The Duncan-Blake Effect In The Blogosphere
Venus de Milo With Drawers, Salvador Dalí, 1936
… Anyway, Venus de Milo. One of the sculptures in the exhibit was a Venus chest of drawers (complete with furry knobs). On Saturday night Clair, Special K, and I had a highbrow conversation about this piece, discussing items to put in the boob drawers. Clair decided that he would put his car keys in Venus’s chest, while Special K opted for the remote control.
Dali, father of WTF, is my new role model. From now on, Good Grief! will embrace Dali’s Paranoiac Critical method and attempt to “systematize confusion and to thus help discredit completely the world of reality.” Dali might have been a raving lunatic, but that last sentence is a damn good mission statement.
– Becky S., March 9, 2005, in Good Grief! Does This Blog Make My Butt Look Big?
“La Femme en Flames”
La Femme en Flammes, Salvador Dalí.
“We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about.” – Charles Kingsley, epigram on the home page of the blog enthusiasm: a novelty choking hazard.
The blogosphere is composed of two and unequal parts: The Facts, which resemble an objective reality, and Factufication, which is the conflation with, and distillation of, purported facts coupled to abundant speculation.
In this way, the shrillest bogs resemble early 20th century yellow journalism, wherein no story was too absurd to be printed, in the main because this sold newspapers. Bloggists, though, in most cases don’t sell anything, other than their points of view and aren’t journalists – except when they are. The bloggist just wants to be heard, in most cases to a group of friends and colleagues, though at other times, to a wider world—which is difficult when there are 50 millions of blogs, and counting.
In the case that concerns this essay, bloggists tried to understand why another bloggist killed herself and whether despondency compelled her companion to walk into the ocean. The susurration of rumor built into a rambunctious clamor as one seeker e-mailed or linked to the next. The romanticizing, demolition and deconstruction of Duncan and Blake was immediate, simultaneous and intertwined.
The Internet fulfilled its use as a public and virtual wailing wall. Testimonies of sorrow were poetic, clunky or rambling, as the writers struggled in plain view of readers to put into words what they felt as they were thinking and typing, with little editing during or following. For any future historian of whatever calamity—even the recent Minneapolis bridge collapse — these kinds of displays will be invaluable if somehow they are archived, preserved, and accessible.
Their deaths were disseminated through a variety of small self-informing communities, from art and literary circles, to marketing and game design groups and into the realm where conspiracy is an acknowledged part of consensus reality. Reaction ranged from almost incoherent grief to gleeful hectoring.
For the chronicler of earlier generations, coming across letters and journals was the best way of seeing through the eyes of those who experienced events as they happened. The words on yellowed pages gave the historian a seat by the elbow of the record keeper. Today, e-mail and blogs, even archived answering machine messages, present unique and multiple perspectives. These are real-time event records that are as close as one can get to the frantic phone calls and the conversational hubbub at coffee shops and art gallery gatherings.
(What will happen if at some point the technology fails or the power goes out for good is another matter. Where will the scribes come from to protect knowledge should Wikipedia ever go dark?)
If the human species survives, and a People’s History of the Blogosphere is one day written, there may well be a slender chapter titled “The Duncan-Blake Effect.” This may offer a case study of how a tragic incident that concerned a rarefied group of people—participants and chroniclers of culture and society comprising a sliver in the greater arts world of Los Angeles and New York City—promulgated wider interest among those who were neither artists nor lived in either of those cities. That clamoring for actual sourced, jot and tittle news was delivered first not by the dead tree fiber media (DTFM), but online sources. The DTFM scrambled, spluttered, and proved itself unable to supply what was demanded in a time that would satisfy an audience grown accustomed to immediacy. In this case, what went sub rosa on the Internet drove what appeared in print and in the other electronic media.
The most disheartening aspect of sifting through the expressionist manner in which comprehension and incomprehension of the Duncan and Blake deaths spread across the Internet is that this highest expression of human ingenuity is at times no better than graffiti scrawled on walls of bathroom stalls.
When all is said and done, this much is known: Theresa Duncan killed herself in her St. Mark’s Place apartment on July 10, 2007. Jeremy Blake, her companion of a dozen years, on July 17, walked off the Rockaway beach into the Atlantic Ocean and drowned.
Duncan and Blake are now part of the collective subconscious; an amalgam of history and myth, grist for endless blogging, glossy magazine features, “based on true events” films, “ripped from the headlines” television dramas, poetry, art, narrative nonfiction history and probably metafiction, too. The corpus of the event resembles one of Salvador Dalí’s undulant women as chest of drawers in paintings and sculptures. Duncan’s own rigorous organization of her blog reminds me of these odd pieces, too, each drawer stuffed with fascinating items, like the characters and situations from the video games she helped devise. Bureaus are for storage, organization and protection — but they may also conceal.
[Image: The Wit of the Staircase, "A Staircasean Mystery," Monday June 25, 2007]
As I recall, my first trip upon Duncan’s Staircase came when looking up the French phrase for which she took her blog’s name, esprit d’escalier. I was a late-comer who first peeked at the site sometime early in 2007, and sad now that I didn’t happen upon it earlier because, to be honest, I would’ve enjoyed experiencing the little phenomenon.
