In the late 80s and early 90s, David Sedaris was an Art Institute graduate living in Chicago, trying to figure out what to do with his life. After seeing him read at a Milly’s Orchid Show, Ira Glass, then with NPR, asked Sedaris if he had any Christmas-themed essays. As it turns out, he did: the soon-to-be-legendary “SantaLand Diaries,” which chronicled his experience as an elf at Macy’s. I started writing in a diary when I was 20 years old, but I didn’t write a story until I was 27....

Courtesy of Newseum Sample pages from The Pulitzer Prize Photographs: Capture the Moment Like many professionals, journalists have a clearer understanding of their own virtues than the public does. Press photographers, for instance, tend to be quick-witted and daring, yet the laity have a way of dismissing them as pushy voyeurs. Movies like to show photographers as a rabid mob—the gauntlet that must be run by decent people falsely accused....

In its early days, photography was often confined to the studio, where subjects posed stock-still for as long as it took an image to be fixed on a glass plate. When film cameras became portable and, later, handheld, the medium easily moved outdoors, keeping pace with dramatic urban growth. But documenting that change wasn’t always the focus; some shooters used the form for contemplation as they wandered on foot, their work the visible transmission of their musings....

The Chef: John Asbaty (Panozzo’s Italian Market)The Challenger: Jonathan Zaragoza (Masa Azul)The Ingredient: Honeycomb tripe “It’s pretty rich, but it’s balanced by those light, fresh elements,” Asbaty said. “The sausage isn’t hugely tripe-forward, but I think you get it at the end.” He’s sold some of the sausage in the store already, and froze the rest, which he served at the Key Ingredient Cook-Off on May 3. Sausage Cover the roasted pork bones with the water by several inches and bring to a simmer....

Kosovo, the Whole Story The situation in Kosovo is portrayed in stark black and white, and the “black and white” change depending on who is covering the issue. In the U.S. media and policy it is evil Serbs against innocent ethnic Albanians in a mountainous region “over there.” This is an incomplete truth and that myth must be rectified. The Serbian army and Serbian-backed paramilitaries committed atrocities and genocide against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo....

The Lines Got Blurred Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Though the nightmare scenarios concocted by the music industry during the Napster scare of the late 90s haven’t exactly become reality—people still buy music and records still go platinum, albeit not in the numbers they used to—the millions of users who’ve taken to file sharing in the intervening decade have undeniably dealt a serious blow to record labels large and small....

In slow mode, this Norwegian instrumental trio plays like a Japanese movie monster walks: lurching and stomping in destructive bursts of low-end noise, its gait only implying any kind of real forward progress. But Noxagt’s violent music–which is even more intense when it’s fast–is about much more than mere brutality, and now that baritone guitarist Anders Hana (MoHa, Ultralyd) has replaced violist Nils Erga, it’s easier to hear that. Kjetil D....

Like a lot of artists in Chicago, Free Street Theater artistic director Ron Bieganski has some experience teaching in the Chicago Public Schools. What he’s seen there over the years convinced him that he’d like something different for his own son, Marcel. This year, when Marcel turned five and kindergarten was looming, Bieganski began thinking seriously about creating a public school alternative. Free Street trains teenagers in experimental writing and theater, so it wasn’t a huge leap for him to imagine that if he pulled together a group of like-minded parents and a minimum of ten students, they could start their own art-centered, creativity-nourishing microschool....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » And as he explains it, I realize that what it’s about is things like exactly what I’m doing: Trying to make drama out of the life of a guy who just wants to make food. A guy who wanted the head-down kitchen life, the brotherhood of cooks, and found himself reading about his hair in magazines instead. “I want to go and travel, do some stages in kitchens that are inspiring to me,” he explains when I ask what his plans are....

Ten years ago, when he was running a French-Asian fusion restaurant in Paris, Jean-Denis Courtin tried infusing vodka with mint-flavored chewing gum. That, unsurprisingly, was a flop: “It was a little bit scary,” he admits. But he continued the experiment with other ingredients—caramel, vanilla, fruit, herbs—and eventually had hits with mint, raspberry, and watermelon flavors that both he and his customers liked. Vodka is usually made from grain—wheat or rye, most commonly—or potatoes, but it can be distilled from pretty much anything with natural sugars, including fruits and vegetables....

