Goonies Never Say Die

"Nobody move, nobody get hurt, they said. Make one wrong move, man, you wake up dead. I exercise my lyrical stylings, and all the while you're dead and gone and forgotten."

Trying to write about my day or my week or my month is no longer an exercise in linear thinking. The way my mind works, the dull, repetitive stuff gets left on the cutting room floor. What remains are snapshots and scenes, memorable moments spliced between lengthy shots of gaudy displays beneath harsh fluorescent bulbs or a boy walking home with his head down and nothing but sheer bloody-mindedness in the rhythm of his footfalls.

These are familiar feelings, and I've already tried to write a novel about them. The sensation I get is that there isn't any one story here, rather fragments of thought and feeling that defy the neat rows of words I use to describe them. If you look into a mirror, you'll find plenty to write about. If you shatter that mirror and then attempt the same exercise, your tale may find a certain lyrical beauty, but the song will lack the coherency that makes people need to know how it ends.

And so on. We've heard this tune before, so let's skip to the next track. If my last two musical needs were the sparse beauty of Morricone and then the smiling, screaming honesty of the Eels, then we need to get to where I've been waking up all this week, with the Transplants' Tall Cans In The Air. Not the most subtle of songs, I'll grant you, but turn the volume on your speakers way up, and you have one of a few songs I've been needing to get me going on bleak post-winter mornings that seem to inhabit some kind of seasonless wasteland. Sure, it's not so cold anymore, but spring has yet to really show its face, and these days seem lacking in character and colour.

Out of bed to Rob Aston's shouty rapping, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes and heading for the briefest of showers, enough for hygiene and the purging of dreams I don't even try to remember anymore. Toothpaste, deodorant, hairwax, clothes, namebadge, and gone. Out the door and walking at the bus stop. Head down.

I got to thinking, the other day, about how the films this generation is growing up with just don't stand up to the ones my generation were raised on. That isn't to say that our movies were better, because I appreciate there's a certain amount of rose-tinting on my spectacles, more that the likes of The Goonies have - beyond the periodic we're-so-ironic revival - a certain emotional resonance that is lacking in similar films released in the nineties and naughties. I'm sure a degree of that opinion is massively subjective, but I'm also sure that it's yet another small but valid jab at the steady degradation of all the things that used to make pop culture great.

What's taken us off on this tangent is that one of the things I thought I'd really, really enjoy about working in the Home Entertainment store was the opportunity to a) watch a fuckload of free films, and b) spend large amounts of time each and every week with people who are passionate about the movies. Like-minded people, I hasten to add. The reason I get so wound up about bad flicks in the first place is because of my love affair with good ones. Poor film-making just frustrates me, especially when we all know that they didn't even try.

So I had this vision in my head of being part of a group of diverse people that liked and disliked different films and could talk/debate/argue about them all day long, should business be especially slow. Sadly, the reality is that there's me and then there's the rest of the staff, and the only place we seem to be able to reach any kind of compromise is when it comes to foreign language films. This is great for a few minutes of discussion about the latest in what is becoming a very long line of brutal horror and action films out of Japan and China, but somewhat depressing when I wonder aloud what might happen if two white guys dressed up as black women complete with stereotypical dialogue and mannerisms and called it comedy only to find everybody staring at me for several seconds of awkward silence before returning to what they were doing.

The other thing is that I'm working for a huge, multinational company now. In the past, my employers have largely been of the independent variety. They weren't fly-by-night operations (with a few notable exceptions), by any stretch of the imagination, but they didn't have this humourless push towards sales, sales, sales, and they didn't treat their customers and employees like cattle. The Home Entertainment people don't quite do that either, but believe me, they aren't far off. Everything is an acronym or a catchphrase or a five-step process, designed to streamline and standardise and just generally drain any life and character out of the whole operation. And the scary thing is, it really works. If this particular company were a person, they'd bleed money. Of course, they'd also be a wall-eyed automaton, but when you're rich, shit like that doesn't matter.

No, I'm not surprised. I'm not that naive. It's just that working in that environment occasionally brings me close to moments of genuine despair at how completely crap the human race can be. And maybe they don't mean all that much, these things we're fed as we grow up, but I find myself thinking of the next generation of Customer Service Representatives, ten or fifteen years down the line, and it scares me a little that they won't have something as completely stupid as "Sloth loves Chunk" to give them a little inner smile and carry them through another few minutes of their streamlined, standardised, homogenised day. No, where I keep The Goonies and Back To The Future and Ghostbusters and Gremlins, they'll have some generic television advert of a movie that only smiles because they wouldn't buy the products otherwise.

Excuse my cynicism, but some days it seems that the future is simply the past presented as part of a bundle deal. Buy these pre-owned sentiments, and we'll throw in a bunch of flashing lights and a lobotomy free of charge.

Whoops. That was kind of a heavy statement to be making at this time of the morning, especially when all I was going to do was talk about my week, make some minor points about the tangential nature of my idle thought processes, and maybe evoke a little nostalgia. Instead, I dragged you through more of this scary Welcome To Forever Stuff. So, just to set the karmic scales to rights, I'd like you all to do something for me. Prepare your best squeaky, wheedling voice, and say the following line:

"C'mon, Mikey, give me a lickery kiss!"

There. Doesn't that feel better?