Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan believed that Scientologists were stalking them. In fact, they had no way of knowing who was interfering in their lives. The newspapers reported this much of the story. They neglected to mention that she also suspected " ... a prominent Republican donor connected to the Heritage Foundation. ... "The CIA's mind control perps often lead the subject to believe that someone else is responsible for the harassment, stalking and invasive interference in their lives and minds. It wasn't necessarily Scientology. The Theresa Duncan case remains open, and there are obvious leads in the death of the famed art blogger:
" ... On July 8 she wrote she was working on a new political essay, under the title 'The Devil And Dick Cheney'. On July 5, she wrote: So it must be clear by now, children of the Staircase, that MK-ULTRA (and even weird, disinfo-saturated Project Monarch) are the ne plus ultra weapons of past decades... "
Lest I be accused of avoiding the subject, AC was obviously an influence on her political views - she writes about Operation Mockingbird, the CIA & cults, mind control history and other of my pet topics. Ever feel way over your head, grappling with a man-eating Leviathon? It may have claimed Theresa - and this is a source of massive sadness to me. Sometimes, the grief that comes with the research is also way over my head. This is one of those instances.
We list at sea and it can claim us at any moment. Theresa did not go gently into that good night. May she NEVER rest in peace. Some things are more important than life itself.
- AC
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The apparent double suicide of Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan
Friends cite strange behavior in the final days of a golden couple in the art world.
http://www.calendarlive.com/galleriesandmuseums/cl-et-blake25jul25,0,5067221.story?coll=cl-art-features
Los Angeles Times
By Chris Lee
July 25, 2007
It's been just eight days since rising art star Jeremy Blake was seen wandering into the ocean off New York's Rockaway Beach -- presumably to his death -- a week after he discovered that his blogger-filmmaker girlfriend, Theresa Duncan, had taken her life in their East Village apartment.
But the apparent double suicide of this glamorous, intellectual couple has confounded and disturbed the art world in New York, London and Los Angeles, where they lived together for several years. Many were shocked by the turn of events while others noted that the couple had acted strangely in their final months together.
According to several friends and art world peers, the two believed they were being stalked and harassed by Scientologists, an abiding fear that soured old friendships and made some of their respective working relationships difficult.
Christine Nichols, a colleague and friend of Blake's since 1998, produced two art exhibitions, two books and a record in conjunction with the artist through the New York art gallery she co-founded, Works on Paper Inc. Nichols dates the couple's rising sense of "paranoia" to around 2004, two years after Blake created an album cover for alternative-rock star Beck, who is a practicing Scientologist.
"They thought Scientologists were really harassing them," Nichols said. "They would say, 'They are following us, harassing our landlord.' I did not see any evidence of that.
"But it got to be something that was huge to them -- a 'You're either with us or against us' thing where if you didn't believe them, you weren't on their side. The story they had woven in paranoia and conspiracies took over part of their lives. A lot of us couldn't understand that acting out."
Two other art world sources corroborated Nichols' characterization but declined to speak on the record out of concern that Blake may still be alive.
Beck was unavailable for comment, but his manager, through a publicist, let it be known that things were "extremely cordial" between the singer and the artist the last time they talked three years ago.A spokesman said the New York Police Department was not investigating any involvement by the Church of Scientology. Karin Pouw, a spokeswoman for the Church of Scientology, denied the allegations, saying, "Never heard of these people. This is completely untrue. ... "
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http://yournewreality.blogspot.com/2007/07/suicide-of-arts-blogger-from-new-york.html
Weapons Of Mass InformationTuesday, July 24, 2007
'Suicide' Of Controversial Arts Blogger Theresa Duncan
"Vital Part Of The Story Missing"
Blogger Theresa Duncan interviews Frank Morales six weeks before her death: "On July 8 she wrote she was working on a new political essay, under the title 'The Devil And Dick Cheney'.
