Two things Click Opera is always banging on about -- how money doesn't equal happiness, and how life in the Anglosphere sucks (largely because money doesn't equal happiness) -- were underlined this week by two reports about the quality of life in Britain and America. First, on Wednesday, U-Switch released their European Quality of Life Index, a survey of life in ten European countries ranking them according to 19 variables, including income, tax, the cost of essential goods and services, and the weather. Despite having the highest household incomes in Europe, Britain and Ireland were ranked lowest for quality of life, at 9 and 10 respectively. France and Spain came highest.



Life in Europe's two English-speaking countries -- which both saw huge market-driven economic booms over the last decade -- was rendered miserable not just by poor weather (Britain gets 17% less sunshine than the European average) but by diesel prices 18% above average, Europe's second-highest unleaded fuel prices and its third highest gas (49% higher than the European average) and electricity prices, as well as by Europe's highest food and property prices. So although British families earned £35,730 (more than £10,000 above the European average of £25,404) per household per year, high prices ended up putting them way behind the lower-earners on the continent in terms of quality of life. Winning the money race, it seems, isn't at all the same thing as winning at life.

Of course, how you spend your money is key. Britain spends less on health and education than its European neighbours; just 8.1% of British GDP goes on health, compared with over 10% in France and Germany. As a result, Britain has only 2.5 doctors per 1000 residents, compared with 3.4 in France and 3.5 in Germany. As for education, Britain puts 5.5% of GDP towards that; the Danes, for instance, spend 8.6%. British people retire later than anyone else in Europe and get fewer holidays (just 28 days a year, compared with Spain's 36). They live shorter lives -- life expectancy in the UK is 78.9 years, compared with 80.9 in France and 80.7 in Spain.

So there it is. Britain and Ireland have the highest average incomes in Europe, but come bottom in terms of quality of life. British households earn £35,730 but are miserable. Spanish households earn on average just £16,800 a year, but low taxation and cheaper prices make that money go a lot further, and other factors -- sunshine and a whole different approach to priorities, let's call it l'art de vivre -- make life much better in the Latin countries. "Clearly, when it comes to the good life, income is less important than free time, sunshine and cheap commodities," concluded one report of the findings.



America also scored poorly this week, this time in a report entitled The Measure of America funded by Oxfam America, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Conrad Hilton Foundation. In a piece entitled US slips down development index, the BBC summarised the report: "Americans live shorter lives than citizens of almost every other developed nation... the US ranked 42nd in the world for life expectancy despite spending more on health care per person than any other country." The US has a life expectancy of 78 (the same as Britain's), but vast inequality between its richest and poorest groups. It has more children (15%) living in poverty than any other advanced nation, and the most people in prison. One in four Americans are now officially obese. They also underperform educationally: "25% of 15-year-old students performed at or below the lowest level in an international maths test -- worse than Canada, France, Germany and Japan".

"Some Americans are living anywhere from 30 to 50 years behind others when it comes to issues we all care about: health, education and standard of living," wrote Sarah Burd-Sharps, the report's author. Asian-American males have the best quality of life and black Americans the lowest. The place with the highest human development index in the US is Manhattan, the place with the lowest is Mississippi.

The exact relationship of money to the problem is ambiguous. For American website ZDNet Healthcare "the bottom line is that in the U.S. your lifespan is closely correlated with your bank balance". For UK newspaper The Independent, "despite an almost cult-like devotion to the belief that unfettered free enterprise is the best way to lift Americans out of poverty, the report points to a rigged system that does little to lessen inequalities".



What the newspaper reports didn't go into is the wider question of how philosophy has shaped these results -- specifically the philosophy underpinning Anglo-Saxon capitalism. For that, you need to turn to Tristram Hunt's BBC Radio 3 Sunday Feature about Adam Smith, Ideas -- The British Version: The Free Market. Standing in front of Bank station and the Bank of England, Hunt describes "a landscape of commerce and enterprise -- high end restaurants, chic retail boutiques, corporate HQs, and the sense of money at work. What this landscape is about is the free market.... The wheels of commerce are at work; a de-regulated process of exchange and contract that's creating wealth all around me." It's also creating poverty, and not just the financial kind.

