Suddenly they all seem so shallow, so three-act formulaic ("Ah, we're half an hour in - time for his daughter to go missing/wife to get kidnapped/parents to get killed in a Mystery Blaze").

And I blame (or do I mean "thank"?) television. Over the last year or two I've watched all five seasons of The Wire, the full whack of Battlestar Galactica and the first season of Heroes. As a result, I now expect my characters to meander and develop. I expect the subplots to be even more complicated and intriguing than the main thrust of the piece. I expect to be non-plussed by how story arcs end on some occasions and to get long-awaited payoffs on others.

But all I really expect is to be entertained. And mainstream cinema isn't doing it for me any more. Boxsets have altered my whole perception of how stories should be told and characters should be drawn. They allow me to root for heroes who, instead of being Tom Cruise in an eye patch, are flawed, flaky, cowardly and inconsistent (hi, McNulty!). Villains can be subtly drawn in a very light shade of grey rather than being barking one-note psychos building up to The Evil Laugh in the last act (hi, Military Bastard in Avatar!)

For over a year now, I haven't seen a single big-budget film that has entertained me or captured my interest even half as much as those first 20 slightly cheapish-looking episodes of Heroes. Not Avatar. And certainly not Watchmen.

Just imagine if District 9, for example, had been a three- or four-season TV show. All the political infighting of the authorities could have been explored in depth. The hero's transformation from dorky nepotism beneficiary to champion of the oppressed wouldn't have occurred over a few minutes - it would have taken years. Wouldn't that have been more satisfying to remember than what that film has been reduced to for me: a "not-bad film I saw one evening"?

Are any other boxset junkies having similar thoughts?

When I get up in the morning and flick on the light switch in the kitchen, it takes ten minutes before there's enough light to read by.

The incandescent light bulb may not have been efficient, but at least it was effective. This changeover is the first time I've had to wait impatiently for anything to warm up since Me Nan's radiogram.

This can't be the only example of a technological development that's swept the world despite being more cumbersome, annoying or generally more rubbish than what it has replaced, so what others are there?

Time was, if you had 40-50 LPs or so, at least three or four of them would be by artists who could only be classified under "Unclassifiable". You might have some Ivor Cutler (a weedy-voiced Weegie with a wheezing harmonium - er, you probably had to be there), or the recently Baker-endorsed Sir Henry at Rawlinson End, or Stanley Unwin increasingrave your word poweribold, or a rake-thin Manc with an even rake-thinner tie reciting poems for punks, or Kevin Coyne (hi, Tony!) singing a capella at you in a uniquely eeee-ing-ing-ing-ing-undi-undi-undignified way.

And it wasn't just an "underground" thing, either. Mainstream pop was teeming with weirdos too, from clowns with bubble perms to keyboard players channelling Charlie Chaplin, with a thousand shades of stuh-range in between.

Where did you go to, my lovelies? Were the Unclassifiables all eventually pigeon-holed with their wings clipped? Have all the eccentrics been forced to follow brutally orthodox orbits? Or are they still out there, risking their entire careers on our willingness to get past our initial "What the..."?

According to Popjustice, the best pop record of the last two years is probably Lady Gaga's "Poker Face". And he's not wrong. But it's not the nu-electrostomp arrangement, or the lyric (pretty banal stuff, purportedly about fancying some fish while eating the meat course or something), or even the Bacofoil-camp staging - complete with strategic Cumberland sausage - that makes it a good record. What makes it a good record is that it sends the none-more-catchy needle careering right off the dial.

But what does "catchy" mean?* Yes, we use it to refer to "earworms" (snippets of music that you can't get out of your head), but what does it actually consist of? Is it some ethereal quality that defies definition - like "soulful", "plaintive" or "raunchy" - or can "catchy" be pinned down?

I think it can. It's all about hooks. And "Poker Face" has five of them. Is that a lot or not many? To give you an idea, Madonna's "Hung Up" - one of the biggest hits of 2005 - managed a paltry two: a two-note tick-tock chant about time going by so slowly so slowly, and a keyboard-ocarina part that was lifted wholesale from an old Abba record, suggesting that coming up with new hooks is anything but easy.

The hooks in "Poker Face" (Spotify link) are these:

1. (0:07) Ma-ma-ma-mah
Filched from Boney M's "Ma Baker", and pre-echoing No. 5.

2. (0:40) Oh, whoa-oh, oh, oh
Eurovisiontabulous la-la-la-ing is easier to remember than actual words, and you don't even need to be listening attentively to find yourself joining in.

3. (0:57) Can't read my, can't read my...
Seemingly pointless repetition isn't pointless at all; it helps hooks get stuck in - especially in a chorus.

4. (1:03) She has got me like no-bo-dy
A call-and-response trick in the form of a three-note arpeggio, again with a repeated phrase.

5. (1:13) Puh-puh-puh po-ker face puh-puh po-ker face
Stammering on a single note works just f-f-f-fine too, especially if it involves repeating the t-t-t-title of the record.

