FM radio poet

Lin Brehmer

     The dog needed her teeth cleaned. Her appointment was at 7:30 a.m. Monday, so I left the house at 7:15, which put me in perfect position to listen to Lin Brehmer's "Lin's Bin" on WXRT, 93.1 FM, which airs Mondays and Fridays, at 7:15 a.m., repeating at 6:15 p.m.
    I'm not sure how to describe Lin's Bin for someone who hasn't heard it. A little poetic digression, answering a listener's question, which can range from the prosaic ("Why are teenagers so grumpy?") to pop culture ("What are the best album covers?") to the profound, ("Can you explain string theory?"). 
     His answers start on the surface of his subject of the moment, then dive into the depths of existence, holding a profound mirror on modern life. Brehmer's droll, steady commentary is interspersed with clips from movies and songs, a sort of aural montage of words and music. He's been doing the twice weekly segment since 2002. 
    Monday's was a question from Chris DeRosa of Westmont. "Lin, after living with my parents, my college friends, and now my fiance, I noticed one similar oddity: Why does every household have a junk drawer?" 
     That's a simple, almost obvious question, one you'd never hear addressed on WBEZ. They'd use the time to tell you about building a road in Guatemala, and would shrug off the junk drawer as lacking in gravitas. 
    Which is why Lin Brehmer can be in turns funny and profound. He has no gravitas, no political agenda, other than to puzzle over the same world we're all puzzling over. His catch phrase, "It's great to be alive," is a 50-50 mix of sincerity and sarcasm. Brehmer understands the small ball most of us play, the tiny interests and flickering, selfish concerns that occupy our lives, somehow redeemed by occasional flashes of wonder. Friday's Lin's Bin was a riff on the phrase, "Take care of you" which he spun into an ode to love and sacrifice that brought a tear to the eye.  
     To my eye, anyway. 
     Monday was more typical, half rumination, half romp.
     "Why does everyone have a junk drawer?" Brehmer asks. "...the junk drawer is just a manifestation of our postponement,  of all the junk we accumulate, the curios that wind up in a drawer are just a mental map of our random lives. The best part of this question is how it forces us to go through our junk drawer and  revisit tokens of our own common existence. Matchboxes from shuttered restaurants. A cheap James Brown wrist watch that doesn't work. . . Our junk drawer is not to be judged or abridged, because we need a place to hold onto what is least important."

    As a person with several junk drawers at home—because one just isn't enough—his existential reflection on our worthless-yet-precious stuff struck home, particular since it evoked —I swear to God—a description of the surface of a desk, my favorite passage from Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow:

         Tantivy's desk is neat, Slothrop's is a godawful mess. It hasn't been cleaned down to the original wood surface since 1942. Things have fallen roughly into layers, over a base of bureaucratic smegma that sifts steadily to the bottom, made up of millions of tiny red and brown curls of rubber eraser, pencil shavings, dried tea or coffee stains, traces of sugar and Household Milk, much cigarette ash, very fine black debris picked and flung from typewriter ribbons, decomposing library paste, broken aspirins ground to powder. Then comes a scatter of paperclips, Zippo flints, rubber bands, staples, cigarette butts and crumpled packs, stray matches, pins, nubs of pens, stubs of pencils of all colors including the hard-to-get heliotrope and raw umber, wooden coffee spoons, Thayer's Slippery Elm Throat Lozenges sent by Slothrop's mother, Nalline, all the way from Massachusetts, bit of tape, string, chalk ... above that a layer of forgotten memoranda, empty buff ration books, phone numbers, unanswered letters, tattered sheets of carbon paper, the scribbled ukulele chords to a dozen songs including "Johnny Doughboy Found a Rose in Ireland" ("He does have some rather snappy arrangements," Tantivy reports, "He's sort of American George Formby, if you can imagine such a thing," but Bloat's decided he'd rather not), an empty Kreml hair tonic bottle, lost pieces to different jigsaw puzzles showing parts of the amber left eye of a Weimaraner, the green velvet folds of a gown, slate-blue veining in a distant cloud, the orange nimbus of an explosion (perhaps a sunset), rivets in the skins of a Flying Fortress, the pink inner thigh of a pouting pin-up girl ... a few old Weekly Intelligence Summaries from G-2, a busted corkscrewing ukulele string, boxes of gummed paper stars in many colors, pieces of a flashlight, top to a Nugget shoe polish can in which Slothrop now and then studies his blurry brass reflection, any number of reference books out of the ACHTUNG library back down the hall—a dictionary of technical German, an F.O. Special Handbook or Town Plan—and usually, unless it's been pinched or thrown away, a News of the World somewhere too—Slothrop's a faithful reader.

