Slowly Going Bald

I'm going to be traveling to New York City in June. I've never been there before, which is the whole reason I'm going there with a couple of friends; we just picked a city where we knew we could have a good time.

Anyway, we'll only be there for a few days, but I'm looking for suggestions. If you know of any good bars, breweries, billiard joints, bookstores, bowling alleys, burger joints, burlesques, or even places that don't start with the letter B, I want to hear about them. Our hotel is on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, but for the right adventure, we'll go most anywhere.

Over at his blog, John linked to another blog whose author is collecting people's lists of their top 10 country artists. This is almost an impossible challenge; the fun (for people like me) will really be in making the lists and then talking about them. John's choices are all great, too, and I can't argue with his selections. I also think he made a good point with his ground rules about genre considerations, though I think he and I have a slightly different placement for the dividing line between pop and country. (Plus he didn't want to include Biggie, which is just biased.) Still, the list is supposed to be favorite country artists in the slightly more traditional sense — someone whose name is typically identified with the genre — so that's the direction I leaned. If anyone's interested in discussing this difference, I'm geekily all for it.

Anyway, the selection process was tough, but here are my top 10 country artists. The race was so close that the ranking is almost arbitrary:

1. Old 97's
2. Gram Parsons
3. The Jayhawks
4. Steve Earle
5. Johnny Cash
6. Emmylou Harris
7. Townes Van Zandt
8. Lyle Lovett
9. Willie Nelson
10. Dixie Chicks

To celebrate, here's Steve Earle doing "Fort Worth Blues":

• Seriously, a horde of helpful monkeys swinging with Shia LaBeouf through the jungle? The fact that Shia LaBeouf swung from vine to fine in the first place?

• Indy survived a nuclear blast by hiding inside a fridge, and was completely fine after that? And why was there a jokey reaction shot to a prairie dog?

• Marion Ravenwood comes back and gets zero time to be a character? I don't know what's worse, squandering Karen Allen or ruining the memory of the relationship Marion built with Indy in Raiders of the Lost Ark. They had so much time in that movie to spend together on screen, building chemistry, but in the new film she just shows up and they trade some really awful zingers that don't at all sound like them, and then they're back in love.

• I get that Indy doesn't like snakes, but he's not terrified of them. At the beginning of Raiders, when his pilot buddy flies him out of danger, he only freaks out for a minute at the snake coiled at his feet before his terror just turns to anger at having the snake there in the first place. Even in the chamber holding the Ark, he puts up with the snakes well enough to set them on fire and rescue Marion. All that to say: Having him act like a baby and refuse to grab hold of a snake that he can use to get out of a sandpit seemed weak, and having him insist that Marion and Mutt refer to the snake as a rope was just lamentable.

• Way too much dependence on CGI. Special effects are tools to tell a story; form cannot drive function. The whole film felt rubbery and unmoving and cold because of the huge emphasis on greater and greater scenes of CGI effects. (And let's not forget the prairie dogs and monkeys.)

• Aliens? Really? When Irina tells Indy that the skull was not made by human hands, he responds with a skeptical, "Come on." That's exactly how I felt. Indiana Jones has always existed in a heightened, pulpy universe as a hero questing after man-made objects imbued with supernatural gifts. (The reason Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade felt so much better than Temple of Doom is because the story returned to the format of Indy fighting the Nazis for control of a Christian historical artifact.) But these religious objects, whether the Ark of the Covenant or the ugly stones from that Indian village, were always tangible, believable things. Having the crystal skulls belong to aliens does away with all that, and what's worse, it turns the film from an adventure into a (really) bad sci-fi rip-off. The plot was just flat-out ludicrous.

Man, what a howling disappointment.

Click here for the review.

Son of Rambow

"Battlestar Galactica," Season Four
[Willamette Week]

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Today's clips are for a pair of songs I remember from childhood.

"Seven Year Ache," Rosanne Cash:

"Many a Long and Lonesome Highway," Rodney Crowell:

[What can I say, I'm on a religion kick today.]