I was entranced by the imagery and imagination, and Duncan’s wonderful turns of phrase. That incandescent photo of her, (taken behind the Chateau Marmont in her favorite garden), regarding me unsmiling, her head at a tilt, as though wondering just who this is who should come here to ramble about in her thoughts.
At times, she seemed to be channeling some 1920s social columnist, attending — or at least describing — glamorous parties with famous friends, and yet retaining a certain world-weariness, and a restless curiosity about the odd nooks and crannies of culture. Her word choices, when she was really taking her time, were remarkable. Twain said, “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a firefly.” Duncan’s prose was, when she was firing on all cylinders, exquisite.
Brevity was the soul of Wit. A striking image of art or fashion photography with an accompanying provocative quote, and a link or two, often constituted a single entry. I hesitated visiting too often because The Wit of the Staircase resembled that long hall Alice finds when she falls into the rabbit hole. One could’ve spent hours there meandering between references to art, the occult, politics and Kate Moss. I didn’t take after her Tarantino obsession, or her fashion fascination, though I appreciated how she’d follow her whimsies wherever they led.
[Image: "Attic Office of the Staircase," April 18, 2007 -- Duncan demonstrates that blogging isn't a life, but a life-style.]
But there was a darkness forming at the head of the stairs.
I grew both more intrigued and concerned as Duncan’s political and cultural observations became more acute and aligned with some of my own. Her words caused raised my anxieties not because I didn’t respond to what she was saying. I instead worried that she was more right than wrong. The DailyKos she was not. Her opinions reminded me of those I’d heard from friends and acquaintances in recent years. This stuff was out there; Duncan wasn’t original in that. But having such hot-topic political material appear disturbed for me the otherwise serene eclectic nature of the staircase she’d built. These ideas seemed like graffiti staining the walls of the landings.
By time she interviewed activist Father Frank Morales, with Jeremy Blake offering occasional insights, I was interested by how Duncan herself was grappling with cataracts of unpleasant information that undermine the concept of a free society.
Next thing I know, the wicked Wit is dead.
Loomings
Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon.
Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted,
And human love will be seen at its height.
Live in fragments no longer.
Only connect…
–E.M. Forster, Howards EndEpigram for “Only Connect”–E. M. Forster In An Age Of Electronic Communication: Computer-Mediated Association And Community Networks by Mary E. Virnoche and Gary T. Marx. July 23, 10097, hyperlink reference via Blake Robin (Baron von Luxxury) on www.disccoworkout.com.
“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.” — Reynolds Price, quote used in Theresa Duncan’s final blog post, July 10, 2007
Never believe anything until it has been officially denied.—Claude Coburn
We do not mean to suggest that there is a little man behind the curtain, a great Wizard of Oz who controls all that is seen, thought, and done. There is no single locus of control that dictates the spectacle. The spectacle, however, generally functions as if there were such a point of central control…. Conspiracy theories of governmental and extragovernmental plots of global control, which have certainly proliferated in recent decades, should thus be recognized as both true and false. As Frederic Jameson explains wonderfully in the context of contemporary film, conspiracy theories are a crude but effective mechanism for approximating the functioning of the totality. The spectacle of politics functions as if the media, the military, the government, the transnational corporations, the global financial institutions, and so forth [the Scientologists] were all consciously and explicitly directed by a single power even though in reality they are not. — excerpt from Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, as provided by SmoothJazzy on Gloss (blog), and referencing Theresa Duncan’s promotion of their later book Multitude.
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A couple of suicide artists? – Lonesome in Massachusetts, July 23, on the Free Republic blog.
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Inertia and entropy drag on the truly creative like Theresa and Jeremy like a lodestone. — Charlie Finch, July 23, “Theremy,” artnet Magazine, artnet.com.
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but she scared the hell out of some people with her sharp tongued rapier wit
i’ve seen so many people turn on her
i’ve seen so many people afraid of her
and i’ve seen how they harrassed her
literally to death
– July 23, 2007, Baron von Luxxury, disccoworkout.
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You fucking hopeless parasites. The world is a violent storm of greed, where the victor takes the spoils, and you are just waking up to it now, saying to your sorry selves, “oh no, they could kill me?”
omnimental, in Rigorous Intuition’s July 25, 2007, entry, “Imitation of Life.”
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She is gone, and he is gone, a play set up in the privacy of love, a stage set in the intimacy of public longing for details.—Jonathan Perez, July 26, 2007, “Ode To Jeremy Blake” at The Palm At The End Of The Mind.
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But like the best bloggers, she created an illusion of intimacy with her readers. Most blogs are simply unedited confessions for the blogger or for close friends, posted where they might be found by strangers (as, I imagine, the diarist dreads but also desires). And still other bloggers hope for anonymity, only to deliberately push its bounds by revealing too much — when readers know all but one secret, they’ll search for it, and find it.—Swati Pandey, August 1, 2007, Los Angeles Times Opinion Daily.
