Yes, you read right. This is a blog post, about reporters reporting on their reporting. And I think that reporting on the reporting is worth….well….reporting to you.
(Clearly I’m in need of more sleep. ) (Or coffee.) (Or both.)
FishBowl LA has just run a post in which LA Weekly’s Kate Coe and the LA Times’, Chris Lee talk about issues surrounding reporting on the ongoing Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake tragedy. (Coe would want me to tell you that she doesn’t work for the Weekly, she freelances for them, but does work for FishbowlLA, among other places.)
For those of you who are completely FED UP with this sad, bad story, just hum to yourself and skip on to something else. I’ll understand.
Lee said he’s never had more people talk off the record on any other story.
Coe told me that she worried she was too hard on Theresa.
Lee and Coe both have heard that multiple big MSM outlets are working on longer Duncan-Hunt stories.
LEE: I heard Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, New York mag and you were working on pieces too. When a producer from Anderson Cooper 360 called me up asking for the phone number of one of my sources I realized a kind of critical mass had been achieved.
Okay, back to our regularly scheduled programming. Thank you for your patience.
Meanwhile, strange bloggers out there have concluded that Coe and Lee are CIA operatives—or at least that Kate is. (If so, I think Kate’s working far too many jobs. I personally don’t see where she’d find the necessary hours to fit in the CIA mind-control thingy.)
Happy Friday.
photos, left to right, by Joshua Jordan and Donald Graham (Happy now? Sheesh.)
Happy Friday? After touching on this topic again?
If they were in the CIA, wouldn’t Marc Cooper know them?
You forgot the usual written-on picture. Some of us like pictures because they help us get through books faster.
Without the writte-on pictures Pokey is completely lost on this story and mostly wonders who these people are, why they killed themselves and why will we miss them?
I’ll wait fo the movie.
Well, it’s not like these two were household names, after all. To me, Duncan represents the pitfalls of being set up as some sort of paragon of beauty and brilliance, but not being able to “deliver” what others expect of her. She seemed too unconventional to succeed in Hollywood, so didn’t try hard enough to deliver her script; but having announced the project it came off as failure. To me, the moral is, that people should set their own life goals, and our competitive society which expects success to mean money and power, can become its own prison.
Add on the fact that she’s a woman, and typically if you’re beautiful you’re not expected to be brilliant or even smart, so she was truly trying to forge her own unique path.
Symbiosis? Is that like enmeshed? Where’s GM Roper when you need him to sort this all out? This is a curious story. I know of instances where one person’s psychosis led them to suicide. Typically, that person was most vulnerable when they began to “clear.” But, usually that’s after an extended period of psychosis that begins to lift, like after 10 years. All the time lost, and all that. Suicide pacts are another animal altogether. But this? Man, I’m puzzled. The joint/shared paranoia is kind of a new one one me. I haven’t seen it in the chronic – hospitalized for extended period – group. Maybe it’s just something the very high functioning can do? Come on, GM. Clue us all in!
Wise move, RLC.
Listener, I don’t know either. I think that’s why there’s so much attention around Duncan and Blake’s deaths. They seemed genuinely both very talented, bright and fairly original. It’s not that they’re inherently more important or valuable as human beings than, say, the people listed on Jill Leovy’s LA Times homicide blog. (In fact they seem fairly insular and self-referring in certain ways.) But it’s the psychological mystery that’s so vexing, because they both made a choice to do this and they seemed to have so much going for them. As you said, the shared disturbance is….unusual to say the least.
Maggie, I agree. The reviews on Duncan’s video games are pretty impressive. And she did seem to be trying to “forge her own unique path,” as you put it. That’s not easy for anybody, male or female.
Okay, time to step away from the keyboard.
Thanks Celeste! People who know me know that my mind is far too unruly to be controlled by the CIA, and my ADD meds keep the L. Ron fans at bay.
JC Herz told me that CD-Roms were the perfect medium for passionate, creative people or small groups–not expensive to make, very exciting technology to use, and not really commodified. But after the hey-day passed, video games took their place and video games are big business, just like feature films, and those commodities are subject to corporate structures, oversight, and endless gate-keepers. Duncan wasn’t actually into video games–I once asked her if she ever thought of creating machinma and she didn’t know what I meant.