Memories of Theresa Duncan

ON THE NIGHT OF JULY 10, 2007 I RECEIVED THE CALL THAT ALL PARENTS DREAD…MY DAUGHTER THERESA DUNCAN, gifted writer, game designer and filmmaker, HAD DIED IN NEW YORK, 600 MILES AND THOUSANDs OF DOUBTS, WHAT-IFS AND FEELINGS OF LOSS, GRIEF AND GUILT AWAY. SHE WAS 40 YEARS OLD. OVER THE NEXT FEW WEEKS THE STORY OF A PERSON THAT I DID NOT KNOW OR RECOGNIZE BEGAN TO EMERGE IN THE PRESS AND BLOGS AND THE NARRATIVE OF HER LIFE WAS LARGELY FORGED BY PEOPLE WHO DID NOT KNOW HER OR WHO MADE THEIR NAME WITH A SENSATIONALIST STORY WITH LITTLE REGARD FOR THE TRUTH OR THE CONSEQUENCES TO THERESA'S GRIEVING FAMILY AND FRIENDS, WITH DEVASTATING EFFECT. FIVE YEARS AFTER HER DEATH I WILL TELL THE STORY OF THERESA AS I KNEW HER, AN INCREDIBLY INTELLIGENT, WITTY, TALENTED, DETERMINED AND COMPLEX PERSON, LARGER THAN LIFE, FLAWED AS WE ALL ARE, WITH UNLIMITED COURAGE AND MOXIE WHO ENRICHED THE LIVES OF MANY WITH HER HUMOUR, INTELLECTUAL INSIGHT AND GENEROUS SPIRIT. . Additional pages can be accessed by clicking on "older" at the bottom of each page.

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Theresa Duncan 10/26/1966-7/10/2007

Theresa Duncan Video.

Film clips of Theresa Duncan shown at her memorial in New York, 12/2007. Thanks to Theresa's long time friends Wilbur King for allowing the use of clips from his film Charlotte Goes Swimming, and Raymond Doherty for editing the clips to make this memorial film.

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Theresa Duncan, 10/26/1966-7/10/2007

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one, Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun, Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood; For nothing now can ever come to any good.

W. H. Auden

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Theresa Duncan in an outtake from the film Charlotte Goes Swimming courtesy of Theresa’s friend Wilbur King, filmmaker.

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Theresa Duncan 10/26/66 - 7/10/2007

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Theresa left Detroit on a train to D.C. with $80.00 in her pocket, wearing black and white polka dot tights, a mini skirt and Eiffel Tower earrings that swung in synchrony with her blonde hair when she moved her head. All of her belongings were stuffed into a mailbag that she dragged behind her. She never looked back through her big hazel eyes, literally or figuratively, to wave goodbye or to waiver in her decision. This was all by design, to leave small town, industrial America for the creative life in the big city where she knew she belonged. Her journey would lead, in a few short years, to three award winning cd roms, a film accepted at the Whitney Biennial, essays published in elite journals, screenplays, tv shows, D.C., N,Y., L.A.; and in 2007 to her death by suicide; a week later her lover, partner and cherished companion of 12 years, artist Jeremy Blake, walked into the water of Rockaway Beach, leaving a note behind.

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Theresa was tall, blonde and strikingly beautiful, but more than that, she was a self-taught scholar, intimidating in her wide-ranging intellect, witty, sarcastic, hard working and determined to succeed, a feminist in red lipstick and designer shoes. She loved words, and was an inspired writer and cultural critic. In her innovative blog Wit of the Staircase, written in her living room surrounded by books and art, she ruminated on philosophy, film, art, politics, music, literary works, fashion, perfume, and life; she developed a large and devoted following that she referred to as the “Children of the Staircase”.  The entries to Wit, in retrospect, seem increasingly troubled in the weeks before her death, with the final post a quote by Reynolds Price

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“A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens–second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small accounts of our day’s events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths.”

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To share Theresa’s story I have compiled the best of the essays from Wit of the Staircase, her published works, journal entries, excerpts from her screenplays, and other works in progress. I will also included cartoons that her lover and partner and innovative artist Jeremy Blake sketched to make her laugh, photographs and images from her cds and film. Her life and work were a seamless and colorful collage. No one can speak for Theresa or tell her story as completely as she has already done, and it is her story in words and images that I will post over the next few weeks.

The clip above is from The History of Glamour which was selected for 2000 Whitney Biennial, illustrated by Jeremy Blake and Karen Kilimnik.

Theresa Duncan's Wit of the Staircase.

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Video games by pioneering game designer Theresa Duncan, Chop Suey, Smarty and Zero, Zero, can now be played free online thanks to the innovative work of Rhizome to preserve the games and make them accessible to a new generation.

