Due to the recent release of her book The Professor, Stanford English professor Terry Castle has been making the promotional rounds. Of particular interest to media outlets is her gossipy post-mortem on Susan Sontag, which features a dinner party I attended.
She is a good writer, and the title of the piece, “Desperately Seeking Susan,” vaguely [...]

Directors Jason Cacioppo and Adam Dugas release their kaleidoscopic new music video for Fischerspooner’s song “The Best Revenge.”
With dancers popping on the screen like a digital Busby Berkeley fun house, the video captures the energy and dynamism of the eclectic electronic performance group. The choreography by Vanessa Walters and wardrobe by Elise Fife were created [...]

It was so satisfying to see this photograph by Spilios Gianakopoulos from Thursday night’s show and compare it to an image of Krampus from the book The Devil in Design, which inspired me many years ago. I’ve wanted to include the Krampus in Chaos & Candy for years and this year I finally made him [...]

How did CHAOS & CANDY first come about?
The germ was first planted in 1998 when I discovered this book called The Battle for Christmas by Stephen Nissenbaum which talked about how Christmas began as a rowdy festival, something closer to Halloween or Mardi Gras with wildness in the streets. The holiday was banned in the [...]

This is my cowboy ballad about the Maccabees. The origin of Hanukkah as a country revenge epic.

These are the first ever tee shirts made for a Chaos & Candy show, although I’ve thought about it over the past seven years. This year I approached the artist Michael Bevilacqua about collaborating on one since one of the characteristics of his paintings is drawing on rock and pop imagery and repurposing it. He [...]

Production is full steam ahead on CHAOS & CANDY 8: UNHOLY NIGHT.
One of my inspirations were all the Castalbajac stuffed animal couture pieces and I wanted to make my own. Luckily, my trip to Materials for the Arts yielded two bags full of matching bears (courtesy of some Kabbalah group, there was a book called [...]

Photo by Casey Spooner

I learned by watching NY1 this morning that the giant balloons for Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade were being inflated tonight and could be viewed along 79th and 81st streets. Since I was already on the Upper West Side picking up tickets at the Met, I walked over to check out the scene.
The parade was a [...]

CHAOS & CANDY 8: UNHOLY NIGHT
Photo by Casey Spooner.