ARCHIVE REVIVAL - RETRIBUTION

Archive Revival is a new thing I'm trying this year. Every Friday, I'm going to pull out an old entry and repost it. It's basically because Friday is a pretty slow Internet day. Everyone either takes the day off, takes a half day or has to make up for all the time they wasted the other four days of the week. Few people actually have time to browse the Internet and learn things that they never knew they wanted to know.

Also, I didn't have anything new to post, but wanted to keep some pseudo-fresh content coming in (this week has been slow for no real reason).

So here it is! The music video my old/kind-of-current band Cherem made back in 2007. The original post is below.

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I had totally forgotten about this video until earlier tonight, because I think I only saw it once. I have a DVD copy and all the raw footage, but never actually sat down and watched what Martin and his co-producers put together.

Let me tell you a little bit about it.

I was in a band called Cherem for about seven years, from late 2000 until I quit in the fall of 2007. We made two albums a couple compilations and toured a fair amount. It was a lot of fun but a lot of work. Martin used to live in Salt Lake City and moved to LA to go to film school. He heard we were coming through town on tour and told us he wanted to make a music video as a project for one of his classes. He told us that it wouldn't cost us anything and that all we had to do was show up. We gave ourselves a day off in the middle of a quick week-long tour through California and met up with him after we played at Chain Reaction in Anaheim.

On a side note, I have an entire separate blog dedicated to Cherem/band tour stories that I've updated exactly once this year. The problem is that I'm trying to go in chronological order, but haven't had time to fill in the blank spots. I have a word document with about 45,000 words in it and a lot of it is the later shows that I wrote about while gone instead of retroactively. My New Year's Resolution (I just decided this, and it may have been my resolution for 2010 also, but that's in the past) is to get a good chunk of that updated and finished. I don't think anyone else really cares, but it'll be fun for me to look back over years down the road.

Now, back on track, here's a few things I remember about the day we shot this video.

- I remember saying that I didn't want this to look like every other hardcore video, but understood that wasn't entirely possible given their budget (which was $0 aside from the equipment rental). Unfortunately, we ended up with a pretty basic music video and the exact kind I didn't want. Can't complain too much though. It was fun to do and I'm stoked they did it for us.

- For a music video to work, the track needs to be played loud enough for everyone to mimic what was going on while still playing their hardest. This didn't quite work because they had forgotten to bring something to play the song through. One of the guys had to drive his car on to the soundstage and play his stereo at full volume, which still didn't work because Clint's drums were so loud.

- Everything looks stiff in a video, you have to over exaggerate every little thing as much as possible before it even looks remotely real. And that's hard to do when you're trying to play along to a track that you can't really hear. Also, we're all terrible actors.

- The soundstage was in a parking garage off either Sunset or Hollywood Boulevard and since we had to start at 8am, it was still a little cold. I have poor circulation anyway, so I kept my hoodie on while we played the song probably 10 times for them to film it from different angles and get close ups of each of us. At about 10:30, it started getting really hot, but we'd already filmed about three runs through the song, so I was fucked. If I took the hoodie off, the whole thing would just look strange, because the takes wouldn't match up. By the time we broke for lunch I was dying.

- We didn't really have a bass player at that time. We'd had a fill-in for the two shows, but he was from Redlands and went home after we played the Anaheim show. Luckily, our friend DP was in town staying with his girlfriend. We made him come with us and stand in as our bass player. Also luckily, they didn't use much of the live footage from the show in Salt Lake because we had someone else playing at that point and that didn't line up either.

All in all, it was a fun thing to do and another experience I can break out at boring family dinner parties where I inevitably end up telling stories to entertain people. Which happens quite often.

ARCHIVE REVIVAL - CALIFORNIA DREAMIN'

I used to make videos all the time. Whenever we'd take a trip somewhere, I always made sure to bring my camera so I could make quick little Internet videos. I stopped when my camera shit the bed and haven't really done it since—even though I now have a much nicer camera and an iPhone that takes pretty high quality videos.

I went back through my YouTube channel to look at a few of them and this is one that pops out—mostly because of how fat Casey was. Check the Top 5 video from this year or even from 2010 to see the difference. It's crazy.

Still. This was fun to do. I need to do it more.

ARCHIVE REVIVAL - PERU

We took this trip in May of 2010. I still have a ton of video footage from it that I haven't done anything with. Originally, Casey came up with the idea—somewhat of an outlandish one, as is his M.O.—that we'd make a reality show out of our trip. We'd then sell that to someone at a network and then they'd pay for us to take more trips and go on more adventures. An awesome idea, but highly unlikely. I had a crappy video camera that I was taking and Casey went out and bought a really nice one to take along.

I didn't think we actually had a shot at a show, but it was going to be fun to try. Casey asked me why I was filming some static backgrounds at one point and I told him it was for cover footage—the footage that you add in transitions and during credits and the like. I'd get a few seconds here and there of the mountains or the streets to add in later.

As we were walking through the streets one day, I heard Brook say "What the fuck are you doing?" and Casey responded, "Cover footage!"

I looked over and he was bent over filming water running through the gutter. And he kept filming. There's about a minute of footage of water running through a gutter. You can't tell where it is. It might as well have been in my front yard. Brook and I looked at each other, laughed and kept walking. The next day, Casey was getting more cover footage, only this time he was filming through the open front door of a someone's home while they watched TV. He was filming the family watching TV. Surprisingly, they thought that was weird and shut the door on him.

When we got home, I uploaded all the footage on my parents computer because my laptop didn't have enough space. It's still there.

