Grönemeyer in Chicago and New York

Marquee of the Beacon Theatre, New York, January 2013

This is how life works: I have to travel to New York to find out that German rockstar Herbert Grönemeyer, one of my all-time favorite musicians, will be performing in Chicago.

I just spent a whirlwind weekend in New York with my family to attend the bar mitzvah of a very good friend's son. We stayed at the rather nice Hotel Beacon on Broadway on the Upper West Side as that was going to be close to the festivities. This hotel happens to be next to the Beacon Theatre, and when we arrived, my daughter mentioned seeing the name Grönemeyer next door as if he might be coming for a concert.

"Really?" I said, not quite believing her. Why, after all, would a German singer perform in New York? He'd never performed in the U.S. before, at least not to my knowledge. I always have to import his CDs from Germany, or buy them on amazon.de and have them shipped.

Statue of Balto the Sled Dog, Central Park, New York, January 2013

Sunday morning my daughter and I squeezed in a walk through Central Park, our mission being to finally see the statue of sled dog Balto, which we did find, see above. On our way back we came up Broadway and, right before our hotel, the red headline on the marquee of the Beacon Theatre beamed "Herbert Grönemeyer." I waited until it had rotated through all the upcoming shows to snap the picture. While standing there at the blustery street corner, I started having visions of returning to New York just to attend this concert. But would he even perform in German? Could I take hearing  my favorite songs sung in English? I decided, in my day dream, that I'd only travel to New York if he performed in German.

After all, his lyrics and especially his word plays, such as "Wir haben den Regen gebogen" from the hauntingly beautiful love song Der Weg, written after the death of his wife, are one big reason I love his work. My favorite song of his is still Bochum, his first big hit back in the early 1980s, a love song to his hometown in Germany's rust belt. For the uninitiated, Grönemeyer has also acted, most famously as the lone surviving journalist in the well known German movie Das Boot.

When I did get around to looking up the New York concert online, what did I find? Grönemeyer rerecorded 20 of his most successful songs in English, is releasing an English CD in the U.S. in February, so will be performing in English (I'm still not thrilled about that), but he will be performing in Chicago first (at the Chicago Theatre on February 23)! No need to indulge in the extravagance of traveling for a concert, and since it's local, I might just survive those songs in English. We shall see. In any case, I got tickets for me and two of my kids who don't loathe him from all my thumping his songs in the car. In fact, they picked up some German that way. Grönemeyer's renown song "Mensch" is called "Telefon, Gas, Elektrik" by my younger son because that phrase from the lyrics stuck in his mind from my playing it in the car so much.

Snow Flurries!

I usually don't get excited about snow flurries, especially not on a rather dreary day like today, but right now I am because it means we are finally getting some snow here in Chicago. The first this winter! You just gotta have snow in winter. Otherwise, what's the point?

So here's the view from one of my sun porch windows.

The Paramedic Method

I'm still struggling with trimming an essay to meet word count (this essay's parking lot is full!), and so I decided to employ the Paramedic Method that I teach in my composition classes at Kaplan University. I'm not sure why it's called "paramedic" since to me it seems more surgical, but perhaps it's meant as a first aid for beginning writers when for me it's more of a last ditch surgical procedure.

The Paramedic Method is an editing method to aid in writing more concisely. Of course I instinctively use it when I edit, but still, my word count is at 807, and I have to get to 800, so perhaps applying the Paramedic Method will help.

Here goes:

Step 1: Find all the prepositions and see if you can contract or replace them with a stronger verb:

   Example: ...laid claim to   " claimed (from 3 words to 1)

                  ...putting in pipes   " laying pipes (1 word less)

Step 2: Look for forms of the verbs "to be" and "to have." The search function comes in handy here. See if they can be replaced, eliminated, or substituted with stronger verbs.

   Example: It wasn’t until I saw the house that I realized... (10 words)

                   " Not until I saw the house did I realize... (9 words)

OK, only one word less with this particular rephrasing, but hey, I'm down to the wire. Incidentally, as I search through the text for "was," I find another spot where I could trim:

          ...because the house was a mess.   "  ...because the house was messy.

But, do I really want to? "Messy" sounds different than "was a mess." Now I'm back to the fact that text is not just text, but hopefully literary writing, and what a phrase sounds like does matter as well.

I might have to resort to cutting another qualifier or description. I've already dropped descriptions like "my father as a boy, in a cable-knit sweater" to read just "my father as a boy." I rather hate that, because "in a cable-knit sweater" provides a nice visual as well as a cultural reference, but alas, it is not strictly necessary to move the story forward. Neither is "walking down the street" in "as we left, walking down the street," so perhaps that will be my next victim.

For today, however, I'll give the essay a break. Only time can provide the necessary distance to see the piece more clearly, and to spot another few words that can go. Then I can consider whether to pop in that one "yet" I'd really like to have in the first sentence.

In Search of Winter

Hello winter, where are you? There is no sight of snow in Chicago, so on a recent trip to the Indiana country side I went in search of winter, looking for snow, ice, and perhaps some icicles, too? Here I wave at myself in a pond.
 

 

 

A less creepy view of the same pond

 

 

 

A look up and the winter sun hangs dim in the sky.

 

 

 

 

On into the forest

 

 

 

 

A remnant of fall

 

 

 

 

I notice that the only color in the winter forest is a dash of russet orange like this.

 

 

 

 

Later I even find some orange bark on a fallen log.

 

 

 

 

Speaking of logs, I love this crack.

