On October 1992, Victoria Clarke found the following message on her answering machine: 'At this point I don't give a flying fuck if I have this recorded that I'm threatening you. I suppose I could throw out a few thousand dollars to have you snuffed out, but maybe I'll try the legal way. First.'

There are those for whom sloth is deadly sin, and there are those for whom it is an animal whose lifestyle they aspire to emulate. Common sense dictates that these correspond with the winners and losers in life's race: all the more perplexing, then,

PSYCHO-KILLER - qu'est-ce que c'est? For an answer look no further than Man Bites Dog, a Belgian film which hustles us through the working day of Ben (Benoit Poelvoorde), a chatty young fellow with a DIY haircut and slightly crossed eyes. Ben enjoys a drink and a joke, keeps in touch with his family, picks up the cheque at dinner, writes poetry, plays the piano and admires the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and Gaud. But what he likes best of all - what he can't get enough of - is murdering people. The film isn't 10 seconds old before he's garrotting a woman in a railway compartment, and we look on helplessly as her trapped-bird contortions slow to a dead halt.

This is where we are: nowhere. The nowhere look. The nothing look. The look with no beginning and no end. The look that says: there is no look, so don't bother. And it is, of course, the only possible look, making the would- be elegant modesty of the pre- Christmas mid-calf skirts and built-up shoes seem dowdy and phony - the worst possible combination (except for glam and phony).

GRUNGE fashion used to be about dirty, positively grotty clothes for the dispossessed. Now it's being cleaned up and going mainstream. Grunge nouveau, redefined since the New York designers took up the theme at the catwalk shows last month, remains just as much for the young at heart, but freshly scrubbed and dry cleaned.

INXS