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  Jane Lynch and Andy Richter in The Real Live Brady Bunch, 1991

  Blog

  Everybody gets their start somewhere, and for a lot of comedic actors, that place is and has been Chicago’s improv comedy scene. In this video, we look back at a time when Jane Lynch (now well known as one of the regular actors in the Christopher Guest mockumentaries and for her role on Glee) and Andy Richter (comedian and Conan O’Brien sidekick) were relative unknowns, playing the roles of Carol and Mike Brady in Annoyance Theatre’s production of The Real […]

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  Look, see, this is our history

  Blog

  A letter from Andrew Seeder I worked at Media Burn the past 18 months as a cataloger and digitizer. This is my last week here, so I’d like to describe to you why Media Burn is important while the experience is still fresh in my mind. There’s what we know will be important 50 years from now: Our 1992 presidential election collection, our 1982 technology collection “Wired In,” or our Cabrini Green collection, among others. We point to these and […]

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  Do you still have untransferred 1/2″ open reel videotapes?

  Blog

  (If you don’t know what this question means, you definitely don’t!) If you were a portable video pioneer who was active in the late 1960s and/or early 1970s, you might still have some lurking around somewhere that you never got around to transferring. Time is almost up… We are in the process of applying for a grant to transfer our remaining 1/2″ reels. We know that many wonderful tapes from this quickly vanishing era of video experimentation remain untransferred and […]

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  Let’s Go Hawks!

  Blog

  multiple edits at once

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  Inside The Baffler, 1993

  Blog

  Today, we look back at the early years of The Baffler, a literary journal which was published out of Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood for more than 20 years. Praised for its critiques of mass media and business culture, The Baffler came from a strong “do it yourself” ethic inspired by punk rock music and the advent of personal computers, which helped move cultural production out of the hands of big businesses and into the hands of everyday people. In this 1993 interview, Thomas […]

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  Neon signs and baked Alaska

  Blog

  We’ve been meaning to update you on the exciting results of our projects with five University of Michigan graduate students back in March. We had a great week together: the students showed us how to do amazing things with our website, and we gave them t-shirts and introduced them to Baked Alaska at Sabatino’s. Sara with the group at lunch (L-R): Yiqing Li, Maria Smith, Soohyun Park, Kimberly Springer, Krishna Vadrevu In just five days, they created some marvelous new […]

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  Mike Gray (1935-2013)

  Blog

  We’re sad to report the passing of a close friend and pioneering documentarian. Mike Gray was brilliant…a journalist, novelist, screenwriter, and filmmaker, steadfast in his beliefs and and absolutely creative every day of his life. H. Michael Gray was born in Darlington, a small town in Indiana. He received an engineering degree from Purdue University, and came to Chicago in the early 1960s. He had lived and worked in Los Angeles since 1973. He was the co-founder of the Chicago-Based […]

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  Richie Havens (1941-2013)

  Blog

  Three videos in honor of musician and activist Richie Havens. The first was shot in 1982 as part of a national nuclear disarmament survey with the participation of more than 300 videomakers. Next, from 1990, a short interview by Skip Blumberg for the PBS series THE 90’s. Lastly, enjoy a performance by Havens at the 1991 Studs Terkel Toast at the Bismarck Hotel in Chicago from our extensive Studs Terkel collection. As always, you can watch the full programs: Disarmament Survey (1982, […]