'Do You Remember Your President Nixon?'

How do we travel?

Peut-etre par avion? (A non-smoking restaurant in an airport in the mid-1980s during a bad winter with toilets that become nests for huddled groups of puffa-jacketed, broken-veined and anaemic transients)

Pick a dance and do it.

Ah, mister wolf!

Come in, check the clock, let me take your coat.

FDR:

Kohl, Adenauer, Brandt, Schmidt, Erhard, Kiesinger.

Forty foxes hunting out in Norway in a condemned office block.

Dirge in marriage and mirth in funeral.

The closing montages of Lars Von Trier's Brechtian epics Dogville and Manderlay use Bowie's hit Young Americans to startling effect. To honour this mode of communication and its love of the stochastic and all forms of error and tedious minutiae, here is a list of all the photographers used in the first film: Jacob Holdt, Jim Hubbard, Douglas A Harper, Dan Holmberg, Russell Lee, Dorothea Lange, Jack Collier, A Siegel, Ben Shan, Carl Mydans, J. Vachon, Arthur Rothenstein. (Von Trier's new film Antichrirst looks great, too, featuring death, Willem Dafoe, genital mutilation and the director voicing a hallucinated fox.)

After reflecting the modern love of quotidian trash, shards of sentences and weird juxtaposition in text, the same occurs in song. Lars mixes images of American decline with the sound of its triumph- the coked-out plastic soul of the '70s- and consequently, unnerves a pack of wild cineastes sitting in the dark. We want to induce that sensation here: that everything is great but at the same time inherently wrong and falling apart. Such scrambling of texture and thought is shooting through us all the time. Bowie wears the skin of an artist from the golden-era of Motown while living up to his eyeballs in drugs, X-ray thin and so paranoid he never leaves his blacked-out house. Crystal Castles cut n' paste the squelches and fireworks of video ecstasy to the sound of a narcoleptic drug addict sobbing on the phone. Spacemen 3 reach the feeling with the most clarity, letting Jason Pierce sing about heroin with the same conviction as a torch singer might sing about Jesus. And so the Great Depression continues: we can't go on, we go on. And light Calliope's hair the colour of Roman Candles and cement and stars.

1. David Bowie- Young Americans

2. Crystal Castles- Knights

3. Spacemen 3- Walkin' With Jesus

Retrace Your Steps Back To The Grave You Were Born Into

Strange serenity, sleepwalking through the dead end streets. It's so late the clocks have fallen asleep and the roads harden and crack under washed-out moonlight. Turning your eyes into monotones. Your ears sharpen and hone in on the whistling and whipping of trees. You walk in the middle of the road, a sense of taboo spurring your actions as you trace the white line markings with your feet. Thoughts dribble through your mind, seeping down into your ankles then back up to your head. Skeleton cars sit motionless and discarded while the soft phosphorescence of towering lamplights highlight the long trail back to your bed. The silence crackles and writhes. Contorting around you, shaping and molding you to the realisation that you're tresspassing on the night. Tip-toeing through the cold air and leaving your footprints in it like it was snow. Strange humbling in the cockles of your heart and glistening in your eyes. The night kisses you even though you're obtruding on it. It craves that sense of violation. It cloaks your body, the slender contours of its female form fitting perfectly against yours. Wrapping itself around you, pressing its cold cheeks against your dry lips. This strange union of body and time sucking you into a vacuum of Love and Hate and Sorrow and Jealousy. Like a room of valuables, hoarded from the nooks and crannies of someones life; a pair of your mother's shoes, a school photo, a Moroccan lamp. Leave them hidden from the night. It will steal them. Strip you bare and leave you when the clocks wake up. Desert you as the day pushes itself onto the sky by the time your key is drawn back out of the door.

Black Meteoric Star - Death Tunnel
90 Day Men - Saint Theresa In Ecstasy

Modernaudiokafka

If Kafka were alive now and creating the same strange, bullet-proof stories of human despair, animal woe and pitiful cities, or working on his fables and puzzles and morals and cracking the same heroic jokes in his broken voice- always remembering to delay the verb for perfection, obviously- what would he listen to? And in what environment?

Would he follow Pynchon's lead and squirrelishly sit in a tiny room in Mexico blasting avant-jazz in between blots of acid and hits of weed grown high on golden mountains? Or would he work like Borges preferring to sit in monastic silence to allow for the endless whirrings of his skull?

