Before deactivating Facebook I did what I always do at that time. I downloaded all my stuff, about 500mb worth, though I swear the download was a lot bigger the last time I did this.

The only thing keeping me connected to Facebook these days was the “Guess the Score” group, which was a lot of fun for me for a couple of months until suddenly it seemed completely inane and gratuitous. Someone posts a page or a single note from a score and the others try to guess what piece of music it’s from. Nothing wrong with the premise, I implemented an identical idea a few years ago with namethecomposer.com, intending to make it a more featureful interactive format allowing questions from site visitors and clues from myself or, potentially, anyone else who wanted to post an excerpt.

What suddenly seemed inane to me about the Facebook group is the format. It’s just too limited, and this is nobody’s fault, this just isn’t the kind of application Facebook groups are designed for.

I was introduced and reintroduced to a lot of good music. I totally forgot about Ten Holt, and a discovery of a new-to-me piano sonata by a composer whose name escapes me at the moment was a real find. But I also felt like my own participation in this group, as prolific as it might have been, was not really making anyone’s day richer. I was showing off my piano sheet music collection, which I have never in my life had a chance to do. But to what end? I didn’t find any evidence to suggest anyone was going to purchase a Robert Helps score after I posted that, or that there would be a revival of the Anton Rubinstein 4th Piano Concerto after I posted a few notes from the first movement cadenza.

Showing off my scores became kind of a surprisingly sensitive bit for me. It reminds me of a scene from Untamed Heart (1993), the Christian Slater/Marisa Tomei movie. Early in their relationship there’s a moment where he is giving her a detailed tour of what I think was his comic book collection (haven’t seen the movie in years so going on memory). She didn’t seem to care about comic books but she was taken by his deep knowledge of and obvious passion for them. That’s when she started falling in love with him, when he demonstrated that he had a passion for something. I connect with that scene, hoping something like that might happen to me some day with regard to something like my piano music or any of my other collections about which I’ve been over-the-top enthusiastic at times.

In any situation comparable to the Slater/Tomei scene I’ve ever been in I think that if I demonstrated a comparable level of interest in my sheet music I’d be told to just shutup.

I think the closest I came to that kind of flashpoint moment was when someone wrote to say she really got a rise out of reading anything I wrote about piano music. Someone else made a similar comment about payphones, saying it was impressive as hell to be around someone who so deeply knows a subject matter, however uninteresting or irrelevant they might have found it before.

By the way me quitting Facebook this time had nothing whatsoever to do with this “Guess the Score” group or anything about it. I quit FB once in a while to keep the noise out. I had felt myself getting the addiction, though. I was fully aware of it, and allowed it to happen, since that’s what the programmers and planners of almost all social media are trying to get you to do. That addiction is real.

I learned recently that Instagram embargoes likes for a while, so you will spend more time sitting there staring at Instagram, waiting for the likes to pop up. Facebook probably does the same thing.

…

I did a lot of writing today on a subject I haven’t thought about so much the last couple of months. Payphones, of course. In particular two matters: My scanned copies of Perspectives magazine, the former trade journal of the payphone industry; and a strange video I found from a Denver Art Museum exhibit that involved phone booths. In 2009 the Denver Art Museum put on an exhibit called “Psychedelic Experience” which focused mostly on rock band posters and art from the 1960s. As part of the show a couple of old phone booths were installed with rotary dial phones. Visitors were invited to use the phones to record stories about their connection to the 1960s. The stories were recorded on video and uploaded to YouTube. Among accounts regarding LSD parties and Woodstock came this tale from a woman who claimed she helped murder a homeless man in Central Park in the 1970s. Is she lying? I’m guessing yes, but see what you think.

What did she think this was, the Apology Line?

Then I went looking for this phone booth scene from The World According to Garp, the 1982 Robin Williams film that I must have watched 40 times over the years. I am looking for lesser-known phone booth and payphone scenes, not for personal amusement but because I am trying to see if Hollywood paints what I think is a more accurate picture of the role payphones and phone booths played in society fails to match up with what I think is false nostalgia for the subject. I don’t know if this scene really fits my premise, but it does align with my memories of phone booths and payphones as being conduits for messages of desperation and maximum anxiety. Contrary to conventional wisdom about comfort and privacy I think that phone booths were places people wanted to get out of, not spend a lot of time.

This scene in particular, especially Helen’s reaction to whatever was on the note from Garp, made my stomach turn when I saw this as a kid. I recognized before I had any reason to think about it that the consequences of cheating on a spouse would start with feeling like garbage. Seeing this again after many years I think that as an actor she could have looked a little more shell-shocked and raw, but I guess she was staying character.

OK, gotta go make dinner, or something. So much to say today but I spent most of it not saying anything.