That Voice Again
Two Succession heavyweights, an esteemed ghostwriter, and a Manhattan restaurateur walk into a bar...
I’ve written here before about how I’m currently in a period of creative exploration. Among the new challenges I’ve taken on these past few months is voice acting — specifically for commercials and narration.
I’ve been using my voice professionally since high school, when I started working as a public address announcer at college sports and minor league baseball games. Then I moved on to college radio, cable TV, and some podcasting.
But for 20 years, that all took a back seat to my full-time career in television production and programming. Other than a brief flirtation with voiceovers about a decade ago, when an agent “discovered” my voice at jury duty (of all places), I haven’t had the time to really give performing a shot.
Well, during this recent creative period, I’ve been giving it a shot. I’ve taken several group voice acting classes, worked one-on-one with a teacher, performed in some showcases for agents, and turned one of my closets into a professional home recording booth.
And as of last week, I have my first commercial demo:
Now comes the giant hurdle of actually breaking into the business. (I’ve booked one small gig so far.)
I’m very aware that thousands of acting professionals are hustling every day and doing great work in this medium. In my insecure moments, I wonder why I think I have any right to just show up and join their ranks. But in my better moments, I ask, “Why not me?”
On to the list…
The Best…
…TV Scene I Watched This Week
Succession (season 4, episode 7) — Tom vs. Shiv
Airing/streaming on HBO
I stayed away from Succession for a long time. The way Rupert Murdoch has weaponized and monetized outrage has been devastatingly corrosive to the modern world. I had no interest in spending time with characters based on him and his .0001 percenter kids.
But after hearing from friends for years that the show was truly great, I finally came around and got caught up prior to the start of the current fourth and final season.
I was pleased to discover that Succession is often a comedy dressed up like a drama. The satire helps set aside — at least for a few moments — the fact that real people similar to these characters actually exist in all their malevolent, selfish glory. In many ways, the show is Veep at twice the running time.
This week’s incredible balcony scene between Shiv (Sarah Snook) and Tom (Matthew Macfadyen), though, was different.
Instead of their usual repartee, which is typically subtextual and jocular even when they’re throwing daggers at each other, this argument was direct and hurtful and mean. It was hard to watch. It was pure drama. And because the show so rarely allows its characters to have moments of such brutal clarity, it was also, indeed, truly great.
…Magazine Piece I Read This Week That Relates to My Life Right Now
“Notes From Prince Harry’s Ghostwriter” — By J.R. Moehringer, The New Yorker, May 8, 2023
Well. Reading this piece at this particular moment in my life was quite something.
Of course it was sent to me by reader Aaron C. He’s the person who introduced me to the writing of J.R. Moehringer almost 20 years ago. The Tender Bar, the author’s memoir, became a seminal work for me. So did Open, Andre Agassi’s book, for which Moehringer served as ghostwriter.
Aaron, a wonderful writer himself, is also the person who directed me to what has become my first official ghostwriting/editing gig. The project is ongoing, so I don’t want to say too much about it. But it has been an enriching, engrossing, and fulfilling experience to help someone figure out how to tell their story in long form.
Because of this project, I’ve had quite a few conversations about ghostwriting in the past year. Befitting its name, the concept is mysterious for people, and I’ve been asked a lot of questions about it. Invariably, among the first is, “Will your name be on the cover?”
I understand why people wonder about this. After all, if you’re contributing a lot of the creative horsepower to a book, shouldn’t you get requisite credit for it? But it’s not a question I think about all.
Yes, I have an ego. I want praise. I want people to like what I do and think I’m good at it. But in this kind of collaboration, the story is the most important thing. And that story doesn’t belong to me — it belongs to the person I’m helping.
In this piece describing his experience working with Prince Harry on Spare, Moehringer writes about this phenomenon as only our patron saint can. (His explanation to his daughter about what a ghostwriter does, putting it in the context of another art form, is so beautiful and true, it made me cry.)
He’s a great writer, whether or not his name appears on any book cover.
…Nostalgic Magazine Piece I Read This Week
“Café Luxembourg and the Art of the Restaurant That Never Changes” — By Jason Diamond, The New Yorker, May 5, 2023
Aaron C. gets an unprecedented two mentions this week, both for stories he sent me from The New Yorker. This one also related to our personal history as we’ve dined together at the restaurant profiled in this piece, Lynn Wagenknecht’s Café Luxembourg.
For me, the story represents nostalgia for one of my past lives, when I lived on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and enjoyed more than a few of this establishment’s steak frites.
More than anything, though, the story is an ode to my favorite kind of restaurant, the solid neighborhood eatery that lasts while flashier newcomers come and go.
Café Luxembourg dates to 1983, when Wagenknecht and Keith McNally opened it as a sister restaurant to their buzzy downtown hotspot, the Odeon (another of my favorites, though let’s be honest, the food’s basically lousy).
Anyone who lives in a reasonably-sized city can probably name a local place or two like this, classic joints where the food may not always wow you but you “never come close to being disappointed,” as Jason Diamond writes of Café Luxembourg.
Here in New Haven, there aren’t many warhorses left. Even some of the few that have survived aren’t the same. Our two most famous apizza places, Pepe’s and Sally’s, have become franchises in recent years. Of the classic “Big 3” spots, only Modern Apizza is keeping it real.
But I digress.
I guess the point of all this is to encourage you to consider visiting your local version of Café Luxembourg, maybe even this weekend. Let’s keep places like this in our lives before they — or we — are all gone.