An interesting parallel to Hollywood’s recycling mania is the much more fruitful phenomenon of the “found footage” film–a practice within independent cinema of working creatively with already existing film footage. In recent years, many of the most inventive experimental filmmakers in the U.S. from Ken Jacobs to Leslie Thornton have worked in this mode, but there is almost certainly no figure who has done more with the form than Bruce Conner....

asterisk (*) = recommended National Film Board of Canada: Animation program By the time he died in 1987, James Baldwin had almost been forgotten, although he was only 63. His greatest creativity, and fame, encompassed the period from the mid-1950s to the mid-’60s when he was a pioneer: novels and essays such as Another Country, Giovanni’s Room, and The Fire Next Time expressed black outrage before the full force of the black liberation movement, and articulated gay love and experience before gay liberation....

DAVID PUSZH DANCE COMPANY The first piece set the tone for the evening. Just Affairs, a 1985 work by Puszczewicz, features a man and a woman in near darkness alternately falling into and pulling away from each other. The couple, danced by Ellen Airi Hubbell and Evan Charles How, seem relatively uninterested in these exchanges, although once in a while they reach for each other longingly. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising is for my money the landmark hip-hop album of ’89, a captivating tapestry of sound, color, and rhythm that makes the vast majority of gold-bedecked MCs seem pretty lame by comparison. Like other hiphoppers, De La Soul raid the pop/rock past for grooves and other fragments to reassemble into new music, but they open the genre up to a much wider range of sounds (I discern samples of, among others, Ben E....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A review in this week’s Reader [March 2] was so destructive and so ugly it calls into question the faculties of its author, Mary Shen Barnidge, who in her review of the show Breaking Wood has mistakenly identified criticism with vicious personal attack. This “review” is much more revealing of a pathetic mean-spiritedness on Mary Shen Barnidge’s part than it is of the play, which I’ve seen and enjoyed, as did others in the audience the night she was there....

MACBETH Unfortunately, the production disintegrates when it goes into action. It turns out the leaves are there for the characters to roll around in, orgasmically or remorsefully. (That motif seems inspired by Macbeth’s line, “My way of life is fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf . . . ” This is the first time I’ve ever seen this device, sometimes called in the classroom a “central visual metaphor,” employed in a theater....

The first time I became aware of technical brilliance as an artistic force was in high school, when some of the band’s trumpet players started raving about “MAY-nard.” (The first name was sufficient, although his initials were an acceptable subsititute as well as a desirable double entendre–M.F., get it?) The object of this gape-mouthed adulation was Ferguson’s command of the trumpet’s upper register, which by then had become his trademark: a roaring sirocco of hot tone that left even other high-note specialists somewhat dazed....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Products new to the market: Trolli Gummi Sour Road Pets, candy in the shape of flattened animals with tire tracks across their backs (in a package with a driver giving a thumbs-up sign), from Trolli Inc. in Pompano Beach, Florida; the Motion-Model shoe, specially designed for wearing while shopping, in “wheat,” black, or white ($72); and the Vegiform (from Robert Marketing Inc....

“I had this moment onstage a few years ago when I was supposed to be witnessing someone’s death,” says Mary Zimmerman. “There we were, all laced up in our corsets, our hair sprayed back, all that. We were trying so hard to be upset about this man’s death. And I suddenly realized that it was just so fake. Without being art, without being artificial. It was nothing but effort. At that moment I thought to myself, ‘I will never be in another play again....

The Old Man and the Kid The other day, Andrew Patner talked to us about his nifty new book on I.F. Stone. “Our father used to take us down to the library all the time,” he remembered. “And up in the top floor reading room were these huge tables with what now would be called homeless people. They all had black coats and thick white beards with food in them and a bag of bread and they sat there all day and read....

YONDER COME DAY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Because J.D. is unable to say more than one word at a time–one word per gasp is his limit–the play focuses on his visitors. In the course of the play the visitors become a small society, united by their love for J.D. Marijo comically exaggerates the habits and walks of J.D.’s friends–Frankie, George, Falette, and the apparently autobiographical narrator–and his nurses....

