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Reader Letters m
Re: “Entwined immigrant lives,” a review of the play Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, written by Cristalle Bowen and published in our January 30 issue (volume 54, number 17)
Great piece. [The play] was thoughtful and considerate of the stylists and their individual situations, o en with much laughter. Inside Chicago Shakespeare, Black women with creative natural hairstyles were in full force—an early display for Black History Month. —Elaine Hegwood Bowen, via X
Re: recent calls to donate to the Reader
Please donate, the Reader made me more creative, a better thinker, and helped me understand what makes Chicago so amazing. —Dr. Brendan Hendrick, via X
Extremely sad, appreciate the Reader and the work all investigative journalists do. —Xena, via Instagram
Hang in there! Keep being creative with your survival techniques. [heart emoji] —Christopher Leon Gray, via Facebook
Don’t give up! We love you! —Bridge artistic collective and journal, via Instagram
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The Chicago Reader accepts comments and letters to the editor of less than 400 words for publication consideration.
m letters@chicagoreader.com
This year’s Groundhog Day celebrations on February 2 provided us with an uneven slate of results. Our local rodent prognosticator, Woodstock Willie, predicted an early spring by reportedly not seeing his shadow. Punxsutawney Phil, Willie’s Pennsylvania cousin and, arguably, the most famous among the animal weather predictors, reportedly saw his shadow, which supposedly means six more weeks of winter. Canadian groundhog Shubenacadie Sam, who lives in a provincial wildlife reserve in Nova Scotia, was the fi rst North American Groundhog Day reveal for the year. At 8 AM Atlantic Standard Time, Sam ambled out of his groundhog house (delightfully labeled with his name, in case other groundhogs get confused), saw his shadow according to park personnel, and stood there for a minute until he was allowed to get out of the eight-degree (Fahrenheit) weather and return inside.
We do have more than just the word (or presence) of these three animals to guide our weather suspicions. Meteorological scientists at the National Weather Service do not predict an early spring, at least for the Chicago area. And while no one really knows exactly when a warmer season will prevail, we can rely on meteorologists, data researchers, scientists, emergency management professionals, and even weather-obsessed bloggers to clue us in to the weather events that might a ect us negatively and o er tips and methods for being prepared.
What we don’t have is any semblance of certainty that our current federal administration understands the importance of the thousands of federal employees who represent decades of experience in their respective fields. We don’t have any guarantee that the systems we depend upon for emergency communications, financial security, or even global diplomacy will stay unchallenged by this current administration. To wit—if representatives from a private company are installed on a “presidential task force” and then allowed to take control of a federal agency’s finances, lock out agency workers from their own computers, access classified information, and remove the current agency leadership, who’s to say what’s next?
Just in case you’ve been trying to hide out in Shubenacadie Sam’s little house (and let me say—I get it, I don’t blame you) and missed the memo, that task force thing happened. This month. Already.
The task force in question is called the
Department of Government Efficiency (yes, it spells out DOGE, like a Scooby-Doo on-thenose villain name), and they took control of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Several employee unions have already filed legal action against the treasury secretary Scott Bessent; the Department of the Treasury; and the Bureau of the Fiscal Service for “unlawful ongoing, systematic, and continuous disclosure of personal and financial information” to Elon Musk and other members of DOGE.
USAID administers humanitarian assistance, including funds for essential HIV patient care in western and southern African countries’ clinics and technical assistance for relief and disaster organizations worldwide. In some cases, the agency has been providing essential programmatic work in underdeveloped countries. But DOGE, led by Musk with approval from the president, seems to be bent on purging the organization altogether— which DOGE doesn’t have the authority to do, and the president requires an act of Congress to do.
If ever there was a time to question authority, it is now. And while you’re catching up, please check in with your elders, neighbors, and fellow citizens who have been keeping up with the news and have already been voicing their concerns and opinions. Learn your neighbors’ names.
Get involved and informed now because we might need to band together during a drastic crisis situation even worse than what we’re currently facing, and at the very least, it will help to know how things are supposed to work.
And though they may be cute, don’t depend solely on groundhog predictions. You don’t need a furry weatherman to know which way the wind blows. You need to stay reading, stay listening, and continue to reach out to each other.
I hope we can bring you more issues of this paper. Please donate at chicagoreader.com/ donate to help us do so. v
—Salem Collo-Julin, editor in chief m scollojulin@chicagoreader.com
Groundhogs are cute but are not scientists. HERBERT A. FRENCH/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
FOOD & DRINK
POP-UP PREVIEW
Xicágo Cevichería’s coastal cuisine could only converge in Chicago
Odin Metzger embraces the fresh piscine treasures of the planet at the next Monday Night Foodball, the Reader’s weekly chef pop-up at Frank and Mary’s Tavern.
By MIKE SULA
One sunny afternoon last August, underneath the Belmont Avenue bridge crossing the river, Odin Metzger chargrilled kosher dogs with onions, relish, and mustard, then plated wonton chips with tuna tartare seasoned with tom yam paste.
“We were cooking underneath the bridge at the troll concert,” he says. “It’s the highlow thing, right? We have the basic common denominator—like, everybody wants a glizzy. And then maybe something crazy that you’ve never had before.”
Metzger is the chef behind Xicágo Cevichería, a raw seafood-focused pop-up that draws upon his Mexican Croatian background and his southern California culinary education. The “troll concert” was his small crew’s
fifth pop-up at the seasonal Secret River concert series staged in the middle of the water on the concrete pillar just south of the bridge. There were plenty of glizzies left over, but he sold out of the tartare to the crowd that gathered on the deck below the bridge to listen. There were roasted vegetable tacos with salsa verde to spare, but they also cleaned him out of the octopus with fingerling potato confit, garlic aioli, and fines herbes pistou.
“I wouldn’t say what I’m doing is fusion,” Metzger says. “I hate that word. We look for where there’s a common ingredient that’s used in different cultures, and how can we embrace that? It’s not, ‘Let’s throw these two things together because we can.’”
Xicágo Cevichería debuted just two months
Willow Springs, though his grandmother, Ljiljana Metzger, was a chef at the former Cafe Croatia in West Ridge, which chalked up good reviews from the critics at the dailies in the 90s. But his interest began to grow after his parents divorced.
“I was just cooking for myself at home a lot because my mom was working a lot. I was making Kraft mac and cheese for myself almost every day, and I was getting tired of that cheese powder product that it comes with. I would take these little Babybel cheeses, rip them with my hands, and make a basic white sauce with it. When my mom found out that I was doing that, she got pissed: ‘I can just buy you the ingredients. It’s so much cheaper to do it that way.’”
Metzger’s early teenage years were troubled. He didn’t have much direction or an interest in school, and after a suspension for smoking weed, he reached a turning point. “It was really not a good time for me,” he says. “I was a really messy person to be around. I was getting into trouble, and I wasn’t really happy. I was in desperate need of a change.”
earlier at Apero wine bar in North Center, but Metzger’s embrace of universal ingredients— like the hamachi and cilantro in his tartare— began a decade earlier in high school, when a culinary arts instructor called him over to check something out.
“He was from Guam, so his style of cooking was very Pacific coastal. I came into the kitchen, and he was curing an entire tuna with kombu [dried Japanese kelp]. I just thought that was so cool. I didn’t even know that I really liked seafood yet, but he opened my eyes to the world of sushi and ceviche and all these flavors that were really, really exciting to me. I kind of just fell in love after that.”
Metzger didn’t have a focused interest in food growing up in southwest suburban
His father, who lived in San Diego, suggested he move west. For one thing, the local high school had a culinary arts program. “That was all I needed to hear.” Metzger jumped right into it, particularly with the school’s entry in the California ProStart Cup, a statewide culinary competition for students. His junior year, the three-course meal the team prepared for 25 judges beat out two dozen other schools. He still serves the Hokkaido scallop ceviche he created for the appetizer, which he took to the national competition in Providence, Rhode Island. The following year they took the state contest again—“I broke down an entire Dungeness crab in five minutes”—and the scholarship money he won bought him a free ride to culinary school at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, outside Los Angeles.
While there, he became increasingly enamored with the overlap between sushi and ceviche culture in southern California; and the crossover among Mexican, Asian, and Mediterranean coastal cuisines, particularly among diasporic communities like La Mesa Barrio Chino, the Chinatown just over the border in Tijuana.
COVID interrupted school near the end of his freshman year, and he headed back to Chicago, where he started making pizza at Whiner Beer Company at the Plant, eventually taking over the kitchen when the head chef moved on.
Xicágo Cevichería’s hamachi tom yum tartare; a portrait of Odin Metzger TJ HAGEN; BETHANY CAREY
RXICÁGO CEVICHERÍA
Monday Night Foodball at Frank and Mary’s Tavern, Mon 2/ 17 at 5 PM until sellout, 2905 N. Elston chicagoreader.com/food/monday-night-foodball
After six months, he headed back to school and took a line cook job at the modern Korean American restaurant Yanbang, headed by Katianna and John Hong, an Alinea vet. “I learned the beauty and elegance of Korean- and Japanese-style cooking there,” he says, and he still serves a dish he created in that kitchen: soy-braised shitakes with acorn noodles and hoja santa furikake.
After a postgraduation eating tour of France and Spain, he returned to Chicago hoping to find a job in a Michelin-level kitchen. “I’m paying attention on Instagram, like, ‘What’s going on in Chicago?’ I see that Kasama gets a Michelin star, and, ‘Oh shit! Things are changing.’ I actually started getting FOMO. It seemed like there was almost a restaurant renaissance happening. And then The Bear came out. And I was like, ‘Why? Why is everyone obsessing over Chicago?’”
These days, Metzger, who’s 23, has come full circle, teaching culinary arts to 150 sophomores at Morton East High School in Cicero. But first, he landed on the line at River North’s Basque steak house Asador Bastien and began to consider how his raw vision of global pi-
scine cuisine could adapt to the midwest.
“It wasn’t really compelling anymore for it to be a California thing; let’s get midwesterners to start eating wild vegetables and raw seafood. We have access to all of these ingredients that we wouldn’t be able to get in France. When I get my sashimi-grade sea bass from Martinez Produce and Seafood—you wouldn’t be able to buy this stu in other really big midwestern cities.”
“This is something that could have only been born and hatched in Chicago.”
Last summer, Metzger launched Xicágo Cevichería with a string of pop-ups at Apero, assisted by a crew of old friends from his Lyons Township High School days (Madison Waliewski, Bethany Carey, Lukas Pallisard, Jess Carvajal) interspersed with weekly river gigs and the occasional night at Solemn Oath Brewery.
On February 17, they’re making their debut at Monday Night Foodball, the Reader’s week-
ly chef pop-up at Frank and Mary’s Tavern in Avondale, featuring a menu headlined by an aguachile rojo trio with shrimp, scallops, and Japanese sea bass, atop a foundation of savory gelee made with the fish’s bones, cured cucumbers, mezcal foam, watermelon Pop Rocks, and watermelon, compressed and intensified through the ancient Mesoamerican process of nixtamalization.
His winning Hokkaido scallop ceviche is on the menu too, cured in citrus and garlic, with kombu oil, chili oil, and sweet potato chips.
There are no glizzies on the menu, but that hamachi tartare is on it, marinated in lime and bound by tom yam paste and Mexican McCormick mayonesa, and sprinkled with toasted mustard seeds.
So is a Japanese tilapia ceviche with green papaya and carrots, pickled som tam–style with brown sugar, fish sauce, and tamarind
FOOD & DRINK
powder, along with kimchi radishes, micro leeks, and wonton chips.
He’ll be debuting Spanish-style papas bravas—fried potatoes with black garlic aioli, salsa macha, and dill—and also Nepalese red spinach and kimchi samosas with tamarind chutney, and an achar made from blended sesame seeds, peanuts, edamame, cumin, tomato, jalapeño, garlic, ginger, and coconut milk. And for dessert, fresas con crema: strawberries macerated in rum, brown sugar, vanilla, and cinnamon, with Mexican chocolate-infused cream and creme fraiche, with a sprinkle of Mexican marzipan, and a hidden layer of strawberry-mezcal coulis.
It’ll be their biggest menu yet, something that could’ve only happened here. “My identity did not exist until my mom and dad met each other in the 80s, because there was a huge influx of Yugoslavian people to Chicago. This is something that could have only been born and hatched in Chicago.”
It starts at 5 PM until sellout at 2905 N. Elston on Monday, February 17. v
m
msula@chicagoreader.com
NEWS & POLITICS
Economics gone wild
Steven Levitt had a plan to revolutionize electronic monitoring. Did it work?
By SHAWN MULCAHY
Steven Levitt isn’t like other economists. At least, that’s what he wants you to think.
The 57-year-old finished his doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1994 and burst into the mainstream in 2005 with the international bestseller, Freakonomics . The book’s title is a nod to Levitt’s academic philosophy—economics isn’t just for money; it’s for everything. (Other titles that didn’t make the cut include “Economics Gone Wild” and “E-Ray Vision.”)
An enticing subtitle advertises: “A rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything.”
Through hundreds of short anecdotes, Levitt and his coauthor, journalist Stephen J. Dubner, apply freakonomics to all sorts of problems: why drug dealers live with their moms, why sumo wrestlers cheat, why Black people give their kids different names than white people. “If you learn to look at data in the right way,” they write, “you can explain riddles that otherwise might have seemed impossible.” More simply: People lie, numbers don’t.
But behind the stories about bagel sales and game shows and swimming pools, a larger ideological project is at play. Levitt and Dubner touch on complex, real-world issues like racism and crime—and despite their contrarian appeal, many of their ideas fit squarely within the neoliberal mainstream. One chapter considers whether Black people are rejected from jobs at higher rates than white people because of racism or because their names might signal “a disadvantaged background to an employer who believes that workers from such backgrounds are undependable.”
For Levitt and Dubner, economics is the very thread that holds together the fabric of society. “Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work—whereas economics represents how it actually does work.”
In the decades since publishing their first book, Levitt and Dubner grew Freakonomics into a media empire—complete with a 2009 “freakquel” called SuperFreakonomics , a blog, a documentary, a recurring New York Times Magazine column, a weekly NPR show, a podcast network, and even a pair of branded pants.
By 2019, Levitt focused most of his energy on his lab at the University of Chicago, where he’s been a faculty member since 1997. The roughly two dozen analysts, data scientists, and entrepreneurs who work at Levitt’s Center for RISC (Radical Innovation for Social
Change) combine “unconventional perspectives” and empirical data to tackle the world’s biggest problems. During pandemic-induced lockdowns, for example, the lab teamed up with the City of Chicago to research the impact of working from home on downtown’s business corridor. Another project, with some of the nation’s largest transplant centers, supports prospective organ donors who are disqualified for “reversible reasons,” like their weight or smoking habits. A global agriculture company enlisted the center to analyze their methane mitigation strategy. “Think of us as Freakonomics, applied,” reads RISC’s profile on a job website.
