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When I think understanding matters most, I can only think of bad analogies. Are there good analogies? All covers of Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” feel like a step back from or a stylization of her original’s raw emotion. As if her style is not a style and instead only lays bare. Avec Sans uses the song for bodily oomph, and Placebo makes me feel like a hot air baloon of my own drama. I listen to the original a lot in the car. In her car she played another cover, by Chromatics. She said she plays it to feel something. I suggested, attempting to understand, that the spacey, numbed inexpressiveness of the Chromatics’ cover gave her greater access to her own feelings. That wasn’t really it, but she played along with a hint of sarcasm, and said that the original is too intense. I remember her shifting gears while we talked in her car, but her car is an automatic. We have the same car, but mine is a manual. When I got in I said idiotically that the interior looks exactly the same.
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If it’s all on my face
It’s all in my mind
You don’t get to let it slide
—Róisín Murphy - Simulation
There is a photo of my brother and I that I’ve found over and over on various backups. We’re sitting on a couch, both facing the camera. My face is soft, bulbous and red, like our father’s and his is angular and bloodless, like our mother’s. I’m smiling and he’s scowling. Is my smile like our mother’s cover-up of dopeyness, or like our father’s dopey incomprehension? My face is a mask of openness, his is a posture of foreclosure. When I came across it most recently, I wanted to say that he looked how I feel. This is of course false. Only because over the years I have gotten to know what’s behind his scowl. There is only one thing to know about poison oak and before you know it, the plant looks cheerful. But you have to go with first impressions. His friends have sometimes mistaken me for him on the street. The photo makes such a mistake look improbable. Never have we looked so different, but in such a way that looking from one to the other is like turning something over. My first impression is that the photo is a key to the affective flows, the flow of affection, between him and I. At first I think that kinship is like an analogy. Then the photo is just two appearances, or two expressions, not especially related or exemplary.
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