Art Star Couple Double Suicide, Paranoia and the Edge of Reality

Sunday, May 13, 2007
The Trouble With Anna Gaskell

Children of the Staircase, meet Jim Cownie, above, also known as Des Moines-born, New York local artist Anna Gaskell's (top) legal guardian after the odd and unhappy coincidences of each of her parent's separate sudden deaths.

This would be regrettable, but of no personal consequence to The Wit Of The Staircase if it had not been for the extremely coordinated and professional physical and psychological harassment Mr. Wit Of The Staircase and I underwent subsequent to Mr. Wit creating an artwork entitled Winchester, a video trilogy based on the violence and guilt in the life of gun-company heiress Sarah Winchester and her subsequent neurotic construction of a house of endless new wings and rooms and doors and stairways meant to accommodate the ghosts of the victims of her family's dangerous product.

The harassment Mr. Wit and I are still enduring featured as its centerpiece an FBI file I earned as an undergrad in Detroit for protesting the plant closings there and doing other labor organizing. I also wrote several eloquent articles for Wayne State University's student newspaper demanding a Federal investigation into the Iran-Contra cover up when I was a freshman. Wit's family has generations of working class factory workers on my father's side, and generations of academic specialists in radical political movements on my mother's side. My mother, who currently works at Wayne State University and has a PhD in politcal science that is focused on Black Panther and other radical movements in the Midwest, also recently received harassing phone calls, as did my younger brother.

On the other hand Mr. Cownie--who built a wing on his Des Moines, Iowa home to house the orphaned Anna Gaskell and her younger brothers Jon, Jake, and Zach after their parents' untimely demise--is very generous in looking after his former business partner John Gaskell's children. He recently devoted $1.5 million to build a sports complex in Des Moines (named after himself, naturally) and gave $50,000 to the Des Moines Art Museum after that institution declined to fund a work that Anna Gaskell, who is also an artist like Mr. Wit, has been lobbying to permanently install there.

In addition to this community largesse, Cownie is a major Republican donor with ties to the Midwest's Heritage Groups, founded by the ultraconservative Adolph Coors with money from his brainchild The Heritage Foundation. Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Heritage Foundation's support for the Nicaraguan contras and Angola's Savimbi proved extremely influential with the United States government, including the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Council and other governmental agencies. The Heritage Foundation presented its case for armed support for these movements, and United States support soon followed.

According to this website at media transparency.org, "among other Heritage efforts have been the publications Beware of the Union Label, The Case for Plant Closures, Upsetting the Balance of U.S. Labor Law: The Striker Replacement Bill and In Praise of Corporate Radiers: Junking Three Fallacies About Hostile Takeovers.

The site further reports: "The U.S. labor movement is a particular target for Heritage. Ronald Reagan's first appointment to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) was Robert Hunter, a conservative activist who wrote the chapter on the Labor Department for the foundation's 'Mandate for Leadership.' In that paper, Hunter called for increasing the use of NLRB injunctions against unions, gutting the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and drastically cutting the Bureau of Labor Statistics."

Mr. Cownie is such an admirer of the Heritage Foundation's political program that he apparently went so far as to name the company from which his mysterious fortune emanates "Heritage Communications." Despite Mr. Cownie's funding of Anna Gaskell's Des Moines Museum vanity project and his keen interest in Mr. Wit's Winchester Series, he and now most of the younger male members of his family are professionally devoted to using Homeland Security pork to overturn decades of social progress and subverting values that the art coummunity struggles to represent and uphold. For example, author Russ Bellant states in his book The Coors Connection that The Heritage Groups "will continue to be a key element in the phalanx of rightist groups with an agenda of austerity for the poor, hostility to minorities and women, upward distribution of wealth for the rich, economic domination of the Third World, with repression and bloodletting for those who rebel.”

