Dave takes a ponderous look at his fellow Hounds

[dhsu@SUN.COM (David Hsu)]

Bloody pervasive third-person.  IED, this is all your fault.

	From: IED0DXM%UCLAMVS.BITNET@MITVMA.MIT.EDU
	Subject: Katemas
	
	     IED cannot, alas, attend. Hours of devout prayer have
	failed to produce the desired auto-telepransportative effect:
	he remains firmly rooted to the L.A. soil. However, eat, drink
	and be merry in the knowledge that IED's spirit celebrates
	with you all, even though his body be three thousand miles
	distant.

Twas the week after Katemas
and all 'round my lair,
not a creature was Kate-less,
not even a hare.

Me? I was Dreaming
in front of a fan,
while visions of kangas
bounced off mom's van.

I echo IED's sympathies here.  Sorry guys, but I've been temporarily
California-ized, and although I was in D.C. last weekend, a jaunt to
Boston could not be justified.
	
	     HAPPY KATEMAS, EVERY ONE!
	
	-- andrew bolTon marvicK

Hah!  That's what you'd LIKE us to think "abm" stands for, but those
of us in the know understand that it really means "abhors Benatar,
Madonna".
	
	From: turner%mpgs.DEC@DECWRL.DEC.COM (Debbie Gibson: the Kate
	Bush of the 90s)

JD?  Is that you?  And what's with this sacrilege?
	
	From: whuts!0707dab@ARPA.ATT.COM (K. Crissey)
	
	I won't argue with you.  I don't often bring Kate's lyrics to
	work with me 8-) and I'll admit it, there are still Kate
	lyrics that I *don't know* verbatim. 8-)
	
You *winged* it?  Ken, I expect you to have EVERY SINGLE HUMAN SOUND
THAT KATE EVER RECORDED fully memorized, with time and durations, by
next Monday.  :-)
	
	From: berns%lti.UUCP@BU-IT.BU.EDU (Brian Berns x26)
	Subject: Kate initiations
	
	P.S. IED, _The_Ninth_Wave_ sucks (relatively speaking, of course).

Hey wait a minute..._The Ninth Wave_ sucks relative to what?
	
	      [	"Gaffa" is a European term gaffer's tape, which is the
		same thing as duct tape.  It is what musician's use to
		tape down wires and the like.  It is very sticky, and
		if you get stuck in it, it no fun at all.  -- |>oug ]

Actually, being stuck in gaffer's tape can be interesting on occasion,
particularly if one is supported exclusively by the stuff.  Like, from
a ceiling joist.  Being stuck with a wood joiner (aka double-headed
nail), on the other hand, is no fun at all, unless maybe you've had so
much "Gatorade" that you don't notice anything, anymore.

	From: "Liz Owens, Microcomputer Product Center, 491-3889"
	Subject: Wilhelm Reich info
	
	Definitely look for _A_Book_of_Dreams_ if you can--it has to
	be one of the most bizzare true stories I've ever read. It's
	not often that one combines masturbation, psychology,
	radiation, rainmaking, the FDA, and UFOs in the same work and
	still gets a readable story. It's fascinating, though.
	
	For those interested in Reich and his works--well, most of his
	stuff is out of print or difficult to find.

You left out Wilhelm's Very Own Stress Relief technique, which often
makes me wonder why Peter didn't end up a bulimic masochist.  Reich's
papers, however, are rather easy to find at most college bookstores,
and there are at least two biographical tomes currently in print, and
at your local Tower Bookstore.

This following item had me a bit perplexed for a while, but I sorted
it out as best I could and have the following to say.  In reading your
response, |>oug, it appears that you're missing the point of Larry's
message.  He's assessing the choreographic content of Kate's videos
(which by most measures, is, uh, "simple") and that quantity alone.
Neither of you is particularly disagreeing with the other; it's just
that most of your (|>oug's) followup comments are non sequitur.

	From: Doug Alan <nessus@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>
	Subject: Re: Kate Bush's Videos
	
	> From: henrik@blblbl.UUCP (Larry DeLuca)
	
	> It's not unique at all.  First of all, the poor girl is
	> hell-bent on symmetry.  Doris Humphrey, in her book _The Art
	> of Making Dances_ (required reading for anyone *anywhere* in
	> the arts) says, "Symmetry is death.".
	
	Who made Doris Humphrey God?  To say that "symmetry is death"
	is like saying "melody is death".  It's the epitome of
	arrogance.  There's a place in the world for many things.
	Including both symmetry and asymmetry, both consonace and
	disonance.  Also to say what Kate is hell-bent on now, at the
	age of 30, is a little presumptuous an extrapolation from what
	she was into at the age of 20.

Ahem.  There's a place for death in the world too.  Arrogance is a
perception, not an intrinsic quality.  I happen to agree that symmetry
is boring, but less so when it mirrors complexity.  Let's drop the Zen
stuff.  Sure, Larry's a bit too inclusive in using the present tense.
Satisfied?

	> Second, her approximation of the choreographic art is crude, at
	> best.  Her efforts [...] are more akin to pantomime [...]
	
	Who declared pantomime an invalid form of art?

[text delete wherein Larry makes a comparison to first year jazz dance
 students and |>oug notes that nobody seriously considers Kate to
 be a dancer]

Nobody did, and certainly Larry didn't.  I am of the opinion that Kate
wasn't trying to achieve any special success in communicating within
the established dance genre, and that her pantomime effects were
simply intuitive ways to express herself.  I expect Andrew to jump in
any day now and explain that Kate's dancing, unlike her songwriting
and singing, make her more akin to an illustrator than a "real"
painter.

	Considering the amount of training she
	had in dance, I think she did a pretty incredible job.

This point may be debatable, but I'm not a dance expert and I won't
take it up directly.  But she certainly had a nontrivial amount of
training, and is ineligible for the "too young to understand"
argument, and of course, art and training are related only by what
_you_ make of the latter.  But I digress.

	Your saying that "you see reams of the same stuff put on by
	little girls in their first jazz class" strikes me as the same
	sort of snobishness that you hear from classical music experts
	about rock music, or from 70's Progressive Rock experts about
	Punk.  What they are criticising doesn't meet some arbitrary,
	myopic, and ultimately meaningless measurement of quality that
	just doesn't apply to the work of artists with different views
	and different goals.

Ahem.  Thanks to the constraints of Western Civilization and human
thought, we are blessed with a multitude of standards to compare
things to.  Remember the duality in your first paragraph, |>oug?
Chaos requires order.  These criteria are hardly arbitrary; many of
them (like consonance, and syncopation) are socially derived, and if
you dig far back enough, I suppose you could even find physiological
bases.  Myopic?  Of course they're myopic.  Few things aren't.  We
live in a temporal universe.  Meaning, of course, is a contextual
thing, and Larry's comment that "Kate's choreography is similar to
that in a little girl's first jazz class" is definitely meaningful,
whereas a statement like "Kate's choreography is similar to the square
root of seven" is decidedly meaningless.  Perhaps you'll be offended
when I say that many of Kate's early videos remind me of the
early-Seventies Sesame Street bits where little kids run around in
front of a video camera with an effects box on, waving their arms.
But it's true, that's what they remind me of.  And I'm sure that
plenty of people who remember what I'm talking about would agree.
Amazing how standards creep out of nowhere, isn't it?

	|>oug /\lan
	
	"I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing,
	 than teach a million stars how not to dance"  -- e. e. cummings

"Beat it, Bird" -- Oscar the Grouch

-dave