The Golden Suicides
Continued (page 2 of 6)
When she moved to Los Angeles, Duncan had a two-picture deal with
Fox Searchlight and had written and directed a pilot for Oxygen Media.
She had “my boyfriend Jeremy Blake”—she was always bringing him
up—literally the poster boy of the 2001 “BitStreams” exhibition of
digital art at the Whitney Museum. That same year, Blake had been tapped
by director Paul Thomas Anderson to create a hallucinogenic dream
sequence for Punch Drunk Love, and singer-songwriter Beck had asked him to do a series of covers and a video for his album Sea Change (both released in 2002).
And then, something began to go very wrong.
“Yes, it looks like New York is a good idea for a few,” Blake wrote breezily in an e-mail to a friend on December 22, 2006, announcing that he and Duncan were moving back. They had evacuated their Venice bungalow two weeks after receiving their landlord’s August letter, cramming themselves into the small office space near the beach Blake had been using as a studio. They were low on funds.
Blake wrote of how he and Duncan had been “harassed here to the point of absurdity” by people who were so “paranoid” that it made him “laugh.” He said that they had been “defamed by crazy Scientologists,” threatened and followed by “their thugs.” (The Church of Scientology has denied any knowledge of the couple.) He wrote of how New York was starting to seem like the place for them to be, a place where they could speak “freely” to “exceptional people” and get their projects started.
Meanwhile, Hollywood, Blake said, was “under a pathetic right-wing invasion” by the Bush administration and “extremist religious groups.” He mentioned a couple of media companies with obvious Republican leanings. And then he said, “They are even running ads on the Cartoon Network recruiting people to be in the CIA!”
He spoke of how he was beginning to realize that his work had the “power to influence” a global audience without the need for “corporate backing.” “I am starting to see this as a very powerful thing,” he said. “Almost miraculous. Best, J.B.”
She had moved to Washington in 1989 to take a job at a family friend’s antiques store. It was a way to get out of Detroit, where she’d been working mostly dead-end jobs after high school. (She never finished college.) She was born in nearby Lapeer (population 9,330), which she described on her blog as “subject to incredible boredom punctured by baroque social intrigue.”
She was Mimi Smartypants, star of Smarty. “At the quarry in July,” she wrote, “my cousins told me the water was ‘bottomless,’ and so I hugged the shore and learned to swim in the Lapeer library instead, suspecting already exactly what the limitless meant.… Ever after I knew all the haunted shades of meaning that were captive in other people’s words. And for that they called me mad.”
Her conversations were always racing with ruminations about “film, philology, Vietnam War memorabilia, rare and discontinued perfume”—listed on her blog as “Interests”—and facts about such obscure historical personages as “the owner of Napoleon’s penis” (a true story) and the “tiny Spanish bullfighter Manolete, who died so tragically in the ring in the 1940s.”
The house she grew up in was on a dirt road. When she was little, her mother, Mary, stocked shelves in a grocery store; her father, Donnie, was a factory worker. A friend said that “some really bad things happened to her” with men; she thought “every man was out to get her.” But she never let it show. People said she was the most confident person in the world. She wanted to be famous. She wanted to be noticed.
Jeremy wanted to be a hero. “I liked reading about heroic behavior and the constant ethical dilemmas of Marvel characters spoke to me directly,” he said in an interview. “They were a precursor to the punk records I have still not outgrown.” He told a friend that he “took his personality cues from Chevy Chase in Caddyshack and Han Solo in Star Wars.” Some people thought he was a snob, drinking his Manhattans and smoking his Nat Sherman cigarettes, until they realized he was just an artist, and funny and shy.
He made her laugh.
They moved to New York separately in 1995 and ran into each other backstage at a concert at the Knitting Factory that year. She was “a blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window,” Jeremy told someone, quoting Raymond Chandler. She was just this girl in Washington and now she was famous—everybody was talking about her. How’d she do that? (Nerve. She was a receptionist at a Washington CD-rom company, Magnet Interactive, when she walked into the boss’s office with a pitch dreamed up by a co-worker, whom she made her partner.)
He was 23, she 28. They started talking and they never stopped. He thought she was lovely.
