Newsweek covers Theresa Duncan

More than a month after after their passing, Newsweek covers Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake's tragic deaths under the "society" page. The gist of the story: the internet made them do it.

Duncan and Blake built their lives around computers and the Internet, using them to create innovative art, prize-winning video­games and visionary stories. But as time progressed, the very technologies that had infused their work and elevated their lives became tools to reinforce destructive delusions and weapons to lash out at a world they thought was closing in on them. By the end of their lives, this formerly outgoing and affable couple had turned cold toward outsiders. They addressed friends and colleagues from behind electronic walls of accusatory e-mails and confrontational blog posts, and their storybook devotion to each other slowly warped into a shared madness—what is known as a folie à deux. “This wasn’t who they wanted to be,” says Katie Brennan, a Los Angeles gallery owner and long­time friend. She compares the couple’s late-life delusions to “a kind of terminal cancer” that overtook the true Jeremy and Theresa.

Furthermore:

“The condition of being super-social and super-isolated at the same time is an Internet-era kind of thing,” says Fred Turner, a media historian at Stanford University, who speculates that as Blake and Duncan withdrew from friends, “their only reality check left was the wisps of information on their computer screens. And unfortunately, that isn’t a very powerful check.”

We like the theory and appreciate the reality-based assessments of Duncan's career, and now we're getting the hell off this computer.

New York magazine covers Theresa Duncan

Well you've probably read it by now, since Fishbowl L.A. mentioned this earlier in the day, but here's New York's take on Theresa and Jeremy.

If you've been following this blog, you won't learn much more. You do get some color and added details about the Duncan-Blake's last days. For example, Duncan and Blake refused to come down from their apartment at St. Marks to participate in the fundraiser they had organized. (In other words, they were AWOL at their own party.)

"Duncan and Blake had been found in the rectory, seated by the window, looking down at the party—their party—below. Without apology they explained that they could not come down, no, they were experiencing a “collective vision” that the grill was going to explode, somehow harming Duncan."

The mystery has changed. It is no longer about why the killed themselves, but rather why they didn't do it sooner. We're lucky they didn't choose to take innocent people with them, like the Virginia Tech killer did. (Some of Duncan's writing was about as unintelligible as Cho's.)

Another gem from this story:

"She wrote new scripts, pitched smaller projects, freelanced as a critic. More time passed. She created her blog, The Wit of the Staircase, taking on a variety of topics (Kate Moss, poetry, reality TV, philosophy) with her sharp-tongued brand of pop erudition. By 2005, Alice Underground was at Paramount, but here the same patterns repeated themselves. This was not an unusual story in Hollywood, where most projects languish for years before colliding with the voodoo necessary to transform a script into a film, but for Duncan it was a first: a case in which sheer force of will and personality were not enough to build the world she was striving to create."

No mention at all of her plagiarism at Slate. Or the plagiarism on her blog. As I and other bloggers have proved, Duncan's "erudition" consisted of cutting and pasting from other sources like wikipedia. Many of her posts were just links to style.com without any further comment from her.

Those facts were sacrificed at the altar of "story." David Amsden's writerly piece concerns itself with the greater themes such as how Hollywood dashes the dreams of artists.

Then there's this kind of crap, guaranteed to raise the hackles of any self-respecting Angeleno:

"... If New York can be a hostile but ultimately rewarding environment for an artist, Los Angeles is often the opposite: easy and glittering until you begin to suspect that it is all maybe a cruel illusion. It was Nathanael West, himself a New Yorker who settled in Hollywood, who perhaps best understood the potentially grim effects this can have on the mind of an ambitious optimist. “Once there, they discover the sunshine isn’t enough,” he wrote in The Day of the Locust of those who seek a specific paradise in Los Angeles. “Nothing happens. They don’t know what to do with their time … The boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment.”

Oh, give me a fucking break! This is the kind of shit that makes me wish we could deport every single New Yorker. Let's start by rounding them up in Santa Monica, where they clog up our sidewalk cafes and steal our rent-controlled apartments.

L.A. Times runs Theresa Duncan correction

The L.A. Times took its sweet time to run a correction on Duncan.

Double suicide: An article in the July 25 Calendar section about the suicides of artist Jeremy Blake and writer Theresa Duncan reported that Duncan graduated from the University of Michigan. A spokesperson for the university said Duncan was enrolled for a single semester in 1985 at the University of Michigan-Flint.

Hot damn! A single semester. That's balls. Did Duncanologist Kate Coe even know this?

