The Shins' "Kissing the Lipless" always makes me feel as if I'm watching a montage of doorways I've glimpsed in all of the cities I've ever visited. It's like snapshots flickering one after another, sometimes layered, sometimes with the white edges framing the image as if marking the memory like a tombstone in a cemetery. What's surprising is that one of the dominant images is from my middle-school French class's trip to Quebec City. I hadn't even heard of the Shins in 1996! I don't even think they were a they in 1996! (Wikipedia tells me they formed in 1997, so close!)

Anyway, after the doorstep in Quebec City, I picture the many houseboats in the canals of Amsterdam, and then the infamous lampposts that guide one's way through the medieval alleyways of Prague. Even smaller streets abound in Sevilla: I should know as I spent many a drunken eve making my way through the maze of Barrio Santa Cruz trying to find my lodging. During the lifting parts of the songs, I remember racing through the streets of Krakow trying to make my midnight train to Budapest--only to realize that I misread my watch and had arrived with time to spare and was now alone on the platform of one of the more desolate areas of the train station. Speaking of Budapest, it might also be the feeling one gets when one realizes one has just climbed to see the view of the entire city with a complete stranger. And the sun is setting. But then you're riding atop a bus in Cambridge, England, and the wind is blowing and you are with your mother and you are twelve and you think things cannot get any better. And how cool the English teens must think you are, what with your style, which is not actually style in any sense of the word, it's simply the fact that you wear XL teeshirts even though you are stick-skinny and short.