Oh Dog, you Sleuth!

So Gothamist did their take on The Angel Tour, which makes my coverage feel scant.

I found this and thought it was enjoyably lame.

The car was trapped in the garage until today at 1pm, but we’re leaving for Chicago at 3.

Wish us luck!

This is as close as I got.

It started out as an ordinary morning. I had to go to a recording session in the Graybar building. The engineer is somebody I’ve been working with a lot for the last year and he showed me a Simpson’s t-shirt he just got. ‘Oh, painfully lame,’ I thought. And it must have translated on my expression cause then he upped the ante and said, ‘Yeah, they’re coming in right after you leave.’
WHAT!?!
And then it turns out that this guy Bill records voices for The Simpsons. Mostly, the show is recorded in L.A., but whenever talent is in NY, they always go to Bill. So I’m freaking out rather seriously now. ‘So is Julie Kavner about to walk through the door as I’m leaving?’ I scream (I’ve wanted to be her best friend since the Tracy Ullman show). And he was like, no, no. They were just doing some guest appearance voices today: Thomas Pynchon.
And I’m like, Back the Fuck Up!
The Thomas Pynchon, author of ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’, ‘V’, ‘The Crying of Lot 49′, who is never photographed, interviewed, etc. around whom an entire literary cult is formed?
Yes.
Of course no one else from the ad agency or Bill really knew who I was talking about and didn’t understand why I was turning bright red and freaking out. I’d pretty much stopped caring that I was there to record a voice over for a lipstick commercial and all that. And planning what I’d say to Pynchon, who I (along with my friend Josh) spent much of our 20’s being very heavily obsessed with.
Then I realized that I could not hang out afterwards because I had another session to go to right after this one was finished. And these things are super-expensive. Like it’s a $1000 bucks an hour and it’s the last time you’re looking at the commercial before it’s on TV. I’m still ready to blow off the next session, hide in the recording booth and then jump out when Pynchon walks in and, who knows, not leave until he agrees to write a Fox reality show pilot with me?
So I had to fucking leave, 42 street to 20th street. But my second session ended early, which made me immediately hop in a cab heading uptown again. There’s a window in the studio door which allows you a clear sight-line to the recording booth. But once I got up to the 19th floor, the room was empty. I found Bill in the kitchen and he told me about the session. No big deal. He brought his son (!) and he was really ‘chatty’. If you do a voice on The Simpsons you get one of these lame leather high school letterman jackets with a Homer logo on it. The height of lame and I guess very coveted in the inner circles of that world. Even producers who have worked on the show for 10 years can’t get one unless they do a voice. And apparently Pynchon was very psyched about his jacket. Oh sadess. The final blow was that everyone was psyched that Tom Clancy was coming in tomorrow to record a guest voice.

If you have a spare second at Grand Central, check out the High Line exhibition in Vanderbilt Hall. They have the results of an open competition to come up with a plan for the abandoned raised tracks. There were a couple of great ones (see below). It was really thrilling to think that the city would spend some money to fix up this blighty area I work in. But I remain doubtfull that it’s really going to work. I mean, west Chelsea is no diamond in the rough like pre-gentrified Soho or Tribecca. It makes the LES look like the Flatiron district. Still…

I like this log flume ride for clones.

Probably the most practicle idea.

I ran out today and picked up The Invisible Frontier, a book about sneaking around in hidden and cool places in the city. It’s written by these two guys from the online Jinx Magazine. There was a pretty interesting article about them sneaking on to the roof of the Met Life Building in this week’s Time Out.

This is Christina Aguliera’s food that is demanded in her rider. It was the window display of the same gallery that was showing the summer blockbuster movies a few weeks ago. I thought this was funny and very unlike them (must be a new curator), but I have to say, this was done to death a year ago by The Smoking Gun.

Last thing I’ll say about Thomas Pynchon: I did a pretty casual search and I’m fairly certain I’m the first to break the Pynchon/Guest Voice news (look out, Page Six!). And Bobby, check this out.

There was long article in today’s NYTimes about the Ernie K-Doe Lounge in New Orleans. I went there with Kim and Jeremy last year for the first time right after a wayward pick up truck drove through the front wall. I guess it was a slow news day for the Arts editor. The club is great and Antoinette, the widow/owner is super cool. But it is in a completely crimey neighborhood. And also K-Doe was not that great of a NO early R&B guy (not compared to the freaky/beautiful work coming out at the same time by Little Richard, Bobby Marchan and Shirley and Lee). His one hit, ‘Mother In Law’ is nice, but it’s typical of the Allan Toussaint sound of that time. Toussaint was kind of the Dr. Dre of the New Orleans early Rock and Roll/R&B period.

Upper West Side.