I read Wild at Heart in college. Everyone did, or at least, a lot of the guys did. I could spend weeks discussing abstract principles and specific examples of how memes tend to crop up and sweep through Southern evangelical circles like fire. It's the same way fashion and music trends appear seemingly out of nowhere and consume high schoolers or twentysomethings or any given age group, only the church patterns carry more weight because there's an inherent and unspoken perception that the thing you're participating in isn't just new or popular but also Important and Meaningful and Connected to the Fate of Your Immortal Soul. It's why everyone my age from that background still knows the words to "Flood"; sometimes, these things just happen. In college, what happened was John Eldredge's Wild at Heart.

It wasn't just Eldredge's writing style that put me off, or the fact that the book seemed to have been hastily cobbled together and not edited at all. I like to think I have a healthy respect for accuracy and language, and reading about "Jerry McGuire" didn't exactly inspire confidence, since if the author couldn't bother to fact-check his pop culture references, what assurance did I have that he wasn't on theologically shaky ground as well? But my biggest problem with the book was the manner of the responsibility it seemed to be calling me to, and the fact that years of not inconsiderable education and thought, not to mention a set of loving and God-fearing parents, hadn't taught me what Eldredge and others in the burgeoning masculinity movement said was my real purpose. Apparently, while I'd been learning and trying to be a good person, I was supposed to be preparing myself for some kind of epic battle for the heart of a woman and possibly the fate of all mankind.

The Christian camps I attended in the summers of my youth had never skimped on the Braveheart parallels, but while they used Mel Gibson's movie mainly as a terrifying example of sacrifice for a cause, it wasn't until the masculinity movement kicked off that writers and preachers began to see a whole new side of William Wallace for modern Christian men to mimic. Eldredge wrote that most Christian men believe God wants them to be "nice guys," and there's apparently an inherent failure in this that I never really saw. Most of Jesus' teachings and the epistles of the New Testament did seem to be about being, you know, nice.

But Eldredge is just a misguided man of passion next to Marc Driscoll, who through the Mars Hill Church in Seattle is apparently doing his damnedest to ruin my religion. Driscoll has said that the modern church has turned out "a bunch of nice, soft, tender, chickified church boys." And just in case you're wondering if Driscoll is the kind of person who uses words like "dudes" and "chicks" ironically, he isn't: "Sixty percent of Christians are chicks, and the forty percent that are dudes are still sort of chicks." Driscoll's other quotes are equally enlightening: "Jesus was not a long-haired, effeminate-looking dude," but a man with "big biceps." Real men are "dudes: heterosexual, win-a-fight, punch-you-in-the-nose dudes."

There's also a terrifying group called GodMen, all one word. The most worrisome part of this noxious promotional video is the moment at around 2:40 when one of the men in the crowd at the gathering said that he's preparing to be a pastor and as such has thought he needed to be more meek and humble, but he's now had a change of heart. That's right: This man who had been contemplating entering the ministry and pursuing Jesusian qualities that are actually cited in the Beatitudes has decided not to do that because he's been misled by a part of the masculinity movement.

There are two main problems with this whole thing, namely, that the movement creates a false definition for masculinity and then says that it must be pursued. But this is such a dangerous, damning road to walk. It's a divisive tactic born of branding and the desire to sell books, and to mistake the movement's sectarian call for segregation among believers damages the men at its center and would seem to ignore the God they claim to follow. Yet it's also easy to see why the movement has such a foothold in the souls of men my age: It promises power and revolution, and talks about swords and being valiant. We are a generation scattered further afield than our parents; we search for answers and yearn for something like guidance, but this isn't it. This is wrong, and mean, and small-minded, and it plays into an idea of stereotypical maleness that has nothing to do with manhood.

A few weeks ago, I was hanging out with some old friends from college and discussing our common experiences, including a week-long course in human sexuality that a few of us had taken. Taking a class like that at a school like mine basically meant you were in for four straight days of therapy, since most of us were repressed white kids from middle- to upper-middle-class churches in the South. You've met a million of us. One of the things we got to talking about was the quasi-spiritual language employed by some of our classmates in the context of the course as an excuse to sound educated or advanced or just generally better than everyone else. Below, an excerpt of the beer-fueled rant into which I heartily threw myself:

"He said he was 'convicted' that masturbation was a sin. Well, I was 'convicted' that I was a college student and that it's a great stress reliever. Plus I never know what anyone means when they say they were 'convicted' about it. I get this image of him rubbing one out while holding a Bible, his tears falling down onto the thin pages, crying out, 'I'm doing it wrong! I'm doing it wrong!'"

