(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 are in great jeopardy of being lost forever. If you would like your 1/2″ tapes to be considered for inclusion in this grant proposal, send a list of the tapes to info@mediaburn.org, with a brief description of what you think is on each one by July 1. This is the last possible day to be included in our grant proposal.

If your tapes are selected and the grant proposal is successful, we will pay to send the tapes to a specialist for cleaning and transfer, make them available for free public viewing (not downloading) on mediaburn.org, store digital masters in our permanent collection, and provide you with a dvd and/or file copy. You’ll get the equivalent of around $300 per reel in restoration work for free. We’ll continue fulfilling our mission to restore and distribute alternative video and TV history.

The Chicago Blackhawks were Stanley Cup champions in 1961 and again in 2010, but Blackhawk fever might be even more intense this year. Some of us still remember that 1961 team, when Bobby Hull, the Scooter Line (Stan Mikita, Kenny Wharram, and Ab McDonald), Pierre Pilote, Moose Vasko, and goalie Glenn Hall helped make the Hawks the toast of the town. Three years later, Hull’s younger brother Dennis joined the ranks, and the two became all-time Chicago sports legends.

In 1995, we (as TnT Productions) produced this video with the Hull brothers as a segment of the Once A Star series broadcast on WGN-TV. As this archival video shows, so much of life, including hockey, was a whole different thing then.

Today, Bobby continues to work for the Blackhawks as an Ambassador alongside his fellow teammate Stan Mikita. He has five children, including his son Brett, who played in the NHL from 1986 to 2005 and ultimately rivaled his own father’s accomplishments.

Meanwhile, Dennis published a light-hearted memoir in 1998 under the self-deprecating title The Third Best Hull. Today, he is an accomplished public speaker and comedian, poking fun at the sport of hockey, his brother, and ultimately himself. He also runs a cattle farm in Northumberland County, Ontario, with his wife, Sue. They have two children.

Watch the full version of Once A Star, featuring Doug Atkins, Robyn Smith, Minnesota Fats, Bowie Kuhn, Bill Wade, and Floyd Patterson at Media Burn Archive.

This video shot by the daring Patrick Creadon in 1993 takes you up 130 feet over the Kennedy Expressway with two sign painters.

This is something that was and still is pretty unusual to see on TV… We produced 17 Chicago Slices programs for WPWR/Channel 50–with more than 100 stories of and about people who were ordinary Chicagoans.

Since then, Fox bought channel 50, which had been one of the two Chicago TV stations that were owned locally by non-national corporations. WCIU (the U) is the only one left.

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 Frank, founder and editor of The Baffler, offers up critiques of mass media and advertising that remain surprisingly relevant to the world of today, where advancements in technology make it easier than ever for people to create and distribute their own art and culture, while at the same time, corporate advertising has become even more pervasive.

In 2011, Tom Frank sold The Baffler to John Summers, who moved the journal over to MIT Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is published three times a year in both print and digital formats. Frank is the author of several books, including the influential “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” and is currently a columnist for Harper’s Magazine.

This video is yet another new find from our Chicago Slices camera original collection. Shot by Jim Morrissette and Matthew Palm, it was never edited or used until now. We have been digitizing these previously unseen Chicago-based videotapes through the support of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, and generous people like you.

Watch the full 1993 video inside Baffler headquarters at Media Burn Archive.

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 tools for mediaburn.org:

“Voices of Cabrini” portal. This page suggests research pathways for viewers who want to dig deeper into the topics explored in “Voices of Cabrini,” whether by following a particular character like Mark Pratt, a place like George Robbins’s Barbershop, or a topic like Chicago politics or community organizing. It’s a wonderful template for how we can present our other historically significant collections of camera original footage.

Revamped Educators page. This engaging page features a dozen curriculum guides and is a launching point for us to be able to add many more activity guides to help teachers at all levels use our collection in their classrooms.

Sleek new “About Us” page and other behind the scenes improvements.

Now, enjoy this video of a visit to a neon sign company in Chicago. Another interesting find from our collection of camera originals, it was shot by Eric Scholl for Chicago Slices in 1993, but it was never used or edited until now. Eric is an accomplished documentary producer and associate professor at Columbia College.

You can watch his entire trip to Triangle Sign Company at Media Burn Archive.

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 Film Group, which included Howard Alk, William Cottle, James Dennett, Lars Hedman, Chuck Olin, and Mike Shea. These pioneering documentary producers chronicled the political violence of the 1960′s in many of their best known and most impactful works, including AMERICAN REVOLUTION II and THE MURDER OF FRED HAMPTON.

