Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Coudal flags an amazing picture of the city from 36,000 feet. On the subject of photography, the recent article by Phillip Gourevitch and Errol Morris on Sabrina Hartman, who took many of the infamous Abu Ghraib photos, is a must-read. On the subject of Liz Phair (see title), Chicagoist has an entertaining thread on whether or not she’s a good guitarist....

Longtime Field Museum public relations and advertising director Pat Kremer says her surprise resignation last week was prompted by the museum’s decision to “go in another direction” with its advertising. Translation: Kremer was informed that the museum’s account–worth roughly $1 million annually and handled by Chicago-based RPM during her dozen-year tenure–would be put out for bid. The decision had been made without consulting her. “It was a shock to me, because we had done such good work together and all of the feedback that we’d received from management had been very positive,” Kremer says....

In 2009 Richard Pollak finished writing After the Barn, the family memoir he’d begun some 20 years earlier. Twice he set the project aside to write—and publish—other books: The Creation of Dr. B, a biography of Bruno Bettelheim; and The Colombo Bay, an account of life on a container ship as it sailed from Hong Kong to New York by way of the Indian Ocean and the Suez Canal. After the Barn was a smaller book, a more personal book, the kind of book publishers don’t know how to promote even though readers often find them deeply gratifying....

On July 29 the city ordered the Uptown Theatre onto the auction block, and the sale had one immediately obvious benefit—it eliminated the tangle of owners, partial owners, mortgages, and liens surrounding the property and made it clear who’s actually responsible for the place. Chicago-based Jam Productions won with a bid of $3.2 million—and surprisingly, the only other bid accepted was from the holder of the first mortgage, not from one of Jam’s competitors....

The sound in Terence Hannum’s video installation Evocation, this month’s 12 x 12 exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art, is a wall of throbbing electronic harmony and dissonance. Hannum recorded the earth-shaking dirges of the experimental metal band Sunn O))) at a recent performance and shot footage, projected here on three walls–dark, abstract scenes in which fragments of performers, fans, and equipment appear in lightning flashes through clouds of thick smoke....

“I don’t think it’s going to work,” I finally admitted to my friend Emily as I tried for the dozenth time to stir the mess of milk solids in the bowl together into cheese. It was supposed to be easy: several sources had assured me that nothing could be faster and simpler, or produce more delicious results, than making fresh mozzarella. Finding the ingredients was in fact fairly easy. Rennet, which contains the enzyme that makes the milk coagulate (traditionally extracted from the stomachs of baby calves or goats but now usually made from vegetable matter), seemed the most daunting, but the second Whole Foods I tried carried it....

Of the 50-plus Chicagoans whose eating habits, dining preferences, and culinary rituals we examine in this issue, there is a single outlier who holds the strange opinion that a person eats to live, and not vice versa. We’ll forgive him that heresy for his willingness to sit down with us for a perfectly delicious breakfast. The rest who show up in these pages take eating far more seriously. Some are consumed by food for thought: the philosophy professor who applies Aristotelian logic to the act of eating a doughnut, the rapper who wonders if Chicago pizza could become a conduit for peace....

thursday6 Thursday6 Daughters of the SunGilberto Santa Rosa Friday7 DialsJohann Johannsson Saturday1 CanastaWillie ClaytonJosephine Foster Sunday9 Black BreathRay Wylie Hubbard Tuesday11 EPMDNite Jewel Wednesday12 Givers GILBERTO SANTA ROSA Last year’s El Caballero de la Salsa (Sony Music Norte) surveys nearly two decades of hits by Puerto Rican salsero Gilberto Santa Rosa, who’s been one of tropical music’s dominant vocalists for at least that long. Almost every song, even the ballads, simmers with rich Afro-Cuban polyrhythms, but the radio-friendly recordings are less than ideal showcases for the improvisation that’s his greatest strength—the arrangements are treacly and predictable, too short to really let him stretch out, and marred by overcompression and annoying synths....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I don’t remember what I was doing, or reading. Just those words, “hot chicken,” somewhere—somewhere on the page. On the Internet. (Am I writing like Peggy Noonan on Mitt Romney? That’s just how I feel. About spice, about chicken.) “Hot chicken” is the kind of phrase that will force a wandering, preprandial mind to attention—so concise, so beguiling. So eight hours away, it turns out....

