The Wooden Finger Five - November 2013

Australians miss out on a number of ‘cool things’ by not having a college system like the US (we miss out on a number of ‘lame things’ too), and one of those is ‘college rock’. To be sure, we’ve listened to the first five REM albums and the Pixies, but we’re removed – we couldn’t be (even those Aussies who are twenty years older than I) part of the groundswell of support that broke those bands. We can read the album and gig reviews of those coffee-sipping, Foster Wallace-reading, Pabst-drinking indie lovers, but we can only get a reflection of what it feels like to grow up amidst the American underground music scene. Which suits some people just fine … my lovely wife was decidedly unenthused about the prospect that I might slide further into auditory elitism.

But these bands have to be revered by the American indie cognoscenti for a reason, right? For the past month, I’ve tried to discover the albums they may have played at house parties in San Francisco, during the time I was in my 20s and stuck in the Melbourne suburbs. The albums that may have changed my life like the Shins changed the lives of Natalie Portman and Zach Braff in ‘Garden State’. So what have I missed by repeatedly playing Oasis and Coldplay? Am I a shadow of a white male?

1.    I Am A Scientist – Guided By Voices

For years I thought Guided By Voices were some sort of Christian band, but I gradually realised that they were instead worshipped by sensitive young beardos. Their most ‘well-known’ albums, ‘Bee Thousand’ and ‘Alien Lanes’ are somewhat amateurish and ramshackle, with tracks seemingly ending when someone knocks out the guitar plug, which has probably contributed to them being so beloved. But they are good songwriters, and ‘I Am A Scientist’, from ‘Bee Thousand’, is a nice tune, even if I have no clue what it is on about. I don’t think I missed out on any big keg parties where was this playing, but I might have missed out on hearing it played while hanging out in the dorm room.    

Opacity rating: 8.5/10

2.    What Do You Want Me To Say? – The Dismemberment Plan

The Pitchfork review for the vinyl reissue of ‘Emergency & I’ claims that ‘[e]veryone I've talked to mentions that they can't imagine getting through their twenties without it.’ But I got through my entire twenties without it. Was my third decade only half-lived because of this? Anyway, this is quite poppy and relatively easy to understand – it seems to simply be about relationship problems. I imagine it’s the type of track that would gone down pretty well at Coachella.   

Opacity rating: 6.3/10

3.    Car – Built To Spill

Can you have a more American indie rock name than ‘Built To Spill’? I listened through their mid-90s albums ‘There’s Nothing Wrong With Love’ and ‘Perfect From Now On’ and I quite liked both of them – they sound like reasonably accomplished musicians, and even though their tracks regularly stretch to six or seven minutes, they never really sound self-indulgent. ‘Car’ was not a track I heard when it was first released in 1994, but it sounds unmistakably from that era. ‘You get the car/I’ll get the night off/You’ll get the chance to take the world apart and figure out how it works’ makes me think of a bunch of ‘90s road movies (most of which I’ve never seen).

Opacity rating: 6.7/10

4.    Date w/IKEA – Pavement

Pavement sound like they are actually trying on this track, and while I certainly like listening to their ‘slacker’ aesthetic on some of their other tunes (‘Summer Babe (Winter Version)’ for example), this track really soars because of it. I’m curious why IKEA is in the title – the lyrics don’t seem to relate to the store, but who knows? Maybe it’s the name of a Swedish backpacker Stephen Malkmus met?

Opacity rating: 8.9/10
 

5.    7 Chinese Bros – REM 

Surely I’ve listened to ‘Reckoning’ before, right? Well, not really … certainly ‘Murmur’ got a lot of spins when I was at Uni, but I never progressed to REM’s second album, concentrating instead on their Warner Bros. records. Early REM songs are famous for their obscurity, but this one confused me even more after I tried to do some research about it. Michael Stipe sings about ‘Seven Chinese brothers swallowing the ocean’, however the children’s book about Chinese brothers that this seems to be based on had five brothers and only one of them could swallow the ocean. And that book was itself based on a folk tale with ten brothers and it doesn’t look like any of them had sea-swallowing powers. Presumably dozens of REM scholars have speculated about the change in number of brothers, if indeed it is a change. By the way, love the guitar on this one.  

Opacity rating: 10/10

The Finger Points Outwards - No. 69

MUSIC: Lou Reed v Lester Bangs.

MUSIC: The results of NME’s 500 greatest albums list provide a welcome move away from the Sixties.

MUSIC: A metal band fails to pay their sound engineer … and he exacts his revenge.

FILM: Predicting box office performance.

ECONOMICS: Does nobody dislike currency inflation more than strippers?