If there’s still any doubt about Amy Sedaris being cooler than her brother, please check out, this article which is full of lots of interesting details about her apartment and her new job as a waitress at a seafood restaurant in the West Village (”They don’t have to pay me… I just wanna wear cute outfits and talk to people.”)

Has anyone received an invitation to be part of the Mob Project? You basically get an email to show up at a location, follow a simple direction and leave. Since lots of people show up, it’s kind of surreal. I heard about one in Macys recently. But now that they’ve been getting a lot of press in places like Wired I guess it’s become kind of the lame hipster thing to do. Hopefully, that fire on the F train this last weekend that sent 60 people to the hospital was not part of it.

The Angel Tour

On Saturday I did the Angel Tour. There was a lot of press about this and the NY Post kind of gave away most of the secrets, so I made sure to avoid their coverage. The Times piece about it had me hooked, though. I’m a huge fan of strange walking tours and constantly think up my own all the time. I’ve really liked the Soundwalks I’ve done and when I heard about this one, I was salivating. The meeting point was Roosevelt Island, which was a drag since it’s a hard to get to depressing place. I figured ‘Angel Tour’ that means you’ll take the gondola that runs alongside the Queensboro bridge. There was a note on the ticket to meet at the gondola, but when I got there, there was a little sign saying ‘Wait’. In the meantime, I was about a half hour early, so I ended up talking to a lady who was on time. The whole point was doing this tour by yourself, so we sat there for a while talking our heads off about what we thought was going to happen. And then a guy in a golf cart pulled up and she got in.

My golf cart took me to the southern tip of the island, past the Bauhaus nightmare of the new hospital and the crumbling 19th century old hospital, where Spider Man killed Willem Dafoe. At the very edge, which provides a great view of the old Pepsi sign in Queens, there was an open field with a trailer. Inside, a lady gave me a booklet and subway pass and told me to follow the instructions and ABSOLUTELY not to take any pictures. ‘Right….’ I thought. I just paid $90, so I can remember all this. Anyway, first shock was I had to take the subway (!) to 42nd Street.

The first location wasn’t that special. I had to go up to a mostly vacant apartment south of Bryant Park. It was pretty creepy, though, like you’d snuck in a serial killer’s apartment. There was lots of old religious iconography. And on a table, there were pages of the phone book ripped out, and names were circled in red. A pair of binoculars sat on the window ledge.

The next building was a couple of blocks away. I had to take an elevator up to thirty-somethingth floor, which was supposed to be… the angel’s locker room???

Yes, these are feathers.

This was pretty cool. Some of the lockers opened and there were some cool things inside. My favorite was an old dance card, dated 1910. And the dance slots were filled out!!!

The next stop was the Peep-O-Rama on 42nd Street. I was really psyched about this one because the Soundwalk tour made you walk into one of the porno stores on 8th Ave., which was awesome and terrifying. I noticed the Peep-O-Rama, of course, cause it’s one of the last vestiges of old Times Square and it’s right next to Tad’s steak house, which is another vestige of old gross TS. This was the first point where I thought this tour was genius. Because the facade of this building is all mirrored glass. And when you walk in, there’s a dark room and about six chairs set up so that you can sit there and watch people walk by. I was in love since the only time I ever get to sit there and truly scrutinize strangers is when I’m editing, so getting to ‘go live’ was completely wonderfull. And 42nd Street on a Saturday afternoon is a perfect place to do this.

The tours were set up so that you always had to be alone, so everyone was dispersed at 30 minute intervals. But this was the one point where everybody started to bunch up since no one could pull themselves away.

Behind the ‘peeping’ room was this dark scarifying room chock full of religious books. When I was sitting in the front room, a couple walked in off the street — I swear they thought this was still a porno place, cause they kinda ignorned the group of us looking out the window and went straight to the book room. I wish I was in the book room same time as them, just to see the disappointed look on their faces. They quickly left, very confused.

Next was Times Square, where I had to walk up to the tip of the ‘island’, where a very old-school nun was praying. Was this part of the tour? She was very cute and didn’t look like any of the nuns that used to bitch slap me at Resurrection of Our Lord in New Orleans.

The next show-stopper was One Times Square, which is the building where they drop the ball on New Years Eve. It seemed entirely abandoned now, but had a beautiful desecrated lobby. I’m convinced they also shoot all movies here where there’s a scene where somebody’s sitting at their desk over looking the ’square’ (think Broadway Danny Rose).

This was the part of the tour that I thought Jeremy would have freaked out over because you got to walk around a creepy midtown office space and there were stacks of dead computers .

The floor was made entirely of sugar. I got yelled at for taking pictures in here.

