Second Thoughts

I've spent most of the day listening to the Magnetic Fields, which has both comforted and enabled a short bit of depressed feeling I've had for the last few days. The three disc collection called 69 Love Songs is just about three hours long, and I got through it one and a half times. The songs are as realized as the misanthrope persona that all the songs are written from.

Part of my down feeling has to do with the fact that I've spent the week in a poorly ventilated room with permanent markers crossing out personal information from medical records, though they let me bring my headphones. The Cardiovascular Research Foundation is conducting a study on patients who have had bypass surgery and they want all 400-some records to be anonymous, each of the 200 sheets in every file labeled with a number and letter code instead. Enter the lowly "temps" to do the grunt work. It really felt like manual labor, and the fumes, ironically, couldn't have been good for my heart.

It was interesting and partly disturbing to rifle through people's medical records, especially because they were filed chronologically, from the initial emergency room records citing "chest pain" to what I, as the omniscient observer in the situation, knew would inevitably result in extensive surgery. I read about a legally blind piano tuner from Queens who quit smoking in 1990, the Wonderbread delivery man who is 5'6" and 215 pounds, and the 65 year old practicing physician who ran tests and listed himself as patient and physician, then submitted them to the hospital.

So the dizzying monotony of sitting in a room doing the same thing for 8 hours, along with the strange predetermination of worst-case-scenario outcome in the medical records--long week. Enter Magnetic Fields and the cheeky, perfect love songs. Really, they're not about love, but love falling apart. But somehow, they avoid self-pity, even though the lyrics seem like they are full of it. And Stephen Merritt's extraordinarily low voice, of course, doesn't exactly lighten things up. It took me around 4 trips through the whole 69 songs to start liking it, to develop what is definitely an acquired taste. What I realize I love about the songs is that they don't beg you to like them; they barely even ask. It's not slick production that's smiling at you to join in, but as you learn to pick up the ridiculously clever lyrics and appreciate the subtlety, you realize that they are what love songs really ought to sound like: effortless, honest, silly, introspective, depressed, pretentious, casual, self-consciously sentimental. Part of the way they avoid annoying self-pity is that Stephen Merritt plays it up in a persona--that and the songs are so well executed, one doesn't ask questions. I think if something is written well enough, I'll believe pretty much anything it says.

I got a letter from Con Ed this afternoon saying that we have been illegally using electricity, and it will be turned off in three days. I guess I should call them tomorrow.

"I could make a career of being blue / I could dress in black and read Camus / smoke clove cigarettes and drink vermouth / like I was 17 / that would be a scream / but I don't want to get over you."

"There'll be time enough for sleeping when we're dead / You will have a velvet pillow for your head ... There'll be time enough for sex and drugs in heaven / When our pheremones are turned up to 11."

"Heather, Heather, we belong together /like sex and violence / Like death and silence."