Another busy day...

I don't really foresee having time to do a "real" blog entry today, so I'm leaving you with another embedded video from YouTube. Today, it's the divine Ms. Kate Bush's video for "Cloudbusting" from 1985's Hounds Of Love, starring Donald Sutherland and co-conceived (but not, contrary to what some have said, actually directed) by Terry Gilliam.

"Cloudbusting" is loosely inspired by the life and fall from grace of one Wilhelm Reich, a disciple of Sigmund Freud's who broke with his master after deciding that human behavior was governed almost entirely by sexual energy, which he dubbed "orgone." Had Reich stopped there, he might have been no more of a crank than Freud or Carl Jung, but Reich took it another step and decided that orgone wasn't merely a conceit but an actual thing in the world that could be drained, stored, topped-off, whatever, and that everything marvelous and terrible in the world could be attributed to orgone surpluses and deficits. When he tried to market orgone-based cures for cancers and other ailments, the FDA stepped in, and eventually Reich ended up in prison with a good bit of his property burned (including, unfortunately, the books he tried to sell, which more than anything helped make him something of a martyr in some circles and was admittedly heavy-handed).

One of the things Reich claimed you could do with orgone is make and break clouds with it, causing clouds to disappear entirely or making it rain if you wanted to. "Cloudbusting," the music video, has a Reich-like figure (played by Sutherland) making a working orgone gun and putting it on a hilltop. Any phallic imagery you may notice when the loaded cloudbuster is fired is doubtlessly intentional and apt--that's what orgone was all about, using your libido to cure cancer and make rain.

Anyway, the video:

Enjoy, and keep having a good weekend!