Levitt’s work has touched on everything from campaign finance to cheating teachers in Chicago public schools. Often, though, he comes back to crime. Some of his earliest research, dating back to the 1990s, considered the impact of incarcerating people on crime rates and the economics of street gangs and their drug-selling enterprises. More recently, electronic monitoring (EM), a surveillance technology that was being adopted by law enforcement agencies across the country, caught the economist’s eye.
“One of the main reasons we keep people locked up in jail is that we’re afraid of what they’ll do in terms of crime when we release them,” he explained in a 2023 episode of his podcast, People I (Mostly) Admire . Levitt thought that people would be less likely to commit new crimes if they knew they were under surveillance. If so, “we could let a huge share of the incarcerated population free with little impact on crime rates—and it’s just a huge win for society.”
Levitt had just one problem: he didn’t have a way to test his hypothesis.
Across town, Thomas Dart, the Cook County sheriff, just had a major disaster dropped into his lap. For years, the county’s EM program—launched in the late 80s under a judicial mandate to shrink the size of a dangerously overcrowded jail—was limited to people charged with relatively minor crimes. But in 2017, Timothy Evans, the county’s chief judge, issued an order requiring that bail be set at amounts defendants can actually a ord. This meant people facing charges like gun possession and even murder were sent home, often with a tracking bracelet, while they awaited their day in court. Dart, whose o ce oversees the thousands of people sentenced to tracking before their cases go to trial, was less than enthused.
“You could determine exactly who was at the scene of the crime and use the GPS not only to identify those people but to find them and to question them within a few minutes.”
“Out of concern for the public safety that I am sworn to safeguard,” Dart wrote in a 2018 letter to Toni Preckwinkle, the Cook County board president, “I have determined that I am neither satisfied nor convinced that the E.M. program, in its current form, o ers adequate protections given this recent dramatic increase in violent o enders.”
Electronic monitoring became nearly impossible to manage, but not necessarily due to the change in the severity of charges. The monitors themselves flooded the sheriff’s o ce with thousands of false alerts every day. There were plenty of legitimate alerts, too. In addition to the handful of people actively trying to evade authorities were the more routine violations caused by a late bus, a stop at the grocery store on the way home from court, or a trip to the dumpster out back. Investigators spent their days chasing down one alert after another, but there were simply too many to tackle.
Steven Levitt didn’t know any of this when he asked the sheri for a meeting in late 2018. In fact, he didn’t even tell Dart ahead of time what he wanted to meet about, so the sheri ’s initial reaction came as a bit of a shock. “There’s nothing I hate more than electronic monitoring,” Dart said at the outset, as Levitt later recalled in his podcast. “Oh my god,” Levitt thought. “This is the biggest waste of time.” But he stuck with it. He laid out a vision for what he called a “very di erent electronic monitoring system.” At its heart was a simple idea: People rarely commit crimes if they know they’ll get caught. “For instance,” he explained in his podcast, “nobody commits a robbery in front of a police o cer. So, if we could use GPS to track a potential criminal’s movements, we could cross-reference his or her location at some particular time with crime incidents using databases that police departments already assemble.” When combined with technology like the artificial intelligence (AI)–powered gunshot detection system ShotSpotter, he suggested, “you could determine exactly who was at the scene of the crime and use the GPS not only to identify
those people but to find them and to question them within a few minutes.”
By the end of the meeting, Dart was sold. He turned to his chief of sta and said, “Figure out who the hundred most dangerous people are that we’ve got on electronic monitoring right now, and I want GPS-enabled bracelets on them by next week.”
“Unbeknownst to you,” Dart later reflected on Levitt’s podcast, “I never needed your help more than when you walked in that door.”
One of Steven Levitt’s first priorities when his Center for RISC got to work in June 2019 was to swap out the county’s existing electronic monitors for new ones outfitted with GPS. Levitt thought it was ridiculous that Cook County—like most jurisdictions in the U.S.—still relied on a technology called radio-frequency identification (RFID). RFID monitors use radio waves to communicate with an antenna, sometimes called a beacon, that’s installed in a person’s home. When a person moves too far away, their beacon alerts authorities. RFID monitors can generally tell you whether a person is where they’re supposed to be—but not much else. They’re also prone to errors, particularly when used in homes with basements or multiple floors that can interfere with the signal.
In practice, this meant investigators spent entire shifts chipping away at an endless backlog of alerts. GPS, Levitt thought, “could transform the legal system.” It would even benefit the people under surveillance, he said, giving them “an airtight alibi against being accused of a crime they didn’t commit.”
“It’s completely crazy in a world when you have GPS because [RFID] didn’t do your deputies any good,” Levitt mused to Dart on his podcast. “They’re gone, but you can’t find them ’cause you don’t have a technology to actually track them down. You don’t know whether they’ve gone to the backyard to play with their kids or whether they’re halfway across town.”
Hand in hand with more accurate data, Levitt reasoned, the sheri ’s o ce needed a better
way to use it. He thought the sheri ’s o ce’s limited resources would be better spent on the minority of cases that most likely represented legitimate violations. His team got to work on a solution and, about ten months later, in April 2020, researchers at the Center for RISC began to quietly test a software they called Decision Aid.
In its early stages, Decision Aid mostly functioned like a filter on a spreadsheet. It suppressed alerts for unauthorized trips that lasted less than half an hour and granted participants a “grace period” to return home before and after approved trips. More important, however, was its ability to prioritize
the alerts that did make it through. Using an algorithm developed by RISC, the software ranked alleged violators as high, medium, or low risk based on “the recency of alerts generated, volume of alerts generated, and severity of the participants’ charge,” according to an internal program status presentation. Without the flood of false and low-level alerts, investigators were free to focus on the “most urgent” cases first—people accused of violent crimes or who frequently violated their release conditions.
It would take officials nearly 18 months to transition the majority of Cook County’s electronic monitors to new, GPS-enabled devices.
NEWS & POLITICS
continued from p. 7
GPS monitoring expanded from just 63 people in April 2020 to more than two thousand people as of mid-November 2020, and it would top 3,500—the vast majority of people on EM—by the following January, public records show. A January 21, 2021, presentation from RISC noted that three-quarters of the program was “in compliance or low priority” and just 6 percent of participants generated location alerts each day. (“Some of these alerts,” the presentation noted, “are due to legitimate work obligations without a fixed address or movement.”)
It soon became clear, however, that GPS was not without its own issues. For starters, most GPS devices are susceptible to what’s known as signal drift, or the difference between where a device actually is and where its location shows it is. The phenomenon is worse in rural areas, where cellular coverage is sparse, as well as in major cities, amidst tall buildings, thick walls, and thousands of competing signals. The GPS monitors, like the RFID ones before them, issued thousands of false alerts.
In the roughly one-month period between May 1 and June 9, 2021, the sheriff’s office logged more than 163,000 alarms, including more than 14,500 for “communication loss,” records show. An analysis prepared by RISC in November 2021 found that about eight of every ten alerts issued by GPS monitors were false positives. (The Reader and the TRiiBE first wrote about this in 2022.) Researchers further found that alerts for people suspected of leaving their homes were incorrect a whopping 96 percent of the time.
I asked Levitt and the Center for RISC’s executive director and cofounder, Je rey Severts, how they could be confident in a technology that their own analysis showed was incorrect
thew Walberg, the sheri ’s communications director, tells me my question is based on “a mischaracterization” of RISC’s analysis.
The purpose of Decision Aid, Walberg wrote in a statement, “was to weed out alerts that were not actionable” so the sheriff’s office could “focus [its] limited resources on instances that posed a high likelihood of actual violations of program rules. In those limited instances, investigators evaluated the alert data to determine an actual violation.” He added that “monitoring thousands of individuals who were court-ordered to our EM program is an incredibly complex task. The Sheriff’s O ce works hard to ensure that program participants are accurately monitored and built a system of review to identify the violations.”
Yet prosecutors, armed with data from the sheri ’s o ce, continued to rely on the technology to argue that people should be locked up even as they were aware of its limitations. One man was sent back to jail in December 2021 when authorities accused him of leaving his home 15 times—only to be released three months later after a prosecutor acknowledged in court the presence of evidence that “directly contradicts” the sheri ’s o ce’s claims. Another time, according to emails I reviewed, a deputy wrote their colleagues that someone’s monitor showed them moving through Lake Michigan. In reply, a deputy quipped, “Either it’s a speed boat or a drift :).”
In May 2021, a man emailed the sheriff’s o ce disputing multiple alarms that his monitor had generated. He was home all along, he wrote, and he wanted to see a log of GPS coordinates from his monitor. An assistant in the sheriff’s EM division later forwarded the man’s email to Carmen Ruffin, the unit’s director. “I thought to bring this to your at-
A relatively sparse website created to demonstrate the platform promises electronic monitoring that is “better,” “smarter,” and “safer.” I’m left to wonder: better, smarter, and safer for whom?
(I asked the sheri ’s o ce why sta appeared concerned that EM information could be used in court. Walberg writes that the sheri ’s office “has no concerns about the public learning about Decision Aid or our efforts to protect public safety” and that it “seems to be more of an assumption” on my part.)
80 percent of the time. I never heard back from Severts, and Levitt says he’ll “leave it to the Sheri ‘s o ce to answer the questions about the electronic monitoring program.” Mat-
tention,” the assistant wrote. “I’m uncertain if you would want someone from investigations to look into this matter as I could imagine this participant using this information in court.”
Another man, Kahleif Whitfield, was accused of leaving his home at least five times, according to emails and court records. One supposed trip showed Whitfield, who had paraplegia and used a manual wheelchair, moving back and forth through a grassy, unpaved park near his home. Tracy Harkins, Whitfield’s attorney, emailed the county’s
electronic monitoring vendor, Track Group, in May 2021 asking for help. “Since Decision Aid clearly flags false positives with regularity, let alone the overall system being at 90% false positive, this is a huge problem for us,” she wrote. “I believe this client to be being truthful and I am just trying to keep an innocent person out of jail. Will you please assist me?” Lavonne Turner, a Track Group account manager, forwarded Harkins’s email to Ru n and added this note: “I have received emails, text message and calls all in a day from this attorney. How would you like for me to proceed with her inquiry? Also, how does she know about the decision aid?”
NEWS & POLITICS
By the end of 2020, Decision Aid was in full swing. The software sifted through a constant stream of alerts and picked out the ones it thought posed the greatest risk. It addressed Sheriff Tom Dart’s most immediate needs, but Steven Levitt and his Center for RISC were already working to expand its capabilities even further.
Law enforcement agencies warehouse troves of personal data on virtually everyone—whether we’re suspected of crimes or not. Vast networks of security cameras, license plate readers, facial recognition tools, and more tell authorities intimate details about where we travel and who we associate
Nothing’s ever what it seems..
What you running your mouth for? your problems don’t make you perfect! tell me when you see me what’s wrong, it’s never worth, dealing with emotions, ain’t how we roll. but things change, we point blame & never point at our self. take a look in the mirror, do you love what you see? Or do you just like it on payday, who you trying to be?
Dying to see, who in your corner, when you don’t got no more to give. Vultures eat the dead, because they ain’t happy the way they live. I’m nappy & afraid of kids, but my fears aint gone stop me from growing waves.
Or tryna make twins every time I get laid. Call a spade a spade.
Shade for the snitches, we working to get out of the trenches, back to the business.
Tunnel vision keep a clear-eyed view, you on’t think the same things you wanting I be wanting ‘em too!
Gotta pick & choose your battles, every season aint gone be the only reason you fight. I just came home from a cell bidding, its a couple cats aint gone never see light. Never be knight when you a king, some gone have to follow, & some just follow they dream. I want to take it to the Apollo, & hear everybody scream, even then I aint made it though, nothings ever what it seems. believe half of what you hear, none of what you see, half tell truth, other half make believe. None show facts, facts don’t come free, you sell it, not tell it,
with. Levitt reasoned that, by combining some of this information with the detailed location data collected by electronic monitors, authorities could gain an even clearer picture of the people under Dart’s watch.
By January 2021, researchers at RISC developed an algorithm to match people’s historical locations to crimes reported by the Chicago Police Department (CPD), documents show. A “match” doesn’t necessarily mean someone committed a crime; it just means they lingered (“loitering” in EM parlance) in the general area of an incident reported to police. RISC sta notified Dart’s o ce of notable matches in once-a-day email updates and reported on
By Frsh Waters
& that come with a fee. Good game like good brain, take time too achieve, one hand you soaking it up, other hand you letting it leak. Don’t let a spill, be the reason you run with the weak. Stay thorough, like you’ve been running for weeks! Is you tired?
Ready to retire?
Kobe in his last years, did he get all he desired?
What wisdom did he leave Russell? Was it sincere & edifying, or was he just out for self, let’s ask Shaq to give me some help. Some questions answer they self, others dont need an answer.
When the only person, in your corner stop listening, do you retreat from speaking, or speak for no reason.
Hope you not here for no season, love it like Kobe.
Don’t just get a paycheck, then when you out you dont know me. Sign pieces of your passion, so I can feel it and have it.
Is you still in yo madness?
Or is you mad from yo sadness?
Tired of asking, tell me the truth, don’t just leave me alone, when you don’t like what I do. You gotta pick and choose yo homies, everybody ain’t gone be yo friend. I just came out a cell bidding, it’s couple cats I won’t ever see again. Never bear burdens when you burden free. Some cats you gone want, & some cats you just won’t need. I wanna take it to a level we ain’t never seen, United Center, screaming our names in the nose bleeds.
Even then I ain’t achieve what I want be Nothings ever what it seems Nothings ever what it seems Nothings ever what it seems
Frsh Waters from Chicago’s Westside is a writer, performance artist, & community outreach coordinator for Chicago youth arts non-profit John Walt Foundation and is a Co-Founder of Chicago’s incomparable Pivot Gang. He believes writing is a road map to the world. Frsh is a street food lover & appreciator of art. His mantra is “Change is the crossroads to innovation; either be the change you want to see envisioned on a canvas, or wonder why it doesn’t exist.”
Opening Hours
Wednesday, Friday, Saturday: 11:00 AM–5:00 PM
Thursday: 11:00 AM–6:00 PM
More Light! Exhibition Chicago design duo Luftwerk’s immersive interpretation of Aram Saroyan’s poem “lighght” transforms the Poetry Foundation gallery into a dynamic lightbox.
Extended through February 15, 2025
A weekly series curated by the Chicago Reader and sponsored by the Poetry Foundation.
NEWS & POLITICS
their progress regularly. A presentation from January 2021 announced that “4 confirmed participants have been matched to shootings by our algorithm.” (Three, the presentation noted, were shot at, and the fourth was “likely [an] instigator.”) But the process took time and some additional investigation. Information was delayed and limited to incidents reported by police. What researchers really wanted was a way to match people to crimes in real time.
