Issuu

How a rogue laboratory got people wrongfully convicted for driving

Maya Dukmasova, Injustice Watch, p.

THIS WEEK

FOOD & DRINK

04 Reader Bites The communal climate of Casa Cactus CITY LIFE

05 Dilla’s Chicago The Pittsﬁeld Building NEWS & POLITICS

06 Cover Story | Investigation

A forensics scandal at the University of Illinois Chicago reveals a crisis of oversight in the state’s crime labs.

COMMENTARY

15 Planning Chicago should be doing much more when it comes to traﬃc planning for street festivals and major events.

ARTS & CULTURE

16 Books A semi-autobiographical novel by Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. depicts one scorching day in Chicago in 1979.

THEATER

17 Feature | Reid You’re Being Ridiculous celebrates 15 years of live lit about real lives.

18 Plays of Note A moving Fiddler on the Roof at Music Theater Works, an immersive Three Sisters in Rogers Park, and a timely Ubu the King in Humboldt Park

FILM

19 The Moviegoer The freaky gauntlet

19 Movies of Note Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest is irresistibly watchable; the mystery of Weapons is more compelling than its conclusion.

MUSIC

20 Feature | Galil It’s time to dump Spotify, and Chicago musicians are joining a growing exodus.

22 Chicagoans of Note

| Ludwig Seth Boustead, composer and founder of Access

Contemporary Music

25 Shows of Note Previews of concerts including Portraits of Past, OK Cool, and Xerobot

27 Jobs

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Illustration by Verónica Martinez for Injustice Watch. See more of Martinez’s work at veromartinezart.com.

From top: The scene of a car crash in Hanover Park in January 2019; headlines related to Illinois forensics lab scandals between the 1980s and 2010s COURTESY HANOVER PARK POLICE AND INJUSTICE WATCH; MAGGIE SIVIT/INJUSTICE WATCH

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IEDITOR’S NOTE

n this week’s issue, we publish an indepth investigation into concerning practices at a University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) laboratory involved in testing whether THC was present in human samples related to DUI allegations in several criminal cases.

Former Reader staff writer Maya Dukmasova meticulously researched a pattern of irregularities relating to both correspondence and testimony offered by the UIC Analytical

Forensic Testing Laboratory, which ceased human testing in February 2024.

Inaccurate and misleading testimony in several court cases led to wrongful convictions. This only serves to erode public trust in our safety and judicial systems.

Last month, UIC released an independent internal report investigating the situation, but this report itself does not absolve the lab or the university of negligence.

In my opinion, it just makes plain UIC’s lack of oversight on matters that affect our citizenry.

The Chicago Reader accepts comments and letters to the editor of fewer than 400 words for publication consideration. m letters@chicagoreader.com

Transparency and accountability are essential for every public institution, and especially when representatives of that entity are being called upon to testify in court. Our thanks to Maya and to her current home, Chicago nonprofit newsroom Injustice Watch, for allowing us to bring this story to your attention. v

—Salem Collo-Julin, editor in chief m scollojulin@chicagoreader.com

Southeast Spotlight: Raze Up Barber Spa

For fresh cuts, facials, and fabulous conversations

When it comes to conﬁdence about our looks, loyalty to and trust in those who care for our hair is crucial. Kecia Pointer, owner of Raze Up Barber Spa, knows just how to keep her clientele coming back. Over 25 years in the industry have taught Pointer how to provide the essentials: great service and great conversation.

Still in its early years, Raze Up Barber Spa ofﬁcially opened on Chicago’s Southeast Side in 2023. Her deep love for cutting hair eventually led to her expanding her services to the full spectrum of self-care—and that’s what makes Raze Up Barber Spa diﬀerent. Relaxation, one

RAZE UP BARBER SPA

1901 E. 79th

FOOD & DRINK

Cof Raze Up’s pillars, is taken a step further by pairing a fresh cut with a facial. Seeing her guests’ conﬁdence rise is a feeling that never gets old—their smiles always bring a smile to her face

Having attended one of the oldest barber schools in the city, located just up the street from Raze Up Barber Spa’s storefront on 79th, Pointer’s professional career has come full circle. She takes pride in giving back to the community where she got started. With her business, Pointer seeks to not only continue serving her long-standing clients but also to support early career barbers and self-care servicers; she hopes for Raze Up Barber Spa to be a catalyst for other businesses joining her block.

Like most classic barber shops, Raze Up Barber Spa surely has a television on during operating hours. Rather than sports or the news, Pointer plays music videos; a nostalgic touch that she refers to as “a better form of classic radio.” The aesthetics of her space are tailored just as nicely and carefully as the fresh lineups she trims. As our world gets crazier, self-care is one of the things that’s always in our control; Raze Up Barber Spa is just the place to simultaneously ﬁnd reprieve from the chaos and handle the upkeep that provides the calm.

Tue-Fri 9 AM-7 PM; Sat 9 AM-5 PM razeupbarberspa.com | @razeupbarberspa 312-933-8081, keciapointer@razeupbarberspa.com

hicago has no shortage of coffee shops, but few invite you to linger like Casa Cactus, where café de olla is served in terracotta mugs, and cafe walls easily become impromptu photo exhibits. Tucked behind a brick facade on North Elston in Albany Park, Casa Cactus’s white-lettered sign is easy to miss. But inside, the former storage space transforms into a greenhouse-style cafe, where rustic tables sit among dozens of cacti and succulents crowding every surface, some even cascading from old paint buckets hanging overhead.

Find more one-of-a-kind Chicago food and drink content at chicagoreader.com/food

bled for use rather than display. They even weave their childhood ﬂavors into the menu, with cinnamon-dusted horchata lattes, ponche lattes fragrant with fruit and spice, and playful creations like a Jarritos cold brew or the “Mexi Soda Pop”—Mexican Coca-Cola mixed with espresso and their own cherry syrup.

Casa Cactus isn’t styled so much as it is lived in. Almost every piece—red and green spindle-back chairs, magenta and purple serapes draped over couches, and burlap co ee sacks repurposed as tablecloths—is borrowed from co-owners Ozzy Gámez and Juan Quezada’s homes, brought in when they opened the cafe in late 2023 as an extension of their neighboring plant shop. Along the exposed brick walls, handpainted folk masks and tiny alebrijes share shelves with talavera bowls and stacks of vinyls, suggesting that the space is assem-

But my favorite detail is hidden past the espresso bar: a back room lined with floor-to-ceiling shelves brimming with cacti from the owners’ personal collection. Though compact, this makeshift venue has an intimate feel, anchored by two console tables that double as desks by day and workshop benches by night. At the far end, the sliding garage doors display a colorful mural of a Mexican-style courtyard, painted by a regular—a gesture that makes the room as personal as it is communal. More often than not, my friends and I stay long enough to wander into a microcinema popup screening, try our hand at a faux stained glass workshop, or see whatever else the evening has in store. And that’s the kind of spirit that can’t be replicated. —PAULINA MARINKOVIC CASA CACTUS 4595 N. Elston, 773-609-1489, casacactuscoffee.com v

Reader Bites celebrates dishes, drinks, and atmospheres from the Chicagoland food scene. Have you had a recent food or drink experience that you can’t stop thinking about? Share it with us at fooddrink@ chicagoreader.com.

MONDAY NIGHT

FOODBALL

The Reader’s weekly chef pop-up series, now at Frank and Mary’s Tavern, 2905 N. Elston, Avondale

Follow the chefs, @chicago_reader, and @mikesula on Instagram for weekly menu drops, ordering info, updates, and the stories behind Chicago’s most exciting foodlums.

The communal climate of Casa Cactus

This content is sponsored by the Southeast Chicago Chamber of Commerce

MAX SANSING

Courtesy Raze Up Barber Spa

CITY LIFE

DILLA’S CHICAGO

A 38-sory if o he ciy

The Pittsﬁeld Building is short compared to other skyscrapers, but it’s full of character.

By SHERMANN “DILLA” THOMAS

Dilla’s Chicago is a biweekly window into the hidden histories of Chicago area historical ﬁgures, buildings, neighborhoods, and more from Shermann “Dilla” Thomas. Thomas is a Chicago historian and content creator, and the founder of Chicago Mahogany, LLC. He serves as the brand ambassador and chief of social media for the DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center.

Anyone who has ever taken one of my neighborhood history tours has heard me repeatedly say, “If it has a name, it has a history.” This statement applies to everything, including the names given to buildings and other structures.

Recently, I saw an Instagram post of a man touring the interior of a century-old building that he had recently purchased. My first thought when seeing the post was, “Man, I wish I could buy a high-rise building.” But my second thought was, “Hey, I know what

building that is.”

The building in question happens to house one of my favorite breakfast spots. The building and the restaurant share the name Pittsﬁeld, and, as you might guess, there is a history behind that name.

The Pittsﬁeld is in the Loop on the northeast corner of Wabash and Washington, and was built in 1927. Newspaper accounts at the time suggest that the building was completed incredibly quickly, with construction taking less than a year.

Aesthetically, it’s one of my favorite buildings in all of Chicago. It is 38 stories tall, a “shorty” compared to contemporary Chicago skyscrapers. Still, what it lacks in height it makes up for in character.

The building is clad in brick and terra-cotta with a weathered copper tip on the roof. The interior features intricately designed elevators and ceilings and a chandelier that is at least three stories tall. The first five floors of

Museum, which the family also funded. Quick sidebar: Doesn’t it seem that the super wealthy were more civically-minded back in the day? Chicago’s foundational cultural institutions were gifts from our pioneering business moguls. Field—whose business founded the legendary Marshall Field’s department store chain—gave this gift to the Field Museum. The Shedd Aquarium was a gift from John G. Shedd, the second-ever president of the Marshall Field Company. The Civic Opera House was a gift from investor Sam Insull, who was an early executive for a series of companies that evolved into what we know as Commonwealth Edison today. The Adler Planetarium was a gift from Max Adler, who took over Sears, Roebuck and Company after Julius Rosenwald’s departure. And speaking of Rosenwald, in this historian’s opinion, he might be one of the dopest philanthropists this country has ever had. He gave us the Museum of Science and Industry and so much more. I can’t really think of anything being built by the super wealthy in this same manner nowadays. Anyway . . .

The Field family have long been supporters of the museum that bears their name, so it isn’t surprising that Marshall Field III decided to give the museum such a fantastic gift. The museum would go on to sell the building in 1960 for $6 million, which is equivalent to $65.3 million in today.

the building were originally ﬁtted for shops, the upper ﬂoors mostly o ce spaces.

In 1959, a Chicago Tribune column reported that approximately 750 doctors had office space at the Pittsﬁeld, and the building even had its own plainclothes security detail. The Pittsﬁeld is one of the last large buildings built in Chicago during the 1920s.

The 1930s would usher in the Great Depression. With it, Chicago wouldn’t see any more new skyscrapers until the Prudential building was built in 1955.

The Pittsfield was commissioned by the estate of business mogul and Chicago philanthropist Marshall Field. His grandson, Marshall Field III, was the main force behind its construction. It bears the name Pittsﬁeld because Marshall Field got his first job in Pittsﬁeld, Massachusetts.

The building was constructed as an investment for the Field family, but in 1944, it was a 50th anniversary gift to the Field

Today, the building is owned by investor Tom Liravongsa, aka “Tom the Skyscraper Guy,” and per his Instagram (instagram.com/ skyscraperguy), he is converting the remaining o ce spaces of the building into housing. I especially appreciate that some of the units will be reserved for a ordable housing.

Did I mention the breakfast at the Pittsﬁeld Cafe is really, really good? It’s also amazingly good that this building is being preserved and restored. Too often we’re in a hurry to knock down something old in the name of something new. We can always build, but when the old stu is gone, it’s gone forever. v m letters@chicagoreader.com

Dilla’s Chicago is sponsored by Clayco, a fullservice real estate–development, master-planning, architecture, engineering, and construction firm. Clayco specializes in the “art and science of building,” providing fast-track, efficient solutions for industrial, commercial, institutional, and residential-related building projects.

Highlights from public spaces within the Pittsﬁ eld Building include an illuminated sign for the express elevator, a huge chandelier suspended in the center of the atrium, and the original Spanish Gothic Revival-style ceilings with hexagonal coﬀers featuring touches of gold, turquoise, and coral paint. KIRK WILLIAMSON

MORE FROM DILLA

Find Shermann “Dilla” Thomas at @ 6figga_dilla on Instagram or TikTok..

NEWS & POLITICS

The scientist was on the witness stand explaining how marijuana affects the human body. Forensic toxicologist Jennifer Bash was called by the state as an expert witness, as she had been dozens of times before. But this case in DuPage County wasn’t the typical stu of courtroom drama; there were no dead victims or tearful relatives in the gallery and no prison time in the cards for the defendant. He was charged with a misdemeanor DUI for allegedly driving under the influence of cannabis.

Late one night in 2017, Lombard police ocers pulled over 32-year-old Dwan Thompson for going 17 miles over the speed limit. O cers

CRIME LAB CRISIS

Fake science, faulty methods, misleading testimony

How a rogue laboratory got people wrongfully convicted for driving high

A liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry machine. It allows scientists to analyze the content of liquid samples such as blood and urine.

as an expert witness more than 80 times before that day, she told the judge.

At trial, McMahon expected Bash to say she didn’t ﬁnd any THC in his client’s urine, because the drug doesn’t show up in urine. Its metabolites—chemical byproducts created as the body processes drugs and other toxins—can be found in urine days, even weeks after last use, making them useless for determining whether someone is high while driving.

On the stand, Bash, in her early 40s with short, reddish-pink-dyed hair, used complicated scientiﬁc terms to describe how the body processes marijuana and the steps she took to analyze urine. She explained how the body ﬂushes the THC out with a “complex molecule called glucuronide” attached. She described how she performed chemistry on Thompson’s urine to separate that complex molecule from the THC and quantify how much of it Thompson had in his system.

Judge Anthony Coco, struggling to keep up, interrupted Bash. “You are saying glucon—?” Bash spelled it out: “It’s g-l-u-c-u-r-o-n-i-d-e.”

By MAYA DUKMASOVA,

suspected he was stoned, reporting he had watery eyes and a blunt in his cup holder.

After conducting several ﬁeld sobriety tests, o cers still suspected he was intoxicated, so they arrested him and asked for a sample of his urine back at the station. The sample was sent to Bash’s lab at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she tested it for cannabis.

As he watched Bash testify, Kevin McMahon—who was less than four years into his legal career as a public defender and hadn’t had much experience challenging scientific evidence—grew annoyed, then outraged.

Leading up to the trial, McMahon had several lengthy phone calls with Bash in an attempt to understand her analysis of Thompson’s urine. “After two to four conversations I still felt confused by the lab report,” McMahon told Injustice Watch. The report didn’t specify

whether Thompson was over the legal limit for tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC—the component of marijuana that gets people high. “I was like OK, the way she’s describing it this guy is guilty . . .” and yet, “I was still on the fence about whether to advise him to plead because I still didn’t understand if he was guilty,” McMahon said.

He reached out to a toxicologist at another crime lab for a second opinion. “And that’s when I knew I wouldn’t be pleading this out.”

Bash had extensive credentials: a master’s degree in organic chemistry, more than a decade of professional experience, certiﬁcations from the American Board of Forensic Toxicology and the Illinois State Police (ISP). Her lab at UIC was accredited to international standards. Bash had tested blood and urine for alcohol and drugs “thousands” of times and testiﬁed

The prosecutor continued her questions, driving Bash to her overall point: The metabolites of marijuana in Thompson’s urine were ultimately the same as the drug. By then, McMahon had done enough research to know that wasn’t true.

“I object,” McMahon said. “The scientific community does not treat these compounds as if they are the same.”

“I am going to overrule your objection,” the judge said, “but I am not understanding.”

“She should not be allowed to testify to this,” McMahon objected again. But the judge wasn’t convinced.

Next, McMahon tried to ﬁght Bash’s testimony with his own expert—a forensic toxicologist with decades of work experience in the ISP crime lab who had testiﬁed more than 100 times for the state and only one other time for the defense.

He confirmed THC and its byproducts in urine are not the same thing and said the state police lab doesn’t test urine for DUI-cannabis investigations. McMahon was hoping to make the judge understand there was no THC in his

VERÓNICA MARTINEZ

This story was copublished with Injustice Watch.

INJUSTICE WATCH

client’s urine until Bash converted metabolites back into the drug. But it was futile.