Weekends (and some weekdays) throughout the summer feature a plethora of street fairs, festivals, and other community events. Admission fees listed for most neighborhood festivals are suggested donations for charity or community projects. —Sam Worley Belmont-Sheffield Music Festival Trippin Billies and Wedding Banned headline. 5/29-5/30, Sat noon-10 PM, Sun noon-9 PM, Sheffield between Belmont and School, $5. Eastside Millennium Art Festival 150 artists on three blocks, with live music and food....

Matt Farmer’s a hotshot trial lawyer in a downtown firm who plays in a rock ‘n’ roll band on the side and rarely gets involved in local politics. But since the Chicago Public Schools kicked his kindergarten daughter in the teeth, he’s been an activist unleashed, sending snarky e-mails to reporters, school officials, and parents on the northwest side. The issue on his mind is Arne Duncan’s plan to move the Edison Regional Gifted Center out of its longtime home at 6220 N....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For years now EDM and rap artists have given music away for free online, under the unexamined assumption that not charging for it would allow them to explore sampling and remixing in ways that would be amazingly difficult, if not downright impossible, to pull off within the label system, where all those samples would have to be cleared and paid for....

CLASSICAL: The Empty Bottle broadcasts the first Thirsty Ear Festival On Sat 8/11 at 5 PM, the Empty Bottle will broadcast a show live on the radio for the first time in its history—but the music won’t be the sort of underground rock the club usually hosts. The occasion is the first Thirsty Ear Festival, a two-hour concert of contemporary classical music featuring local ensembles and artists. It’s organized by Seth Boustead, who hosts the hour-long radio program Relevant Tones on WFMT 98....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The acts participating in “Write the Night”–Tortoise, the Jesus Lizard, Built to Spill, and Yo La Tengo–will be playing songs selected by Internet voters, a process likely to result in the resuscitation of fan favorites that’ve dropped out of the bands’ regular sets for one reason or another. And that’s exactly my beef with this situation, and with the band in general....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A sanctuary from the general obnoxiousness that is Lincoln Park, the Local Option always has a more than respectable tap lineup, often with a few unusual beers thrown into the mix. Last Friday, as they periodically do, they turned over all of their 31 taps to interesting—sorry, “rare and evil”—brews, this time titled “Mommy, Can I Go Out and Drink Tonight?...

Mathieu Zazzo Rokia Traore Remarkable Malian singer and songwriter Rokia Traore has demonstrated a consistent desire to expand the reach of her sound since she first emerged on the global circuit in 1998, slowly adding Western instruments and influences to her gently cycling but insistent music. In fact, electric guitars elbowed out traditional n’goni, acoustic guitar, and balafon on her fourth and most recent album, Tchamantché (Nonesuch), from 2009. Still, I wasn’t prepared for the force electric guitars exert on her forthcoming Beautiful Africa—due from the same label on April 9—which marks a major transformation and a huge step forward artistically....

Spray Paint spray painted every copy of Spray Paint It’s early in 2013, and I’m already overwhelmed by the quality of records that have come out—at least in the realm of the gross and weird music I prefer to subject myself to. My current favorite of the year thus far is without a doubt Spray Paint‘s self-titled debut LP on S.S. Records. The Austin trio plays jumpy noise-punk with a wonky, sketchy vibe and a country-fried drawl....

David O. Russell’s fictionalized drama about Abscam, the FBI sting operation that nailed more than a half dozen U.S. legislators on bribery and conspiracy charges, made me nostalgic for the 70s—not for all the bad hair, splayed collars, gold chains, and plunging necklines, but for an era when grown-up movies like this one came out almost every week. Scripted by Eric Warren Singer (The International) and given a comic punch-up by Russell, it centers on two con artists in love (Christian Bale and Amy Adams) who are sucked into the operation by a dodgy FBI agent (Bradley Cooper) and forced to entrap the beloved mayor of Trenton, New Jersey (Jeremy Renner, playing a role based on Congressman Frank Thompson)....

Robert Taylor, Frachot Tone, and Robert Young play the title characters. If nothing else, the recent release of Baz Luhrmann’s Great Gatsby adaptation provides a good excuse to revisit the sole film on which F. Scott Fitzgerald received screenwriting credit, the 1938 melodrama Three Comrades. The movies are similar insofar that neither one really respects Fitzgerald’s writing—the author was reportedly unhappy with Comrades because relatively little of his work made it into the completed film....