Definitive (ha!) monthly post

[barger@aristotle.ils.nwu.edu (Jorn Barger)]

Rec.music.gaffa is a 5-year-old newsgroup dedicated to the sublime artistic
genius of Kate Bush.  "Gaffa" comes from her song "Suspended in Gaffa" (on
_The_Dreaming_), and (according to Kate) refers to gaffer's tape, or duct
tape, used to keep people from tripping over electrical cabling, and
metaphorically, apparently, to a frustrating sort of limbo-dimension:

"Suddenly my feet are feet of mud/ It all goes slo-mo
I don't know why I'm crying/ Am I suspended In Gaffa?"

Rec.music.gaffa is run as a moderated group only because submissions to it
are forwarded to an extensive mailing list of people without netnews
access, who form an informal fan club called "Love-Hounds". (The mailing
list was r.m.g's original format, when started by |>oug /\lan so many years
ago.)  You can mail submissions, without fear of censorship, to:

love-hounds@eddie.mit.edu

To subscribe to the mailing list, send a friendly message to the
"moderator", Bill Wisner (who's actually in Alaska), via:

love-hounds-request@eddie.mit.edu

Love-hounds celebrate Kate's birthday (Katemas) each year on July 30, with
parties all over the world (she was born in 1958).

The big event of 1990 was the Kate Bush Fan Clubs Convention, November 17
at London's Hammersmith Palais, celebrating the release (in the UK, Canada
and Japan) of the "This Woman's Work" boxed set, containing all her albums
in conventional form, along with two CDs (or three LPs) of B-sides and
alternative mixes.  Of the 1300 convention attendees, some 50 were
Love-Hounds, many from the US and Australia, meeting face to face for the
first time.  Kate spent an hour answering questions submitted by audience
members, and announced that she hopes to have a new album finished very
quickly, having begun composing at the piano again.

She also claimed she's planning to "play some dates" at the end of 1991,
possibly including some in the US.  (Old Kate-Hounds are protecting
themselves from disappointment with a wait-and-see attitude, having heard
all this before.)

Kate's earliest band was called the KT Bush Band, (KT being readable as
Katie), and all her albums have had a KT emblem hidden somewhere on the
cover.  With the boxed set she introduced a new version of the symbol,
integrating the astrological        ( )
symbol for Venus (ie, the           -|-
biological symbol for woman).        |<

Topics of interest to love-hounds include other alternative female artists,
and Kate-related others like Peter Gabriel and Roy Harper.  Many new
discoveries have been brought to our attention by Vickie Mapes (of
Vickie'n'Chris), whose radio show "Suspended in Gaffa" focuses on
alternative female artists, airing Wednesdays from 7 to 8pm on WZRD in
Chicago (88.3 FM), and Saturdays from 10 to 11pm on KKFI (90.1 FM) in
Kansas City.  Vickie is especially big on Jane Siberry, Happy Rhodes, and
Victoria Williams.

Another welcome fixture in the group is the numinous curmudgeon "IED", Andy
Marvick's self-parody as the ultimate "true believer" Katefan.  IED has
acted at times as the flame-wielding bouncer of the group, but has mellowed
of late into the simpler role of a supremely well-informed and selfless
devotee of the cause.

All five years of rec.music.gaffa/love-hounds-digest can be ftp'd from the
love-hounds archive at hayes.ims.alaska.edu (137.229.30.200) in directory
/pub/love-hounds/archives
Song lyrics, interviews, etc are in
/pub/love-hounds/kb on the same host.
GIF files are also available in
/pub/love-hounds/kb/pix/gif [and gif.new]
If you've never used ftp, you use a program on your UNIX system called FTP.
 You connect by typing:
ftp hayes.ims.alaska.edu
Log in as "anonymous", and use your username as your password.
To change directories type:
cd pub/love-hounds
"dir" will get you a directory, "get" and the filename will retrieve the
file.  If you "cd" again into "archives" or "kb" you'll find the main
goodies, with "pix" being another subdirectory within "kb", and "gif" and
"gif.new" within "pix".  (When downloading gif's, set your transfer type to
binary by typing
binary
at the "ftp>" prompt.)

For those without FTP capabilities, Richard Caldwell has started a BBS that
offers the GIFs and current r.m.g postings.  The Big Sky BBS can be reached
24 hours a day at 614-864-1198 (1200 or 2400 baud).

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"Kate Bush is God!" (She really IS!)
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