“This was a very interesting trial,” the judge said in a sincere tone after both sides ﬁnished their closing arguments. He found Thompson guilty on one count of speeding and not guilty of impaired driving based on the ﬁeld sobriety tests. That left only the DUI-cannabis charge hanging on Bash’s lab analysis.

“As to the charge with all the science, a big reason I went to [law] school was because I stunk at math and I stunk at science,” the judge said, and announced he would take some time to review the transcript before ruling.

A month later, the judge found Thompson guilty and sentenced him to court supervision, a two-year slog with hundreds of dollars in court costs stacked on top of the loss of his driving privileges and many 90-mile round trips from his home on the far south side of Chicago to the courthouse in Wheaton.

McMahon remains convinced the judge made the wrong call by discounting testimony from the state police toxicologist. But he said he was more stunned by what Bash said in court, and how conﬁdently she testiﬁed.

Though Thompson appealed, he lost. The appellate court ruled it had no legal standing to override the trial judge’s decisions about expert witness credibility. As that ruling came down, McMahon’s office was flooded with more clients facing DUI-cannabis charges based on Bash’s urine testing—mostly low-level misdemeanors typically resolved through plea deals.

“We felt forced to dig deep,” McMahon said. “You have so many people you’re representing accused of things they’re not guilty of. . . . I just knew we gotta do something, we can’t just plead those out.”

Thompson, who otherwise had a clean

driving record, is still ba ed by his case. Regardless of what Bash said about his urine, he said in an interview with Injustice Watch, he knew he wasn’t high when he got behind the wheel of his black Nissan Altima the night he was pulled over.

He’d driven out to Joliet with a friend to catch his brother’s concert. Before the show, he smoked half a blunt. He was saving the other half for later and left it in the cup holder. By the time he got on the road after the performance it had been several hours since he’d smoked. After years of experience, he said, he knew his limits with marijuana and he was good to drive.

the lab was aware of some of the problems in its testing since at least 2021 but continued to perform tests and report results to law enforcement, mostly in DUI cases. Bash, meanwhile, repeatedly testiﬁed about the lab’s ﬁndings in inaccurate and misleading ways.

“I take great pride in my work and have always conducted myself ethically,” Bash said in written responses to Injustice Watch questions.

“It is deeply upsetting to be falsely accused.”

estimate hundreds of other people are still dogged by criminal convictions based on the lab’s work and Bash’s testimony. Some are still awaiting trial on DUI charges stemming from her work. At least two people are serving prison sentences.

The Injustice Watch investigation reveals lax oversight over forensic labs in Illinois, which has a long history of wrongful convictions based on junk science. Despite recent reforms to improve the quality of forensic science, the state is not prepared to stop another crime lab from going rogue.

UIC’s Analytical Forensic Testing Laboratory opened in 2004 when the Illinois Racing Board began using the university to test racehorses for illicit drugs. Bash began working at the lab in 2015, taking a $31,000 pay cut from her prior job as a forensic toxicologist with the ISP.

It would take more than six years for Thompson to be exonerated, along with more than a dozen other DuPage County defendants who had been convicted of low-level DUI-cannabis charges with the help of Bash’s lab work and testimony.

By then, Bash would resign, and UIC would shut down her lab right as an accrediting agency’s audit uncovered a range of unacceptable problems in its operations. Prosecutors’ o ces in some of the 17 counties for which the lab provided testing would also issue disclosures to defendants about Bash’s “inaccurate and unqualiﬁed testimony.”

In a months-long investigation—including more than 45 Freedom of Information Act requests, more than one hundred interviews,

Injustice Watch also found university ocials charged with overseeing the lab were focused on the lab’s ﬁnancial performance, not on the quality of its scientiﬁc work. According to internal emails, o cials’ eventual decision to shut down human testing at the lab came as a result of its failure to generate revenue.

UIC officials declined interview requests from Injustice Watch but recently issued an internal investigation report exonerating themselves from oversight failures. The report concluded the lab’s methods were “at all times appropriate and met accepted scientiﬁc standards” and none of its analysts “knowingly provided false testimony in criminal proceedings.”

The investigation was conducted by outside attorneys specializing in business emergencies, class action defense, and white-collar crime. In May 2024, the lab sent a letter to

“Apparently some folks are having problems with the detection and separation of Delta-8 and Delta-9-THC.”

VERÓNICA

and a review of some eight thousand pages of public records—Injustice Watch found more than 2,200 cases in which body fluids were tested for THC by the UIC lab between 2016 and 2024. In addition to improperly testing urine for DUI-cannabis investigations, these sources indicate the lab was for years unable to di erentiate between legal and illegal types of THC in people’s body ﬂuids. Worse, internal records examined by Injustice Watch suggest

prosecutors in more than a dozen counties reporting one problem in its testing methodologies going back years, but the lab did not report how many cases were a ected or issue any corrected lab reports.

To date, University of Illinois o cials have not notiﬁed any defendants that the lab’s test results of their body fluids may have been wrong. While Thompson’s record was cleared after years of legal battles, defense attorneys

By the time she began working there the lab had half a dozen full-time employees, an annual budget of $1.5 million, and was testing up to 20,000 horse samples annually. It received coveted accreditation from ANAB, the National Accreditation Board of the nonproﬁt American National Standards Institute. But the horse racing industry in the state was in decline amid the rise of Internet-based gambling options; two of the state’s four racetracks closed in 2015. The UIC lab was looking to pivot.

In her written response to Injustice Watch’s questions, Bash said she took the job at UIC because building up the lab “was a great career opportunity.” At the time she started, Bash wrote, “no one at the lab had experience conducting human testing.”

According to her hiring documents, Bash’s job duties included helping find “state and private agencies which require forensic toxicological analysis in humans to . . . assist in bringing their business to our laboratory.”

As one of the University of Illinois’s “self-supporting units,” the lab had to cover its own operating costs through selling its services and obtaining grants. According to university policy documents, such independent units are expected to support their teaching, research, public service, or economic development missions and to operate like a business, “with one important exception: a self-supporting Fund must break even over time. The Fund should not generate a proﬁt or incur a deﬁcit.”

Bash told Injustice Watch she “wasn’t told anything regarding revenue goals.”

VERÓNICA MARTINEZ

MARTINEZ

NEWS & POLITICS

continued from p. 7

The lab was housed in a low-slung concrete building on Harrison Street, inside the pharmaceutical sciences department at the UIC College of Pharmacy. Yet Injustice Watch could find no evidence anyone at UIC or the broader university bureaucracy knew much about the scientiﬁc work happening there. The university’s lawyers confirmed this in their recent internal investigation report, which emphasized officials were “unaware of any of the allegations” against the lab as late as March 2024.

Bash’s boss, lab director A. Karl Larsen, was a seasoned lab administrator. They had worked together at one of the state police crime labs in the early 2000s. A waiver of open job search procedures was requested for Bash’s hire, describing her as “very qualiﬁed as a forensic research specialist” with 14 years of experience.

Larsen declined Injustice Watch’s request for an interview but said through his attorney he “stands behind his work and the work of the Lab.”

As Bash got the UIC lab’s human testing services running, the yearslong battle to legalize marijuana in Illinois achieved a major milestone. In the summer of 2016, possession of small amounts of cannabis was decriminalized, and the state legislature also amended the impaired driving law to include a speciﬁc reference to cannabis.

There are two ways to be guilty of DUI—by failing field sobriety tests or having certain quantities of alcohol or drugs in your system. Regardless of someone’s ability to walk a straight line, blowing 0.08 percent or more on a Breathalyzer can result in a DUI conviction. Lawmakers sought to create a similar legal limit for cannabis. The problem, though, was a lack of scientiﬁc consensus on how much THC in the body equals impairment. Even more than alcohol, THC affects different people di erently, depending on body size, frequency of use, and other individual factors. To make matters more complicated, there are no breath tests to determine cannabis levels in the body. By the time Illinois lawmakers were puzzling over the problem, several states had DUI statutes that explicitly referenced cannabis, and most of them had a zero-tolerance policy. The states that did set legal limits opted for ﬁve nanograms of THC per milliliter of blood or less—a limit unsupported by science but tolerable for law enforcement.

When lawmakers initially passed a bill with a higher limit, then governor Bruce Rauner

vetoed it, saying he would only go as far as other states. In 2016, the legislators yielded and Rauner enacted the legal limit of 5 ng of THC per mL of blood and 10 ng/mL of “other bodily substance,” which wasn’t defined in the law. For some attorneys and scientists the language implied saliva, but cannabis tests using it were still in their infancy.

At the state police–run labs, forensic scientists determined that only blood testing would provide accurate results for DUI investigations under the new law. But at the UIC lab, Bash and Larsen took the law to mean urine testing was fair game.

Because of the vague statute, Bash told Injustice Watch, “the lab decided to provide the information objectively and allow the attorneys, judges, and courts to interpret the law as is appropriate.” To provide information on the amount of THC in urine, Bash used a testing method that converted metabolites back into the drug.

No other lab in the country o ered to quantify THC in urine for Illinois prosecutions.

After cannabis was added to the DUI law, the lab’s invoicing for cannabis testing skyrocketed. University ﬁnancial records show the lab billed just ten law enforcement clients for a total of $4,455 for cannabis testing in 2016. The following year the lab’s client list grew to 71 agencies with total billing of $37,650, most of which was done speciﬁcally for DUI investigations, records show.

“The demand grew rapidly and we developed a backlog,” Bash told Injustice Watch.

The lab was particularly popular in collar counties. Law enforcement from Lake, McHenry, Kane, DuPage, and Will counties accounted for about one-third of its cannabis testing business in 2017. The following year, it was more than half. This growth was driven in large part by DuPage County clients, in particular the Carol Stream Police Department, which has a reputation for aggressive DUI enforcement.

“We were more active in drug-impaired driving arrests perhaps than other agencies,” Carol Stream Police Department Deputy Chief Brian Cluever told Injustice Watch. Testing urine in DUI-cannabis cases “was important because

it was less invasive than having to collect the blood,” he added. “With blood you have to have a certiﬁed phlebotomist to do that.”

Between 2022 and 2024, an average of about 22,000 Illinois drivers were arrested for DUI each year, according to data compiled by the Illinois Secretary of State. About a quarter of them were in Cook County, with DuPage County—which has less than one-fifth of Cook’s population—coming in second. The state data doesn’t specify arrests by substance, but attorneys practicing DUI defense told Injustice Watch most cases stem from alcohol.

Still, the UIC lab analyzed hundreds of human samples for THC and its metabolites every year, mostly for DUI investigations. In

total, it issued more than 2,200 reports on human blood and urine samples tested for cannabinoids between 2016 and 2024, according to statistics obtained by Injustice Watch. The university denied a request for the underlying lab reports, and Injustice Watch has filed a lawsuit against the university to obtain them.

While scientiﬁcally unfounded quantiﬁcation of THC in urine continued at the UIC lab, at the end of March 2021, internal records show, the lab documented another problem—one the lab later acknowledged had compromised the integrity of its blood testing, too.

Scientists from a major forensic lab in

Caleb Rallings, now 27, holds his test results signed by toxicologist Jennifer Bash, which showed no THC in his blood. Doctors testifi ed he was suffering from a dehydration-triggered delirium when he caused a fatal car accident; he was found not guilty of driving under the infl uence of cannabis. SEBASTIÁN HIDALGO FOR INJUSTICE WATCH

Pennsylvania published an article in the Journal of Analytical Toxicology describing how their lab’s machines failed to tell the di erence between two types of cannabis molecules.

machine would report its ﬁndings as delta-9.

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legal limits are tied exclusively to delta-9.

The problem was highly technical, but in Illinois, this technicality could make the di erence between freedom and years of imprisonment. The cannabis plant is composed of many chemical substances. As the fibers of the plant material are broken down into its molecules, there’s the stu that gets people high—various types of THC—and the stu that doesn’t, like cannabidiol, or CBD. Illinois law specifies DUI suspects must be tested for delta-9 THC. The Pennsylvania lab found its machines were not properly set up to di erentiate between delta-9 and delta-8 THC—another psychoactive compound that is legal in many states, including Illinois. It meant when body fluids containing both types of THC, or just delta-8, were loaded into the machine for analysis, the

A week after the publication of the article, Larsen got a call from one of the head toxicologists at the Illinois State Police, according to internal email records ﬁled in court.

“Apparently some folks are having problems with the detection and separation of Delta8 and Delta-9-THC,”

“I describe it as chemical heresy.”

Larsen wrote to Bash and two junior analysts.

“Has this been an issue yet?” Bash, who by then had been promoted to an additional role as the lab’s quality manager, wrote back she would have one of the junior sta ers check.

On March 31 the junior sta er ran the test, according to lab records filed in court. The lab’s machine showed it was not seeing the di erence between the two types of THC. The email conversation among the lab personnel about the issue dropped o . After that, Bash told outsiders in emails the lab had no problem distinguishing the THC types while internally Bash and Larsen acknowledged they did. Meanwhile, the state police labs, which had

discovered the same problem, were scrambling to ﬁx their blood-testing methods.

On May 11, 2021, ISP’s toxicology technical leader Shannon George sent a letter to prosecutors and law enforcement agencies around the state describing the problem, promising to issue amended lab reports for all a ected cases and to reanalyze blood samples using a corrected testing method where possible. Ultimately, ISP issued amended reports for 1,110 cases, according to a spokesperson.

The day after getting ISP’s letter, Kara Stefanson, a forensics liaison at the Cook County State’s Attorney’s O ce, which mostly relies on ISP for toxicology, emailed Bash: “Does your testing allow for the separation of these two isomers of THC in blood?” Bash, copying Larsen on the email, wrote back that it did.

According to their own test of the lab’s machinery and internal emails, the assertion was not true.

For nearly three years, the UIC lab kept testing blood and urine in DUI cases using a method unable to properly detect the presence of delta-9 THC—even though the state’s

Two years after the initial documentation of the problem, the lab’s main point of contact from the Carol Stream Police Department emailed Bash asking whether the lab had the capacity to test for delta-8 THC as the village was exploring ordinances to prohibit its sale.

As Bash and Larsen considered in an email exchange how to respond, she reminded him, “We couldn’t see the difference when it was mixed with delta-9.”

Larsen wrote back: “I do remember that.” In her written response to Injustice Watch’s questions, Bash maintained the lab “could distinguish between the isomers and if delta-8 THC was present it would have been noticed.”

But in their internal investigation report, UIC’s lawyers wrote the March 2021 test “indicated that the methodology used could not adequately separate the isomers.” The lawyers added their team “found no evidence that [the lab] ever considered implementing changes, nor did it ﬁnd evidence that [the lab] analysts understood the limitations of the methodologies used by the lab in quantitating Delta-9.”

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continued from p. 9

While the problem with the UIC lab’s machines remained unreported to the public and testing of blood and urine continued, the DuPage County Public Defender’s O ce, at McMahon’s urging, mounted a major challenge to Bash’s admissibility as an expert witness.

After years of handling an ebb and ﬂow of cases tied to the lab, the o ce had ten clients at the same time charged with misdemeanor DUI-cannabis based on the lab’s urine testing—nine cases prosecuted by the village of Carol Stream, and one by the DuPage County State’s Attorney’s O ce. McMahon convinced his superiors it was a good opportunity to ask a judge to bar Bash from testifying in all of them instead of ﬁghting each individually.

In April 2023, his office flew in Virginiabased forensic toxicologist Marilyn Huestis, one of the world’s leading experts on the impact of THC on driving, whose research Bash has cited to justify her own work. Huestis was asked to testify in one hearing consolidating all 10 cases. Before the judge even swore Huestis in, the DuPage County State’s Attorney’s O ce dropped its case.

The courtroom was packed with scientists from around the state, police chiefs, and attorneys who came to see the celebrity toxicologist. A few of the defendants were there, too. Bash didn’t attend, citing a COVID-19 infection.

Huestis, who took the stand in a flowing blue skirt and blouse set with large statement glasses and her gray curly hair cut short, used the only two free days she had that month to come to Wheaton and told Injustice Watch she accepted a lower payment than she normally charges to show up to court.

Huestis testified about extensive scientific evidence that “free THC”—the term scientists use to refer to the drug—does not show up in the urine of either occasional or frequent cannabis users. She testified the drug’s metabolites can be found in people’s urine up to 24 days after last use, making urine inappropriate for testing in DUI investigations. Contradicting Bash’s assertions, she testified that the field of toxicology does not treat free THC and its metabolites as the same thing. Huestis testified that in more than 50 years of working in toxicology with hundreds of colleagues, she had never heard another toxicologist claim THC and its byproducts in urine are equivalent.

