Big romantic stuff

I haven't posted any music in a while. I'm not sure I'd call this a mix in the consciously assembled sense so much as a selection of songs that have been on rotation recently. Some have more obvious aetiologies than others. I could have sworn I owned the Dresden Dolls cover about ten years ago, as a concert bootleg, but I had to go looking for it again after being reminded of its existence. In my junior year at Brandeis, I learned "If Love Were All" from the singing of Alan Rickman in Private Lives. When a song gets in my head, I listen to it wall to wall. I've never known if that was normal and I don't think it makes much difference.

Alan Rickman & Lindsay Duncan, "If Love Were All/Someday I'll Find You"

But I believe that since my life began
The most I've had is just
A talent to amuse

Alan Vega, Alex Chilton, Ben Vaughn, "Fat City"

Looking at my tracks, I miss my train

Angela Burns, "All Together"

No, I don't need you to keep me whole and safe
From the dangers behind that thick brick wall

The Dresden Dolls, "Life on Mars"

Oh, man, look at those cavemen go

Elvis Perkins in Dearland, "Weeping Pilgrim, 417"

I weep
I mourn
And I move slowly on
I'm a poor mourning pilgrim, I'm bound for Canaan's land

Jake Xerxes Fussell, "Pork and Beans"

See my clothes string hanging on your line
Tell by that, well, I got a rambling mind

The Jezabels, "Dark Storm"

But when I took it to the sky
To the bright white cockatoo on a satellite
She looked down on all my years
With a click of a finger

Joan Armatrading, "Woncha Come on Home"

Every light is on, but all the rooms are empty except one
Oh, baby, don't stay too late
You know I hate to be alone
And I'm alone

Johnny Flynn, "Lost and Found"

Just a lonely radio
Just a makeshift show and tell
Playing out the lives of the lost and found

Made of thin air, full of desire

I wish I had not been given a nickname in elementary school by people who meant it to hurt.¹

gaudior had to listen to me talking about this the other day. It depended on a mispronunciation of my last name, which was one of the guaranteed sure-fire ways to upset me in childhood. I still don't like when it happens, nobody likes their name being mangled, but I no longer take it personally unless it is a visible act of malice, in which case I consider people who try this sort of stunt as adults hilarious. It's not like the pronunciation used by my father's family is in any way authentic to the original Welsh. But I lost my temper easily as a child. I think some of it may have been a form of social processing overload; certainly some of my other emotional reactions were not normative for my age group. I imagine the rest of it was the normal curve of learning not to fly off the handle when other people were whatever they were. Either way, it was apparently very funny for other children to watch. And I didn't like people messing around with my name. It didn't just feel mocking or belittling, it felt wrong. The concept of true names always made sense to me: the idea that to change the name is to change the thing itself. I noticed years ago that I don't share my Hebrew name widely, even though it would not be secret from anyone who ever saw my ketubah or heard me called to the bimah. I use the same name for all my social media, but I recognize it as a handle, not my actual name. I might turn my head if I heard it across a room; you could not enchant me with it. I do actually feel that my alternate male name would be mine if I wanted to use it, but its existence is strictly a feature of having been conceived at a point in history when there was no assumption of knowing a child's sex ahead of birth—my brother born four years later only ever had the one name, because my parents were told the genetics early on. My grandmother had a nickname for me which no one else has ever used. I answered to it; I understood it as affection. It was not derived from any of my names.

The easiest way to mispronounce my last name is to make it sound like a form of chewy candy or a pejorative term for the Welsh. Stick a first name on me that led naturally into that pronunciation and I blew a gasket. Otherwise I think I could have coped quite decently with being known as "Saltwater Taaffe."

1. Please note that this post is not a request for anyone to start using it seriously. I think about nicknames from time to time, because they interest me, and they were on my mind recently because of a character in Only Angels Have Wings (1939) whose proper name we never actually know, even though he's one of the film's quartet of main characters. So then I was thinking about the fact that the one nickname I attracted in elementary school was a deliberate effort to needle me and the one that really didn't stick in high school was similarly based around not letting me live something down and it would have been nice if it had worked out otherwise. I know there's a time-honored tradition of teasing tangled with affection, but I was not the right person for it. I console myself by thinking that I might have needed to be a character by Damon Runyon to make it work, anyway.