Beginning July 12th, WFMU's new archives will no longer be available in 20k Real Audio, and this change will affect archive listeners on a dial-up connection. Going forward, all new archives will be available in the higher quality 64k AAC+ format, which sounds fantastic with our new Pop-Up Player. However, the Pop-Up Player and new archives from July 12th onward will NOT work if you have a dial-up connection.

I doubt if this announcement sent any thunderous shockwaves down the Intertubes. WFMU's live audio feed will continue to be available to dial-up users. The station's unfathomably enormous archives which date from time immemorial will also remain available through next month's cutoff date, at which time the station will cease production of archives for dial-up users. This would seem to reflect the continuing fade into irrelevance of the RealAudio format, a codec which revolutionized online audio but failed to garner any good will because of it.

I was piqued by this announcement because I first heard WFMU over dial-up, in a hotel room far from New York. I had heard of WFMU but I had never actually heard this purportedly influential radio station that allegedly broadcast to this city.

I have lived in New York for 19 years and I have never been able to pick up WFMU's signal on a plain old radio. Never -- not from Manhattan, not from Queens, not from anywhere, not even as a faint slip of sound glimmering within a blizzard of static. That blizzard of snowy noise is all I have ever heard at 91.1 on any of my numerous FM radio sets.

I understand a certain measure of feng shui can help achieve WFMU reception but access to 'FMU over the web has (for me, at least) made such maneuvering unnecessary.

Some years ago I applied to host a show at WFMU but my application was completely ignored. Not rejected, but ignored. I do not know if that is typical of WFMU (I know they are very, very busy) or if my application was just particularly laughable, but I meekly allowed this little bit of discouragement to keep me out of radio for another decade.

Radio was supposed to be my calling after college, where I was Classical Programming Director for a couple of years at the school station. In 1990 I came close to landing a spot at KTPB, a new classical station in Kilgore, Texas; and I was in the running for a spot at a station in Sitka, Alaska. If I remember this right I believe I got near-offers from stations in Tampa and Orlando, but those calls came after I had left Florida for New York (where I was eventually by rejected by every radio station I applied to) in October, 1990.

I would have been a poor fit at any commercial or time-formatted station. I have the voice for radio but not the temporal discipline. Though I was officially in charge of Classical at my college station I would often take to the airwaves talking about things like rubber canoes:

 

	RUBBER CANOES
	    slathered with 
	     mineral frosting and 



	GULLIES OF DEATH

	in which the 

		college president 

		stirs 

		  black beans and rice

 		   with his 

			 35mm 

                             mandolin! 

During the summers (when the station was officially off the air) I would sneak in to the station at 2 or 3am and commence broadcasting to whoever had their radio on at that moment, talking like a surrealist poet (or so I thought) and playing only the music of the human voice. During these sessions I took the station's telephones off the hook so none could intrude on my over-the-air solitude. By design I never recorded any of these litanies, and in fact the above is something I made up just now to demonstrate the spirit of those broadcasts, not the material.

I believe in randomness in all things. I believe that without randomness nothing exists. In the spirit of that and of the above-mentioned attempts at surrealist searchings I think that the radio programming closest in spirit to what I would want to do is the Joe Frank series, though I wish he had the freedom of not falling into the 58-minute format, filling out shows with what unnecessary padding just to make them long enough to fill buckets of air time.

I imagine a type of programming that is radio-like but not necessarily on the radio. I remember my days working with the Apology Line, a telephone art project which held way too much influence over me but which I nevertheless recall with interest and nostalgia.

I remember Apology for its sound. Just yesterday, for instance, I was listening to phone calls made to the Lost and Found Photos site, and the sound of the voices evoked memories of those lonely, depressing telephone messages left to Apology. That is not to suggest that the calls to Lost and Found Photos are either lonely or depressing -- entirely the opposite, in fact. As a Found Photos enthusiast I found those recorded statements to be interesting and enlightening. But at first blush it was that sound, that timbre of human voices rising up from the wire of the telephone that captured my imagination and reminded me of Apology. The gruff, crackling, voyeuristic timbre of analog phone calls compels my attention and makes me listen.

Some time ago, as I described toward the end of this story over at Sorabji.com, I pursued a project I had contemplated for a long time prior. For several nights I shook up payphones around America by patching them in to conference calls. At random I chose some of the few payphones I could find that still accepted incoming calls and, using an Internet phone software, I called them all at once. As many as 10 payphones located anywhere from Wisconsin to Chicago to Texas to Florida all rang at the sametime, and after a few moments individuals at these locations answered. The first person to answer always sounded to me like the most excited, but in fact everyone who connected to this sudden community answered with varied sense of anticipation, anxiety, and even anger.

The first person to pick up, though, was the crux of the endeavor, for it was that person who answered a phone and heard not the voice of another person but the sounds of other phones ringing. That person's attention was always critical.

One night the first person to answer was a bar fly in Wisconsin, a man who picked up a payphone and heard ringing phones, then waited long enough to hear a woman at another bar in Wyoming answer the ringing payphone there. Beneath the din of the other phone lines still ringing followed confusion between these two people, half-crazed accusations of who called who and questions of what the hell was going on.

Into the mix fell a third person at a bus stop in Arizona, followed quickly by someone at a motel in Tampa. The first moments of each new player started with a bit of combat, settling into the place while simply comprehending what it is.