In addition to his business bona fides, Cownie also has a more colorful side behind the cryptic Bruce Wayneian businessman front. According to Mr. Wit of the Staircase, aka artist Jeremy Blake, (who briefly dated Ms. Gaskell for a year or so as an undergrad in art school and who as such was more than once a personal guest of Mr. Cownie's in the early 1990s) Jim Cownie has an oddly vast collection of firearms--an entire out building devoted to them in fact. Mr. Cownie also had a Hummer in 1992, way before they were a common sight. Then there were the mobster "friends" in Las Vegas who comped Mr. Wit and Ms. Gaskell with an eye roll and a groan when they mentioned Cownie's name at the front desk, as he had instructed them to do. In addition to the Gaskell orphans, Cownie has four or five children of his own. The oldest male Cownie child, then a teenager, even bragged to Mr. Wit during one visit "My Dad's going to get me in the CIA!"

Once the harassment of The Wits began, these disparate old Anna Gaskell anecdotes, which up to the late summer of 2006 had been completely unknown to me, began to suddenly bob up in Mr. Wit's memory. Mr. Wit's recollection was further jarred after we repeatedly witnessed Ms. Gaskell's brother Zach mysteriously pacing in front of our Venice California home. Then there were the many cars with Iowa license plates following us around Los Angeles at the time. (We took photos of these, naturally.) Mr. Wit during this time also suddenly remembered that busy Cownie often travelled to South Dakota to attend some of the Midwest's more unsavory biker rallies. But I guess being friends with ex-con bikers and Vegas mobsters doesn't necessarily point to somebody who would, like, hire thugs to harass, threaten or--wow--maybe even kill people.

Much of the harassment of me and Mr. Wit was also conducted by the Church Of Scientology in L. A., who Cownie also no doubt also "does business with." U.S. Intelligence "black ops" and "psy ops" have long relied on (or just outright invented) religious cults (including the Manson Family--Charles Manson received 150 hours of in-prison Scientology "auditing"), biker gangs, and the like in Federal Counterintelligence prorgrams in order to disrupt the counterculture since the 1960s. Read more about the CIA and cults here and couch jumping, Katie kidnapping mind controlled movie star Tom Crusie's meeting with Scooter Libby and State Department head Richard Armitage here.

While this ongoing illegal harassment of Wit using Federal employees (or their "cut-out" counterparts) and Federal funding (your Homeland Security tax dollars at work!) is meant to deprive us of work and our livelihoods and even sanity, the harassment also has a curious sexual focus on Wit that mirrors this J. Edgar Hoover campaign against Black Panther organizer and actress Jean Seberg.

Like the Federal "Cointelpro" campaign that deliberately drove Seberg to suicide, the smear campaign against Wit and Mr. Wit uses as its basis pre-existing, completely invented smears started by married art professor Ralph Rugoff and his student girlfriend Hilary Chartrand in order to cover up their 2000 affair while both worked at the California College of Arts And Crafts. This is something that sharp-eyed Wit accidentally discovered during one particularly dreary art dinner in November of that year. Hilary Chartrand is friends with Anna Gaskell, who is also known for carrying on affairs with her married professors in order to have access to ethics-challenged art world log rollers like NY Times critic Roberta Smith and her husband Jerry Saltz. (See article below.)

To add the final dessert topping to this apocalyptic art world sundae, Mr. Wit says that normally dour Cownie frequently made jokes about child molestation as a "training" tool. This wouldn't be so fucking spooky, friends of the Staircase, if Des Moines wasn't the land of the Project Monarch/U.S. Intelligence rumored disappearance of Johnny Gosch and the odd resemblance of poor little Johnny to Bush White House gay hooker-psychological operative Jeff Gannon.

Anyway, Ms. Gaskell and I don't seem to have much in common besides her very brief intersection with the life of Jeremy Blake, a period about which Mr. Wit says "She was so dumb, so arrogant and so mysteriously smug. She really thought she had some sort of advantage in every situation. I could never, ever figure out where that came from, because it sure wasn't coming from anything she did. But I guess now I know.")

