\t\t\t\ti alluded yesterday to a payphone-related project on which i recently
\nembarked, or rather re-embarked. i happened to choose earthquake day to
\nresume the project, but that’s neither here nor there except to note that
\ni found myself unwittingly hogging a public resource at one of its rare
\nmoments of value.<\/p>\n
the project is fairly simple in design. i go out with a pocket full of
\nquarters and i call a voicemail number i set up for this project. i call
\nthe number, and i talk, talk about this or that — the substance of the
\nlittle speeches i record was what i experimented with today, just getting
\nused to doing this such that i could think and talk freely.<\/p>\n
i decided to start following people. i used to do this a fair amount, for
\nidle interests in the mundane actions of fellow human beings. i pursue
\nthis hobby with no intention of entering the lives of the people i follow,
\nnor do i have any desire to so much as enter their consciousness, or cross
\ntheir radar of awareness. i rarely follow for more than a few minutes, but
\ni feel like interesting things frequently rise up from these little spy
\njobs.<\/p>\n
today i turned the plot a few degrees, deciding that if i was calling like
\nthsi from payphones then i should endeavor to follow someone for the
\ndistance between the payphones, then after i stop following i report in to
\nthe voicemail to recount everything i can remember about that person.<\/p>\n
today i followed a woman carrying a Brooks Brothers shopping bag. she wore
\nflip flops, a one-piece dress. at first i thought she had a limp but i
\nsoon found that it was more of a swagger. it was an odd gait, but not too
\ndemonstratively so. over her left shoulder was a bag, checkered with brown
\nand black squares. the bag may have been leather, but more likely some
\nother fabric. there was a broken strap on the bag. i think the broken
\nstrap would have been used to tie the bag shut, but instead it just
\ndangled off the side of the bag.<\/p>\n
not an interesting trail to follow. nothing learned, really. i gleaned
\nmore bahavioural flourishes from a 20-something man walking briskly south
\non 3rd Avenue. he poked and picked at everything along the way, punching
\nbuttons on electronic parking meters and picking up payphones for less
\nthan one second before slamming them back on the hook.<\/p>\n
i also reported in on memories i had of experiences near the payphone i
\nwas using. one story, vivid in my memory, involved the Tramway Diner on
\n2nd Avenue. i was there once when it was very crowded, and i was sitting
\ntoo close for comfort to two people at the table to my right and one
\nelderly woman at the table to my left. i noticed the elderly woman but, as
\ncrowded as the place was, i paid her no particular mind. this was probably
\nin 1994 or 1995.<\/p>\n
i dropped something. it must have been a fork or a spoon, but whatever it
\nwas it landed on the elderly woman’s table. she picked it up and, slowly,
\nbegan handing it to me. as i took the utensil from her she pressed two of
\nher fingers into the palm of my hand. making eye contact she asked “Do you
\nwant some company?”<\/p>\n
she was a hooker. i looked at her face. the makeup was gaudy and even
\nludicrous, like something from a child’s face painting party, or a
\ncircus clown. her fingers trembled and her eyeballs jiggled, but she
\nseemed confident in what she was doing.<\/p>\n
i thanked her for handing me the eating utensil, and acted like i didn’t
\nhear her question. she did not pursue the matter by asking again or
\nclarifying. she just sat there alone at the crowded diner, eating her
\nsoup very, very slowly.<\/p>\n
the payphone voicemail project could be interesting, if i find the
\nresources to do it right. it’s a lot of follow up audio editing and
\nprocessing, which is painful for me. hell, yeah, but i need a damn editor.
\non the other hand the artistry of it all is to be able to deliver short
\naccounts of the what and where from a given payphone, so maybe the post
\nprocessing would be targeted for minimal time investment.<\/p>\n
i did feel as if yesterday’s calls made for interesting accounting of the
\nearthquake, and of my gradual realization that such a thing had happened
\nwith no exposure to media coverage of the event.<\/p>\n
blahblhablahbalhbalbhalhbal<\/p>\n
today is the first time i can remember being around the road-thrashing
\nthat will end with the T train, better known as the 2nd Avenue
\nSubway. i think it’s a needless project that few if any normal people
\nreally want or need, but at least it seems to be squeezing the bikes away
\nto other avenues. it is really, really, loud and obnoxious, though, the
\nconstruction, or destruction as it appears to be.<\/p>\n
oh, another interesting memory that rose up from today’s payphone project
\ninvolved those mysterious tangles of disemboweled cassette tape matter
\nthat litter gutters and sidewalks. one of my earliest memories of New
\nYork was seeing what seemed like miles and miles and miles of this stuff,
\ncassette tapes freed from the tyranny of the spools that guided them over
\nthe cassette player’s head. i had imagined that these discarded tapes
\ncontained clandestine messages, and a tape picked out of the gutter would,
\nwhen carefully re-spooled onto a cassette container, be playable on a
\nstandard cassette deck, whence the mysteries of the discarded tape would
\nbe revealed, linking the listener to where they could find the next
\ncassette tape in the puzzle and resume to hunt.<\/p>\n
i picked up a sliver of such cassette tape today, vaguely imagining that i
\nmight actually do this, conduct this little forensic project of
\nre-spooling the tape and playing back its secrets.<\/p>\n
Alas, I decided against it when I found that the tape was stuck to a wad
\nof chewing gum, and soaked in fluids originated from God-knows-where. and,
\nseriously, the scrap of cassette tape is unlikely to hold anything more
\nmysterious than a few seconds from a Tony Bennett song.<\/p>\n
i long to find the cassette tape i know i recorded at the Parc Lincoln in
\n1991, the day before or the day of my exit from that place. i know the
\ntape exists, but where? it is probably disintegrated by now, but the tape
\nrecorded a woman talking and rambling like a bored loon, a sullen voice of
\ninchoate ennui from a woman whiling away her days in placidity at the Parc
\nLincoln. cassettes like that are why i still get a bit of a charge when i
\nsee home-made cassettes on sale at thrift shops. i imagine that the tapes
\nare not simply mixed tapes of songs but genuine expressions of
\nindividuals, or at least some solitary cultural backwash. not bloody
\nlikely, right?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
i alluded yesterday to a payphone-related project on which i recently embarked, or rather re-embarked. i happened to choose earthquake day to resume the project, but that’s neither here nor there except to note that i found myself unwittingly hogging a public resource at one of its rare moments of value. the project is fairly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1848","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-text","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paumAn-tO","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1848","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1848"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1848\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}