“This is how we’ve heard it: During slavery, there was hardly anything to eat. They would whip you until your ass was burning, then they would give you a bit of plain rice in a bowl. And the gods said, they said that this is no way for human beings to live. The gods would help them. ‘Let each one go where he may.’ So they ran.” —From the oral history of the Saramaccans...

A first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I try to be as accurate as I can. One of the stickiest eras is the Civil War, because there are so many Civil War reenactors, and they really know how far off the ground women’s skirts were, how thick the collars tended to be. If you’re out there and you’re dressed in period clothes without a corset, people will know....

Mary Badham and Gregory Peck as Scout and Atticus Finch My favorite moment of To Kill a Mockingbird, which screened at the Film Center on Wednesday night from a beautiful new 35-millimeter print, is a brief cutaway shot to Scout in an early scene. Atticus Finch is tucking her into bed and telling her of the jewelry she’ll inherit when she’s old enough to take responsibility for it. Gregory Peck’s performance as Atticus is justly revered; it’s authoritative but warm, and above all conveys great deliberation....

Paul John Higgins Last time, we told you that “May 22 will be here sooner than you think.” Well—it’s here: the last day voting is open in our annual Best of Chicago poll! The deadline is midnight tonight, so start filling out your ballots if you haven’t already. At our Best of Chicago ballot you can vote on Best Underground Art Space, Best Place for a New El Stop, and Best Place to Get Married....

For some reason greenbacks started falling from the sky during the seventh-inning stretch at Sox Park yesterday, delighting fans already feeling pretty good, what with the sunshine, the uncharacteristically sloppy defense on the part of the Twins (three errors that should have been four), and the sharp pitching of Mark Buehrle (who beat out Carlos Zambrano and Brian Urlacher to be named favorite Chicago athlete in the Sun-Times‘s annual poll of sports fans)....

courtesy of Jonais Spenoy in association with Hameed Khan ‘Kawa’ Jaipur Kawa Brass Band I’ve had a thing for brass-band music ever since I first came across the manic sound of Balkan music in the Emir Kusturica film Underground, where the soundtrack included high-octane pumpers from the great Macedonian band led by Boban Markovic. Before long I learned that one of the few positive by-products of colonialism was that just about every part of the world had a brass-brand tradition, where local musical styles had been adapted to the military instruments left behind by occupiers....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At last year’s Chicago Jazz Festival drummer and bandleader Mike Reed debuted a project called the Myth/Science Assembly that included stellar players from Chicago and the east coast. It was part of an ongoing initiative launched by Experimental Sound Studio that enlists artists to create new work from sound materials in the Sun Ra/El Saturn Collection, which is housed in the organization’s Creative Audio Archive....

cbssports.com Andrew Shaw: another master of psychological warfare It seems only right and fitting that a team that did not lose a single game in the first half of the (admittedly abbreviated) 2013 hockey season should win the Stanley Cup. You could credit the success to the talented players and their talented coach (and his equally talented mustache), but you should not neglect the effect of the environment in which they play....

Will Burns, a candidate for alderman in Chicago’s Fourth Ward, is not a flashy politician. Short and stocky, with a boyish face and a sharp wit, he dons conservative suits and shuttles between campaign events in a beat-up 2003 Impala. His voice is firm and brassy but not booming. If Burns, who’s 37, didn’t represent Illinois’s 26th house district, a job he’s held for three years, he might be running a social service agency or teaching grad students political theory....

Tonika G. Johnson is a photographer and cofounder/lead teacher of Media-N-Motion, a south-side after-school writing program that explores media stereotypes and overcoming bias. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It was fall of 1993, the eve of my first day as a freshman at Lane Tech high school, and the night was filled with serious stomach butterflies—and fashion preparations. As the television blared music from the now-defunct cable channel the Box, I prestyled my hair between the careful selection of my outfit, which I laid out on the bed to make sure it was properly coordinated....

Finally, after nearly a dozen years and seven albums, this Minneapolis entity is nearing an exposure level the Arcade Fire–a not entirely dissimilar band–seemed to reach in about ten minutes. But leader Craig Minowa has chosen his own circuitous, borderline obsessive path–one that’s required him, for instance, to plant trees and buy wind-power credits to offset the energy used in recording and touring. Early on Minowa’s activist lyrics were a bit too stridently concrete for his fragile psych-pop to support, but gradually he’s found balance: his vision has grown more mystical, while his production style has gotten more rigorously detailed....