OK, I am a little late to get wise to this, but apparently all Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher do is travel North American thrift stores looking for hilarious VHS tapes. While listening to them talk about this quest for the strange while I was in the audience at the Toronto stop of the Found Footage 2010 Spring Tour, my eyes got all glossy and I thought: "these guys have the best job in the world!" Even later at Future Bakery over schnitzel, my husband and friend both tried to convince me otherwise. "They probably go city to city in a station wagon!" "They have to sleep at Motel 8s and Red Roof Inns every night!" "They have to haul that goddamn Venus II over the border and endure grilling from customs agents!" But instead of discouraging me, it just sounded like they were enticing me to run away and join them!
Sure, their show is fun and goofy but I think ephemera is a genuinely important category of material culture. Because of its lowbrow or ubiquitous quality, many people dismiss it as unimportant to collect or document. Yet so many people within society can connect themselves to it. These two guys use the hilarity of the recent past to showcase ephemera, but as they described an upcoming documentary film project they're working on I was thinking they also recognize its deeper significance. http://dirtycountrymovie.com/
Plus, goddamn was that Heavy Metal Picnic hilarious!
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