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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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Monday, August 28, 2006

The Keys To The Kingdom: Not Dead, Just Drunk

The_low_god_of_summer"I prefer to think that God is not dead, just drunk." ~John Huston

Sometimes, though it has nothing to do with Wit's certainty that God, like John Huston, is dead, we like to get a bit drunk. And when we look into the gloaming California light at the bottom of our empty, still cold glass of Ardmore at 5:30 p.m.--down through the peaty, honeyed head, past the breath of heather and down, down to the bottom where the kiss of coal tar soap lingers--well, what do we see stirring there? Not God, certainly.

No, the small low gods of Staircase happy hour (we call it Full Fathom Five) are ideas. The ones that come unbidden, to suddenly re-electrify us after a few fallow hours where we wonder in this Golden Land of Scientology Gone Wild and wiretapping what it's all about. Ideas that quietly alight from Santa Monica crosstown bus 000 and climb the Staircase like runaways with unwashed faces. They approach not on little cat feet (like the June Gloom fog Venice is famous for) but on shoplifted high heels, or on supercharged Tesla currents that leave behind sulphrous after-smells of the bergamot, lime, and ylang ylang of Parfums Del Rae's Debut. There's nothing cleaner and brighter and sharper than Debut, which smells like hope, because hey--this is still Hollywood, and hey--you never know.

Ideas ring the air around here like a finger spun around the wet rim of a half drained crystal wine goblet. They pour from the chunk of glass flacon that just barely holds Debut, and no one, once they are released will ever contain them again. Debut makes us feel as new as an eighteen year old when under its green-gold anti-ecclesiastical influence. (In perfume, as in thought, time doens't follow a straight line, but travels forward, then backward, on opalled-out green hummingbird wings. From this same bird's flower-fucking proboscis hangs a fat joint rolled with Debut's wet lily of the valley, linden blossom, and cyclamen.)

Del Rae's Debut is an alternating current electric flower-bong under whose influence I finally saw god. He was playing dress up with flowers in front of humanity's vanity-mirror, grateful that most of us had grown up and didn't need him. In the peculiar Staircasean anti-religion Bigfoot is the disappearing Dad, the big man whose guidance most of my generation never had and then sought on Loch Ness, Yeti, UFO and other nineteen seventies cryptocreature expeditions. Bigfoot's enormity, overcompensatory hairiness and giant masculine swinging balls smoke like two round church censers, obscene orbs that emit Debut's heavy, heavenly basenotes of vetyver, sandalwood and musk.

Hear me Saints and Sinners, we were heaven's latchkey kids, and you motherfuckers will never lock us up now. Wear Debut as a hair of the Daddy dog that bit you: a sort of post-theological God repellent that proves with inarguable scent-logic where the power really lies. Over here, no over here, no over here...

Monday, August 28, 2006 in Los Angeles, Perfume |

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