Somewhere in the Hermosa neighborhood on Chicago’s northwest side, a storage locker is filled with thousands of VHS copies of Cameron Crowe’s schmaltzy ode to premature midlife crisis, Jerry Maguire. To explain the existence of this bizarre stockpile it’s necessary to understand the methodology of the video collective Everything Is Terrible! The group’s members regularly raid thrift-store shelves in search of obscure and discarded visual media—B movies, instructional tapes, public-access shows—to use as raw materials for their hyperkinetic mashups, which first were published on their blog and are now being commissioned by the likes of MTV and Adult Swim. Somewhere along the line it occurred to one EIT! member that a crowd-sourced sport—”Maguirewatch”—could be made of the pursuit. The goal: to nab every available copy of the 1996 Tom Cruise vehicle. Eventually EIT! amassed more than 8,000 tapes, a number that continues to grow thanks to a ravenous EIT! fan base that mails in copies and drops off tapes at the Bucktown video-rental store Odd Obsession.
“They’ve surely become a force,” says Odd Obsession proprietor Brian Chankin, a connoisseur of compelling and strange media. “A big reason for this is obvious, I think: naturally copacetic people coming together with great ideas about how to best expose the ridiculousness thirtysomethings all grew up with, media-wise, in the 90s and early 2000s.”
“I always want to make people laugh,” Simakis says, “but in a way where they have to look around because they think a monster is going to eat them.” This effect may have been what MTV had in mind when it tapped Simakis and Maier to pitch ideas for MTV Other, the network’s webseries hub. “All I could think about was how badly I wanted to get my grubby hands on their library,” Simakis recalls. In the resulting series, Analog Mountain, TRL-era MTV interns Dennis and Denise are turned into furry creatures after eating too much analog tape. The show mixes puppet-centric original content with clips from turn-of-the-millennium reality shows like Laguna Beach and the dating show Next; adhering to EIT!’s house style, Simakis and Maier push the humor to its brink of uncomfortability, sequencing the clips in rapid-fire succession to create a sensory-assaulting symphony of inane statements—one Next contestant claims, “I’m 18, and I’m not the brightest crayon in the box, but my box is still cute”—that contextualize the love affair between Dennis and Denise.
The show includes a double billing of two recent EIT! projects, Comic Relief Zero! (a mashup of morally dubious stand-up comedy routines from the 80s that promote racial stereotypes, among other alarming things) and Everything Is Terrible! Does the Hip-Hop (a collection of “corporate raps” used to sell everything from postage stamps to crescent rolls), as well as a smattering of choice cuts from the website. To round out the evening, EIT! members take the stage in monster costumes, which resemble Sesame Street characters as imagined by Ralph Steadman, to deliver what’s basically a bizzaro variety show, replete with music, sketch and stand-up comedy, and even a dance routine or two.
Thu 5/29, 9 PMLincoln Hall2424 N. Lincoln773-525-2501lincolnhallchicago.com$15