This is a pretty ugly set of circumstances, and a weirder true tale than even Wit usually presents. But, as usual from what I hear, Ms. Gaskell has gotten somebody else to do the work of articulating and then cleaning up her mental messes for her. If you're reading this, Anna, here's some free advice: Stop accepting payoffs from Cownie immediately, get your younger brothers away from him, get a lawyer using only your own money, and have the lawyer get Cownie to answer a few questions about your mother and father.

If I were you, I'd even take a job in a factory in order to do it.

At this link below are the members of the board of one of the many oddly nondescript companies Cownie is linked with. It looks like a roll call of the unsavories from "Lumberton" in David Lynch's Twin Peaks: Wexford & James LLC.

Anna Gaskell: artnet.com Magazine News - THE ROYAL FLUSH.

Sunday, May 13, 2007 in Art | Permalink
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I don't know anything about this guy Cownie, but I am familiar with the "Church" of Scientology. Why do you think Cownie "does business" with the CoS?

Posted by: blavatsky | Sunday, May 20, 2007 at 01:35 AM

Current and former Federal intelligence officers are often employed by the CoS in attacking, researching and harassing their pereceived enemies.

I was harassed by the Church of Scientology during and after my boyfriend and I worked with their member Beck Hansen.

I have dozens of pictures of this harassment, including a dead cat, grafitti on and near our property, and four of five police reports with the LAPD to bear this out.

Also during this time, someone named Reza Aslan, a Muslim "scholar" and friend of a friend who attended school in Iowa came to my house in Venice, CA and freely chatted about an FBI file of mine he seemed vividly aware of, even though at that time I myself did not know such a file existed. A consequent FOIA filing revealed his "magic" knowledge of these documents to be true.

The overlap of a Muslim American seeming Homeland Security agent from Iowa asking me about my life in Detroit and the large Muslim population there (a population I sadlly never mixed with while I lived in Detroit as a lass) during the height of the Scientology harassment, and the continual mention of my heretofore unknow to me FBI file by members of the CoS indicates a blending of the two communities that is borne out in the history of the church's use of current former members of Federal intelligence agencies.

Also, as I mentioned above in the Cownie article, MK Ultra and other Strangelovian secret intelligence mind control techniques often used cults like the CoS, the Manson cult, and the Jim Jones cult to manipulate and infiltrate the left and the counterculture.

This "Cointelpro" program using cults and hypnosis, mind control, etc. is now well known thanks to lawsuits filed against the CoS, the Federal govt. by victims of these programs, and through the declassification of documents related to these Federal programs.

Also, a couple investigative journalists in the Midwest and California have been helping me look into Cownie's many companies' adresses, SEC filings, and other "follow the money" trails that conclusively point to financial dealings with the entities I suggest in the article above.

Posted by: Theresa Duncan | Sunday, May 20, 2007 at 04:16 PM

Scary business. I appreciate the explanation. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that the CoS would be involved in this sort of thing.

But why harass you with dead cats and such because you were working with Beck? Even if you had some sort of conflict with him, why couldn't he "handle" it with the amazing abilities he's gained from practicing Scientology? The fact that the CoS felt it had to play mob enforcer doesn't speak much for what the "tech" has done for Beck!

Best of luck with your investigation and dealing with these thugs.

Posted by: blavatsky | Monday, May 21, 2007 at 01:27 AM

Woah! I saw Winchester at SFMOMA and really liked it. I have Jeremy Blake's Winchester book too.

This is CRAZY!!

I really enjoyed the SFMOMA show. Apparently his show at the Corcoran this fall will go on.

Crazy artists be crazy.

I DIED, are you...?

???

I DIED is not dead

I thought so.

Though he may be missing.