    There, now you can say you've read most of a paragraph of Gravity's Rainbow. If you think that was tough sledding, imagine getting through 776 pages of similar. Exhausting, but satisfying too. When you're done, you know you've accomplished something, and it sticks with you, obviously, or at least that part stuck with me.
    Brehmer's words also stick with you, a blend of personal and universal, an oasis of intelligence in a media landscape that too often seems as if it has hit the bedrock of stupid and is struggling to drill deeper. I sat in the van outside the veterinarian's office, listening, scritching my dog, waiting for Lin to finish his segment. You only get two chances to hear each "Lin's Bin" on air, then it vanishes. While he will post scripts on line, occasionally, the finished product, with its fun acoustic embellishments, does not exist on the web. Because of the medley of music and movie clips, and the insane hash of our copyright laws, he can broadcast it, but not post it. So you have two chances to hear it and then it disappears. 
     Which is both regrettable and apt. Because one of the points underlying Lin Brehmer's writing is, I believe, that life is not only great, but fleeting, and we have to appreciate what's in front of us while it's there and while we can.

Amazon's white collar sweatshop

    Treating your employees like crap is not a new concept.
     In fact it's very old. Peer into the past and you see it everywhere. The 12-hour day. The six-day work week. Children in thread factories. Lose your hand in the spinning exposed gears? You're fired and the next guy takes your place.
     Nor do we have to go back in time to find Dickensian conditions. The reason our stuff is made in China is because decent workplaces, which cost money, are scarce there. Workers packed into dormitories, nets under the windows to catch the suicides, factories belching pollution. No pesky EPA there, and the fact that 4,000 Chinese citizens die of air pollution-related illnesses every day, well, there's plenty more.
     How do we compete with that?
     We used to fancy we'd be smarter, more productive, more innovative. That was a decade ago; we seem to have given up that dream.
     Now the plan is to compete by emulating them. We'll work all the time too, embracing an insane Horatio Alger pluck and luck and email ethic. There is always an element of America who wants to imitate our foes. In the 1950s, that meant instilling the same thought-police, loyalty-oath fear tactics that we decried in the Soviet Union. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Now we're going to out-hustle China.

     I'm writing this in the aftermath of reading a lengthy, jaw-dropping exploration of the corporate culture of Amazon that ran in the New York Times  They spoke with more than 100 employees, past and present, of the Seattle-based online retailing giant, and portray a white collar sweatshop where a set percentage of employees are fired each year on general principles. Where failing to answer a midnight email is unacceptable, and employees unfortunate enough to contract cancer or have children can find themselves shunted toward the exits for being insufficiently committed.
     And like Communist China, it works great, on one level. Amazon is worth a quarter trillion dollars. Founder Jeff Bezos is the fifth wealthiest man on earth, with 188,000 employees working like plow horses to make him fourth richest.
     But on another level, the notion that employees should have full, rounded lives, with hobbies and families and relaxation, it's a failure.
     Their entire philosophy seems to be that the customer is king. the assumption being that all customers want is to get their "Minions" DVDs delivered in 20 minutes, by drone if possible. But customers also care, maybe, a little, about where the stuff they buy comes from, and as much a disincentive it is to buy books on Amazon, knowing how it has been chewing up publishing, it's even more off-putting to realize you're supporting a dehumanizing hive.
     But not that off-putting. Amazon will not suffer much from a story in the Times. Horrid conditions in China might make us shake our heads, but we still buy their khakis.
     Why? Maybe somewhere we lost our humanity. Maybe decent work environments were a phase, a mid-20th century American fad, and now we are reverting to form. The philosophical groundwork is certainly being laid. Politicians used to paint themselves as the workers' friend. Now a truly loathsome billionaire like Donald Trump can be the darling of the party of Lincoln, just because he promises to bring his secret rich guy knowledge to the table. Scott Walker is running on his success at crippling public unions in Wisconsin, and Bruce Rauner is aping him. We went from a society that asked itself why teachers don't get paid like athletes do, to a society that wonders why teachers get paid so much, and tries to see that it stops, in the name of economy.
     Reading the Amazon story, I uttered a silent thanks for the career I've had. A good union salary to do work I love for tolerable management. Now people line up to do that work for free under the dubious proposition that making Arianna Huffington rich will rebound well to them in some nebulous fashion.
     Our only hope is that working for free, like abusing workers, is an untenable business model, long run. You can dupe people for a while. But they don't like being unpaid drones. No dogma of well-polished MBA phrases hides that forever, and so coercive ideologies, whether communism or our current technology stoked wealth worship, won't prevail. People are not that stupid. At least I hope they're not that stupid. Donald Trump is still topping the polls

