The eighth edition of the annual festival of black independent film runs through Thursday, August 17, at the DuSable Museum of African American History, 740 E. 56th Pl., 947-0600; at the Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, 443-3737; and at Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton, 281-4114. Tickets are $5, $3 for Blacklight members. For more information call 509-2981. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » HERITAGE AFRICA Kwah Ansah’s film from Ghana, receiving its U....

JESSE HICKMAN: THE COUNTY SERIES The big pieces are composed of rectangular walnut panels of irregular lengths, joined by dowels to form the shapes of the counties they’re named for. Each work is painted with pigmented gesso and selectively burned to achieve a simple pattern of stripes–the burned black areas alternate with the areas of colored gesso remaining. Because Hickman controlled the burning by laying lengths of wet rope across the gessoed surface, each stripe is separated from its neighbor by a narrow, softened parallel line with tiny blisters....

Friday 24 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » No election season in Chicago is complete without a screening of Bill Stamets’s Super-8 chronicles. In years past Stamets has treated us to Nazi rallies, Byrne psychobabble, and Washington wins after the vote tallies. Now comes the world premiere of Presidential Appearances, Stamets’s postscript to last November’s contest, a travelogue that includes the Iowa caucuses, the conventions, and President Bush’s inauguration....

CAN’T TAKE JOHNNY TO THE FUNERAL What makes a hunk of pink plastic a baby? I don’t know, and if Can’t Take Johnny to the Funeral is any indication, neither does Goat Island. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Johnny opens with an extended section of choreographed roughhousing. In the Wellington Avenue Church gymnasium, spectators were seated on risers on four sides of a 19-foot-square area, with lights pointed from all sides into the center, producing the effect of a boxing ring....

It is a nightly performance, a curious sort of automobile ballet on the quaint wide boulevard that meanders through the north end of Lincoln Park. Every model car imaginable wanders, weaves, pauses, turns around, speeds up, slows down. The lone drivers are also of every sort imaginable–white, black, brown, Asian, young and old. They have one thing in common, though; they’re all men. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Surely this stretch of parkland, from Montrose to Foster, is one of the sex centers of the city....

The Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad went out of business in 1980. After a long futile struggle against competing railroads, trucks on the interstate, and high labor costs, Rock Island’s stockholders finally persuaded U.S. District Court Judge Frank McGarr that their railroad–operating in bankruptcy since 1975–was worth more dead than alive. The offices at 332 S. Michigan were closed, the freight trains and switch engines stopped operating, the employees were laid off, and the Rock’s court-appointed trustee, William Gibbons, began liquidating company assets: real estate, rolling stock, locomotives, and 11,000 miles of line running across 13 midwestern and western states....

Peter Duesberg, professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California at Berkeley, has concluded that the Human Immunodeficiency Virus–HIV–does not cause AIDS. In so doing, he is dismissing the most cherished hypothesis of the world’s AIDS experts. Two healthy people have sex with the same HIV-infected person. One has sex a hundred times and never gets sick; the other comes down with AIDS after a single experience. Why?...

We don’t look like the winners, Anna and I, sitting in the cold outside City Hall with our sour faces. You could never tell by looking at us that this is the moment we’ve been visualizing for years. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s the mayor and there’s Larry Gorski, the smiling quadriplegic whom the mayor pays $75,000 a year to represent us disabled folk in City Hall as his special assistant....

Pam Gore has got to be the most unlikely low-rent hotel operator in Chicago. She stands all of four feet 11 inches and might weigh 100 pounds. By her own definition she’s a middle-class suburban housewife. Later her father started buying properties, concentrating on low-rent hotels. He belonged to a circle of inner-city landlords, some of whom were pretty shady. But he was different, his daughter recalls. “He wasn’t like a lot of those guys....

PILOBOLUS DANCE THEATRE Recently at the Auditorium Theatre, Pilobolus–which now numbers six (new) dancers, including two women–showed how far their ingenuity has taken them in 17 years. The group burst onstage with a medley of Elvis Presley favorites; presented a disturbing portrait of violence and rape; and finally slipped neatly out of narrative with a minimalist, primitive exhibit of bare flesh and muscle. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The newest piece on the program, and a Chicago premiere, was I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone (1987)....