Getting ready for next week's shows in Berlin, Newcastle and Glasgow, I've been programming some new backing tracks for old songs. Some of them I've never performed before live. The retro format started when Craig Wilson, who's organised the Newcastle show, asked me to make quite a long, intimate, cabaret-ish show, something like "An Evening with Momus". So I decided to do a song from each of my eighteen (soon to be nineteen) studio albums. The Berlin warm-up will feature the same set, but will be "An Auction with Momus and Michael Portnoy", with Michael haggling my prices down between the songs, dressed as a fish auctioneer. The Glasgow show will concentrate on the future, featuring a live collaboration with Joe Howe, who's working with me on "Mr Proctor" or "Cig Jam" or "Joemus" or whatever we end up calling the new one.

Here's the Berlin / Newcastle set-list -- with a glimpse of me, slightly drunk, singing a scratch version of The Cheque's in the Post.

1. King Solomon's Song and Mine
(from the 1986 album Circus Maximus)
A new version of a song I now realize was very influenced by The Passage. The "Alison" in the lyric is Ali Smith, with whom I was hopelessly smitten at university, and who's now one of Britain's most famous novelists. Ali was one of the first people I sent a copy of Circus Maximus when it came out. Having never much liked my poetry in the Creative Writing Group, she was surprised by how well it turned out!

2. Violets
(from the 1987 album The Poison Boyfriend)
I've often been rather passive-aggressive about songs people like, preferring to make them listen to the songs of mine I like instead. Violets was the song on The Poison Boyfriend people who didn't really like my other stuff liked. And actually, now it's had the rather cheesy session accordion licks removed, I really like it too! Especially the end, where I go all Paolo Conte.

3. The Angels are Voyeurs
(from the 1988 album Tender Pervert)
Done as a piano song, this is from the height of my Mishima Period (when I was so abject I could only afford sperm- and blood-coloured paint). Something about the arrangement of this one (very cabaret) makes me dream of a West End musical arranged around my songs. It would be a hell of a lot more spunky than Mamma Mia!

4. The Hairstyle of the Devil
(from the 1989 album Don't Stop the Night)
My big hit! And I've played it surprisingly little. Passive aggression again, perhaps, but I don't really think the tune is strong enough. Good lyric, though. It's a Brazilian soap opera, really.

5. What will Death Be Like?
(from the 1990 album Monsters of Love)
There are various new versions of this song floating around -- an acapella version will be released at some point on a record associated with the Great Pyramid project in Germany. This is the backing track from my performance at the Pyramid Gala at HAU1 in Kreuzberg a couple of months ago, dominated by a fuzzy distorted bass.

6. Marquis of Sadness
(from the 1991 album Hippopotamomus)
I actually picked this because it's the favourite song ever of Phespirit, who runs the excellent Momus lyrics website (which has been a great resource as I re-learned these old songs). "The Marquis of Sadness remains the greatest of all Momus's character creations; Phespirit's ideal fantasy lifestyle," the man says.

7. Summer Holiday 1999
(from the 1992 album Voyager)
This is a spooky mid-noughties remake of my contribution to the 1990 Fab Gear compilation (the founding record, some say, of Shibuya-kei), and my love song to my very first Japanese girlfriend, Junko Shoji. I'm particularly fond of the central Asian bagpipes on this one, a weirdly-tuned sample I made in Tokyo while recording Oskar Tennis Champion.

8. The Cheque's in the Post
(from the 1992 album The Ultraconformist)
A new backing track for one of the more personal songs on the neo-cabaret record I made in 1992 for Mike Alway's Richmond label (in defiance of my Creation contract, which is why we had to pretend it was a live record). I remember (with half a tingle, half a cringe) each episode, each sin, each girlfriend detailed in this song.



9. Platinum
(from the 1993 album Timelord)
This backing track is actually the original demo, rediscovered on an old cassette tape, of the song. It's got all sorts of key changes which didn't make it through to the album version, and will probably trip me up when I do it live.

10. Red Pyjamas
(from the 1995 album The Philosophy of Momus)
This song is a hidden gem, and this version of it packs more punch than the one on the record, though it comes from the same session. The sounds are mostly from a Nintendo GameBoy; after my first two trips to Japan I wanted to make a computer game-sounding record, and this comes from a 1993 session in my flat on Cleveland Street. The mix between sentimental themes and this tiny robotic music is one I still find poignant.

