Well, I’m back from my glamorous and exciting vacation. I have too many RSS feeds to catch up on to bore you with details, but suffice it to say, my Thanksgiving adventures looked a lot like the above scene from Punch-Drunk Love, except I fortunately managed to make an escape before damaging any property. I want to thank Pamela Cohn and Chris Campbell for filling in while I was gone; if you missed their posts, you can check out Pamela’s here and Chris’ here.

UPDATE: A story published in Saturday’s print edition of the New York Times has some additional information on Jeremy Blake’s disappearance and Theresa Duncan’s death. The story says a note referring to Duncan was found with Blake’s passport on Rockaway Beach. NYPD scuba teams have searched for but have not yet found a body.

Rumors are swirling that artist Jeremy Blake has gone missing, a week after his girlfriend, filmmaker/blogger Theresa Duncan, committed suicide. Kate Coe alerted me to the news, which she’s rounded up from several sources at FishbowlLA.

Duncan, a former videogame creator, was known in the blogosphere for her sometimes eccentric but often fascinating ruminations on art, imagery, culture and perfume. Her blog The Wit of the Staircase had its second anniversary on July 4th; she last updated July 10. She was apparently in New York, directing an adaptation of a Francesca Lia Block novel for Fox Searchlight. There is no IMDB entry for the film, or for Duncan; I don’t know how far along production had progressed, but it was her first feature film and it she had apparently hit a bump in the road.

The news of Duncan’s suicide and Blake’s disappearance stems from this perfume message board, which was then picked up by L.A. Observed. Blake, in apparent reaction to Duncan’s death, disappeared earlier this week. According to a posting on this modern art blog, Blake’s passport and clothes were found on Rockaway Beach here in New York shortly after a 911 call was placed reporting a sighting of a man swimming out to sea.

Again, I can’t confirm that this is how it all went down (no mainstream non-blog* outlet has yet reported on either Duncan’s death or Blake’s disappearance), but if it turns out to be true … man, what a sad story. Fans of Punch Drunk Love will know Blake’s work: he designed the film’s psychedelic transitions. He and Duncan also collaborated on a short called The History of Glamour, which L.A. Observer describes as “animated mockumentary about an art scene similar to Andy Warhol’s Factory.” Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be on YouTube but another of their collaborations, an animated short made for the Oxygen channel, is:

**Wording changed after learning via an email from Tyler Green that he and Modern Art Notes are “as mainstream as it gets.”