• I spent a recent weekend embracing revertigo. It's easy to consider the affliction purely in negative terms, given that it involves becoming the self that you used to be, which is contrary to everything we tell ourselves about growth and maturation and the other labels we give to getting boring. But a friend of mine helped me realize that the term is free of judgment and only becomes positive or negative within a given context. "I feel like I'm the best version of myself around these people," he said to me, speaking of the friends in our presence, and I knew what he meant.

• We've all of us been scarred by the world, but there's nothing like spending time with people who went to the same private university you did and who received the same level of education and occasionally downright terrible spiritual and career guidance to make you realize how much you have in common, and how it's something a broader swath of humanity can never understand. We joke about the bad classes, we lament the horrible air of micromanagement that seeped into the administration's efforts to guide the faith of the student body, and we rail against the occasional instructors who told us that, for whatever reason, we're not cut out to achieve our dreams.

• I remember being 20 years old and having a ranking professor in the political science department tell me that, because of my faith, I would never make it as a film critic on the New York Times level. I didn't know if he meant that a good Christian would choose to avoid the varied roster of films that are required viewing for most critics, or if trying to make it in such a mainstream publication would be to abandon my faith; he probably meant all that and more, but I'll never know. He told me this in the context of an interview I had to endure before I could participate in a film studies program my junior year, and though at 20 I was pretty dumb, I wasn't stupid enough to contradict the man in that setting. I simply nodded and said I knew he was right and understood his point, but inside I knew that I was done with that place and every fucked up and misguided thing about its mentality. In a weird way, the school often acted as a refining fire, burning off the parts of my faith that mirrored the worst parts of the university and leaving me with something struggling and different and entirely better for me.

• And oh, the conversations you can have with these people, these wounded and wandering people who share so much of your past that every word carries with it the subtext of what it means to grow up in these worlds and to get beyond them. I sat in a bar the other night with four other men my age as we did our best to map out the problems facing the faithful few of our generation and what it means to finally let go of the last shred of the familiar in order to embrace the necessary.

• Because the biggest problem facing my alma mater is the misconception that there's something special about the school or the place, when it's the people you can meet there. It's an understandable problem, but still a stupid one reflective of a mindset that building improvements will make a church better. And you can always tell who from the school gets it and who doesn't. Every year at homecoming, another senior citizen would address the daily convocation and say that of all the things they liked about our university, the chapel service is what they missed the most. And when I hear that, I always think: You didn't have any friends here, or anyway, not like mine, not like the ones you could have had.

Including my note at the end about the upcoming schedule for "Lost," this recap came in around 4,900 words. I can't tell whether to be proud I went so long or disappointed I didn't hit the 5K mark.

Click here for the recap.

Click here for the review.

On a related note, I completely understand and accept that filmic adaptations of books will never tell the whole story; they can only be as canonical as possible. Still, watching Caspian and Susan flirt was a bit disappointing, as was their kiss at the end, since Caspian doesn't love Susan but instead winds up marrying the daughter of Ramandu the retired star, whom he meets while journeying through and past the Lone Islands. It's kind of the whole reason he turns back from the eastern end of the world. But whatever.

On an unrelated note, I have now written more than 150 film reviews for Pajiba, and that's not even counting Guides or essays on Pajiba Blockbusters or Underappreciated Gems.

[This is a much longer and fundamentally different version of a column running today in the Willamette Week. Also, you should know that this version was written, obviously, shortly after the first episode of the season of "Battlestar Galactica," and by now the wildly disappointing third episode has already aired and we've already moved well past that to seeing Tyrol shave his head and Gaeta get his leg blown apart. But them's the breaks with publishing columns in a weekly paper.]

• "Battlestar Galactica" has always existed in a state of permanent change. A glance at what's transpired over the first three seasons is almost jaw-dropping for the amount of pure plot that the series has packed into about 50 episodes. The series is ostensibly about the remnants of the human race on the run from the cyborgs that annihilated their home worlds and everyone on them, but it's really about the price of humanity and what it means to live with your mistakes, which is why instead of spending an entire season on potentially lengthy arcs — the settlement on New Caprica, or the whole damn civil war when President Roslin and Apollo go galloping off to Kobol and drive a wedge between the military and the government that threatened to derail everything — the series often finds a way to wrap these stories in a handful of episodes while (a) preserving their emotional ramifications and (b) getting everything close enough to normal so that the cycle of change and reconciliation can start all over again.

