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This came out of left field tonight, but I was watching Brother's Keeper tonight, and one of the DVD extras was their trailer, which was Spalding Gray basically enthusing about the film for two minutes. And astoundingly, the absence of Spalding Gray in the world hit me right in the middle of the chest, palpably, right there.
I watched Swimming to Cambodia in university... middle of the afternoon on a Saturday, flipping channels, and hit on Swimming to Cambodia on A&E (Canadian cable channel) and, standing, decided to check it out for five minutes.
An hour later, I was sitting there with my mouth hanging open. This was a documentary. This wasn't even a documentary. This was one guy in a chair, just talking, and it was one of the most riveting things I'd ever seen.
So I became a Spalding Gray fan, and read his occasional New Yorker pieces, and enjoyed his monologues, and got very sad when he went missing, and very sad when he died.
All of this a little self-consciously. Liking Spalding Gray is a bit like liking Woody Allen; you're deliberately buying into the idea that focusing on one relatively lucky (white, well-off, intelligent, successful) man's neuroses are worth your time and attention. But the guy had a way of getting excited about things, even his own weird internal contortions, that really spoke to me.
And this evening, seeing Spalding Gray pop up unannounced on my TV screen, I felt deprived.
I'm pretty sure Spalding Gray won't be remembered with any great note in the history of things. Cult at his apex, and now dead and dwindling. But I miss Spalding Gray. Whacking his name into Google, I was glad to see that some other people remember him too.
So anyway. This isn't really a film thread or a literature thread or an anything thread, so I'm tossing it in here.
And trying to make it bigger than Gray by asking: what minor note in the cultural stratosphere are you missing right now? People that won't be remembered in 100 years, maybe not even 10, but right here, right now, people you wish were still around and doing whatever it is they do. |
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