I keep telling myself that I'll get to it eventually, but who knows. My plan was to get a new desktop computer, install Final Cut Pro and teach myself to use it by practicing on the Peru footage.

To tide us over, I put together this trailer. It's still the only thing that I've done with it.

I haven't gotten a new desktop yet, though. Maybe one day. I need a job first. Blogging at trevorhale.com doesn't pay too many bills.

WOLVES & MARTYRS - THE ORIGIN OF VALENTINE'S DAY

*Ed. Note -- I post this every Valentine's Day because I had fun writing it and think it's kind of fun to read. Don't get upset about this.*

I miss the days when I had to come up with an awesome Valentine's Day box for school. I was pretty good at it and it was fun. Now it's just a day where I read girls complaining about it on the Internet.

But where did it come from? How did it start?

Allow me.

If you want to get all comic book-y, we can call this kind of a "Year One" type story.

In 3rd or 4th century BC, The Parentalia and Feralia Festivals of Purification were celebrated from February 13-18 to coincide with the Fertility Festival. The latter was a ritual not unlike the "Casual Encounters" section of CraigsList. All of the willing females would enter their names into a box and one by one, eligible men would step up for their turn. With a name in hand, the two would go off and what happened next was reffered to as a "rite of passage." You can use your imagination for what that entails.

Before that began however, there was the LUPERCALIA (from the Latin lupus, meaning "wolf"). During this day, priests—known as Luperci—from two colleges (Quintillii and Fabii) would meet at the Cave of Lupercal in the Palatine Hill, where a she-wolf was said to have nursed Romulus and Remus, the twin founders of Rome. There, Vestal Virgins would offer holy salt cakes and the priests would sacrifice a dog and a goat, smearing the animal blood onto the foreheads of youths of noble birth. Clad only in a goatskin thong, those same youths would later lead a band of revelers known as the luperci in the performance of such antics as whipping fields of crops and bystanders with a goatskin strip (known as the februa). Women gently lashed in such a fashion were thought to become fertile—even those known to be barren. The act of such lashings or whippings was known as februatio. Both this word and the word februa come from the Latin meaning "to purify." The naming of the month, February, is believed to have originated from these meanings.

Basically, February means "to purify by beating with a goatskin strip."

No flowers, chocolate or candy hearts yet.

When Christianity was eventually formed, it was attempted to replace the rituals with something a little bit more uplifting. Pope Gelasius outlawed the Lupercian Festival, but kept the name drawing part—just slightly tweaked. Instead of available women, the names of Saints were written on the papers and it was believed that the recipient (boys and girls participated in the drawing) would emulate the life of whichever Saint was chosen. This new system, while much more noble, was a lot less fun. Eventually, it was abandoned and the old "rite of passage" returned.

Those are the ones you don't hear too much about. This one however, is the most widely known part of the origin.

In Rome, 270 AD, Claudius II passed an edict that abolished marriage. He felt that married men made poor soldiers because they were loath to leave their loves ones for battle. The emperor craved a strong army far more than he cared about popularity and banned the act of marriage all together.

Valentine, a bishop of Interamna, disagreed with the Emperor and invited young lovers to come to him in secret to be joined in the sacrament of matrimony. Claudius soon learned of this "friend of lovers" and had the bishop brought to the palace. The Emperor, impressed with the young priest's dignity and conviction, attempted to convert him to the Roman gods to save him from otherwise certain execution. Valentine refused to renounce Christianity and imprudently attempted to convert the Emperor. It didn't work and he was sentenced to death. While Valentine was in prison awaiting execution, he fell in love with the blind daughter of the jailer, Asterius. Through his unswerving faith, he miraculously restored her sight—which bothers me because I still have to basically wait out a god damn cold. He signed a farewell message to her "From Your Valentine."

Soon after he left the note, actually on February 14th (or so history claims), Valentine was clubbed, stoned and then beheaded.

To recap, in case you got bored: Valentine's Day is essentially the celebration of torture, blood, sacrifice, random sex, wolves and martyrs.

I want a card with that on it.

(*Note - I wrote this after reading a few different histories relating to Valentine's Day on the Internet. Originally I circulated it vie LiveJournal, then MySpace. I put it together after reading something Warren Ellis posted way back in the day, so this is all his fault. Also, it's entirely possible that none of this is true or historically accurate at all. But it's far more entertaining.)

ARCHIVE REVIVAL - "BUCKET OF DEATH (REDUX)"

Another gem from the archives that was originally posted on 3/8/11. This is the short version that only shows the lighting and destruction of the Bucket of Death. If you want to see how many fireworks and how much gasoline we actually stuffed into that cooler and a somewhat boring history of the Bucket of Death, check out the long version. I won't be offended if you just watch this one though.

We opted out of doing another one of these this year because, you know, the entire state of Utah is on fire and we didn't want to be part of the problem. Then it rained all day on July 5. Oh well, there's always the 24th.

ARCHIVE REVIVAL - "THE GANG HAS THE BEST IDEA EVER"

I was searching the archive out of boredom this morning and realized that there are a lot of pretty awesome things stored back there. So I decided that a new feature on here would be called "Archive Revival" and I'd randomly roll out old things that I feel deserve to be reposted every once in a while. There will be no rhyme or reason as to what gets posted or how often this feature will occur. It'll basically be whenever I find something that I want more people to see or see again. I can do that. It's my website.

First up is this video I made for what might have been one of the best, most entertaining nights my friends and I have had in a long, long time. It was originally posted on 2/2/11.

"The Gang Has The Best Idea Ever"

Enjoy.