The pinwheel turns

     Before I ever came to Chicago, Chicago came to me, with all its sweet ethnic pride, in the form of Maurice Lenell cookies. I didn't know it, at the time, that these small, sugary emissaries, marching by the millions from their Harlem Avenue plant, were a lingering remnant of the city's vibrant Swedish community, along with Andersonville, Peterson Avenue, and Walgreen's.
     A remnant that will fade out of existence now that the brand has been shut down by its owner, Consolidated Biscuit of Ohio.
     No more almonettes. No more raspberry jelly swirls. No more—sob!—pinwheels.
     Of course there was always more to Maurice Lenell than just cookies. They had the crinkly red paper nest the cookies sat stacked in. The distinctive logo, a lucky boy who had somehow contrived to find a cookie jar larger than himself and climb inside. The cookies were all of a size, about a half dollar, came in two dozen varieties.
     Not that the varieties were equal: there was a hierarchy. At the bottom, the Chinese almond—boring. Next, the chocolate chip -- always a disappointment, never really very chocolate chippy. Better were the hexagonal cookies topped with coarse sugar, and the raspberry jelly swirls, with their tongue-pleasing ridges and glob of red goo—they might call it "jelly," but it was hard, and would embed itself in your molar to be picked out with a fingernail.
     And the empyrean, the best-selling pinwheel. A dense disc of sugar, swirled chocolate and vanilla, with an improbable pink trim.
     They spelled cookie "cooky," "The Maurice Lenell Cooky Co.," a throwback to its origins: Hans and Gunnar Lenell. who opened the Lenell Bakery in 1925, and then joined with friend Agaard Billing in 1937 to start the company at 3352 N. Milwaukee. The company moved to West Belmont Avenue in 1940 and built the last Harlem Avenue plant in 1956 (okay, not in Chicago, but Norridge. Close enough for baseball).
     Speaking of lucky boys, I toured the Harlem factory, though it took some doing. As a card-carrying member of the Division Street Russian Baths, I would take the heat, and one of the sweaty Jewish guys on the bench with me was Wayne Cohen, whose father Sonny bought the company in 1987. He was reluctant to let me visit. Why? I wondered. The machine, he said, for making pinwheels is proprietary. He worried their competitors would learn their secrets.
     "How about this," I suggested. "You don't show me the machine that makes the pinwheels. And I'll promise not to say anything about how pinwheels are made. So between your not showing it to me and my not writing anything about it, the secret will be safe."
     That worked. So I got to walk through the plant, which closed when Lenell went bankrupt in 2008. Passing happily through pools of aroma, puffs of almond, of sugary sweetness. If you like pinwheels from a box, imagine eating one hot off the production line. Bliss.
     For years afterward, at Christmas, Lenell would dispatch a four-pound drum of cookies, sometimes several drums which, ethical journalist I am, I would either set out in the newsroom or convey to the local firehouse. It made a grand procession down Halsted Street, me, holding the big drum, two eager boys skipping along after, on our way to make firemen happy.
     People are rushing to buy up the dwindling stock, but they're just postponing the inevitable. It's sorta sad, spinning the dials of your safe, pulling out that last stack of pinwheels, laying on a chaise in a dimmed room and slowly bringing it to your lips, weeping. 
     I've reached the point where I let stuff go. It's the Willis Tower now. Deal with it. If you love Maurice Lenell Cookies, you've already had better memories of them than you'll get by fetishizing the last ones made by some company in Ohio.
     Better to end with one last Maurice Lenell memory. Then we'll sweep the crumbs into the dust pan of history.
     There was a huge old furnace in the basement of our building at Pine Grove, some 1920s relic too big to remove. I always told the boys that a monster lived there. Now and then I'd suggest we go down and feed the monster in the basement. I can see us, one boy gingerly holding a paper plate containing a couple of Lenell cookies--not all those tins got to the firemen. A boy would timidly set it down, and as they'd bolt for safety, I would sky the cookies off the plate, jam them into my mouth, and follow.
     We'd assemble just outside the furnace room.
     "Go back," I'd whisper. "And see if the monster ate the cookies."
     The younger one cautiously peeked through the doorway, at the bare white plate set before the furnace.
     "They're gone!" he said.
     Now Maurice Lenell is gone too. But they were here, once, and that's the important thing.

