I knew it was coming. Or going. But to hear strange voices talking sports on my 880AM dial I felt something had changed. One of my first memories of finding a room of my own in New York City (Room 1422 at the Parc Lincoln) was turning on a radio and hearing the incessant tapping noise and background hiss of 1010WINS. I quickly found 880 WCBS and considered it a more grown-up, mature sounding news radio. I never completely shut out 1010WINS but I always found its sound to be hyper and irritating. I always shut off the radio when Karen Stewart gives her nearly-shouting angry traffic summary. I guess she’s trying to empathize with the frustration of people stuck in traffic but I’m not stuck in traffic and even if I was I don’t think I’d need a muse to keep me frustrated with the situation.
I’m not a radio junkie like I kind of used to be. I don’t have time or place to listen in these days, which is probably just as well. A reflection of the times but in a spirit different from the general movement away from he AM dial. The death knell for AM radio has been tolling for decades but for the most part it just keeps on keeping on.
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In other news I revisited Jamaica yesterday and made a couple of surprising payphone discoveries. I did not think I was going to keep finding relics of New York’s payphone past but they just keep turning up in unexpected places. I used to have leads on where to find them, skillfully gleaned from reverse-engineering public information in ways I consider utter genius. But that resource is exhausted and now I’m left to just finding them in the wilds at random. I mean that was always a “technique” that fit nicely with my flaneur ways, but the public records trick turned up a lot of good locations.