Returning, after two years’ hiatus, under the auspices of producer Doug Bragan’s Douglas Theater Corp., this third not-so-annual event features 16 non-Equity companies in as many one-act plays, organized in programs of four. The selections range from experimental drama to camp melodrama to medieval farce to musical comedy to good ol’ American naturalism. At the Theatre Building, through April 15. Saturdays, 2 and 7 PM; Sundays, 1 and 6 PM. $14-$19 per four-play program; “marathon tickets,” good for one whole day (two programs), $27....

A Critic’s Conversion But then, Marsh and von Rhein disagree about nearly everything. The classical music critics of the Sun-Times and Tribune, respectively, they have the amazing ability to attend the same concert and hear entirely different music. Consider their reviews last week when the CSO introduced George Lloyd’s Seventh Symphony. “Surprisingly appealing,” wrote von Rhein. “Synthetic Sibelius . . . derivative, diffuse and dull,” ruled Marsh. Or the week before, when Italian conductor Giuseppe Sinopoli came to town....

At the little dock below the Michigan Avenue bridge, a drowned man lay floating face down in the river. Two divers struggled to slide him onto a tray suspended just above the water by several straps held by a group of fire fighters. Reporters, photographers, and police clustered around them on the walkway just above the river. Behind them a crowd was gathering, they hung over the water from the walkway, lined the steps leading up to the bridge, and stood two and three deep along the bridge’s rail....

North Carolina’s Eugene Chadbourne is the outer limits of absurdity’s leading rocker, and San Francisco’s Camper Van Beethoven were always rock’s leading absurdists. Guitar wizard and free-lance eccentric Chadbourne and a few of the more adventurous members of the now-defunct Camper come together like slightly askew sound waves: their more peculiar tendencies sometimes combine, sometimes cancel each other out. When the two tendencies combine, you get very long, very noodley, and sometimes grating excursions into something that might be described as avant-folk-fusion, or insane country-jazz, or maybe balalaika bluegrass....

A major event in the history of the Chicago Jazz Festival occurred eight years ago when it commissioned Randy Weston to compose a major work honoring the African sources of jazz. Weston and his arranger-orchestrator Melba Liston came up with African Sunrise, a huge, sprawling composition that the Machito Orchestra played–with guests Dizzy Gillespie, Weston, and others–in an exciting performance. African Sunrise didn’t appear on record until this year, when a reworked version was included on Weston’s Spirits of Our Ancestors CD....

Dong Lee once described himself to me as “just a kid from the rice paddies.” He came here from his native China as a young man and has now retired from a career in the post office. For Lee, the job has provided a focus for his enjoyment of nature. For the people who tag along on his nature walks, he provides an opportunity to use the park and a starting point for another informal network like our group of dog walkers....

CANNIBAL CHEERLEADERS ON CRACK Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last summer Torso Theatre did a bawdy little comedy about three bored west-coasters trying to perk up their sex lives, but critics were quick –almost too quick–to dismiss it as just another bedroom farce. So Torso decided to get more elementary. Instead of the relatively mature pleasures of sex, Cannibal Cheerleaders on Crack revels in an earlier obsession–bodily secretions....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For countless years the residents of CHA public housing, city officials, and the public have been unsuccessful in their attempts to improve the living conditions of public housing. Finally a program that works and a chairman with proven ability have had a positive impact. Ms. Juffer attempts to tarnish the program by injecting unsubstantiated accusations of misconduct on the part of the police and security personnel....

JANET SKIDMORE AND BRYAN SANER Helen Tamiris’s most famous work, the 1932 Negro Spirituals, is that mundane but is also surprisingly powerful, especially as performed by Janet Skidmore (in Ann Wykell’s reconstruction from Lucy Venable’s Labanotation score). Historical material like this showed in especially sharp relief on a concert bill otherwise made up of contemporary works: Bryan Saner’s The Hand Shake and Tales of the Laborer (The Coffee Break), Skidmore’s The Place In-Between and Duet, and a joint effort, Name That Dance....