A little circuitous randomness today. Our friends at the eye-roving DailySwarm point out the fact that the ridiculous rock event, RushCon ’08 is happening this Wednesday in Toronto. Rushcon being a celebration of everything Rush, the long-running Canadian power trio beloved by all types of nerds, wizards and role-playing enthusiasts.
This reminds us of a moment in our of our favorite underrated and unsung movies of the ’90s, the indie punk scene comedy, “SLC Punk!,” starring Matthew Lillard, Michael A. Goorjian, Annabeth Gish and a very young and then mostly unknown Jason Segel.
Following the lives of “anarchist” punks living in the nowhere-ness of mid 1980s Salt Lake City, the film in many ways is a loving chronicle to the rise and fall of youthfully idealistic, but ultimately naive punk ideologies which many of us have experienced (god, where is this director, James Merendino, now? Doing a lot of crap it appears). If you’ve never seen this super amusing, clever and insightful little film, you should add it to your netflix queue now (if you really want to be cheap about it, the whole thing is up on YouTube).
Near the end of the film “Heroin Bob” dies of an overdose (Goorjian) and Stevo (Lillard) flashes back to their teenage years at his funeral. The young kids are playing Dungeouns and Dragons and listening to Rush’s “The Trees” (from Hemisphere). But the increasingly aware Bob questions the “coolness” of it all and especially of Rush. Stevo is shocked and protests “Rush is a very good band. Their music is very complex and the perfection…!”
You’d really need to have seen the film and understand it all to truly appreciate the moment, but it’s nice nod to a changing of the guard, which echoes the characters’ own crossroads at the end of the film where they bittersweetly leave behind adolescence (punk) and and begrudingly become adults.
