

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


It’s hard to remember now, but Black Metal was once an interesting cultural phenomenon

At some point in the 2000s, however, it was infiltrated by New York hipsters, who sucked the life out of it, then tried to rewrite its history as a rebellion against the ‘right-wing, patriarchal church’.

Of course anyone who was around in the ‘90s remembers it was the exact opposite - a rebellion against the stifling left-wing conformity of the Norwegian state church (known in the Scandinavian countries as the Law of Jante, similar to Tall Poppy Syndrome).

Fenriz of Darkthrone recounts a Norwegian swimming race where, instead of the fastest child being the winner, the authorities picked the child whose time was closest to the average. No wonder the Norwegian teenage metalheads rebelled!

At the same time, the best Black Metal bands were more up the volkisch end of the spectrum than the Ayn Rand end.

This book has some interesting essays, and despite being a bit repetitive, is a lot more insightful than the tacky ‘Lords of Chaos’ book.





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Something Quite Peculiar

Something Quite Peculiar by Steve Kilbey

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The Church are probably the best Aussie band and one of the best of all time, but I would only recommend Steve Kilbey’s autobiography to those who are already longtime fans.

During Kilbey’s high school debating-team days one of his opponents was an oily little spiv called Malcolm Turnbull, who would later go on to be one of Australia’s worst prime ministers. Turnbull was just as much of a wanker back then as he is now!



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Is This the End of the Liberal International Order?

Is This the End of the Liberal International Order?: The Munk Debate on Geopolitics by Niall Ferguson

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I hope so.

When ‘economic liberal’ (slang for tight-fisted Scot) Niall Ferguson goes up against CNN Fake News scumbag Fareed Zakaria, and both agree Trump’s election was the result of ‘former KGB operatives’ you know that the current ‘intellectual’ scene is just one seething mass of delusion.



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Plato's 'Gorgias'

Gorgias by Plato

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Men do bad when they do what they merely think best, rather than what they most deeply desire.

That seems to be the central point of this long dialogue.

The age-old question is: how to get men to follow their true Will (i.e. Self, rather than ego).

Does the dialogue answer it?

The answer it gives appears to be: Engage in the combat of life, live as well as you can, and then, after death, you will attain the Islands of the Blessed, and not the realm of the wretched, Tartarus.


But that doesn’t answer the question of how to distinguish between the desires of ego, and the true Will!!!






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W.B. Yeats: A New Biography

W.B. Yeats: A New Biography by A. Norman Jeffares

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I would have liked to have learned more about his interactions with O’Duffys’s fascist Blueshirts, which must have been significant as he was writing marching songs for them.

Leaving aside such omissions, the book isn’t bad for an overall impression, including his complex relation to Irish nationalism.

‘As always, Yeats yearned for a society where all classes would share in a half-mythological half-philosophical folk belief.’ p.212.

That’s supposed to be bad???



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Plutarch’s Life of Fabius Maximus

Plutarch’s Lives: Life of Fabius Maximus by Plutarch

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


The Fabian goal of Fabius (wearing Hannibal out)
Hannibal’s men thought cowardly - but H. himself had doubts.

Fabius had stability, not slowness from docility;
So H. replied with a trick of his own (showing his ability)

In leaving F’s estates untouched as he scorched the earth around,
Making Rome distrust its dictator and try to bring him down

By raising rash Minucius to be his military equal.
But F. proved wiser in the end - M’s rashness had a sequel:

It led to loss, and Fabius had to bail his ‘equal’ out.
Then Cannae, Roma’s heaviest loss, was caused by Varro’s flout

(Plus Hannibal’s excellent strategy of weak centre and strong wings),
And after that, F. was thought to know a few odd things,

His courage no more doubted (the only one not scared);
But Plutarch lists his faults as well, like the totally unfair

Massacre at Bruttian, and his hatred of Scipio.
All in all, a balanced and informative bio.



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The Fabrication of Aboriginal History

The Fabrication Of Aboriginal History: Volume One: Van Diemen's Land 1803-1847 by Keith Windschuttle

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Windschuttle’s book demolishes the fiction of ‘Aboriginal resistance’ in colonial VDL. There was no ‘guerrilla war’; lightning raids were only carried out against civilians, and when soldiers were present the Aborigines didn’t show. What hostilities there were occurred over processed food like flour.

Governor Arthur wanted to protect and preserve the Aboriginal race, and worried that if conflicts with settlers continued the Aborigines would be extirpated. The infamous Black Line was intended to herd two troublesome tribes away from the settled districts; there was no genocidal intent behind it; it was a success, because the Aborigines thereafter took the whites seriously, and largely stopped their violent assaults.

By means of logic and careful argument, Windschuttle demolishes the ‘Cape Grim massacre’ story as an invention of George Augustus Robinson. Robinson also covered up murders by Aborigines in order to swell his followers’ numbers and enhance his reputation.

As far as the treatment of Aborigines on Flinders Island went, even far left ‘historian’ Henry Reynolds admits they received 2.5 times as much as white orphans, and had stylish brick huts better than those of Irish peasants.

In chapter nine, ‘Settler Opinion and the Extirpation Thesis’, Windschuttle lays many of Reynolds’ lies and distortions bare. Full-blooded Tasmanian Aborigines died out from a combination of respiratory illnesses like influenza, and venereal diseases (contracted from Bass Strait sealers) which left them infertile.

Many of their women fled voluntarily to those same Bass Strait sealers, who while rough, treated them less brutally than their own menfolk. Furthermore, the Aboriginal males would often sell their own women for seal meat, flour or potatoes.

Their deaths from disease were not the fault of colonial authorities, who provided them with first rate medical care (again, far better than that of poor whites). Inter-tribal warfare took the lives of twice as many blacks as white-on-black deaths in the same period.

This book caused a panic when it came out in 2002, and a volume called ‘Whitewash’ was rushed out for damage control, itself rebutted in John Dawson’s book ‘Washout’.

No one giving Windschuttle’s book one star on Goodreads appears to have read a word of it!



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