That would come in early 2022, when RISC was granted access to crime data from the CPD’s intelligence center (the CPIC) and ShotSpotter. With these updates, Decision Aid automatically notified the sheri ’s o ce anytime someone on a monitor was matched to a crime—a process that could take as little as a few hours and as long as a couple days. The alerts from ShotSpotter allowed the system to flag in real time anyone on a monitor who was in the proximity of a supposed gunshot. (The Reader reported in January 2024 that ShotSpotter alerts in one police district across nine months were accurate less than half the time.)
Cook County’s expansive electronic mon-
oversight from county o cials or the public.
“Oftentimes, surveillance is a convenient Band-Aid, but it doesn’t actually necessarily accomplish what we want it to accomplish,” says Kate Weisburd, a law professor at the University of California, San Francisco, who studies criminal investigation, civil rights, and emerging technologies. “If what Chicago wants to be doing is just creating a virtual panopticon where everybody who’s involved in the criminal justice system is watched 24/7 and—if there’s a crime—they’re instantly identified as being near that crime scene, then let’s be honest about that.” But when used that way, Weisburd says, “a whole other set of constitutional rights apply.” Just as police can’t rummage through your home without a warrant, “they can’t monitor people 24/7 for purposes of criminal investigation. That is against the Constitution.”
the state,” he says. A recent report from Wired details how U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents can already sidestep local sanctuary policies through joint federal, state, and local information-sharing hubs called fusion centers. “The public and the press should not trust claims made by law enforcement agencies and public o cials when they want to give law enforcement agencies and the courts more toys,” he says.
itoring program also meant someone had to sift through a stream of movement requests, which are required anytime someone on a monitor wants to leave home. RISC had an answer for this too. By mid-2021, researchers were piloting a system they called “passive monitoring.” Rather than verify every detail for every medical appointment request, with Decision Aid, EM staff simply answered one question: Does the address correspond to an actual medical establishment? If so, they could approve it and move on; Decision Aid would automatically flag unauthorized trips. The initial pilot was limited to medical requests, but RISC recommended expanding passive monitoring to all requests for movement by September 2021.
Taken together, the quiet development of this web of surveillance raises serious privacy and constitutional concerns, especially considering the people ordered to the sheriff’s electronic monitoring program have not yet been convicted. Thousands of people under surveillance had no opportunity to consent to such an intense level of scrutiny or to the exchange of their data with third parties. In addition, the Decision Aid platform was created with seemingly little transparency or
Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, an American University law professor who researches police surveillance, says there’s cause for concern with any technology claiming to use predictive analytics. “Chicago has led the nation in showcasing why person-based predictive policing fails in practice,” he tells me via email. He’s nodding to the Strategic Subject List, a statistical model used by the CPD that purported to predict whether someone would become a “party to violence.” From 2012 until at least 2018, every person arrested was assigned a risk score that identified the people most likely to be shot—or to shoot someone else—before it was quietly retired in 2019. “Tweaking the technology or the type of risk-based prediction is likely not going to lead to any better success this time around,” Guthrie Ferguson writes. “The only accurate prediction that can be made about person-based predictive risk scores is that they do not work at scale.”
Beyond individual concerns are far more significant fears about the use of sensitive data, particularly at a time when Donald Trump and a growing fascist movement seek to criminalize and disappear immigrants, queer and trans people, and people seeking reproductive care. José Martinez, a senior organizer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says data-sharing agreements between law enforcement and private companies mean information collected by Decision Aid and other surveillance systems could end up in the hands of federal agencies—and probably already has. “It feels to me like this is a workaround to be able to at least share information that, one way or another, is going to make it to the feds or to a cooperating agency somewhere else in
Matthew Walberg, the sheri ’s spokesperson, didn’t answer questions about whether Dart’s office notified people on electronic monitoring of Decision Aid’s development or how their data would be used. He tells me that people ordered to electronic monitoring must “voluntarily agree to participate in the program as a condition of release.” Anyone who doesn’t want to participate can “return to court and seek alternative conditions.” (In practice, this would likely mean remaining in jail instead.) He writes that the sheri ’s o ce “complied with all state and federal laws in its operation of its EM program” and downplayed concerns about surveilling people who are presumed innocent for evidence of future crimes. “EM doesn’t compel or induce participants to incriminate themselves,” he adds.
Nick Shields, a spokesperson for board president Toni Preckwinkle, tells me in a written statement that the president’s o ce was not aware of Decision Aid. He says electronic monitoring is “an important community safety tool” but notes that “it is also critical to consider the rights of the accused when policies are developed that impact the pretrial population.” He adds, “It is important to remember that all individuals on pretrial electronic monitoring are presumed innocent.”
Emmett Sanders, a researcher at the Prison Policy Initiative, spent about three months on a tracking device, an experience he remembers as restrictive and dehumanizing. “I came home and I found out that electronic monitoring brought the prison home with me,” he says. “If you have to add this many layers to something that exists, it shows how it’s failing to function,” Sanders says of Decision Aid.
Sheri Tom Dart had already been working to pare back Cook County’s EM program—one of the largest and longestrunning in the country—before he took o ce in December 2006, while he was still chief of sta to the previous sheri , Michael Sheahan. One of Dart’s gripes early on was that his office—not judges—determined who was fitted with a tracking bracelet and who remained in
Freakonomics has sold more than seven million copies worldwide. ERNESTO ANDRADE/FLICKR VIA CC BY-ND 2.0
jail. It was “reckless,” he argued during a 2007 county board hearing. “The system as it deals with [electronic monitoring] is not fair and is not just.”
The county’s monitoring program was unusual compared to those in most other jurisdictions—and judges do have a more comprehensive picture of people charged with crimes than the sheriff’s office—but Dart’s concern was likely as much political as it was practical. From its inception through the mid-2000s, EM was reserved for people charged with “nonviolent” offenses who could supposedly be released safely while they awaited trial. But if a person on a monitor were to seriously harm someone, blowblack would be inevitable—and it would land squarely at Dart’s feet.
The sheriff’s frustration with this system grew into a public feud with Timothy Evans, Cook County’s chief judge. “Cook County sheri says chief judge isn’t doing job,” read a 2008 headline in the Daily Herald . In legal filings, Dart argued against what had been a quarter century of federal oversight on conditions at the Cook County jail, claiming that “the primary and direct responsibility for reducing the inmate population at the Cook County Department of Corrections rests with the state court judiciary.” He even reportedly went to the General Assembly behind Evans’s back in an attempt to codify the change in state law. After Dart took o ce, the number of people on electronic monitoring plummeted. In 2005, one year before Dart’s election, more than 1,500 people were on tracking devices. That number fell to about 350 in August 2008 and fewer than one hundred in October 2010. All the while, the jail population hovered around its capacity.
In 2011, a panel of federal judges pointed to chronic overcrowding at the jail and “the unexplained reluctance of state judges in Cook County to set a ordable terms for bail” in an order that authorized Dart to release up to 1,500 people on his own. Dart hired retired judges to review the cases of people eligible for release, but by early 2014, a mere 147 people were under monitoring.
It took intervention from the state supreme court, at the request of Toni Preckwinkle, to break the logjam. Beginning in 2014, the number of people subject to electronic monitoring rebounded. In November 2016, the jail population reached its lowest point in years as the number of people on monitors eclipsed 2,200. EM grew even further in 2017, this time in scope rather than size, when Evans issued a new directive—a precursor to the groundbreaking Pretrial Fairness Act—that required
judges to set bail at amounts defendants could a ord. State law already instructed judges to consider a person’s “financial resources” when setting bail, but prior to the order, people charged with crimes spent years in jail simply because they couldn’t afford their freedom. So, beginning in September 2017, hundreds of people who would’ve otherwise been detained indefinitely were instead released on bail, often with the condition that they wear a tracking bracelet.
Though Dart initially expressed support for bond reform, the sheri used the expansion of electronic monitoring to push back against it and other legal reform e orts. In May 2018, his o ce refused to release about 55 people from jail under a short-lived policy intended to keep “high-risk” defendants incarcerated pretrial. “That ankle bracelet doesn’t stop someone from running,” Joseph Ryan, the sheri ’s public policy director, told the Tribune. “It’s not a leash nailed to a wall, and it doesn’t stop anyone from committing a new crime. . . . If there’s a belief that somehow this ankle bracelet is going to stop them from re-o ending, I don’t know where that notion comes from.”
Even as Dart publicly sounded the alarm on the epidemic of “violent o enders” placed under electronic monitoring, internally, his own office found otherwise. “GPS Electronic Monitoring participants are rarely re-arrested for Chicago crimes,” reported a slide from a September 9, 2021, presentation on Decision Aid. The presentation noted that 3.5 percent of the entire program had been rearrested for a new crime.
Dart has continued to spread misinformation about EM. In 2022, the sheri slammed a new state law that guaranteed people on monitors 48 hours of “essential movement” each week. Before the change, many people were barred from leaving their homes even for basic necessities like groceries, medical appointments, or laundry. Dart has repeatedly mischaracterized the policy, falsely claiming as recently as October that the sheri ’s o ce is prohibited from tracking people during periods of essential movement. “With this bill that was imposed upon us, we have no idea where people are at,’” Dart falsely asserted at an October 29 county budget hearing. “All we know is that, for those two days, we aren’t watching them, and that’s problematic.”
Walberg, when asked why Dart continues to repeat false information, maintained that essential movement allows “travel anywhere within Cook County without restriction. For all intents and purposes, the monitors
are, in essence, ‘shut o ’ because there is no ability to monitor whether individuals are violating program rules during their days of free movement.” This, of course, is not true. Even Preckwinkle’s o ce says so. Spokesperson Nick Shields tells me that “monitoring includes tracking individuals’ locations 24/7, including during limited periods of essential movement.”
This chapter of electronic monitoring in Cook County will soon come to an end.
Decision Aid ran for about four years— tracking more than 15,000 people—before the Center for RISC pulled the plug on the program at the end of June 2024 “due to mounting costs,” emails show. Soon, the electronic monitoring program will be transferred away from the sheri ’s o ce altogether. A budget amendment for the 2025 fiscal year begins the process of moving EM oversight to the county’s chief judge, who already runs a separate program for people sentenced to probation. Decision Aid, however, will likely live on. RISC is recruiting law enforcement in other cities and states that have joined the growing EM market. A relatively sparse website created to demonstrate the platform promises electronic monitoring that is “better,” “smarter,” and “safer.” I’m left to wonder: better, smarter, and safer for whom? Discussions of “safety” are often really only about certain crimes. It’s not the 16month genocide livestreamed from our phones or the billions of dollars employers steal from workers each year. When we talk about “crime,” we usually mean theft, drug
But can Decision Aid really claim credit, or could it be that, overall, people awaiting trial are rarely rearrested for new crimes? In 2020, Loyola University criminologists Don Stemen and David Olson found that both before and after Cook County enacted bond reform, a mere 3 percent of people were charged with a new violent crime while awaiting trial. Among people on electronic monitoring, virtually the same proportion—3.6 percent—received a new felony before trial, according to a 2021 report from the Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts. This tracks with Decision Aid’s own data, which found only 3.5 percent of people on monitors were rearrested (less than two tenths of a percent for aggravated crimes), according to a September 2021 presentation. Few studies have looked at the e ectiveness of electronic monitoring, particularly when used pretrial. Proponents frequently cite the technology’s ability to ensure people show up to court and to keep people from committing new crimes, but research hasn’t shown either to be true. A 2017 analysis from the University College London looked at 17 academic papers on electronic monitoring published since 1999 and concluded that the technology “does not have a statistically significant e ect on reducing re-o ending.” A similar survey of research from 2011 concluded that “utilizing EM as a condition of pretrial release does not reduce failure to appear or rearrest.”
In fact, available research suggests that electronic monitoring may actually lead to more new arrests when compared to people who are not monitored. As Emmett Sanders wrote in a 2023 report, “While EM programs
How can we expect companies to “solve” crime when their bottom line depends on it?
use, and gun possession—things people do to survive.
Steven Levitt was quick to declare Decision Aid a “big success.” On his podcast in 2023, he boasted that, during the three years his team worked with the sheriff’s office, only eight people on monitors in Cook County committed a homicide. “I’m not sure even you or I would’ve expected such good results given the backgrounds of the people on the program,” he remarked on his podcast to Tom Dart.
are often depicted as replacing traditional brick-and-mortar incarceration, the reality is these programs are often used to augment and expand the reach of incarceration and may have little e ect on the population of the jail itself.” A recent study from social policy think tank MDRC suggested that EM might invite a heightened level of scrutiny that criminalizes even trivial technical violations that have no bearing on public safety.
Evidence of that can be found in the sheri ’s
NEWS & POLITICS
continued from p. 11
own data. In June 2021, a person under surveillance left home and told authorities he was headed to the police station to pick up his mom, emails show. RISC flagged his alert as “most critical” because Decision Aid placed him within 50 feet of a reported shooting. The man lingered in the area for an hour longer before he left for the police station. “It is possible that the participant was not involved in the shooting,” a RISC analyst later wrote in an email, “especially given that he did not leave the area immediately after the shooting and when he did he went to a CPD station as he had informed earlier.” The shooting might’ve even occurred outside his mother’s home, the analyst noted. “Nonetheless, the participant was within 50 feet of the shooting and did not have authorized movement.” In reply, a sheri ’s deputy added a note in bold, capital letters: “REINCARCERATED.”
To the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s José Martinez, Decision Aid is just one product among a crowded marketplace o ering the latest fix to policing. “When they add ‘algorithmic decision-making’ or so-called AI, [those are] buzz words,” he says. “That’s marketing a lot more than it’s an actual, successful product—especially if it’s ever sold to the public as a product that’s going to reduce interactions between law enforcement and the public or decarcerate people who are dealing with the criminal justice system.”
In this era of “data-driven policing,” public officials funnel millions of dollars into unaccountable—and often unproven—private enterprises in the name of reform. Technology like body cameras and ShotSpotter and gun detection systems each promised to bring about policing that was fairer and more ecient. Yet each failed to live up to that promise and, in many cases, reinforced or even exacerbated underlying inequities. How can we expect companies to “solve” crime when their bottom line depends on it?
Academia benefits from this ecosystem, too. Professors help shape public policy and lend credibility to surveillance technology. In return, they get access to sensitive government information that they’re often free to use in pursuit of their own gains.
The same year Levitt first met with Dart, another University of Chicago professor licensed his research to a police technology startup. Rayid Ghani and a team of more than 20 fellows with the university’s Data Science for Social Good program developed a system to flag ocers at risk of “future adverse behaviour” based on data from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police
Department. With help from the university’s Polsky Center, which supports faculty with “commercializing their discoveries,” Ghani licensed the technology to Benchmark Analytics.
