Memorial Pause

Jeremy Blake (Oct. 4, 1971 -- July 17, 2007 )
Theresa L. Duncan (Oct. 26, 1966 - July 10, 2007)

Theresa Duncan, from a Nov. 21, 2006
post on her blog, The Wit of the Staircase.















Jeremy Blake pictured at the Vanity Fair opening party for the 8th Annual Art Auction Benefit, "Portraits & Polaroids" held April 23, 2007, at New York City's Milk Gallery. The piece behind him is his Dope & Guns Party. For more on his innovative new media work, see Kinz,Tillou + Feigen.

Theresa Duncan, image from
The Wit of the Staircase entry, January 3, 2006,
"Horror Vacui in Venice," about the fear of empty spaces.

Greetings, billion-eyed audience. I've not directly addressed you in some weeks, and I apologize for temporarily drawing the curtain upon the present Richmond fantasia serial. I ask for your indulgence as I return for this entry to another of the Blue Raccoon's ongoing obsessions.

This filigree of quotes and images concerns the second anniversary marking the deaths of artist Jeremy Blake and writer/bloggist Theresa Duncan. I've reprised in part here a post of July 10, 2008.

During the summer of 2007, I fixated on the couple's suicides and their back stories. I wrote a series of interlocking posts called as a group "Seven Kinds of Denial Just to Get Out of Bed." I've noted through recent visits to the Sitemeter that a few people have returned to that series, mostly, I think, to mine the site of Blake-Duncan images. Fair's fair. But what I tried to do then was map "The Blake-Duncan Effect" through the blogosphere. That is, the rounds of speculation, grief, calumny and rank bad taste that metastasized through the Internet in the days and weeks following their demise.

Then, of course, the blogosphere for the most part moved on; to the Xeni Jardin and Violet Blue to-do, and the deaths of Heath Ledger and David Foster Wallace, and, oh, some election thing, and, two wars and economic collapse.

It's not news anymore, but novelist Bret Easton Ellis was mentioned in Vanity Fair about his writing a screenplay pertaining to the Blake-Duncan liebestod. I dragged Ellis into my dissertation that compared the cruelty and melodrama of Weimar culture with our own, and how all that related to Blake and Duncan -- at least to me. But Ellis has plenty of other things going on including his use of Twitter.

I suppose that it's appropriate that Ellis assay the story, especially considering Glamorama. But William Gibson could equally manage the task, especially in his Pattern Recognition/Spook Country mode. Or even Don DeLillo of Underworld and Cosmopolis.

During the past year, when my random-access thoughts fluttered upon this story, I've thought of the changes in the culture even since that summer of '07. The ubiquity of Facebook and Twitter weren't then full-on established. And the dread government she and Blake so hated and, ultimately, couldn't live with underwent at least one significant alteration. But here were times in that summer when even I despaired of ever seeing that reign of misrule end.

Had Blake and Duncan hung on another year, what might their worldviews morphed into? How would the use of these "social utilities" figured into their creative lives? And in terms of how they processed the outside world, would a diet of Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and the Huffingtonpost have somehow turned them around? Who knows, but I doubt it. Something was broken in those two. Whatever happened, it was serious, and deep-seated, and perhaps beyond the reach of anybody to correct.

In the summer of 2007, a number of those within the chattering blogosphere who concerned themselves with matters Blake and Duncan became the thing they beheld. Their attempt to untangle the real/imagined conspiracies against the writer and the artist generated wild speculations. Some of them sounded as nutty as heir subject's latter screeds. It was like at the end of a cable science or history mystery show where there's a screen shot of a field of stars or scary Mayan hieroglyphs and the sonorous announcer says, "Perhaps, really, the more we explore these mysteries, the more we are really delving into ourselves."

The epic lengths of commentary about these deaths proved, too, that in the summer of 2007, members of this eclectic tribe -- "The Children of the Staircase" -- had way too much time on their hands. Including, apparently, and obviously, me. I went from writing about the tears of my wife who mourned the loss of artists to having those same eyes squinted at me and she saying, "Now, you're part of the problem."

Out of all the epic verbiage to which I voluntarily subjected myself, two quotes stand out now, and I've used them more than a few times:

"There exists in the heart of a NYTimes-reading humanities graduate a capacity for nose-upturned covetousness which people don't talk about. It's a horniness for the blessings of another man's life. Not for his health, not for his wife, or for his Ferrari... And not even for the career, exactly, just for the odor of his resume... For his reputation of fulfillment."-- Crid, August 4, 2007, commenting in Amy Alkon’s Advice Goddess blog, to "Making It Up As She Went Along."