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http://archive.rhizome.org/theresa-duncan-cdroms/

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Image: screen shot from Theresa’s film The History of Glamour

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Transfixed by Maps

I am transfixed by maps, colorful, blue and pink and pale green, black lines tracing the paths I will never take. Mountain ranges rising from the surface, where you can run finger down and imagine all the towns, all the places where you could go and make your life better. Maps are like words, the anecdotes to describe my life. I give a one-dimensional, flat portrait of myself, using sentences and guesses about myself. I map out my existence. But like the maps themselves, the stories create a verisimilitude which has nothing to do with reality. See this line? this black highway running  toward the West? You can follow that line all the way and never imagine the flat fields and endless roads.

I can tell you where I came from, what classrooms I sat in, where I drank my coffee and even who I kissed and what he said, and my sentences are merely black lines running into my past, a past whose richness I could never explain with black lines, a place you can’t even imagine. My mother’s house, her porch and yard and the roads leading to it amounting to only a dot. I pull myself farther and farther from the earth, I see longitude and latitude, it was here, I could even point my finger here where I left him behind, my heels kicking up the dust of the road. Horizontal lines, vertical lines along the earth, forming a mesh, a net to catch the past in.

-From Theresa’s journal, 9/17/1989

Image: Two of Theresa’s journals and a few of the contents clipped to the pages.

See Theresa’s blog The Wit of the Staircase

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“My childhood lust for the objects and people and places in a magazine for adult women was, I nowrealize, the desire for some sort of initiation into adolescence. The particular rituals of fashion in Vogue, adhering as they do to the passing of seasons, along with the emphasis on female beauty, its nearly ritualistic body wrapping, bonding, and displaying, and a sort of Protean emphasis on transformation, made it perfect for a soon-to-be teenage girl negotiating sex and civilization on her own. I suppose my avid interest in fashion’s unique sort of sublimation/celebration of female sexuality were my atavistic longing for a sorority, club or tribe that could provide a few guideposts along the trail as I set out in my new red cloak into the forest of the world. The culture of fashion, I have often said, is to female sexuality what violent ground games are to male sexuality: strange homo-social rituals, atavistic contact sports.

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In Medieval Europe, due to the sexism that has plagued women for millennia, I would have been barred from guilds and secret societies and even educational institutions I might then have sought a place near some Mother Goose type at the hearth, and later as I aged, I myself might have become a similar keeper of the female oral traditions, spinning yarns and fairy tales like the ones I still love to read and to invent. The barely disguised sex and violence of fairy tales, their magical red shoes and crimson cloaks and glass slippers and donkey skin coats make them a sort of proto-Vogue in their handling of darker impulses in an metaphorical, entertaining, and sensually beguiling way.”

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—Theresa Duncan, an excerpt from a proposal for a writing assignment

—-Image: Screenshots from The History of Glamour.

(Source: theresalduncan.typepad.com)

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"Cocaine Kate" And The Measure Of A Woman’s Worth

"Kate Moss, the unmoved mover, sparks desire and leaves a vast blank expanse for the limitless excitement that blooms and mushrooms. A cloud within a cloud within a cloud never interrupted by borders or particulars, like an ability to speak Latin, or a mate who lasts past checkout time at Claridges."

An excerpt from Theresa Duncan,  Cocaine Kate and the Measure of a Woman's Worth, Wit of the Staircase, July 05, 2006

also published in Gas, 2007.

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Basil Rathbone's Ghosts

"Basil Rathbone was entertaining a friend one night at his home in the Hollywood Hills. Both men were keenly interested in dogs and their breeding. His friend had brought with him two handsome specimens. As it got late, the two friends had a parting drink and called it a night. The friend and the canines got into the car and drove away. But, sadly, not very far.

As Rathbone turned to go back inside, he heard the screech of brakes and the sickening sounds of a ghastly car crash. His friend and the dogs were killed instantly.

In deep shock, and with the thought, “He was just standing here,” pounding in his aching head, Rathbone heard the damned phone begin ringing. Mechanically he picked it up and heard the voice of the MGM studio’s night switchboard operator. “Sorry, Mr. Rathbone but I have a woman on the line who simply must talk to you. She says it’s desperately, desperately important.” Probably some smitten fan, he thought as the operator said, “Sir, I’ve never heard anyone be so urgent. She hopes you’ll know what a certain message means.”

Rathbone, impatient and in a daze, snapped, “For Christ’s sake, put her on and be done with it!” The woman was calling from her home, located way to hell and gone on the far side of Los Angeles. She had a low and cultivated speaking voice and identified herself as a trance medium and clairvoyant. At that time the movie colony was going through one of its periodic infatuations with psychics, astrologers, table-tipping séances, Ouija boards and such. Rathbone scorned all such claptrap, but, he said, “the woman’s voice was so compelling.”