Okay, everyone who likes chain food has been here. This is the Applebee’s/Chillis next to Madame Toussaud’s in Times Sqare. I was thinking, what are they going to do here? I’ve been to Chillis about a trillion times. But there was a tiny masking tape arrow pointing you to a door on the first floor. Then I went through this ante-room and entered this ancient theater space. It must have been from the 19th century. It’s called the liberty theater and it was amazing. But there were a lot of ‘angels’, actors wearing wings, sitting the balcony completely silent. I stood by the door when I left to see if they’d all start talking, but I couldn’t hear anything.

The final stop was an empty office on the 62nd floor of the Chrysler Building. I was really hoping to get to go in the triangle windows part. It’s been a lifelong dream of mine, which I no longer think is going to happen. There were A LOT of angels up here. At this point I was pretty sick of the angels. But I did see some topless sunbathing on the roof of a nearby building.

So all told it was pretty fun. But not worth all the $$$s. I would have thought $40 would have seemed fair, though I imagine they must have had to spend a lot to get all these places and have the staff dress and prepare them every day for two weeks. It was a blast getting to go inside all these locations in midtown,

On the way through Grand Central, I saw this Kenneth Cole window, which reminded me a lot of the St. Roch’s cemetary in New Orleans.

Later that afternoon I picked up my first Junior’s cheesecake and went to a BBQ at my sister’s house in Windsor Terrace.

Tonight I was looking for pictures of Joe D’Amato of Screw Magazine/’Fuck You’ fame because of his uncanny likeness to Danny Luck, former land lord and instead found this amazing site. I’m joining today.

Copyright violations on a warm summer day.

I guess the good NYC ice cream trucks are all in Soho. I saw this one in the exact same section of Soho that I was in last night. I walked all over looking for New Balance Black 474s and nobody had anything above a size 10. Then I saw the world’s hugest rat (twice the size of a size 12 shoe) when I was looking for the rice paper needed to make summer rolls. Kinda lost my appetite instantly. Mostly cause walking further down to the market I knew about meant crossing the rat gauntlet on this very narrow trash-lined sidewalk.

I know, by this point, you’re probably thinking I need to cut it out with the ice cream. It’s really the ice cream trucks that I’m obsessed with. Last summer, I spent a lot more time in Fort Greene and Greenpoint, where there’s a stronger outsider art stance on the decorating of ice cream trucks. Most of the city, especially 5th Ave. from 8th Street on up, is dominated by the Mr. Softee franchise, which is nice, but sometimes I long for the more primitive. Still, the best I’ve ever seen was in Williamsburg last August when I was checking out a possible apartment for my sister in a very cracked-out stretch off the beaten path.

Pork rinds = bad idea for skateboards.

Katherine and I checked out the Jos� Antonio Hernandez-Diez show at the New Museum tonight. I thought it was kinda skimpy and just ok, like you’re set if you just check out the website. The little red room above was part of the downstairs show about Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. I was bored to tears. Except for this terrifying statue that had the word “aids” written across its forehead. I did sort of like the little phone booth room with all the little hand drawn cameos and blaring African music. It reminded me of another famous New Museum disappointment, the karoke pods. The best part was seeing the new William Eggleston book in the downstairs shop that had me shouting with joy and cursing the museum for their 100% markup compared to Amazon.

Why a bowler hat, Mr. Softee?

After that, Katherine and I went down the Corner Bistro, where she had to wait a monumentally long time for a hamburger while I freaked out about the line.

Chevy spotted on the web.

I became a Friendster friend with my favorite new blog, Gothamist . And I guess I should be glad that I didn’t have to pay for the privledge, which instantly perplexed me and then made me wonder, “Can I sell out my friends on eBay?” I guess I would first need to write some very hype-y testamonials. I haven’t seen anything this outrageous on that annoying website since people started selling the current (and free for the asking) MTA subway maps.

Fuck you, Patrick Mimran!!!

Because I work in the deep hinterland of Chelsea, I’ve been tortured for the last year by this never-ending self-promotional scheme by some hack named Patrick Mimran. The turgid explanation for this bullshit can be found here. I really can’t go out of my way to avoid them and the madness must stop. Paying to have billboards made of little quotes and aphorisms you come up with is a pretty risky gambit. But I prefer to think of these ever changing hated promos as the Worst Signs in New York City.

Sorry for the diatribe. I just wanted confused people to find something negative if they googled his name.

Thank you.

Sixth Avenue, Midtown.

I would really like to be able to sit in on these classes.

I like this 70’s log cabin atop this turn of the century building.

This a detail of Tin Pan Alley, which now instead of selling songs, they sell all that crazy junk that homeless people try to sell you on the train. All the stores around here, require ‘Tax ID’ before you’re allowed to enter, so a person really is at the mercy of the subway salesmen if they want unbreakable combs or light-up yo-yos.

A sexually aggressive moving company, spotted in Chelsea this morning.