“It was thoughtful research,” the company’s CEO, Ron Huberman, told the university in a blog post, “but it lived in the four walls of the university.”
In 2001, Steven Levitt published a provocative paper with lawyer and economist
John J. Donohue III. The pair claimed that the legalization of abortion in 1973 led to a steep drop in violent crime in the ’90s because fewer unwanted children were born into poverty and, therefore, fewer would-be criminals reached the age of “criminal prime.”
Many of their peers had already begun to cast doubt on Levitt’s abortion theory when he and Stephen Dubner reprised it as a chapter in Freakonomics four years later. Shortly after the book went to press, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Christopher L. Foote, and a research assistant, Christopher F. Goetz, documented coding and statistical errors that they said undercut the results. Others reached similar conclusions.
Levitt was—and remains—unapologetic. Just a month after the book’s release, he published a full-throated defense on the Freakonomics blog. I asked him about it, and he pointed me to a follow-up article he and Donohue published in 2020. “It is a highly unusual paper in that it tests, out of sample, the predictions we made almost 20 years earlier in our original paper,” he writes. “The results are a stunning confirmation of the predictions.”
Levitt wants to be seen as an outsider—a rogue—who, through an inventive use of statistics and economics, offers a cold, hard look at the facts. In a world bogged down by dithering about right and wrong, the freakonomist cares only how it really is. “It is well and good to opine or theorize about a subject, as humankind is wont to do,” Levitt and Dubner wrote in the introduction to Freakonomics , “but when moral posturing is replaced by an honest assessment of the data, the result is often a new, surprising insight.”
Take a closer look at those insights, however, and you’ll see that they’re usually nothing more than smoke and mirrors. “Often, in the authors’ writing, the ‘conventional’ and the ‘rogue’ live side by side,” wrote statisticians Andrew Gelman and Kaiser Fung in a 2012 issue of American Scientist . “Chapter one of SuperFreakonomics , for instance, can be viewed either as a clear-eyed quantitative
examination of the economics of prostitution, or as an unquestioning acceptance of conventional wisdom about gender roles.”
It’s no coincidence that Levitt preached freakonomics from the same university where, a half century earlier, Milton Friedman was scheming up his own ideas about free market capitalism. The Levitts and Friedmans of the world see people as like-minded, selfinterested clones. Issues like poverty and crime are the faults of individuals, not a system rife with inequity and exploitation. It’s black-and-white thinking that exchanges morality for a sanitized look at numbers on a page: Poor people should work harder. Criminals shouldn’t commit crimes.
That’s the essence of Freakonomics —and Levitt’s work overall. “I am the kind of person who is always trying to concoct some scheme to beat the system or avoid getting scammed,” he explained in a 2005 blog post, “so I presume the people I’m studying are thinking the same
way. So when I think about legalized abortion, I think it sounds like a really sick form of insurance policy against an unwanted pregnancy. When I see that one sumo wrestler has more to gain from a win than the other foregoes by losing, I figure they’ll make a deal. When I think about real-estate agents, I’m constantly paranoid they are trying to screw me.”
Levitt argues that we are made safer by pervasive systems of crime-fighting surveillance and incarceration. Emmett Sanders has a different take. “We live under this misconception that what makes us safe is surrendering our autonomy, surrendering agency or privacy, and I don’t think that’s actually true,” he tells me. “I think what makes us safer is community. I think what makes us safer is resources. And I think it makes us safer to bring us together—instead of technology that is specifically designed to tear us apart.” v m smulcahy@chicagoreader.com
Milton Friedman DONALD ROCKER/UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO LIBRARY, SPECIAL COLLECTIONS RESEARCH CENTER
We Do Not Part is Han Kang’s most ambitious work yet
The novel links the a ershocks of violence to a chain of neglected South Korean history.
By CLEO QIAN
utures in a half-severed finger, repeatedly injected by a needle. The tiny heartbeat of a fragile bird. Warm juk. Cold snow. Black tree trunks like human torsos. These are some of the recurring images in Han Kang’s intensely visceral and unflinching new novel, We Do Not Part, the latest work by the winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in literature.
“I had parted ways with several people in my life. Some of these partings had been by choice, while others had caught me entirely unawares; I’d fought the latter with everything I had.” The novel opens with the narrator, Kyungha, a writer in Seoul, near-catatonic and suicidal from grief, with a recurring nightmare of black tree trunks—used as gravestones— being washed away by the sea.
Just as she has regained enough strength to write her will, Inseon, an old friend, texts her to come to the hospital. Inseon is a documentary photographer who has su ered a terrible accident and is undergoing a recovery so arduous it’s akin to torture. She makes a request to Kyungha: go to Jeju Island and save her pet bird before it dies.
From there, We Do Not Part unfolds across three sections, growing into a complex structure like the snow crystals it so carefully describes, in prose luminously translated by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris. The aftershocks of violence and trauma are linked in a chain of neglected history, along with the steadfast determination to not forget and to lay the bones of the dead to rest.
Han, a South Korean writer, broke out internationally with the English translation of the 2007 novel The Vegetarian , a dark allegory about a woman who suddenly stops eating meat, which won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize. More translations followed, including Human Acts , a novel whose traumatic core is the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, when South Korean military dictator Chun DooHwan declared martial law and had civilian protestors killed in the name of anti-communism. (Kyungha of We Do Not Part resembles Han in that they are both writers who su er migraines and published novels in 2014 about the Gwangju Uprising.)
Han is both the first Asian woman and South Korean citizen to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Despite her international success, Han has faced censorship at home for her critical takes on South Korean history, including being placed on a short-lived cultural blacklist by her government in 2014.
Once in Jeju, frail Kyungha battles an overwhelming migraine attack during an intense snowstorm which threatens to freeze her to
death before she can reach Inseon’s isolated home. Possibility and reality blur as she is shuttled between the restless boundaries of life and death, su ering and care. The tragedy she confronts on the island, tied to Inseon’s family, is enormous in scale: The Jeju uprising of 1948, when President Syngman Rhee’s declaration of martial law and anti-communist, counterinsurgency campaign resulted in 10 percent of the island’s population—between
14,000 to 30,000 people, possibly more—being killed. Through Inseon’s records, Kyungha pays witness to the massacre, with haunting images of police shooting civilians and infants dead on the beach, and of the search for missing family members and justice in the decades of censorship and repression that followed. Han is no stranger to writing about the extreme poles of human violence, su ering, love, and grief, but We Do Not Part is her most harrowing and ambitious work yet. Whereas her previous novels have jumped between multiple character perspectives, this latest sustains Kyungha’s perspective from beginning to end, and readers feel along with her the cumulative weight of absorbing so much violence and tragedy.
Part of what is magnetic about Han’s prose is her juxtaposition of the tender, the delicate, and the grotesque.
Part of what is magnetic about Han’s prose is her juxtaposition of the tender, the delicate, and the grotesque. Snow is “a few dozen sacks of spilled sugar in the light pouring out of the house”; decades pass while “small skulls shot through with bullet holes” and “bones upon bones” remain buried. Han’s too-knowing descriptions of the body in pain and the world of sickness are also particularly poignant throughout, reminding us that vulnerability and mortality are never far o . By extension, neither are our responsibilities to one another and to the dead.
A novel that opens with the suffering of parting closes with the dignity of refusing to part—not with memory, not with the dead, not with the desire for justice and restitution. With the impeachment of South Korean ex-president Yoon Suk Yeol after declaring martial law for a day on December 3, 2024, it is abundantly clear how perilous it is to forget these historical tragedies lingering so closely under the icy surface of the present. v
m letters@chicagoreader.com
COURTESY HOGARTH
ARTS & CULTURE
FEATURE
Weaving the future
The digital archive project “Textile Stories” is on view at Kiosk.
By XIAO DACUNHA
Istumbled upon “Textile Stories: A Living Archive,” on view at Kiosk through mid-February, during my research for a personal project on the intrinsic connection between womanhood, matrimony heritage, and fiber art. The name “Textile Stories” struck my heart so adamantly that I immediately contacted the two women behind this initiative. “Please, tell me all about it!”
Part artist collective, part online database, Textile Stories is a community project focused on preserving traditional Latin American weaving techniques and promoting the artists who use these techniques for art, community building, and advocacy. Instead of focusing on historical texts and records, the archive aims to shed light on practicing artists and craftspeople. Specifically, the project focuses on women sustaining themselves, their families, and their communities with threads and textiles, bringing them to the forefront alongside contemporary artists who use textiles for artistic exploration and advocacy.
The project came into motion when Louisa Potthast, an art historian, crossed paths with Sofía Magdits Espinoza, a painter-turned–
textile artist, two years ago, right before Potthast moved from Germany to Chicago.
Potthast had just finished developing an archival software, Logly, with her partner, Tyler Roberts, and began to think about building an archive for textile art.
“I was looking for omissions, silences, and voices that have not been heard in art history.
Textile art is a medium often described as craft, mostly practiced by women, and has been omitted from archives and historical records,” Potthast recalled.
Then, Potthast came across Cielo I (Sky I), the first in her soon-to-be cofounder’s communal weaving series at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf’s graduate exhibition. Using hues of blue, grey, white, and brown, the final product is an abstract tapestry resembling a seaside port where the sky, clouds, and water become one harmonious palette. Deeply touched, she invited Magdits Espinoza to join her in making the textile archive a reality.
For Magdits Espinoza, the idea of a textile archive resonated with her experience as a Peruvian artist who went to Germany to study art. Starting off in abstract painting,
R“TEXTILE STORIES: A LIVING ARCHIVE”
Through 2/ 16 : visit website for information on hours and programming, Kiosk, 3054 N. Sheffield, tdhr.io/k-i-o-s-k.html
Magdits Espinoza felt a disconnect between herself and her art. Around that period, an exhibition by German Jewish textile artist and printmaker Anni Albers ignited Magdits Espinoza’s curiosity for textiles and she began experimenting. As her practice grew, Magdits Espinoza began to use her woven pieces to discuss Peru’s textile tradition, the line between art and craft, community participation, and other topics significant to her personal values and experiences.
The project, which received support from the Goethe-Institut Chicago, consists of two segments: an online archive documenting contemporary artists’ work, practices, and shared narratives, and a living community network through which contemporary artists and craftspeople can collaborate and learn from each other.
The digital portion illustrates how textiles are essentially communal and narrativedriven by grouping artists and “artifacts” into “experiences.” In Passing Knowledge, textiles are described as “vessels of communication” and “objects containing knowledge and memory.” Included in this section of the website is Conversaciones con el telar (A conversation with the loom) by María José Murillo. The piece highlights the creation process of the Indigenous ancestral Andean loom, a method that incorporates the weaver’s body as part of the loom’s weaving mechanism.
In Communal Threads, the lens shifts to “the creation of textile arts in collectives of women.” Nos vemos en el cosmos is a participatory weaving project created by Magdits Espinoza continued from her studio to her current exhibition at Kiosk gallery. By repeating the weaving gesture of wrapping threads around the loom to add to the large piece, each participant becomes interconnected as they collectively contribute to the creative process.
“These moments of weaving-encounters are a space of sharing, of intimacy, of meeting and accompanying through doing,” the archive site notes. “The interweaving of threads in different shades of blue and white create a celestial skyscape, like clouds appearing and disappearing on a blue sky day. A yellow thread and a name tag is used to mark the spot where a person weaved, storing their presence in the work.”
“Textile Stories: A Living Archive,” which opened at Comfort Station in January, is now at Kiosk. Although no further showings have been confirmed, Potthast is confident the archive will continue to expand its reach.
“The exhibition programming we have right
now will continue in the future, and what’s on the virtual archive might eventually become a physical one as well,” Potthast said. “There has been a renewed interest in textile art over the past two years, and I feel like Chicago is a great place for textile art. There’s a lot of exchange of ideas and a big community for that.”
As I walked through Comfort Station, I thought of how my grandma taught me to knit: the warmth of her hand over mine as she adjusted how I held the needles or how she’d laugh because my first scarf’s edge looked like a hungry puppy had chewed it up.
I stopped at the furthest wall of the gallery, where a video titled Peregrinaje (Pilgrimage) was playing. It showed weavers in northwest Argentina who rely on textiles to support themselves and their families. The camera focused on the weaver’s hands. Some are old. Some are young. Some moved nimbly and eloquently, having the techniques refined to the core. Others looked a bit raw, perhaps still learning. Then, one collective picks up a piece of work passed to them from another group of women, examining their work and studying their techniques.
Next to the video, a set of collaborative weavings hung from the ceiling and formed a circle. They are the pieces traveling from collective to collective, community to community. Titled Textile Semillas (Textile Seeds), these pieces are a showcase of the unique weaving and embroidery techniques passed through generations by the collectives of women captured by the video. As the groups exchanged and learned from each other, seeds for new collaborations and opportunities were sowed.
“Textile Stories: A Living Archive” also planted a seed. As the archive continues to grow and travel, it threads together the contemporary practitioners of textile traditions and creates a network where artists and makers connect with the public. Through the archive, the story of their ancestors from whom the techniques were passed down is renewed with a fresh chapter, with community members becoming cocreators as they engage and interact with the artists and the art.
“The idea is to build a web that dives into these techniques and their history so they can live in the archive,” said Magdits Espinoza. “This archive then brings this knowledge to other parts of the world, so everyone can gain access to these techniques and the stories and people behind them.” v
m letters@chicagoreader.com
Textile Semillas , a collective project by weavers from northwest Argentina, coordinated by Andrei Fernández and Alejandra Mizrahi (C) TYLER ROBERTS
THEATER
The first time I met Jack Helbig in 1991, he was carrying several shopping bags full of books. He had just come from the annual Newberry Library sale to review a show I was directing in Bucktown, and we had, as I recall, a lovely chat about the struggles of being unrepentant bibliophiles living in small apartments.
I don’t think he much liked the production (a revival of Arthur Kopit’s absurdist oneact Chamber Music ), which he wrote about for Newcity . I can’t fi nd that review, but I’m sure that whatever he wrote, he was probably right about it. He also didn’t hold it against me, because the next year, he wrote a lovely review for the Reader of a late-night solo show I did. While living in San Francisco in the 90s, I ran into Jack while I was house manager of a performance venue in the Mission District that he visited while on vacation (he apparently was not averse to busman’s holidays). And when I returned to Chicago in 2000 and began reviewing for the Reader (and then the Tribune ) myself, he quickly became one of the people I most enjoyed running into in the lobby.