11. London 1888
(from the 1996 album 20 Vodka Jellies)
Time Travel and Japan feature big here: I'm rediscovering London from a Japanese point of view. More specifically, a gay Japanese point of view (the Marquis Matsugae is a gay socialite who comes to London to meet Oscar Wilde and, he hopes, Sherlock Holmes).

12. His Majesty the Baby
(from the 1997 album Ping Pong)
Perennially popular with people who hate -- and, oddly enough, people who love -- babies. I recently met the man who shouts out "Nick, you're a legend!" on the record, on the street in Berlin. He's called John Quin and he writes for Map, the Scottish art magazine, now.

13. Born to be Adored
(from the 1998 album The Little Red Songbook)
I should probably have chosen a never-performed song from TLRS, maybe "A White Oriental Flower". If I have time I'll program a backing for that.

14. Stefano Zarelli
(from the 1999 album Stars Forever)
microworlds will be happy to see this one, but I chose it because it's one of the better pop songs on Stars Forever, and there's something really exhilarating about singing it. Maybe it's all the falsetto!

15. Going for a Walk with a Line
(from the 2001 album Folktronic)
One of my own favourite of my songs ever, the lyrics in this one are based on Paul Klee's diaries and painting titles. "Robert the devil" was the name of his favourite paintbrush, and "An Elderly Phoenix" is a typically-brilliant Klee canvas title.

16. A Lapdog
(from the 2003 album Oskar Tennis Champion)
I still find Oskar an intriguingly odd album, sort of Eislerian, filled with Tokyo postmodernism. This song was written after I had dinner with a very beautiful woman who fawned over a lapdog rather than me, so I suppose it's a sort of song-cousin to His Majesty the Baby, fuelled by a similar "pathetic jealousy".

17. Lady Fancy Knickers
(from the 2004 album Otto Spooky)
This is a pop song heightened to lurid garishness in the mind of a madman. Actually, it comes out of the Tokyo Oskar sessions, not the Berlin Otto sessions. The lyrics were gathered from descriptions of art in a copy of Frieze (little did I know I'd be writing them one day!). I really love singing lines like "spooky foxgloves at the pink pine igloo" and "the etiquette of public information display".

(Additional pop fact: The "lady fancy knickers" of the title is Geraldine Ferraro, the American politician who made waves recently by saying Obama owed everything to being black. She owned the Lafayette Street building housing secondhand clothes shop Smylonylon in New York, and when her rent increases forced English eccentric Chris Brick out, he scrawled "Lady Fancy Knickers, gee up, ya ya!" in the shop window as an insult to Ferraro.)

18. Nervous Heartbeat
(from the 2006 album Ocky Milk)
This has become a live favourite, accompanied by a Marcel Marceau-like mime in which I turn saluting and wiping away tears into the same slow gesture. I don't think I've ever got the lyrics right, which shows that if you want to learn Japanese, writing mneumonic songs probably isn't going to help.

19. The Mouth Organ
(from the forthcoming album)
This song originally appeared on the 2003 Milky album Travels with a Donkey. For the Joemus album I've made a completely new version, very wonky and lurchy, and it's one of my favourites from the new sessions. It's an anti-car song, and I ended it onstage at the Faraday Festival saying "One day we'll live in a post-car world". The sentiment got a surprisingly big cheer.

I think my favourite Lullatone album is still the first one, Computer Recital. For me, it's a record like Eno's Discreet Music -- one that never loses its power to charm. It tinkles where Discreet Music flutes, but they share something primally gentle. E*Rock gave me Computer Recital with a batch of Audio Dregs releases back in 2003, and it was easily my favourite of them. Already a fan of the "cute formalism" of Nobukazu Takemura's Childisc label (Lullatone would later record for them) and Raymond Scott's Soothing Sounds for Baby series, I was in a way the record's ideal listener.



My feeling about the three subsequent Lullatone albums (2004's Little Songs about Raindrops, 2006's Plays Pajama Pop Pour Vous and 2008's The Bedtime Beat, which Shawn just sent me) is that some of the techno purity has been lost: with the addition of Yoshimi's vocals, Lullatone has become an indie band. They almost sound like Kahimi Karie at times, but it's a Kahimi who's somehow no longer adult.