"Mental illness is a politically-convenient myth that transposes the cause of destructive behavior away from social constructs and onto the individual. In truth, suicide is not a randomly-occuring chemical imbalance with no external cause (no more so than a malignant tumor metastasizes without prior exposure to carcinogens) but rather the lawful consequence of intelligent organisms struggling to survive in a modern capitalist democracy. The depressed choose to kill themselves because analysis of the data available suggests that to die solves otherwise insoluble problems. If the mental health industry were honest, it would admit that the consequences of freedom are aimlessness and anomie, and that a consequence of the market economy is a lifetime of consumerism culminating in death without meaning. If this life is a hell for some, the world we have inherited is why...Of course, if the mental health industry were honest, nobody would buy their happy drugs anymore; and everybodies [sic.] gotta make a living -right?" -- Manna, on Gawker.com, August 20, 2007.

Then, speaking of native Richmonder Xeni Jardin, there was a New York Times article this past summer about her and the Internets, and concluding with these observations by writer Noam Cohen:

"For all the damage to reputations the Internet can cause, perhaps the greater anxiety from online communication is the weightlessness of it all. The whole World Wide Web can seem like a hall of mirrors — nothing tangible, no binding, no watermarks, no notary public seals. Where, exactly, is it? How do we know any of it is true?

Ms. Jardin said she did not sign up for the heaviness of being a publication of record.

“It’s still kind of punk rock,” she said. “The part that still freaks me out is that it is such a huge thing. Part of what people love about Boing Boing is that I can post whatever I want. It’s super fast-moving.” She added: “The huge impact it has, the whole thing that makes it this thing, is that it is so lightweight.”

Yet it seems so important at the time.

"American Ruins" segment from Blake's digital video piece Winchester, April 16, 2006.


From Blake's Reading Ossie Clark, in the Daily Serving, August 27, 2007.

Blake and Duncan in 1997, by Michael Levine/CPI, via New York Magazine web site post, August 20, 2007.

Duncan and Blake, pictured Sept. 17, 2007, on the "St. James Version" of the World of Wonder, taken at an art opening in the fall of 2006.

"She is gone, and he is gone, a play set up in the privacy of love, a stage set in the intimacy of public longing for details." —Jonathan Perez, July 26, 2007, “Ode To Jeremy Blake” at The Palm At The End Of The Mind.

"…Whatever interests they may have had, the suicides are not really all that astonishing. I talk to people who have tried it every single working day and the explanations are usually very mundane and sad. As for the “paranoia”, please consider some alternative explanation.

There are plenty and maybe they’ll show up in the toxicology report.” – CB, July 31, 2007, DreamsEnd (blog)

“I think we all want this to be more than it is for a myriad reasons. I think we’re all creative and smart and that means we read into things and enjoy it and our brains work on overdrive. We quickly pass over the obvious or the banal because we assume it has just GOT to be more than what it appears to be; this simply CAN’T be all there is. We want to believe that, so whether we know it or not, we fuel and perpetuate that. I posted once before that I’m sure if I died suddenly or mysteriously, lots of things would come to light about me that people would be surprised of and never knew. We all have skeletons in the closet and things that happen to us on a daily basis that we keep to ourselves. Mystery loves company. Without us, there’d be no wonder, no romance, no crypticism. Right?” — GothamInsider, August 1, 2007, onDreamsEnd, (blog)

“Paired paranoia is particularly pernicious. * SIGH *”
--Scottynuke, Washington Post, August 1, 2007, “Achenblog,”

"But like the best bloggers, she created an illusion of intimacy with her readers. Most blogs are simply unedited confessions for the blogger or for close friends, posted where they might be found by strangers (as, I imagine, the diarist dreads but also desires). And still other bloggers hope for anonymity, only to deliberately push its bounds by revealing too much — when readers know all but one secret, they’ll search for it, and find it." —Swati Pandey, August 1, 2007, Los Angeles Times Opinion Daily.

“Beauty. Brains. Bonkers. The question now is, what the hell was going on in Jeremy Blake's head?” -- August 2, 2007, SoMA: Society of Mutual Autopsy (blog), “Theresa Duncan Upsate.”

“She was bright and polished apple with a rotten core.”
--#15.”Guest” commenting August 4, 2007, Laist, “Staircase to Nowhere.”