Helbig, 66, died Tuesday, January 28, of a heart attack. As was true after the premature death of former Time Out Chicago critic Kris Vire in November, social media filled with tributes to a man who pulled no punches in reviews, but who also gave vital early praise to artists like Brett Neveu. On Facebook, the Chicago playwright noted the impact Helbig’s Reader review of his 2000 play, The Last Barbecue, had on his career. “He let me know I wasn’t out of my gourd in thinking the play was honestly good, that I actually had something to say, and that midwesterners who barely spoke to each other (what I’ve always been into, if folks didn’t already know that) could engage audiences.”
On the other hand, his 1993 Reader review of Tracy Letts’s Killer Joe at Next Theatre called the playwright’s vision “contemptible, barbaric, and flat-out evil.” As recounted by former Reader theater editor Tony Adler in a 2007 Chicago magazine profile of Letts, at the 2001 premiere of Letts’s Bug at A Red Orchid Theatre, the playwright saw Helbig coming down the street and yelled, “Jack, you fucking horse’s cock!” at him. As reported by Adler, Helbig “has since chosen to think of the insult as a homage to his virility.” (Adler also edited Helbig at the Reader for many years, and told me in an email, “His stu would come in rough but smart, and smart wins.”)
The Letts anecdote is the kind that’s fun to
MEMORIAL
Remembering Jack Helbig
1958-2025
The longtime Reader contributor brought erudition, wit, and discernment to his work as a critic, playwright, and teacher.
By KERRY REID
recount when talking about a critic’s legacy. But as someone who had the pleasure of editing Helbig for the past five-plus years, I think what’s important to remember is that he was
utterly unjaded about theater (no mean feat after 40 years in the reviewing trenches), and open to going to almost anything I threw at him: musicals, new plays, revivals of classics,
sketch comedy, and improv. (He also wrote about books and films for the Reader.)
Helbig studied at iO and Second City in his earlier days (we bonded over our mutual memories of some psychologically scarring experiences in the Second City Training Center back in the 80s—he went back and finished the program in the early aughts), and had a special love of Chicago improv. He covered it often in the boom years of the 1990s; his review of TJ and Dave (TJ Jagodowski and Dave Pasquesi) at the Goodman this past summer praised the two longtime improv partners as the “pure embodiment of Del Close’s dream of ‘slow comedy.’”
Helbig wasn’t just a critic and arts journalist (a role he filled for several years at the Daily Herald in addition to the Reader and Newcity).
A 1980 graduate of the University of Chicago (he grew up in Saint Louis), he returned to school later in life to get a degree in education and taught English, first at Wicker Park’s Holy Trinity High School, and for the past couple of years at Rochelle Zell Jewish High School in Deerfield. Some of the most touching tributes on social media came from his past students. Helbig also headed the drama club at Holy Trinity and helped student journalists on the school newspaper.
As an editor, I noticed that Helbig’s experiences as a teacher, especially at Holy Trinity, informed his work as a critic. He reviewed Congo Square’s 2022 production of Aleshea Harris’s What to Send Up When It Goes Down. We had a frank discussion beforehand about what it would mean for an older white man to review a show about the experiences of Black people with systemic racism and violence. He noted to me that he knew students who had been harassed by cops or who had lost family to violence. In his glowing review, Helbig wrote that the show wasn’t written for white people, but “it is in a way about us, but not in a way we frequently want to see—or acknowledge. Some of the more trenchant scenes in the show reveal uncomfortable parallels between the attitudes of old-school white racists and those of white people who consider themselves more enlightened, but who in our own ways, consciously or not, play a role in (or at least benefit from) a racist system.”
In recent years, Helbig often noted to me that he enjoyed doing profiles and features even more than reviews—I often wondered if that was a byproduct of his teaching career, where he could engage in conversation with the work and ideas of others in order to translate them for readers.
Jack Helbig wrote for the Reader for nearly 40 years. COURTESY ROCHELLE ZELL JEWISH HIGH SCHOOL
Helbig was also a playwright and librettist. He collaborated with Tony Award–winning composer Mark Hollmann ( Urinetown: The Musical) on a show that started out with the title The Complaining Well and eventually morphed into Girl, The Grouch, and the Goat, based on an ancient comedy by Menander called Dyskolos (which translates as The Grouch). In a phone conversation, Hollmann recalls that they met taking classes at iO, and Helbig ended up dropping by Hollmann’s
THEATER
create work from sources as diverse as French operetta composer Jacques Offenbach and Austro-Hungarian composer Franz Lehár, reworking the latter’s The Merry Widow. Their collaborations enjoyed several productions at Light Opera Works (now known as Music Theater Works). Like Hollmann, Opelka notes that Helbig was “a tinkerer,” which could lead to lots of little changes in pieces over the years (and occasionally some frustration on the part of artistic directors).
“He was perpetually fascinated by everything.”
apartment for informal play readings. At one point, Hollmann mentioned to Helbig that he was taking a class at the now-gone New Tuners musical development workshop and was looking for a subject for a full musical. Helbig suggested Dyskolos—the fact that Menander was an influence on Burt Shevelove’s book for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum was a selling point.
“Jack and I started working on that around 1988,” recalls Hollmann. The show went through various iterations over subsequent years (including a production at suburban Steel Beam Theatre in 2009 and a production that same year in Anaheim, California).
As a collaborator, Hollmann says Helbig “had such a positive spirit. I remember him liking most of what I did. I can’t remember an argument I ever had with him over the music I had written, or anything he had done, for that matter. He was perpetually fascinated by everything.” Their show “went through several personalities, and that was because Jack was really into the characters,” says Hollmann, who notes that a song discarded from an earlier version of their show ended up (with di erent lyrics) in Urinetown as the ballad “Follow Your Heart.”
He also had a longtime collaboration with composer Gregg Opelka, which also showed Helbig’s expansive knowledge and taste in theater. Perhaps their most successful work was 1993’s Hotel d’Amour, based on Georges Feydeau’s farce A Flea in Her Ear and staged at suburban Buffalo Theatre Ensemble (and subsequently several other places around the U.S.). The two men also met at New Tuners around 1989 and began collaborating on Hotel d’Amour from an idea suggested by director Gary Griffin. Opelka and Helbig went on to
Opelka, who now lives in Brazil, had been working recently on another show with Helbig (he declines to name the source material at this time as they clean up rights issues). “Jack surprised me, because in the past he was a bit of a slowpoke, but he fi nished this one quickly. He wrote a great script. The thing about Jack, I feel like he’s always been highly underrated as a comedy writer and has been one show away from having a hit.” He adds, “Jack was extremely well-read and very erudite. He had a lightning-quick wit. He was just one of those people you always paid attention to when he talked, because he had little jokes and cracks. But he knew a lot about a lot.”
“I think he was honest,” says Opelka. “As a comedy writer, you have to be honest.” He notes one of his favorite lines from a Helbig review of a play that was awash in nostalgia: “I long for the good old days when people never longed for the good old days.”
As his editor, I appreciated that Helbig’s erudition never translated into snobbishness, and that his honesty and integrity meant he avoided the game of playing starmaker/starbreaker that can plague other practitioners of the critical craft. And despite his long history with Chicago theater, he never seemed to get bogged down in nostalgia for a better time, instead always looking forward to whatever the next show might bring. I will miss his voice in reviews and his company at the theater more than I can say.
Helbig is survived by his wife, Sherry Kent, their daughter, Margaret, and a sister, Jordan Kirk. Kent says that a memorial will be planned for March or April. v
m kreid@chicagoreader.com
to the Funniest Show you’ll see all Winter by
Directed by Nate Santana by Kenneth
Directed by Nate Santana
Kenneth Lonergan
Lonergan
‘What I’m performing is my memories’
Local filmmaker Kyle Henry tells a personal story of family and aging in Time Passages.
By KAT SACHS
Iapologize to filmmaker and Northwestern University professor Kyle Henry early in our interview about his latest film, Time Passages, which focuses on his mother, Elaine, and follows the end of her life with late-stage dementia during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. I was telling him about my grandmother, who also su ered from dementia and passed away from COVID in a nursing home just a few years later.
“I’m sorry in advance for all the sad stories you’re probably going to hear,” I say after he tells me about his plan to tour with the film, “because I’m sure I’m just one of among many, many people who have very similar stories, and they’re all going to tell you about it.”
“Not at all,” he replies. “And in fact, I actually told myself . . . Listen, your story is done. You share it with an audience, and you’re here to listen to people and to point them towards resources. I realized it’s not about me anymore. . . . It is about what is triggered and touched and shared by audience members.”
Time Passages screens three times this weekend at the Gene Siskel Film Center and on Thursday, February 13, at Block Cinema at Northwestern University. Henry will be in attendance at each screening accompanied by guests such as caregivers, eldercare experts, community organizers, and grief counselors. The Film Center screenings are copresented with Caring Across Generations, Chicago
own, Time Passages is an encapsulation of the phrase “necessity is the mother of invention.”
Henry originally wanted to make a fiction film about eldercare, but because of the pandemic, he wasn’t able to work with elderly actors. What he had was himself, and it’s through himself—both figuratively and literally—that he explores his mother, her identity, their family, and issues respective to end-of-life care.
Henry employs some interesting tactics, such as animation using peg dolls and a blackbox set wherein at one point he sits across from himself as his mother and converses with her, inspired by the “empty chair” Gestalt therapy technique. (Most elements of the film, if not directly inspired by therapy or Henry’s longtime participation in psychoanalysis, reflect such strategies.) Henry had gotten his mother’s blessing to make the film; naturally, the subject matter and his focus on his mother during her physical decline is bound to raise questions of ethics with regard to the filmmaking process.
in the film where he wonders at his mother’s lack of participation in social justice issues.
As COVID went hand-in-hand with a period of racial reckoning (“I don’t know if our country really reckoned,” he jokes), Henry also considers the privilege of his mother being able to a ord eldercare when the relative wealth required is unattainable for many and there are grave disparities in how non-white people are able to access this support.
There are more personal struggles from earlier in his mother’s life, too, such as his parents’ sometimes contentious relationship and Henry’s coming out to them during the height of the AIDS crisis. He doesn’t shy away from these facts, even using the peg dolls to recreate less-than-sunny memories of his parents’ relationship with each other and their five children.
Department of Family and Support Services, Illinois Family Caregiver Coalition, and AgeOptions. At the Block screening, Henry will participate in a discussion with Ai-jen Poo, the executive director of Caring Across Generations, and Northwestern professor of psychology Dan McAdams.
An elegy in film form to a person so important to the filmmaker’s life yet unfortunately, at the end of her life, so removed from her
“Ethics are an ongoing conversation,” he tells me. “I tell my students sometimes we think ethics are, like, hard-and-fast rules. Like, the police are enforcing them, but they are societally constructed, and so as artists, it’s our duty to question and interrogate those things. And with my mother, how do you make a film about somebody who already has late-stage dementia? Who can’t sign a release form legally? Who can’t give their permission and consent? How do you still represent them in a way that’s honoring them and their spirit? . . . You check your ego and you check in, but you don’t let that limit your creativity. And I see this with the discussion of ethics and documentary over the last five years. For a lot of filmmakers, it paralyzed them or it became a kind of thing of, like, ‘thou shalt nots’ instead of ‘yes, ands.’”
He relied heavily on his editors, Karen Skloss and Abbigail Vandersnick, to not only help him make sense of the abundance of archival material at his disposal (Henry notes that his family likely has more than the average amount of pictures and home movies, in part because his father trained in
photojournalism for the military) but also to provide their perspectives on such fraught considerations.
Further, “I thought it was important to have two editors who were women, who might understand what my mother went through, who could remind me of things at a certain point. Like, ‘Well, you know, Kyle, your mother did have five children and maybe there was a reason why she wasn’t an activist out on the streets in the 60s,’” he says, referring to a part
“They had such great pleasure and purpose from having children, and when I came out at the height of [the] AIDS crisis . . . I now look back and see things at the time that maybe I interpreted as homophobia,” he says. “I think . . . they were frightened. . . . So I had to temper my understanding of who they were. I actually think they were amazing people that, at 60, they incorporated this entirely new perspective of somebody who was their child and then adapted and changed and accepted. Like, I hope to God when I’m 60 years old and I’m confronted with a reality that’s a complete surprise and society has trained me to somehow think it’s horrible, I hope I have the ability that they had to actually incorporate it into their being.”
Henry tells me he believes in facts, which applies to the events of a person’s life as much as anything else, but also that the facts need interpretation—and that’s where subjectivity, a personal perspective, comes in. Just as I felt compelled to relate to him the story of my grandmother’s death, he, too, felt the need to take the facts of what had happened and make them his own to share with the world.
“I definitely see that what I’m performing is my memories,” he says, “and I’m using my mother as a character. Is it my mother? You know, I hope through the peg dolls and that kind of Brechtian distanciation, there’s always a little bit of a sense of, like, ‘Wait a second, this is just Kyle’s interpretation.’”
He’s looking forward to your interpretation, too—and there’ll be plenty of opportunities to contemplate it at these upcoming screenings.
Egg, all over my face. Because as of this writing, I am ten films behind on my resolution to see, on average, one movie per day in theaters. Note the “on average” part—so my goal for this new month is to get back on track. What can I say, I’m ambitious. (Now if only I could apply even the intent of such dedication to working out. . . .)
To be fair, last month was quality over quantity, as many of the films I saw were long, between the Settle In and Worlds of Wiseman series at the Gene Siskel Film Center. (Many of Frederick Wiseman’s films are close to or more than three hours, if not longer.) I loved my time with the Wiseman films; there’s a hypnotic quality to them that isn’t so much tuning out as really tuning in, focusing on things that you might have otherwise either overlooked or not thought about at all. And as chaos reigns, Wiseman shows there is calmness to be found in order, as he details various institutions and their labyrinthine inner workings.
Wiseman has made two fiction films: A Couple (2022) and The Last Letter (2002), the latter of which I wrote about for Cine-File last week. I continue thinking about the film several days later; it features only French actress Catherine Samie, reciting an extended monologue in the form of a letter from a woman—a Russian Jewish doctor living in a Ukrainian ghetto during World War II—to her son, proclaiming it to be her last as she awaits certain death in the concentration camps.
FILM
A still from The Great Dictator (1940) THE CRITERION COLLECTION
At just over an hour long, it builds steadily, going through a range of emotions with limited inflection on the part of Samie. But as she neared the end of the letter, and of her life, I felt inside me what I can imagine is only a fraction of what one might feel, might have felt, in such a scenario. It’s something I’ve been feeling in general lately, a kind of impending doom that on its face seems similar to that which is occurring in The Last Letter
I also watched, at home, Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940)—are you sensing a theme?
I don’t know if I’m finding comfort in these texts or if they’re making me depressed by the idea that even as we evolve as humans, we can still devolve as a society. Have we learned nothing from all the great art made during times of turmoil and terror? Chaplin’s iconic speech at the end of the film is only too relevant nowadays. But maybe it never stopped being relevant. Maybe nothing will ever change.