He went on to write and direct other important works of documentary and narrative, including the original screenplay for the four time Oscar nominated THE CHINA SYNDROME (1979). He authored several books, including The Warning: Accident at Three Mile Island (1982) with Ira Rosen; Angle of Attack: Harrison Storms and the Race to the Moon (1992); Drug Crazy: How We Got Into This Mess and How We Can Get Out (1998); Busted: Stone Cowboys, Narco-Lords, and Washington’s War on Drugs (2002); and The Death Game: Capital Punishment and the Luck of the Draw (2003).

He had been working on a documentary following former Chicago Black Panther Robert E. Lee III, a community organizer trained by Saul Alinsky. A trailer for THE ORGANIZER was posted by Gray in 2011. He had also recently been working on a project that reunited him with Andy Davis and Haskell Wexler in Chicago during the 2012 NATO protests, a reflection of the formative effect 1968 Chicago had on all of their careers. Gray’s iconic footage of the 1968 police riots at the Democratic National Convention has been seen around the world.

Mike is survived by his wife, Carol, and son, Lucas. Our hearts and love go to them.

He will be missed.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1NAEgpQirw[/youtube]

Watch the full versions of American Revolution II and The Murder of Fred Hampton.

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, 30 min)

The 90′s episode 113: Global Voices (1990, 60 min)

Studs Terkel Toast (1991, 140 min)

For this year’s Earth Day, we take a look back to the year 1990, when thousands of activists congregated in various bases throughout California’s redwood forests as part of the large scale anti-deforestation protest known as Redwood Summer. The event involved various forms of nonviolent protest and civil disobedience, including protesters sitting in front of bulldozers or chaining themselves to trees as well as legal motions for court injunctions against the logging of old growth forests. Redwood Summer sparked conflict with local logging communities, who felt that their livelihood was under attack and showed up with counter-demonstrations. This tension between the protesters and loggers is the focus of Jay April’s piece “Redwood Forest,” which was shot for the award-winning series THE 90′s.

Watch the full THE 90′s episode “The Environment and Our Oceans” at Media Burn Archive.

For more about the 1990 protests, check out “Redwood Summer: Where the 90′s Begin” by Mary Liz Thomson and Tim Pearson, also shown on THE 90′s. The piece includes footage of Earth First! member Judi Bari, who was injured during Redwood Summer when a bomb under the seat of her car exploded. You can watch the episode at: http://mediaburn.org/video/the-90s-episode-206-the-earth-and-the-environment/

Next week is national preservation week! Learn how to take care of your own archive through this free webinar offered by the American Library Association:

Personal Digital Archiving
April 24, 2013
1-2pm Central time.

Increase your understanding of common digital files – digital photos, recordings, video, documents, and others – and learn what it takes to preserve them. Technology changes rapidly. If you don’t actively care for your digital possessions you may lose access to them as some technologies become obsolete. Learn about the nature of the problem and hear about some simple, practical tips and tools to help you preserve your digital stuff.

Presenter: Mike Ashenfelder, Digital Preservation Project Coordinator, has worked for the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program at the Library of Congress since 2003. Mike has a Bachelors degree in Music Education from the Berklee College of Music and a Masters in Music History from San Francisco State University.

For additional information and access to registration link, please go to the following website:

http://www.ala.org/alcts/confevents/upcoming/webinar/pres/042413

Tax day is upon us, and we thought it was a great time to revisit artist Doug Michels’ (1943-2003) project “Money Man Monument” (1991). Michels proposed the installation of a 23-foot-tall Money Man on the National Mall alongside memorials to American icons like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, calling it “a permanent tribute to green power and the American way.”

It also features the contributions of two more of our close friends, Joe Angio (camera) and Tony Judge (actor).

You can also watch the raw footage.

We cannot begin to articulate the sadness that Chicago is feeling today after the loss of one of our greats, Roger Ebert. By now there are innumerable tributes; we particularly recommend you read Robert Feder and Rick Kogan.

Here’s Roger at his best in 1999, reminiscing about drinking with Mike Royko as a young kid fresh out of Urbana, Illinois, and reading Royko’s review of “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.” It’s a portrait of Chicago journalism that we deeply miss.

Watch the full video at Media Burn Archive.

Plus, save the date for this special event!

Race and Chicago Politics: 30 Years After the Election of Mayor Harold Washington. A panel discussion featuring: David Axelrod, Will Burns, Michael Dawson, Jacky Grimshaw, and Laura Washington. Plus, excerpts from Bill Stamets’ “Chicago Politics: A Theatre of Power”

Tuesday, April 9, 6-7:30 pm

Free and open to the public
University of Chicago International House, Assembly Hall
1414 E. 59th Street