Spalding Grey Confirmed Dead

:(

Four or five summers ago on Martha's Vineyard, I saw S. Gray waiting in line with some friends of his to get their car on the ferry. He was, unfortunately, wearing only a speedo. This was not a good look for him, although he was in reasonable shape for someone his age.

My friends and I kind of chuckled, "Look, there's Spalding Gray. Kinda weird." But then we all acknowledged that anything we'd seen of his was really, really good.

It's too bad, and makes me rather sad. But again, I'm not sure why. I didn't know him.

(or am I just assuming you're a Xtian because of your conservatism?)

I have a friend who is simillarly obsessed with suicide, and it is a constant topic of conversation/fascination for him (he too often "jokes" about taking "the big swim"), and I find it horribly distasteful and selfish. His wife and mother would be crushed beyond comprehension were he to make good on it, but to hear him discuss it, it doesn't even register as a concern with him. Once again -- I know I'm addressing it as if it's something one can get over like a cold or the breakup of a relationship, it's obviously a disorder far deeper than that, but that just seems like such a cop-out argument to me. How far gone must one be to not realize the extent of emotional damage such a stunt is going to cause?

http://www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/features/n_9787

Very far gone. Unfortunately, many of us are all too familiar with these lowest of lows.

Anytime I hear about someone who has struggled with depression and suicidal impulses finally going through with it. . .it really brings me down. I worry that someday I will also not be able to pull myself back anymore.

We saw him speak at Bumbershoot not long after his Irish car accident; he was clearly in trouble at the time.

Depression is a terrible, potentially deadly illness, the worst symptom of which is a belief that it can't get any better. Very sorry to see it get another person.

i don't think i really know much about him when it comes right down to it, but i think i understand him these days to a very frightening degree.

Anyway, R.I.P. I saw him perform with Chris Noth and Charles Durning in Gore Vidal's "The Best Man" on Broadway about 3 years ago.

so Steven Soderbergh has curated, more than directed, a 90-minute Gray autobio using the monologue clips, interviews, etc. The footage at the end after his car accident is painful to watch.

http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/and-everything-is-going-fine/5195

want to see

yes, would definitely like to see that.

I saw him a few times live. His out-of-print compilation of non-Cambodia 1980s monologues, Sex and Death to the Age 14 is a great and (probably even still) funny read.

I had forgotten the degree to which the potential for suicide (as well as the legacy of his mother's) is all over the monologues.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4B5c5xi8J8

the one time i saw him he did an incredibly funny monologue about that production of our town.

i think the monlogue was called monster in a box.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpMGzAY34KE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTvCSNZkSds&feature=related

there is an Our Town story excerpted in this S.S. project (it might be from MiaB, which is anchored on a book project, no?).

Yup, it's about him getting an advance to write Impossible Vacation and getting the offer to do Our Town at the same time.

I forgot that I saw him read from Impossible Vacation at the Walker Art Center, which wasn't as exciting as a regular Gray performance (in the way that Laurie Anderson behind-some-keyboard concerts aren't as spectacular as her multimedia shows). He did tell some digressive story of being out on the town the night before and meeting someone in a diner and ending up in a car somewhere -- I can barely remember it, but it was some random adventure.

After going to Swimming, Gray's, MiaB and maybe some older ones he re-performed in NYC, the last 2 times I saw him were in Vidal's The Best Man and one of his "interview an audience member" things in Prospect Park. He picked a fiftyish lifelong Brooklynite who'd been gentrified out of Park Slope, and at one point she asked him, "So is that woman you dumped still pissed off at you?"

Oliver Sacks on Spalding Gray:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/27/the-catastrophe-oliver-sacks