Illinois State Fair II: Cows don't have names or say "moo"

     This is Part 2 of my visit to the Illinois State Fair. If you missed Part 1, you can find it here. 

     Pride is a sin, I know. But I'm really, really proud of asking that question about the black sheep.

     SPRINGFIELD — Sheep are not known for their clothing. Usually they are seen sporting nothing more than their own luxurious fleece.
     So here at the Illinois State Fair, I was surprised to find sheep dressed in outfits. Identical getups, fittingly for sheep: blankets and masks, like ovine superheroes from some weird comic book: "Super Sheep Patrol!"
     I had a hunch why — protect their coats for judging — but since a reporter's hunches can be spectacularly wrong when diving into unfamiliar areas, I thought I'd better check.
     "Keep 'em clean," confirmed Kati Grimes, of Peterson Sheep Farm in Kewanee. "It takes a long time to clean the wool; a good hour. After all that hard work, we always want to cover 'em up. The legs will get a little dirty, but you can always rinse them off."
     I had never spoken with a sheep farmer before; as we talked, my attention was drawn to a solitary black sheep in a nearby pen.
     "The black sheep . . ." I asked, keeping my face arranged in an expression of serious inquiry. "Do they pose any particular behavior problems?" 
     She smiled. "The black sheep do not behave worse," she said. "They're actually pretty well-behaved."
     Another myth shattered by solid reporting. Pigs, on the other hand, are as advertised: fat and lazy. Getting pigs to stand for a few minutes of judging takes constant flicks of a whip. Most pigs in pens were inert mounds of sleeping flesh, lightly breathing, ears fluttering, extending a hock in dream.
     The fair has two distinct worlds — that of the visitors, here to eat corn dogs and shriek on the carnival rides and, maybe, pop into a livestock barn for a quick look-see. Then there are the farmers, who are here for the competitions, which are not merely points of pride but solid business opportunities — being a permanent champion raises an animal's value for breeding purposes.

      I watched white-shirted 4-H Club members Abe Henkel, 13, his sister Kate, 10, and 17-year-old twins Cameron and Evan Jodlowski display their Toggenburg goats.
     What's it like to raise goats?
     "Hard work," said Abe Henkel.
     They're sure not here for the rides.