• The fourth-season premiere, "He That Believeth In Me," in true series fashion, managed to live up to those expectations of growth/challenge even as it managed to broaden the larger story's impact, which is no small thing to do this far into a show, especially since this season will be the last. The episode continued to explore the religious and moral and societal problems facing a people whose numbers are just small enough — 39,000 and change — that they could conceivably implode under the weight of trying to remain upright. Everything on the series has always been about shades of gray, and about doing the best you can in compromising situations, and searching for hope and victory amid despair and chaos.

• For instance, the fact that four of the "final five" Cylon are members of the Galactica crew (except for Tory, who was already pretty expendable and whose confirmation as a Cylon is impactful in that she's the aide to President Roslin but otherwise unimportant because she's a pretty fringe and unlikable character) is amazing on so many levels that it can only be called perfect. Col. Tigh, who's always been the most adamant anti-Cylon voice and who killed his own wife because she was aiding and abetting the robotic alien force of whose ranks he is now a horrified member; Sam Anders, who was stranded on Caprica and led a guerilla squad against the Cylons until Starbuck returned to rescue him; and of course Chief Tyrol, who's gone through this whole thing before when he and Boomer were together only to find out she was a Cylon. The entire concept of betrayal and denial doubles back on itself over and over.

• Which is part of the point: The Cylons were created by man and then rebelled. They have always been mankind's greatest mistake, the decision that led to catastrophe, and in essence the series has been about the survivors running from the physical versions of their own screwed-up lives, of the wrong choices they can never stop making. But the identity of some of the final Cylon models brings that home even more, and it raises a series of killer questions: What does it mean to be human? How much control do I/we have over my/our actions? What is it about someone that makes us love them, and how much of whatever that is is beyond our ability to regulate as far as our feelings are concerned? At what point does the person we love stop being that person we love? Yes, the Cylons wiped out most of humanity; that's gonna make for some bad blood. But what does it mean when we become them, and not in the abstract way where we both resort to similar methods of warfare, but actually physically are our enemies?

• And man, there's no other show on television regularly grappling with tough theology. Baltar's Jesusian appearance and ascendance to cult-like leader were one thing, but the plot involving the sick boy and his anguished mother were deeply religious. When the mother asked Baltar why the one true God didn't want her son to live, she wasn't doing it in that facetious manner of unearned weariness that's commonplace on TV drama; she actually wanted to know why this was happening. She believed; she needed help in her unbelief. And of course Baltar's prayer over the sick boy one night, angrily asking God why a boy who hadn't been alive long enough to sin against his creator was being made to suffer while Baltar himself walked as always free. Baltar's encounter later with Six was another moment of reckoning, as Baltar was held at knife-point and pierced not for the boy's transgressions but for his own lack of moral fortitude. And yet Six — if you act on or at least play along with the assumption that the Cylons can somehow influence Baltar's life and surroundings — granted him a reprieve from death and called his bluff. Now Baltar will have to confront his own feelings about his willingness to be sacrificed, and whether they're real, and what it would mean to act on them.

• Tying religion into the whole human-Cylon issue: Starbuck's apparent resurrection is the first time the characters have to deal with something truly fantastical. Everything else that's happened to them has a vague sense of rationality underpinning it; hell, even the magical jaunt to Earth in the caves of Kobol seems normal compared with this. The Cylons are robots; Vipers run on fuel; water is wet; etc. Everything in the "Battlestar Galactica" universe is usually pretty understandable, but this time, the characters can't avoid the fact that the only thing guiding them for now is their faith. Apollo believes Starbuck is who she says she is, and that she's been to Earth and back; others aren't so sure. And Starbuck is broken by her inability to convince her friends of her humanity, something she's always taken for granted and never thought she'd have to verify. All she can do is tell them who she is; it's up to them to believe her. That's why the script did its best to quietly underscore her human nature: Aside from Adama's (warning) shout of "Starbuck" upon her return, she was almost exclusively referred to as Kara throughout the episode.

• Which is the whole issue. The Cylons are now among the crew of the Galactica, fully aware of what they are and unable to know what will happen to them next. The characters used to ask themselves, Will we survive? But for those coming to grips with their true nature, they face an even tougher question: Do we want to?

