Following the release of The Kick Inside, Kate Bush undertook an astonishingly busy 6-month promotional campaign. In addition to topping
charts and appearing on what seemed like every TV program in the UK, Bush did an extensive amount of traveling, visiting West Germany, the Republic of Ireland, the Netherlands, France, the United States, Canada, and Japan. One could unpack any one of these tips individually, but they mostly consist of Bush performing songs from The Kick Inside. As Dreams of Orgonon is a song-by-song blog, we analyze episodes in Kate Bush’s career through the lenses of new songs as they come. Bush’s promotional visit to Japan in June of 1978 not only offers a couple songs we haven’t heard her sing before, even if they are covers, but it gives a chance to see what Kate Bush does when she’s not doing Kate Bush things.
You see, Kate Bush wasn’t in control of her environment. She didn’t have her own band, gigs she planned, and she was undertaking activities she wouldn’t do again until the Eighties and Nineties (we will cover Let It Be on this blog again). But even more paramount to the uniqueness of Bush’s Japan trip is ...
Slightly lighter fare this week (everything being relative) as Daniel tells Jack about how the far-right have seen Donald Trump, from the rise of the romance through to the fall, via the fluctuating feelings of the hosts of the 'Fash the Nation' podcast.
As always, warnings apply...
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Show Notes:
Cantwell banned from Gab
Fash the Nation
Fash the Nation interviews Tila Tequila
Fash the Nation David Duke
Fash the Nation Paul Nehlen
Jazzhands McFeels on the Radical Agenda in 2015
Enoch, Jazzhands, Allsup, Sven, etc 2018 Midterm coverage
Fash the Nation deletes its archives after Enoch/Dunstant doxxing
White Hot Takes "Fash the Nation" (To the tune of Human League "Fascination"
Svenpai "Right Wing Death Squads" (To the tune of Live "Lightning Crashes."
Spencer/Enoch at Syria protest
Trump's Far-Right Supporters Turn on Him Over Syria Strike
Brad Griffin talks Andrew Yang at the Political Cesspool, 3/23/19
Yang Gang Explained at Rolling Stone
It’s January 1st, 2017. Did you guess that Rockabye were at number one with “Clean Bandit”? If so, well done. Zara Larsson, Little Mix, Bruno Mars, and Wham also chart, the latter with a post-Christmas surge for “Last Christmas.” In news, US troops withdraw from Afghanistan, Obama imposes sanctions against Russian intelligence agencies for interfering with the election, and Nevada’s marijuana legalization goes into effect.
While on television, the puzzling failure of Sherlock Season Four begins with The Six Thatchers. Let’s begin with the obvious, which is that the death of Mary is a terrible idea. There was a bit in comments a few weeks ago about fridging, including a discussion of the fridging of male characters. But it’s worth de-genericiding the term a bit and remembering exactly what it is and why it’s bad. Because fridging is not simply character death in the general case. It is not even character death as a means of motivating other characters, a category that can also include plot beats like the mentor figure dying so that the hero can step up. Fridging was a term created by then comics journalist and now comics superstar Gail Simone in 1999 to describe ...
As it's come up a few times and I've thus far only said it on Twitter, I figured I should make a quick statement on the site. Short form: I have decided going forward that I will no longer be covering Big Finish material on the site or in my books. There are a handful of existing obligations I'll still fulfill. I've promised Andrew Hickey I'll cover Doctor Who and the Pirates in the revised Volume 6, and while I'm going to swap out one or two of the mooted 7th Doctor Big Finish essays for things on other topics, there'll still be a few of those. And I'm not going to go around deleting already written Big Finish essays. But starting with Volume 8, none of the new essays added to any of the book collections are going to be on Big Finish material.
There are a lot of reasons why I've taken this decision. Many of them are outlined in my post on their UNIT Assembled box set, but I'll sum up a few quickly.
