Spaulding Gray’s Perfect Moment

Spaulding Gray’s Perfect Moment
by Daniel Tucker

I found Spaulding Gray’s monologue Swimming to Cambodia, directed by Jonathan Demme in 1987, surprisingly provocative for such a stripped-down format. In truth, it was not so simple as man at a table with a glass of water and a notebook. It was a highly produced video with multiple camera angles, lighting effects, soundtrack, alternating backdrops and most certainly multiple-takes. Gray utilized a wide range of story-telling and performance techniques which appear simple because they are effective, but most certainly are the result of years of training. He build tension like the best novelists and screenwriters do, by establishing the groundwork and introducing an inciting event - in his case, it was auditioning for a film about Cambodia - from which the story arch is built up and brought back into resolution. In this project there were certainly many subplots and tangents, but he brought them all back to his story of being in this film. My favorite scene was the one where he proposed that he could not leave the film shoot without having a “perfect moment”, suggesting that all exotic trips need a perfect moment to be complete. Check out the clip here:

Love Letter to Chicago

Based on the prompt given from our TA, I have informally “imitated” Spaulding Gray’s Dear New York City on page 113 from Life Interrupted: The Unfinished Monologues (Crown Publishers, 2005).

Dear Chicago,
For eleven years I lived with you and have fallen in and out and in love with you. I came to you because you were down to earth but still contained unknowns. You still contain unknowns and that keeps me curious. I am sometimes charmed by your “realness” but sometimes find it to harsh. I think you need to find a better story than just being “real.” The real mafia and the real politicos with their the down and dirty corruption are now being replaced by the realness of fancy-finance Rahm and his fancy-finance friends. Both are real and both are bad.

There is so much reality in the world and that hasn’t always been enough. Sometimes we need better stories, more myths, dreams that make us imagine beyond “the real.”

I hope as we continue to evolve together you can create new and better stories about yourself. I will try to do my part.

in cahoots,
Daniel Tucker

Spalding Gray's Love Letter to New York

http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/features/n_9787/

Hi everyone,
Good to see you all this week in Lincoln 205.  As promised, what follows this note is the copy of Spalding Gray's love letter to New York.  It was published posthumously in the New York Times on September 11, 2005 and in Life Interrupted, a later collection of his essays, and some notes of reflection from his friends and colleagues.  If you choose to imitate it, remember that it can be to any place you have known or experienced or even imagined.

I've also included a link above to a New York Times Magazine cover story that appeared after his disappearance in January of 2004, but before his body was discovered in March of that year.  Eerie.  At least to me.

But here's the letter:  

"Dear New York:
For 34 years I lived with you and came to love you. I came to you because I loved theater and found theater everywhere I looked. I fled New England and came to Manhattan, that island off the coast of America, where human nature was king and everyone exuded character and had big attitude. You gave me a sense of humor because you are so absurd.

When we were kids, my mom hung a poster over our bed. It had a picture of a bumblebee, and under the picture the caption read:

'According to all aerodynamic laws, the bumblebee cannot fly because its body weight is not in the right proportion to its wingspan. But ignoring these laws, the bee flies anyway.'
That is still New York City for me.

--SG"

Thompson

I found Hunter to be quite the...rebel? If that word even suffices for the behavior we saw from a unsurprisingly intelligent guy. Watching the movie really clarified what we read of and from Hunter. It is a different vibe you get once you actually see that person acting...unethical? He wanted so much from this country...as many of us do. The aspect that really intrigued me was the fact that he was looking for the "American Dream." Sorry Hunter, it still doesn't exist....

Dear Mexico,

I am constantly being reminded of you. Your smells follow me and I find you in the city, the suburbs, my block. I miss Abuelita's house and how I can visit Tia Lily, Tio Jaime, y mis primos Jaimito, Abraham, y Pedro just by walking around the corner. I miss how the air feels on my skin and how the sun bathes me. I even miss being called "guera."
I feel that the older I get, the more I need to see you and visit you. I haven't seen you in over 4 years. I feel that my tongue is slipping from your language no matter how hard I try. Over here in the States, it is considered as an asset. Over by you, I consider it home. Te extrano.
Remember that you are always in my thoughts, in my blood, and in my veins.
I will see you soon, espero.

-Con mucho carino.

