At the corner of La Brea and Sunset in Hollywood, there stands a peculiar set of buildings, out of place in the increasingly stucco-and-tiled universe of Southern California. Lots of dark wood and brick. Quite stately in its way.

Oh, and there’s also a statue of Kermit the Frog dressed as Charlie Chaplin out front.

These buildings are what’s left of Chaplin’s original Hollywood studio and at which he filmed The Gold Rush and The Great Dictator, among other classics. After he co-founded United Artists and moved to new digs, the lot was eventually purchased by A&M Records and became their headquarters.

In 2000, Jim Henson’s children bought the property and leased it to the Jim Henson Company, thus explaining what The Little Frog-Tramp is doing there.

It’s quite amazing to think of what all has been created there at 1416 N. La Brea Avenue. In addition to Chaplin’s early films: The George Reeves “Superman” TV show was shot there, as were “Perry Mason” and others. “We Are The World” was sung (and the accompanying video was shot) there in 1985. “Rattle and Hum” was mixed there. Guns and Roses had sessions there — more recently, so did No Doubt and Jane’s Addiction.

There is a plaque marking the site as Historical Cultural Monument No. 58, which it was declared as by the City of L.A. in 1969.

Charlie Chaplin died in 1977. A&M Records is part of interscope. And just this year, The Disney Empire assimilated the Muppets.

One wonders what the arrangements will be for the Henson Company Headquarters, for Historical Cultural Monument No. 58. Will they replace the Little Tramp hat with a set of Mouse Ears? Will the Kermit statue be toppled by American troops and Henson dissidents? Will there be Muppets lined up out the gates, being herded into trucks waiting to take them to Anaheim?

Here’s a quote from the email Henson employees received informing them about the deal:

Building the future for a “new” JHC, while helping Disney achieve long lasting greatness for the properties from our past, seems like an ideal combination. On behalf of the Company and the Henson family, we thank each one of you for your help in making it happen.

Meanwhile, somewhere just in your peripheral vision as you drive down La Brea, a bedraggled tramp hobbles across a dusty side street, ghostlike, ethereal, disappearing with a tip of his hat into the shadows.

So I’m jamming down a dirt road on my Specialized, with a vacant field on one side and a wrought-iron fence protecting a concrete river on the other. The tracks are pretty clear, nothing much to worry about except the occasional rocks and patches of soft sand. A smell hits me at one point, the exact same smell from twenty-five years ago in a similar field, with ten-year-old me on a Huffy, and I start to time-travel. Not the best thing to do when you’re hurtling down a dirt track, so I keep the traveling down to melding my thirty-five-year-old mouth into the gleeful smile of a ten-year-old. Both of us have sunburns, and neither of us care. The smells of earth and dry grass and sweat. The sound of tire tread on granular dirt, occasionally scaring some poor basking lizard out of my way…

In the Present, the recently tuned and lubed derailleurs click beautifully like clockworks, gears marking the time of a life. The time of my life. In the Past, I can almost see the number on the plastic plate hanging off the front of the Huffy, but to do so I’d have to slow down. No time for that.

About half a mile ahead, the streets of a future housing development look ghostly, as if a bomb has gone off and the debris cleared away, leaving only the asphalt outlines. Such is the way of Southern California. It was the way of that field twenty-five years ago, now a cookie-cutter neighborhood. This new one will be gone soon, and with it the few orange groves that are left nearby and their 100-year-old houses. Long-gone children used to play in these fields, too, in these groves. I can still smell some of the same things they did century before last: citrus, dirt, fetid water from standing pools, the last whiffs of smudge from cold nights.

It’s the Vernal Equinox — I shouldn’t be feeling a sense of loss today, right? I should be feeling renewed, energized, full of life, vigorous.

Oh wait, I do.

Someday, maybe Southern California will be paved. But until then, there are lizards that need scaring out of their lazy basking, dirt roads and fields that need exploration, and lethargy that needs expulsion.

Besides, life wouldn’t be as precious if we were all immortal, right?

Grave Anatomy

And so, Spalding Gray is dead. He saw it coming, worried over it, knew it was possible, likely even, given his history, for his entire life. Add in the car wreck, the injuries, the stressors coming left and right….

His mother once asked him, “How shall I do it? Shall I do it in the garage with the car?”

She wound up doing that very thing when he was 26. He died when he was 62. He would have appreciated the symmetry.

To say Spalding poured his life into his art is to misspeak: his life was his art. His way of living, the way he found to keep going forward, provided the raw materials for his carefully constructed monologues. Spoken pieces that seemed so uncontrived because they were obsessively contrived over multiple performances. His instrument was his voice, his body, his hands, his face, painting pictures for his audience. Causing them to laugh with him and at him and feel stabs of regret with him and for him.

To miss him when he disappeared. To mourn him when his death was confirmed.

The question is raised every time a tortured artist dies: does it take a troubled soul to be a great artist? Can the happy person truly be an artist?

I’ve fallen on both sides of this issue over the years, and I don’t pretend to have an answer now. But if an artist is someone who expresses Something in a creative medium, might we not say that the discontented person by definition has more “Somethings” to express? Of course, this doesn’t mean the expression is worthwhile or original or artistic or any of the other measures by which we judge Art. Doesn’t have to be any of that. Just has to be yours.

Was Spalding Gray fated to die by his own hand? By all rights, the car crash, in which he was driving without a seatbelt, might well have done it for him. And three times after the accident and subsequent torturous physical and emotional recovery Gray attempted suicide, finally successful with a jump from a ferry into frozen waters. Are those things fate?

Isn’t fate only fate in retrospect?

Gray was at heart a writer, or at least a storyteller. He could weave a life out of thin air for his audience, just him on a stage with a notebook and a glass of water, a desk and a chair. I saw him perform once at UCLA, on the Slippery Slope tour. This was several years ago, before the accident, but after he had met his new wife and the mother of his children.

We had seats near the front of the auditorium. There was this moment where Spalding paused speaking and looked directly into my eyes. The slightest look came over his face for an instant, then he looked away and continued the monologue.

I’ve often thought of that moment, trying to decipher the look. I was reminded of it when I first heard he was missing back in January.

Now when I think of it, I almost wonder if he wasn’t surprised to find someone looking at him as he was lost in the moment of telling a story.

All of us have different reasons for writing, or painting, or playing music, or whatever it is we do. All of us have different Somethings with which to struggle. For some of us, those struggles become bigger than the art, than the expression can handle. For others, the struggles subsume everything and become the expression, as we turn outward for release.

Some of us will never find release.

Some of us will keep looking, realizing that in the pursuit there is salvation.

I did not know Spalding Gray. Even after reading all his books, hearing and watching his monologues, seeing his movies, I do not know him.

If his body of work was an exploration, trying to find out what it was all about, trying to do Something… well, then, I am a distance removed even from that. What insight can I offer?

Insight. Sight in. I can offer a look inside, to myself and others. Who knows? Maybe someone out there gets it. Maybe someone out there needs to get Something.

Maybe we all do.

(See also Dalai Lama interviewed by Spalding Gray.)

Okay, no offense, but if you saw this fellow coming into the office, wouldn’t you be just a smidgen suspicious? And his name is “Stephen King”? And he’s an expert on…. never mind, just read the article.

#!/bin/sh
# Search google via the command line with this shell script.
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done
open "http://www.google.com/search?q=${query}"