Theresa Duncan's blog eulogized in L.A. Times

The L.A. Times eulogizes The Wit of the Staircase in the Calendar section:

Lavishly illustrated with fine art, fashion photography, film stills, news and paparazzi photos, book and album covers, and recurring images of Kate Moss, her preferred celebrity obsession, Wit, as she called it and herself interchangeably, was a cultural free-for-all. In this forum, which she could credibly assert was engendering a new type of writing, Duncan shared the things that caught her fancy, sometimes crafting lengthy, heavily researched ruminations on subjects mundane and arcane, sometimes excerpting articles or posting poems or even listing a particularly good run on her iPod. Always, her poetic sensibility, arch glamour and fiery spirit came through. Hers was a unique female voice, and this is why her death is such an acute loss to her readers, myself included. [emphasis mine]

Ah to read Duncan's heavily researched ruminations. Yes, of course--like the history of electricity.

Thank you L.A. Times, for another terrific "well-researched" piece of your own! What happened? Judith Miller wasn't available to take this assignment?

Theresa Duncan in New York Observer

The Observer weighs in.
Is it me, or does it look like the Wit was wearing flesh tone hose with gold slides in that photo? The legs seem very opaque and a different color than the arms.

NY Post covers Theresa Duncan

The New York Post covers Theresa Duncan with a piece shamelessly cribbed from stories written by the L.A. Weekly, Washington Post and L.A. Times. How fitting for The Wit. No doubt she would have appreciated the blatant plagiarism.

Major coverage of Theresa Duncan's story

Let's face it, blogs rarely practice original reporting, preferring instead to deal in gossip and speculation. (Which, of course, we all love.) Wacky conspiracy theories aside, so far the most interesting stuff written about Theresa Duncan, a.k.a. "The Wit" (don't you just luvit when people nickname themselves?) has come from the MSM. In case you missed them, here are some of those must-reads:

LA Weekly

Kate Coe (who also writes Mediabistro's FishbowlLA), writing in the L.A. Weekly, has penned the most interesting piece so far. It's been eclipsed only by Vanity Fair's profile of Judi Guiliani as my favorite dishy page turner of the summer. Coe does a terrific job of pulling back the curtain to reveal the darkness that was lurking in the Staircase. (No doubt The Wit would have approved, all shadowy and lunar as she was.) Early on in the piece, Coe delivers a stunning prosecutorial opener:

"I knew her, and I knew that much of what she wrote about her world was an elaborate tale, taken as fact by the uninitiated. Duncan blogged daily on her elegant Web site, The Wit of the Staircase, about her bohemian-chic cottage on a Venice canal, meetings of the slightly sinister and probably nonexistent Lunar Society of Los Angeles, and the turbulent love life of Kate Moss." [emphasis mine]

Unfortunately, Coe doesn't quite deliver, and instead gives us a pretty prim account of Duncan's career. Tell us about the cottage, Kate! What else was an elaborate tale? My guess is Coe would like to reveal more, but her editors won't let her. (Or maybe that's just wishful thinking on my part.)

LA Times

In the L.A. Times Chris Lee gives a riveting account of Jeremy Blake's final days (after finding The Wit witty no more in their uber-hipster digs in le Village). Eyebrow-raising quote:

"Possessed of movie star good looks, remembered as "alarmingly brilliant" and at times jealously protective of each other, the couple has been posthumously dubbed "Theremy" by Artnet.com."

Alarmingly brilliant? I wonder where that leaves Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonini. Theremy? Somehow I thought art world people had a little more elan. Apparently they're as clever as a Bonnie Fuller coverline. Still, Lee does give insight into the couple's paranoia. And, of course, it's reassuring to read that Scientologists queried by Lee deny any foul play relating to The Wits. That really put my mind at ease.

The New York Times

The Gray Lady beat the L.A. Times to the punch. (Which makes sense, since
The Wit was no longer living in Venice and she bid this life adieu in Manhattan.) I'm not bothering to include the link, because the Times has put the story on TimesSelect. Brilliant guys! Simply brilliant! They should call you The Wits, part deux in fact.

The Washington Post

David Segal writes: "They were one of those New York couples: good-looking and ridiculously gifted." Whoa! Actually, they were one of those L.A. couples, David. Trust me on this one. (Jeremey's penchant for wearing trucker hats should be your first clue.) Ridiculously gifted? Okay, I'll grant that by L.A.'s generous intellectual standards perhaps they were, but by New York standards? I think more than a handful of people on the upper West Side, Brooklyn and the Village might disagree with that assesment.

Anyway, Jeremy was from Washington, didn't you know? So that's what we learn in this piece. (That and the fact that Mr. Wit was indeed accomplished and talented.)

Eyebrow-raising quote:

"Physically, Duncan was a knockout, but it was her mind that left the most lasting impact. She wrote a blog called the Wit of the Staircase, and it is a roiling tour of a capacious mind, bouncing from lowbrow to high, from Kate Moss to Franz Kafka, from film to the history of electricity."

Is it me or does this guy sound like he's kinda sweet on The Wit? Watch out dude! She's dangerous. Stay away from any body of water containing salt!