Wrong Number?
This strange and somewhat unnerving call came through recently, at my (212) number. Whoever made...
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This strange and somewhat unnerving call came through recently, at my (212) number. Whoever made...
Read MoreRummaging through old recordings for Payphone Radio when I found this call to my public phone...
Read MoreIf anybody who finds this can interpret, just in general, what this person is saying that’d be neat.
Read MoreThis is one of the oddest things I ever encountered in the wilderness of the free telephone partylines I used to call. Context is everything, I suppose, and in this short bit I have none.
Read MoreA bunch of years ago I bought a suite of 80-something WordPress themes, from a company called...
Read MoreThis playlist starts with me discovering a new-to-me set of immaculate old phone booths at the 347 Madison Avenue building. I tell some stories in this set that get dismembered by cell phone signal suckage. Kid in a Candy...
Read MoreI appreciated the earnestness of the woman’s attempt to inform someone of their upcoming appointment. She dialed the wrong number and found me. The idea of a missed doctor’s appointment reminded me of another element...
Read MoreThis is a tedious playlist save for the bit about the pen, and the one about the Asian woman. Too bad the cell phone signal dropped when it did, though you might not notice. Messed UpMute ButtonThe PenWandering...
Read MoreMy career path after college was supposed to be in radio. I feel fortunate it was not, since the world of broadcast radio in the early 1990s probably would have chewed me up and spit me out. But my interest in pursuing something in the realm of broadcasting has stayed with me. Years ago I […]
Read MoreI’m going to be redirecting this site soon and making it public once and for all. Wanted to share this little bit from one of the payphones outside the Queensbridge Houses last week. Added it to Payphone Radio but have not yet linked live to Payphone Radio so here it is for safe keeping.
Read MoreTrying to remember when I first knew of Joe Frank, and I read an Apology transcript that I stuck to the inside of the payphone enclosure.
Read MoreI changed my mind about one key point in this phone call. The journalist posting the phone number I use was not as boss a thing as I thought. My hope was that people would call the number from the machines, and a couple of people did, but mostly the calls came from peoples’ home […]
Read MoreIn summary: A reporter from Gothamist somehow got hold of the phone number I use for my little shenanigan. The number is not exactly a state secret but not many people have it, and fewer still would have the wherewithal or knowledge of the situation to contact Gothamist, and this particular reporter at that. Something […]
Read MoreIt was not intended to coincide with the 9/11 anniversary but I happened to find what I’ve called the “Big Box of Bad”, a cardboard box I had in storage containing all the newspapers and magazines I picked up after the attacks on 9/11. I wasn’t going to say anything about the anniversary but here […]
Read MoreIt’s a payphone version of something I wrote earlier. At this point I thought my dad’s “PERMANENT RECORD” was from grade school. It is in fact from the military high school.
Read MoreWhat is strange about this phone call, aside from it being in a language I don’t recognize, is that the call came to my Skype number, which has not received a call from anyone but myself in years. What is she saying?
Read MoreAs many as three of us all at once were using the payphones at the end of the Graybar Passage. One of us was a beautiful woman. She seemed disturbed. I wanted to ask her who the hell she thought she was talking to.
Read MoreHad to call from the cell on the second call because no working payphones could be found in Ridgewood. Took a dump for the ages at a pizza place on Fresh Pond. Hah, left my own fresh pond there.
Read MoreI’ll transcribe and have more to say about this tomorrow. Listen if you dare.
Read MoreStanding at Astoria Boulevard and 35th Street. This is across the street from a precinct. I’m out here looking for God. I found PRAY in Astoria yesterday. So I’m canvassing what’s left of the payphones around to see if I can find more. I think I’m just going to have to stick to the one […]
Read MoreI think what I should really do with all these calls is put them on a single page and form a playlist. i mean duh, right? That is my plan but I want to get as many of them posted now so I can get them into some kind of order.
Read MoreMe talking about the time I put Joe Frank on the kiosks, and about going to a regional high school reunion that night. Catching up on these calls, this one is from a couple of months ago at a midtown payphone.
Read MoreIt’s me, calling from a Grand Central payphone, talking about how the activist group wants me to align with them but I’m not so sure. I have a lot else to say about this in other places but suffice to say I did not make it to the Thursday meeting. This time it was because […]
Read MoreI started writing more about this, which has enveloped my mind and activities the last few weeks… But then I did not. Let’s just say that I have successfully bewildered millions.
Read MoreHere’s a call that includes a story about a strange encounter I had about a year earlier, with a guy who apparently didn’t like it when people took pictures of other people in public, so he retaliated by taking pictures of me. I just thought it was funny. I laughed. At first i thought, well, […]
Read MoreI spent some hours writing short 16-bar dance form pieces. That night I slept 11 hours. I think that’s because writing like that uses a part of my brain I had not used in a while. My brain is my biggest muscle.
Read MoreI might never get this stuff sorted out. E-mails I found from 1994 show that I contacted and interacted with some of the Legion of Doom people. I remain certain, however, that I had no idea these might have been the very people who plowed us all over on that voicemail system in Connecticut.