“What she did was wrong,” Huestis said emphatically in an interview with Injustice

Watch. “Forensic science is all about truth. Everything we do—the DNA people, the gun casing people, all the forensic sciences—is about using scientific evidence to get at the truth. And if something is wrong scientiﬁcally, and then it’s used in a manner in which it affects the truth, then that could a ect anyone.”

Ultimately the judge never ruled on Bash’s admissibility as an expert. The prosecutor for Carol Stream dropped its cases before Bash had an opportunity to return to court to defend herself. But Huestis’s testimony led the lab to pause quantifying THC in urine.

“With the reception of the testimony from Huestis,” Bash wrote in an email to Carol Stream police o cials a few weeks after the hearing, “my lab director and I have temporarily suspended our urine quantiﬁcations for THC simply out of an abundance of caution.” In July 2023, after the cases were dropped, she emailed the Carol Stream police o cials with an update: “lf people are comfortable with it, we could start quantifying the urine samples again,” Bash wrote, “but I would just put it out there that this issue is obviously going to come up again.”

Though word was spreading about the courtroom assault on Bash’s credibility as an expert witness, less than two weeks after the hearing with Huestis, Bash was back on the stand in Cook County. She was testifying in a case against Caleb Rallings, a former Forest Preserves employee who had been charged with aggravated DUI and reckless homicide after driving his work truck into a line of cars, causing the death of one person.

Doctors testified 19-year-old Rallings had experienced a dehydration-triggered delirium after spending several 90-degree days in a row doing hard physical labor and not drinking enough water. Bash reported finding THC metabolites in his urine but said the sample was too small to quantify how much. Her lab report notes that no THC was found in his blood. Still, she testiﬁed the presence of one of the metabolites in his urine suggested Rallings had consumed cannabis 12 to 24 hours before driving—an estimation about last use that toxicologists are trained not to make and that Huestis told Injustice Watch was “dead wrong.”

One of the defense witnesses, pharmacologist James O’Donnell, said he was stunned at Bash’s testimony as a fellow scientist.

“I describe it as chemical heresy,” O’Donnell said of Bash’s methods and testimony. “Mr. Rallings was lucky that he had a judge who saw through her testimony and accepted mine.”

Rallings was ultimately acquitted on the DUI charges but found guilty of reckless homicide.

Six months after the Rallings case, Bash testified in the case that would ultimately cause her the most serious damage. A college student from Cook County named Jonathan Franco had been charged with aggravated DUI and reckless homicide after crashing his car into an oncoming vehicle in Hanover Park.

Franco had just ﬁnished a graveyard shift at a FedEx package sorting facility and was on his way home when witnesses saw his car drift across the double yellow lines and collide head-on with a vehicle in which a man was driving with his 12-year-old son. According to Hanover Park police reports, witnesses said they never saw Franco’s car swerve or try to avoid the collision. The father died.

Bash found the amount of THC in Franco’s blood was well below the legal limit. Yet during grand jury proceedings to indict Franco on aggravated DUI charges, a Hanover Park detective testified “she was able to scientifically confirm” Franco was “under the influence of cannabis at the time of the crash.” Once she reached the witness stand herself, Bash stood by this characterization.

HBash testified she had no opinion about whether Franco was impaired because “that’s not what toxicologists do,” but the presence of any THC in Franco’s blood meant that “scientiﬁcally, they were under the inﬂuence.”

Franco’s attorney sought to have the DUI charges dismissed, arguing Bash’s testimony misled lay people in whose minds “science is equated with truth, and here it was not.”

The state dropped the aggravated DUI counts against Franco and offered him a ﬁve-year plea deal for reckless homicide. He had already been on electronic monitoring for more than two years and spent 14 days incarcerated. Still, media coverage of the case suggested Franco was a high driver who didn’t get a harsh enough sentence.

Two weeks after Bash’s testimony in Franco’s case, someone ﬁled an anonymous complaint against Bash with ANAB, the national accrediting agency. The complaint alleged “untruthful, inaccurate, and unqualiﬁed testimony was provided by a toxicology analyst” at the UIC lab, according to records obtained from the university.

ow exactly the accrediting agency investigated the complaint remains a secret. “In light of confidentiality restrictions we have with our clients, we can’t release information,” Pamela Sale, vice president for forensics at ANAB, told Injustice Watch.

But shortly before ANAB auditors arrived for a scheduled inspection in February 2024, UIC o cials told Bash they wouldn’t be renewing her contract, then shut down human testing at the lab. All contracts with law enforcement were abruptly terminated, and the agencies were asked to come retrieve their blood and urine samples.

The lab personnel were caught o guard by the closure. Bash wrote to a Carol Stream police sergeant on January 10, 2024, that she and her colleagues “were shocked by the university’s decision and are working to

navigate this on a personal level.” The next day, she submitted a resignation letter, e ective at the end of the month.

The accrediting agency’s audit report detailed a slew of problems at the lab: months of missing records on “calibrators and controls used in THC quantitative testing”; years of missing evaluations on THC measurement uncertainty; no procedure to “preclude an individual from technically reviewing their own work”; no instructions for reporting inconclusive results; failure to properly review and document complaints about laboratory activities. The instrument used for THC screening hadn’t received required annual maintenance in nearly two years.

When an assistant state’s attorney from Kane County called Larsen to ask why the lab was closing, “I let him know it was because we were not proﬁtable.

Nothing related to the quality of our work,” Larsen wrote in an internal lab memo. No one in a position of administrative or financial authority over Larsen and his lab at UIC or the University of Illinois system agreed to be interviewed for this story—not pharmaceutical sciences department chair Nancy Freitag, not the College of Pharmacy dean Glen Schumock, not vice chancellor for health a airs Robert Barish, nor UIC chancellor Marie Lynn Miranda. University of Illinois system president Timothy Killeen and board of trustees chair Jesse Ruiz also refused to answer questions.

In their internal investigative report, the university’s lawyers wrote the decision to stop human testing at the lab “was the culmination of a process, which began in 2022, that weighed the financial burden of [the lab’s] human testing along with the decision to suspend the forensic science programs at the College.” According to the report, the lab wasn’t generating enough revenue to cover the expense of human testing.

Despite the growth of the lab’s law enforcement client list, less than 5 percent of its reported revenue came from human testing between 2017 and 2024, according to ﬁnancial records reviewed by Injustice Watch. Instead, most of the lab’s money still came from testing racehorses, which primarily came from the Illinois Racing Board, but also included clients in Maine, Oregon, and Texas.

Weeks after the lab ceased human testing, the accrediting agency informed Larsen about the results of its investigation into Bash. The agency “determined that the allegations related to inaccurate and unqualiﬁed testimony have merit,” Sale wrote in an email to Larsen, while ﬁnding the allegation that she was “untruthful” to be without merit.

Attorneys in DuPage County soon caught wind of these findings against Bash. In April 2024, prosecutors issued the first disclosures about Bash’s history of giving “inaccurate and unqualified testimony.” She was now a radioactive witness.

The disclosures reverberated among attorneys and forensic scientists throughout the state. Email records obtained by Injustice Watch show Illinois Traffic Safety Resource Prosecutor Jennifer Cifaldi, also an employee of the University of Illinois, ﬁelding questions from prosecutors who had relied on Bash for testimony.

At the same time, the lab’s remaining sta began to receive questions from defense attorneys and prosecutors about the lab’s ability to

distinguish between delta-8 and delta-9 THC. One of the analysts on the racehorse testing side of the lab repeated the test that was ﬁrst run in March 2021. “In short, we are unable to distinguish between the two isomers using the current methods,” the analyst wrote in an internal lab memo. “It is unknown how many cases this may have a ected.”

The analyst and Larsen emailed back and forth about whether it made sense to figure out how many cases were a ected and how to move forward. On May 16, 2024, Larsen ﬁnally acknowledged that the analytical method used by the lab “may not” have been able to tell the di erence between delta-8 and delta-9 THC in human samples going back at least six years. In a letter to state’s attorney’s offices in 17 counties, Larsen wrote, “This issue has been of concern since we learned of its existence.”

Larsen also sent a passionate three-page letter to ANAB asking the accreditation agency to reconsider its negative findings against Bash. Larsen wrote he did not see any problems with her testimony in Franco’s case, where she had described him as “scientiﬁcally under the inﬂuence” even though he was well below the legal limit for THC.

Larsen argued Bash had no meaningful opportunity to defend herself against the accusation she testiﬁed improperly. He called the disclosures issued by prosecutors based on ANAB’s ﬁndings “misleading and potentially defamatory,” and added the agency’s reputation was on the line.

“It is appalling how rapidly an accomplished and honest professional’s career can be jeopardized by misinformation and accusations shrouded in secrecy,” he wrote.

Larsen never got a response. As the academic year came to a close, Larsen retired, though he continued fielding panicked communications from the lab’s former clients trying to ﬁgure out their exposure. He now works as an adjunct lecturer in forensic science at Loyola University Chicago.

Bash, meanwhile, founded her own science consultancy, remains a member of the Illinois Impaired Driving Task Force, and continues to be certiﬁed by the American Board of Forensic Toxicology. She remains able to testify in Illinois courtrooms.

According to the National Registry of Exonerations, false or misleading forensic evidence helped convict a quarter of the more than four thousand people wrongfully convicted in the U.S. since tracking began — including 79 people from Illinois.

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Scandals involving junk science in the criminal legal system tend to involve whole forensic disciplines such as controversial bite mark and bloodstain pattern analysis, which are admissible because of rules on expert testimony set by the U.S. Supreme Court.

It can be di cult to challenge junk scientists because the only people allowed to weigh in about their legitimacy are other scientists in the same ﬁeld. Bite mark analysts must be impeached by other bite mark analysts, not by dentists or osteologists. Once admitted into a case, junk science becomes harder to challenge in others, especially when court decisions relying on it are a rmed on appeal.

Forensic toxicology, however, is not considered a junk science. Where bloodstain pattern analysis is akin to palm reading, forensic toxicology is more like measuring someone’s hand. Its practice is subject to standards governing toxicology beyond the legal system. To be taken seriously, a lab seeking to sell its testing services must be accredited by an independent body such as ANAB, which audits thousands of workplaces globally, from steel mills in Angola to animal health monitoring facilities in Ireland. UIC’s lab was one of nearly 200 sites ANAB accredited for forensic toxicology in the U.S.

Yet an accrediting agency is not a watchdog. Labs undergo accreditation voluntarily, and audits by accrediting bodies often come down to verifying that the lab has written down its operating procedures and is following them.

“We do expect that our laboratories are operating in good faith,” said ANAB vice president Sale. “It’s hard to detect if somebody wants to hide something from you. We’re only there for a short period of time.”

ANAB does not review how lab analysts testify or check the validity of scientiﬁc principles labs use as the foundations of their testing approaches.

“Accreditation is a baseline requirement for quality management of any forensic science service provider,” said Sarah Chu, director of policy and reform at the Perlmutter Center for Legal Justice at Cardozo Law School in New York. But to achieve true oversight of forensic science, she said, states need “commissions that have the power to investigate and are transparent and have the trust of all the stakeholders in the system.”

The gold standard for forensic science oversight in the U.S. has evolved in Texas over the last 20 years, after high-profile lab scandals there exposed numerous wrongful convictions. The Texas Forensic Science

From top: Jennifer Bash, the quality manager and senior analyst leading human sample testing at UIC’s forensics lab; A. Karl Larsen, the lab’s director from 2014 to 2024

VERÓNICA MARTINEZ

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continued from p. 11

Commission, formed in the wake of those scandals, today has its own accreditation requirements for crime labs and analysts; when labs and individual scientists lose the accreditation due to misconduct or incompetence, the evidence they produce cannot be used in Texas courtrooms. The commission publishes reports naming rogue scientists and detailing misconduct at labs; though the reports themselves are not admissible in court, they add public accountability.

In addition, Texas has a state law requiring

dissertation about the Texas Forensic Science Commission, found over a period of four years external complaints about labs fell precipitously as labs’ self-reporting of issues to the commission climbed.

Balancing disclosure of lab mistakes with concerns about being sued is “always uncomfortable,” said Peter Stout, director of the Houston Forensic Science Center, one of the largest crime labs in the country. “But the rights of the victims and defendants supersede the fear of the agency.”

Recent lab scandals in other states have laid

that do workplace drug testing for federal agencies, regulated through the National Laboratory Certiﬁcation Program. If a lab the size of his was subject to as much scrutiny as one doing basic urine drug testing for, say, postal workers, “I would have an audit team on the ground here in the laboratory four times a year” instead of once every four years, Stout said. He added the funding for forensics lab work across the country is also drastically lower than for workplace drug testing labs.

“The reality is, in this country, Texas is abnormal,” he said. When it comes to forensic science, “there basically just isn’t any oversight.”

prosecutors to continuously disclose evidence to defendants; prosecutors can be disciplined for failing to do so. There’s a “junk science writ” that allows people to seek new trials if they can show ﬂaws in the forensic evidence used to convict them. Most recently, the state created a portal making crime lab ﬁles directly open to both prosecutors and defense attorneys, eliminating some of the burdens of transmitting evidence.

Experts who have studied forensic oversight in Texas told Injustice Watch its broken system didn’t change overnight. But once the state committed to principles of transparency and accountability, the culture of crime labs, law enforcement agencies, and the courts began to shift. Chu, who wrote her doctoral

bare the inadequacy of forensic science regulation nationwide. In Massachusetts, a state crime lab chemist was convicted on obstruction of justice charges for falsifying lab results in as many as 34,000 cases, while another served an 18-month prison sentence for using the drugs she was supposed to be testing in some 24,000 cases. In Washington state, years of blood drug tests were suppressed due to methamphetamine contamination at the state toxicology lab. In Colorado, a former forensic scientist is facing 102 felony counts for alleged manipulation of DNA evidence. All the reforms in Texas notwithstanding, bad forensic science still ﬁnds its way into courtrooms there. Stout compared the lax supervision of crime labs to the much stricter oversight of labs

e cient delivery of forensic services and the sound practice of forensic science,” but it has no authority to investigate complaints, shut down labs, discipline analysts, or issue legally binding ﬁndings.

Instead, the commission is an advisory body housed inside the ISP, which pushed for its creation in the ﬁrst place. The chair of the commission is state police director Brendan Kelly—who also oversees most of the state’s forensics labs. Kelly declined Injustice Watch’s request for an interview.

In researching an upcoming book, Stout found only eight states with laws requiring forensics labs to be accredited or certified to produce evidence used in criminal prosecutions. In this environment, bad science can ﬂourish because most defendants, police officers, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges lack the expertise to evaluate the validity of scientists’ assertions.

In Illinois, the law is silent on accreditation but labs and individual analysts must be certified by the ISP to perform forensic testing. This process involves periodic submission of proof that lab analysts are passing proficiency tests. Like accreditation, certification adds a gloss of legitimacy without serving a watchdog function.

Despite periodic crime lab scandals—systemic failures in the Chicago Police Department’s ﬁngerprint analysis reported in 2017; lack of scientific method validation in state police blood alcohol testing reported in 2015; a local DNA analyst who failed to disclose evidence of innocence for years starting in the 1990s—Illinois, like most states, has no government body in charge of oversight and auditing of forensic sciences.

Following the discovery of a 766-case DNA testing backlog for Chicago murder cases, Governor J.B. Pritzker signed a law in 2021 creating the state’s first Forensic Science Commission. It was tasked with ensuring “the

Donald Ramsell, an attorney specializing in DUI defense who has long crusaded for more forensic science accountability in Illinois, said crime lab oversight throughout the state is “subpar and not trustworthy.”

With no one in charge of surveilling the underlying scientiﬁc validity of lab methods, “when you have a rogue lab or a lab operating in nonconformance with accepted scientific practice, if they don’t self-report, most of it goes undiscovered,” Ramsell said.

He said the state Forensic Science Commission falls far short of the authority its name implies. “Instead of improving the practice of forensic science in Illinois, it’s become another layer of paperwork,” Ramsell said.

The commission meets its ﬁrst true test in the UIC lab scandal. Its handling of the matter thus far shows the lengths left to go before it can provide a meaningful backstop to junk science in the courtroom or serve as a forum for correcting forensic injustices.

The Illinois Forensic Science Commission, which has received virtually no media coverage since it began meeting in 2022, has 14 members, including crime lab directors and criminal legal systems stakeholders. Members are divided into subcommittees focused on public policy, DNA, training, and quality issues at labs.

