"In 1996, Chuck Palahniuk attended a Santa Rampage in Portland, Oregon, one of several Cacophony Society events that would go on to inspire his novel Fight Club and the idea of Project Mayhem. This November, he'll appear in a new documentary, SantaCon, which explores how a Bay Area anti-capitalist experiment became a drunken, commercial shitshow. Ahead of the movie's premiere tonight at DOC NYC, Palahniuk reflects on his early days as a Cacophonist and how the intent went so sideways."
"First, a story about Edith Wharton: Days after finishing the manuscript for a new book, she lost it in a fire. Her publisher asked when she'd have the work rewritten, and Wharton replied, "Why bother?" She'd already discovered the ending. The story no longer held any mystery for her. Per the bad-boy editor and writer Gordon Lish, every story should begin with a "line of flight." Each sentence should carry us forward from the sentence before until the story resolves itself."
Chuck Palahniuk attended a 1996 Santa Rampage in Portland, an event run by the Cacophony Society that later inspired Fight Club and Project Mayhem. The Cacophony Society staged monthly anti-capitalist performance experiments in the Bay Area, including themed happenings like the Mad Hatter's Tea Party and Le Art Mal. Those events blended pranksterism, absurdist costumes, and public interventions designed to unsettle observers and mock cultural pretensions. Over time some experiments, such as SantaCon, devolved into drunken, commercialized spectacles that subverted original intentions and provoked criticism. The evolution from disruptive art experiment to chaotic mass event illustrates tensions between intent, scale, and public reception.
Read at Vulture
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]