In other ways, though, the purity of the Lullatone project hasn't been diluted by a single raindrop. The band's abiding themes are sleep, childhood, charm, naiveté, cuteness and minimalism. And whether Yoshimi sings or it's just Shawn doodling with his Casio SK1, there's always something of the space visitor about them -- and something of Mr Spock about Shawn. The emotions, the problems, the experiences that make people adult don't seem to apply to Lullatone. They seem to have skipped them altogether. They're the very opposite of Emo.



Meeting Lullatone was one of the high points of last year's Japan trip for me. I found that in person, as in their music, they had some kind of shadow side offsetting the carefree naiveté. I don't mean that I think their lovely big white house in Nagoya has a torture dungeon -- I'm sure it doesn't. But Shawn did seem particularly -- almost suspiciously -- interested in building hypno-suggestion into his music. So I introduced him to Alastair, a hypnotist friend, who proceeded to freeze his arm using nothing more than a string of clichés about creativity and self-empowerment.



Recently something extraordinary has happened, something which proves that Lullatone are adults. Yoshimi has got pregnant. Heavily pregnant; she's due to deliver her first child in a couple of weeks. As one of the comments below the Flickr picture puts it, it's "such a surprise, i see you like two little kids".

Can kids have kids? Or are the childish themes -- splashing at bathtime, romping in pajamas, teddy bear music parades -- simply evidence that Lullatone (who married in 2005) have been putting together, piece by piece, the perfect child environment, the dream playroom? Yesterday, with these questions in my mind, I had a bit of a revelation. I was in a bookshop on Falckensteinstrasse, a place Hisae and I always stop at. It's beautifully designed, this place, and at the back they've laid out a little room with a kidzone, full of the kind of signifiers hip Kreuzberg parents want to associate with their children. There's a little table from OK, the cute 3rd World goods store on Alte Schoenhauser Strasse, showing people from all over the world laid out in an illustrative chart. On it lie books about anthropomorphised animals, but no crayons, just in case the kids are tempted to scribble on the merchandise. When I was in there yesterday there were no kids in the store, just this corner arranged "for kids", but actually, it occurred to me, a completely adult space, made by adults with adult ideas about childhood; what it is, what it should be.

It's time we accepted that "childhood" is something -- something benign -- that adults impose, sentimentally, didactically, on their offspring. It's an invention of adults. Left to their own devices, kids reject "childhood" at the earliest possible opportunity, embracing sex, drugs, cigarettes, guns and knives. The press reported the other day that victims and assailants in UK knife-crime are getting younger, from mid- to early-teens. The UK has seen a spate of child-on-child gun crime recently too. Of course, this reminds us of how childhood has become a class signifier: lower class kids get "adult" sooner, upper class kids stay children as long as possible. "Childhood" in this sense just means protection and privilege. Maybe the Falckensteinstr. bookstore laid out its child corner primarily as a class signifier.

But if childhood is something adult -- a particular arrangement of a room, a behavioural etiquette adults can use to relate to other adults -- where does that leave us? Well, it would certainly disarm the criticism that Lullatone are an "infantile" or "twee" band. Childish themes, for them, are what Modernism was to Mondrian, what sex was to Gainsbourg, what technology was to Kraftwerk -- a totalizing system, an etiquette, a radically-purifying regimen, a life-plan, a style, a belief. And just as child themes are really adult, tweeness embraced this wholeheartedly is almost a kind of machismo, a bold "Fuck you!" to harrowing cares, to conformist angst, to responsibility.

Nobody who was simply childish would drop references to Italian designer Bruno Munari (also referenced in the sleeve for my Ocky Milk album), and nobody who was simply sleepy would invoke Raymond Scott's experiments with minimalist lullabies. And we haven't even gone into the whole Asian cuteness-collectivism dimension -- the fact that Lullatone (like Scott's Manhattan Research) have set up a jingles unit called Lullatone Melody Design, to make music for TV and exhibitions. They've already worked with NHK and Chanel. When Lullatone are interviewed, it's not by Western music magazines, but by Marie Claire China, where they talk about their cute eco bags. The cuteness works perfectly with Asian commercial culture, because it's non-aggressive and appealing, an aesthetic that finds a common denominator in our collective consumerist desire to escape to the reassuring togetherness of toddlers. Clearly, though, no toddler could make a commercially-appealing version of toddler culture, just as nobody sleeping could make music which expressed the concept "sleep".



