A bunch of responses to jer

[Doug Alan <nessus>]

> From: jer

> In "Watching you Without Me", right after the lines that sound
> backwards/oriental, doesn't she sing "It's here" several times in
> French? I am not sure... I don't remember French very well, but I
> thought "ici" meant "here".  (Or maybe "I'm not here".  I'm not sure.)

That's what I thought sounded like "Really see".  This is the part that
if you play it backwards, it still sounds the same.  I don't know much
French either, but I think "It's here" would be "C'est ici" and "I'm not
here" would be "Juis suis ici"....

> In the song, does she have a light, or is it just that her face "is
> all lit up"?

Maybe moonlight?  A white face in the black water.

> How can you be a vegetarian for moral reasons?  Sharks won't not eat
> you while you are floating out on the oceans, making sure no one will
> mistake you for a b[u]oy, just because you don't eat any meat
> yourself!

Kate Bush isn't opposed to the natural life cycle.  She's opposed to the
assembly line slaughter of animals.  I'm sure if her cats could feed
themselves on birds and mice, she wouldn't mind too much, but I dunno
how possible that is in the 'burbs.

> Subject: All the Love: Answering Machine

> Here's 2 things I've thought of about this song.

> 1) I don't believe the story, once I thought awhile, about her
> answering machine deleting all but the "goodbyes" off of the
> tape... how could it do that?  It would have to sort of have a
> delay in starting up recording.  Now, if it deleted all but the
> "hello"s, that would make more sense.

I don't think she'd lie about it.  Maybe there *was* a delay in starting
up.  It was only half a dozen messages, so the chances of everything
working out just that way aren't astronomical.  She said that it would
often record at the wrong speed and things like that.  On the other
hand, maybe it was really in a dream.  Or in a future life....  In any
case, what's on the record isn't the tape that inspired the song.  She
compiled those goodbyes from other answering machine tapes she had lying
around.

> Subject: Re:  The Meaning of RuTH

[I don't trust poets that use the word "fruition".]

> However, I guess your description is fairly convincing... I think I
> will write to Kate Bush and say, "see, here is this alternative
> interpretation I have come up with."  I only hope she is more
> responsive than whoever that other person I wrote to was, or Ms. X.

The KBC says she's too busy to answer mail right now (she hasn't
answered any of mine), so you might want to wait a year or so to write
if you want an answer.  

>> I should also point out that the promo video (not the one being shown
>> on MTV) perfectly matches this interpretation.

> But, the videos rarely have anything to do with the songs!

Well Kate isn't like everyone else, is she?  All her videos and dances
are strongly related to the songs.

> Well... maybe... I think too much is made of "lovers" in songs these
> days... I wish she would write songs about something else.  That's the
> good thing about Yes, and Genesis back in Peter Gabriel's time, and
> Pink Floyd... they have a more diversified view of life... however, I
> guess the other songs make up for it...

I used to hate love songs.  Until I discovered the likes of Kate Bush
and Roy Harper, because they are two of the very few people who can do
them right.  And for that reason, they should do them.  You wouldn't
want the whole genre to just be empty, would you?  Besides, Kate's use
of lovers is usually very metaphorical.

Also, Pink Floyd has a lot to say about lovers.  A significant portion
of Roger Waters' lyrics seem to be about his problems with dealing with
women.

>> 	It's also perhaps talking about some of the fundamental
>> 	differences between men and woman.

> I think this is what the song is really about.

Naw!  That's only the surface meaning.  Besides, what Kate *really*
meant, because she puts it much better in poetry than in straight prose,
is that it's talking about some of the fundamental differences between
*people*.

> Today's puzzle:

> If Kate Bush is such a nice person, why does she call police "pigs"?

She doesn't.  That's a character in a story she wrote.  Besides, "Though
pigs can fly" is a really neat line because "a pig with wings" is a
common expression.

> I think it's specifically supposed to be *hounds* baying...
> personally I think it's pretty corny.

No sense of humor, huh?  I think it's hilarious.  All the artificial
animal sounds in the song "The Dreaming" are great too, but they're not
humorous.

> This is a big problem with a lot of these speakers they sell for rock
> music, they build them to produce a lot of bass, and then put these
> infernal no-good "ferrofluid-cooled" midrange speakers in there, which
> work like the cones were glued down with bubble gum!

But my speakers are not rock music speakers.  They're Bose 901s.
Unfortunately, they are very sibilant.  This does not go well with
Kate's voice, which is also over-sibilant (which the British media
refuses to let us forget!).

> But, you know Kate Bush always gives the "wrong" interpretation of her
> lyrics, just to lead people off track.

She doesn't give wrong interpretations.  She often just doesn't reveal
the whole story -- and doesn't say that she isn't.

>> But much great poetry is very ambiguous, including much of Kate's.

> Fie! ...

> But if the poem is ambiguous, then it should still be consistent
> across the several interpretations the ambiguity allows.