See what she did there? We're only a minute and a quarter in and all five hooks have been embedded in our heads already. Now, for the remaining two thirds of the song, all she has to do is repeat them, intertwine them and overlay them. So that's exactly what she does, the little tinker. The end of the record assaults us with 3, 4, 5, 4, 5, 1, 5, 1, 5, 1, 5, 1... all in 30 seconds.

Catchy? It's a contagion in G# minor.

(Continues in Comments)
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* For anyone who hasn't read it already, David Hepworth's piece on the Beatles over at The Rocking Vicar is what set me off exploring the idea of catchiness in the first place.

We've tiptoed up to it many a time, only to skirt round it before tackling it head on. We've dropped hints and made vague allusions. We've read between the lines, no doubt chopped out with a Swiss Army knife. But we've never actually "done" it here, have we? So here goes.

My name is Archie and I've used drugs recreationally.

After a few not terribly satisfactory experiences with blocks of purported Moroccan hash so hard that Henry Moore would have needed a large array of power tools to chip a paltry spliff’s worth off them, I trotted off to university in the mid-Seventies.

The next-door neighbours at my hall of residence were two brothers, both pushing thirty, from San Francisco. They'd pitched up there on some only-vaguely-explained mature-student junket. Equally vaguely explained was their seemingly endless supply of cash, but they were quite up-front about what it should be spent on. "A bit druggy" doesn't come close. Brett and Brad (not their real names, but I don’t think their real names were their real names either) were Cheech & Chong re-imagined by Hunter S. Thompson, and their domain - room B-14, which not inappropriately sounds like a U.S. bomber - was the People's Republic of Lysergia.

B-14 was furnished on the centrifugal principle: push everything up against the walls to leave as much space as possible around the middle of the carpet, so as to create a respectful distance around the brothers' holy of holies, their raison d'ether: The One True Bong. Much like a wok in a modern kitchen, The One True Bong was a versatile utensil, readily processing anything more or less combustible that got chucked in it, ranging from the everyday, like Thai sticks or red Leb, to the more exotic, like opium, ayahuasca or Bulgarian vodka.

Under the brothers' shamanic guidance, I was introduced to all the above, as well as such arcane concepts as "eating Mexican" (an entrée of peyote buttons washed down with José Cuervo tequila) or "acid-trip trips" (excursions to watch double bills of Doctor Phibes movies under conditions probably not as the filmmakers intended).

Apart from declaring your willingness to listen to side one of the Pure Prairie League's Bustin’ Out in perpetuity, B-14's house rules were quite simple: don’t do barbiturates and don't do heroin. Anything else went - usually in the blink of an eye.

Nobody got any course work done, obviously, and most of us had already decided by Christmas that the only realistic option was to leave at the end of the year. But even if we weren't ideal students, we certainly couldn't be accused of not being dedicated to our chosen pursuit. The sessions - referred to by the brothers as "seminars", ho ho - would last for days, punctuated only by the odd break to heat up some chili sin carne. (Brad had declared himself a vegetarian for purely practical rather than ethical reasons: he'd discovered that food with no meat in it doesn’t go off anything like as quickly, so a single bean stew would last him for most of the term.)

My experiences with pharma for fun after that year-long initiation were - a bit like falling in love again, some might say - all something of a letdown. Yes, striving to stay in tune with the times, I did some speed in '77, coke in the Eighties and E in the Nineties, but B-14 was the yardstick against which everything that came after it got measured and, perhaps inevitably, was found disappointingly lacking.

So, that's me: to this day, pretty much everything except barbiturates and heroin. What about you?* In the spirit of B-14, whether you respond with a hoary old drug anecdote, your arguments for or against legalisation, or the formula for your own favourite MDMA precursor is entirely up to you. Just don't diss the Pure Prairie League, eh?
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* If you post here under your own name, yes, of course we’re interested in the experiences of “a friend” of yours.

According to The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian, FC Barcelona beat Manchester United 20-0 in last season's Champions League Final, Usain Bolt smashed the world record by running 100 metres in under a second (0.96 seconds, to be precise), and Moscow is 155 miles from London.

Can you imagine those three newspapers - three of the four "quality" daily broadsheets - all printing any such thing on the same day? Yet that's exactly what happened yesterday, when the three of them were one order or magnitude out when they claimed that Bono had called at the Tory conference for 7% of the British GDP to be allocated to international aid projects.

I'm not an economist. Indeed, I only scraped through "O"-level maths, so I'm barely numerate, but it was obvious even to me that something was squiffy with that figure. If Britain's tax revenue - the government's kitty, basically - is 35-40% of the GDP, then 7% of the GDP would be about one fifth of that kitty.

The Prime Minister addresses the nation: "Bad news for British schools and hospitals, I'm afraid, but they'll have to close. All of them. A diminutive Irishman in stupid sunglasses has bagged their entire budget."

How is it possible for (presumably) three sub-editors on three of the best (allegedly) four newspapers in the country to have missed something so (patently) obvious? Would this have happened before the Internet was the default tool for fact-checking? Is it just a consequence of the death of real reporting of which David Simon, among others, has warned? Am I alone in giving a damn about things like this? Should I just shut up and watch the cagefighting?

(The Independent, amazingly, got it right.)

