Cloudbusting

I don't know much about Wilhelm Reich, but he seems like a crazy fuck. After seeing Sweet Movie, I read up on Dusan Makavejev, and his previous film, W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism, is about Reich, among other things. Further Wikipediaing lead me to the insanity of Reich's philosophy and practices. There's too much to go into, and I really don't know that much about him, but beyond the fact that his practices are fascinatingly bizarre, I can't say that I have too much interest in him.

What is interesting, is to get a clearer understanding of Kate Bush's "Cloudbusting".  Most of her songs are so enigmatic and intelligent that I feel like I need footnotes to decipher them.

Loosely, from what I can understand, a "cloudbuster" is designed to shoot Orgone energy into the sky to create clouds, thus producing rain.  Orgones were created by Reich, and in his own words, are a "primordial cosmic energy".  Apparently anti-Orgone energy played a role in the desertification of the earth, and he used cloudbusters to fight this.  This is obviously an oversimplified description, but from what I can tell it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

I wanted to post a cool picture of one of these cloudbusters, but it turns out they aren't that visually impressive, so instead I'll post the cover of Bush's single, which has a very imaginative re-creation of a cloudbuster, conceived by Terry Gilliam.



To make a very long, and very weird, story short, Reich was eventually arrested by the FBI and died while imprisoned. The Kate Bush song is written from the perspective of his son.

I thought about posting the music video for this song, featuring Donald Sutherland portraying Reich, and Bush as his son, but when it comes down to it, the video unfortunately sucks.  I am already walking the fine line of posting too much questionable material in one post.  You can youtube the video if you really want to, but it's pretty disappointing. 

Kate Bush - Cloudbusting