"The saddest part of the story is the implication that she may have finally realized that she wasn't special, that she was talented but normal, and rather than see the collapse of her house of lies as an opportunity to finally grow up, she chose to die. What a waste of her creativity and passion."--- from comment by "wf," August 6, 2007, on SLOG, the blog of Seattle, Wash.'s The Stranger alt-weekly, "The Latest on Theresa Duncan"

"Since their suicides last month, the sadly foreshortened life stories of Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan have passed beyond their control and are currently passing through the distorted mirrors of projection, grief, anger and a sort of perverse, bicoastal peer review by New Yorkers and Los Angelenos who are stumped as to why a talented and beautiful young artist couple who had been together for 12 years took their own lives, despite seeming to have the grail of professional and personal success firmly in hand."-- August 7, 2007, New York Observer,“Art World Shivers After Lovers’ Double Suicide.”

“The lilly-livered, packaged conclusions that have been drawn about this woman, attempting to do the impossible (explain human complexity in about nine sentences), are falling short of doing anything but making me want to hit someone.” --Alison Tuck, August 7, 2007, Women and Children First, “Dead Artist, Beautiful and Brilliant, Cops Further Beatings” (blog)

"Duncan was a pioneering digital artist/entrepreneur who did not have any mentors (if any) to be her guide in the digital arts world. Her work was distinctive, wonderful and she will be missed."-- Katherine K., commenting, August 8, 2007, on the New York Observer article, “Art World Shivers After Lovers’ Double Suicide.”

“Duncan portrayed herself as a Freudian and a fashionista, an intellectual and a stoner, a political radical with a perfume fetish, and a groupie in a 12-year monogamous relationship. Because of the pliancy of her mind, these seeming contradictions could coexist. She was hungry for knowledge, for answers, for beauty, and she created an online space that was essentially a map of her discovery process -- a "web log" in the truest sense."--
– Steffie Nelson, August 12, 2007, the Los Angeles Times, calendarlive.com

"Just like every other piece on the duo so far, this is about "why" they killed themselves. Not unexpectedly, no one as yet has an "answer." I do! You know why they killed themselves? Because they were fucked in the head. Just like everyone else who's ever killed himelf. Probably not their fault, either—surely the fault of natural chemicals or other chemicals that they put in themselves. Because you know what else is weird? All these profiles talk about how erratic the twosome became—they were paranoid,convincedthat the CIA and the Scientologists were out to get them, erratic with friends.... You know whatthat sounds like? Hi, crystal meth. They sound like everyone who's ever done a lot of stimulants; tinfoil on the windows, water glass to the door, looking for secret cameras. Lots of those folks do themselves in too."-- Choire,August 20, 2007, Gawker.com, suicide is painless"Why Did Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake Commit Suicide?"

You Can Actually Learn Stuff On Blogs
And other Friday-ness

Last night television was chock full for current events freaks: the presidential candidates at a service forum where they did not talk to each other and just repeated high sounding nostrums; the vice-presidential sweetheart sounding amped up and sometimes clueless; and two specials about 9/11, one gripping and still shocking and the other chopped up by commercials and pathetic.

I'm tired of the politicians, (and many of their shrill, block headed adherents) so I'll cut to the documentaries.

The History Channel's 120 Minutes The Changed America is just about a perfect non-fiction retelling of the awful day seven years ago except for its title: I'd gone with 120 Minutes: 9/11 NYC for short. Taking a cue about immediacy from the otherwise fearmongering and fictional 24, History gives viewers real terror as it happened to actual people who had ways to record the unfolding events. White on black numbers spin between segments. Every viewer is left to recall what they were doing and at what time they first heard the news.

No over-familiar faces of famous newscasters pull us from the reality of that moment; viewers are taken into the sunny Manhattan streets that turn black with debris clouds, causing people caught in the open to resemble the ash-entombed victims of Pompeii brought to life, like gholems suddenly self-aware and scared of all the new sensations, the cloaked air ringing with the high warbling of ceaseless fire alarms, the sirens and the cacophony of screaming mass hysteria.

The excellent editing of these disparate, stitched together elements are linked together not by comforting voice overs but radio broadcasts, civilian and EMS. They serve to keep up us along in the story, as does when one of those experiencing the attack from his apartment holds up a ripped off piece of notebook paper that says simply: 10:15. A sudden bang prior to the first tower falling will make you jump in your seat. If you sit down and watch this, free of distraction, you will relive that day. You know what's coming, of course, but what this documentary achieves, by putting us there, seeing afresh through the eyes of people we've never met, is a retelling that does not feel stale or trite. It's just gut wrenching.

You can see a trailer here.