“I have for you, sir, what we term ‘a calling of urgency,’” she said. “It came to me with such impact that, although not knowing its meaning, I simply had to find you. The message is brief. Here it is in its entirety: ‘Traveling very fast. No time to say good-bye.’ And then, ‘There are no dogs here.’ ”

The next time I saw Rathbone (F.Y.I., he lived at 135 Central Park West), more years had gone by, and he was in the act of receiving a summons for letting his dog Ginger off the leash in Central Park. I thought he might have decided, looking back, that it had all been some sort of bizarre coincidence, or maybe a highly original prank. He said, “At the time, of course, I was quite shaken by it.” And now? “I am still shaken by it.”

Posted posthumously by Theresa Duncan, Wit of the Staircase from NYT

Image: from Theresa's records.

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"Developed in 1994 and published the following year, Chop Suey was a cunning piece of multimedia edutainment, suited just as well to grown-ups — smirking hipsters and punk rockers, probably — as it was to the prescribed “girls 7 to 12” crowd. But it wasn’t a computer game. It was something else: a loosely-strung system of vignettes; a psychedelic exercise in “let’s-pretend”; a daydream in which the mundanity of small-town Ohio collides with the interior lives of its two young protagonists.

Every moment in the game, however connected, is also suspended in time. But the game’s perpetual loop of story is deliberate: 'It works the same way that Alice in Wonderland does, where she leaves home and then she has adventures,' designer Theresa Duncan explained in 1998, “but if you took everything in between the beginning and the end of Alice in Wonderland and scrambled up every chapter, it would make no difference to the development of the story.” Every moment in the game, however connected, is also suspended in time."

~Jenn Frank, Motherboard.

 “With its sly whimsy and tactile, folk-art imagery, Chop Suey brings a whole new sensibility — quirky, poetic, almost bittersweet — to a medium that’s often lacking in such nuance."

~Greg Beato, Wired

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                            Theresa Duncan 10/26/1966-7/10/2007

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”I believe that what we want to write wants to be written. I believe that as I have an impulse to create, the something I want to create has an impulse to want to be born. My job, then, is to show up on the page and let that something move through me, in a sense, what wants to be written is none of my business.”

—Julia Cameron

Posted by Theresa Duncan on Wit of the Staircase, Sunday, November 19, 2006

Image: Theresa and Tuesday in California, December, 2006

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Theresa Duncan 10/26/1966-7/10/2007 

Writer, Filmmaker, Game Designer, Blogger 

“When you look up at the sky at night, since I’ll be living on one of them, since I’ll be laughing on one of them, for you it’ll be as if all the stars are laughing… And when you’re consoled (everyone eventually is consoled), you’ll be glad you’ve known me.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

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“Let’s regard her lasting spark and tell the tyrants of the dark who has left the greater mark.”

~Rachel Wetzsteon, excerpt from May Poles

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Rachel Wetzsteon wrote this poem in memory of fellow poet Sarah Hannah.

Rachel died in 2009 at 42.

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Transfixed by Maps

I am transfixed by maps, colorful, blue and pink and pale green, black lines tracing the paths I will never take. Mountain ranges rising from the surface, where you can run finger down and imagine all the towns, all the places where you could go and make your life better. Maps are like words, the anecdotes to describe my life. I give a one-dimensional, flat portrait of myself, using sentences and guesses about myself. I map out my existence. But like the maps themselves, the stories create a verisimilitude which has nothing to do with reality. See this line? this black highway running  toward the West? You can follow that line all the way and never imagine the flat fields and endless roads.

I can tell you where I came from, what classrooms I sat in, where I drank my coffee and even who I kissed and what he said, and my sentences are merely black lines running into my past, a past whose richness I could never explain with black lines, a place you can’t even imagine. My mother’s house, her porch and yard and the roads leading to it amounting to only a dot. I pull myself farther and farther from the earth, I see longitude and latitude, it was here, I could even point my finger here where I left him behind, my heels kicking up the dust of the road. Horizontal lines, vertical lines along the earth, forming a mesh, a net to catch the past in.

-From Theresa’s journal, 9/17/1989

Image: Two of Theresa’s journals and a few of the contents clipped to the pages.

See Theresa’s blog The Wit of the Staircase

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Theresa’s games and film The History of Glamour were exhibited at Dundee Gallery in Scotland, July 16-Sept 04, 2016, curated by Graham Domke. 

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“I’ve always been interested in misfits…I think their toughness and nonconformity and propensity for trouble belie a different interior, the person who is a perpetual outcast is usually too good for this earth, too smart or too funny or too kind or too sad or too lonely or too talented to fit into a world where the mediocre fare best.”

Theresa Duncan, journal entry August, 19, 1989.