With all this and some personal things going on this week, I needed something light, so I managed to get out to see One of Them Days (2025). It was very cute; Keke Palmer and SZA have incredible presences by themselves and out-ofthis-world chemistry together. If only life were like a buddy comedy.
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.
MUSIC
THE SECRET HISTORY OF CHICAGO MUSIC
Teenage outfit the Monteras embody shambolic 60s garage rock
The friends wowed the battle-of-the-bands circuit before recording a highly coveted single.
By STEVE KRAKOW
Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place.
I’ve always been transparent about the fact that the Secret History of Chicago Music relies on other people. I get leads from the musicians I write about, from my knowledgeable friends, and from Philip Montoro—my editor of 20 years who understands my mania for documenting every one of Chicago’s obscure 1960s garage bands.
In January, Philip alerted me to an Instagram post by local DJ Shazam Bangles, aka Michael Reuter, about a 1967 single by local combo the Monteras that Reuter’s aunt Debbie O’Connor had passed along to him. When I messaged Reuter, I found out he’d contacted Monteras guitarist Joe Malin a few years ago. Reuter connected me with Malin, and the rest is history—specifically the history of a cool teen DIY rock band, an improbably collectible output of a pay-to-play label, and the connections among friends and family that made it all happen.
O’Connor was living at 4448 W. Walton in West Humboldt Park when she acquired the single. “She had a stinky neighbor, Ms. Karmino , who worked at a nearby tavern, and she brought the record over from their jukebox,” Reuter recalls. The members of the Monteras all grew up on the north side, and guitarist Mike Melarkey attended Gordon Tech High School (now DePaul College Prep) at 3300 N. Campbell—he might’ve dropped the 45 o at
the club after school.
In a 2014 interview with blogger Stuart Shea at Ten Records, Melarkey recalled the autumn day in 1965 that led to the band’s formation. “I’d occasionally run into friends from grammar school on the bus or at the Friday night teen sock hops that St. Priscilla’s put on in the church’s basement,” Melarkey said. “It was there that Father Dore announced a battle of the bands with a $100 first prize.”
ing to her play and listening to her old 78 rpm records, so I decided to give it a try.”
At age 13, Malin wanted to switch to guitar, and he struck a deal with his parents.
Melarkey was approached by his eighthgrade classmate Steve Forester, who played bass, about joining forces for the contest. Along with Melarkey on rhythm guitar, he recruited Tony Winter from Saint Patrick High School on lead guitar, and a “neighborhood greaser” named Mike D. on drums. The battle of the bands took place in early 1966. “We were allowed two songs,” Melarkey said. “I remember they were ‘Gloria’ by the Shadows of Knight and ‘Good Lovin’’ by the Young Rascals. Unfortunately, every single band that competed that night (maybe five or six) had chosen those same songs.” This speaks miles as to the influence of UK protopunks like Them (who recorded the original version of “Gloria” in 1964) on Chicago’s teen rock scene. Winter was family friends with the Malinowskis, whose son Joe (who now goes by Joe Malin) was a skilled musician and guitar teacher. “My first real musical training began at age eight, when my mother, who played the accordion, asked me if I would like to take lessons,” Malin told me. “I really enjoyed listen-
“They said l had to buy my own guitar, and we alternated one week guitar and one week of accordion lessons. I had been saving and bought a Harmony hollowbody electric and an amplifier. I also started buying and collecting 45s and LPs. . . . I remember listening mostly to doo-wop music, especially Herb Kent the Cool Gent on WVON.”
As a young teen Malin had started the Cascades, who had also played in a battle of the bands, opening for rock ‘n’ roll great Del Shannon at the Illinois State Fair in Springfield. Though he had since given up rocking to pursue his college studies, after seeing Winter’s group perform live, he was inspired to join up—and he brought the Monteras name with him.
“The name came from my previous band. We had changed our name from the Contrasts to the Monteras after we added some new members,” Malin told Shea. “Some bands at the time used car models as names. Mercury had a model called the Monterey. I think another band had that name so we decided to change it slightly and become the Monteras.”
Winters switched to bass, and Malin asked his 14-year-old sister, Lyn Malin, to join on organ, but first she had to buy the instrument. “I took organ lessons from about seven years old until I was about 15. I traveled to a private instructor in downtown Chicago—Mrs. Edith Dobson—whose studios were above the Hammond Organ showroom [4200 W. Diversey],” she told Shea. “I used my entire savings— about $1,200—to purchase a Farfisa Combo Compact organ and amp.”
Lyn Malin’s first gig with the band was at her parents’ 25th wedding anniversary party. Soon after, the Monteras parted ways with Mike D. and brought in new drummer John Scoville, who had moved from the Austin area to the north side. Scoville was a fan of jazz greats Buddy Rich and Gene Krupa, and his parents allowed the band to practice in their basement (Scoville’s father had a hearing impairment, and didn’t mind the band jamming loudly). The band’s gear was still in Mike D.’s basement, though, and he wasn’t happy about being kicked out of the band, so they had to be quick and quiet about moving their gear across the alley and into Scoville’s basement. Joe Malin was the only member of the Monteras old enough to drive, so when they performed, they loaded up their gear in
STEVE KRAKOW
his Pontiac Tempest convertible. The guys dressed in matching maroon blazers they bought at Smoky Joe’s on Maxwell Street, while Lyn wore a dress in a similar hue. They began booking as many gigs as they could.
“We played in the schoolyard at my old elementary school, on a flatbed truck in the parking lot at Belmont and Cumberland for the opening of Zayre department store, and many Fridays for Carl Bonafede [original manager of the Buckinghams] at the Holiday Ballroom on Milwaukee Avenue,” Joe Malin told me. They also played local teen clubs like the Deep End, the Hut, and the Daisy Patch, but the fateful gig that would immortalize the Monteras was another band battle.
“We entered a band contest at the Teenage Fair in Itasca, which we won,” Melarkey told Shea. “I think it was January 1967. We were disqualified from the prize money because Joe had turned 20 years old and was no longer a teenager. But we still got the recording deal with Orlyn Records.”
The award was a borderline scam. Orlyn, which was owned by Oren Stembel (the name merges his name with his wife Marilyn’s), was a pay-to-play label that operated from 19651968. As historian Ken Voss of the site Illinois Music Archives wrote in 2020, “The artist would pay for the session time, and in return receive one hundred or so records to either try to get airplay, sell, or give to relatives. Groups on Orlyn didn’t stand a chance to become big from these releases.” Most if not all of the groups who recorded there were like the Monteras—teen bands who had won staged competitions—and the label provided no promotion or publicity. Today, Orlyn singles are exceedingly rare and valuable, and many are excellent examples of the rough-hewn garage rock sound by local bands like the Outspoken Blues and Graf Zeppelin.
While the odds for commercial success were against them, the brief recording session challenged the Monteras to step up their game and write their own material. Until then, they’d been playing covers by bands on the radio they dug, including Paul Revere & the Raiders, the Buckinghams (whose Dennis Tufano also went to Gordon Tech), the Kingsmen, and the Kinks. Those influences are shown in the tough, snotty “She’s a Tease,” which has some fine harmonies and guitar solos reminiscent of Chuck Berry courtesy of Joe Malin, and the moody, organ-driven flip side, “Cry Myself to Sleep,” which harks back to the innocent pop sounds of the early 60s.
MUSIC
The Monteras sold the singles at shows for one dollar and tried to get them in local jukeboxes. “We asked if we could put our record in a jukebox at the local hot dog joint,” Winter told Shea. “When we came back a few days later to play it, the heat from the box had warped the record and made it unplayable.” (Perhaps why the 45 was purged from the tavern mentioned at the beginning).
Lyn Malin soon left the band to marry a fellow she met at the banquet hall where her parents’ anniversary party was held, so Joe Malin took over on organ (adding a Leslie speaker for more warbly sounds) and Melarkey became the lead guitarist. They also hired a manager. “We took on a professional manager that worked us to death in 1968,” Melarky told Shea. “Joe Thomas, who was the manager of Crown Music (on Chicago near Laramie). He brought out the best in us and we practiced until our fingers bled (literally).”
The Monteras swapped their blazers for Nehru jackets and began incorporating heavier rock influences from groups like Vanilla Fudge and Deep Purple into their sound. After losing another battle at the State Fair and the cancellation of a major gig at Triton College with local rockers the Cryan’ Shames and the American Breed, the Monteras drifted apart. They played their last show in 1969.
Joe Malin and John Scofield then formed the horn-rocking Heaven and Earth while Malin played solo as Joey Mann as well as in local groups such as the Company She Keeps, Three’s Company, Baker’s Street, and the Randall Road Band. Winters joined Incognito in the early 70s, and then a power trio called Chester Madden, and played into the 80s with the Rockoons and DChrome.
The members of the Monteras are still all in touch. After Shea published his blog post about the band, they got together a few times to play their old favorites and learn some new tunes. They even invited Shea to join them on guitar. With their lone recording now heralded as a garage masterpiece—in recent years, the two-sider has sold for a whopping four figures on eBay—I hope a more formal reunion is in the cards. It would surely be a fun north-side family-and-friends a air, and ain’t that what it’s all about? v The radio version of the Secret History of Chicago Music airs on Outside the Loop on WGN Radio 720 AM, Saturdays at 5 AM with host Mike Stephen. Past shows are archived at outsidetheloopradio.com.
THE REVIVALISTS
WAR KIDS
NATASHA BEDINGFIELD
PETE YORN
Drift’s Manic signals a midwest IDM revival
This new EP marks the end of an 18-year hiatus for the Consumers Research & Development Label, a key regional voice in experimental electronic music.
By JACOB ARNOLD
The Consumers Research & Development
Label was one of several Chicago-based electronic-music outlets I followed in the early 2000s, before I’d even moved here. Its releases were always high quality, though it was di cult to concisely describe the label’s aesthetic due to their wide range of sounds, which included postrock and so-called IDM (“intelligent dance music”). The Drift EP Manic , issued digitally last November and expected on vinyl February 10, is the first Consumers release since 2006.
Consumers is now an imprint of Someoddpilot, with which it was closely linked during its original run—Consumers cofounder Geo rey Wilson worked for Someoddpilot, and the two labels’ rosters overlapped. The Someoddpilot label, a liated with Chris Eichenseer’s design studio of the same name, is also back after a decades-long hiatus.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Consumers and Someoddpilot played a big role in making Chicago a hub for experimental electronic music—along with the Kranky label, which signed electronic artists adjacent to rock, hip-hop, or shoegaze. Beginning in the 2010s, though, the vibe shifted. The rise of dubstep, drill, and footwork drove a sea change in tastes; long-running venues that supported the music, including Darkroom, Rodan, Danny’s Tavern, Sonotheque, and Lava Lounge, got priced out of their locations; and streaming shrunk the market for vinyl and CDs.
Now signs of a revival in experimental electronic music have emerged. Plenty of nights you can see live acts in Chicago working samplers and modular synthesizers, in clubs or DIY venues. Someoddpilot held a well-attended label-relaunch party November 8 at the design studio’s Wicker Park shop and gallery Public Works, featuring live sets by K-rAd, Signaldrift, and Sanford Parker, accompanied by stunning projected visuals from Eichenseer. Drift is an alias of Sean Krainik, 51, who has a long history in the midwest electronic-music scene. He first got into techno in the early 1990s, when he was studying art in Madison,
Wisconsin. He founded experimental techno label Parotic Music in 1997, and in the early 2000s he DJed at Danny’s Tavern, becoming a regular at its well-regarded Play night. One evening when Krainik was spinning a Parotic track, Wilson tapped him on the shoulder to ask about it, beginning a long friendship.
Wilson founded Consumers in 2001 with his friend Jodi Williams. “One of the first things that Chris [Eichenseer] said was, ‘We are the under underground,’ and I have to wholeheartedly agree with that,” Wilson says. “But the idea was for us to bring the underground up.”
Over its original six-year run, Consumers showcased releases by midwest artists Miles Tilmann, String Theory, Signaldrift, and the Timeout Drawer, among others. Looking back, Wilson realizes Consumers was an anomaly. “A Black guy running a label that has mostly white people on there was kind of unheard-of,” he says.
sample and then just microphone it through the speaker so you get a weird feedback,” says Krainik. “It gives it a little more of a live feel than being so in-the-box.”
“R$W” is minimal and almost industrial. Chords throb, driven by an intricate snareand-cymbal rhythm. I could see this one working on an adventurous dance floor. “Shocked” repeats the title word every measure while a complicated beat burbles and electronic notes chime in. Like all the tracks, it’s best played loud.
something catches my ear and then try to finish it, which is always the hardest part. When I paint, I do the same thing. I work on layers, then I leave it alone, then pull it out and see if I can do something with it.”
Krainik moved to Los Angeles in 2023, but he lived in Chicago for 20 years and still considers it home. Krainik parents his son, and when inspiration strikes, he paints. He recorded the tracks on Manic over the course of several years. They mix dark, textured house and techno on the A-side with deep IDM on the B-side. Krainik cites influences such as hiphop legend J Dilla, who inspired him to take small samples from multiple sources, and UK techno producer Baby Ford.
“I would say each one of those songs probably took me 70, 80 hours,” he says. “My workflow is: I work on something, then I shelve it, and then cycle back months later and see if
Krainik painted the front and back covers of Manic , whose vinyl run is limited to 250 copies. On the EP’s title track, a hard, fast beat accompanies samples of a man talking that sound like a TV commercial playing in the next room. Two-note synth patterns build, then disintegrate or fade away. A snippet of singing occasionally taunts. “Murderer’s Row” clacks along at a slightly slower pace, while another voice speaks barely intelligible instructions in the background. The contrast between the mu ed speech and the song’s constant pulses of minor-key synth chords sets an uneasy mood.
“I do a lot of mike stuff, where I’ll solo a
The EP is DJ friendly but still complex enough to make for interesting home listening, especially in its second half. The downtempo melody of “We Still Have All You Know” makes for a welcome relief from the fast, aggressive cuts that precede it. A delicate, glassy synth converses with lightly sung lines from a female vocalist, and pops from sampled vinyl add a soothing texture.
Krainik explains that he composed the track as an answer to a question posed by his son’s mother that he prefers not to share. He draws influence from footwork here, playing keys over Roland drum-machine triplets and seamlessly weaving in the vocal sample. Manic draws on established genres such as house, techno, and IDM, but it adds a contemporary twist, with unusual textures and great attention to detail. Asked about this range of sounds, Krainik responds, “It’s a journey. It’s all a lot of di erent stu over the last three years that I made it. I hate records where it’s just one thing the entire time.”
