The Circle of Rudy Life
A Tour of the 90s
10/25/2022 - Nate "Dog"
Man, that last article of Tim’s, where he takes a large dump on working from home, was a real buzz-kill. It wasn’t just that it was depressing, but it was so “presently” depressing, that is depressing solely about stuff happening in the present. Of course, that’s not only what the Schroeder Zine is about. Our Zine is about reminding ourselves how cool and fun the 90s were, and then—and only then—getting depressed upon reflection of that fun and joy through its stark contrast to the present, where we are all old, miserable middle-aged pieces of shit. I don’t like taking a detour and driving straight to the present jugular without the requisite ride to the past—and through that journey and back-- remember how we ended up in this filthy ditch.
There’s a lot of paths we can take through the 1990s, but I have one for you: it’s the Rudy path. “Oh Nate, you must have ingested too much kratom, what the hell are you taking about, Rudy?” First of all, no it’s not too much. And second, how dare you be so rude. If you grew up in the 90s you know perfectly well what I’m referring to: the 1993 Sean Astin classic hit “Rudy.” It’s about a working class little guy who is pretty dumb but likes Notre Dame football a lot, so he abandons his family and super cute girlfriend played by Lili Taylor, and through guts and determination, he ends up playing a little bit on the team of said sport for said university. It’s a great film because it really reflects the spirit the 1990s, coming as it did after the end of the Cold War when America was at its peak in optimism and global power, and where teenagers, like myself, could dream of becoming whatever they wanted as long Jerry Goldsmith’s inspiring score played on repeat.
Of course, growing up in Greenwich-- one of the wealthiest and most privileged towns in America-- is not the same as Rudy’s shithole steel mill blue-collar village, but you can fudge the origin story a little. And I didn’t play sports; in fact, I mocked it relentlessly, even going as far as wearing suspenders and a beanie helicopter hat during varsity baseball try-outs so I would be kicked off the team and forced to not play sports for spring semester, thus allotting more time to listen to ska music and smoke Lucky Strikes.
And that’s where we get to my other passion of the 1990s. Besides pretending to be Rudy even though I was nothing like him in any shape or spirit, there was the other 90s icon: the Rude Boy, or rudie or rudi. If you’ve forgotten this thin-tied, bespeckled well-dressed lovable nerd of the ska scene, remember the lyrics of the famous Clash song “Ruddie Can’t Fail”:
How you get a rude and a reckless?
Don't you be so crude and feckless
You been drinking brew for breakfast
Rudie can't fail (no, no)
If it still doesn’t ring a bell, put it on Spotify for a bit and I guarantee it’ll lift your spirits, at least for short while. That and the Jerry Goldsmith Rudy music will be part of your new Rudy playlist as you do some squats and down some Miller Lites. The song wasn’t from the 90s, but was featured in the very enjoyable 1997 flick “Grosse Pointe Blank”, starring John Cusack, which ironically was a nostalgia film about the 80s, but I still associate the song as a nostalgic item of 1990s and the fecund ska/punk scene of that time.
Standing behind the Rudy on the screen and the Rudy on the sticky floors of ska shows was another well-known Rudy of the 1990s. I’m referring of course to Rudy Giuliani. Not the MAGA Nosferatu Rudy of today, but that prudish hard-nosed mayor of NYC who “cleaned up the city” or some bullshit like that, I never really paid attention. Nobody did then. Except for some jokes about how he replaced Times Square hookers with Disney characters, in the 90s suburban teenagers didn’t give a crap about politics. It wasn’t on anyone’s mind. Nobody argued about this or that thing from the Left or Right, or getting all concerned and worked up over stuff and wanting to cancel everything and everyone. There were no smartphones to make kids all offended and distracted and insecure. No obnoxious social media algorithm, precision-designed to incite hatred or fears about the collapse of the world. The news was for newspapers, that is, for parents. There were Blockbuster Friday nights to rent movies like Rudy and rudies at the club to bum cigarettes off of, that’s pretty much it. Indeed it was a wonderful innocent time of Rudy’s the 90s was. Or was it?
I could have ended with that but I promised this was a circle-- a downward spirally one-- to the depressing present. The other night, I had a 101 fever but not Covid, so I got no sympathy or concern by my loved ones. I decided to watch the movie Rudy after many many years. Boy was I wrong about the character. Watching it today, he seems like a really ungrateful, uninspiring dolt. First, he had the opportunity to stay in his steel mill job, which seems now like an excellent paying union one—he’d be lucky to have that today; the factory has long been shut down. Today, he’d be working at Dollar Store while dreaming of Notre Dame. Second, he has a pretty hot girlfriend and a chance to live in a nice, single family home. No way could they afford that today. And his dad is pretty cool and loving. No, Rudy abandons all of this. He goes to South Bend, where the rest of the movie he encounters a series of implausible hand-outs: the priest at the beginning gets him into a local community college; he gets help on his grades thanks to his horny friend played by a baby-faced pre-fame Jon Favereau; he gets a job and free room by some wise black landscaper dude. He gets to play in the final game only because Notre Dame is winning by such a large margin. And then he gets hoisted and carried off the field with drunken crowds screaming “RUUUUDEEE!!!”.
