Mr. Magic
Clive Davis defined an era of popular American music that ended with his death
The Last Mogul
He argues, threatens, and cajoles, even from beyond the grave.
Music lives inside our heads. That’s not entirely true, though. The music we live by is the creation of individual songwriters and musicians, who hear what we hear, but in a different way, and then they give it back to us, through the channels of their own mastery, and of their own particular psyches, which are unique to them. Who really knows what Bob Dylan is thinking about when he writes his American folk songs, which are not really folk songs, or what he thinks about when he performs on stage, with musicians who fill in the blanks of Bob Dylan’s own musical imagination. Sometimes he gets bored of what he’s hearing, the same way that we do. Why? Because he got bored, even though his music is ours, too, as part of the soundtrack of our lives.
The phrase “soundtrack of our lives,” is another giveaway, though. American music is, or was, in its heyday, a vast commercial enterprise. For every …
Listen to the Flowers
It is generally agreed that between 2 to 5 essences is the ideal number for a blend.
Tansy is the essence for ‘lethargy, procrastination, inability to take straightforward action’ — to quote the Repertory.
Hundreds of tiny beings? Where did they come from?
To teach the flower essence workshop, my first, I needed two-dozen one-ounce glass dropper bottles for tinctures. I planned to cart them with me to Brooklyn, where the retreat I was teaching at would be held. Thinking I’d have to haul home a flat of tiny glass bottles, I asked my husband to accompany me to Herbally Grounded, our local herb store in Las Vegas, a place reached by driving on a potholed thoroughfare that’s already given me three flat tires and is perpetually under construction. At this charming little shop — located in an innocuous strip mall next to Walmart and Michael’s — they sell such witchy paraphernalia, along with every conceivable loose herb in bulk and gnarled pink Himalayan salt lamps in a variety of shapes and sizes. The bottles, which my students would use to hold their own blends of flower essences, come in deep, dark tapestry colors — royal blue, hunter green, tortoiseshell …
Passengers
The world will burst like an intestine in the sun,
the dark turn to granite and the granite to a name,
but there will always be somebody riding the bus
through these intersections strewn with broken glass
among speechless women beating their little ones,
always a slow alphabet of rain
speaking of drifting and perishing to the air,
always these definite jails of light in the sky
at the wedding of this clarity and this storm
and a woman's turning—her languid flight of hair
traveling through frame after frame of memory
where the past turns, its face sparking like emery,
to open its grace and incredible harm
over my life, and I will never die.