 

 

 

 

One of the few pine trees reaches into the winter scene.

 

 

 

 

A frozen ditch

 

 

 

 

 

For some reason I love that rusty ton. I featured it in my fall photo essay. Now I see that some of that rust is really orange!

 

 

 

 

A reminder of summer's hot days watering the trees.

Just around the corner from the sprawling hose, this icicle beauty catches my eye.

And here, I catch myself in the window of the tool shed amidst all the beauty of winter.

The Beauty of the Parking Lot

Luc-sur-Mer, Normandy, France, June 2009

Ok, so this parking lot is beautiful because it is a) on the Normandy Coast of France, and b) features a sunset. I chose this vacation shot my daughter took because it fits today's post, but I actually want to talk about the beauty of the parking lot as a writerly tool.

The past few days I have been trimming an essay to meet the word count of a call for submissions, and the "parking lot" method has made this much easier. All this means is that I open another document, give it the same file name as the piece I am editing, but add the words "parking lot." Then, when I cut passages, I paste them into the parking lot document, rather than just hitting the delete button. That way the trimming goes much faster because I can be harsher. Those precious phrases are not lost, they are just "parked."

I have occasionally gone back and put something in again that I had previously parked. After all, the editorial process is a fickle one. As you trim, you home in on a piece's meaning, and sometimes something you thought should be cut actually needs to go back in. The beauty of that writerly parking lot is that your hard work in writing those words and sentences is not lost.

I also never delete my parking lots because once in a while I have been working on another piece and had that keen sense of having already written about this, and sure enough, I find it in a parking lot (the document search function is also a beautiful thing). Most of the time, however, a parking lot never gets looked at again once its corresponding piece is submitted.

Sometimes the parking lot does get full, meaning there is no more I can cut. With this essay I am working on, I started with about 1,300 words and am now down to 878, still not quite within the word count range of 700 - 800 words. This is when the piece goes off to an editor friend. She can see what I cannot, and perhaps she'll ask me, despite all the cutting, to elaborate on something I took out. The beauty then is that it's still in the parking lot, ready to be evaluated again.

What's Left of a Friendship

In my current quest to get stuff done around the house, I hung up this crystal again. For years it hung in the southern sun porch window, and the kids would always delight in the rainbow colors it would throw onto the living room walls when the sunlight hit it just right. I don't even remember when I took it down, probably when the window cleaners came by last (that's also been a while), but it sat in a dish on my desk for a long time.

I put it back in its old place, namely the sun porch window facing my desk, where it sparkles in midst of the view of the apartment buildings beyond. For all its clear beauty, the crystal also carries a twinge for me as it is what's left of a long friendship. It was given to me by my oldest friend in the sense that our friendship reached the furthest back (we met when I was twelve and she fourteen). Sadly our friendship broke up when I had my third child, something she did not approve of. The good thing is that we did talk about it, about our different views and goals for life - she that she couldn't support a decision of mine that she thought was bad (in her opinion as a budding family therapist and longtime elementary school teacher she felt that three children were too much for a family), and I that I felt friendship entailed supporting a friend no matter what you ultimately thought of her decisions. In the end we agreed that we wanted to continue to stay in touch because our long history together was valuable to both of us, but sadly that did not happen. I sent her New Year's cards for a while after that, but did not hear back. Five years ago when I wase visiting the Badlands in South Dakota with my family (one of my favorite places in the world), I thought much about her as we had done that trip together many years prior to that, so I sent her a postcard. I never heard back either.

So the crystal is what remains, and many memories, of course. In fact, now that I think about it, I have two other things that she gave me, and they are also made of glass: a crystal cake platter she gave me for my wedding (we use it often), and iridescent dessert glasses of which I only have three left, so I hardly use them (the family is too big). Perhaps it is symbolic that what I have left of that friendship is glass - beautiful but oh so easily shattered.

Winter Beach Walk

New Year's Day had me walking the beach with my younger son, and I'm glad we did because then the weather turned gray, and the last remnants of ice and the dusting of snow have vanished in the meantime.

Calling this shelf ice is a little grand but still, that's what it is.

Water painting on sand.

This could be any time, really.

It required some serious bundling up, though!

You can still hunt for beach treasures in the cold - here sea glass with an interesting pattern.

Those were crunchy footsteps on ice and piles of cracked seashells.

At the end of 57th Street Beach: a theater of ice! Oh, by the way, the light was really that blue.

Glazed in ice - the pier at 59th Street Harbor.

Light and a Word for 2013

Here's wishing you lots of light for this new year 2013! I'm a tiny bit proud of this photo because I was trying to achieve the bokeh effect (those blurry lights - skilled photographers will know what I'm talking about), and I sort of managed it here. I took this on New Year's Day during a visit to the Museum of Science and Industry; it is actually a fat column decorated with light chains, but in its blurry version I've named it light shower. So, may you, dear reader, be showered with light this year!

Pushing my photography skills along is certainly one of the things I will be doing this year. As I was hibernating these past few days, I've been coming up with ideas and plans. Making my way through Susannah Conway's Unraveling 2013 Workbook was one of my "between the years" activities, and one of her prescriptions is to have a guiding word for the new year. I've never done this before, but I didn't hesitate at all in knowing what mine would be: create.

In fact, I commissioned my son a while ago to cast those six letters in metal so I can mount them on the wall right across from where I usually sit on the couch writing, reading, or editing photos. If he ever manages to create those letters, I'll share the view. In the meantime, I am curious to see what having a word for the year will bring. Perhaps you want to think about having one, too?