BOOKS: The hundred best novels as selected over a hundred years ago.

Australia’s Chances in the 2013-14 Ashes

Unlike some Australians, and a lot of English supporters, I think Australia has a fair chance of reclaiming ‘the Ashes’ in the 2013-2014 Test series in Australia. Now that we know who Australia’s first Test team will be, and we can take a reasonable guess what England’s team will be (or at least Michael Clarke has), I’m going to have a go at comparing how good each team is.

To compare players, I have used the Reliance ICC Player Rankings. I have also calculated a team rating as follows: sum of Batting Ratings for batsmen + sum of Bowling Ratings for bowlers + ¾ * sum of Batting Ratings for bowlers + ¼ sum of Bowling Ratings for batsmen. Alas, there are no wicketkeeping ratings. Australian debutant George Bailey and Michael Carberry have each been given ratings of 500.

Australia		England		% Advantage of Eng over Aus
Batting Ratings - Batsmen
Rogers	515	Cook	737
Warner	567	Carberry	500
Watson	583	Trott	698
Clarke	853	Pietersen	706
Smith	526	Bell	748
Bailey	500	Root	580
Haddin	448	Prior	647
Total	3992		4616	15.6
Batting Ratings - Bowlers
Johnson	287	Broad	389
Siddle	274	Swann	369
Harris	202	Tremlett	54
Lyon	158	Anderson	131
Total	921		943	2.4
Bowling Ratings - Bowlers
Johnson	537	Broad	740
Siddle	760	Swann	760
Harris	782	Tremlett	460
Lyon	576	Anderson	741
Total	2655		2701	1.7
Bowling Ratings - Batsmen
Smith	97	Root	92
Watson	423	Pietersen	88
Clarke	141	Trott	49
Total	661		229	-65.4
Total team rating	7503		8081.5	7.7

Based on the Reliance ratings, England’s line-up looks to be about 8 per cent better than Australia’s. Their specialist batsmen – depending on how good Bailey turns out to be – look to be a bit more than 8 per cent better.  Their specialist bowlers look to be slightly better than Australia’s at both bowling and batting. Australia’s batsmen look to be considerably better bowlers, but that largely depends upon how much and how well Shane Watson bowls this summer.

However, the reason I think Australia have a good chance to win the series is that they are playing the series at home. Is England’s ’8 per cent’ advantage enough in a series played in Australia? A well-known comment is that a team has to be 25 per cent than Australia to beat them on their own turf. Even if that does not sound particularly scientific, one can note that home teams win about 40 per cent of the time in Test cricket, compared to only 25 per cent of the time for away teams. The English team is clearly better – but although they may be the second (or third) best team in the world, and Australia may be middle-of-the-pack, the Aussies down under may be good enough.    

Who Has The Easiest AFL Draw in 2014?

Once again, upon the release of the 2014 AFL fixture it’s time here to see which teams look likely to be helped/hindered by their particular draw next season. The way I do this is as follows: I sum up for every game a club plays the easiness of their opponent as based on my AFL Power Rankings at the end of the season, while adjusting for home ground advantage. Thus, if a Victorian team plays a Western Australian team with 20 ranking points in Perth I would assign them -32 points in terms of the easiness of this match, made up of -20 points for the easiness of their opponent along with -12 points for playing that opponent on their home turf.

(One adjustment that I’ve made this year in terms of rating each team’s draw is that I’ve adjusted each team’s ranking so that the sum of ranking points across teams is zero. The sum of ranking points across teams is otherwise negative, because I take into account finals games. Anyone comparing my ratings of each team’s draw across years will see that this adjustment lowers the rating of the easiness of each team’s draw, and that these ratings now sum to zero.)

The easiness of each AFL team’s draw in 2014, ranked from easiest to hardest, is shown in the table below:

Therefore, on my assessment, the Western Bulldogs have the easiest draw in 2014, and GWS has the hardest.  The rating for each team’s draw can be broken down into three components:

-          The effect of not playing your own team: As I’ve said before this often gets overlooked in rating each team’s draw. For example, Hawthorn’s draw is made easier by the simple fact that they don’t have to play Hawthorn. (This really kills GWS.)

-          Net home ground advantage: This is simply the net effect of the adjustments for home ground advantage across the season. This doesn’t tend to matter much because each team plays the same amount of ‘home’ and ‘away’ games, though things like how many non-Victorian teams a Victorian teams plays at home, or the Western Bulldogs playing a ‘home’ game at Cazaly Stadium will affect this component.