I wish I could join that clarion call of the 1990s today—“RUUDEE!”-- but I simply can’t. Through my open source research I read that the real Daniel "Rudy" Ruettiger—whom the movie is based upon—was actually kind of a drunken douchebag who had really bad grades, didn’t care at all about academics, and who raided underwear from female dormitories. And he really milked his whole “Rudy” myth story after he graduated, even when people asked him to stop. Whereas in the 90s I thought it was all about Goldsmithian grit and hard effort that makes Rudy a hero, now I realize it was just plain old luck and almost all of the movie was built on lies and self-aggrandizement.
The only character I really liked in that movie was Rudy’s friend Pete, the younger version, played by Robert Steinmiller Jr. If you recall Robert Steinmiller was a 90s staple. He was a cute little tyke in the very underrated film “The Ref”, starring comic Denis Leary and Kevin Spacey (Jeez, I hope he didn’t molest the young Steinmiller during the making of the film). And speaking of trauma, you must not forget the unforgettably depressing 1993 film he was in called “Jack the Bear”, starring Danny DeVito. Oh, so much fun that Danny Devito you think? Wrong!
This intensely dreary film is about this kid Jack and his younger brother Dylan. Their mom died in a car accident. They live with John, played by Danny Devito, who’s a drunk. Their neighbor Norman is this neo-Nazi. Jack has a minor love interest. But he’s interrupted by Dexter, Norman’s kid, who wears a Nazi costume for Halloween, but John doesn’t really care about all this and drunkenly spouts racial slurs on TV. This is just the first third of the movie. I could go on, but I would need to go to CVS to get a refill on my Zoloft.
It's hard to describe the vibe a 90s film like “Jack the Bear” gives off, because mostly it’s the context in which you saw it. Back then, there was no Netflix algorithm feeding you what you wanted. There was no search engine, like a Star Trek “replicator” that instantly produced what you asked for. You just “stumbled” unwittingly and without consent upon heavy, dreary childhood trauma movies and TV dramas, because that what was on cable TV on a cold, November Sunday afternoon on Showtime or Cinemax while avoiding homework and dreading the upcoming school week. This was your prize. And you accepted whatever scraps were given to you.
A perfect example is Life of Brian. No, not the Monty Python cult classic. I’m talking about the little known 1992 TV series called “LifeStories: Families in Crisis”, season 1 episode 4 entitled. “Gunplay: the Day in the Life of Brian Darling”, a hilarious romp about a 10-year-old boy who is accidentally shot to death by his friend playing with a gun they find at home. That’s all it is. 30 long dreary minutes of dark build-up and then BAM!-- an innocent boy is shot point blank in the fucking head, roll credits. That’s true 90s entertainment for you.
You see, along the glamour of ska and the holy heights of Rudy accomplishment, in 90s you would often wander into dark alleyways of cable TV where 10 year-olds get killed in horrible ways. You didn’t ask for it, it just arrived out of nowhere, and you would try to forget.
And often it took so long to get through such PTSD-inducing horror. There was no smartphone to glance at. There was nobody to text to when it was over. You watched in silence, you watched all of it. You ate it, because for every little boy shot or wearing a Nazi Halloween costume, there was always some happy and optimistic mozzarella stick in the 90s coming your way.
And that is the point-- there’s a lot of the 90s trauma out there that one spends decades to suppress—those Jack the Bear moments, those cold and grey Sundays of the soul—and a lot of that decade was built on such loose sand, like ska itself.
Not all ska is bad. Bands like Mephiskapheles or Slackers still stand up to time for sure, but back then there was also a whole lot of Ska garbage that just about anyone would eat up because what else was there to do in downtown New Haven at night in the 90s? And that indiscriminate ska enthusiast is really embodied in the Rude Boy, I suppose. Pimply, thin-tied, big-rimmed glasses dork skanking it up with arms flailing and smelling of clove cigarettes and cheap beer, everyone cheering him on for no reason. Can’t believe this was one of our ambassadors who represented us in the 90s. There’s some nutritiously filling ska steak dinners out there, but upon reflection it’s far crowded out by off-brand Nerds candy ska. Much like watching all of “Life of Brian” (unfunny version), you would just stand there listening to this Rude Boy and all of his emptiness and bullshit enthusiasm, because there were no other options. Again, no smart phone to save you. Oh, the patience we had! Painstakingly enduring Rude boys and child abuse TV shows—the perfect preparation for the tedium of a job working with Excel datasets and Java script that awaited you in the 2000s.
Then we come around to the Rudy Giuliani of today. I need not go further into details here. You can see where I’m going with all of this.
Each Rudy covered here, upon reflection, is a golem of sorts. A haunting figure who on the surface makes you nostalgic of the 90s but then joins your living nightmare of the present. This series of Rudys exists on some other previously unarticulated dimension, a separate ring in Dante’s hell. At first it lifts you to the heady notes of Clash and Goldsmith and Ska, but then throws you back down to 2022 present, leaving you smeared over with L3/L4 spinal bulges, benzo withdrawals, thinning hair, and black screened social media addictions. For every TGIF 90s night, upon further inspection, what persists today and perhaps what it always has been, was just a long Sunday afternoon of dread.
