\t\t\t\tsometimes i start to think that i actually love payphones. is that so strange? i don’t know. i was looking for an old payphone yesterday, patrolling 21st Street area, when i felt a nudge in my gut any time i passed a spot where i know a payphone used to be, or where i at least *think* a payphone used to be. sometimes the memory is definite, other times i get that nudging sensation when i pass a place where i can assume a payphone used to be. a gas station, for isntance, a BP station on 21st Street, almost certainly had a payphone at one time, aannd my instincts rose up to look for it when i passed by. but i have no distinct memory of a public phone being there, just an instinct (probably accurate, retrospectively) that this was the sort of place where i could find a phone.<\/p>\n
i think that type of mental instinct, described here in reference to payphones, applies to other objects, either physical or ephemeral. somehow you know something is going to be somewhere, whether you are familiar with the space or not. it’s like a meta sense of things, keyed in to lightly remembered fantasies and realities, keyed in to a sense of architecture, of public space, and of shared memory.<\/p>\n
so i printed out some old pictures today, pictures of old payphones, and i went around to where they used tto be, and took photos of the spots. at a couple of spots i left the photos, affixing the photos of the payphones to the spot where the payphone used to be. i didn’t plan to do this, though i’ve had the idea in the past. i should have brought tape. had i brought tape, that would reflect that i had a plan.<\/p>\n
i left one photo stuck inside an abandoned payphone stump on northern boulevard, a colorful location outside of an abandoned building that has been vacant for years, but which still has a fully-lit, blinking neon sign saying “OPEN 24 HOURS”. it used to be a check cashing place, and inside the vacated place of business are a few gigantic gumball machines, filled with gumballs, gumballs waiting until God knows when to erupt in a Hostess Twinkies like explosion of dormant fungus.<\/p>\n
then i got caught up in a filming scene for “Person of Interest,” which was really annoying. i recognized it as a filming scene immediately when i saw that about 85% of the people present were standing around doing nothing, and then i overheard some of the people in that 85% ask where the free food was. an enterprising homeless dude appears to have crashed the catering hall, walking off with a phat mountain of food and eating it a few feet from me while i called myself and left a voicemail from a Northern Boulevard payphone.<\/p>\n
i was thinking about the phrase “Person of Interest,” and how lame it is. i remember when either Richard Jewell or Philip Hatfill (names could be munged into memory) was described by the FBI as a “Person of Interest” in their investigations of the Atlanta Olympic Bombings and the post 9\/11 anthrax attacks. one or the other of these two suspects pointed out that the term “Person of Interest” seemed never to have existed in the FBI lexicon until it was used in reference to these individuals, leading me to conclude that the FBI’s media management got a little ahead of itself, overconfident and needlessly imperious in a way that turned out to be transparent.<\/p>\n
other then that, the filming setup just annoyed the shit out of me.<\/p>\n
…..<\/p>\n
i played through some Liszt pieces today. Au Lac du Wallenstadt, and Sospiro. the latter piece used to intimidate me after i discovered that i had learned it wrong. then i played it as written, and it was no problem at all. hard to describe, i guess, but there is a hand over hand passage that is particularly tall, and which i always played the way Earl Wild played it, which was not hand over hand.<\/p>\n
still thinking about the Yamaha piano, as either a replacement or a complement to the Roland. i don’t know about it, because the Yamaha is about $10,000, which is cheap for a piano of quality construction and concert grand action. but it is a “hybrid” piano, meaning it is a piece of technology, a computer. that means it will be replaced by a better and cheaper version in 3 months. in the meantime the recently fixed Roland sounds good to me. it doesn’t feel so good as the Yamaha, but it sounds ok…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
sometimes i start to think that i actually love payphones. is that so strange? i don’t know. i was looking for an old payphone yesterday, patrolling 21st Street area, when i felt a nudge in my gut any time i passed a spot where i know a payphone used to be, or where i at […]<\/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":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-image","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-wL","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2031","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=2031"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2031\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}