I'm looking for a good used book store. I had my pick of them in major Texas cities, but I'm having a tougher time finding them out here, and when I do come across one it's usually overpriced and really just there to sell antique coffee table books that Westsiders buy so they can beat off over them and think about how cool they are.

So I need help. I'm looking for places to buy used books. It doesn't matter how big the store is, I just want it to be a good one. I used to live in Glendale, and remember going to a couple places down on either Central or Brand (it's been a few years). I also try and swing by the Iliad when I can, though its Cahuenga store can't live up to its old Vineland digs. Also, I live in Sherman Oaks, so it'd be nice to hear of some places in my corner of the Valley or in Hollywood/West Hollywood, since that's where I work, but I'm willing to make a longer journey if the place is worth it.

OK. Help me out.

I discovered this last night and got an unapologetically geeky rush (click the image for a larger view):

The folks over at Watch "Veronica Mars" used a blurb from my obit of the show as a pull quote at the top of their home page. Thanks to whoever did that, and you should know I'm doing a piece about the show next month over at Pajiba as part of the ongoing guide we're calling "The Best 15 Seasons of the Past 20 Years."

The Sis, after a protracted silence brought on by disdain for her job and a newfound penchant for margaritas, has decided to return to the blogging world. This is good news for all of us. Why? An example:

"Dewey is always dirty and sweaty, his butt crack is always showing, and I can always tell when he's been in a room based on its odor. But at least he's always polite."

That's right.

Her blog is here.

Also, I would probably have failed Richard's test. I would've grabbed the knife, the comic book, and the baseball glove.

Click here for the recap.

Click here for the review.

After the movie, I could not get this song out of my head:

My buddy Collins recently burned me an album he downloaded (in a probably less than legal manner) of a Counting Crows concert recorded during their first tour, still a couple months away from the release of August and Everything After. It's a fun performance with surprisingly good sound quality, and the set list is notable for the fact that it doesn't include "Mr. Jones" but does feature a cover of Van Morrison's "Caravan" as well as solid renditions of "Marjorie" and "Open All Night," the latter of which has yet to see official release.

But what strikes me most is how the songs from August and Everything take on a new life when hearing them across the span of 15 years. Frontman Adam Duritz is still riffing on his own melodies so much that you sympathize with the bandmates tasked with singing harmony, but he's also more in control than he would be on later live outings, probably because he wanted to give the audience as good an idea as possible of what the songs would actually sound like when the album came out. As such, he's more lyrically clear than you'd expect to hear on a live recording, and I find myself only now learning a few snatches of lines I thought I learned when I was in high school.

The best example of this is on "Time and Time Again," a plaintive song that immediately follows "Anna Begins" on the studio album, the one-two punch of which is guaranteed to unmake you. It's been years since I looked at the liner notes to read the lyrics, and over that time my brain has filled in gaps caused by Duritz's occasionally hectic phrasing. For this reason, whenever I heard the chorus of "Time and Time Again," I always thought he was singing, "Time and time again / I can't believe myself / and I can't believe nobody else," compressing the "believe" into something like "b'lieve" in his emotional frenzy. And that word works; it gives the song an air of disillusionment and goes nicely with the sense of loss and possible betrayal seen in the rest of the lyrics. (The guy definitely has a theme.) But that's not at all right. He's actually singing, "Time and time again / I can't please myself / And I can't please nobody else." And this makes the song whole worlds sadder. He's no longer singing about losing someone and feeling adrift; he's taking the burden on himself, realizing with a sinking feeling that he's partly or completely to blame for what's happened. He can't make himself happy, or anyone else, but he still howls, "When are you coming home, sweet angel?" I thought I knew the song, and I almost did. But this one's better.

The Lonesome Cowboys

Demons of Consequence

Pinprick Sainthood

Bob Downey and the Iron Men

The Lapsed Protestants

Pony Boy and the Outsiders

The Real Hatfields

• Blame It on Gravity, the latest Old 97's album, is more than just another fantastic record: It's an energetic, emotionally mature fusion of everything they've ever done, from country to rock to pop, a gorgeous tapestry held together by the thread of frontman Rhett Miller's yearning lyrics.