Krainik has had a di cult year already: He’s faced health issues, and he had to help his son and his son’s mother evacuate during the January LA wildfires. Thankfully, everyone is safe. The dubby reverberating chords, stuttering beats, and shimmering synth sweeps of “Osmosis,” the final track on the EP, carry a glimmer of hope. I look forward to hearing Someoddpilot and the Consumers Research & Development Label contribute their voices again to Chicago’s experimental electronic-music scene. Both operations already have more releases planned for this year. v
m letters@chicagoreader.com
Sean Krainik COURTESY THE CONSUMERS RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT LABEL
MUSIC
PICK OF THE WEEK
CalicoLoco bring their omnivorous rock ’n’ roll ambition to Metro’s big stage
Dani Robles and Zeke Ramsey of CalicoLoco TRACY CONOBOY
CALICOLOCO, DAMAGER, PLUM
Sat 2/8, 8 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, $20, $15 in advance. b
IF YOU IMAGINE INDIE ROCK as a vast landmass made up of disparate biomes, then you can see Chicago musicians Dani Robles and Zeke Ramsey as roving naturalists intent on gathering its richness together in one place. As CalicoLoco, Robles and Ramsey have spent the past few years devising songs that make room for shabbily jangly melodies, grand shoegaze ambience, and nervy emo breakdowns. From the first notes of their debut album, May’s I Love Myself (Ur Mom), CalicoLoco set their rock power to full blast, and in the record’s back half, their utopian vision gets bigger and more ornate, unfolding into symphonic-pop splendor—you can hear the band’s ideas snap into focus when the ersatz doo-wop balladry of “Nightmare Nightmare Nightmare” melts into a mile-high cloud of vocal harmonies worthy of the Zombies’ Odessey and Oracle. I Love Myself draws from the euphoric energy of CalicoLoco’s corner of the Chicago rock scene, which they share with Japandroids acolytes Damager, one of the openers at this show. Based on I Love Myself and the risks it takes, I’d nominate CalicoLoco as Most Likely to Make a Rock Opera—and no matter what they end up doing, I look forward to hearing it. —LEOR GALIL
Recommended
SATURDAY8
CalicoLoco See Pick of the Week at le . Damager and Plum open. 8 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, $20, $15 in advance. b
Gouge Away Gumm and Smut open. 8 PM, Cobra Lounge, 235 N. Ashland, $30.90, $27.81 in advance. b
Not just any hardcore band can make you feel the bulk of a two-story boulder. Florida five-piece Gouge Away belong to an even more select group: not only can they summon that sense of colossal mass, but they can also make it feel locomotive. The songs on last year’s Deep Sage (Deathwish Inc.) swing and thrash, and their expertly calibrated rhythmic architecture makes each explosion as spectacular as a cannonball blasting through sheetrock. Gouge Away can do more than just pulverize: their coiled power can hold itself suspended, leaving room for emotions more nuanced than fury. On “Newtau,” front woman Christina Michelle addresses a lover who won’t straighten up and fly right, delivering sly half-spoken lyrics and ironic coos between bouts of screaming—and her occasional restraint helps intensify every serrated, thundering outburst. —LEOR GALIL
Satin Jackets 9 PM, Subterranean (upstairs), 2011 W. North, advance tickets sold out. 21+
It feels good to find music you can count on to be smooth, assured, and welcoming, and that seems to be the MO of Munich nu-disco project Satin Jackets. Veteran German house musician Tim Bernhardt launched it in 2012, and his first single under that name is a melange of sublime atmospheres, sprightly beats, and upli ing vocals titled “You Make Me Feel Good.” Bernhardt has since released three full-lengths, a few EPs, and a bunch of singles and remixes, working with a vast network of collaborators, including DJ Tensnake, house duo Booka Shade, and guest vocalists such as Niya Wells, David
Harks, and Emma Brammer. Satin Jackets’ most recent full-length, 2022’s Reunion, feels like diving into cool, calming waters as the sun sets over a sandy beach—when you listen to it, you can imagine you’re leaving your burdens on the shore to exist in the moment. The sleek, stylish album, which incorporates synth pop and funk, was inspired by virtual DJ sets that Bernhart streamed during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic—an experience that reminded him that the healing and connective powers of music can transcend distance, isolation, and personal differences. Satin Jackets’ brand-new single, “On My Own,” a collaboration with vocalist, multiinstrumentalist, and producer Thunder (aka Dominic Donner), underscores that sentiment with its warm keys, soft guitar, and shimmering production. As Thunder sings about breaking out of a lonely existence in search of new adventure and fulfillment, his voice shifts from melancholy to triumphant.
—JAMIE LUDWIG
070 Shake Bryant Barnes and Johan Lenox open. 8 PM, Salt Shed, 1357 N. Elston, $37.50$67.50, $128 early entry, $210 meet and greet. b
Danielle Balbuena, who makes music as 070 Shake, has grown from up-and-comer to quiet giant since she broke out on Soundcloud in 2016. While many artists wax poetic about genre bending, Shake effortlessly pulverizes styles and flavors in her ever-evolving sound. She’s known for her vulnerability and raw emotion, but she might even be more famous for her contributions to great records by other artists. She collaborated with Ye on his 2018 self-titled album, most notably on the outstanding verse and refrain that close “Ghost Town”: “And nothing hurts anymore / I feel kinda free.” That song is one of my favorites in Ye’s more recent, polarizing canon, and it’s all because of Shake—I like to sing along with her with every bit of my lungs and feel the catharsis.
In 2022, Shake was featured on “Escapism,” a monstrous electro-pop single from British singersongwriter Raye, which topped the UK charts and further cemented Shake’s place in the game.
Gouge Away ALI BEAUDETTE
Beyond the commercial realm, though, Shake’s grasp of the experimental has made her music stand out to anyone who’s paying attention, and she’s continued to push her artistic boundaries on her third and latest full-length, November’s Petrichor . Shake celebrated the album’s release with an event at Los Angeles’s El Rey Theatre that included a one-off screening of the live performance film A Night at the Ballet , choreographed by Zoï Tatopoulos. The album itself is certainly a jaunt, with swelling highs, beautiful spurts of pop perfection, and smart, eyebrow- raising features from guests such as Miami rapper JT (formerly of City Girls) and Courtney Love. Because it’s stripped of overtly electronic elements, the spotlight can stay on Shake’s lyrics about love and relationships, which are among her most personal to date. This Salt Shed concert is part of her galvanizing tour with Texas alt-pop artist Bryant Barnes and LA-based alt-hip-hop singer and producer Johan Lenox. —CRISTALLE BOWEN
WEDNESDAY12
Julianna Barwick Barwick performs before a screening of The Tree of Life (2011) as part of Salt Shed’s three-night film and music series Crying at the Shed. 7:30 PM, Salt Shed, 1357 N. Elston, $30, $35 with 5:30 PM screening of Bird (2024). Separate tickets to Bird alone cost $12. b
Julianna Barwick owes a lot of her music to the church. The singer and composer grew up in rural Louisiana, where she’d attend services three times a week and sing a cappella hymns with the rest of the congregation. That experience sparked her love of the voice’s prismatic capabilities. As a teenager, she took an opera class, joined the choir, and found everyday joy singing in different spaces, whether a stairwell or a parking garage. So it’s no surprise that her music revels in reverb.
Barwick’s self-released 2006 debut, Sanguine, is filled with looping experiments in vocal texture and ambience—the track “Unt9” even has a bit of beatboxing. The record’s down-home charm is made
possible by her bare-bones setup: guitar pedals, a four-track, and her voice. Barwick bought a loop station to make her 2009 follow-up, Florine , and her songs became gargantuan; the remarkable uplift of the crystalline “Cloudbank” puts me in mind of Icelandic postrock outfit Sigur Rós distilled into their purest essence.
While Barwick’s vocalizing can be compared to religious chants, church choirs, Nordic herding calls, or even whale song, her early releases were inevitably lumped in with Celtic and other forms of new age music. Though some of her music bears similarities to the 1986 album Voices by English singer-songwriter Claire Hamill, it’s not the best lens through which to view Barwick’s work. So many of her songs feel tied to era- specific sub genres of underground music, especially the hypna gogic pop in vogue around the turn of the 2010s. Listen to “White Flag” off her 2011 breakthrough album, The Magic Place, and in its vocal melodies and spacious atmospherics you’ll hear not only something that belongs to centuries past but also Animal Collective’s Panda Bear. The connections between past and present feel especially clear in the lilting vocal phrases and faint piano melody of “Vow.” The Magic Place was remastered last fall, and every track sounds more lush and expansive than ever. Barwick has released three more full-lengths since those early days, but that early album run remains a staggering achievement whose commercial success feels like a sign of times gone by. Gentler sounds were growing popular among swathes of young listeners, and new light was shed on so rock and new age music by reissue campaigns, crate-digger compilations, and artists across the musical spectrum. It was a perfect time, too, for the release of Terrence Malick’s 2011 film The Tree of Life , which will screen at the Salt Shed following Barwick’s performance. The story follows the O’Brien family as they grapple with grief, faith, and existential crises, and the soundtrack is full of choral and classical music. Since the film’s release, its swooping camerawork has become commonplace in prestige television, and it remains a masterpiece in the same way as The Magic Place . It wields the power of the sacrosanct and overflows in a conviction of its ecstatic beauty. —JOSHUA MINSOO KIM
Institute of Chicago, and joined the faculty of at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine.
In 1983, Baltimore artists Linda Smith and Nancy Andrews shared a house and a band. While their group, Ceramic Madonna Head (With Plastic Arms), didn’t outlive their rental agreement, it established the foundation for a periodic partnership that recently yielded an album of new songs and a sparse transoceanic touring schedule. In the mid-80s, Smith moved to New York, where she was part of a folk-rock band called the Woods. During that time she obtained a four-track cassette recorder to help her teach songs and arrangements to her bandmates. A er the group broke up, she returned to Baltimore and went on to record her own songs, which wedded sophisticated, 1960s-steeped pop to understated guitars and rickety, mechanical rhythms. In the 90s, Smith gained recognition as an originator of homemade indie pop, then in the 2000s turned her attention to painting. Meanwhile, Andrews immersed herself in performance art and filmmaking, got an MFA at the School of the Art
A er Smith’s 1995 song “I So Like Spring” turned up on the 2016 compilation LP Sky Girl (Efficient Space) and in the 2018 Amazon Prime series Forever, the Captured Tracks label reissued her music on vinyl and she began recording new material again. She reached out to Andrews during the pandemic, and the two started writing songs that apply feminist perspectives to lines lifted from Andrews’s collection of pulp novels. Home recording being what it is now, the songs on the duo’s 2023 album, A Passing Cloud (Grapefruit/Gertrude Tapes), don’t sound like demos—they’re fully realized. With its ebowed guitar drone, the sicknesshaunted “It’s Everytown” recalls a Yo La Tengo ballad, and the jaunty keys and beats of “Spare Me the Details” match its protagonist’s give-no-fucks attitude. Since releasing the album, the duo have played one concert in Baltimore and three in the United Kingdom; this is their fifth. Opening the show are Jon Langford (Mekons, Waco Brothers) and Nervous Boy (Dave Trumfio of the Pulsars and Mekons). —BILL MEYER v
LInda Smith & Nancy Andrews Nervous Boy and Jon Langford open. 8:30 PM, the Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, $20. 21+
070 Shake GIANNI GALLANT
Tim Bernhardt of Satin Jackets ØYSTEIN HAARA
Linda Smith (L) and Nancy Andrews SAMUEL MITCHELL / COURTESY THE ARTIST
Julianna Barwick COURTESY THE ARTIST
GOSSIP WOLF
ON FRIDAY, February 7, Angel Tapes releases Clover , the debut album from softhearted Chicago folk duo Sleeper’s Bell. Chicago singer-songwriter Blaine Teppema, 26, began using that name (borrowed from the Gabriel García Márquez novel One Hundred Years of Solitude ) in the mid-2010s for solo songs she wrote, recorded, and uploaded. Sleeper’s Bell became a duo in late 2021, when guitarist Evan Green joined the project.
In September 2021, Teppema self-released the EP Umarell, which features contributions from multi-instrumentalist Max Subar and viola from her father, Jeff. She’d assumed that would be the end of Sleeper’s Bell. “I thought the EP was ‘one and done,’” she says. “I just wanted to see if I could do it. I didn’t really like performing.”
Shortly after Umarell came out, though, Teppema started rehearsing with guitarist Evan Green. “Evan really just made it fun,” she says. “It’s fun to trust someone, collaborate with someone, and make music with someone. I feel less exposed with him there.” Green helped Teppema gain trust in herself, which would help her return to songwriting and eventually finish Clover.
Teppema says she wrote the oldest song on Clover when she was 16, but much of the album evolved in recent years, thanks in part to her experience undergoing cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). “I was doing this really intensive aspect of CBT where I was going through all of my journals,” she says, “and I had to write a letter to my younger self.” Teppema has been journaling since she was nine years old, and she’s saved all of her writings. The first song that arose from revisiting her old entries is the comforting “Hey Blue,” which closes Clover
Teppema says she and Green recorded Clover casually, enlisting friends and family, and it sounds as relaxed and intimate as you’d expect. Teppema’s father and Subar contribute again, as do Plant Matter bandleader Gabe Bostick, who adds piano and vocals, and Free Range live drummer Jack Henry. Henry engineered the sessions (Teppema had been impressed by his work on Free Range’s 2023 album, Practice), with help from Bostick, Green, and Green’s roommate Leo Paterniti. “I got lucky with really talented friends,” Teppema says.
Sleeper’s Bell celebrate Clover with a headlining performance at the Hideout on Saturday, February 8. Henry True, Tara Firma, and Leo Paterniti open; tickets cost $12, and the music starts at 8:30 PM.
KEITH KOHN founded local COVID-conscious concert production organization Save the Night in the summer of 2023 as a response to the Biden administration declaring an end to this country’s pandemic status that spring. Kohn started by booking mask-re-
A furry ear to the ground of the local music scene
quired shows for his metalcore band, Ruinous Time Blade . Save the Night has since blossomed into a robust grassroots operation that organizes 50 volunteers via a Discord channel. As of press time, Save the Night has booked about 25 shows—including a Fallen Log show they’re cohosting on Tuesday, February 11.
Kohn’s interest in COVID safety is tied up in his history with political activism; he’s a member of the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression. He views access to indoor spaces with clean air through the prism of his liberatory ideals. “We don’t view COVID as a single issue,” Kohn says. “We are not trying to just make our own corner of the world where things are good, while the rest of it burns down. We really want to unite this with greater demands for justice and liberation.” To that end, Tuesday’s event doubles as a fundraiser for three families in Gaza.
