More Theresa Duncan mysteries

Fall is in the air (yes, dear New York readers, we do have seasons in Los Angeles), but that beachy summer mystery known as Theresa Duncan continues to haunt our imagination.

1. Is she alive and well and working as a prostitute?
2. Why has Duncanologist seaword (who, following our lead, exposed Wit's literary peccadillos) vanished into the ether, shuttering the blog and neglecting to answer email from fans? (Btw, if you really want to read that page, you can here.)
3. Has famed Duncanologist Kate Coe of FBLA, who hasn't posted her keen insights here or elsewhere lately, also lost interest and vanished?
4. Will this blogger soon follow suit?
5. Was Jeremy Blake really the rear-ending type? And if, so can we tell from this conversation?

I'll let Dream's End work on 1-4 and leave 5 for you to solve.

Theresa Duncan's boyfriend was gay

So says the U.K. Independent in this story. (Hat tip to Lou.) The piece rehashes what everyone else has written (golden couple, tragic end, blah, blah, blah) and relies mostly on an interview with punk impresario Malcolm McLaren, who knew the couple. However, there's this bombshell:

"I liked him [Jeremy] a lot," McLaren says, "but he always struck me as a troubled person. Everything that's been written about them since it happened has suggested that Theresa was the crazy one. But actually I don't think she was all that crazy. I think it was the other way around."

So Jeremy was the crazy one. And there's this:

The golden-couple image was flawed in other ways, too.' "If we're being honest," says McLaren, "Jeremy was gay. I don't think his relationship with Theresa was all that sexual. She was a mother to him. When I saw them in Hollywood, he was always terribly concerned that people would think he was a fag – he walked around with this hip flask of whisky in his pocket and he was constantly swigging from it, like some kind of cowboy."

Jeremy was gay and Theresa wasn't getting laid. Have to admit I hadn't thought of that. So far it seems Kate Coe is the only person who's written about them who actually knew them. Yet she seems to have missed this. Perhaps her gaydar is in need of tune-up.

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.

Theory: Why Theresa didn't want her blog to be too interactive

On this long and sleepy Perfume of Life thread a poster named fulltiltredhead
who claims to have corresponded with Duncan writes:

I think many people corresponded with her [Duncan] via pm and she knew very well that she/her blog was popular, that she had a loyal following, and that many people thought she was marvelous. She was not a person to be much moved by what other people thought, though. She measured herself by her own yardstick. If she wasn't happy with herself, nobody else's approval would have made any difference. She wasn't that kind of person. IMO and from what I knew of her.

and

She [Duncan] didn't publish most of the comments she got, but she got a lot of comments. Her blog was more like a magazine. She didn't like it to get too interactive.

Here's my theory, based on a recent viewing of Annie Hall (this film has held up so incredibly well, btw, it's really amazing): Duncan suffered from the same affliction that drove Woody Allen's Alvy Singer to a lifetime of analysis: She did not want to belong to a club that would have her as its member.*

Duncan knew she was a fake. She couldn't have had anything but contempt for those who viewed her with awe. That's why she kept them at arm's length.


*This quote has often been attributed to Allen. In fact, in the film, he attributes it to Grouch Marx.

As long as we're giving credit, how about a hand for Marshall Brickman, who co-wrote the screenplay to Annie Hall? (Gesue to Allen's Duncan? You decide.) This film kicked some serious ass at the Oscars. Could a romantic comedy every win again?

Random thoughts on Theresa Duncan

The temperature has finally dropped, there's a cool little breeze blowing through TDC's awesomely cross-ventilated headquarters, Bryan Ferry is crooning "Sweet & Lovely" on the ipod and I'm sipping some intensely refreshing, slightly slushy homemade kumquat-cello (no, really, I am!) and naturally at times like these, thoughts turn to the empress of I-wish-I-would-have-said-that.

Here's what's going through my head, in no particular order. (Feel free to chime in with your own thoughts.)

1. Would Duncan have received as much press after her passing if she had been 100 lbs overweight and suffered from flatulence?
2. Does anybody think it's weird that as a librarian for the Los Angeles Lunar Society Duncan drank Calvados, yet she chose bourbon as her final drink?
3. Why are drugs not mentioned in any of the mainstream stories about Duncan? (Yes, gawker made the crystal meth comment and that last, sappy tribute in the L.A. Times mentioned Duncan being a stoner.) But why aren't drugs being seriously considered as having played a role in the couple's growing paranoia?
4. I'm not a doctor and I don't play one on TV either, but I don't think either Duncan or Blake was schizophrenic. I prefer to leave the psychoanalysis to the pros, so you won't find me quoting the DSM (whatever the hell number it's up to these days) here.
5. I think Duncan used wikipedia's random subject of the day as her idea generator for her blog. Go to wikipedia's home page every day and you'll get a new esoteric subject. (That's what I did to generate the faux Duncan quote posted yesterday.)
6. No one's mentioned it (or if they have, I've missed it), but hasn't it occurred to somebody that The History of Glamour, clever as it may be (still haven't caught it), may have actually been mostly the work of JEREMY BLAKE? He was devoted to Duncan, so he wouldn't have pulled a Gesue. (I mean nothing derogatory toward Gesue by this. Gesue has taken ownership of her creation--as well she should!)
7. Is it not self evident that Jeremy WAS indeed talented and original and she was NOT? How come nobody says it?
8. How cruel that she's the one garnering all the attention.
9. Do you think Jeremy, who had a master's degree, knew she only went to school for one semester?
10. I'd love to see that transcript.
11. Why won't anyone (well, hardly anyone) go on the record?
12. When is the movie coming out?
13. If she really wanted to put out a movie, why didn't she just raise some money herself and go indie? Take it to Sundance, dazzle the Weinstein's with her wit, presto, distribution deal. Robert Rodriguez financed El Mariachi for $7K, legend has it.
14. Or wait, I'm sure Kate Moss could have put up a couple of mil.
15. Why are there very few comments on her supposedly popular blog?
16. Is there a way to find the Wit's blog ranking BEFORE her death?
17. Is Kate Coe working on book?

Looking for clues: Did cannibis kill Theresa Duncan

A study in the journal Lancet (coincidentally published right around the time of Wit's death) found... Well, read it for yourself here.