In February 2024, right as the UIC lab was shutting down human testing, the commission’s public policy subcommittee heard presentations from two forensic scientists about the lack of scientiﬁc basis for testing urine in DUI-cannabis investigations. One also spoke about misleading testimony coming from the lab and the imperative to clarify the state’s DUI law on urine testing in order to prevent wrongful convictions.

“I can’t remember how many times we’ve discussed this issue, so it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone,” said Claire Dragovich, one of the commission members and the director of the DuPage County Forensic Science Center.

She wanted the commission to recommend a change to the DUI law. “I’m sure [ISP] legal will have opinions about how much we can say in a letter to support this, but I want to get crackalackin’,” Dragovich said.

The commission made no public comment about the UIC lab, but seven months later it issued a recommendation to amend the DUI law to specify the measurement of “free” delta-9 THC only, which would put an end to urine testing.

State senator Julie Morrison introduced a bill explicitly excluding urine from DUI-cannabis testing in February 2025, but it died in committee with no cosponsors or hearings. Morrison declined Injustice Watch’s multiple requests to discuss the bill.

This year, for the ﬁrst time, the commission asked the UIC lab to submit a report about its “significant non-conformities”—lab-speak for major problems that require documented correction.

The UIC lab sent a report detailing just two problems for 2024: the failure to separate delta-8 and delta-9 THC and the issue of Bash’s inaccurate and misleading testimony about a defendant being “scientifically under the inﬂuence.”

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ments like “scientiﬁcally under the inﬂuence” to refer to people who weren’t high while driving.

She added she couldn’t understand why the lab hadn’t notiﬁed all prosecutors’ o ces about Bash’s past improper testimony. “I don’t understand why it was acceptable to not notify,” she said, “like it’s a really serious issue.”

Dragovich concluded the lab’s personnel can be subpoenaed years after they left its employment. “So even though the lab is not currently performing any casework, it is possible that the results from this laboratory are still being used in prosecutions and that past employees are still testifying, and there is zero oversight on what’s happening during that process.”

“I am going to overrule your objection,” the judge said, “but I am not understanding.”

Members of the commission’s subcommittee dedicated to lab quality met over Webex to discuss the UIC lab’s response in April. Most had their cameras o . The discussion sounded more like a monologue by Dragovich, the subcommittee chair who was the only person to express serious concern about the UIC lab at any commission meetings.

Dragovich said it was strange the lab had not issued any amended lab reports after discovering it could not tell the di erence between two types of THC. She spoke for a while about it being impossible to testify about the meaning of past lab results without amended reports.

Dragovich paused, making room for any of the other subcommittee members to comment. She waited for 13 seconds, then broke the awkward silence herself: “If no one has any comments about that, we can just move on to the next issue they reported.”

She read out the lab’s explanation of the problems with Bash’s testimony and said it didn’t make sense the lab hadn’t tried to ﬁgure out how many cases were impacted by state-

In June, the full commission approved its annual report about problems at state crime labs. It noted labs should issue amended reports anytime they discover testing has been inaccurate and, when a lab discovers inaccurate testimony by an analyst, identify all impacted cases and notify prosecutors. The commission’s advice—which has no legal bearing—did not include any mention of labs’ duties toward the people whose body fluids they test.

Chu, who reviewed the commission’s report, told Injustice Watch it isn’t su cient for crime labs that discover problems to notify only their law enforcement clients. She likened the failure to notify defendants themselves to a hospital failing to notify a patient of a diagnostic error.

“Forensic labs and justice system actors should have a duty to notify individuals when flawed forensic evidence may have contributed to their conviction,” Chu said. “A prosecutor might decide it wouldn’t have changed the case outcome,” but in the legal context, “determining the value of evidence is the role of the courts, not one party.”

With the Forensic Science Commission lacking authority to force any disclosures, discipline scientists, or challenge labs’ accreditations, the University of Illinois remains the only institution that can make amends for what happened at the UIC lab.

Defense attorneys who knew about UIC’s internal investigation of the lab were eager to read their ﬁndings. The report, however, came as a disappointment.

Let’s Play!

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continued from p. 13

McMahon called it “biased and incomplete. In my opinion, it’s to protect the university from lawsuits.” Ramsell called it “a whitewash.”

According to the report—which does not address the problems with testing urine in DUI-cannabis investigations—the lab’s leadership merely “missed the signiﬁcance” of the delta-8 and 9 separation issue. UIC’s attorneys also undercut the lab’s own admissions about its ﬂawed testing method, describing them as “overbroad and inaccurate.”

The lawyers wrote they consulted with Pennsylvania-based forensic toxicologist Michael Coyer to review the lab’s methods and concluded they were “at all times appropriate and met accepted scientiﬁc standards.”

Asked by Injustice Watch whether he was aware of the lab’s protocols for testing urine, Coyer said he had “no knowledge” about that. “I just looked at the technical stu ,” he said in a brief phone conversation. “I only ever talked to the lawyers.”

Bash, who at one point retained famed criminal defense attorney Jennifer Bonjean—known for representing wrongfully convicted Chicagoans as well as high-proﬁle clients including Harvey Weinstein and R. Kelly—“declined numerous attempts from the investigative team to be interviewed,” according to the report. Nevertheless, the university declared “there is no evidence to support the allegation that Ms. Bash knowingly provided

The UIC Analytical Forensic Testing Laboratory was ultimately shuttered for human testing amid a growing scandal in 2024. VERÓNICA MARTINEZ

while fatigued. If not for Bash’s lab report, Lee would be a free man.

“I know that I was not under the inﬂuence that morning,” Lee told ABC7, which first reported on his case and problems at the lab in December. “As far as the UIC lab, I believe that somebody there should have to answer for this.”

In a statement recently ﬁled in Lee’s case, the UIC lab’s director of operations told Moreschi one of the machines used to analyze Lee’s blood showed signs of THC contamination before his sample was run. In a statement to Injustice Watch, Bash denied the machine was contaminated.

Another man whose incarceration is tied to Bash’s lab work and testimony is William Bishop, a 47-year-old Chicagoan serving a 31-year prison sentence.

wasn’t impaired by marijuana while driving. He never even saw his lab report but said his lawyers told him he was over the legal limit. “We really didn’t address the cannabis subject much after that,” he said. “We all agreed I would be found guilty of DUI and should hope for a light sentence on that charge.”

In a weeklong trial focused mostly on expert testimony from doctors about his mental state, Bash’s testimony about the marijuana in his body seemed almost irrelevant. Bishop was going for an insanity defense.

The judge found Bishop guilty but mentally ill and imposed a 24-year sentence for the murder and a consecutive seven years for the aggravated DUI. Kenneally went on to hold up Bishop’s case as a prime example of cannabis-induced psychosis.

Bishop lost his appeal. He and his family said they were unaware of all the allegations against the lab until Injustice Watch reached out with questions.

false or inaccurate testimony in any criminal proceeding.”

Dwan Thompson, who now works as a CTA bus driver, was exonerated at the end of January along with 17 other people who had been convicted of cannabis DUIs in DuPage County based on the UIC lab’s urine analysis. DuPage County State’s Attorney Bob Berlin declined Injustice Watch’s request to discuss the decision to clear the cases. McMahon and his colleagues at the DuPage County Public Defender’s Office have been uniquely aggressive in pursuing justice for people convicted with evidence produced by the lab.

Besides McMahon, two private defense attorneys—Ramsell and Paul Moreschi, who represented Jonathan Franco—have led the charge fighting the UIC lab’s evidence in pending DUI cases as well as trying to get convictions overturned. They are currently representing Corey Lee, who is serving a sixyear prison sentence for aggravated DUI. Lee showed no signs of impairment after an early morning car crash that killed a father and son in Boone County. But Bash found 6.5 ng/mL of THC in his blood, over the legal limit. Lee, who later admitted to being a frequent recreational user, told police he stayed up all night with his sick dogs before heading out for work. He said he fell asleep at the wheel and ran a stop sign and that he had last smoked 27 hours before the accident. The judge found him not guilty of reckless homicide and operating a vehicle

In May 2020, Bishop, a successful former triathlete with a ﬂourishing personal training business, was in the middle of a psychotic episode when he decided to drive from his home in River North to see his parents in Lake Barrington, according to court records, including multiple psychiatrists’ testimony. Bishop described his hallucinations to Injustice Watch and said they worsened in the car as he sped down a two-lane road in rural McHenry County. He said at the time he was convinced he was being chased by a mob and thought he heard Howard Stern on the radio telling him to drive into the next car he saw. Convinced he would die if he didn’t obey, Bishop said, he slammed his Jeep into a large cargo van going 84 miles per hour. The driver of the van died, and the passenger survived with life-altering injuries.

Bishop was eventually diagnosed with bipolar I disorder with psychotic features. He spent weeks in an inpatient psychiatric unit after the deadly crash. When he was discharged he was taken to the McHenry County Jail and charged with 11 counts, including murder and aggravated DUI. State’s Attorney Patrick Kenneally’s entire theory of the case was that marijuana made Bishop do it.

In a recent interview, Bishop told Injustice Watch he used marijuana to “self-medicate” before he had the right diagnosis and treatment for his mental illness. He maintained he last took a hit from his vape pen hours before driving on the day of his accident. But Bash’s lab report showed at least 9.6 nanograms of THC in his blood, nearly twice the legal limit.

Bishop told Injustice Watch he was sure he

“Now that we are learning about the lab’s unethical performance, I question a few things,” Bishop wrote to Injustice Watch over a prison text-messaging app. “1. Was there even any delta 9 THC in my system? 2. What were my real levels and were they even over the driving statute? 3. If there was Delta 9 THC in my system, how do we know it wasn’t from contaminated equipment and not a previous sample tested?”

Lee and Bishop are the extreme cases. Prison time for DUIs is rare, unless someone has multiple prior DUI convictions or someone dies in a crash. Most DUIs end up in misdemeanor court, where defendants usually plead guilty and accept punishment in the form of ﬁnes, probation, costly substance abuse counseling, and classes on the harms of impaired driving. These punishments can still be burdensome, especially for people in challenging life circumstances or in jobs dependent on clean driving records. DUI convictions cannot be expunged in Illinois.

Bishop and Lee were among some 680 people incarcerated in Illinois prisons for DUI offenses as of the end of March. How many of them were convicted with the help of lab work from UIC’s Analytical Forensic Testing Laboratory and testimony from Jennifer Bash remains unknown. v

Northwestern University journalism residents Mitra Nourbakhsh, Kristen Axtman, and Sara Stanisavic contributed to this report.

m letters@chicagoreader.com

PLANNING

Following the wrap-up of Lollapalooza, the city has dismantled stages, reopened roads, and restored Grant Park after hosting over 100,000 attendees each day. Traffic patterns are returning to normal and transit routes are resuming their regular schedules, but for South Loop residents, the festival marked yet another weekend of road closures, crowded trains, and packed sidewalks—part of an ongoing pattern during Chicago’s busy summer concert season.

In May, I left Soldier Field alongside thousands of rhinestoned Beyoncé fans—some still singing, some already scrolling for rideshares—and quickly realized the hardest part of the night had just begun. The concert was over, but the bottlenecks were only getting started. Chicago prides itself on being a worldclass music destination, yet every summer, South Loop residents and concertgoers alike are caught in a logistical nightmare.

I’d seen this kind of postconcert chaos

Concert tra c is a safety issue

The city and CTA need to do more when planning for large public events, whether a neighborhood street fest or Lollapalooza.

By VIVIAN RICHEY

According to a recent economic study, Lollapalooza generated more than $422 million for Chicago’s economy in 2022. Hotels, restaurants, and bars in neighborhoods like the Loop, River North, and South Loop experience some of their busiest days of the year during the festival. Hotel occupancy rates routinely exceed 90 percent, far surpassing the city’s typical summer average of 75 percent. With over 90 smaller street parades and festivals throughout the summer (excluding mega-events like Lollapalooza or Sueños,

before. Two hours in the Kansas City rain after a Taylor Swift concert during the Eras Tour taught me patience, if nothing else. But I ﬁgured a city like Chicago, with its sprawling CTA network and experience hosting events, would know how to handle the crowds. Instead, I found myself watching bus after bus fill instantly, surge prices climb into the absurd, and strangers start the long walk home together like an impromptu parade.

On a sold-out night at Soldier Field, up to 61,500 people flood into a part of the city where rideshares are jammed by barricades and trains struggle to keep up. The CTA usually offers extra service during major concerts, but locals say the effort often falls short. Other cities have found ways to handle the crush. Congestion pricing, a system that charges drivers a fee for entering busy areas during peak times, is being rolled out in New York to cut traffic and fund transit.

where residents and tourists pay hundreds just for a ticket) relying on people hoping to get in for free isn’t enough to sustain these local events in the long term. The city’s heavy focus on mega-events not only strains infrastructure—it pulls attention and resources away from neighborhood festivals, many of which are shrinking or disappearing entirely.

A lack of preparation can also create safety issues for neighborhood festivals and street fairs. A Block Club analysis of city permit data from 2024 found many street festival producers are submitting permits for crowd sizes signiﬁcantly lower than what’s being advertised online, causing those smaller estimates to be used for safety plans.

West Loop’s Taste of Randolph’s 2022 permit projected nine thousand people but advertised 100,000 to food vendors. Southport Art Fest listed nine hundred on its 2024 permit but told artists to expect 30,000. Windy City

Hot Dog Fest in Portage Park projected 1,500 on its 2024 permit but promoted 40,000, and Andersonville Midsommarfest’s 2024 permit listed 18,000 while advertising 80,000. Without an accurate crowd count, both public safety and transportation are left unprepared.

Discrepancies like this in an already crowded city, following the recent Astroworld crowd-crush that left ten people dead in 2021, are putting festivalgoers, employees, and contributors at risk with blatant knowledge of it.

Ironically, even as some festivals overpromise attendance to vendors, others can’t draw enough support to survive.

While the city bends over backwards for mega-tours and large-scale festivals, smaller neighborhood events are quietly shrinking or disappearing altogether. Rising costs, tighter regulations, and lower gate donations—a main

nation of one of its three stages and 20 fewer performers than usual.

Wicker Park Fest and more than 20 other Chicago-based festivals have formed the Save Our Street Fest Coalition, working to address the rising costs and declining donations that are threatening the survival of the city’s neighborhood street festivals. Some festivals suggest $5 or $10 to enter, while a few ask for $15 or $20, according to the group’s website.

For South Loop residents, summer weekends can feel less like a celebration and more like a siege. Parking becomes a scavenger hunt, streets close without warning, and noise carries late into the night. Local businesses, hoping to benefit from the influx of people, instead see some regular customers staying away entirely, unwilling to ﬁght the crowds or navigate the tra c.

Chicago doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel—it just needs to actually plan for it.

Dedicated postconcert transit routes, designated rideshare pick-up points, and earlier public communication about street closures could ease the strain. Investing in smaller festivals would spread out the crowds, bringing culture to more neighborhoods without overloading one part of the city.

Live music is one of Chicago’s greatest

revenue stream for Chicago street festivals— have made it difficult for local organizers to compete for permits and resources. The imbalance is glaring: While a stadium show can shut down streets and monopolize police presence for hours, a neighborhood fest can’t even secure enough funding to break even.

Wicker Park Fest, for example, saw its gate donations plummet 50 percent between 2023 and 2024 despite increased attendance, according to Crain’s Chicago Business . The street festival had to trim its operating budget by $40,000 this year, resulting in the elimi-

strengths, but it shouldn’t come at the cost of making entire neighborhoods unlivable. With the right planning, we can keep the music playing without turning the South Loop and other neighborhoods into gridlocked obstacle courses every summer weekend. v

Vivian Richey is a senior journalism major at Columbia College Chicago and will serve as the editor in chief for the Columbia Chronicle in the fall.

m letters@chicagoreader.com

Lollapalooza fans head to Grant Park on Saturday, August 3, 2025.

ARTS & CULTURE

CHICAGO HISTORY

‘Our stories just don’t get told’

The El tells the story of an Indigenous teen in 70s Chicago.

