Monthly post, for *NEWCOMERS*

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

Rec.music.gaffa is a 5-year-old newsgroup dedicated to the sublime,
peerless 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 ("the idea of seeing something incredibly beautiful,
having a religious experience... but not being able to get back there"):

"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

It's not a bad idea to subscribe to the list even if you read r.m.g.,
because occasionally glitches may cause you to miss messages. 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

It is possible to subscribe via various other email services: Compuserve,
MCI-Mail, SprintMail, Peacenet, Bix, Envoy-100, Connect, and others.  Right
now, GEnie, Prodigy, and America OnLine are NOT possible gateways to
Usenet.  For details contact Jorn.

As an experiment in Reaching Out to non-Usenet fans, we will be offering on
an experimental basis a monthly (or so) digest of Kate newsbriefs and
comments.  Ideally we want to keep this a minimalist venture, so ideally we
would like to send the digest only to clubs, etc that have their own
mailing lists it can be redistributed thru.  Other solutions are possible,
though.  To inquire, contact Jorn Barger, PO Box 81988, Chicago IL
60681-0988.

Love-Hounds celebrate Kate's birthday (Katemas) each year around July 30,
with parties all over the world.  1991 saw parties in Boston, Washington
DC, Cleveland, San Jose, San Diego, Austin, Dallas, Iowa City, Chapel Hill,
Chicago, Ipswich UK, Sweden, Australia, and New South Wales.

At a fan club convention in November 1990, Kate announced that she hoped to
have a new album finished by the end of 1991, and that she was planning to
"play some dates" at the end of 1991, possibly including some in the US. 
Gossip now says the album won't be out until early 1992, though there may
be a new single this year. The tour is apparently in the works, but the
album must be finished first.

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 release of the This Woman's Work boxed set in the UK,
Japan and Canada, she introduced a new version of the symbol,
integrating the astrological        ( )
symbol for Venus (ie, the           -|-
biological symbol for woman).        |<

FAQs: No, she's not married, but she has a longstanding Significant Other. 
Yes, she smokes, and we hope she'll stop.  Yes, she's a vegetarian.  5'3".
Albums: The Kick Inside '78; Lionheart '78; Never For Ever '80; The
Dreaming '82 (!!!!); Hounds of Love '85; The Sensual World '89.

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, the
soon-to-be-superstar 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.

Katefans are generally the nicest people you could hope to meet, but r.m.g.
does erupt fairly regularly into classic Usenet flamewar- behavior, most
recently on the question of whether Katenews was being unfairly swamped by
discussion of Happy Rhodes.  Newcomers can rest assured that you are
welcome to participate, and that if you feel ignored or incinerated you can
safely assume it's nothing personal, and persist until you feel accepted...
for you will be.
(Happy Rhodes traffic has been moved to a mailing-list that remains quite
active.  You can send a request to subscribe to:
ecto-request@cs.rutgers.edu 
Ordering info for Happy's tapes: Aural Gratification, POB 8658 Academy
Station, Albany NY 12208. Tapes are $9.99 plus $2.00 s&h ($0.35 each add'l
tape or CD): Vol 1, Vol 2, Rearmament, Ecto, and Warpaint.  CD of Warpaint
is $13.99 and $2 shipping. UK: #8/tape, #11/CD, incl. s&h.)

Two priceless resources for Katefans have recently been made available by
Love-Hounds Andy Marvick and Ron Hill:  "The Garden" is a 600-page
compilation of reference material on Kate, including a detailed chronology
of her life and career, a discography and videography, and scores of
transcriptions of interviews.  "Cloudbusting" is a re-edited version of the
interviews from "The Garden", sorted by subject.

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, the Garden and Cloudbusting, 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, gif_footah, gif.saintjohn,
pix.hill, gif_tour_program, gif.newer, gif.fenger]

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).  Tom Richards of C-Side
Records hopes to have a similar system operational Real Soon Now.

The custodian of the monthly post makes a good-faith effort to forward a
copy to all newcomers, especially when they ask questions it answers.

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