Feeds:
Posts
Comments

At Last, My Arm Is Complete Again

30 Mar 2015 by KRAG

NataliaWhile I’m taking a hiatus from writing (and if you didn’t realize I’m on hiatus, you haven’t been paying attention), I’ve been reconnecting with the musical avocation I put down when I picked up the author’s pen.

David T Stone and company did an excellent job repairing my instruments, including fixing the divots left in my viola when a mic boom fell on us during a performance. Natalia (my viola) looks wonderful, and my violin is once again in playing condition.

I, however, am not. Continue Reading »

Posted in Music | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments »

Let Me Get This Straight

28 Mar 2015 by KRAG

I’ve been on vacation/sick as a dog for the past week, and a ton of topics have stacked up, but this Indiana…thing…has taken up all my thinking time and must be addressed first.

If you’re not aware, this week, Indiana’s governor Mike Pence signed a law that will allow businesses to turn away anyone if serving that customer would place a “significant burden” on the business owner’s religious beliefs. Setting aside its incredibly vague and non-quantifiable language, the context and timing of this bill–as well as that of similar laws/bills in nineteen other states–is squarely aimed at allowing businesses to discriminate against members of the LGBT community. In the wake of the SCOTUS Hobby Lobby decision, so-called “religious freedom” is being used as a holy cudgel with which to beat secular society over the head, and give religious zealots carte blanche to foist their particular beliefs on non-believers.

Here’s the thing: You have a right to your religious beliefs–undoubtedly and without question–but you do not have a right to run a business in any way you see fit. Your faith is your own, but your business is a secular enterprise, and if it is open to the public, that’s with whom it must treat: the public.

All of the public. Not just the part of the public you like. Continue Reading »

Posted in Culture, Politics | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment »

Limerick

17 Mar 2015 by KRAG

There once was a young man from Limerick

Who had no idea that short, usually humorous poems often bore the same name as his hometown.

k

Violas

Posted in Writing | Tagged , | 1 Comment »

Vignette 12Mar2015

12 Mar 2015 by KRAG

IEarth and Moonn time, he knew, his transgression would be forgiven (though not forgotten, for during their thirty tumultuous years, his wife had proven the tenacious nature of her memory when it came to remembered wrongs), but oh, in those first raw moments when his sleeping, animal mind awoke to action, its raging mouth spewing vowel-filled vomit and its sharp-clawed arms flailing the air with a strength that quite overwhelmed his usually reasonable demeanor, while his shrieking brain was infused by a single thought–Damn you!–and his only goal was to win, to beat down any who had the stupefying arrogance to question his authority, he was transformed by the heat of his frustration and anger from his normal self into a god–not the loving God of Creation, possessed of boundless serenity and knowledge, but one of the ancient gods, in whom everything human was magnified and every act saturated with earthly emotion–and though the rational part of his mind recoiled at the anguish he sculpted, his chiseled words striking her features with cold, steely precision, he could not suppress (and in truth, actually reveled in) the pounding exultation he felt as each tear tracked down her wizened cheek, a flood of salt water pressed from a frozen stone.

k

Posted in Writing | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments »

Cat Gut and Horse Hair

10 Mar 2015 by KRAG

SwordleafThe last time I walked into David T. Stone‘s luthier shop, I didn’t have much money. It was a quarter century ago, and I was going through tough financial times. My wife’s health prevented her from working outside the home, we were suffering through a long string of cheap but unreliable cars, and we were trying simultaneously to pay off our credit card debt and save the down payment on a house, all on a single salary. So, back then, when I brought my viola into David’s shop, I was just there for the bare minimum.

As a semi-professional musician (principal viola for the Bellevue Philharmonic and member of a couple working string quartets), the bare minimum meant two things: cat-gut and horse-hair.

Strings and bows.   Continue Reading »

Posted in Music | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Tuning Up

05 Mar 2015 by KRAG

A Sixty-Fourth NoteI used to be a musician. In my early years, it was my destiny, my fate, and my doom.

It was my destiny because of my mother. Her father was a music teacher and she herself played piano. She encouraged all her children to enjoy and play music, leading us in “kitchen band” sessions where we accompanied her rendition of “The Girl from Ipanema” with our percussion section made of pots and spoons. I showed an aptitude for it, and thus I graduated from a ladle-struck saucier to a real instrument: a violin.

Fate stepped in when it became clear that my aptitude was actually a talent. In addition to playing in school orchestra (back when every public school had a music program) I also began private lessons. These torture sessions–scales, arpeggios, the dreaded Kreutzer etudes–were held in the back room at a neighborhood music shop. The shop was a dark, cluttered space that smelled of rosin and slide grease. Instruments hung on the walls like hunter’s trophies, and the glass case was filled with paraphernalia of all kinds, from strings to reed cutters to mutes of all sorts. Mr. Meacham, my violin teacher, was a stern, unhappy man with curly grey hair and a prim smile that never reached his eyes. He set a very high bar which I approached but never met; it always seemed to be just out of reach, moving higher each time my skills improved. Continue Reading »

Posted in Music | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Song of Spring

03 Mar 2015 by KRAG

Gossamer WheelThe spruce stood tall, a shadowed cone against the cold and dawning morn, a giant sentinel overlooking the crossroads along my route to work. The bus rocked like a ship in rough seas as it rattled into the intersection, fatigued metal complaining, whirring heater blasting air like a blow-dryer, but as we passed the ancient spruce, above the din, I heard music.

From atop the spruce’s coal-dark spire, the first robin of spring, eyes wide and heart in dire earnest, sang his unmistakable song of spring. To him, it was a song of warning–This is MY tree, mofos, MY tree, ALL mine–but to me his music painted a future of lengthening days and budding groves. In his song I heard the buzz of bees amongst the blossoms, and could smell the green, green scent of new-mown grass.

I continued onward to work, departed my bus at the station and walked through the freezing city where the sun’s first rays lanced in to melt the frost from a thousand glittering windows. Around me was the bleak, chaotic noise of urban life, the only music the beeping of a dump truck set to the percussive beat of early morning construction, but that robin’s song, so high and confident, so filled with simple promise, echoed in my mind.

I hear it still.

k

 

Posted in Seattle, Writing | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »