Maybe this sort of thing is not as interesting to others as I seem to think, but I like listening to this stuff. It’s recorded in 3D/binaural audio. This particular recording might not be that interesting from the 3D perspective but there are times when listening to sound recorded binaurally feels more real than actually being there. As a friend commented, it’s like hearing sound with your entire head.

I don’t know why but at Queens Place Mall I have been told a few times over the years that it is illegal to take photos of the payphones in the food court. I did anyway but is not the only place where I’ve been ordered by security guards to not do that. One other time a guard by the Ditto Center of the Time & Life Building shouted at me to not take photos of the phones. I didn’t think to ask if all photography in that area was forbidden but it really did seem like he had a hardon for photos of the payphones. A similar encounter happened in the basement of the UBS Warburg Building next door, where a row of old phone booths existed until early 2009. I don’t remember for certain now but I think I managed to sneak those pictures in by discretely stopping in my tracks behind a column of the building. A correspondence with a woman who found those pictures on my web site revealed that she had a similar encounter with security guards at the UBS building informing her that photos of the payphones are not allowed.

With cameraphones so ubiquitous now it seems kind of hopeless for security guards to think they can prevent photos of things like this. But it also makes me question if audio recording is not similarly discouraged. I don’t know why it would be but you never know what random seeming activity is considered dangerous these days. There remain, as far as I know, wiretapping laws that ban the use of surveillance cameras to record video with audio. I think about these things too much.

Truth is I am just trying to write, write, and write. Much of what is coming out of these hands lately is not very interesting, but I want to get the mental writing muscles back in some kind of shape. I write more than just what goes onto this website, with a private journal I’ve written in for years and that no one else has ever seen. It is called “The Road to Elvis”, which is a reference to one of my earliest memories of New York and the goal it led me to establish for myself.

Posters around town in 1990 advertised a concert of “Elvis Live” at Radio City Music Hall. Elvis was, of course, famously dead by then but I interpreted the title of the concert as a nod to the myth that he was still alive. The concert was to feature large screens with concert video of Elvis as a live orchestra comprising his former musicians played on stage. Tickets were something like $75, an outrageous amount of money to me in 1990, but I determined I would find a way to scrape the funds together.

The concert, alas, was canceled due to lack of interest. But I said to myself that if/when this concert comes back to New York again I would find the money to attend.

It took 21 years but the concert finally came back to New York, and I was there.

That is why my private journal is called “The Road to Elvis”.