Press Yourself: Lily Tomlin's web-design meltdown
Has Ernestine moved on from phone-terrorizing to online sabotage?
The whole point of flyers, posters, and publicity photos is to attract attention to yourself and/or your event. We at The A.V. Club go through dozens of these things a week, and it's true that some are better than others. In Press Yourself, we reward clever, gimmicky, and/or offensive promotional tactics by highlighting them.
The whole point of seeing actress Lily Tomlin's one-woman comedy show (which comes to Overture Hall this Wednesday) is to see her cycle through her many faces, from Ernestine the telephone-company lady to Las Vegas cheese-ball Tommy Velour. But as for interacting with her actual face via the Internet? Well, no one ever asked for that, but the curious and/or extremely bored can click their way through a cycle of squishy-mouthed, squinty-eyed expressions (and corresponding giggles and shrieks) at the centerpiece of Tomlin's official website.
On the whole, her place on the "information superhighway" represents the cyber-equivalent of a lawn strewn with broken-down Yugos. Many pages feature a repetitive drum loop that apparently cannot be turned off, but that's not all. A "guest book," chaotic voids of white space, and no end of patched-together little animations of Tomlin's many characters all conspire to make those of us who remember making our own nifty Geocities pages feel really goddamn old. Though this "classic kitsch" is deliberate, it's an eerily accurate reminder of a time when people could slop together goofy little shrines to themselves without the aid of MySpace. Adjust your Web 2.0 impatience a little, and you just might learn a ton about Lily Tomlin, including what she looks like when searching for intelligent life in the universe.
