The Blog of Xanadu has moved! Go here!

Gimme gimme shock treatment Okay, the melancholy of the morning has been blown into the weeds. I put Tori Amos aside and on a whim put in the Ramones. Talk about a change of pace -- Tori Amos is akin to walking alone through a drab November landscape, while the Ramones are more akin to riding a racebike at high speed on a white hot summer afternoon. It definitely clears the head. Oh, and Dee Dee Ramone was a Reaganite. All the better...

Moving the keys... I'm a fairly big music person. I have no talent to create music whatsoever, but I can appreciate the work of others. Tori Amos is one artist for whom I have immense respect, at least for her music. I know her only through the mask of recorded sound. Her 1991 release "Little Earthquakes" is one of the best CDs I've ever put in a player. The music is consistently good, and drags hard at my heart. This is what I'm listening to right now, even as I type. "Little Earthquakes" allows me to wallow for a little while in the grief, to be subjected to the catharsis that the Greeks believed so important for the audience of tragedy. It's not that my life is tragedy -- it's not. But we all have tragic moments; the loss of a father, a baby, the bittersweet transitions of life. The times when we know things must change, and when we shuffle our feet to a different beat, to a different sound, to a different destination. We must mourn, because we cannot contain our lives completely into ourselves, and it must leak from our souls and spill to the ground, where instead of a bitter poison, it becomes a sweet water that nourishes the seeds of our new future.

Moving to MT... I'm slowly moving the blog to my own hierarchy at the Garage of Xanadu. It's not quite ready yet, but it's getting there.