-          The effect of which teams your team plays twice: This is the collective strength of the opponents that each teams plays twice, with a higher rating for this component meaning that you have easier opponents in your return bouts.

 

The third effect is really the main point of difference between each team’s draw. The Bulldogs are considered to have a relatively easy draw at this stage because three of the opponents they play twice are low-ranked teams in GWS, Melbourne, and Gold Coast. This is in part because the AFL has, for the 2014 fixture, broken teams into three groups: those which finished 1-6 in 2013, those which finished 7-12, and those which finished 13-18, with the lower groups (in theory) playing more of the easier teams twice. As has already been noted, this has greatly helped Richmond, who fell to 7^th after their painful finals loss to Carlton, with the Tigers being granted return matches against GWS and St. Kilda despite being only half a game off a top four finish going into the 2013 finals (as a Richmond fan, I’m all for this!)

On the other end of the scale, Brisbane has indeed been savaged by the draw given their relatively low finish in 2013, while on my assessment Essendon will also have a tough draw in 2014. I’ll leave AFL fans to form their own conspiracy theories on this.

The Legacy of Lou Reed

 

Alas, over the next decade we will probably lose many of the remaining important figures in rock ‘n’ roll from the 1960s and early 1970s, with today seeing the passing of singer, guitarist, and songwriter Lou Reed, solo artist and former member of the Velvet Underground. Reed was well-known for his songs portraying street life, most often in his hometown of New York City, as well as his ability to switch from droning, feedback-ridden guitar playing to tender ballads.

One could argue that the Velvet Underground are the ‘consensus’ greatest band in the history of American rock ‘n’ roll*, or at least the most influential. I don’t have the inclination to draw a Jack Black-style family tree to test that claim, but I will note that the most important tendencies in the Velvets’ music have become general tendencies in American alternative or underground rock over the past 40 years – though of course there are exceptions. First, American alternative rock has tended to be quite literate, even if the lyrics have often not been as straightforward as Reed’s ‘short story’ approach. Second, the Velvet Underground’s use of both heavy, droning noise and simple 1950s pop structures are pretty much the main tendencies informing American indie music even today. Third, another of Reed’s main contribution was to, as Andy Warhol requested, leave the ‘dirty words’ in, showing the darker aspects of the sex ‘n’ drugs lifestyle. Three-chord rock would likely still be fairly common without Lou Reed, but it would probably be a whole lot cleaner.

I’m not as across Lou Reed’s solo work – in part, because there is so much more of it – with ‘Transformer’, ‘Berlin’, ‘Songs for Drella’, and some of his more well-known tracks (such as ‘Coney Island Baby’) forming the majority of my knowledge of that part of his career. From what I have heard, it is in large part an extension of his VU-stuff, which is not to say that it is unoriginal, but that he was able to establish a definite style that served him well throughout his career. I’ll have to go back and listen to more of it, as I imagine many people will over the next several weeks.

But even from what I have heard there are so many great songs – ‘Heroin’, ‘What Goes On’, ‘Oh! Sweet Nuthin’’, ‘Vicious’, ‘Street Hassle’, ‘Perfect Day’ and so on … Lou Reed’s music may have been far blacker than the Beatles or the Beach Boys, but in its own way, it possibly brought as much joy to those who appreciated it.

*In the 1990s it looked like Velvets-fans R.E.M. might grab that title, but critical favour seems to have shifted away from them over the past fifteen years. Somewhat perversely, if they had stopped making records after ‘Automatic For The People’ they probably would have taken the top spot.

Predictions for the 2013-14 NBA Season

Given that I got almost every single NBA prediction wrong last year, severely overestimating the voting influence of the New York media, you’d think I would give this a miss this season. But there were three important things I got right: the two Conference champions (Miami and San Antonio), and the eventual NBA champion (Miami). And that has given me enough encouragement to try again. So here are some more hoops predictions to laugh at during April 2014:

MVP: Yes, I picked against LeBron James last season. I thought New York’s improvement last season – which incidentally, did happen - would be enough to get the media behind Carmelo Anthony, even if he didn’t deserve it. In fairness, I did say LeBron would have the better season, and Carmelo actually did end up getting the one vote that didn’t go to James for the exact reason I thought he would get the majority of votes.

So surely I’ve learnt my lesson, and will back the best player on the planet this season, right? Not so fast. I think the Heat might take a backward step this season, and voter fatigue for James must surely soon set in. I’m actually going to pick LA Clippers point guard Chris Paul to take home the trophy. The Clippers won a lot of games last season, and I think they’ll win over 60 games this season, which given this is the Clippers is almost barely conceivable. And I think that will swing voters Paul’s way. Plus, it would really annoy Lakers fans, which is another reason for wanting it to happen.