By EMILY MCCLANATHAN

Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. has always been a good storyteller, the kind whose friends and family say things like, “You need to write this stu down,” but it took him many years to follow their advice. Born in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood, Van Alst attended Sullivan High School in Rogers Park, earned his GED while serving in the U.S. Navy, continued on to higher education in his mid-30s, and now works as professor of Indigenous nations studies at Portland State University. A lifelong avid reader, he ﬁnally began writing down his own stories after editing The Faster Redder Road , a collection by popular horror writer Stephen Graham Jones, ten years ago. Now, at age 60, “I can’t really turn it off,”

Van Alst says of his writing, and that’s welcome news for readers who enjoy books set in Chicago. An enrolled member of the Mackinac Bands of Chippewa and Ottawa Indians, Van Alst wrote a trilogy of mosaic novels about growing up in Chicago ( Sacred Smokes , Sacred City, and Sacred Folks); he also contributed to the recently published Red Line: Chicago Horror Stories and coedited the national bestseller Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology. His latest work, The El , began as a semiautobiographical short story but grew into a full-length novel as memories of his hometown and old friends poured onto its pages. Set over the course of one scorching day in

RNew Chicago Fiction: Grit and Grace panel Sat 9/6, noon, Printers Row Lit Fest, Center Stage, S. Dearborn St. in Printers Row Park between Polk and Harrison, printersrowlitfest.org, free

August 1979, the book follows Teddy, an Indigenous teen and member of the Simon City Royals, as he leads a group of his fellow gang members on a dangerous journey through hostile territory, traveling on what are now the Red and Brown lines from Rogers Park to Roosevelt High School.

“I’m missing Chicago every day, and I miss taking the el,” Van Alst said in an interview with the Reader. He grew up riding the train to school, downtown to watch kung fu movies on the weekends, and wherever else he needed to go. “I just wanted to write a story about taking the el and what it felt like, what it smelled like, what it sounded and looked like.” The

RThe El by Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. Vintage, paperback, 192 pp., $17, penguinrandomhouse.com/books/ 738830/ the-el-by-theodore-c-van-alst-jr

novel is full of such sensory details, from the screech of rusty wheels to the crackle of the intercom. It also includes a map of Chicago’s train system as it looked at the time, with the addition of hand-drawn gang symbols marking the territories of Teddy’s peers and rivals.

One of Van Alst’s aims as a writer is to tell authentic stories about working-class people who care about literature, music, and art as much as anyone else. These qualities are readily apparent in The El ’s Teddy, who carries a copy of Mike Royko’s Boss in his pocket, never turns o the radio in the middle of a song (out of respect, of course), and mentions in a Lincoln Park–set scene that he would love to visit the DePaul Art Museum someday, but “I didn’t think I could get in.”

“Our stories just don’t get told, and they live in a whole world that a lot of people just don’t notice,” Van Alst said. “There’s a whole group of folks in this city who are not filler, who are not just background, who are not just the people who ﬁx your lighting or take your orders or do whatever. It’s really important to understand that our lives are equally as important to making Chicago what it is.”

In addition to his focus on working-class characters, Van Alst is passionate about telling stories of Native Chicago, especially from the north-side neighborhoods that have changed so much since his youth. “We have to tell our stories, because if we don’t, we disappear. Chicago was a huge relocation city; there was a massive Native neighborhood in Uptown. That’s gone,” he said, also noting that the American Indian Center, the oldest of its kind in the country, has since moved from Uptown to the northwest side. “If you’re not telling the stories of what it was like, then you’ll never know what you lost. And I think, to not just document loss, but to celebrate what was, is really important. . . . It’s a big responsibility to get it right.”

As Teddy puts it in the final pages of The El: “Elders always said we’re only our stories, it’s important to keep them alive.” Elaborating on what it takes to be a keeper of stories, Teddy continues, “Timing and timeliness, rhythm, volume, inflection, delivery. Those skills took years to learn, let alone master. Was there a harder job? Probably not. Was there a better one? No. Definitely not.” v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

Author Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.

YOU’RE BEING RIDICULOUS: GIRL, BYE

8/ 14 - 8/ 16 : Thu–Fri 8 PM, Sat 3 :30 and 8 PM; Steppenwolf 1700 Theater, 1700 N. Halsted, steppenwolf.org and yourebeingridiculous.com, $ 30

PREVIEW

You’re Being Ridiculous: Girl, Bye lets performers take out their personal garbage

Jeremy Owens talks about 15 years of producing a true-life live lit show.

By KERRY REID

Like so many other newly minted theater grads, Jeremy Owens moved to Chicago in 2000 intending to become an actor. (Owens, a native of Stuttgart, Arkansas, graduated from the University of Arkansas.) But after earning his MFA in performance at Roosevelt University, Owens found himself “just sort of overwhelmed . . . I kind of felt lost.” Then, like so many other theater and theater-adjacent people in Chicago, Owens found a niche in the city’s burgeoning live lit scene.

Owens says, “After a little bit of just sitting around, going, ‘Why aren’t I auditioning? Why

That was in 2010. Fifteen years later, Owens hasn’t moved on—but the latest incarnation of You’re Being Ridiculous (YBR) is all about letting go of what holds us back. The storytelling show where, as the website cogently explains, “real people tell true stories about their lives,” returns to Steppenwolf’s 1700 Theater for a three-day, four-performance stand this weekend as part of the LookOut series, with the phrase, “Girl, Bye” providing the prompt for 29 performers, each of whom will read a new ten-minute story. (Owens will perform at each of the shows, but otherwise, each installation will feature di erent performers.)

storytelling shows around town, including Nestor Gomez of 80 Minutes Around the World: Immigration Stories, Keith Ecker of the late Guts & Glory series (cofounded with Samantha Irby), and Corrbette Pasko, producer of Write Club (created by Ian Belknap). In one way or another, they will all, as the program description promises, be talking about “saying ‘so long’ to all the garbage holding us back (we’re lookin’ at you 2025).”

As the cheeky title and theme suggest, wit is prized by Owens and his coproducer and husband, Andy Fine. “I wanted to do stand-up, but I was not brave enough,” says Owens. “When I moved to Chicago, everybody was like, ‘Go to Second City, do these classes, do this thing.’ And then that also just scared the crap out of me. So I was never brave enough to take the classes or do the stand-up thing. So this was like my super controlled and safe way to try to do all of those things.”

Jeremy Owens (lower le ) and performers in You’re Being Ridiculous

aren’t I being an actor?’ I was like, ‘I’ll make this thing, and we’ll do monologues. It’ll be like a monologue show, and that’ll make me feel like an actor. And then I will have had my little thing, and then I can move on with my life.’”

The lineup includes Gift Theatre founding ensemble member Maggie Andersen, whose memoir No Stars in Jefferson Park will be published by Northwestern University Press in October; Chicago novelist Rebecca Makkai (The Great Believers); and several vets of other

In the ﬁrst years, Owens had a small group of people who would read the submissions for YBR, but now it’s just him and Fine making the final decisions. “Sometimes it is a fight because there are things that he will like that I don’t necessarily love or like. You know, he is more touchy-feely, and I’m like, ‘But I don’t want to cry.’ We’re just like duking it out together. He really has a big part and a big say in how it’s curated.”

I ask Owens if he’s seen a di erent kind of voice coming out in submissions since the 2020 pandemic shutdown and the nation’s slide toward fascism since the election last fall.

“You’re telling things from your journal, things you would only tell your best friends, but in a public forum.”

But there’s also room for poignancy in the show. When I talked to Owens last fall about his late friend, critic and arts journalist Kris Vire, he cited a pair of 2015 pieces that Vire and his college girlfriend, Kelly Gilbride-Loris, performed about Vire coming out to her as one of his favorite experiences with the show. Vire influenced the theme of this latest incarnation in some way. “It’s not a funny story, but this year has been—so Kris died and our dog died. There’s been a lot of loss lately. And so I was like, ‘How do I have a theme that to me says grief, but in a way that doesn’t sound like this show is

You’re Being Ridiculous: The Funeral?’ You know what I mean? Where it can encapsulate something other than sadness. It could be the end of a relationship. It could be a death. It could be some other kind of thing you’re letting go of.”

“I’m thinking of one essay that will be in the show, which is pointedly directed at politics. I think a lot of that has to do with the current person living in the White House. I don’t like to say his name because then it’s like Beetlejuice, and he’ll suddenly appear. I know that I personally feel like I want to speak out and have my voice heard. But that’s also pandemic-related. It feels like, ‘You know what, anything can happen.’ I think there is an urgency to connect with people and to be your brave, bold, truest, most authentic self.”

More recently, Owens has started facing one of the fears that led to the creation of the show in the ﬁrst place. “This is also connected to Kris. All that time just made me reevaluate, like, ‘Why are you afraid of whatever you’re afraid of?’ And I auditioned for a play for the ﬁrst time in literally 20 years.”

What Owens treasures with You’re Being Ridiculous is not just the variety of voices onstage, but the supportive audiences, which matters even more in these fraught times. “You’re telling things from your journal, things you would only tell your best friends, but in a public forum. So it feels so brave, but also so protected because the audience is really the opposite of a stand-up audience. Everyone’s rooting for you. They are warm and lovely and excited to see people expose themselves in this way.” v

THEATER

OPENING

R LuvaBull

A new 1990s basketball comedy at Annoyance shoots and scores.

If you can imagine blending the 1993 feel-good underdog sports classic Rudy with a crass Adam Sandler comedy of the same era (or now, I guess, since Happy Gilmore 2 just dropped), then you’ll understand the shaggy appeal of Traer Schon and Anna Weatherwax’s Bull at Annoyance. It’s 1996, and the “Unstoppa-Bulls” are on track to win their fourth NBA championship in six years. Bryce Drew (Schon) and Scott Mason (Weatherwax) are the comic-relief benchwarmers for the team—until both Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen are injured and Coach Krank (Jamie McInerney) has to put them on the court for more than the last ten seconds of the game.

Will the “lowest paid, least respected” players in the league ﬁnd their time to shine? Will the media pressure blow up their bro-ship? Will anyone ﬁgure out just what Bryce’s mysterious girlfriend, Vivian Pump (Jackson McKenzie), is really up to? Does it matter?

No. It absolutely doesn’t when a story is this blissfully ridiculous. What matters in this show, cowritten and directed by Weatherwax and Schon, is that we enjoy the ride. And despite some uneven moments opening night (some performers still seemed a little unsure of lines, and some jokes got lost in the mix), this is a show that understands and has great aﬀection for the world of sports fandom. Schon and Weatherwax hold down the center of the story with their characters’ deliberately dumb jokes and earnest love of the game (even if they don’t actually understand the rules of basketball). Solid work from the supporting characters, especially McInerny’s equally-in-over-his-head coach, McKenzie’s scheming femme fatale (every entrance accompanied by Heart’s “Barracuda”), and Cadence Messier’s turn as Niko Mason, Scott’s nerdy and accident-prone little brother, add oddball charm, as do the 1990s in-jokes and Max Dawson’s lo-ﬁ interstitial animations. —KERRY REID BULL Through 9/11: Thu 7:30 PM, Annoyance Theatre, 851 W. Belmont, 773-697-9693, theannoyance.com, $20

Stitching together past and present

Female, Ashkenazi With a Sewing Machine premieres locally with Arts Judaica.

Anna is a textile artist and an adoptee who knows little about her birth family, other than that she comes from a line of “stitchers,” and has an old Singer sewing machine from her biological mother that she uses to create her art. Benjamin is a gardener and a devout Jew. When they fall in love, building a family out of whole cloth and fertile soil seems like the next step—until Anna discovers that she has ovarian cancer, caused by the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genetic mutations that aﬀect one in 40 women of Ashkenazi Jewish descent.

Anna’s struggle to ﬁnd herself amid the shadow of death and the mystery of her ancestry is the spine for Jamie Greenblatt’s Female, Ashkenazi With a Sewing Machine now in a local premiere with Arts Judaica under the direction of Izadorius Tortuga, who also did the honors for the company’s admirable production of Andrea Stolowitz’s The Berlin Diaries last winter. That play was also about a woman artist seeking answers in

her family’s past. But in Greenblatt’s play, a few too many self-conscious devices and a few too many on-the-nose metaphors around cloth and plants add distance from the emotional journey of the play.

At heart, this is a story about how couples cope with a grim diagnosis and find ways to keep living and loving in the new normal. When Haley Basil’s Anna and Keith Surney’s Benjamin are speaking their fears and love for each other plainly, it feels honest and empathetic. But Greenblatt’s decision to use a narrator, played by Margo Chervony, who also plays assorted other figures, including a hospital chaplain and dreamlike representations of Anna’s Ashkenazi ancestors (who, in at least one instance, tell us about how Jews were scapegoated during the European Black Death), muddies the narrative stream. This o en deflects from the emotional investment. Still, there are some truly affecting elements here, including lovely original music by Richard Jennings, played live by violinist Venus Fu. And it’s refreshing to see a cancer story that asks us to remember the “living” part of people who are living with cancer. —KERRY REID FEMALE, ASHKENAZI WITH A SEWING MACHINE Through 8/23: Thu–Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 PM; Berger Park Coach House, 6205 N. Sheridan, artsjudaica.com, $25 ($20 seniors/students)

RA fabulous Fiddler

An enchanting revival of the story of Tevye and his daughters with Music Theater Works

Just through this weekend, Anatevka comes to Skokie. Thanks to L. Walter Stearns’s remarkable and sensitive staging and a rock-solid cast, Music Theater Works’s revival of 1964’s Fiddler on the Roof feels familiar and fresh at the same time. There’s nothing ﬂashy or high-concept at work here. Instead, what we have is faith in the original book (by Joseph Stein, based on stories by Sholom Aleichem) and score (music by Jerry Bock, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick) that, like Tevye the milkman’s faith in God, is open to subtle interpretation without rejecting the basic framework.

Stearns does frame the story initially as a memory play—Tevye and the other residents of Anatevka, who have been kicked out of their village by the czarist forces (timely, eh?), are gathered in a storytelling circle. Several of the characters sit at the back and sides of the stage when they are not in scenes, bearing witness (or in the case of the Russian soldiers, serving as grim portents). Sam Nachison’s Tevye nails the character’s blend of world-weary acceptance and puckish wit, well matched by Mitzi Smith as his practical wife, Golde,

and Madison Uphoﬀ, Elissa Newcorn, and Madison Jaﬀe-Richter as daughters Tzeitel, Hodel, and Chava, whose marriage plans drive the story. (I’ve always loved that it’s the young women who challenge the patriarchy and remake the 20th-century possibilities in the world of Fiddler.)

The entire ensemble delivers the songs with clear and powerful voices (music direction by Eugene Dizon), aided by a 19-piece orchestra conducted by Valerie Gebert. Bob Knuth’s simple set uses contrasting shades of wood and a series of proscenium arches that look like wooden fencing torn apart and reassembled, which is a pretty good visual metaphor for a world where the boundaries of tradition and community are being turned topsy-turvy. Marla Lampert’s choreography (yes, the bottle dance is still loads of fun to see) adds wit and joy, along with tenderness—the very things displaced people like Tevye and his family need to survive. —KERRY REID FIDDLER ON THE ROOF Through 8/17: Wed 2 PM, Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 2 PM (ASL interpretation), Sat 2 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2 PM; North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, 9501 Skokie Blvd., Skokie, 847673-6300, musictheaterworks.com, $19.50-$89 (half price for 25 and under)

RThree Sisters takes us to church

Sandbox Theatre Collective’s immersive production of Chekhov is worth the wait-list.

As the youngest of three sisters, it’s perhaps not surprising that I’ve always had a tender spot for Anton Chekhov’s 1900 play about the thwarted female Prozorov trio (and their hapless brother). But I was not prepared for how much richness remained to be unearthed in this story until I saw Sandbox Theatre Collective’s immersive staging of Three Sisters at United Church of Rogers Park, running only through this weekend. (It’s sold out, but if you can get in on the wait-list, it’s worth it, even though the venue lacks air conditioning.)

Since it’s just a few months a er New Theatre Project’s breathtaking staged-in-a-factory presentation of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya I wonder if we’re going to see more environmental Chekhov pieces. Based on the results so far, I’m absolutely OK with that. Particularly in the Sandbox production (directed by Audrey Napoli, using a translation by Paul Schmidt), we feel as if we’re both guests and confessors for the family. Since the first scene takes place at a birthday party, we’re literally guests. You can wear a white flower badge to indicate if you’re up for interaction, but you’ll be offered cake and a finger sandwich in any event.

Sometimes conversations take place in diﬀerent

areas of the room, so your impressions of whose story matters at what time in the play will vary depending on where you’re sitting (much like life itself). At one point, some of us were guided out to a staircase where Vershinin (James Lewis), a lieutenant colonel in the garrison of soldiers who provide the only excitement in the provincial city, and Masha (Lexy Weixel), the married middle sister, confess their attraction for each other. I could only see them from the neck down from my vantage point, which created an interesting split between the voices and the physicality of the actors.