Here is A Night To Remember for the 21st century. That 1955 book by Walter Lord revived what was then somnolent interest in the Titanic disaster which hasn't abated since. I first read the slim 135-page book from out of the library of Salem Church Junior High. Lord's swift and detailed narrative history, a form of non-fiction of which he was a pioneer, has remained an inspiration for me. My guess is that some young person who sees 120 Minutes may feel the same way.

This is not a presentation about the other simultaneous horrors; of the Pentagon or United 93's destruction over Shanksville, Pa. The latter got a feature length docu-style theatrical film made (though just prior to the cockpit transcripts getting released).

We are given a glimpse of what is to come in the aftermath in the emotional reactions of those watching in helpless, jaw-slackened, eyes-wide distress on the huge screens of Times Square. One man says: go over there to Arabia and blow it up, "Bin Laden, all of'em." Traumatized patrons of a bar watch in silence as Bush gives his statement in Florida, but we don't see him sitting there like bump on a log for several minutes, looking poleaxed, in front of the elementary kids.

This program doesn't deal with the conspiracies or the politics or blame. It's just what happened to those who witnessed.

Meanwhile, over on MSNBC, 9/11 As It Happened was too painful for me to sit through -- not because of the circumstances. Most of the early going is swaying non-blinking images of the burning towers, replays of the second plane hitting, and a closing in and moving away that resembles the motions of the late great John Candy in his Dr. Tongue and The 3-D House of Stewardesses on Second City Television, see it about minute two here. Or maybe the "Near, Far" exercise on Sesame Street. That's not the show's fault: there wasn't any crew near the site at the time.

In addition, there is the chattering of Katie Couric, Matt Lauer and Al Roker, over the images of this mushrooming disaster until they sound a little overwhelmed -- which is understandable, just about all of us were. But the frequent commercial interruptions--as though MSNBC feared for our psychological safety--instead gave this whiplash sensation, spinning us out of the calamitous morning into the now that it changed. Terrible programming decision, and somewhat insulting, and if we ever got to Ashliegh Banfield running through the streets trying to report as the massive cloud billowed and curled through Broadway, I don't know. I couldn't bear to watch.

You can read real commentary about the broadcast here.

Now, In Hadron Collider News...

From the Madison + Main Advertising blog -- and I never thought I'd ever quote from such a source, thanks to RVA Blogs -- a bit of Hadron Collider humor. The source is old, and reveals the mirror reflecting in a mirror progression of the Intertubes.

The article was archived by Mr. Oogly and titled, LHC: The World's Funniest Malapropism, here and here. From these postings, the information migrated to boingboing. And thence to this blog.

Also on Kamen Lee.com, from whence I kited this image of the Hadron at rest, this Live Cam of the LHC, which Kamen got from elsewhere, and is worth viewing here.

Wha?

Xeni Jardin, via the New York Times, by Ann Johansson.

-- How did I miss this before?-- I mean, I'm a Richmond lifer and consider myself somewhat plugged in to the city's cultural history. But again, the Madison + Main blog learned me something.

And that, billion-eyed audience, is that boingboing new tech babe Xeni Jardin is from Richmond. Richmond, Virginia! Daughter of an artist. Duh. I feel, well, about 12 circles of left out. In black and white, it's here.

Well, as they say, shut my mouth. I 've labored off and on with a novel about three Richmond sisters who've gone on to disparate careers who reunite here for a weekend due to the exhbition opening of their youngest. The older sister is something of an Internet/new tech guru, a public scholar, who can make sharp jokes and provocative observations but also writes books that get people talking and are taught in university classes. And I read such books, and consumed articles, and waded into Wired, realizing--over the course of an embarrassing number of years--that the tech environment was changing with such rapidity that, well, trying to write about a person who writes and speaks about such matters in a novel would sound, well, old by time it came out. And that's kind of where I am with that part of the problem.

My trio are from a rather gnarled branch of an old Richmond family, and the artist chose to stay here. Anyway, so I've been working on his for quite some time, too much at last, then history got in the way since, well, a publisher wanted me to write that stuff.

I've run across Xeni, and read about her here and there, and she seemed way too California for my kind of background study....then I learn of her Richmond nativity. The last time I came across her was a recent New York Times article about the purging of sex writer Violet Blue from boingboing, at the engineering of Xeni, and the resulting to-do in the blogosphere. I actually quoted from the piece, some weeks ago, "Poof! You're Unpublished" about the transiency and ephemeral nature of what this is that is done here on the Innernets, and you can read the NYT's piece here.

Have a great weekend, all. I'm editing Richmond In Ragtime, somehow. And I've got a toothache.