SOCK MONKEYS In many of the arts, the term “postmodern” has been used in so many ways that it may have little meaning left. The dance world is so small that postmodern dance can be traced to a single class in choreography taught by Douglas Dunn at Merce Cunningham’s New York studio in 1960. Dunn’s students experimented wildly, staging concerts at New York’s Judson Church starting in 1962; this group is often collectively called the Judson Church choreographers....

“The path of life has become very rough to me since the most loving and devoted husband and children have been called from my side,” wrote the widowed Mary Todd Lincoln to a friend in 1875. “In the great hereafter . . . we will then know why the gracious Father has caused such deep affliction.” To this day she remains, according to historians’ informal polls, our most disliked first lady....

Over 16 years and an irritatingly unascertainable number of album, single, cassette, and CD releases, the Residents have made at least one point: if rock ‘n’ roll can be taken at all seriously, they (the Residents) will take it to whatever lengths they wish. Far more than comparable works by Zappa or Beefheart, the Residents’ experimentations and genre-destructions have, at their core, a love for and a deep caring about rock music–in fact rock has been the subject of their most interesting work, like the (40 song!...

I hate nouvelle cuisine. And I’m not alone. There were no “grazers” until places like Ambria started listing things like rare liver with raspberries as entrees. That’s when people with functioning taste buds began ordering two appetizers, salad, and dessert. I of course ordered two desserts. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This little storefront addition to the River North restaurant explosion, with its silver ceiling, exposed brick walls, white paper tablecloths, schoolroom chairs, and wait staff clad in Art Institute-student black, looks anything but homey....

It’s a pity that Jerry Schatzberg’s most recent picture–and one of his very best–has had to wait two years for its Chicago premiere. Adapted by Harold Pinter from a novel by Fred Uhlman, and shot in ‘Scope by Bruno De Keyzer, this French-English-West German production is a story about a Jewish lawyer in New York (Jason Robards) who’s returning to Stuttgart, Germany, after a 55-year absence to discover what happened during the early 30s to his best friend (Samuel West)–an ambassador’s son who didn’t share the racism of his aristocratic family....

Ex-Chicagoan Roscoe Mitchell–the alternately lyrical, intense, melodic, minimaliost, humorous, and brutal composer-saxophonist–has brought about major events in American music in his recurring visits to the University of Chicago’s Mandel Hall. As long ago as 1966 he and pianist Jodie Christian led one of the very first A.A.C.M. concerts there; Mitchell then discovered new worlds of form and sound when he led his early Art Ensemble in weekly jam sessions at the hall’s student lounge....

TAKING STEPS However, one clever visual joke and one good role are not enough to make a farce superior, and Taking Steps is a weaker effort by Alan Ayckbourn, considered to be the British Neil Simon. But these two attributes, coupled with farcical devices (though standard), which Ayckbourn clearly has mastered, are more than enough to provide a few laughs, so if the Touchstone Theatre’s production of this play seems flat, the fault must lie with the production....

To the editors. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Byrne’s idea that the owner of a newspaper should concern itself with morality is as anachronistic as the noble quotations carved into the walls of the lobby of Tribune Tower where Byrne innocently “. . . thought the guardian of the City’s good taste and virtue was ensconced . . .” Tesser admits “–that there’s something troubling about Harry Caray’s marriage of the ‘Bud man’ logo to his ‘Cub fan’ image–” and there is....

Outside the windows of the Truman College cafeteria, as a balmy breeze wafts through the trees, tennis players and softball swatters congregate, enjoying one of the gentler, more peaceful days of spring. But inside the stuffy cafeteria of the Uptown junior college, it’s all work for 200 or so north-side activists getting down to the serious political business of the day. “What we are trying to do is combine the activist organizations that have been working up and down the lakefront since the Harold Washington campaign,” says Peyton, herself cochair of one such group, Network 44....

At midnight Sunday, nobody came through the doors of the Chicago Sun-Times except a tall, handsome security guard in a blue parka and cap. He whispered into his walkie-talkie as soon as he saw the clump of delivery truck drivers waiting for their load, smiled and nodded at a couple of reporters from other media, then kept walking. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chicago news broadcasts had been leading all Sunday night with the Sun-Times–some 250 editorial workers were threatening to go on strike sometime Monday....