Sunday, December 23, 2007

On Elizabeth Duncan and Jeremy Blake's Suicides

I was just reading the details of the tragic story of multimedia artist-couple Elizabeth Duncan and Jeremy Blake's suicides in July in the January 2008 issue of Vanity Fair (I love it when they write about artists!). Whatever the burden that weighed so heavily on the two souls, two oh-so-much-in-love, beautiful people driven as much by their success as by their insecurities in the elite artworlds of New York and LA; whatever paranoias that robbed them of the sense of good judgment; whatever passions moved them to tragicoromantic notions of love, love of the kind that eventually lost its way in the labyrinthine, cobwebbed maze of contemporary life, it is indeed a powerfully sad story that Shakespeare could have invented. Their families and friends must now deal with the pain, the utter bewilderment, perhaps even guilt of having failed to offer succor to the drifting lovers asphyxiated by an existential blackhole into which they were sucked, terminally. No doubt, some scriptwriters somewhere must be thinking of a Hollywood version of this story. Till, then one must have to contemplate how once again the fatal mix of ambition, delusion, and (hunger for) fame claimed two young, mysterious lives, but also how closely Duncan's animated film History of Glamour (1999) preempted the July 2007 suicides.

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