Lullatone are adults, all right -- one hell of a slick organization, and the cutest formalists in town.

People often ask if and when I'm next playing a concert in Berlin, and usually the answer is "I'm not!" My music shows tend to happen in other places, making a home-town performance relatively rare. It's slightly irksome, then, to have to tell you that the Momus / Top Model show previously announced for July 20th won't happen on Sunday 20th after all, but on the following day, Monday July 21st. Same place, though, Kreuzberg's West Germany. If it's already in your diary, please change the date now!



Since I'm playing Newcastle two days later and Glasgow on the 27th (details for all these shows on the LastFM Momus events page), and since the Newcastle show will be "An Evening with Momus", and since I've decided to do a never-played song off each of my twenty albums for that show, I think that's what I'll be doing at West Germany too. Support comes from Top Model, who make pleasingly messy glockenspiel avant folk. I've also asked performance artist Michael Portnoy to do an 8-second reverse Tsukiji fish auction in between each song. So the general result will be of me auctioning off old, unwanted songs -- not-so-fresh fish, if you like -- to the lowest bidder.

Momus / Top Model
West Germany
Skalitzer Straße 133
10999 Berlin
Germany

9:30pm Monday July 21st 2008

Map

I was reading a lovely blog post by Emma, Joe Germlin's squeeze, entitled This Must Be The Place. Accompanied by a picture of someone looking happy in a toilet, it's about what the Japanese call ganbaranai -- not going for it (slogan, by the way, of the eco-friendly Slow Life movement). It's about coming to the realisation -- the decision -- that you don't need any more money, that this place and these people and this standard of living is all you need. "Going for it" would involve too much compromise and ultimately just bring us into contact with people (in the words of Tao Lin) "talking about jet-skis and expensive handbags or something and we would feel alienated".



I think this is an incredibly important realisation to have, and statement to make. It underpins a lot of life in Berlin, for a start, and it's what distinguishes Berlin from cities like New York and London, and it's what people inevitably talk about when they arrive here from those cities (it's what Michael Portnoy and various Piratebay Swedes were talking about last night at Forgotten Bar Project, for instance). But it's also an aesthetic decision, a decision that shapes sound if you're a musician and form if you're a plastic artist. As an aesthetic decision -- the decision to go your own way, make your own sound -- it's a hugely liberating moment too.



"When Aids Wolf came to Glasgow a few weeks ago," Emma continues, "we took them for brunch and I asked Chloe what she did before she did Seripop full time. She did a shitty Admin job and Yannick was a video technician at an art school. I was happy to get to ask someone who in my mind is doing incredible things, what it is they did to get themselves going. I need that reassurance when I look at my bank balance and try to work out if I have enough £££ in there not to cave in to temping or other equally awful things."

I didn't know about AIDS Wolf, and set about educating myself about them. The first thing I discovered was the video my friend Eric Mast (E*Rock) made for Spit Tastes Like Metal:



I like the signifiers, musical and visual, here. First musical thing I thought about -- it's that guitar sound -- was Captain Beefheart (another person who decided pretty early on not to go for money, that "this was the place" -- in his case, the Mojave Desert). Then, perhaps, Yximalloo, who also seems to exist outside commercial structures. Visually the references were to "the colour movement", a term I use to describe people who squeeze the maximum amount of colour, often jarring colour, into what they do, and to The Boredoms.



These references are basically hippy ones, and AIDS Wolf have touched on a hippy archetype in their promo pictures, which feature them leading an idyllic life, naked in the forest. The Beefheart connection is confirmed in their Wikipedia page, which sees them quoting the Captain's description of his music as the sound of "a squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag".

I guess I also thought of Deerhoof, listening to AIDS Wolf, and maybe of Mu, although Mu are more housey. What I didn't think of, because I'm not really a noise aficionado, was people like The Locust, apparently a big influence on them, and a bit too cartoony and Superhero-ey for my taste, like a noise version of Devo. I suppose I identify more readily with naked Canadians (AIDS Wolf are Montrealers with French accents) than Americans (The Locust are from San Diego) in Marvel costumes, which always seem a bit fascist and puritan.

AIDS Wolf (who blog here, and who yield zero results in a Pitchfork search) took their name from a piece of graffiti in an Ohio backyard. Apparently it referred to an urban legend about AIDS-infected wolves coming to the city and biting housepets, which could then infect their owners by licking them. The band had a ferret stuck in their wall at one point, and when they heard it scratching, they'd say "Oh no, there's the AIDS wolf!"