The sound was unbelievable. It was opera, sounding to me like great art in that it challenged my personal sense of control, reason, even sanity.

If I called 10 lines the number of people who stayed to talk would usually settle at 4 or 5, eventually petering out to 2 as the mystery of how this connection came about was never forgotten but simply accepted.

In fact the value of this web site has been written about in many places, most memorably for me in a front page New York Times story of May 13, 2004; a story which detailed (among other things) a mother's use of this web site to track down her runaway daughter.

The value of this site has changed over time, and I am first to say that it is not as valuable as it once was, nor was it ever as valuable as it might have been had I found a reliable flow of current data linking payphone numbers to exact physical locations.

Nevertheless, today I received an e-mail like one from the old days of this web site -- a message from someone who used information on this web site to connect her troubled daughter to an exact location. This is one of many reasons this site has continued to exist, and I wish that someone with access to current payphone locations and numbers would see the value in making this data regularly available to the public.

Here is the message I received today:

"Many thanks for keeping that payphone info available. my daughter called me from one with a not so good message. now because of your web site i know the exact last point of our contact. and the other companies were going to charge me money for that. when you are stressed about a loved one you don't need to be decieved about info that need not cost you any thing. although if i had it i would have paid but desperation and hope made me continue to look for your answer  again many thank you's"

At a cost of $10,990 US I do not anticipate adding the ELP Laser Turntable to my personal arsenal of audio archiving tools. It seems, however, like an interesting sounding product for libraries, archivists and LP collectors with money to burn.

The company web site lists pianist Keith Jarrett as a happy customer, but offers no sound samples of this interesting device designed to reproduce the superior sound quality of LP records while preserving their physical state. I would like to hear how this device plows through scratches and surface blemishes of older LP records. There appears to be no way to use this handsome device to digitize old LPs. While one who is ready to spend this much money for a record player that exists to preserve the quality of their records might not be the sort who intends to turn their LPs into FLAC files I would nevertheless expect such an option.

Some time ago I began a side project of archiving my old cassette tapes. I have bags filled with tapes from my Panasonic answering machines and from various telephone related projects of mine. I mentioned this project to some friends and was surprised to find how interested people were in my little endeavor. Most folks I talked to seemed to think that digitizing cassettes saves them from oblivion, preserving them for eternity in a format less susceptible to decay and obsolescence. I disagree. Digital content is far more susceptible to complete destruction than any of its analog cousins. Preserving something digitally immediately puts it in a certain state of limbo, a state where no amount of backup or redundancy will ever guarantee that it will exist tomorrow, a state in which none can reasonably expect it to last as long as those old cassettes themselves. Some of my cassettes date back 25 years. I do not expect that my digitized versions of them will last as long.

In reply to that question one of his reporters is said to have replied "Not a new."

If Horace Greeley were looking for payphone news and information today I would have to say there is nary a new, save for the occasional moribund new that another locality is down to its final public telephone.

Payphones and phone booths are on their way to becoming objects of nostalgia, and this Payphone Project I established so many years ago would seem to have moldered away in tandem with the public's awareness of public telephony.

Payphones are not simply a disappearing bit of Americana but another example of the presumed obsolescence that I believe characterizes all technology. Today's high-tech is tomorrow's junk, and at times I lament that my Internet-based livelihoods have been built not with the tools of an artisan but with disposable gadgets and cheap plastic keyboards.

As the one or two people who still subscribe to this section's RSS feed may have noticed I spent some time today cleaning up some old stories. I may plug in some other old stories from the last year or so in the coming days before moving forward. I am going to try to make this news section interesting -- not by linking to every possible story which mentions payphones and phone booths but by expanding on the payphone as one of many technologies both evolving and devolving across generations. This will be a lightly updated section, the focus of which I am not certain, but for now I think it will focus on obsolete or nearly-obsolete technologies and their appearances in contemporary times.

I will also soon revive a message board at this site. I was forced by spam overload to remove a Payphone Project message board several years ago but it might be fun to see what randomness awaits a fresh and uninhabited message board that is linked to from throughout this and my other web sites. I am hoping for incoherentness settling into confusion and then some sort of focus among random humans who find themselves arbitrarily sharing a virtual space.

Read more:

• New York Daily News
• Epoch Times
• NY1
• amNY

Telecommunications giant Verizon, in conjunction with the resort's Public Works office, has removed all but four of its pay phones from the resort because the coin-operated devices aren't generating enough revenue to justify keeping them, according to town auditor Susan Childs.

Read more at DelmarvaNOW.com

I actually own a life-size cardboard print of the famous Life magazine photo. Two of the faces are cut out of the print, allowing people to stick their heads through and pose. It is really very funny to see.

There was plenty of coverage of this amusing anniversary. The above quote is from SFGATE.com. That story includes several photos of the booth-cramming and of the now-92-year-old photographer, Joe Munroe.

Read more at Inquisitr.com

But it's the public telephone across the street from the Inglewood Wine Market that's the real draw for undesirables: The 9 Ave. S.E. phone booth is a magnet for addicts, dealers and prostitutes, and the bane of businesses for blocks around.

Read more at The Calgary Sun.

Read Lost child... Call Home.

Rex is also owner of the famous BugWing

Read more at Philadelphia City Paper

Read more at Naplesnews.com

Not so fast, my friend. Finding a pay phone these days is not that easy.

Read more at Star Exponent.com in Culpeper, Virginia