Perhaps he would listen to music fresh from a few lengths at Prague Swimming Centre or after a quick defeat from Max on the tennis courts. Perhaps he would opt for klezmer music following a conversation on Kabbalah in the park out of earshot of the winter-faced local rabbi. Ever the romantic, the lovelorn Kafka might sit in his pyjamas late at night and put on some trip hop to soothe his wounds following another row with his beloved Felice and then cough severely in a little metal bin overflowing with extinct sentences.

Would he stand in the gardens with Julia and watch the falling rain of fireworks, or hide wounds from Father, trudging with typewriter through grey snow to reach a telephone to complain to Nabokov? He would probably watch television most nights trying to find a similar beast to Reagan and failing. And he might purchase exclusively Kompakt compilations and nod off to the coniferous warmth of Wolfgang Voigt. And he might return from work one glum night to discover his burrow brimming with new inhabitants who have snuck soundlessly in and quietly wrecked everything he holds dear. These new inhabitants are the people he hoped would listen; the people influenced by him and they bump, blind as moles, into the walls he has covered with maps of his imagined America.

If Kafka were alive now, we would admire him for what? Well, the terrifying wonder of his prose, but not solely that. He showered at regular intervals with great conviction, aesthetic joy and moral purpose. He was never late. He gardened when confronted with the nausea of artistic struggle.

Would there be as much critical consideration and furious beard-scratching about Kafka now if he was alive? There is a whole house somewhere, falling apart probably, made out of critical approaches to Kafka. My personal favourite of these is Kafka, The Jewish Patient which interprets all of his work through the lens of psychiatric and medical methodology, turning the sickly, woozy workings of his genius into a mimetic device for actual disorders. The chapters themselves would make great stories (but not great Kafka stories- a distinction that has to be made) purely on titular value: 'On Language, Difference and Mice', 'Kafka Weeps' and 'Fin-de-siecle Jewish Readings of Tuberculosis' that invoke images of a Berlin university run by a single antechamber of deranged academics more profoundly influenced by the repeated narcotic drubbings of the German Autumn than the tangled extraction of meaning from the first bit in Of Grammatology. If we had not lost Kafka and fast-forwarded and forced him into contemporary society with its gross contortions of meaning and brutal dissection and destructions of self, would he be collaborating with David Lynch? Would he be working at all? And would he (or any artist) feel more at ease in a society that they helped articulate, an external world that so badly reflects the one they imagined? It is a problem and not really a new one.

1. Gang of Four- Love Like Anthrax

2. Tim Hecker- 100 Years Ago

3. Squarepusher- Tundra

Bursting At The Seams

This is not your town, you don't own it
You don't control the skies
In with the New
Take your children home
Put them to bed. Put them to sleep
Stay off the streets
Leave everything as your found it
Show a bit of tit
You're pouring petrol on the fire
I'm the one who steals the night
Open your legs
It Burns.
I Love It.


Le Matos - Pray For Death
Tuxedomask - Twin Peaks

Water Flowing Underground...

It left. Scuttled out and broke tradition. You'll never spot a happier creature but it only had just over an hour. They all looked on as it fled, despondent, envious. Let them. It'd just made the bravest and best move of its existence. The world had never looked so unnatural. The boiling sun polished the pavements, cars took off and burnt up, buildings dripped and melted like they were made of ice cream. He ran, he only had just over an hour...

Populous - Only Hope
Talking Heads - I Zimbra
Jacaszek - Rytm To Niesmiertelnosc II

A Prostitute Becomes A Dog

A jeremiad of skinny dogs skulk over flyovers with their blood-haunted eyes and beaten fur bleached grey by the low wattage of car headlights. One of the dogs is a transformed prostitute. He breaks from the pack and wanders down to a kitchen in the industrial wasteland to listen to bacon roiling in thick grease and watch the shimmering of lunar light on a pane of glass. Then the factory begins to roar and, in the pre-dawn, pre-warm, heat its machines. They clang and wail and crash, sounding to the cocked and broken ear of our ex-drab and now dog like the mourning songs of whales. It is relatively easy to imagine in this area that the sky is just a ceiling; a swollen roof of ice ending at the level of the satellites and the clouds of tired smog. The dog prowls outside the kitchen. He lives on a diet of Polish meat, melted ice cream and the twisted bones of cigarette ends. When he was a boy- long before his transformation- he was weaned on milk and rum, only ever consuming food cold due to fears of a monster living in the oven. He would sit on the ulcerated shag carpet and slurp at coagulated tomato soup, safely bathed in the womblike light of the television.