I disagree.  Too much is made by some people of *meaning*.  (Just ask
David Byrne!)  Meaning is only one important aspect of poetry, and there
are many others.  Saying that all poems must have a clear meaning is
like saying that all paintings must represent something.  The power of a
poem is in the sensation it gives you to read it and ponder it.  But all
of this sensation may not be "meaning".  Part of it may reside in the
meaning, but certainly not all of it, and perhaps in some cases, none of
it will.  Take, for example the first stanza of The Jabborwocky:

	T'was brillig and the slithy toves
	Did gyre and gymble in the wabe
	All mimsy were the borogoves
	And the mome-raths outgrabe

This is one of my very favorite poems.  (Perhaps the only one I have
completely memorized....)  Does this stanza mean anything?  Does it have
a "consistent interpretation"?  Lewis Carrol gives one, but I don't
think one would come up with his explanation on their own.

Regarding "Jig of Life"....

> This song starts out with the narrator looking in the mirror and
> seeing there the face of her mother; thus "this is the place
> where the crossroads meet"; and the narrator disappears from the
> picture, and there is the mother, and her offspring... which
> don't yet exist! ....

I think you're working at it to hard.  Okay, I'll give it away....

Why do you say that the old lady in the mirror is her mother?  Why not
herself?  KB doesn't say the old lady is in her mirror -- she says the
old lady comes to her and says "I'll be sitting in your mirror".

			     Hello old Lady
			 I know your face well
			     I know it well
				She says
		    "I'll be sitting in your mirror
	       Now is the place where the crossroads meet
		     Will you look into the future"

The song is about the ghost of KB future coming and telling KB, "You
can't let yourself drown, because it's not just your life you'd be
giving up, but *my* life, and the lives of the children you will have.

			       [She says]
			  "This moment in time
			It doesn't belong to you
			    It belongs to me
	     And to your little boy and to your little girl
		       And the one hand clapping
		  Where on your palm is my little line
	     When you're written in mine as an old memory"

> But... but... it says in the Bible that you shouldn't consort
> with necromancers, sorcerers, and their kind!  Aren't palm
> readers sort of that way?  Maybe this means Kate Bush really is
> a witch after all!!

Well, since KB is pretty paegan, I'm sure a Fundamentalist would tell
you that KB is the spawn of the devil, but then so are all
non-Fundametalists....

> Is the yo-yo in "cloudbusting" another factual error on the part of
> Kate Bush?

Why do you say this?  The yo-yo is exactly as described in "A Book of
Dreams".  What do you think is wrong with it?  Did the message I posted
about Peter and Wilhelm Reich go off the end of your floppy too?

> Meanwhile, I sent my SO, the Stanford biochemist who discovered
> Primase, one of the pink albums.

What's Primase?  And how come you get pink ones?  The ones around here
are all grey with swirls or purpleish-grey with swirls.

> Today when I called, one of the folks who lives there in her house, a
> philosophy grad. student, answered the phone, and said, spontaneously,
> "You have good tastes in music!  I have all of Kate Bush's albums, I
> have had them for years!  Oh... Lee thought _The_Dreaming_ was
> `wierd'.  I don't like it either, it's too much like Yoko Ono."  I
> asked him what this meant, and he said, "You know," and made some
> wailing noises.

Well, he's a yotch!  Everybody I've ever met who likes early KB, but not
"The Dreaming" is a yotch.  They're all more interested in photos of her
and lust after her, rather than being into the music.  They always say
things like, "But before her voice was *so* sexy, and now it's like her
boyfriend dumped her or something and she's inflicting it on me."
They're yotches!

> If she doesn't return my calls soon, I guess I will have to join the
> ranks of the "SO convinced me not to listen to her any more" group, as
> well!  This is terrible!

Listen, music is more important than SOs any day.  Dump her and keep
the KB albums.

A girl, who's a friend of my cousin, said she appreciated artistic music
and said she liked Brian Eno and Peter Gabriel.  Well, I was driving her
and my cousin around in Manhattan, so I plopped into the stereo a
cassete of "The Dreaming".  The girl soon said, "This isn't art!  This
is Pat Benetar backwards!"  This was not good thing to say to me while I
was driving in Manhatten if she valued any of our lives....

Later she admitted that she doesn't *really* like Peter Gabriel because
he is too "artsy fartsy".  But Kate Bush isn't even "artsy fartsy" --
she's Pat Benetar backwards....  This from an art major!

> 	Boinger goes another SO
> 	On the bonnet of my song!

> ....

> You know... we Slovak people make rolls out of poppies heavy with
> seed, and they don't take us deeper and deeper at all!  (except on
> Christmas Eve, of course, when, late at night, we eat them with milk
> and honey on baked dough balls, and mushroom soup.)

You know, jer, you are getting weirder all the time....  Maybe KB is
having a beneficial effct on you....

			"'Jump' said Yoko Ono
			 'I'm too young and too good looking' I cried"

			 Doug
			

P.S.  "Kate, don't have kids!  You're fans are more important!" cries
Doug with a selfish expression on his face.