the title is consisted of two parts.
the first part stems from my interest in the subject of authorship: an interest that started to bud when i first took that anthropology elective at school where we discussed on the voice of an author in any ethnography. the final project I did for that semester set the tone of and served as the ground stone for my thesis.
the second part of the title, which I added probably a week right before my final presentation in spring, was a result of an encounter of some items from my past.
as i was exporting some old photos from my phone to my laptop one night, i ran into a series of digitised film photos i took of my ex-partner using their own camera back in 2019. there might be 30 something of them (high chance i used up a whole roll of film which is usually 36). i remember i was so proud of those photos. at the time I kept saying to them, look im better at taking pictures of people than you are! I keep the intimacy in photos!
thea, i always thought you were talented and got great eyes. they would always assure me.
my ex-partner had this habit of renaming his photos as soon as he imported them to his computer. and it was not until that night of me importing my photos that i realised he had named all those photo files that i took of him as well:
someone to watch over me-31_JPG. someone to watch over me-6_JPG. someone to watch over me-2_JPG.
i cried immediately. they were no longer in my life. who is there to watch over them now.
Sinéad O’Connor was found dead on July 23rd in 2023. i did have some songs of hers in my library, but not many. that day i looked her up on Apple Music and ran into an EP of hers that is consisted of four tracks. all four were her own covers of some older songs, including two that were originally sung by Marilyn Monroe which I was familiar with. a second later i kind of froze as i saw the title of the last track on this EP. its called Someone to Watch over Me.
how foolish i have been. of course this is a title of a jazz standard. my ex-partner used to name one of his iPods Oscar Peterson.
that day i made a playlist of different covers of the same song. besides the one by Sinéad O’Connor, there were also ones by Etta James, Ella Fitzgerald, Chet Baker, Amy Winehouse, and even Sting. there is something significant to me when it comes to artists like Sinéad O’Connor making their own cover of jazz standards. like Björk performing Like Someone In Love:
something about resilience and tenderness.