Kohn booked the first few Save the Night concerts on his own before other folks began to volunteer to pitch in. At first, Save the Night scheduled gigs at a monthly pace, but Kohn says that’s picked up in recent months. They typically organize shows at small aboveground venues such as Fallen Log and Burlington Bar or DIY spaces; one Save the Night
volunteer is the point person for underground venue Susan’s Applehole. “That’s the only venue in Chicago, DIY or otherwise, that has gone full-bore with the mask requirement, and requires them for all their shows,” Kohn says. “Obviously, we support that.”
At each show, Save the Night volunteers set up air purifiers (which the organization borrows from Clean Air Club), ensure that showgoers follow masking protocols, and provide a livestream. Clean Air Club is one of the other partner orgs behind Tuesday’s Fallen Log show, which was largely booked by a le ist creative collective called the Surface. The festivities include a drag performer, comedy, and visual art as well as musical acts such as underground pop figure Cocojoey and cybergrind act Hot Lettuce. “It’s gonna be a crammed schedule,” Kohn says, “There’s gonna be a lot of art and, you know, culture on display.” Tickets cost $10, and doors open at 7 PM. —LEOR GALIL
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PUBLIC NOTICE
I would really like the Reader to stay alive. Never fail novena! If everyone in town takes out similar ads the paper will live :-) This From Jacques JOBS
Business System
Consultant - Data & Statistical Sciences, AbbVie Inc., North Chicago, Illinois. As a BSC, the individual will be supporting the Data & Statistical Sciences department that in turn, supports the conduct, data collection & analysis of clinical trial data in support of a new drug Application. A Key element is to ensure the applications are current, compliant through the Software lifecycle process. They are also responsible, with the business, for identifying & developing new opportunities to process improve through the adoption of new software. Must possess a Bachelor’s Degree with 5 years of work experience in IT or pharma. Of the exp required, must have 5 years of work experience: (i) collaborating with business stakeholders to identify & communicate business process improvement for product quality & costs leveraging use of Cloud Applications, Cloud APIs, Webservices, & Microservices; (ii) developing Web Applications or databases for at least 1 of: Medidata RAVE, Oracle Inform, IRT & eCOA.; (iii) installing (ii) on both cloud and on-prem, applying Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) principles & producing appropriate documentation; (iv) analyzing current & emerging business needs & evaluating alternative technology solutions using standard information systems methodologies using Waterfall or Agile. Of experience required, must have at least 2 years of the following: (v) working with Data Management & Statistics Business to synthesize needs to develop IS business case; (vi) following SDLC process using project management tools including at least 1 of the following: JIRA, Confluence and JENKINS; (vii) working with at least 2 of the following: Salesforce, SAS, Veeva Suite of products, Oracle Life Science Hub, MS Visio, MS Office. Work experience may be gained concurrently. Pay Range: $148,952.49 - $197,000. Apply online at https:// careers.abbvie.com/en & reference REF34402Y.
Salesforce Administrator, AbbVie Inc., North Chicago, Illinois. Lead implementation, configuration & operations of applications built on Service/
Health Cloud that are used by 1,000 internal users & 100,000 external community users. Acts as technology expert providing Salesforce administration & configuration expertise to the team, ensure SOPs are established & followed to manage the platform, ensure knowledge articles, & hand off from development team are appropriately managed. Implement IT service management framework & principles to maintain SLA for platform performance & operations. Must possess a Bachelor’s degree or foreign academic equivalent in Computer Science, Information Technology, Electronics Engineering, or a highly related field of study and 5 years of related work experience. Of experience required, must have 5 years exp writing in SOQL & SQL with any RDBMS (e.g. SQL Server/Oracle/ DB2). Must have 5 years of each of the following: *Salesforce administration experience; * designing & implementing new processes & facilitating user adoption; * identifying & analyzing upstream & downstream impact analysis through applications, systems, & processes; * performing administration in large scale (500 users) Salesforce implementation; * building with basic triggers/Apex code/LWC knowledge; and * providing all aspects of administration on Service Cloud. Exp may be gained concurrently. Salesforce.com Administrator certification. 5 % of Domestic Travel. 100% telecommuting permitted. Salary Range: $139,500.97 - $153,000 per year. Apply online at https://careers. abbvie.com/en. Refer to Req ID: REF34400Y
Senior Engineer, Technology I, AbbVie Inc., North Chicago, Illinois. Design & implement technical computing strategies including hardware installation, operation system, & software application deployments. Implement & deploy automation (CI/CD) & orchestration solutions. Design & implement technical computing strategies including hardware installation, operation system, & software application deployments. Write scripts & containerize on-premises & cloud systems. Assist users to install, configure &/or script informatics tools & applications. Read & adapt literature & publicly available information to accomplish assignments. Design & develop data, software, & technology solutions as assigned. Work with developers & data scientists to train &/or implement DevOps tools & strategies in new &/or legacy projects. Work with scientists to analyze issues & to prototype, test, tune document & deploy pro-
cessing & data acquisition pipelines. Troubleshoot &/or perform Linux/UNIX Systems Administration tasks as needed. Implement & manage orchestration & automation tools or platforms such as Jenkins &/or Git Flow. Utilize tools, technologies, & methodologies such as Docker, Kubernetes, Bash, Python, Linux, RHEL, Ubuntu, Amazon Web Services (AWS). Implement & deploy Infrastructure as Code including Ansible, JIRA, CloudFormation, &/ or Terraform. Implement multiple storage platforms & diverse fit-to-purpose storage strategies. Support & develop informatics systems & pipelines. Utilize C#, .Net Framework, &/or Angular development. Use statistics &/or machine learning approaches such as Regression, Clustering, Neural Networks, &/or SVM. Conduct database management using Oracle, MS SQL Server, &/or PostgreSQL. Must possess a Bachelor’s degree or foreign academic equivalent in Computer Science, Information Technology, Bioinformatics, Data Science & Business Analytics, or related technical field plus 2 years of experience in: (i) Implementing & deploying automation (CI/CD) & orchestration solutions; (ii) orchestration & automation tools or platforms such as Jenkins &/or GitFlow; (iii) implementing & deploying Infrastructure as Code including Ansible, JIRA, CloudFormation, &/or Terraform; (iv) implementing multiple storage platforms & diverse fit-to-purpose storage strategies; (v) C#, .Net Framework, &/or Angular development; & (vi) statistics &/or machine learning approaches such as Regression, Clustering, Neural Networks, &/or SVM. Apply online at https:// careers.abbvie.com/en & reference REF35117U. Salary Range: $152,880 - $173,500 per year.
Market Access Insights Manager, AbbVie US LLC, Mettawa, IL. Guide communication of findings, results and recommendations of analysis/ research across franchises to improve payor knowledge and provide insights to brand strategies. Manage External vendors. Lead the delivery of brand specific market access analytical insights in response to specific market access issues and trends. Conduct investigative analytics to validate and/or quantify market phenomenon related to competitive or customer tactics. Must possess a Bachelor’s degree or foreign academic equivalent in Engineering, Engineering Management, Mathematics, Computer Science, or a highly related field of study with at least
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2 years of progressive experience in: (i) managing external vendors; (ii) developing strategies for launch brands through advanced modelling techniques; (iii) communicating analytical narratives that describe the opportunities and risks of stakeholder negotiations; (iv) Informing financial projections based on launch pricing and contracting strategies; and (v) conducting investigative analytics to validate and/or quantify market phenomenon related to competitive or customer tactics. Pay Range: $135,831.25 - $197,000. Apply online at https:// careers.abbvie.com/en & reference REF34395N.
Sales Representative
Specializing in decks, porches and outdoor spaces; you will be responsible for generating new business (clients call us for business); Meet with new clients, offer decking products and provide the estimates; discuss design options etc. negotiate terms and close deals; Experience - we will teach right individual, or best would be 2 years in construction field; excellent verbal & written communication skills with ability to explain technical concepts in a simple way; CompensationAttractive commission based; with possible base pay. Bonuses for exceeding the goals. send resumes to: jagconst48@gmail. com
AI Data Scientist I, AbbVie Inc. North Chicago, IL. Identify, develop, & optimize new techniques & solutions for integration, visualization, & analysis of data in order to address critical business needs in a timely manner. Construct architecture for databases, servers, web apps, & knowledge of constructing data visualization dashboard & Implement & analyze machine learning / AI algorithms. Apply & deliver on knowledge of the pharmaceutical business & provide rapid advancement of agile, impactful, & cost-effective solutions within the industry. Must possess a Bachelor’s degree or foreign academic equivalent in Data Science, Business Analytics, Engineering or a highly related field of study with at least 3 years of related experience in the following: (i) providing rapid advancement of agile, impactful, & cost-effective solutions within the industry; (ii) programming experience with Oracle, SQL, JavaScript, Amazon Web Services, Python, & Machine Learning; (iii) constructing architecture for databases, servers,
web apps, and knowledge of constructing data visualization dashboard; (iv) implementing and analyzing machine learning algorithms. Experience may be gained concurrently. Pay Range: $103,600 - $134,500. Apply online at https:// careers.abbvie.com/en & reference REF34401J
213 Management, LLC d.b.a. Sandbox Industries in Chicago, IL seeks Vice President to manage relationships with C-suite level clients. 30% domstc and Intl travel. WFH. Salary: $122,762 to $130,000/ year. Send CV: legal@ sandboxindustries.com
Associate Business System Consultant (HCP Engagements and Contracts), AbbVie Inc. North Chicago, IL. Provides leadership to a team of project managers, business system analysts & developers responsible for building high impact data platform & analytics solutions. Meet with customers to gather requirements for new systems/interfaces or enhancements to existing systems & translate them into solutions partnering with technical teams, vendors, or consultants. Manages projects according to milestones & within budget constraints. Delivers business insights & solutions through analytics by building interfaces with multiple Enterprise systems in Azure Cloud environment. Identifies current & emerging business needs & evaluates alternative technology solutions using standard information systems methodologies & best practices. Accountable for the accuracy of the fit of the proposed solution by effectively communicating the business need & drivers to development groups to fulfill the business need. Oversees Application Support Issue resolution, decommission activities, post data archival partnering with Managed Service Providers. Must possess a B.S. degree in Engineering, Business, Information Systems, Computer Science or related area, with 5 years in building IT solutions interfacing with Enterprise applications. Alternatively, will accept Masters in Engineering, Business, Information Systems, Computer Science or related area, with 3 years in building IT solutions interfacing with Enterprise applications. Of the work exp required, must have: 2 years implementing analytics solutions in a functional lead role using ETL (Informatica), databases (SQL Server) & data visualization tools (Power BI); (ii) 2 years leading projects within a matrix organization; (iii) 2 years in authoring SLC documentation; and (iv) 2 years drafting & delivering Solution Options to
business leadership using Microsoft PowerPoint. Any reasonable combination of experience of education, training, or experience is acceptable. Apply online at https:// careers.abbvie.com/en & reference REF35114T. Salary Range: $126,755 - $173,500 per year.
Business Systems Analysts, Schaumburg, IL Support client-side applications as a part of UPHE Salesforce Ecosystem in planning, developing, designing, and implementing new enhancements for product weekly releases in accordance with the applicable business process. Collaborate with the backend developers and designers to improve usability. 100% Telecommuting permitted. Salary:$90,667 - $93,000. Standard Company Benefits apply. Send res to: Rigelsky, Inc at 120 W Golf Rd, Suite 106, Schaumburg, IL 60195 or email: info@rigelsky.com
Multiple SW Developers Needed Multiple Software Developers needed to dvlp, create, & modify comp app sw or specialized utility prog. Analyze user needs & dvlp sw sol. Design sw or customize sw for client use with the aim of optimizing operational efficiency. Multiple positions are available for Software Developers using one of the listed combinations of tools or skills. SW position 1 -duties will be performed using SAP-APO Demand Planning/Supply Network Planning, SAP-IBP, Blue Yonder, & S4HANA-PPDS; SW position 2 - duties will be performed using MuleSoft, webMethods, AWS suites, & Axway Secure Transport; SW position 3 - duties will be performed using Aldon/ CMS, Postman/Soup UI, & RDI for AS400 development; SW position 4 - duties will be performed using JavaScript, SQL Server, & Dot Net; SW position 5 - duties will be performed using COBOL, CICS, & DB2; SW position 6 - duties will be performed using webMethods product suite, Mulesoft, & EDI; SW position 7 - duties will be performed using MuleSoft, Oracle Fusion Middleware, (SOA, ODI, OAG), Oracle Integration Cloud, Informatica Cloud, & Java; SW position 8duties will be performed using skills in Programming II, Client Side Web Development & Server Side Web Development. Offered wages for SW position 1 to 6 is $148,949/ yr, Offered wage for SW position 7 is $127,754/ yr, Offered wage for SW position 8 is $106,558/yr. Not all positions require all skills & tools. Work locations for all positions will include Chicago, IL & also at various unanticipated locations in the U.S., as assigned, which may require relocation. Applicants
should clearly identify the position they are applying for in their cover letter. The resume must specifically list all post- secondary education, training, or experience. Resumes must show if the applicant has any of the mentioned combination of tools or skills. Mail all resumes to Quinnox, Inc., Attn: EVP & Head - Immigrations, 1 South Wacker Drive, Ste # 3150, Chicago, IL 60606. Sue Booker sueb@ quinnox.com 630-212-7774
TECHNICAL
Cisco Systems, Inc. is accepting resumes for multiple positions in Chicago, IL: Customer Escalations Engineer (Ref#: CHI190A): Lead complex and critical network problems to resolution for customers. Telecommuting permitted. Salary $161,179-189,200/ year. Technical Solutions Architect (Ref#: CHI313A): Responsible for IT advisory and technical consulting services development and delivery. Telecommuting permitted and travel may be required to various unanticipated locations throughout the United States. Salary $181,228253,900/year. Solutions Engineer (Ref#: CHI381A): Work on the company’s Industrial Internet of Things (IOT) Business team to support company’s global entity customers, partners, and account teams. Telecommuting permitted and travel may be required to various unanticipated locations throughout the United States and/or abroad. Salary $162,037253,900/year. Please email resumes including position’s reference number in subject line to Cisco Systems, Inc. at amsjobs@ cisco.com. No phone calls please. Must be legally authorized to work in the U.S. without sponsorship. EOE. www.cisco.com
SERVICES
CHESTNUT
ORGANIZING AND CLEANING SERVICES: especially for people who need an organizing service because of depression, elderly, physical or mental challenges or other causes for your home’s clutter, disorganization, dysfunction, etc. We can organize for the downsizing of your current possessions to more easily move into a smaller home. With your help, we can help to organize your move. We can organize and clean for the deceased in lieu of having the bereaved needing to do the preparation to sell or rent the deceased’s home. We are absolutely not judgmental; we’ve seen and done “worse” than your job assignment. With your help, can we please help you? Chestnut Cleaning Service: 312-332-5575. www.ChestnutCleaning. com www. ChestnutCleaning.com
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