Lying on the pavement in a stolen fur coat at the age of nineteen, the last few seasons fast-forwarded and made dizzy in his head, he quickly died. About a second after he began to moult, the outer layer of fur stripping away and leaving his cold photocopy of skin. The night covered him like tar and the other great light in his life, the moon, just disappeared. The money from his last john slowly swirled in his pocket, conjoining with soaked trousers and thieved boots to form a patchy, worn-out pelt that stretched tightly over fractured bones; the leather boots shifting into the leathery pads of paws, bitten and bled nails jagged into crooked, golden claws and all the metal fell from his mouth, leaving first hollow nubs and stubs of teeth until they smushed together and became canine and his tongue was punched with tiny holes. Four dogs roused him with a poking of noses and mucky tongues. He awoke but still felt sleepy and mumbled onto his feet, his head very sore. He tried to bark to greet the other dogs but couldn't. He had thought he was on a higher level, really even this was just a plateau. He starts to yelp as the light ekes through the clouds.

1. RZA- Ghost Dog Theme

2. Sonic Youth- Tremens

3. Vladislav Delay- Lumi

'Fever' by David Wojnarowicz (1981) No copyright infringement intended.

Loaded Like A Pregnant Whore

While stumbling through a star streamed realm of cyber-infinity I came across "Miss K", a rather alluring Japanese lady-boy. Bleak.

Neon Indian - I Should Have Taken Acid With You
GDFX - Choose Your Emanation
Toro Y Moi - Talamak

Morning Chaos, Midnight Chaos

'I am a commercial film maker. I am a patriot. I want to adapt Ulysses with Snoop Dogg. I hide in trees.'

Harmony Korine

1. A devilish youth drugs a beautiful HIV+ waif in his lair- the gargantuan discotheque of Tunnel. She's dosed on this bastard miscegenation of dissociative drugs and then wanders around, lost in video game noise, stumbling into the void... It is NASA night when alert youths become glaucoma'd, wasted and hopeless cosmonauts drifting through end-of-the-century New York like the summertime that roasts the pavement and fries the insides of its denizens is just one of the endless cold spells of infinite space.

2. After the narcotic lurch of New York in decline we are thrown by tornado into the ravaged land of Xenia, Ohio, where drunk yokels wrestle chairs, albino sisters fatten their breasts with masking tape (loosely swiped from Nabokov's Laughter In The Dark where the nymphet Margot reddens her nipples with lipstick before art class) and glue-sniffing kids whip cats in the skeletal woods for money. Here a ravishing bleach-blonde Chloe Sevigny swoons to Buddy Holly's perfect Everyday.

3/4. A thought-sick young man raves at the dinner table before being disciplined by his crazed German father with a mangled re-telling of that mythic Dirty Harry scene over Thanksgiving turkey and cranberries. An interlude of Czech mourning music. Then pregnant Chloe and the protagonist go ice-skating; the camera whirls and blurs over the scratchy, beautiful soundtrack of broken CDs. Soon after this, one of the most beautiful scenes in cinema, there is a fire (of sorts) and we recede into a womb of darkness and terror. Ah, sorrow.

1. Folk Implosion- Jenny's Theme

2. Buddy Holly- Everyday

3. Antonin Dvorak- 5 Bagatelles, Op. 47, I: Alegretto Scherzando

4. Oval- Meditation

Photograph by Terry Richardson (1999) No copyright infringement intended.

Don't chase beer with cream. It will only make you hurt...

If you've spent all this weekend lying far too cosily with nature under the merciless sun whilst it boils away all the water and blood in your body leaving only beer, then you will probaly need a few tunes to remind you that, just maybe, all is not lost and that our Tesco-whorshipping, Esso-whoring race haven't pushed our luck just a smidge too far. We probably have. One day we'll all leave the house donning little blue hot pants and a Cliff Richard t-shirt having sprayed one too many puffs of Right Guard and we'll be reduced into piles of steaming ash, Carling scented ash.

Until then, the cure for chronic heat discomfort, in my mind, is an oldish Telefon Tel Aviv tune that makes you feel that you yourself should in fact be a bird, a Kidda tune that causes you to ignore all health warnings, forget the sun cream, keep drinking and ignore any mysterious new moles, and a Wave Machines song that simply makes me happy.

Kidda - Under The Sun
Telefon Tel Aviv - The Birds
Wave Machines - Keep The Lights On