'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