Read MoreNow I’m at Manhattan Avenue and India Street. I just wanted to continue with other things I meant to say about that CD. There’s nothing in there to get excited about. Or as my dad once said it’s nothing to shout about. There was this strange site that I did, or a subsite I guess, […]
Read MoreI found a CD full of stuff I backed up in 2000. Some of it dates back to 1992. Some of it I don’t remember ever seeing, some of it I do but it’s been such a long time. I had all these officecam pictures from when I worked at Time-Warner, and I pointed a […]
Read MoreThree calls stitched into one MP3, where the second call is actually from my cell phone, since I spotted no payphones in the emergency room. I did not want to ask, since it would have meant undoing my IV. There was at least one payphone in the old emergency room at Mt. Sinai but I […]
Read MoreJust some comments on what interactions occurred at this event, which was at the Cornell Club. I could not make myself not think that a dude from the class of 1968, the year I was born, must have been old enough to be my father, and that because of this on some transcentemporal level that must […]
Read MoreFrom about 5½ minutes on it’s just ambient sounds from the concourse at Rockefeller Center. I left it in case you, like I, enjoy hearing such things. In this call I describe a regional high school gathering, billed as a “reunion”, but by my assessment more of a fund raiser and nothing more. I […]
Read MoreI woke up feeling as bad as I’d felt in years. I took to a payphone nearby. The substance of my grousing about how software never works and how technology gets in my way is, appropriately enough, intruded upon by what sounds like teeth chattering on the landline. I can hear and understand what I […]
Read MoreTalking about the insignificant prattle I’ve posted here past few years, and how only I can read between the lines.
Read MoreI was having a rough morning. but it cleared when I found a MetroCard on the sidewalk.
Read MoreThinking of merging all my sites into a super site, from the super center payphone. Still not sure how to handle making some postings invisible to searchies and most of them not invisible.
Read MoreThis is a single recording of two payphone calls made from Grand Central Terminal last week. In fact I made three calls but the first one, for whatever reason, did not make it to the voicemail box, as seems to be an increasingly common problem with magicJack. I think about homelessness these days more than […]
Read MoreThis might be my favorite payphone call ever. Well, from the last year or so. Spoken from the mind of a digital hoarder.
Read MoreWow, that was leg-pounding, foot-stomping frustrating. What was meant to be a quick little posting about the last payphone call I made was simply erased by a distressingly common “Network Connection Error” or something meaningless like that which comes with no explanation or diagnostic. This is why you can never rely on having an easy […]
Read MoreHow is that even possible, to sleep 14 hours when I was not especially tired, then wake up feeling more or less normal? Maybe it’s because I did a good amount of writing yesterday in a style that is not comfortable for me. That kind of thing wrings my brain dry. The call above is […]
Read MoreThe photo below is not of the rogue payphone from which the above call was made, though the rogue did have an identical sticker affixed to it. I don’t know who is responsible for this little graffiti campaign but I concur with it in spirit, if not literally. There should be a quantity of payphones […]
Read MoreWell that was dumb. I did not listen back to the MP3 so I didn’t notice that it was warped in ways I cannot explain or excuse. Whatever the case I remembered that I had recorded the call both on the payphone and on my field recorder. I have always meant to see how that […]
Read MoreIt turns out I did not need to make this trip to the Science, Industry and Business Library after all. Somehow I got the impression that certain older Proquest databases were only available onsite, at this or most any other NYPL branch. This appears to be untrue, since I’ve been able to access everything from […]
Read MoreIt’s from 5 years ago. I am a depressing mofo sometimes, as the middle part of this call demonstrates. This is from a trip to Washington, D.C., in October, 2012. I visited the Congressional Cemetery and, the day after this phone call, Arlington, along with the usual walkable places like the Lincoln Memorial, The Mall, […]
Read MoreBeautiful. I think this was 37th Street around 30th Avenue. Too bad it didn’t capture more.
Read MoreI’m checking in from the Super Center payphone. This is the sequel to the original Super Center payphone, or payphones rather. There used to be at least two of them up on the wall of the building that used to be Pathmark and which is now the Food Bazaar. But beteween the Pathmark and the […]
Read MoreI don’t know why I said it was Sunday afternoon at the start of this call. It is Friday afternoon, as I think I mention later. Harder than ever to find a working payphone around here. Talk about the booze toward the end, with rude interruptions from the payphone demanding more quarters.
Read MoreGoing on at greater length with this might have made it clear that I was not exactly fuming over the fact that an attempt to make a call from a nearby payphone failed. It was just a springboard for the greater issue of a world built on shit that Does Not Work™. Too many jobs […]
Read MoreThis is from a few weeks ago. I forgot I did this. I spent a day hunting for phone booths on the far west side, finding a beautiful row of old green booths at the 79th Street Boat Basin. Then I checked in on the new booths on West End Avenue. The new booths replaced the […]
Read MoreOne call from a trusted payphone the night of the traffic ban, when a densely peaceful silence reigned over Astoria. Two other calls from the night after. I was working the payphones of Broadway in Astoria, Queens — the ones I could access, that is. Many were snowed in and unreachable to those of us […]
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