Oh Dog, you Sleuth!

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.

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