I'm reminded of:

I'd love to go drowning
And to stay and to stay
But the ocean doesn't want me today
I'll go in up to here
It can't possibly hurt
All they will find is my beer
And my shirt
A rip tide is raging
And the life guard is away
But the ocean doesn't want me today

yeah it's a tom waits song about someone drowning

this sounds like a particularly confising william gibson novel

can someone condense??

this sounds like a particularly confising william gibson novel

yeah, that's the first thing i thought

xpost ok, I guess you're right. I just like the line about the beer and the shirt. I will hush up now. :(

more confusion your way:
http://theresalduncan.typepad.com/witostaircase/2007/05/stories_read_in.html

Yeah, I just saw that

Oh gawd.. I discovered Wit a month or two back, loved it, always meant to write fanmail..

Reading that blog entry makes Duncan seem more than a little paranoid (according to her, the Manson family, the Church of Scientology and other cults secretly work(ed) for US government to harass and get rid of leftist radicals) and possibly not quite well in her head, which I guess would explain the suicide.

Ladies and gentlemen, that's a wrap.

more info from:
http://ronrosenbaum.pajamasmedia.com/2007/07/21/the_death_of_theresa_duncan_ne.php

The Death of Theresa Duncan: News and Clues
Before trying to draw any conclusions here, are some further facts that have come to light in the wake of artist/blogger Theresa Duncan’s still unexplained suicide (see post below) on July 10 and the apparent suicide of her boyfriend jeremy Blake eight days later.

—The Suicide Notes:

The New York Daily New reports that when her boyfriend found her dead in their East Village apartment on July 10 he found a note. In a report headlined—again ambiguously—“Artist lost in surf likely killed self”, the News tells us Jeremy Blake, Theresa’s boyfriend “had suffered a devastating blow just eight days earlier, when he found his girlfriend of 12 years, filmmaker Theresa Duncan, 40, dead in the bedroom of their East Village apartment”

Here’s the key fact The Times didn’t have: “A bottle of pills and alcohol were found near Duncan’s body inside the E. 11th St. apartment. She left a suicide note saying that she was at peace with her decision and loved Blake and her family deeply, sources said.”

“Sources said”: one assumes these are cops or detectives. But the News adds something more: “The city medical examiner is waiting for tissue and toxicology test results to determine the cause of Duncan’s death.”

Assuming by “determine the cause” they mean what kind of pills she used tokill herself, not whether she killed herself, that still doesn’t explain the real cause.

As for the boyfriend’s death or disappearance The News also has another fact The Times did not: “A woman called cops after she watched the 6-foot-2 Blake walk into the ocean in Rockaway Parkway about 10:30 p.m. Tuesday,” eight days after her death.

The fact that “a woman” called in the 911 report is important I once had a friend who, in a moment of deep despondency, parked his car by a dock, left his clothes and wallet in it, to make it appear like suicide. And then just took off, disappeared. Faked his suicide. Until he showed up at my apartment and I talked him into going back to his family.

When I first read of the boyfriends’s disappearance/suicide it occurred to me that he could have been the one who called in a 911 report of someone fitting his description leaving his clothes behind and walking into the ocean and leaving his wallet behind, he then could have, for any number of reasons, disappeared rather than died.

Now that seems less likely. Unless he had the help of a woman. Which is what makes the surfacing of one of his ex-girlfriends in the case a little troubling.

—Enter the ex-girlfriend. She appears in what seems to be the first report of Theresa’s death, on the LA Observed blog of Kevin Roderick on Thursday July 19th:

Possible news on Theresa Duncan *
Kevin Roderick
Writer, filmmaker and perfume aficionado Theresa Duncan has not posted at her Venice-based blog, The Wit of the Staircase, since July 10. She gave no indication of taking a break, and now an Internet discussion forum has posted an unconfirmed report that Duncan killed herself last week in New York City, where she was making a film. From the same report, her partner of many years, artist Jeremy Blake, is missing off New York’s Rockaway Beach, where a man was seen going into the ocean Tuesday night. The news comes from Anya McCoy, a Florida perfumer who says she spoke with an ex-girlfriend of Blake. I can find no recent news reports tonight on Duncan in New York or her hometown of Detroit, so I’ll stress again that none of this is confirmed.