     "In all the years I've taken them to the fair, they've never once asked to see the carnival," said the Henkels' uncle, Greg Morris. "They're oblivious to the commercial aspects. They're there for the livestock portion. They're farm kids. They'll always be farm kids."
     And if you're wondering how the farm kids view the city visitors, well, let's say on a sliding scale, somewhere between amusement and contempt, depending on the encounter. For instance, I quickly realized the animals aren't given names, and that asking a farmer for an animal's name is like asking an auto mechanic for the names of his wrenches. But I was so thrilled to find the Illini Dairy Club's Milk-A-Cow stall, in a far corner of the fair, that after I paid my dollar, I asked the young man showing me how to squeeze a teat whether the cow had a name. He hesitated for one second, just long enough to convey that he was humoring an imbecile.
     "Bessie," he deadpanned.
     All part of the education process.
     Across the road, in an arena smelling surprisingly of dill, we watched pure white Charolias beef cows walk in a circle of wood shavings
under American flags. Payton Creasey, 15, had just won a red ribbon — second place — in the open show competition with her 1-year-old, and was leading the 1,500 pound animal from the ring when it let out a moo; well, a far more guttural noise than a mere "moo" would suggest, but "mwraerha" looks wrong, so "moo" it is. I might not even have noticed the sound, but my 16-year-old, standing at the fence beside me, said something in utter sincerity that was shocking: "I never heard a cow moo before."
     How sad is that? But also typical. We trot off to the grocery store, load up on milk, vegetables and meat, and seldom wonder about where all this bounty comes from. Every year the movies — most of which are garbage — hold a big awards ceremony for themselves and everybody watches. Everybody pays attention to the Tony Awards and the Pulitzers and all the other self-administered back pats every other profession gives itself. Yet the business that keeps us all from starving to death celebrates and we shrug.
     No, I don't expect that Evan Jodlowski's Toggenburg dairy goat being named Grand Champion at the Illinois State Fair should be up there with this year's Nobel Peace Prize winner. But it's definitely worth showing up at the fair to notice and to clap, and worth looking around—not only to appreciate the variety and beauty of the animals, and the intense, stolid effort of their keepers, but also because the fair's just plain fun, though I think I went the wrong weekend — next weekend is the Monster Truck Competition, the baton twirling and ponytail contests, and the Illinois State Dental Society's Smile Contest. That sounds like something to see.
                              —Originally published in the Sun-Times Aug. 13, 2012

The Illinois State Fair is deep-fried fun

Twilight parade, 2012

    The Illinois State Fair opened Friday, and runs until Aug. 23. While I  can't say that I felt an urgent yearning in my heart to hurry down to Springfield and attend, three years ago my family did go, and it was more fun than we expected. 

Deep-fried dill pickles

     Fried dill pickles from the 17th Street Barbecue. Soft-serve vanilla ice cream in the Dairy Building. Fried walleye from the Walleye Stop. Coconut-flavored watermelon. Fried key lime pie on a stick. Fried cheesecake. Bananas wrapped in rice and fried. A rib-eye beef sandwich, unfried. Shepherd's pie. Greek salad in the Ethnic Village. A fried brownie.
     That does sound like a lot, doesn't it? That was the menu of what I ate, in the order I ate it, during the first four hours of wandering around the Illinois State Fair on Thursday, the evening it opened.
 

Have to try the red velvet funnel cake

   Granted, I didn't eat all of it. I had my family to help. Sometimes I only sampled a forkful. I had only three fried dill pickle slices. The first to try it, to register its hot dill pickleness. The second to confirm what the first had tasted like—not good, not awful, just weird. The third quarter-sized slice because my older son, who had been inspired to buy them, begged me to help.
     "Please have some more," he said, holding the cardboard trough that contained most of the pound or so they gave him for his seven bucks. "I can't finish them all."
     I delivered a little speech about how not finishing everything is a survival skill at the fair, and we pitched the rest.
     So why, having never gone to the Illinois State Fair in my entire life, did I decide to drive the 200 miles to attend now? Several reasons. First, I was in town, not on one of the epic transcontinental vacations we've been taking for, gee, the previous four years.
     Second, I was curious. I went to the fair for the same reason Mallory climbed Mt. Everest: because it's there.
     And third, I heard you could milk a cow. That piqued my interest. I've witnessed a variety of food chain activities—pigs slaughtered, goats fed, turkeys exercised, even watched bloater chubs pulled from Lake Michigan. But I've never been up close and personal with a cow. That seemed a thing to do.
     What I wasn't interested in was snarky urban sneering. Some targets are too wide—I have my pride. Just as I sheathed my dagger when I went to Graceland and Disney World, so I sensed, somehow, driving through the lovely Illinois farmland framed by white expanses of billowy cumulus clouds, that there would be no icon-bashing this trip.

