From the vault: Theresa Duncan on Salon.com

A 1998 interview of Theresa Duncan in Salon takes us back to the future. She manages to simultaneously annoy and attract writer Matthew Debord as she discusses The History of Glamour, here first and last film. Some highlights:

"Duncan, at 29, is engaged in a sort of preemptive maturation driven at least partially by market forces.... Duncan is making it up as she goes along, counterbalancing her Liz Phairish tomkitten chic with fabulous press and a slightly ballsy manner that at times can be patronizing."

Actually Duncan was 31 at the time. Perhaps then her maturation wasn't that "preemptive."

"I cringe a little, for instance, when an e-mail response from her describes Manhattan's mopey gallery circuit as "the rarefied world of the New York art scene," from which was drawn a "Glamour" collaborator, artist Karen Kilimnik. Duncan says that if she used live actors in her work, rather than just voices, she'd want to follow the ensemble model of Woody Allen, Hal Hartley and ... Werner Herzog! She is not a woman who levels her cross hairs on the middlebrow, but the naked aspiration strikes me as more than a little overwrought.

Nothing to get all that ruffled over, of course, since her bootstrapping enthusiasm and indefatigable confidence in her ability to get noticed have resulted in a crucial whammy to the core assumptions of the interactive gaming cabal. "I've been thinking of us in terms of something like the Warhol factory," she says when asked about the composition of her creative team, which includes illustrator/boyfriend/partner Jeremy Blake and Washington, D.C., punk stalwart Brendan Canty of Fugazi, plus former Bikini Kill bassist Karhi Wilcox and a pair of Mac-jockey animators. It's a telling comparison: Like Warhol, Duncan's business is her art, and even if she hasn't completely abandoned her childish ways, she knows exactly what she wants."

And there's more good stuff:

"With the new project, I was interested in examining glamour as a semiotic system," she [Duncan] claims, revealing her slightly wonkish academic background (her senior thesis at the University of Michigan was on technology and narrative). "In the film, the main character is looking for an identity, and glamour becomes for her a potent form of self-expression. She finds it very liberating, because she's from a small town. But by the end of the story, glamour becomes limiting, then imprisoning, so she becomes a writer, chooses grammar over glamour."

Duncan could be summarizing her own biography with these comments. There's more than a vague resemblance between her and her antiheroine, Charles Valentine -- who hails from the fictional backwater of Antler, Ohio, and who storms Manhattan with no coherent ambition beyond plying scams to get noticed ..."

No such thing as an original idea?

"There's a book that influenced 'The History of Glamour' called 'Love, Loss, and What I Wore,'" she says. "It's a series of strange little watercolor paintings of the author, Ilene Beckerman's, outfits from childhood to the present. She describes all the things that happened to her in the outfits -- being dumped, feeling beautiful, going to the prom, her mother dying, her marriage and divorce, her pregnancies. It's a very spare but moving book. I, like Beckerman, remember incidents according to what I was wearing."

Final line of the piece (cue the Twilight Zone theme):

"A hard-working minor celebrity with an evidently carefree but actually quite deliberate business strategy, Duncan is exactly the sort of solo artist/entrepreneur one imagines surviving every market vicissitude -- confirming that there's no such thing as fleeting fame if it's got talent backing it up."