She was a little bit wild (not sexually, God no—she was rather demure there—intellectually) and Jeremy loved wildness in people. “By wildness I’m not referring to some corny idea of rock ’n’ roll excess,” he said. “I’m talking about an internal turbulence and inventiveness that keeps the person and everyone around him or her on their toes.”
She could be combative. She let people know there was a line they couldn’t cross with her.
He was working as a photo retoucher when they got together. He had just graduated from Cal Arts, didn’t really know what he wanted to “do” except that he wanted to make art. He wasn’t interested in fame; he wanted to change the world, to tell stories through art that exposed racism, class inequality, violence. Did that make sense? It did to her.
She hired him as her illustrator and art director at Nicholson New York, a new-media company with offices in the Puck Building. They did Smarty in 1996. He loved making the pictures of the smart little blonde girl with big brown eyes. They did Zero Zero in 1997. “They were co-muses,” said a friend.
He loved the way they lived, starting with the style of their apartment on Broome Street—it was like a reflection of her intricate brain, stuffed with all her books and knickknacks. He teased her, called her “Tucky,” for Tucky the Squirrel, some squirrel on a billboard for a storage-space company. She was a pack rat.
He loved that they knew interesting people, had them over all the time—artists, musicians, writers, producers—constantly drank, smoked, laughed, and never turned on the television.
She started promoting him. As with everything else she did, she was fervent about it, making friends with gallerists in the New York art world (Andrea Rosen, Bronwyn Keenan). Suddenly his work was showing everywhere. He was getting known himself.
Her confidence was contagious. It was “punk.” Inspired, he started making art on his computer—deeply hued, slow-moving films that were “difficult to categorize and that’s part of the fun,” he said. “I think I have invented a new, more poetic kind of pop art that blends elements of pop and noir.” His first solo shows, in New York and Los Angeles in 1999, blew everybody away.
She made him feel free, and that made him feel loyal. Jeremy had a thing about loyalty, said friends, maybe something to do with his father’s death. No one knew for sure; all anyone could say with certainty was that Jeremy and Theresa loved each other.
“Where do you want to be when the Big One hits?” a Los Angeles reporter once asked her. “Asleep in Jeremy Blake’s arms,” she said.
And then, something began to go very wrong.
“Yes, it looks like New York is a good idea for a few,” Blake wrote breezily in an e-mail to a friend on December 22, 2006, announcing that he and Duncan were moving back. They had evacuated their Venice bungalow two weeks after receiving their landlord’s August letter, cramming themselves into the small office space near the beach Blake had been using as a studio. They were low on funds.
Blake wrote of how he and Duncan had been “harassed here to the point of absurdity” by people who were so “paranoid” that it made him “laugh.” He said that they had been “defamed by crazy Scientologists,” threatened and followed by “their thugs.” (The Church of Scientology has denied any knowledge of the couple.) He wrote of how New York was starting to seem like the place for them to be, a place where they could speak “freely” to “exceptional people” and get their projects started.
Meanwhile, Hollywood, Blake said, was “under a pathetic right-wing invasion” by the Bush administration and “extremist religious groups.” He mentioned a couple of media companies with obvious Republican leanings. And then he said, “They are even running ads on the Cartoon Network recruiting people to be in the CIA!”
He spoke of how he was beginning to realize that his work had the “power to influence” a global audience without the need for “corporate backing.” “I am starting to see this as a very powerful thing,” he said. “Almost miraculous. Best, J.B.”
Love Story
Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan first met in 1994. They were both part of the activist, “positive force” punk-rock scene in Washington (think Fugazi, Bikini Kill). He hung around with the band Nation of Ulysses, believed in punk as a philosophy. It was a macho, hipster scene. The women tended to stay in the background, dressed frumpy. Theresa called them “the hausfraus 2000.” She went to parties wearing sequined hot pants. Her boyfriend was Mitch Parker, former bassist of Government Issue. They had a song called “Asshole.” Sometimes she would take out her compact and apply lipstick when someone was boring her.She had moved to Washington in 1989 to take a job at a family friend’s antiques store. It was a way to get out of Detroit, where she’d been working mostly dead-end jobs after high school. (She never finished college.) She was born in nearby Lapeer (population 9,330), which she described on her blog as “subject to incredible boredom punctured by baroque social intrigue.”