Now on in the Sunday July 22 New York Post we learn something about the second suicide note, the one found withthe wallet and clothes of the boyfriend Jeremy Blake as he apparently walked into the sea to kill himself although the News reports a search including copters has not spotted a body yet:

“In the short note, Blake said he was ‘despondent’ over the July 10 pill overdose death of his filmmaker girlfriend…He wrote that he could not imagine living without her by his side.”

Well I wish the use of the word “despondent” didn’t raise a flag to me. If you’re truly despondent do you check out of life saying I’m really really “despondent”?

—The Sylvia Plath Connection

A commenter to the last post offered several possible new avenues to approach the case with , so I’m going to reprint it here. The connection to Theresa Duncan’s fairly recent post on the suicide of another 40 year old woman artist, a poet, and the poet’s connection to Sylvia Plath (follow the Boston Globelink) is certainly suggestive:

I had never heard of Theresa Duncan, but I have been reading her blog off and on all day. I posted this on my own blog…
http://dreamdogsart.typepad.com/art/

I also noticed this entry on “The Wit” about a 40-yr old brilliant poetry professor, Sarah Hannah, who recently committed suicide…

http://theresalduncan.typepad.com/witostaircase/2007/06/pink_unthinking.html

Did this death trigger something?

There are also reports calling her Blake’s ex-girlfriend….

http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Entertainment/2007/07/21/ny_artist_missing_after_apparent_suicide/6187/

And the News has this quote from “a friend of the couple who “said he had a hard time imagining the two committing suicide. ‘Suicide would never be on their to-do list,’ he said. ‘The narrrative of the wallet and the clothes under the boardwalk, it’s like somebody writing a cliche, it’s not them. It would be embarrassing to them. It seems too calculated for the most uncalculated people. I can see some teenager in Idaho who listens to Marilyn Manson doing this, but not them.”
’

Here by the way is Theresa’s haunting last post:

Monday, July 09, 2007
Goodnight, Children, We’re In The Arms Of The Great Lover

“Then, the cool kindliness of sheets, that soon
Smooth away trouble; and the rough male kiss
Of blankets….”

~Rupert Brooke, The Great Lover

See you in the a.m.

Monday, July 09, 2007 in The Wit Of The Staircase | Permalink

I'm guessing that they are calling Duncan a former girlfriend because she predeceased him, but it could also mean something else.

Her site is now gone, but the text is available in Google's cache.

knew I printed that shit out last night for a reason

knew I printed that shit out last night for a reason

Yeah, I grabbed her entire site a couple days ago when the story broke. I've been reading her blog for almost two years now and dug her writing a lot.

I was looking forward to delving into it tonight, having (unfortunately) just discovered it.

Elvis, do you by any chance have an e-copy? I have it in a reader, but text only - and it looks barren without the pictures..

Her site is now gone, but the text is available in Google's cache.

I'm grabbing it now. She sure could write... Sad sad story.

Elvis, do you by any chance have an e-copy?

Here's the whole works including pictures, style sheets, etc.

http://rapidshare.com/files/44880077/WitOfTheStaircase.zip.html

LA Times story -- nothing much in here not already reported.

um, the site seems to still be there in the usual place

um, the site seems to still be there in the usual place

Yeah... TypePad was knocked out by the SF blackout.

Based on that LA Times article and the blog entry this seems like a case of folie à deux.

that's what the thetans would have you believe

Why was that Cownie guy harrassing her?

Because she knew Beck was a secret government agent.

Here's the whole works..

I know the site's back, but thanks for doing that.

Theresa’s site was the reason I started using rss – so many updates, each one so quietly betwitching.. I didn’t want to miss anything. She somehow managed to connect these marginal passions (“Interests: Film, philology, Vietnam War memorabilia, rare and discontinued perfume, book collecting, philately, card and coin tricks, futurism, Napoleon Bonaparte, the history of electricity”) into something coherent, universal. An aesthetic, I suppose. A world built out of spider’s web.