• The 97's have always been a country band at heart, and that's what they remain, but they've also never been content to be "just" a country band, which is why they've so successfully spread their reach into rock and pop. Their debut, 1994's Hitchhike to Rhome, was a raw, deeply country affair, evidenced by everything from the heartbroken shuffle of "Dancing With Tears" to the cover of Merle Haggard's "Mama Tried" and the rendition of Cindy Walker's "Miss Molly." But 1997's Too Far to Care was a crunchy country-rock record, bookended by "Timebomb" and "Four Leaf Clover." The band moved on to poppier sounds with Fight Songs (1999) and Satellite Rides (2001), letting the honky-tonk of "Crash on the Barrelhead" butt against the sunnier "Nineteen," or the bar blast of "Am I Too Late" ride comfortably next to the pop brilliance of "Rollerskate Skinny."

• All of which is to say that the 97's have always had that Texas country-rock sound as the core on which they build their pop and rock; it's the hub in the center of their wheel.

• But 2004's Drag It Up was a change in the band's sound, or more accurately, a change in the way they balanced their country and pop loyalties. Lead guitarist Ken Bethea — who contributed lead vocals for the first time on that album's "Coahuila" — said on the band's site that Too Far to Care was "made for big cars and air guitars," while Drag It Up was "better served by thinking and driving on Sunday afternoons in the middle of nowhere." And listening to the album, you get the feel that's something the band did a lot of when they were cooking it up. It wasn't that they decided to move away from Texas country or snappy pop; they simply said, "Why not do both?" The result was a blending of their previous sounds, something at once rawer and more advanced, opening with the more (for them) traditional beat of "Won't Be Home" but sliding through the minor howl of "Smokers" and the lonesome two-step of "Blinding Sheets of Rain" on its way to the ballad "Adelaide" and the poignant "No Mother." It was as if the band was saying: We will continue to do what we've always done, but we're going to do it differently.

• That's what makes Blame It on Gravity so wonderful. It's an energetic blend of the band's dual sounds, and the twin hearts of country and pop beat through every song. The ballad "Color of a Lonely Heart is Blue" has the kind of teardrops-in-the-sawdust vibe the band has been putting out since its early days, while "Here's to the Halcyon" is a rollicking take on the up-tempo boom-chicka-boom that Old 97's do like no one else. But there's also "This Beautiful Thing" and "Ride," poppier rock numbers that would be at home on Satellite Rides or one of frontman Rhett Miller's solo efforts. There's even "She Loves the Sunset," a tropical tune so startlingly different for the band but so perfectly done — the grace note Miller pops into the line "The sky is falling / but I fell long ago" gets me every time — that it's not a wayward experiment but an example of the genre-pushing fun the band likes to have.

• Even more, Blame It on Gravity is the most geographically expansive record the band's ever made. Miller's lyrics have always expressed a kind of heartbroken wanderlust, whether it's being stranded in New York while your girl is back home ("Niteclub," "Broadway") or journeying into the unknown West ("Streets of Where I'm From," "W. Tx. Teardrops"). But the new album name-checks everything from the Tappan Zee to a host of Los Angeles landmarks. In fact, it's L.A. that receives the most detailed treatment. On "Ride," Miller sings, "There is a white hot sun and a big blue sky / from the 101 to the 405." It's as if the lyrics are finally catching up to the sonic displacement that happens when the band straddles the line between Texas country and pop that seems to come right out of the SoCal sunshine.

• The final track, "The One," is a kind of summation of everything the band has worked through. It's a peppy number in which Miller says he and the other guys are going to knock off a bank and drive off into the sunset, and the lyrics call out the rest of the band by name. When they finally take the money and run, Miller sings, "What's the rush, let's take the 1." Given the other references to Los Angeles highways, as well as the article in front of the highway number, it's likely that Miller's referring to the PCH, and the song's grinning demeanor and attitude of "Let's just amble up the highway" — not to mention Miller's ease about traffic congestion — would certainly fit the road. But when I hear the song, I can't help but think that Miller's also talking about Mopac. Instead of (literally) choosing one route or the other, the band has it both ways, marrying their influences and setting out on a path at once familiar and uncharted.

There haven't been any posts since the last recap because life and the real world have been all kinds of hellishly busy. Plus this one was written in a state of defiant fatigue, if that makes any sense. Anyway:

Click here for the recap.