100th POST ANNIVERSARY: A review of Reviews You Can Iews (Critic Megan Powell)

There’s a strange and efficacious charm at work in Eric & Andy's Reviews You Can Iews! , which celebrates its 100th post this month. The cute misnomer “iews,” in fact, limns the essence of the blog: be as entertaining as you can and willfully obtuse as often as possible. Exhaustively (and sometimes exhaustingly) reveling in a gleeful and resolute punch-drunkenness, its topics range from films and obscure music (ever wonder who the eff Moxy is?), games and toys (favorite childhood playthings vs. their contemporary iterations = simple charm), to theatre (back off). Iews’ infrastructure makes the parts work, but not sing. Visually perfunctory, the blog could use more brio, and we wondered why a Microsoft Office 2007 add-on attempts to run when we click on certain posts. Also, its commitment to its craft is somewhat in question. What happened? 49 posts in August 2009 diminished to a lean four just the next month.

But the blog overcomes both the vagaries of Blogger (truly a user interface still stuck in 2005) its own loquaciousness. While some early posts are the equivalent of the unsolicited pontification of that talky woman that works the 10 pm to 6 am shift at the 24-hour (and seemingly last remaining) White Hen Pantry in the basement of the condo building at Armitage, Clark and Lincoln Park West, the introduction of guest reviewers has variously revitalized their efforts. Anthony Tournis’ exploitation of the parenthesis masked as a spring baseball update is prodigiously, er , parenthetical, while the newer music reviews are informative, honing in on a particular rock music group or song (thanks, Rob Biesenbach for the history of “My Sharona”—no really, that gets my rocks off. I mean, between you, me and the wall -- I’d love to review music. Just once. I mean, I don’t know, maybe Eric and Andy would let me guest review a wee bit of music for the blog. Believe me, I shouldn’t quit my day job to do that, but it’s fun to talk about obscure things like how many bottles of Old Grand Dad Keith went through during the recording of Exile on Main Street and to share all the obscure bits of cultural detritus I can mine from this series that I usually have to bore my friends with when they just want to have a beer and some grilled brats and not think anymore, thank you very much. For once it’d be a relief to indulge in some choplogic and trade some heavily mixed metaphors about something besides why John Guare plays do not age well or Darrell Cox’s abs …Um. Anyway.).

Eric & Andy's Reviews You Can Iews! has ultimately and entertainingly blossomed in its infancy. Let’s see if it can cut some teeth in during its toddler phase.

Eric and Andy's Reviews You Can Iews
A-

-Megan Powell (important critic)
*this review does not reflect the opinion of TimeOut Chicago. We know this because TimeOut Chicago thinks we are the fucking JAM.