This Is Why

I Love E.L.O.

The Electric Light Orchestra.

E.L.O. is music that brings an eager message to the world, a message of some urgency but great delicacy:

Life is special.

This is why I Love E.L.O.

But E.L.O. gives even more: Their music also says, Music is Special.

Music is An Event.

And isn't it exciting?

You might say that E.L.O. is music about music.

Music about the Beatles. Music about Beethoven and Roy Orbison.

In this way, E.L.O. is very Disney. Because so often, the Disney ethos is art about art. Fantasy about fantasy. Experience about experience. Take Angels Stadium in Anaheim, designed under Disney: a baseball stadium about baseball. Or Disney Hall: a concert hall about concert halls (as Jonathan Gold wrote when it first opened, if memory serves).

I like that, though.

And no, I'm not smoking pot.

To bring this all back to the subject at hand, I would now like to posit that the Passion Flower, Passiflora edulis, is the most Disney of flowers. Or, put another way, it is the E.L.O. of flowers.

Passiflora edulis is the one flower that, more than all flowers, says, Aren't flowers cool?

Passiflora edulis is a flower about flowers.

There's really no other explanation.