This Sunday evening at 8 p.m., the good boys and girls of UC Davis are cordially invited to come down to the TCS building to kick off the X-Mas season with one of the most crap-tacular holiday specials ever conceived.
The evening’s festivities will revolve around an ingeniously edited video collage of the most abominable holiday clips in existence, described as “A millennium’s worth of VHS memories of misplaced sentimentalities, fist fights over toys for tots, erotic Santas and an endless parade of singing kids.”
The hard-working elves behind this event belong to the Chicago-based website everythingisterrible.com, a video blog dedicated to resurrecting and revamping bargain-bin VHS content so bad it must be seen to be believed.
The organization began in the year 2000 as a group of college friends who would show their found content at parties. Later, to share their findings to the world, they formed a popular blog and staged a series of select live performances/screenings.
Now in the apocalyptic 2012, they are aggressively expanding their business model with a feat worthy of Santa himself: the staging of two simultaneous live tours, traveling the length of the East and West coasts throughout the month of December.
According to one of the group’s main leaders, Commodore Gilgamesh, this special is “way bigger on its own than anything we’ve done before.”
Commodore took some time amid the stress of pre-holiday preparations to warn us of the group’s growing influence.
“EIT! grows everyday. We are now an enormous network of artists and contributors from around the country,” Gilgamesh said. “From friends who make the scores for our movies to the fans who mail us footage, we are a huge nation of face-painted hillbillies. We are going to continue to travel the country every year preaching the Terrible word and converting new followers.”
This unique show has made its way to our campus by happenstance: after a rescheduling from its original Sacramento venue, the tour was re-routed to the TCS Art Annex through UC Davis alumnus and KDVS DJ Simi Sahota, who has been setting up events for the station for the past six years.
“In addition to a screening of videos, they’ll also be doing a live show with elaborate costumes and smoke machines,” Sahota said. “I’m really excited because I’ve been a fan of these videos for a while and it just worked out perfectly to bring them here.”
Other fans on campus have iterated their feelings about the holiday special, including fourth-year microbiology major Peter Eckes-Wahl.
“I’m excited to peer into that particular dark corner of the human imagination,” Eckes-Wahl said. “I pretty much have no way of predicting what could be in it.”
The entertainers at EIT would no doubt prefer it that way, as the best gifts aren’t meant to be opened until their time. In the meantime, those intrigued can look forward to what can only be described as “the tackiest winter wonderland imaginable.”
More information can be found on the Facebook event page or at the EIT website, everythingisterrible.com. The event starts at 8 p.m on Dec. 9, at the TCS Building on campus. $5 donations are strongly encouraged.
ANDREW RUSSELL can be reached at arts@theaggie.org.
