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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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Wednesday, July 26, 2006

The Unheimlich Hills And Canyons Of Los Angeles, California

Furniture_in_tree_1"The German word 'unheimlich' is obviously the opposite of 'heimlich' ['homely'], 'heimisch' ['native'] the opposite of what is familiar; and we are tempted to conclude that what is 'uncanny' is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar. Naturally not everything that is new and unfamiliar is frightening, however; the relation is not capable of inversion."

--Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny

Mr. Wit Of The Staircase and I are looking to buy a house in Los Angeles, most likely Topanga Canyon, and I can't tell you what this has thrown up from the Wit unconscious. (Though of course we will try, as one of our goals here on the Staircase is to describe the undescribable.) The dreams, mon dieu, they are fascinating, though on the nauseating side, causing their own kind of morning- or seasickness.

Each dawn I produce one dream like Madame Oyster does Mademoiselle Pearl, and then I hold her up to the new light, marvelling at her meanings and her many nacreous layers. Even though my dreams now are transparent, they are totally tough, and they take just like a woman.

If you enjoy interpreting this stuff like I do (I'm a Nabokovian lepidopterist in this way, and I leave each luminescent linguistic specimen posted on a pin in some curator's fancy of cross-category cataloging) the discomfort they cause is usually in proportion to their beauty and signifigance, and therefore a boon and joy.

Every nightmare is a gift, I guess you could say, and those ones that first elude me, sending me chasing for miles over hill and dale in a pith helmet with an empty butterfly net, are often the ones that are my "pretties", my prize possessions, my frosted pink petit fours. My motherfucking pearlllssss.

Anyway, Wit and its dreams and daredevil feats of (mis?) interpretation may soon be coming to you from a canyon, and not just the one down in my skull where the dead men go. Call it Radio Topanga, if you please.

And should you be in Los Angeles do drop us a line so we don't get lonely out there among the coyotes and the cliffs and that slender creek that runs down to the ocean, where the lovely mer-men flow.

All alone, yep. With all you beautiful people out there in the dark and just our opalized and wingified dreams for company. Hollywooding, just like a little girl.

Wednesday, July 26, 2006 in Los Angeles, Philosophy |

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