The show moves from a ground-floor study to an upper-story room that stands in for the attic where the sisters (who, in addition to Weixel’s sardonic but vulnerable Masha, include Cait Kelly’s steadfast but beleaguered Olga and Andi Muriel’s wistful Irina) see their dreams go up in smoke along with the fire in the town. A final scene in the church’s garden brings us back into the air, but also reintegrates the story of these characters with our own contemporary lives. They are struggling, fickle, foolish, lovesick, and filled with longings they can only voice through their desire to return to Moscow. Would they be any happier there? Probably not. As we wander together through this production, we’re reminded that no matter where we go, we take ourselves with us. That is the tragedy and glory of being alive. —KERRY REID THREE SISTERS Through 8/17: Thu–Sun 7 PM, United Church of Rogers Park, 1545 W. Morse, sandboxtheatrecollective.com, sold out, but waitlist available at the door or online at ticketsource. com/threesisters, $25

RBigger, louder, dumber

Meat Machine’s Ubu the King is gloriously goofy.

The fourth wall has been torn to shreds. In Ubu the King, Ramona Rotten and Denver Hoffman’s anarchic sprint through Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, the audience is hurled into the nasty lives of the Ubus. Jarry first came up with the concept of Ubu Roi, itself a sort of adaptation of Macbeth, in his early teens to mock a teacher he detested. (The play premiered when Jarry was 23.) Hoffman and Rotten engage directly with Jarry’s intentions for his play in a prerecorded prelude, and that attention to Ubu’s inception shows.

The Meat Machine’s production, running now at Facility Theatre, directed and designed by Rotten, would make young Jarry proud. It’s a proudly stupid (stupid used positively here) satire of sociopathic warmongers, realist but never didactic. Michael Oakes is a perfect failson oaf as Daddy Ubu, his crybaby tendencies contrasted by Fay Florence-Steddum’s take on Mommy Ubu, a horny clown in Marie Antoinette makeup. The boilersuit-clad ensemble launches itself into the house and all over Rotten’s set, a candy-colored patchwork itself lovingly scattered on top of the set of Facility’s recent production of Endgame. Locations are announced Brecht-style, using handwritten placards presented by a hapless onstage technician.

In an arts landscape hung up on subtlety and wit, it’s heartening to see high-quality goofery like this shining bright, as evidenced by the critical acclaim for I Think You Should Leave and the recent Naked Gun reboot. Ubu the King has enormous energy, holding its audience in a vise grip and rocketing through the plot, buoyed at all times by its embrace of the stupidest and biggest choices.

—ROB SILVERMAN ASCHER UBU THE KING Through 8/23: Thu–Sat 7:30 PM; Facility Theatre, 1138 N. California, ticketsource.com/ramona-rotten, $25 v

Three Sisters JOE MAZZA/BRAVELUX

Get showtimes and see reviews of everything playing this week at chicagoreader.com/movies

After finishing Susan Seidelman’s recently published memoir, Desperately Seeking Something: A Memoir About Movies, Mothers, and Material Girls , I began Richard Schickel’s 1997 biography of actor and filmmaker Clint Eastwood, the subject of an ongoing series at the Davis Theater. I also bought Shawn Levy’s Clint: The Man and the Movies , published in July, and plan to read it soon, but Schnickel’s similarly massive tome has beckoned from the bookshelf for many years.

This felt like a perfect time to start it; my admiration for Eastwood runs deep in spite of many reasons why, on the surface, it shouldn’t. (I remember the empty chair incident at the 2012 Republican National Convention as well as anyone else.) Eastwood is far from a perfect human, but it’s precisely that complexity that makes his films so compelling. “You can call what this man does an advance or a retreat from tradition, depending on your taste,” Schickel writes in the prologue to his book. “But in a time when public ﬁgures are forever trying to ingratiate themselves with us, you can see something exemplary in his on-screen refusal to be easily liked, and in his o -screen refusal to be easily understood.” As long as I’ve admired Eastwood, I’ve struggled to put into words exactly why. Thus far, what I’ve read in Shickel’s book is helping to qualify it, but it still doesn’t exactly articulate how I feel, a zenith toward which I’m ever working.

Anyway, Eastwood’s The Gauntlet (1977), which screened at the Davis on Wednesday, was a lot of fun. He stars as a detective who’s assigned to escort a key witness, a Las Vegas

NOW PLAYING

RHighest 2 Lowest

A still from The Gauntlet (1977)

sex worker (played by Eastwood’s then real-life girlfriend, Sondra Locke, whom he did not treat well), back to Phoenix to testify in a “nothing trial,” except it’s all a ruse to entrap the witness. Eastwood’s detective is committed to having her testify as planned, despite the inside job by a crooked police commissioner to stop her. Fuck the police, obviously, but here one ﬁ nds Eastwood interrogating the institution just as much as he’s seemingly upholding it by being committed to his onetime ideals of law enforcement. It’s exactly this merging of cinema and pathos, entertainment and examination, that intrigues me about Eastwood and his output as both ﬁlmmaker and star.

I couldn’t really ﬁnd a theme between my primary moviegoing this week, but maybe a small connector would be the idea of a gauntlet, deﬁned loosely as “a severe trial.” What is that— and bear with me—if not that which is depicted in Freaky Friday (2003) and subsequently its long-awaited sequel, Nisha Ganatra’s Freakier Friday (2025), wherein two people must switch bodies with the other to more fully understand their perspective? I went in with no expectations and came out pleasantly surprised. Better even were the circumstances in which I saw it: after dinner and at a cold multiplex with my best friend, diet soda in hand. If life is a gauntlet, that was my much-needed respite amid going through it.

Until next time, moviegoers. —KAT SACHS v

The Moviegoer is the diary of a local ﬁlm bu , collecting the best of what Chicago’s independent and underground ﬁlm scene has to o er.

Many artists, as they grow older, grow indulgent—particularly men. Sometimes that indulgence leads to brilliance; other times, it leads to excess. This is characteristic of any “blank check” project. Francis Ford Coppola’s maniacal manifesto, Megalopolis (2024), embodies the former, while Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans (2022) takes a gentler, reflective turn. Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest is indulgent, that’s for sure. It’s an unfiltered meditation on the dilemmas of success, offering all the highs and lows of Lee’s filmmaking. Highest 2 Lowest adapts Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 masterpiece High and Low, itself based on Ed McBain’s 1959 novel King’s Ransom. Kurosawa’s film centered on Kingo Gondo (Toshiro Mifune), a shoe company CEO unwilling to compromise on quality, his elevated status symbolized by a home perched high above the city. Today, Lee casts Denzel Washington as David King, founder of Stackin’ Hits and a man with the “best ears in the business”; he surveys New York from the balcony of his Brooklyn high-rise.

King, on the brink of the biggest gamble of his career—taking control of his record label to preserve the quality of its music—is thrust into a moral crisis when the son of his chauffeur, Paul (Jeffrey Wright), is mistakenly kidnapped. He’s ready to pay ransom when he believes at first that it’s his own child, jeopardizing his takeover, but when it turns out to be Paul’s son, the question becomes: Will he do the same for his right-hand man?

Simply put, the first half of Highest 2 Lowest is stilted. Perhaps Lee is trying to honor the slow buildup of its predecessor while shaking off its looming legacy to place his stamp on the story. But as the kidnapping unfolds, each character’s reaction is painfully awkward—a whisper of Kurosawa’s magnificently blocked exposition. It’s made worse as Howard Drossin’s melodramatic score pummels through everything else. This languorous opening is sometimes punctuated by Washington and Wright’s precise performances, a shared Bronx backstory surfacing to give the second act much-needed emotional weight.

And, eventually, it works. Once King retrieves the $17.5 million ransom and rides the Bronx-bound number four train to ferry the cash to the kidnapper (played by A$AP Rocky), Highest 2 Lowest finally gets on track. Lee harnesses the cacophony of New York: a train full of Yankees fans and a Puerto Rican Day celebration. This kicks the film into high gear, with Washington delivering such a committed performance that he reminds us once again why his name belongs in the annals of acting. Lee may miss a few beats and allow too many haphazard monologues, but he keeps the whole film irresistibly watchable. —MAXWELL RABB R, 133 min. Limited release in theaters, streaming on Apple TV+ Fri 9/5

Weapons

Writer–director Zach Cregger’s Weapons spends most of its runtime in the same funny, scary, mysterious, and thematically-legible-without-being-too-overt sweet spot as his last film, the delightfully unexpected Barbarian (2022). Unfortunately, its final section drags the whole movie down by insisting upon audience hand-holding. The film is split into several character point-of-view chapters, each introduced with a title card of the character’s name, o en cutting off a moment of great excitement in the preceding chapter. It’s a format that works well in terms of pacing, keeping the audience on edge by cutting every time we’re closer to answers, and it emphasizes the individuals in the story. A small wave between teacher Justine (Julia Garner) and cop Paul (Alden Ehrenreich) means something very different to each of them, and its meaning isn’t relevant to the film’s mystery, but to their emotional lives.

It’s that balance of genre thrills and earnest investment in character that overwhelmingly justiﬁes Weapons’s two-hour and nine-minute runtime. It’s an enticing premise—a classroom of children all individually ran out of their homes at 2:17 AM one night, never to be seen again—but it’s the details about the characters investigating the disappearances that keep things interesting. Garner, Ehrenreich, and Josh Brolin are all especially great at bringing the drama within the genre ﬁlm to life as each delivers beautifully in key scenes that force them to communicate a gamut of emotions in a short time.

Weapons simply falls apart toward the end in a classic case of “the mystery is better than the explanation.” The initial reveal itself isn’t wholly satisfying, but the real problem is how much time is spent ﬁlling in the details a er the reveal. It leaves the ﬁnal stretch of the movie feeling more like cleanup than climax, casting the joys that came before in a disappointing light. —KYLE LOGAN R, 128 min. Wide release in theaters v

Highest 2 Lowest DAVID LEE/A24

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Time to dump Spotify

It was already a blight on the music ecosystem, and CEO Daniel Ek is investing hundreds of millions in AI weaponry. Chicagoans are joining a growing exodus from the streaming platform.

By LEOR GALIL

Six hundred and seventy-five million people in 184 countries and territories—roughly 8.2 percent of the world’s population—actively use Spotify every month, according to the Swedish streaming company’s most recent filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. “Spotify has transformed the way people access and enjoy music, podcasts, and audiobooks,” the 2024 SEC paperwork says. The platform has also had a profound impact—almost none of it good—on the people who create those media. Even if you’re nestled so comfortably in the embrace of the Spotify algorithm that you barely notice which artists’ songs it’s playing, you probably know that streaming royalty rates are, generally speaking, garbage. Spotify is a vast engine for extracting wealth from the music ecosystem, and one of the main ways it does this is by paying, on average, just $0.003 for every time a song is streamed. Last year, Spotify further tilted its playing field toward big stars by instituting a policy withholding payouts entirely on songs streamed fewer than 1,000 times in a 12-month period. (Full disclosure: In 2021, I was paid to appear on the Spotify-produced podcast Bandsplain.) These paltry rates are a big part of why some musicians have never played ball with Spotify—and why others who once streamed their music through the platform are now leaving it. Spotify devalues music in other ways too— for instance, by encouraging listeners to treat it as wallpaper, or by building playlists rife with agreeably bland commissioned tracks it can license at even more favorable rates. (Look up Liz Pelly’s reporting on “Perfect Fit Content.”) But because Spotify offers a jaw-droppingly vast catalog—more than 100 million songs, per that same SEC filing—it also has the biggest user base. This keeps artists on the platform despite the growing litany of in-

justices and insults it inﬂicts on them. In 2020, for example, Spotify cofounder and CEO Daniel Ek said that musicians need to release more material to create “a continuous engagement with their fans” if they want to thrive on the platform: “You can’t record music once every three to four years and think that’s going to be enough.” Ek himself has no music on Spotify, and he hasn’t had to cultivate continuous engagement with a single fan to be worth, according to Forbes, roughly $10 billion.

It’d be an understatement to say Ek’s business plan and approach to art are sore spots for people in the music industry. “We’ve just felt like it’s been a necessary evil for a long time,” says Ben Moskow, cofounder of Chicago hip-hop multimedia collective Real Ones. “But I just don’t think it has to be, and I’m glad that

ect Cindy Lee for refusing to upload the 2024 album Diamond Jubilee to Spotify. (They initially self-released it as a folder of WAV ﬁles via a GeoCities site.) But the latest news has traveled further and seems to be sticking better. Since mid-June, several high-proﬁle indie acts—Deerhoof, Xiu Xiu, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard—have pulled their music from Spotify and explicitly cited Ek’s involvement in Helsing.

Some Chicago artists are following suit. On July 25, the same day King Gizzard left Spotify, Chicago singer-songwriter Austin Koenigstein, who records psychedelic pop as Smushie, announced he’d be bailing on the platform too. Two weeks before that, he’d self-released his second Smushie album, Cicero Pizza Anthology. “I had the best two weeks of online performance on Spotify after my record came out,” Koenigstein says. “Things were really spiking, and it felt promising. But I was all the while being exposed to stu about AI bands—like the proliferation of that stu on the platform.”

In July, an AI-generated soft-rock band called Velvet Sundown attracted press attention after racking up more than a million streams on a couple albums it had uploaded to Spotify in June. This is a separate phenomenon from Spotify’s Perfect Fit Content program—those “ghost artists” are real musicians, but they typically work pseudonymously and sign deals with Spotify that give up certain royalty rights. This allows Spotify to place ghost tracks on playlists with huge followings and keep a bigger share of the money they generate.

we just ﬁnally have agreed to start treating it that way.”

I’ve noticed lots of musicians openly questioning their engagement with Spotify this year, especially since the January publication of Pelly’s rigorously reported book, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist. And this summer, the exodus accelerated when a damning piece of news came to light. On June 17, German AI defense company Helsing announced it had raised 600 million euros in a funding round led by Prima Materia, Ek’s venture capital firm. Ek also serves as chairman of Helsing. This connection isn’t new—Prima Materia invested 100 million euros in Helsing in 2021, and this was one of the reasons cited by front person Patrick Flegel of Canadian indie proj-

Ek is funneling money he’s made from Spotify—money that could’ve gone to struggling musicians, if he’d been content to be less obscenely wealthy—into an AI weapons company. This has weighed heavily on many artists, Koenigstein among them. “The weapons industry has one face to it,” he says. “It’s pro-war, wherever it is—or pro-militarism, or violence. I started to feel like it was all zerosum.” The news of Ek’s new investment in Helsing broke as Israel intensiﬁed its genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza with a near total blockade of food and other aid, and that was the last straw for Koenigstein. He decided to pull his solo work from Spotify. “I saw this video of a girl eating sand in Gaza,” he says, “and I was like, ‘I would do anything if I could just wash a little bit of this o of me.’” Chicago metal band Immortal Bird pulled its early DIY material from Spotify the same day Koenigstein removed Smushie. For the

band to remove the rest of their music, they’ll have to reach agreements with the folks who released it—most notably Pittsburgh label 20 Buck Spin, which put out their 2019 album, Thrive on Neglect, and its 2024 follow-up, Sin Querencia.

“It was really easy,” says vocalist Rae Amitay. “It’s not like we’re leaving money on the table—it’s really not a huge move for us,” they explain. “At a couple points in our career, we’ve made it onto those big Spotify playlists with half a million listeners, and that boosts your plays and it looks cool for a couple weeks. When our 2019 album came out—that was probably the most successful one, and Spotify was behind that in whatever way they were—we had, like, 20, 30K monthly listeners, something like that. It goes away. It’s not real. There’s no real return on that success.”

Ek is funneling money he’s made from Spotify—money that could’ve gone to struggling musicians, if he’d been content to be less obscenely wealthy—into an AI weapons company.

Amitay supports Palestinian liberation and bailed on Spotify in large part because of Helsing. “Everyone has their lines and their limits,” they say. “I just don’t like 40-yearold Megamind supervillains investing in AI weaponry.”

Ben Moskow from Real Ones and Minor Moon main man Sam Cantor are both making plans to leave Spotify. Moskow isn’t a musician, but the Real Ones collective has such an active role in the scene that its movement on Spotify could change a lot of minds. The collective has used its Spotify account to build playlists on which its members collaborate.