She was Mimi Smartypants, star of Smarty. “At the quarry in July,” she wrote, “my cousins told me the water was ‘bottomless,’ and so I hugged the shore and learned to swim in the Lapeer library instead, suspecting already exactly what the limitless meant.… Ever after I knew all the haunted shades of meaning that were captive in other people’s words. And for that they called me mad.”
Her conversations were always racing with ruminations about “film, philology, Vietnam War memorabilia, rare and discontinued perfume”—listed on her blog as “Interests”—and facts about such obscure historical personages as “the owner of Napoleon’s penis” (a true story) and the “tiny Spanish bullfighter Manolete, who died so tragically in the ring in the 1940s.”
The house she grew up in was on a dirt road. When she was little, her mother, Mary, stocked shelves in a grocery store; her father, Donnie, was a factory worker. A friend said that “some really bad things happened to her” with men; she thought “every man was out to get her.” But she never let it show. People said she was the most confident person in the world. She wanted to be famous. She wanted to be noticed.
Jeremy wanted to be a hero. “I liked reading about heroic behavior and the constant ethical dilemmas of Marvel characters spoke to me directly,” he said in an interview. “They were a precursor to the punk records I have still not outgrown.” He told a friend that he “took his personality cues from Chevy Chase in Caddyshack and Han Solo in Star Wars.” Some people thought he was a snob, drinking his Manhattans and smoking his Nat Sherman cigarettes, until they realized he was just an artist, and funny and shy.
He made her laugh.
They moved to New York separately in 1995 and ran into each other backstage at a concert at the Knitting Factory that year. She was “a blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window,” Jeremy told someone, quoting Raymond Chandler. She was just this girl in Washington and now she was famous—everybody was talking about her. How’d she do that? (Nerve. She was a receptionist at a Washington CD-rom company, Magnet Interactive, when she walked into the boss’s office with a pitch dreamed up by a co-worker, whom she made her partner.)
He was 23, she 28. They started talking and they never stopped. He thought she was lovely.
She was a little bit wild (not sexually, God no—she was rather demure there—intellectually) and Jeremy loved wildness in people. “By wildness I’m not referring to some corny idea of rock ’n’ roll excess,” he said. “I’m talking about an internal turbulence and inventiveness that keeps the person and everyone around him or her on their toes.”
She could be combative. She let people know there was a line they couldn’t cross with her.
He was working as a photo retoucher when they got together. He had just graduated from Cal Arts, didn’t really know what he wanted to “do” except that he wanted to make art. He wasn’t interested in fame; he wanted to change the world, to tell stories through art that exposed racism, class inequality, violence. Did that make sense? It did to her.
She hired him as her illustrator and art director at Nicholson New York, a new-media company with offices in the Puck Building. They did Smarty in 1996. He loved making the pictures of the smart little blonde girl with big brown eyes. They did Zero Zero in 1997. “They were co-muses,” said a friend.
He loved the way they lived, starting with the style of their apartment on Broome Street—it was like a reflection of her intricate brain, stuffed with all her books and knickknacks. He teased her, called her “Tucky,” for Tucky the Squirrel, some squirrel on a billboard for a storage-space company. She was a pack rat.
He loved that they knew interesting people, had them over all the time—artists, musicians, writers, producers—constantly drank, smoked, laughed, and never turned on the television.
She started promoting him. As with everything else she did, she was fervent about it, making friends with gallerists in the New York art world (Andrea Rosen, Bronwyn Keenan). Suddenly his work was showing everywhere. He was getting known himself.
Her confidence was contagious. It was “punk.” Inspired, he started making art on his computer—deeply hued, slow-moving films that were “difficult to categorize and that’s part of the fun,” he said. “I think I have invented a new, more poetic kind of pop art that blends elements of pop and noir.” His first solo shows, in New York and Los Angeles in 1999, blew everybody away.
She made him feel free, and that made him feel loyal. Jeremy had a thing about loyalty, said friends, maybe something to do with his father’s death. No one knew for sure; all anyone could say with certainty was that Jeremy and Theresa loved each other.
“Where do you want to be when the Big One hits?” a Los Angeles reporter once asked her. “Asleep in Jeremy Blake’s arms,” she said.
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