Some final thoughts on Hunter S. Thompson

Note: Before we move on to Spalding & Annie, I thought it time I chimed in on Fear & Loathing. As I was reviewing the posts of my peers, I noticed that we all have a lot of the same things on our minds, which gave me cause for both revelation and apology. While thinking about the American Dream as I read F&L, I dog-eared many of the same pages to which several of my illustrious classmates have already referred. I realized that I need to get on top of this blogging so my posts aren't redundant, and consequently I apologize if this one seems to be.

Prior to writing about F&L, I need to state the obvious and mention how the American Dream's ultimate manifestation can have very different definitions for people from diverse backgrounds and with varying ideologies. We can talk about stereotyped white-picket fences and 2.5 children, but the immigrant, the kid from the projects or the suburbs, the born rich, and myriad others likely all want something different. Nevertheless, I think we can at least crystallize the overreaching sense of the AD to a sense of security. Whatever that security means to whomever it means. Thus, it is fascinating that Hunter S. Thompson should attempt to locate the AD in Las Vegas where nothing is certain except chance.

Although he subjects other notions of the AD to more overt scrutiny near the end of the book, I think that HST gives us his own personal take most clearly in the third chapter of Part One. As he first contemplates the kick of drag racing along the Strip—before they've even arrived in Vegas—he states that “old Americans go out to the highway and drive themselves to death with huge cars.” Then, after a full line-break, he continues: “But our trip was different. It was a classic affirmation of everything right and true and decent in the national character. It was a gross, physical salute to the fantastic possibilities of life in this country—but only for those with true grit. And we were chock full of that” (18). (Aside: In my opinion the most laugh-out-loud funny part of the book is when he finally does drag race along the Strip in Part Two, Chapter 8 as his attorney hangs out the window shouting obscenities at the “two hoggish looking couples.”)

Clearly, HST doesn't identify with the old version of the AD, yet he recognizes the tremendous significance of the possible in forming any conception of an AD. Furthermore, he concedes that you've got to have a big set of balls to make it happen here. Indeed he and his attorney do. So I think, that in a sense, his drug-fueled escapades and ripping of norms are his way of living his own idea of the AD: to be free, which essentially it what's “right and true and decent in [our] national character.” HST just had a unique way of going about it. It's his right to f- things up, get into outrageous circumstances, and provide biting commentary on those people who don't even consider the possibilities of the possible because that's what he does. And he does it well. And he's productive. Well, at least he was. This particular time was just right for someone like HST to come along and shred old perceptions, to highlight various notions of how Americans conceive of the American Dream and then sh*t on them. He was able to do this on the campaign trail in the Seventies as well, but as time progressed and society changed, the HST brand didn't seem to fit so well anymore. Nevertheless, as we said in class, that brand had become so indelible that HST couldn't do much else. And well, we know how that ended.

Lastly, I also wanted to note that I do agree with Luis and those classmates who pointed out how HST did bemoan the failure of the Sixties counter-culture despite their destiny to fail. It's clear in the “high water mark” passage quoted in Gonzo and when he notes “that downers came in with Nixon” (202). Moreover, it's brutally realized at the end of Part Two, Chapter Nine (the transcripted section) when upon finally locating the old Psychiatrist's Club, which might or might not have been the AD, HST remarks, “The owner of a gas station across the road said the place had 'burned down about three years ago'” (168), which would have been in 1968.

Thinking of American Dreams

The ending quote from the previous blog entitled "American Dreaming" sparked a lot of "literary" thoughts in my mind, and many along the lines of what we've been introduced to through the world of H.S.T.

"There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning….Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail."

Throughout that era within the 60s, what made H.S.T. stand out then and what has helped “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” maintain relevancy is that idea of energy, which was perhaps the perhaps new sense of energy. He helped infuse into the 60s a sense of radical activity that touched the masses on a personal level rather than by an untouchable celebrity figure. The novel is perhaps the most interesting that I’ve read this semester, or in a couple at least, because not only the eccentric nature of H.S.T. but also through the removal of American ideals from their typical domestic place in New York, until the wild terrain of Las Vegas. Thankfully the book wasn’t as muddled down by eccentric images such as the different exaggerations we saw from film clips and was able to still express the central ideas of a shift from the hipster image and the removal of the American dream from picket fence houses to open terrain and open standards of living.