“Our biggest playlist, the Coldest in Chicago playlist on Spotify, has 300-something likes, and that was after a few years of development,” Moskow says. “But we were still, like, ‘Oh, it would be a shame to have to start over and not care about all that growth.’ Eventual-

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ly, when we really looked at it on paper, there’s no equivalency here to be made. It was just, like, ‘We can’t keep doing this.’” Real Ones stopped paying for a premium Spotify account and imported all its playlists to Tidal. Moskow says the collective will have to talk further about whether to completely pull the plug on Spotify.

Sam Cantor has long been skeptical of Spotify—in 2021, he attended Zoom meetings held by the local chapter of the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers in advance of a demonstration in front of Spotify’s Chicago o ces. Despite his discomfort, though, Minor Moon’s alt-Americana is on the platform. “Over the last ten or so years, if you’re not on Spotify, as an indie band, it’s in some ways felt like you are excluding yourself from the opportunity to be heard by the wider public,” he says. “You’re foreclosing the opportunity to sort of be ‘discovered’—and that ‘democratized discoverability,’ it didn’t feel completely imaginary. I think in the last few years, it’s felt more like they’re dangling something shiny in front of all of us. It’s really not a widely accessible way to be discovered, more and more, in the context of all the slop that’s increasingly a big part of these playlists.”

Cantor has the same complaints about Spotify as everyone else I spoke to—especially Ek’s Helsing investment, in light of the genocide in Gaza. Like most musicians, Cantor doesn’t see signiﬁcant income from Spotify— he makes more money selling LPs and other physical merch—but leaving isn’t without its risks. Some venues, for instance, use Spotify metrics to help them decide who to book.

“You’re not just disappearing to the listeners that you have or might potentially have,” Cantor says. “You’re also disappearing to the portion of the industry that’s placing Spotify metrics as a central part of how they determine the reach and potential of a given artist.

I’m really interested in being part of a cultural shift in which that is no longer the case.”

Whether that cultural shift occurs now or years from now is up to the artists whose millions of tracks make up Spotify’s library.

“Part of me feels like we’ve all been talking about this for so long—we’re like, ‘We’re gonna get o ,’” Koenigstein says. “We all need to see each other do it, and we’ve been playing chicken for a long time. King Gizzard, they’re a huge band, which is nice. But I think people also need to start seeing maybe their friends’ band go for it.” v

m lgalil@chicagoreader.com

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THIRSTY EARS FESTIVAL Schedule at acmusic.org/events/thirsty-ears-festival-2025. Sat 8/23, 2–11 PM, Sun 8/24, 1–9 PM, Wilson between Ravenswood and Hermitage, $10 suggested donation, all ages

CHICAGOANS OF NOTE

Seth Boustead, composer and founder of Access Contemporary Music

“I

wanted people who didn’t really know anything about classical music to come to the concerts. That was really important to me; I wanted them to experience this music and strip away any pretense.”

As told to JAMIE LUDWIG

Seth Boustead is a composer, pianist, and arts manager. Raised by a single mother in Missouri and Arizona, Boustead studied composition at the University of Missouri, then moved to Chicago in 1995. In 2004, he cofounded the nonprofit Access Contemporary Music (ACM), where he still serves as executive director.

ACM works to foster a public understanding of classical music as a living tradition open to new players and diverse voices, not a relic that belongs to dead white men in strange wigs.

In 2015, ACM launched Thirsty Ears, Chicago’s only street festival devoted to classical music. This year’s Thirsty Ears takes place on Saturday and Sunday, August 23 and 24, on Wilson between Hermitage and Ravenswood.

In September, ACM will open a venue called the CheckOut in a former 7-Eleven at

4116 N. Clark, which will also have rooms for private lessons. The nonprofit already operates music schools at three other locations (Avondale, Rogers Park, and Ravenswood) and produces concerts in Chicago and elsewhere, but the CheckOut will be its first dedicated live- music space, presenting chamber music, jazz, cabaret, country, and more. ACM has a 15-year lease on the building, and it paid for the build-out with a $250,000 city grant and a capital campaign that’s raised a comparable amount. A festival celebrating the CheckOut’s launch will run from September 13 till September 28.

In this interview, Boustead talks about the history of ACM, changing attitudes toward classical music, and what makes Thirsty Ears “magical.”

Iheard a lot of punk music in the 70s, and I was into all of that. But I heard classical music on the radio [in the 80s,] when I was 15 or 16, and it really moved me. It spoke to me, and I thought the instruments were beautiful. I started going to the library and reading more about the composers, and I started playing [piano] a lot.

When I went to college at Mizzou, I majored in anthropology and took piano classes as electives. Maybe that never would’ve gone anywhere, because I wasn’t a good enough pianist to be a piano major—I just wasn’t quite at that level. But this crazy thing happened. I met someone who said, “I’m a composer. I’m in the composition department.”

I was like, “What are you talking about? Classical music is old—it’s been written.” He’s

looking at me like I’m an idiot. “No, there are still composers today.” That just blew me away. So I went to a composition seminar and started writing, and I had this epiphany. I loved to make up music. I loved to improvise on the piano. I had such a skill for that—a very good ear—but that’s not really what they wanted in the performance department. I figured out I was in the wrong place, and that’s why it wasn’t really clicking. So I became a composer. Composing is an academic career. Most people get a doctor of musical arts or a PhD, and they teach. But I didn’t really want to do that, so I came to Chicago in ’95 and started playing piano for the Annoyance Theatre. It was improv comedy, and my job was to make up music every night. They were on Clark Street back then, across from the Metro, and there were all these other bars that had live music. I was 23 years old, and I could walk up and down Clark and play piano—I was in heaven. I did that for a few years, and then I went back to school at Roosevelt’s Chicago College of Performing Arts, where I finished my master’s degree. I really wanted to get back to my first love, composing. I wanted to write music for films, theaters, and concerts, but when I graduated— again, it’s such an academic pastime. It’s really hard to find groups that will play your music if you’re not actively associated with a university. That’s why I started Access Contemporary Music.

I wanted all the wonderful stu you get in the university setting, where everybody’s running around showing each other their scores and having concerts of their own music. I just wanted it outside the university, and I wanted people who didn’t really know anything about classical music to come to the concerts. That was really important to me; I wanted them to experience this music and strip away any pretense. [Classical] music isn’t better than other music. It’s just music, like anything else. So that’s become my career. I still play piano, and I write about 15 to 20 pieces a year. ACM is now this larger organization that produces a variety of di erent things.

A[ccessibility and equity in classical music] is such a huge thing. I’m a white man, but I grew up with a single mother, and we didn’t have any money. If you look at a lot of people with successful classical

Seth Boustead ALAIN MILOTTI

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music careers, they all have similar backgrounds, and they were able to take the whole summer and go to these expensive training camps. I had a paper route when I was 12, and I’ve had a job ever since.

So there’s lots of reasons people are left behind. It’s usually money, and sometimes it’s systematized racism and other things—but it doesn’t need to be that way. The music started in Italy or Germany or someplace as a kind of European art form, and this idea that you could notate sound and write it down so you could remember it later was a unique and very big change in musical history. But that’s all it was. Concerts in Beethoven’s day were these raucous a airs that the lower classes absolutely attended. They’d repeat a movement of a symphony, they’d clap in the middle, they’d sing along. If you went to an Italian opera in the 19th century, it was nuts—like going to a ball game. How did it go from being this joyful thing to being this joyless thing?

Back when we had Tower Records and these big chain stores, they had full-on classical departments. That was amazing but could also be super overwhelming. Like, “I know Beethoven’s supposed to be good. Let me start there.” Then there’s ﬁve thousand recordings of the same

symphony. Most people just go “forget it.”

Or, “OK, I’ll get CSO tickets for 80 bucks.” But then you get there and you don’t know when to clap, and there’s so much information.

That’s just the benign part of it. I’ve worked with major institutions where if you mention you think Prince or somebody is a musical genius, they’re like, “Well, Prince is very talented, but all the musical geniuses are gone.” Even if you just follow the European side of the tradition, that’s obviously false—some of the biggest names, like Stravinsky and Shostakovich, died in the 1970s.

It’s also insulting. Although this art form started in Europe, it spread all over the world. By the 19th century, you had composers in South America. You had composers in China. But women and all these other people were kept out.

The organizations today, they’re not racist. They’re not misogynistic. But they all have this big conundrum, because they’ve trained their audiences not to like new music. They’ve trained their audiences that geniuses used to walk the earth and they no longer do. So the audiences are like, “Look, I paid 80 bucks. I want to hear my Mozart, and you’re playing this new music?”

The institutions have painted themselves into a corner, because if they’re not doing new music—because we systematically refuse to let a lot of people partake in this art form—they’re only playing old music. So they’re finding people like Florence Price, a Black composer who was ignored during her lifetime. She was amazingly talented, but she’s safe because she’s dead; it’s removed. They’re digging up these older people, but they’re excluding people who are very much alive, very much diverse, and who actually look like the audience they supposedly want to come to their concerts. All of that was driving me crazy. [Classical music] is a European art form, and it certainly benefited from colonialism, and there were certainly racist strains. But it’s bigger than that. The sense that there was a perfect time for music is a dangerous thing to fall into. There was no perfect time. These people were a mess. Half of them committed suicide. All I wanted to do was say, “Let’s just go back and listen to the music. Isn’t it interesting that a Chinese composer wants to put one of their Indigenous instruments, like the pipa, into the orchestra? Or isn’t it interesting that a modern-day composer who moonlights as a DJ wants to put turntables into it?”

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 4 8PM

Bob Mould

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continued from p. 23

When I started ACM, if you were a contemporary classical music organization, [people assumed] you were these weird kids making weird music in a basement somewhere. But right from the beginning, my models were like Goodman Theatre and Hubbard Street Dance. We wanted ACM to be this really important institution that plays what I consider to be very important music. The attempts to ghettoize us or tell us we were doing this crazy thing were, frankly, hurtful and wrong. But that’s changed—there’s a lot of groups that changed that, like Eighth Blackbird. They memorized their music so they weren’t tethered to the music stands anymore and they could hire choreographers. They worked with Blair Thomas, who used to run the Redmoon puppet theater. Their shows were fun.

New music in the 70s and 80s was these people who never smiled. They’d come out dressed all in black and play this crazy music. If you didn’t get it, you were just out. That started to change in the 90s and 2000s. As there are fewer orchestras—which is a sad thing—there are fewer opportunities for these highly

trained musicians, so they have to create their own DIY things. So you see groups like Third Coast Percussion and Eighth Blackbird and our group, Access Contemporary Music, forming. And we can’t just go out onstage and not smile at anybody. We’re responsible for our own marketing. We have to learn the notes on the page, and we also have to market through our social media. And so we became fun.

This is a really fantastic time for [classical music]. We used to call it the style wars—you were writing either really thorny, complex music or you were writing Philip Glass’s kind of minimalistic, repetitive music, and the two sides hated each other. When I was in school, that was still very popular, but younger composers don’t have to deal with that. The style wars are mostly gone, and we can just have fun. If you want to write a G-major chord, you can—it’s more about communication. Like, “G-major? It’s been done before.” Sure, but that’s like telling a painter that the color red has been done before; I’m using it as a tool in a very speciﬁc context to communicate an idea or an emotion. We’re back to that again and not trying to reinvent the wheel all the time.

Ialways say that ACM couldn’t have happened in a different city. It’s so Chicago to me, from our storefront music schools to our ﬁlm festival [Sound of Silent Film] to Thirsty Ears. Now we’re converting an old 7-Eleven into a music venue at Clark and Southport. It’s called the CheckOut and it’s opening in September.

I remember, years ago, being at the Hideout when they used to do their block parties. I had a VIP ticket, and I was in the VIP area. These bands are coming in after their sets, and I had the best musical conversations with these guys. I’m telling them I’m a classical composer, and they’re like, “Wow. What are you working on?” That’s just so Chicago—I don’t care that they’re indie rockers. They don’t care that I’m a classical composer. We’re talking about music. The city is expensive, but compared to New York or LA, it’s really not, and there are all these opportunities to do things. That’s how Thirsty Ears started. I was at the German American festival with friends, and I was angry. I’d been going to that festival for years, and every year the bands were a little bit less German—they’re playing “Mustang Sally” and all the generic stuff you hear at every street festival. I was like, “Gosh, street festivals used to have all these di erent identities.”

So I told my friends, “I’m going to start a classical music street festival.” Of course, they laughed, but I was serious. The alderperson in the 47th Ward at that time was Ameya Pawar, and he was really into classical. I wrote him and said, “I want to do a Chicago street festival with food trucks, craft beer, kid-friendly stu , and vendor booths—but the music will all be classical.” And he said, “That’s amazing. Let’s do it. My o ce will help you wade through all the paperwork and get the permits and all of that.”

In 2015 we gave it a go as a one-day event on Wilson, which is where one of our music schools is. It’s a beautiful tree-lined street with two landmarks on it: the All Saints church, which is the oldest wood-frame church still standing in Chicago (Carl Sandburg was a parishioner there), and the Abbott mansion. It was a big success. Ten years later, people are writing me months ahead, asking, “Can I play on Thirsty Ears?” That’s so gratifying to me.

[The artists are] almost entirely from Chicago, and in fact this year is all Chicago. Originally it was going to be our [fundraising] gala, like an ungala. (We don’t consider ourselves a black-tie organization booking a street festival.) We did make money for a few years, but prices have gone up so much for the rentals that we don’t really make money anymore. We

“When we say ‘classical’ these days, it’s a pretty big tent. By and large, it’s still notated music, but you can notate almost anything.”

still do it in August, speciﬁcally because that’s usually our slowest month for our schools.

The people who come are largely from Rogers Park, Andersonville, Lakeview, Ravenswood, Uptown, and the surrounding communities. We work really hard to partner with a ton of different groups and neighborhood organizations to get people out, but also to diversify the audience and really bring a lot of di erent kinds of people out. The music ranges too. There’s people with period instruments playing music from the 17th century, and there’s hard-core electronic music from the 21st century.

When we say “classical” these days, it’s a pretty big tent. By and large, it’s still notated music, but you can notate almost anything. So the festival is all over the map, and the vibe is really cool. A lot of people like it because it’s not a beer fest or anything—not to throw shade at the suburbs, but people aren’t coming from the suburbs just to get wasted. It’s a more friendly vibe.

The church has a lawn, so people bring blankets and sit, and we put out about 200 chairs. The vendors are all community-based arts and crafts, mom-and-pop shops, independently owned [places] like CHIRP Radio and Nomadic Ant, a really cool jewelry shop on Western.

In addition to the music, on Saturday, as per our tradition the last six or seven years, at sundown we put up a screen and do a version of the ﬁlm festival that we do with the Music Box every year. We choose six or seven of our favorite [short] ﬁlms, and we reprise them with live music on the street. It’s just magical. Last year it rained, and I have this picture of a hundred people or more with their umbrellas because they wanted to see this thing so much. And I’m like, “Oh my god, I love Chicago.”

We feel really grateful to the community who comes out year after year, and seeing how much they enjoy this festival. We self-produce it, meaning that we put up all the tents and we build the stage ourselves. It gets harder every year, but we do it because we love that everybody likes it so much. And I think that there’s this sense that this is a really magical event. v

m jludwig@chicagoreader.com

Recommended and notable shows with critics’ insights for the week of August 14 b

PORTRAITS

PICK OF THE WEEK

Bay Area screamo pioneers

Portraits of Past regroup to rage again

THURSDAY14

OK COOL Truth or Consequences New Mexico and Superdime open. 8 PM, Subterranean, 2011 W. North, $21.80. 17+

YOU’RE FORGIVEN IF YOU CAN’T immediately tell what Portraits of Past front man Robert Allan Pettersen is shrieking about on “Song With the Slow Part.” This posthardcore burner sounds like it’s on the precipice of collapse, with every member of the band playing like they’re running alongside a moving freight train and desperately trying to ﬁnd a way aboard. The Bay Area group cut the cruddy-sounding version on the 2008 compilation Portraits of Past (Ebullition) in 1995, with Gravity Records cofounder Matt Anderson serving as their recording engineer. Anderson was well suited to capture their sound: His old band, Heroin, pioneered screamo, and Portraits of Past played that volatile posthardcore subgenre with borderline self-destructive force. In a December 1994 Maximumrocknroll interview, Pettersen explained what “Song With the Slow Part” meant to him: “It’s . . . about taking an active role instead of a passive and receiving role in the hardcore scene,” he said. “It also has to do with really being into it. There’s a lot of bands out now that are really good musicians and stu but it seems like they’re totally not into it, like they’re detached.”

