Josephine Foster - "Nähe des Geliebten"

My goodness, I must say you have very fine manners! You have such fine manners, the way you curtsied just under waistline and smiled upwards towards the lights, I've never seen such pleasant behaviour! You removed your shoes and left them hanging to dry, you crept snake-like across the floor to the chair and sat knees at a square right angle, how kind. You've kept your singing voice practiced and moist, what care! You eat nothing outside the proper colour spectrum, and drink nothing less viscous than peanut butter, you certainly have done your homework. You've even taken the care to carve the names of all the members of the visited household on the fleshy part of your belly. And such penmanship with that pen knife! Cared enough even to learn the dimensions of the house in advance so you could navigate to and from the bathroom and bedroom eyes closed and without hands rudely outstretched. Your appearance is even tempered to be that of a single degree below your host, but worlds beyond any of my many pets. How ugly my birds look when you are here, yet I feel so perfectly jolie. May all the blessings of your politesse come to you instantly, quicker than this instant dinner will be ready for you to enjoy. May God text message you from heaven with thoughtful wishes of success and achievement. May your health treatments be totally functional and errorless, may nothing go wrong with the lasers or weights. The vision of the future that generations had before did not quite turn out so excitingly, did it? How odd. [Buy from Insound]

Beach Boys - "Kokomo"

I was taking Montreal's famous metro the other night. It was the last train of the night before it stopped. I got into my car, getting ready for the 5-stop wait to get off again, when I found myself in a new and strange situation: I had the car all to myself. And it dawned on me immediately that I had never experienced this before. I looked around, up and down, checking to make sure I wasn't missing any slumped over drunk or sleeping hooded figure. No, I was really alone in this train car. So I thought, in a weird knee-jerk i'm-never-going-to-get-this-chance-again kind of way; I have to take advantage of this situation.

Now, rides between metro stops are usually under a minute, so these thoughts were coming very quickly, and I knew I was running out of time even as I considered my options. Kick something, break something, write on something, wait, why are my first instincts to Destroy and Deface? So I just started singing. And before I knew it, I was singing, of all things, "Kokomo". I sang it loud, as loud as I could, really belting out all the notes that were in my range. And then the doors opened at the next stop and I stopped. And no one got on. So when the doors closed and the train started moving, I sang it again. [Buy]

(photo from the amazing Hyunkoo Lee, thanks ddp)