Skip to primary content

Song 10 | Aug 12 2003

The tenth song is The Desperate Things You Make Me Do by the Magnetic Fields. I hate to complain, but I think the banjo or glockenspiel or whatever that was, was mixed too high. This made it hard to hear the lyrics and I really wanted to hear the lyrics because they reminded me, from what I could hear of them, of Morrissey, whose lyrics I’ve always loved, so much so that just this past weekend I realized that Morrissey isn’t merely a great lyricist but a great philosopher, albeit in the oblique and somewhat fragmented sense of, say, the later Wittgenstein.

Speaking of the Magnetic Fields, many years ago a friend borrowed my copy of Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville, which is one my favorite CDs ever, stuck-on-a-desert-island stuff, far better than anything she’s done since, almost to the point where you have to seriously wonder if Liz Phair actually died right after making it and was secretly replaced by a woman who looks exactly like her, sings exactly like her, and even shares some of Liz Phair’s “issues,” but isn’t Liz Phair. All this aside, my friend, who is now my ex-friend, kept promising to return the CD but kept “forgetting” to do so, as he put it, until I finally had no choice but to tell him to either return my CD or consider himself my ex-friend, whereupon he mailed the CD to me, only the CD he mailed wasn’t Exile in Guyville but some piece of crap by the Magnetic Fields, which for obvious reasons I never listened to.

This reminds me (I’m in an even more associative mood than usual) of the enormous depression I saw in the middle of the street today. It must have been eight feet across and two feet deep. It was right in the center of the south-bound lane on Vanderbilt, just past where Vanderbilt crosses Sterling. The police had drawn a thick yellow line around it, but that was all: no traffic cones or traffic barrels or traffic anythings. It was scary. What if someone drove right into it?

As I walked away, I imagined a story about a guy who sees such a depression, except in the story the depression is much deeper than two feet, so deep that when the guy looks down into it he can’t see the bottom, so that it’s not really a depression at all but a hole. As the guy walks away, he imagines seeing some kid ride his bicycle right into it. This terrifies him to the point that he has to turn around just to make sure that no kid is approaching on his bicycle. It’s irrational of course—what are the chances of such thing happening just at that moment?—and yet this is precisely what happens: a kid rides his bicycle directly into the hole. The weird thing is that the kid never screams or does anything to indicate he’s falling into a hole, and instead just keeps pedaling his bicycle, eyes straight ahead, seemingly calm and relaxed, so that it looks like he’s simply at the top of a long steep hill and is now just heading down it.