***Monthly post for newcomers***

[barger@ils.nwu.edu]

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

Especially rabid Hounds subscribe to the list as well as reading r.m.g.,
because glitches can cause you to miss messages. To subscribe to the
mailing list, send a friendly message to the "moderator", Bill Wisner
(who's actually in California), via:

love-hounds-request@eddie.mit.edu

It is possible to subscribe via various other email services: Compuserve,
MCI-Mail, FidoNet, SprintMail, Peacenet, Bix, Envoy-100, Connect, and
others.  For example, Compuserve users can use the above addresses with
">INTERNET:" in front of them.  Right now, GEnie, Prodigy, and America
OnLine are NOT possible gateways to Usenet.  Love-Hound Richard Caldwell
offers access for the price of your long-distance call via the Big Sky BBS,
24 hours a day at 614-864-1198 (1200 or 2400 baud).

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, Seattle, Austin, Dallas, Iowa City, Chapel Hill,
Chicago, Ipswich UK, Sweden, and two sites in Australia.

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, her first 'tour' since her only tour
in 1979.  Rumor claimed it would include some in the US.  Gossip now says
the album won't be out until spring 1992 at the earliest, though Kate's
buoyant cover of Rocket Man finally arrived October 22, on the Elton John
tribute album "Two Rooms", and a CDsingle with Kate's cover of "Candle in
the Wind" as 'B-side' is out in the UK. The tour is as far as anyone knows
still in the works, but of course 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                 _O_
biological symbol for woman).              |<

FAQs: No, she's not married, but she has a longstanding Significant Other:
Del Palmer, her bassist.  Yes, she smokes, and we all hope she'll stop. 
Yes, she's a vegetarian.  5'3". Albums:
The Cathy Demos (bootleg gems ca. 1975)
The Kick Inside (TKI: passionate and girlish, includes her British megahit
Wuthering Heights, 1978) 
Lionheart (LH: rushed, rewarmed TKI is still absolute genius, 1978)
Never For Ever (NfE: Kate begins producing, ascends into the sixth level of
enlightenment, 1980)
The Dreaming (TD: The Seventh Level of Enlightenment. Too naked for more
timid souls.  Play it... LOUDER! 1982)
The Single File (Boxset of 45's, *tres* collectible. 1983?)
Hounds of Love (HoL: One side delectably bright, one side deliciously
shadowy.  The shadowy side is a never-filmed movie of a drowning woman's
last hours in the sea.  Does she survive?  We just don't know, but we hope
so. 1985)
The Whole Story (TWS: compilation-cum-video, 1986)
The Sensual World (TSW: Her "most feminine" album, whatever that means. 
Noisily engineered.  Controversial, especially "Reaching Out".  1989)
This Woman's Work I and II (TWW: The Japanese version of this boxset has:
--no stickers (umpteen almost-identical KTfems - tell us if you think of
sumpn to do with em?),
--more/ bigger books in Japanese with non-canonical lyrics in English,
--the Japanese album-covers for TKI and NfE, and
--the mythical "better-sounding CDs" (tell us if you believe this).
Almost all B-sides, dance-mixes, and other incidentals are collected on the
extra disks, but not all, and damned pricey, too. Great music though, yeah!
1990)

Topics of interest to Love-Hounds include other alternative female artists,
and Kate-related others like Peter Gabriel and Roy Harper, and, for that
matter, anything sproingy, or not-so-sproingy.  Many new discoveries have
been brought to our attention by Vickie Mapes (of Vickie'n'Chris), whose
definitively sproingy 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 12pm on KKFI (90.1 FM) in
Kansas City.  Vickie is especially big on Jane Siberry, the
soon-to-be-superstar from Albany Happy Tyler Rhodes, and Victoria Williams.

A less-frequent visitor these days is the numinous curmudgeon "IED", Andy
Marvick's self-parody as the ultimate "true believer" Katefan.  IED used to
act as the flame-wielding bouncer of the group, but seems to have mellowed
of late into the more natural role of encyclopedic demigod. (Andy, welcome
back!)

Katefans are generally the nicest people you could hope to meet, but r.m.g.
does erupt fairly regularly into classic Usenet flamewar- behavior. 
**We're les concierges, chez-nous, honey, and we let the weirdness in.** 
This tender agreement sometimes gets abused, and we try to do the best we
can to uphold our ideals in the face of mindless astral violence, as Kate
would surely want.  (If you consider that what you write here may one day
be read by her... be kind to everybody's mistakes, huh?)  Newcomers can
rest assured that you are welcome to participate, and if you feel ignored
or incinerated you can be pretty sure it's nothing personal, and persist
until you feel accepted... for if your interest is genuine, you certainly
will be.

The way to build community online surely involves making cooing supportive
motherly encouraging sounds to try and open people up, yes?  So when some
demolition man comes vaunting into the party (one eye in the mirror... and
the other up his butt) and kills conversation for the moment, what can you
do?  Send a little chill his way and hope he gets the message?  Or thunder:
GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY HOUSE!!!  Oops.  Our house.  Hmmm.  His house. 
Grrr.  Dang.

(One recent flamewar centered on the question of whether Katenews was being
unfairly swamped by discussion of Happy Rhodes, whose new CD "Warpaint" has
spawned a #1 hit on Philadelphia's NPR station.  HR traffic has been moved
to a mailing-list that grows more and more active, shadowing the
gaffa-flow.  You can send a request to subscribe to Jessica via:
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.)

1991 also saw a certain amount of infighting between the Love-Hounds and an
upstart fanclub out of Ohio called AATHP.  AATHP managed to sow a lot of
bad vibes by attacking the UK fanzine "Homeground", defending the PMRC, and
making grandiose claims about inside connections to Kate via Sony.  In a
delicious karmic twist, it turned out that their President was a
pathological liar, and had to be forced out of office. So caveat emptor,
there.

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 scrupulously re-edited
version of all the interviews from "The Garden", and more, sorted by
subject, forming the closest we may ever see to a full-fledged Kate
autobiography.

All five years of rec.music.gaffa/love-hounds-digest can be ftp'd from the
love-hounds archive at wiretap.Spies.com (a California public access site
named Spies in the Net, IP 130.43.3.3) in directory /love-hounds/archives
(Anybody wanna compile an index? a best-of anthology?)

Song lyrics, interviews, the Garden and Cloudbusting, etc are in
/love-hounds/kb on the same host.

GIF files are also available in
/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 wiretap.Spies.com
Log in as "anonymous", and use your username as your password.
To change directories type:
cd 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's Big Sky BBS offers
the GIFs, too.  Tom Richards of C-Side Records, a good guy who  hopes to
have a similar system operational Real Soon Now.

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