I can easily believe that the ﬁve members of Portraits of Past won’t bother with the band unless they’re fully invested in it. The group called it quits in 1995, after around two years together, and their small

but mighty catalog sounds like the work of people singularly focused on expending 100 percent of their energy through screamo. I’m automatically skeptical about any band from the 20th century regrouping now, when the Reunion Tour Industrial Complex is powering entire festivals and sucking up oxygen that new artists would need to get a hearing, but Portraits of Past don’t seem to be cashing in. For one thing, screamo remains pretty marginal in popularity. People obviously still care about the band, but there might not be enough of them for a tour in this economy to be a safe bet financially. That’s all to say I’m convinced they really want to play this music at this moment. This isn’t the first time Portraits of Past have reunited, either. When they got back together in 2008, they recorded the 2009 EP Cypress Dust Witch (Excursions Into the Abyss). Early this year, Ebullition reissued Portraits of Past’s 1996 self-titled album (and that 2008 compilation), and the band have reemerged at a moment when their version of screamo—lo-fi, frazzled, a bit sloppy—is once again en vogue. For proof, look at the bill for tonight’s show. Newish Chicago posthardcore four-piece Mail, one of three openers, released a frayed-sounding demo this spring called Live at the Subterranean 03/08/2025 that swelters with the heat of a packed show.

—LEOR GALIL

The core duo of Chicago indie-rock band OK Cool, Bridget Stiebris and Haley Blomquist Waller, managed to fit a big, honking sound into compact songs on their 17-minute 2023 EP, Fawn. For their follow-up, they didn’t go bigger—OK Cool’s debut album, the new Chit Chat (Take a Hike), doesn’t rip harder or get more aggressive. On these relatively somber songs, Stiebris and Waller repackage the intensity of their earlier material. The riffs are still pretty huge, but the tone is more cool and subdued. On the chorus for “Safety Car,” twinkling, minor-key synths embroider crunchy, pent-up guitar and forlorn vocals—the overall effect is to supersize the tune’s bittersweet wooziness, which makes for a fun contrast with its lighters-up rock ’n’ roll roar. —LEOR GALIL

FRIDAY15

Blue Öyster Cult The Steepwater Band open. 7:30 PM, Riviera, 4746 N. Racine, $47.25–$163.31. b

Early this summer, I bought most of Blue Öyster Cult’s discography on cassette at Bloomington’s excellent Reverberation Vinyl. I already owned a bunch of those albums on LP, but I’m all about listening to music versus just “collecting” it, even

OF PAST, KATHRYN MOHR, MAIL, HUNTING SCENE Mon 8/18, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln, $40.50, $33.25 in advance. 18+

JAIME OWENS

OK Cool TRACY CONOBOY

MUSIC

when I’ve heard it already. I decided to use those tapes to embark on a musical mission: I would listen to every album from BÖC’s 70s and 80s prime in chronological order over my Walkman headphones. The experience has been a richly detailed revelation. The band formed as Soft White Underbelly at New York’s Stony Brook University in 1967, playing psychedelic art-rock. They used several names, most notably the Stalk-Forrest Group, and became campus faves (though no incarnation put out much music till the archival releases that arrived later). By the time they relaunched themselves as Blue Öyster Cult in 1971, they were experienced players who hoped to become Long Island’s answer to Black Sabbath. The ﬁrst three BÖC LPs, released between 1972 and 1974 (sometimes called the band’s “black-and-white years” due to those albums’ monochromatic cover art) are a master class in evil, heady rock ’n’ roll. As I listened to each one, I found myself falling deeper in love with BÖC’s sophisticated, doomy rock, which combines pop-savvy, spaced-out production with killer riffs, obtuse arrangements, and clever occult lyrics delivered with a wink (the band often drafted poets, including Jim Carroll, Patti Smith, and Richard Meltzer, to contribute verses). In the 80s, the band shi ed into a more streamlined and radio-friendly mode, so that the latest BÖC LP I can get behind is 1985’s Club Ninja, where the intricate, pounding drumming of Albert Bouchard is replaced by the typical 80s hard-rock moves of Thommy Price. The space-rockin’ “Shadow Warrior” is one of the few goodies on it.

My BÖC mission will culminate on Friday, August 15, when the band celebrate their vast catalog live at the Riviera. Original lead guitarists Eric Bloom and Donald “Buck Dharma” Roeser remain with the group, and Roeser still sings the tunes that made BÖC famous, including “(Don’t Fear) the Reaper” and “Burnin’ for You” (which both owe a debt to the Byrds) and “Godzilla” (whose chugging thud and monstrous riﬀ echo the kaiju’s city-destroying stomp). The band’s recent set lists include not just their biggest hits but also deep cuts from every phase of their career—they’re even throwing down

“Black Blade” off 1980’s Cultösaurus Erectus , with lyrics by sci-fi author and Hawkwind collaborator Michael Moorcock. The BÖC site proudly claims the band are “on tour forever,” but I’m gonna go see them while I can—I’m not sure they made a deal with the right demon to claim life eternal. Appropriately, the opening act for this show is local longhair institution the Steepwater Band, purveyors of shouldbe-classic rock. —STEVE KRAKOW

Xerobot Bobby Conn and James Marlon Magas open. 8 PM, Burlington Bar, 3425 W. Fullerton, $19.90. 21+

Xerobot are generally classified as a latter-day no-wave band, but their bizarre yowling and herkyjerky math-rock can’t really be stuffed into the box of a single style, no matter how odd or angular. The Madison-based band were active throughout the 90s, then moved to the west coast in 1999, where they subsequently split up. While still in Wisconsin, they played Chicago regularly, blasting out spasmodic but meticulously constructed snippets of weird dorky aggression that nodded to the new wave nerdery of Devo, the crazed noisecore of Melt-Banana, the off-kilter punk-funk of Firehose, and the postdisco deconstructions of the Contortions before flailing off into their own joyful staccato assault.

In 2021 Chunklet Industries released a selftitled compilation that includes Xerobot’s only fulllength, 1996’s Control Panel , along with a bunch of live tracks and other odds and ends. Nearly 30 years a er its release, the record still sounds gloriously and uniquely unhinged: Singer Greg Peters squeals like a chipmunk in a blender while guitarist Dave Broekema, drummer Steve Coombs, and bassist Eric Landmark stab and scrape their way through ﬁendish compositions that seem to be made entirely of serrated edges and gaping clown smiles.

Xerobot are also touring again. In December, they dropped a marvelous video of their ﬁrst rehearsal in 25 years, where they reconstruct their music and energy to a remarkable degree. “Warts and all, warts and all,” Peters mutters between

tunes, then spins in circles in front of the microphone. The instant the band explodes to life, he starts to shake and shriek with the feral frenzy of yore. Ordinarily you can only catch lightning in a bottle once before it’s gone, but sometimes—if you’re just weird enough—the magic never goes away. —NOAH BERLATSKY

MONDAY18

Portraits of PaSt See Pick of the Week on page 25. Kathryn Mohr, Mail, and Hunting Scene open. 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln, $40.50, $33.25 in advance. 18+

WEDNESDAY20

Tetchy Edging headline; Tetchy and Muscle open. 9 PM, Sleeping Village, 3734 W. Belmont, $19.57. 21+

Tetchy are a rising Brooklyn four-piece who make dreamy, anguished pop punk, and they’ve gradually matured their style over time. The band’s 2019 debut single, “Fascist,” describes being in a relationship with someone who has impossible standards, yet who also thinks, “Huh, maybe that Hitler guy was just misunderstood.” It checks all the pop-punk boxes, with bubble gum melodies, relationship angst, and liberal politics. Vocalist and guitarist Maggie Denning incorporates so coos and trills that contrast with her increasingly ragged, indignant screaming, while guitarist Jesse French takes angular detours as the song hurtles toward a breakdown that feels like a bad dream falling apart. In 2020, Tetchy included the track on their ﬁrst EP, Hounds

Find

On their second EP, 2024’s All in My Head (Trash Casual), Tetchy build on this pop-punk foundation with four imaginative tracks that reference 90s and 00s rock and incorporate audio samples. “Voices” recalls the breezy melodicism of Lemuria but throws in art-rock fretwork. “Hands” opens with a 1988 New Year’s Eve countdown, then segues into a pained confession: Denning sings of never wanting her partner to touch her again, to the extent that she’d be willing to forgo touch altogether. “Married” uses a nu-metal stomp to question why an emotionally immature man is getting married. (In the song’s video, Denning skateboards, throws cookbooks, and pours champagne over her greasy chewing-gum-pink hair, making it clear that she sees marriage as bondage—and that she’s aware she’s not ready for it.) On closing track “Psychosomatic,” a meditation on Denning’s struggles with long COVID, the range of her emotional vocals makes her sound more like Evanescence’s Amy Lee than a typical punk rocker. Tetchy are a high-energy group who can reﬂect on themselves without taking any of that too seriously. They balance their sad, dark side with humor, humility, and upbeat riﬀs. For their Chicago debut, they’re opening for local punks Edging at Sleeping Village, and it should be plenty of fun. —MICCO CAPORALE v

continued from p. 25

Xerobot during their original run

COURTESY CHUNKLET

Blue Öyster Cult COURTESY THE ARTIST

Tetchy COURTESY THE ARTIST

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Business Information Analyst Senior. Carelon Medical Benefits Management, Inc. Chicago, IL. Analyze large quantities of data to create summaries, deve models & extract insights. BS: CS, Engg, Data Analytics, Data Sci, Buss Analytics, IT, or rel. 3 yrs exp. Alt Reqs: MS & 1 yr exp. Other exp reqd. Pay: $101,806$102,806/yr. Apply: https:// careers.elevancehealth. com/. Job Ref: JR160487

TransMarket Operations LLC seeks Data Services Engineers for Chicago, IL, to provide day-to-day support for the firm’s proprietary software trading environment. Master’s in Comp Sci/Comp Eng/ related ﬁeld +2yrs exp OR Bachelor’s in Comp Sci/ Comp Eng/related field +5yrs exp req’d. Req’d Skills: Gitlab, ELK stack, InﬂuxDB, VMWare, Docker/Kubernetes, FastAPI, C++, SQL Databases, Postgres, Electron, Angular, React, Active Directory, Nodejs, Typescript, Python, AWS, API Security, JWT Authentication, Time Series Data (Tick Data), Tick DB, Pcaps.

$148,949-180,000/yr. Apply online: https://grnh.se/ bb9yz5xt7us Ref: 43567

Chime’s Chicago, IL office has multiple openings for the following positions (various types/levels):

- DATA ANALYST Analyze & measure exposure to credit & market risk threatening assets, earning capacity/economic state of an org. Some telecommuting permitted

$130,000-$150,000* - ANALYST Analyze & measure exposure to credit & market risk threatening assets, earning capacity/ economic state of an org. Must be available to work on projects at various, unanticipated sites throughout U.S. Telecommuting permitted

$160,000-$180,000 * *Starting base salary range for each role reflected above; salary is one part of competitive package; offers based on candidate exp & geographic location. TO APPLY: Email resume to apply@chime.com & indicate appropriate job code. Proof of U.S. work authorization req’d if hired. Chime is an Equal Opportunity Employer & fully supports aﬃrmative action practices.

Construction Manager (Lemont, IL 60439), Duties incl: oversee construction workers, subcontractors, & projects from start to completion. Keep on schedule & prep estimate costs for material & labor, monitor compliance w/ building & safety regs. Req: 24 mnths of exp as a Supervisor, Project Manager, or similar position. Send resume to Mark’s Complete Construction Inc., at matarekdziedzina@ comcast.net

Kuvare Corporate Management, LLC in Rosemont, IL seeks a Vice President, Asset Based Investments to analyze new investment opportunities.10-20% dmstc trvl. WFH and hybrid benefits available. Salary: $57,013/y. Apply at: https:// tinyurl.com/2jsuxy6h

Quantitative Researchers (Optiver Services US LLC; Chicago, IL; multiple positions available): Help to continuously improve Optiver’s core derivatives pricing and trading strategies. No Telecommuting Allowed. Salary: $109,574 - $150,000/ yr. Beneﬁts Summary: Global profit-sharing pool and performance-based bonus structure. 401(k) match up to 50%. Comprehensive health, mental, dental, vision, disability, and life coverage. 25 paid vacation days alongside market holidays. Extensive office perks, including breakfast, lunch and snacks, regular social events, clubs, sporting leagues and more. Resume to: resumes@optiver.us and include Ref#: 00089485.

SENIOR BUSINESS SYSTEMS ANALYSTS

Itasca, IL area. Gather, analyze & document business requirements. Translate requirements into system specs. Travel / relocate to various unanticipated U.S. locs as reqd. Salary: $121,742 per year. Send res to: Sierra Consulting Inc., 650 E Devon Ave., Ste. 115, Itasca, IL 60143.

Commonwealth Edison seeks Senior Business Analyst in Oakbrook Terrace, IL to perform detailed anlysis to supp. bus. ops., incl. conducting complex modeling, forecasting, trending, variance anlysis, bus. case dvlpmnt, & ﬁnancial & operational anlysis; track, maintain, & anlyz operation’s key perf. indicators; dvlp & present perf. reports for both internal & external use; & dvlp & conduct short-term & long-range bus. planning. Reqs U.S. or foreign equiv. bach.’s deg. in Bus., Engr., Finance, or Econ. + 4 yrs in-depth financial &/or ops. anlysis exp. incl. a min. of 3 yrs energy ind. ops. anlysis applying managerial acct. concepts, customer intelligence gathering, forecasting, staff planning, scheduling, anlytcl & stat. problem solving, & demonstrating adv. proficiency in specialized bus. apps. incl. wrkforce mgmt., project mgmt., PassPort, Brio, CIS, EPS, Bus. Objects, SAP planning, bus. modeling, forecasting, voice response unit, automatic call distributors, wrk mgmt., & outage mgmt. Telecomm. 2 days/ wk from w/in normal commuting distance of Oakbrook Terrace, IL is perm. Salary range from $77,600 to $116,400. Reply by email w/ resume to jobposting@ exeloncorp.com.

Commonwealth Edison seeks Engineer, Overhead Transmission Engineering, in Oakbrook Terrace, IL to dvlp studies, plans, criteria, specs., calcs., evals., dsgn docs., perf. assessments, integrated sys. anlysis, cost ests., & budgets, assoc. w/ the planning, dsgn, licensing, constr., op., & maint. of ComEd’s elec. transmission sys. Specifics incl. studying elec. transmission sys., collecting data, performing engr. analysis, interpreting results, drawing conclusions, & presenting recommendations to mgmt.; anlyzing & interpreting results of complex power flows & performing complex engr. tests; verifying & validating studies, blueprints, or dsgns against accepted engr. principles & practices; & dsgning high voltage transmission & distribution circuits. Reqs U.S. or foreign equiv. Bach.’s deg. in an Engr. ﬁeld + 2 yrs product dvlpmnt exp. using AutoCAD to create detailed dsgns tailored to specific reqs. & dvlping technical documentation for same, incl. 6 mos energy ind. engr. exp. anlyzng & interpreting complex electrical & mech. sys. & w/ regs., guides, standards, codes, methods, & practices necessary to perform assignments. Position may be req. to wrk extended hrs for coverage during storms or other energy delivery emergencies. Telecomm. 2 days/ wk w/in normal commuting distance of Oakbrook Terrace, IL is perm. Salary range from $83,200 to $124,800. Reply by email w/ resume to jobposting@ exeloncorp.com.

FOR SALE

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UPCOMING SHOWS

AUG 29 the beaches WITH HELLO MARY AND BRENNAN WEDL

AUG 28 TURNPIKE TROUBADOURS . . FAIRGROUNDS WITH OLD CROW MEDICINE SHOW AND KEN POMEROY

AUG 31 STREETLIGHT MANIFESTO . . . . THE SHED SEPT 5 PUP & JEFF ROSENSTOCK . . FAIRGROUNDS WITH EKKO ASTRAL

SEPT 6 D4VD .

. . FAIRGROUNDS WITH BRYANT BARNES

SEPT 7 BEACH BUNNY . . . . . . . . . . FAIRGROUNDS WITH SOCCER MOMMY, ANNIE DIRUSSO, SIDNEY GISH AND GREAT GRANDPA

SEPT 8 CLIPSE . . .

. . THE SHED WITH INDIGO DE SOUZA

SEPT 9 WAXAHATCHEE . . .

. . FAIRGROUNDS WITH JESSICA PRATT AND SHARP PINS

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