I loved it because I couldn’t do it myself.

Here by the way is Theresa’s haunting last post:

Monday, July 09, 2007
Goodnight, Children, We’re In The Arms Of The Great Lover

fyi this was not the last post, there were two after it. the last one was the reynolds price quote about storytelling (as noted in the NYT story)

were they by her?

http://www.app.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070726/NEWS/707260351

this has movie written all over it

Posted by: mfm1010 on Thu Jul 26, 2007 1:13 pm

Blake confirmed :(

http://www.silive.com/newsflash/metro/index.ssf?/base/news-27/1185905043318520.xml&storylist=simetro

this is sad - she reminds me of k3rry

Some more information. Terrible all around.

Longish article from today's LA Weekly from a decidedly different viewpoint:
http://www.laweekly.com/news/news/the-theresa-duncan-tragedy/16942/?page=1

Not surprisingly, the Real Person behind something you like (blog, album, whatever) is a whole lot more complex and erratic than you might think. I hate thinking that in the 21st century there are still things that lead someone to conclude that suicide is a logical decision, but that's just my knee-jerk reaction to tragedy.

Vanity Fair article this month is kind of interesting in giving a bit more context to the paranoia. I am paranoid myself of course so I think there is probably something to the 'hounded by scientologists' angle, at least at the beginning. But the way things unravel at the end just seems weird, and the article doesn't shed any light on that.

conspiracy theory begats conspiracy theory:

http://aconstantineblacklist.blogspot.com/2007/08/abstract-murder-of-theresa-duncan_5680.html

the really crazy people never have any web design skills

On November 30, 2008 the New York Post's Page Six reported that Bret Easton Ellis is writing a screenplay about Duncan and Blake. Director Gus Van Sant has signed on as a consultant for the movie, which is being produced by Braxton Pope and Andrew Weiner of Ithaka films along with Lionsgate.

Ellis and Van Sant involvement confirmed

Gus Van Sant and author Bret Easton Ellis will team to write a feature about the double suicide of artists Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake.
PalmStar Entertainment, Celluloid Dreams and K5 Film have acquired screen rights to "The Golden Suicides," a Vanity Fair article written by Nancy Jo Sales.

Van Sant, who helmed "Milk" and is prepping the Columbia Pictures drama "Restless," is involved only as writer at this point.

Ithaka Entertainment's Braxton Pope will produce with PalmStar's Kevin Frakes and Celluloid Dreams' Hengameh Panahi.

Duncan and Blake formed a popular couple on the downtown New York and Venice, Calif., art scenes. She was one of the first videogame designers for girls, and his "digital paintings" -- kaleidoscopic images shown on plasma screens -- established him as a rising star on the circuit.

The couple descended into a paranoid spiral when the artists developed a consuming belief that government and religious organizations were conspiring against them. She killed herself in 2007. Blake found her body on the floor of their bedroom, and walked into the Atlantic Ocean a week later, ending his life.

Patrick Siaretta, Oliver Simon and Daniel Baur will be exec producers, and Courtney Andrialis is co-producer.

Jeremy Blake is an important and incredible artist I think and it really is sad that he is gone.

one of my best friends is totally obsessed w/this story; i had almost forgotten about it until she reminded me of it a week ago.

i dunno about GVS's death flicks, they always remind me of this horrible award-winning short story i read once about a kid remembering his freewheeling older brother and how he died after running into a sliding glass door and getting a shard of glass stuck in his neck and he bled out in front of everyone and i guess it was supposed to have some kind of deep meaning....don't remember who wrote that piece of shit...

but this story sounds like it would be a lot more interesting.

i think jeremy blake has a similar sort of queer aesthetic to GVS and has a similar formal stillness.

weird that he made that video for beck who is a SCIENTOLOGIST

yeah - I saw his Westminster piece a while back and the cowboy/American West iconography definitely seemed to have that going on.

who will play him, mark ruffalo? naomi watts for duncan.

as long as this results in a retrospective i'm happy

his work didn't do a whole lot for me as far as video art goes, but i think it's pretty interesting looking at it in the context of painting.

yeah exactly!

its more like he's using time as a compositional element of painting moreso than being video art

that makes a lot of sense.

this horrible award-winning short story i read once about a kid remembering his freewheeling older brother and how he died after running into a sliding glass door and getting a shard of glass stuck in his neck and he bled out in front of everyone and i guess it was supposed to have some kind of deep meaning....don't remember who wrote that piece of shit...

