East River Body is Spalding Gray's

Gothamist, are you aware of Google's news alert feature? I've been using it to receive periodic updates on this case, as well as the mysterious death of former Brooklyn Assistant D.A. Jonathan Luna.

It's about the right time for him to surface. I grew up near Barnegat Bay in Jersey, which is a large tidal estuary similar to the East River (which isn't really a river). People who drowned during the winter would normally surface in mid or late March.

Thanks, Marc.

sigh...

I lost my mother as he lost his. It's an indescribably sad burden, a mystery, a nagging non-presence. People say you should be angry but you don't feel angry. He dove into it, talking about it constantly; I tend to move around it, getting close without actually touching. I won't say that I understand, but it all makes a sad kind of sense. I will definitely miss him.

I first saw Swimming late at night on PBS (back before Bravo, A&E, and IFC) and my first thought was "who is this madman and why is he going on about sharks and bananas?" my second thought - ninety minutes later - was, "whoever he is, he's a genius."

Now, I am officially betting that:
- within eighteen months there will be an "award-winning documentary" about Gray
- within three years there will be a one-man or one-woman show about Gray, "telling the monologue he always wanted to tell - his own life, told, not lived." (those are his words, from an NPR interview I just heard.)
- the title of one of them will be a play on "Gray's Anatomy"
- I'll see both, and cry.

worst.

Say it ain't so...I had to leave work early, I was so distressed by this news. Did anyone see Spalding Gray's "interview" show in Prospect Park around 5 years ago. I'll never forget that night. He held a mirror up to the soul of the audience by interviewing, from out of the crowd, a Hindu UPS driver who wanted to go to medical school, a British ex-pat who had just bought a brownstone (Gray had fun flustering him), and a woman who was a former heroin addict turned punk rock mom who grew up in the neighborhood.
The powers that be should make Gray's book of monologues, "Sex and Death to the Age 14" required reading. I read it the year I got out of college, and I took it as my bible, like how "On the Road" and "Catcher In the Rye" inspired folks to just run around and experience life, instead of watching manufactured illusions on television and in the movies.

I'm going to go buy another copy now.

Thanks for listening.

an orange tent,dancing with a pistol, lip-synching to his father's and grandmother's tape-recorded voices, on an oil platform coaxing that party piece - an hysterically prolonged scream, the veneer of his deadpan monolgues, the frenzied gymnastics of the tortured Tyrones/Grays...unforgettable...incomparable experiences...goodbye Spalding Gray...