On July 5, she wrote :
"So it must be clear by now, children of the Staircase, that MK-ULTRA (and even weird, disinfo-saturated Project Monarch) are the ne plus ultra weapons of past decades, as if all the Cold War missile paranoia was just a smoke screen for all the body snatchers the Pentagon was beginning to hatch."
UPDATE : Ron Rosenbaum claims that, contrary to the New York Times story excerpted below, his checking the facts of Theresa Duncan's death with the New York City Police Department and the City Medical Examiner’s Office reveals that her death has "not yet been officially ruled a suicide" :
To my knowledge no evidence has come to light suggesting murder or accidental death. But the authorities aren’t commenting, awaiting, for one thing, toxicology reports on Duncan they say may not be available for at least two weeks.
A verdict “on the cause and manner of her death” is still “pending investigation” is all a spokesman for the Medical Examiner said she was authorized to say.
Meanwhile the body of Theresa Duncan’s boyfriend, Jeremy Blake—who reportedly committed suicide in the waters off Rockaway Beach because he was “despondent” over Theresa’s death—has still not been found.
But in the meantime, 'Anonymous' commenters are filling up blog sites with claims that both Theresa and partner Jeremy Blake were mentally ill and "deeply troubled", which we examine in more detail below. Interesting then that the many 'Anonymous' comments we've read so far, from a close look at the writing styles and syntax, seem to have been written by the same one or two people.
From the New York Times :
In a case that is reverberating in the art world, the New York Police Department said yesterday that a video-game designer and budding filmmaker committed suicide last week and that her companion, a rising art star, has been missing since Tuesday.
The filmmaker, Theresa Duncan, 40, who has also drawn attention for her writings on cultural topics, committed suicide in their East Village apartment on July 10, the police said. Her companion, Jeremy Blake, 35, a well-regarded artist known for digital animation that blurs the line between abstract painting and film, has been missing since his clothes were found on a beach in the Rockaways on Tuesday evening, they added.
Found with the clothes was a note that made reference to Ms. Duncan, the police said.
Theresa Duncan also ran an arts and literary blog we visited occasionally called 'Wit Of The Staircase'.
In a post on her blog the day she died, July 10, Theresa quoted novelist Reynolds Price :
"Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small accounts of our day's events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths."
The night before she killed herself, she headed a short post 'Goodnight, Children, We're In The Arms Of The Great Lover'. The Great Lover being sleep.
On July 8 she wrote she was working on a new political essay, under the title 'The Devil And Dick Cheney'.
On July 5, she wrote :
So it must be clear by now, children of the Staircase, that MK-ULTRA (and even weird, disinfo-saturated Project Monarch) are the ne plus ultra weapons of past decades, as if all the Cold War missile paranoia was just a smoke screen for all the body snatchers the Pentagon was beginning to hatch.
Mind control and psychological warfare are the primary weapons that led to our current Monarch Moment. Cults like Scientology and mind control-manufactured Monarch girlies and Operation Mockingbird are the fungus among us that has been eating away at the foundations of democracy for decades....
And then linked to this video, a strange and troubling documentary on the history of American intelligence and military run mind control experimentation:
The NYT story claimed her partner Jeremy Blake found her body :
Mr. Kinz said that Mr. Blake told him he had discovered Ms. Duncan’s body after she committed suicide. He said he had spoken with Mr. Blake after her death and that, while devastated and grieving, “he seemed to be very much in control and to be coping with it.”
News of her death spread fast amongst her friends, and in the New York art circles. Her blog averaged 800-900 visits a day while she alive. There was an increase of a few hundred extra visitors a day in the week after she died, perhaps friends and family members who had never visited her blog much before, but went there in search of learning something about why she did what she did.
On the day this story about her death appeared in the New York Times, the visits to her site shot up to more than 10,000 :
There are a growing number of blogs, FaceBook and MySpace pages belonging to people who've died. Often families and friends don't take down the pages, leaving them online as a personal memorial, with farewell messages from loved ones filling the comments. I've been told there are at least 200 or so MySpace pages from Americans, Brits and Iraqis who've died in the Iraq War still online. Permanent portraits of the lives and minds of the dead. As permanent as the internet remains anyway.