I have totally read this - what story is this?! Anybody else know? I can't remember...

yeah i really want to know, it was pretty rough

was it michael cunningham, in a home at the end of the world maybe? or paul auster? i've totally read that.

i've totally read that too and it's KILLING me not remembering who wrote it

i dunno about GVS's death flicks,

to be honest gus van sant seems like kind of a vampire to me. he dresses up his melodramas in arty longueurs but they remain exploitative at the core.

I hope they do the whole backstory of them meeting in the DC post-hardcore scene with elliot gould playing a young ian sevonius.

Gaspar Noé is directing the brett easton ellis project??

who will play him, mark ruffalo? ...

― velko, Tuesday, October 27, 2009 3:19 PM (2 years ago)

it will happen

Not if the sci-ties have anything to say about it.

Jeremy Blake is an important and incredible artist I think and it really is sad that he is gone.
― plax (I know, right?), Tuesday, October 27, 2009 6:00 PM (4 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ended up reading the NYMag / VF pieces on Duncan and Blake after coming across Blake doing the cover art for Sea Change/the paranoid Scientology aftermath. Expected Blake's artwork to be some dumb multimedia bullshit but wow, the Winchester stuff, some of his one-off video pieces ... legit amazing work.

This followup from 2012 is worth a read too: Theresa Duncan And Jeremy Blake, The Suicides That 'Launched A Thousand Blogs'

Those are some fair crits-- Sales' piece leans on Morales' account of that week between deaths quite a bit; but, it reads like color analysis and isn't really all that vital (or at least Morales doesn't really offer a whole lot).

What's frustrating is that basically none of the profiles really dive into the paranoia / conspiracy angle, aside from a perfunctory comment from Beck and a bunch of friends saying that Duncan/Blake thought they were the victims of a conspiracy. I figured it was mostly due to the journalists' confidence that the couple was delusional and it might come off as kinda gross / unsympathetic to treat their concerns as justified. Or, the couple was so spooked that they just refused to share any of their findings w/ people on the outside, even friends/family. And, if they were both becoming unwound, an explanation of the folie imposée / folie à deux angles would have been interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvVjWKc-qC0

^^^^^^^^ Either way Blake dope as fuck, wish I'd come across his work sooner.

That piece also links to this blog, which includes this post: Duncan and Blake "Suicides" Solved-- The Omaha/Des Moines Allegations, MediaBistro.com Data Mining and the CIA

http://aconstantineblacklist.blogspot.com/2008/02/duncan-blake-suicides-solved.html

I finally read Constantine's blog post and behind the conspiracy lorem ipsum there's was very little to chew on other than the standard "mysterious death of person who investigated too close to the truth" line that every theorist uses. Not the first time I run across an unsatisfying conspiracy theory. The data mining/CIA angle is interesting because in the post-Snowden era it seems trivial to order up custom-targeted gaslighting. Your already have your target's complete electronic communication history, exploiting that data to induce mistrust and paranoia is the obvious next step.

Folie-à-deux always felt like an intangible phenomena until I watched the documentary on the Eriksson sisters. Highly recommend it.

Duncan/Blake-themed episode of Law & Order also disappointing, but mainly because it's a crummy season 18 episode.

doubly endorse 'madness in the fast lane' that shit is so compelling

Got talking about this case a couple of days ago. I'm not suggesting that something start a podcast about this, but I certainly would listen.

I'd echo that.