Strange Phenomena (demo)
Strange Phenomena
Efteling
Hammersmith Odeon
In “Strange Phenomena,” we have another statement of intent from Kate Bush. Unlike most of Bush’s songs, it’s a purely conceptual rather than narrative work. “Strange Phenomena” is populated by the esoteric and the inconclusive, dwelling in the liminal spaces of everyday life and exploring its unexplained coincidences. It nods to the physical and the supernatural in equal turn, suggesting the two aren’t separate entities but different compartments of life, in league with one another, conspiring to make life exciting. In short, it’s everything The Kick Inside takes stock in and values.
“Strange Phenomena” famously begins with an arpeggiating (A/F) ode to menstruation, “the phase of the moon when people tune in.” In her typical fashion, Kate Bush refers to menstruation as “the punctual blues,” suggesting both a musical quality and a natural rhythm to this particular bodily function (she also refers to it as something “every girl” knows about, but in her defense trans issues were not a topic of national conversation in 1978). Throughout The Kick Inside, Bush has made a case that all functions of the body are a thing of beauty, whether those be ...
The TARDIS Data Core has never been a great site. This ranges from its extraordinarily dubious content decisions such as individually listing every floor of the spaceship in World Enough and TIme to be mentioned in the episode to its outright pernicious decisions like having pages for "rape" and for individual racial slurs that exist to document every single case across all of Doctor Who where they have come up. And this badness has been known to take an overtly queerphobic tinge, such as the decision to jettison categories listing LGBTQ characters in Doctor Who because, and I quote, "We write articles in the past tense from an 'end of the universe' POV. The Category:LGBT individuals, makes no sense for me as it's a very 20th to early 21st century view point" and "If the concept of LGBT existed in the DW universe we'd have a page for it, and we don't, cause it's really not something that's given a lot of thought as a defined concept." (It's not clear why categories such as "human secretaries," "victims of the bubonic plague," and of course "gamers" are more relevant at the end of the universe ...
In this episode we touch on the promised topic of the mainstreamers vs the vanguardists in the far-right movement, but only in the course of covering topical events.
These include the firing of the 'Nazi EMT' Alex McNabb, and the recently released tapes of disgusting comments by Fox News's pet white nationalist con-man Tucker Carlson.
But, most particularly, of course, we talk about the recent ghastly massacre at Christchurch, New Zealand.
Daniel provides really vital insights in this episode into the way such murderous terrorist attacks by fascists - of which the Christchurch attack is just the latest of many - stem from a conscious organisational strategy within the far right called 'leaderless resistance'. Daniel explains this and where it comes from, its meaning within the movement, etc, going into the infamous racist novel The Turner Diaries and 'The Order', and so on. He also goes into the murderer's 'manifesto', the meme-drenched nature of his chan board-based fascism, and describes the contents of his livestream broadcast. We touch on the killer's 'Balkan Nationalism' and his ostensible ecological concerns.
Needless to say, some of this is upsetting listening.
(Sorry for the delay ...
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| Sure, yes, you feel pain, but tell me... do you bleed? |
It’s December 25th, 2016. Clean Bandit’s “Rockabye” remains at number one, while Rag ‘n Bone Man, Little Mix, Zara Larsson, and the annual re-charting of Mariah Carey also chart. In news since Class got lost, the CIA reported to Congress that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election, which President-elect Trump described as “ridiculous,” the Obama administration allowed a UN resolution condemning Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory to pass, and a riot broke out in a Birmingham prison, the worst British prison riot since the Thatcher era.
On television, meanwhile, for the first time in a year, Doctor Who. When this aired at the brutal end of 2016, suspended between Carrie Fisher’s heart attack and her death and in the immediate wake of George Michael’s, it felt like a baffling way to bring the show back after its longest gap between episodes since Rose. Two years and change later, it feels like a baffling artifact from another world. At its heart, it features Moffat making a well-earned return to autopilot. He will not phone it in for the entirety of Series 10, mercifully, but he is ...