I was reading a piece on the Times site this morning about the musical progeny of the Edmondson-Saunders axis, and halfway through I thought, "Ooh, this is proper writing." So I scrolled back up to check the byline.

Whaddyaknow - it's the Mighty Mossman.

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* No, I don't know what it means either, but never let semantics get in the way of a good headline.

Download or stream? Pay or free? Three strikes or chemical castration?

Meanwhile, music just shrugs and doesn't give a hot damn.

"Hee hee. That was tee-oo fay-ust!"

Splutter, gasp and throb of vein....

I enjoy the magazine very much. I often nod in agreement, but I sometimes tut in despair - not so much at what's written as how it's presented. Why does the magazine persist with such a wonky citation style? Why fly in the face of a convention that's accepted the world over for published material of all kinds?

It's not that hard, honest: if it's a whole (an album, anthology, collection, suite, etc.), italicise it; if it's a part (a song, article, poem, segment, piece, etc.), use inverted commas.

So, Prince's Purple Rain was both an album and a film, but the song was "Purple Rain". And although Roy Bittan played piano on Bowie's Scary Monsters, he didn't play on "Scary Monsters".

Pedantic? Damn right. But also unequivocal when it comes to sorting out title tracks from the albums they belong to.

Ah. That feels better.

From today's Media Guardian:

I love the Word, edited by the effervescent Mark Ellen, and sneak a read of my daughter's NME.

.

First it was Forever Changes. Then came Lou Reed's Berlin, Sparks doing their Compleat Workes, and Van "reimagining" Astral Weeks - and no doubt a few others I've missed.

I now see that Hugh Cornwell is about to take Rattus Norvegicus IV out for a note-by-note gnaw of the cash cow.

So, who's next? Will Dylan follow up his festive croakfest with Blonde on Blonde at the Budokan, perhaps?

I do enjoy a proper meaty feature in a magazine, me - one that clearly has a single hand at the rudder to hold a steady course and allow an argument to be coherently made or an angle comprehensively covered.

Imagine, then, my groan of dismay* upon learning that the main event in the latest issue of Word is to be yet another fragture. A what? I mean a single topic that's fragmented into half a dozen or more "voices", each allocated a bit of space to set out their "perspective" or recount their "personal journey".

Recently, the features on Bono, student ents, cult figures and now the Dame have all been given the fragture treatment.

Can I be alone in finding this format irksomely light, slight and targeted to appeal only to those with the attention span of a sugar-rushing kitten? According to the alleged tenets of the MTV Generation, too much depth can bog things down, but a bigger danger is not having a clear idea of where you're going or how you might best end up there. And that's why only a single person should be tracing out the best route for a story to take. (If it doesn't work, the editor spikes it - simple as that.)

Take the fascinating 7,000-word piece on Annie Leibovitz's travails that appeared in New York magazine last month.** If that story had been planned as a fragture, we'd have ended up with a handful of single-column anecdotes from her former camera-loader, her realtor, her personal trainer, her dog-walker, and no doubt Demi Moore's now-concave-again belly too. And we'd have been none the wiser.

If one-feature-one-writer is a system that still holds good not only at New York magazine, but also at The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Esquire, GQ and - despite its catastrophic decline - Rolling Stone, why has Word apparently dumped it in favour of the freakin' fragture?

In short, why is a magazine ostensibly for grown-ups turning into the Trafalgar Square plinth?

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* If imagining isn't working for you, phonetically it went "Grrpsstpwhrrrrrr".

** I came across that New York piece thanks to a link posted on Twitter by one @davidhepworth.)

I've now tried twice to watch Scorsese's Rolling Stones film Strike A Light and both times I've got as far as the performance of "Jumping Jack Flash" about ten minutes in, only to run screaming from the room.

Keith is out of time, Ron is out of tune and Charlie is apparently out of the office until tomorrow. The "Yes, I know I'm not Bill Wyman but if I stand here in the wings maybe nobody'll notice" bass player is all but inaudible. Jagger looks like a Botoxed gargoyle being casually Tasered. (He also sounds like Freddie Starr guesting on 3-2-1, but he has since about 1976, so no surprises there.) But worse, far worse, than all that are the waves of arrogant "Hi, we're legends, us" self-satisfaction that come rolling off that stage like an avalanche of dry ice. How can these people have the gall to be so preposterously pleased with themselves while creating a noise so shoddy and feeble it makes the Johnny Thunders Band sound like the Count Basie Orchestra?

Has anyone managed to get through the whole thing? Should I persist - it is Marty, after all - or is that opening a declaration of intentions for the rest of the film?

Matching muslin shifts notwithstanding, this clip is so non-weedy - so the complete, absolute, 180-degree opposite of weedy - that it's positively, er, ydeew.

It's also arguably the best live music performance in the whole of the last 40 years of world television. Actually, that's not quite true - there's no "arguably" about it.

Good Gawd!

May I suggest "I don't want no trash" as an eleventh-hour entry for the t-shirt slogan competition?

Take two concepts much loved by the video tweakers - "literal" and "shreds" - just fulge them together, and you're laughing. Well, at least I was.