Jason Guriel

But now it’s raining below the greener clouds of trees that were absorbent but only up to a point. And these raindrops strained by treetops should (you would think) be filtered and finer and therefore pure (and not Chinese water torture’s fatter, darker drops that always pick out of all possible bull’s-eyes your bald spot). But these are late, last drops and a little bloated like late, last poems by name your poet.

They’re worse than weak links in chains, which we can blame on blacksmiths’ fire, and chinks in armor, made by rain of arrows. Soft spots, those parts of us that bruise, prove we’re fruit that rots as hourglasses ooze. But I’ve a soft spot for, a phrase we tend to whisper, is what we say before we name our guilty pleasure— the damper pedal that pounds sonatas into mush the critic Ezra Pound would call, with a shudder, slush.

The Wrecking Crew was just the cream of the "you pay — we'll play" LA session pool, that crack squad of 50 or 60 musicians...who played on Pet Sounds and Smile and probably half the records in your collection. They didn't just play the chops. They invented them. — Rob Chapman, MOJO Money is also a kind of music. I don't mean the slight sleigh bell of a pocketed change purse or an old-time till's single tap of triangle, ringing up sale, or even the percussion of post-pillage coffers filling up, plink by plink. I think I mean that current of classically trained breath certain amounts of currency can call forth and blow through brass. I mean the mean current of electricity Carol Kaye's bass drew from Capitol Records in the sixties, the timesheets that took their toll and exchanged it for four / four time kept without fail by the brain of drummer Hal Blaine, worth its weight in scale.

marc-antonizes. Somehow it organizes the mob—like so much lead—into rank and file. Somehow it stands us rabble up and makes a row of men stiffen or a rose of lead filings arise. A rose is a rose that arose, a magnetic personality very nearly said. She knew how to draw this one painter to her place in Paris and make him something greater. (She knew how to cube him.) But the magnetic can turn on a dime and go all red like a face of a Rubik’s Cube. In fact, its flip side can repel what it once sucked in— all those friends, Romans, countrymen, cubists.

—cooked by crooked math—is more than enough. For example, the rough patch on the roof of the mouth we tongue— a light fixture, chandelier of texture—is so much more than mere canker. And when fingering the clasp on Father's snuffbox, his fine initials grate against our fingerprints' grain like an engraved last gasp. Less, being more, makes of the tectonic plates of molehills a mountain ridge the way the stark plain of the White Album's sleeve raises the Beatles' embossed logo to the level of topography— the way tiny things can't help being, next to nothing, something— the unanticipated mole that makes a one-night stand's upturned ass, the last leaf out on a limb, the little going a long way.

makes wind the way it whirls about and blows the neighboring names of other signatories away. The point of it is not the John or Jane Doe it names; the point’s the quill in motion as if still stuck and aquiver in goose skin. The trick to writing well isn’t up the sleeve. It is the sleeve that fluffs up the flourish, that blooms around the stunted stamens of the fingers and distracts us from our grasping for the sun or the uncertain scratching of the stylus.

Heifetz’s Decca recordings show him doing what he did best: transforming two- and three-minute trifles into works of perfection. —John Maltese Imperfect things are always— it seems—a wave of some wand away from perfection. They’re there—the toady and the bumpy with warts—for turning into princes. Even pumpkins— propped upon piles of lumber— idle like unupholstered carriages up on cinder blocks. But a trifle’s potential— its capacity for alchemy, actually— can leave you longing for lead. So many things you think are Prince Hals are really just kings.