I just suddenly feel like commenting on a discussion about Momus's recent albums. Some people think they're not as good as his old stuff. Some people disagree.

However, what strikes me more than whether the noughties are "better" or "worse" than earlier decades, is that the new albums recapitulate earlier trajectories.

The best for me (qualified by not having heard Joemus) is Oskar Tennis Champion, which I think is possibly one of the top 5 Momus albums.

Oskar Tennis Champion is a "peak" Momus album (like Hipopotomomus) where the audio experiments are really radical, the lyrics are brilliant (clever, funny, interesting), the melodies are strange but catchy, the images powerful, and everything hangs together in a coherent sort of way.

On the other hand, the next album, Otto Spooky, is (IMHO) the worst Momus album of all. It's a "tired" album like The Philosophy of Momus, where the clever parts don't save it from the fact he's largely run out of ideas and treading water. Some songs (Sempreverde, Lute Score) are just one good idea stretched further than necessary. Many songs on the album are less than one good idea (Belvedere, Your Fat Friend, Klaxon, Robin Hood, Jesus in Furs) or mere washes of atmosphere.

A couple of honourable exceptions : Cockle Pickers and the musically extraordinary Bantam Boys are one-idea songs but justify their existence because the result is striking.
And there are a couple of songs which could potentially be a strong matrix of idea, tune and imagery (Life of the Fields and Corkscrew King) which are let down by pedestrian and lifeless arrangements.

As with The Philosophy of Momus (which shares similar problems) Momus then follows with an example of what I'd call one of his "crowd pleaser" albums : Ocky Milk. These tend to be raids on the back-catalogue, consolidating the good from the earlier experiments with great tunes and pleasant arrangements. Previous examples are 20 Vodka Jellies in the 90s and maybe Monsters of Love at the end of the 80s. "Crowd-pleasers" tend to be far more enjoyable than the "tired" albums but don't excite the way that the peak albums do.

Kucinich goes directly after fractional reserve banking.

Things are turning very ugly.

This is awful!

It looks as though there's no real "illegality" in what Total are doing. Membership of the EU means that workers are free to work in any member country. And companies are free to pitch for business in other member countries. And it's quite understandable that a company would wish to use its own, known-quantity, employees and sub-contractors rather than find and hire new ones.

But the end result is that, as we crash into a major recession, the unemployed in some of impoverished parts of the UK see major work going ahead around them, and Italian and Portuguese guys brought in to do it.

They are understandably furious. Union spokespeople interviewed on the BBC yesterday were trying to walk an impossibly narrow tightrope. Not able to claim that IREM has broken any laws (or is even doing anything morally wrong) but wanting to echo the anger of their members. They're trying to do this by focusing on worries of a "race to the bottom" and the lack of social clauses in European freedom of labour rules. But, as far as I can tell, this isn't really the issue here. The Italians who are coming will be paid the same rate as UK contractors. They aren't being brought in because they're cheap. They're being brought in because the company that employs them is Italian and already familiar with them.

This is a horrible situation with no possibility of a happy outcome. The government and unions are caught in a dilemma. Go protectionist and they risk deepening the recession and wrecking European economic and political co-operation. Could the EU basically fall apart?

Defend the rights of foreign companies to work on contracts here, bringing their own labour, and they risk losing all credibility with the workers and opening the possibility of a right-wing working-class backlash. Think major gains for the British National Party in local government and within unions themselves; foreign workers everywhere in the UK becoming victims of xenophobia and racist attack.

Horrible. Horrible!

There are only two options that might save us from this.

1) One is the government really commits to massive spending and development of its own in these areas, effectively creating enough jobs that this and similar cases don't matter all that much.

2) Or engage in quiet, behind the scenes, back-politicking with Total, IREM and maybe the Italian government ... for example to get them to create some extra positions for UK workers in this project. I'm talking even payoffs and bribes if it helps. It's underhand, ethically icky, but in this case, maybe it would be worth it. (Though I prefer option 1 obviously.)

Paul Johnson : Bad banking drives out good.

Hat-tip Jason : Manic Ronald McDonald remix.

Simon Reynolds is revisiting some old essays on the "'Ardcore Continuum" (ah! maybe that's where the word "nuum" comes from!)

Great writing about the fascinating story, anyway.

Apparently women in the UK are losing their jobs due to the recession far more rapidly than men.

Something that impresses me : the new active blogrolls in Blogger.

I think there's something very profound here. There was a danger that the blogroll would atrophy into a mere historical curiosity as people moved to using dedicated RSS readers to follow their friends.

But suddenly the situation is reverse.d The blogroll becomes your RSS reader. And it's the dedicated reader which is starting to look somewhat dated. Not only that but by adding second degree flow to the web (ie. people who read me also see what's up-to-date with the people I read) everything feels like its moving even faster.

Very interesting : Bill Gates writes a status update of his philanthropic foundation.

Nooranch.com gets the first taste of an (incremental) make-over.

Trade Union Banners

Theremins are (still) cool (I guess). Russian Dolls are definitely cool.

Matryomin is ... well ... coolness squared. No?

What Johnny Chung Lee said.

The Burning Piano

Another interesting "post-capitalism" link. On the end of "jobs".

I've been swapping some ideas with Darius in the last few weeks, thinking of an essay on "what is politics?"

We were considering the alleged fact that the senior managers of companies seemed to be gaining at the expense of the shareholders - awarding themselves ever larger bonuses and the like.

If this is true, rather than a media myth, is it a good counter-example to a Marxist theory that would predict that capital (ownership) tends to trump labour (even the most senior).

Darius thought that James Burnam's "Managerialism" might be relevant, but I (naturally) started wondering if Netocracy isn't the better frame of thinking.

Why would this phenomenon be yet another symptom of a shift to a netocratic society?

Because the managers who are (allegedly) rooking their shareholders are not succeeding in this due to either subterfuge or ability in their jobs. Instead they succeed because of a network of inter-supportive compensation committees.

Round up of Pen interface research.

Ben Hyde :

But then I also wonder about the health of Google App Engine. I recently paged thru their example application catalog and it’s a lot thinner than I would have expected. There was almost nothing in there that I thought: “Yeah! I should blog this.” That is not good.

Chemical weapons finally discovered in the middle-east :-)

Actually, those of a conspiratorial bent may find this research suspiciously convenient for Western propagandists.

It's Hilan's blog birthday.