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In Memoriam

  • Memories of Theresa
  • Play Theresa Duncan's Video Games Free Online
    Rhizome has preserved Theresa Duncan's visionary video games and they are now available to be played for free at http://archive.rhizome.org/theresa-duncan-cdroms/
  • Chop Suey
    "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." Jenn Frank
  • Smarty
    Smarty was Theresa's second award winning video. This is a film version used to demonstrate the game for potential distributors. Art direction by Jeremy Blake
  • Theresa Duncan's The History of Glamour
    The History of Glamour “In the film, the main character is looking for an identity, and glamour becomes for her a potent form of self-expression. She finds it very liberating, because she’s from a small town. But by the end of the story, glamour becomes limiting, then imprisoning, so she becomes a writer, chooses grammar over glamour.” Theresa Duncan on The History of Glamour in Salon. ~ The History of Glamour, is a music-based animated film, it aired at The New York Video Festival, The Women Make Waves International Women's Film Festival, The Rotterdam International Film Festival, The Montreal Film Festival, the Channel Hopping Festival in Austria and was selected for inclusion in The Whitney Biennial 2000. Glamour also aired on Channel 4 in the UK, on Canal + in France, and in Japan. * ~Writer and Director Theresa Duncan; Art Director Jeremy Blake; Art work by Jeremy Blake and Karen Kilimnick; animation by Eric Dyer.
  • Memorial Film
    This film was shown at a memorial for Theresa in New York, December 2007. A special thanks to Wilbur King for the use of clips from his film “Charlotte Goes Swimming” and Raymond Doherty, editor.
  • In a Land of 90's Barbieland Wreckage Chop Suey Got Everything Right
  • Memories Of Theresa Tumblr
  • The Lovely Theresa by Baron Von Luxxury
  • Eric Dyer

Worthy of Mention

  • Spoon -

    Spoon: Girls Can Tell
    This is a great, understated album that merits repeated plays. Spoon have made a literate, rocking, breakthrough record that occupies a funny place--the songs are not unconventional, per se, yet they're somehow really special. Girls Can Tell displays the emotional resonance and big rock power of, say, Thin Lizzy and Mott the Hoople; the sonically referential, indie-rock smarts of a band like Versus; and amazing hooks that recall Colin Blunstone of the Zombies. Like Jennyanykind, Moviola, and the Lilys, this Austin, Texas, trio has chosen to work on perfecting their craft without paying much heed to mainstream or trends. In spite of (but mostly because of) wrenching breakup-centered lyrical material delivered in a very real, matter-of-fact way, Girls Can Tell is one of those life-affirming pop albums you know you'll return to in years to come. --Mike McGonigal (*****)

Books

  • Michael Hardt: Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

    Michael Hardt: Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire
    Empire (2000)—the surprise hit that made its term for U.S global hegemony stick and presciently set the agenda for post–9/11 political theory on the left—was written by this same somewhat unlikely duo: Hardt, an American political scientist at Duke University, and Negri, a former Italian parliament member and political exile, trained political scientist and sometime inmate of Rome's Rebibbia prison. This book follows up on Empire's promise of imagining a full-blown global democracy. Though the authors admit that they can't provide the final means for bringing that entity about (or the forms for maintaining it), the book is rich in ideas and agitational ends. The "multitude" is Hardt and Negri's term for the earth's six billion increasingly networked citizens, an enormous potential force for "the destruction of sovereignty in favor of democracy." The middle section on the nature of that multitude is bookended by two others. The first describes the situation in which the multitude finds itself: "permanent war." The last grounds demands for and historical precursors of global democracy. Written for activists to provide a solid goal (with digressions into history and theory) toward which protest actions might move, this timely book brings together myriad loose strands of far left thinking with clarity, measured reasoning and humor, major accomplishments in and of themselves. (****)

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Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Summer's Cauldron

Irving_penn_honey_watr
"Oh, the summer time is coming
And the leaves are sweetly turning
And the wild mountain thyme
Blooms across the purple heather
Will you go, lassie, go?
If you will not go with me
I will surely find another
To pull wild mountain thyme
All across the purple heather"

--The Byrds, "Wild Mountain Thyme"

Honey Water by L'Occitane is gorgeous, liquid, golden, alive with the hazy-baked feel of hot sun and buzzy in the background with obese bumblebees drunk on amber pollen. It's alcohol free and so fine it can be sprayed directly on the face and neck and hair and shoulders when you're hot in your car in L.A. traffic or lying on the beach like an attenuated arm of driftwood, too perfect to move.

Once when I was a kid I fell asleep in the masses of white clover flower in the hayfields that went and went until they met the border of some other farm's fence and there I hallucinated dreadful rainbows in the waves of heat that hovered over the hayfields like silver ovoid UFOs.

My childhood in the seventies means hot summers and lurid color and danger to me, and being in the country means trouble and enough space for the imagination to run wild for better or for worse. A gang of brigands in every midnight floor creak and a world in every fucking flower, I'm telling you.

Just as an orphan in the enormous spaces of her uncle the king's castle will always have room for a world famous fairy tale to unfurl all around her, so the vast boring vacuum of nature was for me. Frankly, what didn't happen to me there? And if it didn't--well, I can always make it up.

Under mats of flower lava, copper chord of August's organ, I heard, I saw, I came, and when I woke up I was here, only this delicious drunken nectar to remind me.

All the real glamour and hippie weirdness of nature are in Honey Water, I swear to motherfucking god, and it's a right bargain at $30.

Link: L'OCCITANE en Provence - Honey Harvest - Gentle Water - Eau de Toilette - Fine Fragrances.

Tuesday, May 16, 2006 in Perfume |

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