In it, Nancy Jo Sales writes mawkishly about the couple’s “meltdown” - in the last years of their lives, Duncan and Blake became paranoid that they were being harassed by Scientologists after Blake designed the cover for Beck’s Sea Change. I found out about it in the contemporary way that most people do: reading “ The Golden Suicides,” a sordid story about the 2007 suicides of Duncan and her husband, the artist Jeremy Blake.
I probably would have loved Chop Suey in the ’90s, but I didn’t know it existed then. (Given how thoughtful and precise Duncan was in her diction, I’m all the more irritated and disappointed by her decision to take an appropriative, “Asian-sounding” phrase as her title - we don’t know if Lily and June Bugg are white, but Duncan was.) The flower is “decidedly un-rose-like,” but who cares? The character doesn’t need to be lectured about what she should interpret of her interactions with the world - that girl is right just as she is. In that first scene, the sisters “didn’t know the names of the flowers in which they lay,” so June Bugg extracts a Queen Anne’s lace blossom and names it herself: rose. As that wording suggests, Duncan isn’t embarrassed to be ardent in her language, and her observations exemplify her empiricist knack. The game never reveals Lily and June Bugg themselves, save for their brown and white legs as they “dozed amid the flowers and the grasses on a low green hill” in the game’s introductory frames. Here, their music examines the merits of pickles. (At the time, Sedaris otherwise worked as a part-time house cleaner.) The game’s score was composed and performed by members of the political punk band Fugazi and the wider Dischord Records scene. Chop Suey was narrated by the not-yet-famous author David Sedaris, voice-acting the role of the moon who also serves as the cursor. The game is all about empiricism: The point is to touch everything you can and see what animations, dialogue, and music your prodding shakes loose.Ī lot of what you investigate in the game is contingent on the game’s hella lush audio. Highly stylized, each scene looks like a patchwork quilt rendered in Magic Marker. Chop Suey was illustrated by Monica Gesue with help from the musician, author, and artist Ian Svenonius. Chop Suey places Lily and June Bugg’s world in the context of the wider one, synthesizing dreamt-together towns and cities and the work of real, live artists. What you can do is visit a candy store called Cupid’s Treats, an observatory, the home of ribald Aunt Vera and two of her three ex-husbands (all named Bob), and other screwball locales.ĭuncan was an aesthete, and it’s maybe demographically off-key to call this a sensual game, but it is. It’s more of a set of vignettes than an adventure, or a linear cartoon picture book. In Chop Suey, the sisters Lily and June Bugg do nothing more than wander around their town with a takeout hangover, observing their neighbors. Chop Suey was officially marketed to ages “8 to 15 to adult,” but as Theresa Duncan told an interviewer in 1998, “My stated goal in life is to make the most beautiful thing a 7-year-old has ever seen.”ĭuncan decided that the most beautiful thing a young person could see was something possibly similar to her own life. When I played it, I felt as though, 20 years before Rookie existed, Duncan had scrawled its predecessor onto a CD-ROM. Near the end of my time there, I discovered Chop Suey, a 1995 point-and-click computer game created by the writer and multimedia artist Theresa Duncan. Rookie has a fairly straightforward mission: to speak honestly with teenagers and give them rad things to look at and think about.
#DELMAR CHOP SUEY SERIES#
From 2011 to 2015 and occasionally after, I worked for Rookie, an online magazine and book series for teenage girls.
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