Library Everywhere

My sister Joy and I are big Kate Bush fans. We grew up listening to Hounds of Love, The Kick Inside, and a few other of her albums that our mom had on vinyl. You might say she was the soundtrack to our childhood, but beyond that we were really taken with her because she was just so… weird. My mom had her concert video on VHS (or was it Beta?!), and the fact that she not only sang songs about killer violins but that she also had a man dress in a huge violin costume and chase her around the stage during a concert made her all the more appealing. I think I can say that our appreciation for Kate and her music has only deepened as we’ve gotten older.

If you want to know how truly dorky we are about it, we once had a Kate Bush lyrics showdown where we had a friend read randomly chosen lyrics from various Kate Bush songs and then proceeded to try and beat each other at guessing which song and album they were from. My sister blew me out of the water, in case you were wondering.

So the other night Joy and I were trolling YouTube for Maya Deren films. She hadn’t seen any Maya Deren and I was thinking about doing a post about her, so we were looking at parts of Meshes of the Afternoon and Ritual in Transfigured Time. Suddenly we started noticing all these images that were eerily reminicent of things we’d seen either in Kate Bush videos or on her album covers. It had been a while since we really dorked out on Kate Bush, so I committed to investigating the matter further.

Here’s what I found…

Exhibit A: The lead dude in Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love video closely resembles a dude we see several shots of in the party scene in Ritual in Transfigured Time. They both have very bold, unconventional, almost superhero-ish features.

Exhibit B: Elements of the party scene in Hounds of Love are very reminiscent of the Ritual party scene. The choreography and flow feel very similar. The stills I picked out are so similar it kind of freaked me out.

Exhibit C: The cover of Kate Bush’s The Dreaming shows her with a key in her mouth. Next to that is a still from Meshes of the Afternoon- the part where Maya removes a key from her mouth. Plus they just look kind of alike, so it’s even weirder to see these images next to each other.

So is that weird or what? Do Joy and I have too much time on our hands? I don’t know. I do know I will continue my quest for further bizarre Maya/Kate linkages and post them here.