Sometimes you find the personal blogs and web sites of the dead are just as the creator left them the day they died. There is nothing on Theresa's site, at the moment, to say she died, or how she died. There is just the blog she created and filled with images and quotes from books and poetry that meant something to her, that she wanted to share with the world.
Many artists dream of some kind of immortality. Her blog renders her immortal in at least one sense : you can learn something of her life, her interests, her passions and her sadness from moving through the few months of archives.
It would be a shame indeed if her site, 'The Wit Of The Staircase' was taken down now she's gone. It is filled with sometimes beautiful, sometimes stark paintings, photography and artwork, and enough interesting and thought-provoking quotes and excerpts of novelists and poets to point any visitor towards searching out and reading something new they might never have come across had Theresa not created and filled this site.
UPDATE : Marshall Sponder, of Art In NYC, isn't convinced the full story of Theresa Duncan's death, and the disappearance of Jeremy Blake, has been told :
"there's some vital part of the story that's missing here..."
Theresa Duncan claimed back in May on her blog that she and Blake were being harassed, threatened, smeared and stalked by Scientologists, and a prominent Republican donor connected to the Heritage Foundation:
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.
On June 1, Theresa engaged in something of a slanging match in the comments of Charm School, after the blog posted on her then recent interview with Episcopal priest Frank Morales. In the comments, she sounded like she had important information she wanted to share with as many people as possible. Charm School described the interview as an "elevated" discourse on:
Gov't conspiracies, dissent in art, Scientology, Christianity as subversion and Jesus as Insurrectionist, some meaning of Time, Lennon, P.K. Dick, Disney, St. Paul, the truth about 911, how the artist must take risks...
Charm School pays tribute to Theresa here, and points out that the New York Times, the New York Post and other media stories that reported on her death: are whitewashed of any mention of the harassment Wit claims she and her longtime lover suffered.
Theresa seemed to identify with the actress Jean Seberg, of whom she wrote:
The declassified "Cointelpro" FBI document requesting permission to smear the actress and Black Panther activist Jean Seberg. J. Edgar Hoover sent letters to the Los Angeles press claiming that Seberg's pregnancy was the result of an affair with a Black Panther. Seberg, who was married to playwright Romain Gary, subsequently miscarried due to the stress of the scandal. She and Gary buried their child in a glass coffin to prove that the dead child was Gary's, and to show the public that they had been lied to. Seberg suffered mental health problems for years afterward, and eventually succeeded in commiting suicide after many attempts. Seberg was gorgeous, one of kind. She can be seen in "Breathless" "Bonjour Tristesse" and Otto Preminger's "Joan of Arc.
The method of suicide Theresa Duncan allegedly chose was pills and alcohol, but an official verdict on the cause of death has not yet been made public, contrary to the "It's over" style of reporting in the New York Times, which claimed a police source had confirmed suicide.
UPDATE : The interview Theresa Duncan conducted with Father Frank Morales in late May also includes her partner Jeremy Blake commenting on how the punk music scene had changed in New York since the 9/11 attacks.
Very interesting.
The general tone of the interview, while discussing government and military programs against the American people, certainly doesn't sound like a person who was either suicidal or mentally ill.
Theresa sounds like somebody who was soaking up new information and sharing her knowledge and thirsting for more. She also supplies some of the best insights into Philip K Dick's infamous 'epiphany' that you'll read online.
One further note, many of the documents and government and military programs Frank Morales discusses in this interview are declassified and available online. So it's best not to dismiss the entire conversation as wacko conspiracy talk. If you pay attention, and follow up with some critical Googling, you might learn some very interesting things.
UPDATE : The smearing of Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Duncan by 'Anonymous' commenters has well and truly begun.
