In “There’s No Secrets this Year,” the first song on Swoon, the Silversun Pickups come out swinging for the fences. If the band has been bothered by frequent comparisons to the Smashing Pumpkins, they don’t show any signs of it here. It’s an auspicious track that makes the same kind of promises that “Cherub Rock” made as the opening track of Siamese Dream fifteen years ago.
The comparisons are apt. The band enthusiastically acknowledges the Pumpkins as one of their primary influences, and even the appearance, gender, and ethnicity (a lanky vocalist, a female bassist, an Asian-American male) of their lineup is similar. “There’s No Secrets this Year” showcases a number of the postive ways the Pumpkins have influenced the Pickups, as mulitple guitar overdubs and rattling drum rolls are assembled together into an ambitious, portentous opener.
In 1998, Terrence McNally’s play “Corpus Christi” was first performed in New York City. It wasn’t hard to predict that portraying Jesus as a promiscuous homosexual living in Corpus Christi, Texas would inspire vehement condemnation from religious groups – and it most certainly did, as “Christians” spewed death threats against the members of the Manhattan Theater Group that first produced the play, and when the play opened in London in 1999 a British Muslim group issued a fatwa calling for the assassination of the playwright.
Conceptually, counting cards is incredibly simple. Take a deck of cards. With a full deck, the count is zero. Deal the cards out one by one. Each time you see a card numbered 2 through 6, add one to the count. Each time you see an ace, a face card, or a ten, subtract one from the count. That’s it. You’re done. You’ve learned the basic high-low counting system, a system that mathematician Edward O. Thorpe developed and proved by winning huge money during a single weekend.
In 2002 I decided to cross one of the items off my bucket list (I hate that expression – if someone knows a better one please leave it in the comments) and took a trip to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. My boss didn’t want to sign off on the vacation time because he was anticipating some sort of crisis during that week, so I almost had to quit my job for it. It was one of the few times I actually played hardball – I was playing chicken with a $2000 Christmas bonus that wouldn’t be awarded unless you actually worked for the company the day they handed out the checks – but I eventually got my way and flew out to Austin to join my college friend F****. Our plan was to rent a car and drive from Texas to Louisiana, stay at an as-yet undetermined hotel on the outskirts of Louisiana and drive into town each day for parades.
Every great football game, at its heart, is like an action movie. Once you cut out the commercials and halftime, they’re both about the same length. They both build along the same story arc. Depending on your home city (or which side you happened to gamble money on), each game has a protagonist – a burly male hero – with a few trusted allies that faces down an black-hearted maniac and his band of unforgivable, faceless thugs.
Buddy Revel, the seemingly unstoppable juggernaut of a bully in Three O’Clock High (1987), isn’t actually a bully. Bullying is a tool used to establish or enforce social dominance. And Buddy isn’t the slightest bit interested in the social dynamic at Weaver High School. As he clearly states to Jerry Mitchell (Casey Siemaszko) when the hapless young journalist attempts to engage him while they stand in front of a row of urinals, Buddy doesn’t want anybody to know anything about him. The enigmatic and elusive science fiction writer John Steakley wrote “Bullies don’t want to fight you. They don’t want to fight at all. They just want to beat you up.” And the exact opposite is true of Buddy Revel. He has countless chances to beat Jerry up. But he’s not interested in beating Jerry up. All he wants to do is fight him.
The first time I realized I was driving by one of the locations used in The Big Lebowski (1998)- 
