We've gotten so used to thin, contradictory cover stories for certain "suicides," or political murders, that the press and blogs rush in to eulogize on the "reasons for Theresa Duncan's suicide" before it has even been ruled a "suicide."
And the CIA's perception managers on the Net know how to slip in a belief - take it as a given. Discuss the "suicide," and soon everyone will take it for granted without giving it a second thought. Media-programmed proles - uncomfortable with thinking for themselves - follow suit. Must be a "suicide." Let's sentimentalize with a mascara-stained Tammy Faye Baker impression ...
Always excuse political murder, allow the CIA to kill anyone of us, con us, because if we have to face reality ... why, this frail little mortal quisling nervous system couldn't take it. Let's live out the next "suicide" lie and revile anyone who says otherwise. Spit on the Constantines.
I'll just move away to a country of one and live in reality.
Where did all the flags go?
You-all can have the Fox News/CNN version of reality, spit on those who are fighting for your rights, proselatyze over the "suicides" and "lone nut" murders ... as a substitute for intelligence.
Many bloggers are, in a metaphorical sense, my children. They learned about the world, in some part, from me. Theresa Duncan was one of them, and I know this after reading her blog. I will not call her death a "suicide" until I know it as a fact.
- AC
Posted: Tue Jul 24, 2007 8:55 am
Post subject: Theresa Duncan
Posted on the blog last night
After the Ambulances Go
"Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life." - Simone Weil
The image above was posted by Theresa Duncan on her eclectic blog The Wit of the Staircase, July 10. Later that day, Theresa's boyfriend of 12 years, Jeremy Blake, discovered her body in their East Village apartment, an evident suicide. ("A bottle of pills and alcohol were found near Duncan's body [and] she left a suicide note saying that she was at peace with her decision and loved Blake and her family deeply.") A week later, a man was seen walking into the ocean at Rockaway Park, and not walking out. Blake's wallet and clothing, and his suicide note, were found beneath the boardwalk.
Duncan and Blake were both career artists and filmmakers. Theresa was also a game designer, a culture critic and a reader of this blog. "Paranoia seems to us an absolute patriotic duty at the moment," she wrote a year ago, "and Rigorous Intuition is like the incredibly symbolically twisted and bizarre dream you wake up from to realize that the scenario thrown up from the unconscious is actually the expression of some very simple truth you had been desperate to avoid facing." It was last May that Theresa faced hers, and posted "The Trouble with Anna Gaskell," in which she described an ongoing campaign of harassment against herself and Jeremy, and the long shadow cast by Des Moines' businessman Jim Cownie, "a major Republican donor with ties to the Midwest's Heritage Groups, founded by the ultraconservative Adolph Coors."
Cownie became the legal guardian of New York-based artist Gaskell and her siblings following the early deaths of her parents (her father was Cownie's business partner). While an undergraduate she dated Jeremy Blake for about a year. It was during that time that Blake got to know Cownie as well.
Cownie has an oddly vast collection of firearms--an entire out building devoted to them in fact.... Then there were the mobster "friends" in Las Vegas who comped Mr. Wit [Jeremy] 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 [Jeremy and Theresa] 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.
...
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.
She concludes with advice for Anna Gaskell: "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."
When news of the deaths of Duncan and Blake were posted on Metafilter, a clue to the cause of their presumed suicides was Theresa's "paranoid screed," in which many of the "bugbears of the psy-ops crowd were put on Duncan's mental merry-go-round and given a real strong spin." The words "psy-ops crowd" were linked to the RI forum.
I don't know how I could begin assessing from here, tonight, the merits of Duncan's story and the legitimacy of the verdict of suicide. I do know it would be indecent to try. We enjoy mysteries. We even revel in the great mysteries that may mean either our destiny or our doom. But God help us if we become a mystery. And I don't want to make one now of Theresa Duncan.
I've known people who've had dead cats hung at their doorstep; who've been poisoned and burgled, and received death threats all because of the work they do and the privileged interests they challenge. I know they're not making shit up, because I know them. But if you didn't know them, to hear them talk sometimes, you might want to think they were. Because maybe it would be better if they were a little deluded than that they were describing the world. Even if you did know them, for their sakes you might want to think so, too.
But both harassment and the delusion of harassment are real, and a paranoid screed can also be one's patriotic duty. Murders and suicides happen all the time, as do murders that mimic suicide, and less frequently the reverse. Advocating for justice and truth and a closure to mystery does not mean forever contending that death must come by another hand. And sometimes we ought to be adamant that we simply don't know.
Two days before her death, on Sunday, July 8, Duncan wrote that she had another political essay in the works and would post it later. She'd entitled it, "The Devil and Dick Cheney." What would she have said? We don't know.
Asta
Joined: 16 May 2005
Posts: 169
Posted: Tue Jul 24, 2007
Did you read her blog entry of July 5, 2007, "Citizen Wit and Project Monarch"? When I saw that, it gave me chills.
Quote:
"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....
King Bush? Emperor Cheney? They don't call it Monarch for nothin'."
Back to top
Uncle $cam
Joined: 03 Nov 2006
Posts: 40
Posted: Wed Jul 25, 2007 1:59 am Post subject: Don't know about anyone else...
Don't know about anyone else, but her entries on Friday, June 29, 2007 entitled: Beware The Undertow
Here: http://theresalduncan.typepad.com/witostaircase/2007/06/beware-the-unde.html
and her other one, "Night Falls Fast: Ten Books by Authors Who Offed Themselves" Saturday, July 23, 2005
Here: http://theresalduncan.typepad.com/witostaircase/2005/07/night_falls_fas.html
kinda creep me out...
Trifecta
Joined: 07 Oct 2005
Posts: 519
Location: United Kingdom
Posted: Wed Jul 25, 2007 10:12 am
Post subject: The Trouble With Anna Gaskell
Sunday, May 13, 2007
The Trouble With Anna Gaskell
Gaskell_3
Jim_cownieChildren 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.
http://theresalduncan.typepad.com/witostaircase/2007/05/the_trouble_wit.html
_________________
Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two. ~ Octavio Paz
Back to top
chiggerbit
Joined: 10 May 2005
Posts: 3631
Posted: Wed Jul 25, 2007 11:25 am Post subject:
Works by Anna Gaskell:
http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_works_191_0.html