The way AIDS Wolf's music achieves its results with structure and dynamics and colour rather than tonality, melody or harmony made me think that this is pop music coming up against / coming up with what serialism came up against / with in 1912 or so. And just as many conservatives to this day hate serialists like Webern and Berg and Schoenberg, so they'll hate AIDS Wolf and Yximalloo and others who compose with dynamics and structure, but not harmony and melody.



Something else AIDS Wolf remind me of is the Stiff Records Akron Ohio compilation, from 1978, and the squirt of basic, essential weirdness it injected into the indie charts that year. And I guess outsider bands like Half Japanese and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. This is music you only tend to make when you decide "this must be the place". It's also arty music, music that loves art, made by people who love art. AIDS Wolf's singer, Chloe Lum, loves Fassbinder and Eric Rohmer (who also happen to be pretty much my favourite directors). She even named this song after Fassbinder's "Chinese Roulette":



Chloe and Yannick Desranleau describe themselves as self-flagellating Catholics, and during the day run Seripop, a Montreal art unit and print shop known for colourful, scrawly posters, books, record sleeves and screen prints. It's a world I can see fitting with the Staalplaat / Le Petit Mignon culture here in Berlin, a world where post-materialist values and the true spirit of indie meet, a happily inventive state of mind, a fusion of colour and sound. I guess this -- and that -- must be the place.

My latest columns touch on the subject of the relationship of art to money. Satirizing Luxury introduces New York Times readers to Chim↑Pom's "reverse auctions" and Michael Portnoy's "abstract gambling", both satires on financial procedures. Meanwhile, Genuinely Rude in Frieze considers whether rudeness in art journalism is healthy, and generally answers the question by saying that "the big yes" means little unless it's accompanied by "the big no", especially when advertising and PR is generally so unbelievably positive.



There's a passing reference in the Frieze piece to Don Thompson's assertion, in his book "The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art", that broadsheet reviews have zero effect on the prices of contemporary art. Thompson's book presents a freakonomics-style list of strange-but-true facts about the financial structure of the art world. I quote a few of them from New Yorker András Szántó's summary in the Artworld Salon blog:

• Eight of ten works purchased directly from an artist and half the works purchased at auction will never again resell at their purchase price.
• For a branded dealer in a strong market, there is little financial risk in opening additional galleries. When paintings sell for $50,000-100,000, three sold-out shows pay for leasing and renovating the new gallery.
• Conventional wisdom in the art world is that four out of five new contemporary art galleries will fail within five years. Ten percent of galleries established for more than five years also close each year.
• Only one artist in 200 – and that is 200 established artists – will reach a point where her work is ever offered at Christie’s or Sotheby’s auctions.
• The past twenty-five years have seen a hundred new museums around the world, each intent on acquiring, on average, 2,000 works of art.
• The world of contemporary art is not that big. There are about 10,000 museums, art institutions and public collections worldwide, 1,500 auction houses and about 250 annual art fairs and shows. There are 17,000 commercial galleries worldwide, 70 percent of which are in North America and Western Europe. Average turnover per gallery is about $650,000, implying gross sales for the primary market and part of the secondary market of about $11 billion – of which $7 billion could be considered contemporary art.
• There are approximately 40,000 artists resident in London, and about the same number in New York. Of the total 80,000, seventy-five are superstar artists with a seven-figure income.
• In 2006, 810 works of art – all art, not just contemporary art – were auctioned for more than $1 million; of these 801 were sold at one or other of the two main auction houses.
• The $135 million paid by Ron Lauder for Klimt’s “Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer I” equals the price of a fully equipped Boeing 787 Dreamliner, an aircraft capable of holding 300 passengers.
• The number of wealthy collectors is probably twenty times larger today than it was before the 1990 crash.
• Fewer than half of the modern and contemporary artists listed in a Christie’s or a Sotheby’s modern and contemporary auction catalogue twenty-five years ago are still offered at any major auction.

Personally, I find artists playing with the rites of money (auctions and gambling, for instance) a lot more interesting than money facts about the art world. I wonder if disgraced Société Générale trader and "digital surrealist" Jérôme Kerviel -- who generated €1.4 billion in SocGen profits in 2007, then lost them €4.9 billion in three days in January -- has become an artist yet?

