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  7/29/17: Milly’s Orchid Show 30th anniversary

  Blog, Events

  Three Decades of Cutting-Edge Cabaret Milly May Smithy is the alter ego of performer and musician Brigid Murphy. Since 1987, Murphy, as Milly, has hosted Milly’s Orchid Show, a variety show featuring an eclectic blend of music, dance, comedy and high art. The showcase introduced audiences in Chicago and around the country to performers including the Blue Man Group, David Sedaris, Emo Philips, and Nora Dunn. This Saturday, July 29, Milly’s Orchid Show will be making its return to Park […]

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  Chicago Slices – A Slice of Summer 1993

  Blog

  Chicago Slices was a local television series we produced 24 years ago. They were half-hour programs with four minutes of commercials, broadcast on independent channel 50, now owned by Fox TV. We created it to show interesting and offbeat local characters in short videos. As with many of the pioneering programs archived on Media Burn, it was an audience, critical and artistic success, but wasn’t financially viable for commercial television. Here’s a small slice of Chicago Slices from 1993. Watch the […]

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  Why we save raw tapes

  Blog

  Media Burn has over 7,000 videos. Thousands are RAW TAPES, camera original video from the day and time it was produced. It’s rare for anyone besides the producer to ever get a chance to see the raw tapes. That’s one of the underlying principles of what we do. Raw tapes show and tell historical context. Almost always, dozens of hours (sometimes hundreds) of videos are shot for a 30 or 60 minute edited version. We preserve the camera original videos […]

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  Video pioneer Annette Barbier (1950-2017)

  Blog

  The video community has lost one of its pioneers. Annette Barbier passed away last week. Her art and her impact were legendary since the 1970s, when she was among the first video artists at the Chicago Editing Center. Annette mentored hundreds in her years at Northwestern University and Columbia College. She was one-of-a-kind and a Chicago icon. Our hearts go out to Drew and Celine. So many of us are shocked and deeply saddened. Here’s a look at Annette’s “Bouncing […]

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  Jimmy Piersall, 1929-2017

  Blog

  Jimmy Piersall died last weekend.  He was 87.  He was a great outfielder, one of the best I ever saw.  But, the thing that made him so well-known is that he was “a character.” Once he ran around the bases backwards.  Once he threw a ball at the scoreboard. He was the first bipolar person (manic-depressive, then) in sports to be publicly labeled.  He did it himself by writing a remarkable book, Fear Strikes Out., which In 1957, became a […]

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  Tom Joyner off the air in Chicago after four decades

  Blog

  Tom Joyner has long been a fixture of Chicago radio. Because of his daily commute between Dallas and Chicago during the 1980s, he earned the nickname “The Fly Jock, the hardest working man in radio.” This week, Robert Feder reported that his morning show on WSRB has been dropped in Chicago, but it still airs every morning on dozens of other stations and live online. In this clip from 1989, we join Joyner in the studio at WGCI and in […]

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  5/19/17: screening of new work by Media Burn + On the Real Film

  Blog, Events

  From Celluloid to the Pixel: Exploring Documentation, Technology, and Time Screening and discussion of a new collaborative piece created by Media Burn Archive and On The Real Film The opening night of the Chicago Archives + Artists Festival, coordinated by Sixty Inches From Center, is a celebration of archive lovers, a film screening, and an accompanying discussion around the changing technologies of preservation. The evening will feature From Celluloid to the Pixel: Exploring Relationships between Documentation, Technology and Time, a new […]

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  5/16/17: Special episode of PANORAMA celebrating Studs Terkel at Hideout

  Blog, Events

  In honor of what would have been Studs Terkel’s 105th birthday, the monthly variety show Panorama has put together a special evening of music, stories, video, and performance. In addition to hosts Rick Kogan and Michael Miles, the program will feature Lily Emerson as Lily Lowell, Glenda Zahra Baker as Lucy Jefferson, Tony Fitzpatrick as Kid Pharoah and Dennis Hart in Division Street, and Lloyd King as himself in Race. It will also feature video and audio clips of Studs […]