All-NBA Teams: 1^st – Paul, James Harden (Houston), James, Kevin Durant (Oklahoma City), Dwight Howard (Houston); 2^nd – Derrick Rose (Chicago) , Kyrie Irving (Cleveland), Blake Griffin (LA Clippers), Kevin Love (Minnesota), Marc Gasol (Memphis); 3^rd – Paul George (Indiana), Tony Parker (San Antonio), Carmelo Anthony (New York), Greg Monroe (Detroit), Joakim Noah (Chicago).

All-Star Teams: East – Rose, Dwyane Wade (Miami), James, Anthony, Noah (starters), George, Monroe, Irving, Al Horford (Atlanta), Chris Bosh (Miami), Luol Deng (Chicago), Josh Smith (Detroit); West: Paul, Kobe Bryant (LA Lakers), Durant, Griffin, Howard (starters), Love, Parker, Gasol, Stephen Curry (Golden State), Anthony Davis (New Orleans), Dirk Nowitzki (Dallas), Mike Conley (Memphis).

Most Improved Player: Oh, I don’t know … let’s go for Andre Drummond (Detroit), because he’s awesome and he should get an increase in minutes.

Sixth Man of Year: Jarrett Jack (Cleveland).

Defensive Player of the Year: Howard. The Houston Rockets are going to kill it this year.

Coach of the Year: Doc Rivers (LA Clippers)

Western Conference Champion: Houston.

Eastern Conference Champion: Miami. Meaning that, if I’m right, the Finals will feature both LeBron and Dwight Howard, and the internet will explode.

Champion: I actually think Houston will do it, with Howard winning Finals MVP. Or maybe I just want Lakers fans to have the worst season ever.

Recent Structural Changes in Employment in Australia

This month the Productivity Commission released a report (or more accurately, a supplement to its annual report) on ‘structural change’ in Australia’s economy over the past decade. The phenomenon of structural change has gotten some more notice here over the past few years, particularly from the Reserve Bank of Australia, with production in Australia shifting towards the mining industry.

But why do we care? Well, as the Commission’s report says there are benefits and costs to us from this type of change. On the plus side, resources should be flowing towards the areas of the economy where they are of highest use, therefore raising the value of what Australia produces. This includes workers moving to where they are of highest use, although this concept is often not all that palatable given the human element involved. Which brings us to the costs of structural change – there are costs from moving resources around, including workers, and some of these will find themselves unemployed, at least in the short-term.

Of course changes like this go on constantly, so by structural change we mean something bigger and more lasting than, say, a local clothes shop closing down, as much as that might initially suck for the shop’s owner and staff. Without having an exact definition, we can think of it as something like, for example, one sector increasing its share of Australia’s economic activity by 5 percentage points over several years, while another contracts by the same amount. The RBA showed a few years back, using ‘structural change indices’, that the rate of structural change appeared to have increased in recent years, although by how much depends on which economic variable you look at (i.e. output, employment or investment), and there had been increases of similar magnitude before.

In terms of employment, the Productivity Commission report shows that the recent boom in natural resources in Australia ‘has not been associated with an unprecedented rate of structural change in employment’ (p. 69). Employment has shifted from agriculture and manufacturing towards mining, and also the services sector, which is perhaps less well-known given that you do not tend to hear about a ‘services boom’ in Australia. These trends though have been going on for some time, as the Commission’s report illustrates, and some of them are not unique to Australia – the shift from manufacturing to services for example is common among the most-developed countries. Some of these service jobs will be in relatively low-paying sectors such as retail and hospitality, but others will be in relatively high-paying sectors such as professional services.

Across states, the Commission's report shows that the redistribution of employment is also not at an unprecedented level. The redistribution of employment across states is typically lower than that across sectors; which is interesting, and may or may not be surprising depending on whether you think people are more likely to move from manufacturing to services than from, say, Victoria to Queensland. The report concludes there is evidence that disparities in unemployment across regions have decreased during the 2000s (though they widened slightly between 2008 and 2012).

The report has quite a large section on recent trends in labour adjustments and mobility. Essentially, these trends are what you would expect given the shifts in overall employment between sectors – e.g. manufacturing is attracting fewer new workers.

Articles and reports on structural change in Australia often seem like they should come with a ‘DON’T PANIC’ sticker on them. The RBA said earlier this year that monetary policy cannot and should not prevent structural change from occurring. The Productivity Commission report gives much the same impression of inevitability. This is not to say that such change should be blindly accepted, but that the relative rise and fall of various sectors has happened before, and will happen again.