     And indeed, my immediate impressions of the crowds flowing into the fair included none of the standard anthropological clucking. My fellow visitors weren't particularly fatter than anybody you'd see shopping on Michigan Avenue. They weren't rustic in obvious, laughable ways. Just here to enjoy good old-fashioned—if hypercaloric—American fun.
     Maybe it helped that the temperature was in the low 80s, so it wasn't the hell­scape it might be if it were in the upper 90s. There was even a cool breeze.
     The fair opened its 10-day run—until Aug. 19—with a Twilight Parade, led by fire trucks representing entities such as the Illiopolis Fire Protection District. Gov. Pat Quinn led a phalanx of green-shirted supporters. Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan seemed surprised to spot me in the crowd.
     "What are you doing here?" she shouted as the parade rolled by.
     "Working!" I yelled back.
     The family shared a table in the Ethnic Village with Kris Theilen, alderman of Springfield's 8th Ward, and supporter Patrick O'Ravis.
     "A lot of people who come to the fair are locals," said O'Ravis. "You get a chance to see people you haven't seen. And it's a great children's atmosphere."
      "For 10 days your routine is different," said Theilen. "I saw people I haven't seen for years. We buy the Mega-Pass. My children ride the rides like you wouldn't believe."

      My boys, while too cool for the Zipper or the Ferris wheel, were placated by the vista of bizarre fried foods — candy bars, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, anything that could be dropped into a fryer — and seemed to be having a good time, or at least as good a time as teens are capable of having with their parents. I had fun, finding the kind of whimsy I admire. One of the food stands is called, "Mom 'n' Pop Corn."
     "My oldest daughter came up with the name," said Mike Paine, who travels the country selling candied popcorn with his wife, Bonnie. "I'm pop and this is mom and the little kernels are back in Minnesota."
     He said business is good. At that moment it began to rain, lightly. I worried it might be bad for the fair, but Paine unexpectedly called to the heavens for more.
     "Quit teasing us with rain!" he commanded the skies, explaining that the drought is affecting his business.
     "My popcorn is not popping like normal," he said—the moisture in popcorn is what causes it to pop, and dry popcorn doesn't pop right. "There's a definite difference. If it's hurting me, imagine what it's doing with the farmers."
     Monday: Cows, both butter and living.

                —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 12, 20012

Enigma in an alley

     If you look down enough alleys in Chicago, you will eventually see a cellist in a bowler hat. 
     I know this is true, based on personal experience. Friday evening at the Glenwood Avenue Arts Festival, going on this weekend in Rogers Park, I was doing something utterly mundane: trying to help my younger son find a bathroom. We were proceeding up Glenwood Avenue, when I heard the distinctive sound of cello, turned my head to the left, and saw this tableau.
     When you are confronted with something enigmatic, you can do one of two things. You can either keep going about your business, accepting the gift of its mystery. Or you can investigate, plunge into the thicket, push aside the leaves of the puzzle and try to find the truth within. The former is probably the better path for a life imbued with tantalizing possibility and, even, magic. Had I kept walking, i would forever wonder, and never know when I might glance inside a parking garage and see someone juggling, or hear the flute coming from within a ComEd service vault.  

     But given my personality, and the demands of my trade, I usually take the latter route. My thinking at the moment is, if I don't find out now, I'll never know. I wordlessly handed my glass of watermelon lemonade to my son and went over and approached the man in the derby hat.
     Ryan P. Carney. From St. Charles. Indiana University grad. Plays bass with the folk group, Antony and the Tramps. Opened for Spoon at Taste of Chicago last year, carried by WXRT. Was playing in the alley at that moment for the very prosaic reason that he needed to warm up before Antony and the Tramps went onstage. 
     Of course. Thank you. It all made perfect sense. Which is why, afterward, I was a little sorry I asked. Not to take anything away from Ryan Carney: he was politeness itself. But the truth can be overrated. It's a human desire to want to know the story behind a situation. The explanation falls short of the delightful possibility. You break open a seashell, looking for the source of the swooshing sea, and all you find in your palm are shards of broken shell. 

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     August is half over. Which means that school is beginning soon. Here are some young men at ... well, I shouldn't say where they are. You'll have to guess. And "a school gym" doesn't count. Which school? I think it's knowable. There are subtle clues. I cropped the photo a bit to make it a harder challenge, but if nobody gets it by 12 noon, I'll put up a wider cropped version. Alas, someone will no doubt crack it by then. I could say that I'm batting .000 when it comes to stumping the Hive, but I prefer to view it as you're batting 1.000. 
     Anyway, where are these young men? And bonus credit if you know what it is they're doing. The winner gets ... wait for it ... a 2015 blog poster, complete in its sturdy Chicago Mailing Tube tube. Place your guesses below. Good luck.