Curiouser and Curiouser
Bob Morales first twigged me to the double suicide of artists Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake, and I was immediately hooked — there were uncanny similarities between their story and a book I'm getting started on, and their lives touched on the things I love to write about: merged identities, obsessive love, twins, artists, madness, death. Plus the blogosphere latched onto the conspiracy aspect of their deaths with a ferocity and imagination I haven't seen before (I don't delve that deeply into the worldwide well). The echoes between real life and the work of William Gibson, for one, are uncanny, especially when filtered through the bravura performance at
http://dreamsend.wordpress.com/
Dreamsend posted this morning that there's nothing to his ARG theory. I never thought there was, but that seemed to me beside the point. While obviously these are real lives and terrible deaths, I was (and am) fascinated by how readily those lives can be adapted to the cause of art (and blogging can be an art form); how frighteningly malleable our notions of self and identity can become, and how quickly. This is something Theresa Duncan dealt with in her work; tragically, it also seems to have been part of what destroyed her.
The LA Weekly nails this story best, I think --
http://www.laweekly.com/news/news/the-theresa-duncan-tragedy/16942/
Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake, RIP.
http://dreamsend.wordpress.com/
Dreamsend posted this morning that there's nothing to his ARG theory. I never thought there was, but that seemed to me beside the point. While obviously these are real lives and terrible deaths, I was (and am) fascinated by how readily those lives can be adapted to the cause of art (and blogging can be an art form); how frighteningly malleable our notions of self and identity can become, and how quickly. This is something Theresa Duncan dealt with in her work; tragically, it also seems to have been part of what destroyed her.
The LA Weekly nails this story best, I think --
http://www.laweekly.com/news/news/the-theresa-duncan-tragedy/16942/
Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake, RIP.