Here's my current musical "other half", Joe Howe, with his personal other half, Emma Balkind, curator of the Dark Horses exhibition currently showing at Glasgow's Recoat Gallery (click through the Dark Horses zine on their blog or have a gander at the gallery's Flickr set).



When people ask what the Joemus album is sounding like, I tend to say "8-bit Glam Rock", which is the genre description that seems to fit best. (My next Playground column, by the way, is going to be about the frustrations and confusions of genre -- at the Rough Trade shop in Truman's Yard I had no idea where to start looking for Momus records, because I didn't know if I was officially "UK Pop" or "Postpunk" or "New Folk" or "Electronica" or whatever -- all and none of the above, really).

Joe and Emma will be our guests in Berlin for a week or so later this month, before they move to Eats Tapes' place in Kreuzberg for a month or so. Here's an Eats Tapes video:



Eats Tapes don't have a genre complex, they're happy to slap the "8bit techno" label on what they do. But can I find an 8bit techno divider header in a record shop near me?

Joe Howe has a new project which I wanted to tell you about today, it's called Ben Butler and Mousepad. The MySpace page says it's inspired by "computing science prog-funk jams" and lists influences as "magma, gentle giant, curved air, king crimson, giorgio moroder, greg phillinganes, weather report, yellow magic orchestra, funkadelic, moog, library music, bbc radiophonic workshop, tape music, glass candy, day of the tentacle".



One thing you won't hear on the three excellent mixtapes Joe links from his Ben Butler page is The Rah Band. Despite the fact that bits of BB&Mousepad sound remarkably like early Rahs (electronic Glam, basically), Joe had never heard of them! He tells me he's "stoked" to have them pointed out. To be honest, I knew very little about them (I vaguely remembered Lawrence from Denim going on about them circa 1990) until Cherry Red asked me to go through their entire catalogue and choose 15 songs for a digital-only compilation. (It'll appear soon on the Cherry Red website, along with my own selection from my Noughties albums.)

I stumbled on the Cherry Red Rah Band album and wowed a big wow. It was Joe, before Joe!

Was it Germaine Greer who said "What really terrifies men is the bodies of other men"? So true. If the taboo on male nudity comes from anyone, it comes from men.

Male nudity probably wouldn't be taboo if women ruled the world. Certainly not if the comments by women under this photo by Madi Ju and Patrick "Pat Pat" Tsai are anything to go by; female Flickr users fell over themselves to call the nonchalant, indie-ish cock shot "sweet... awesome... cool... cute... delightful".



The picture (entitled "Shanghai") originally ran in the My Little Dead Dick photo-diary, a collaborative effort by American-Chinese photographer couple Madi and Pat Pat. As Selena Hoy from Pingmag reported last week, Madi and Pat Pat have now broken up, and not altogether amicably.

The Pingmag story was slightly disturbing; amidst semi-naked photos of his ex, Madi Ju, Patrick Tsai used the interview to advertise his arrival in Japan and amorous pursuit of a new photographer partner, Ume Kayo. Whether Ume is requiting his passion is not clear at this point, but it's safe to assume that Madi can't be too happy about the feature.



The focus of the controversy that's blown up over this article wasn't Patrick's declaration of love for a Japanese photographer, though, or his use of photos of his ex to generate cultural capital for himself. It was his penis. The problem, in other words, wasn't that Patrick wasn't being a gentleman, but rather that he was so obviously and so vulnerably... a man.



Pingmag used the "Shanghai" image -- the same image you'll see in this month's edition of Theme magazine, and the same image designer Ian Lynam chose to pick up when he linked the Pingmag story from Meta No Tame. A day or so later, the Shangai image had disappeared from both Meta No Tame and Pingmag, amidst complaints that it was "not safe for work". Meta No Tame quickly updated with a zero-comments story about 1960s Japanese student radicalism, but there was a distinct feeling that a small revolution had been quelled in its own backyard -- in the interests of workplace propriety.



The male organ, unsheathed, becomes, at last, unthreatening. By keeping it hidden, we keep it scary. Attitudes are changing, though, in the West and Asia. As we saw during the Edison Chen affair, the Chinese government tends not to give a damn about sex and nudity -- religion and political agitation s