THEY'RE REALLY DOING IT

Well that escalated quickly.

Back in January (which is like 6 posts ago, I know, and I'm sorry. I've been busy) I wrote about the Satanic Temple and their plans to erect a giant Baphomet statue in front of the Oklahoma state capitol. The reasoning is that since Oklahoma is kind of violating that whole "separation of church and state" thing by having a 10 Commandments monument, the other side of the coin should be represented as well.

The Satanic Temple launched an Indie GoGo fund to raise money, and hit their goal fairly easily. I pretty much assumed that would be the last we heard of it, but that's thankfully not the case and they've been hard at work actually making the damn thing.

It turns out that Oklahoma state representative Mike Ritze paid for the 10 Commandments statue with his own money and donated it to the state house. Since it was a gift, it was deemed okay to place it on state grounds. Following that explanation, the Satanic Temple has submitted the proper forms and applications and is waiting to hear back. All the while, they've hired a New York-based artist trained in classic sculptures to start making a bust that they'll be able to cast in bronze and place as soon as they get the word.

As noted before, The Church of Satan (probably pissed that they didn't think of it first) had a few issues with the proposed statue, and it looks like some of those issues have been addressed. Vice followed up on the project and got a nice little behind the scenes look at the progress of the 7-foot statue and some great comments from Lucien Greaves—who used to be listed as the leader of the group, but is now just listed as a spokesman. I could probably find out one way or the other, but I've got other things to get back to.

Most notably, Greaves spoke about what might happen to the statue once it's placed. There are bound to be a lot of unhappy people in Oklahoma if the statue is put up and vandalism is highly likely. Greaves said he "wouldn’t expect these outraged and nearly insensible reactionaries to actually know how to assault a bronze monument without severely hurting themselves in the process."

Still, they're not taking any chances and instead building a mold so that if one is damaged, they can just pop out another. "Depending on our insurance policy, we may be able to cast two from the destruction of one, expediting our arrival to the next battleground."

Oklahoma's been staging some great battles in newspaper headlines and inside execution chambers this week, so I'm sure shedding blood on the steps of their statehouse over a statue wouldn't be outside their wheelhouse.

So yeah, the Satanic Temple isn't fucking around here. You should head over to Vice to read their whole piece. I lifted a couple of quotes and these photos from them, so the least you can do is actually go check out their article. And you'll probably get lost in their archives like I do every time. It's fun though. They've got good stuff.

GREATEST UNSCRIPTED SCENES

The hardest part about being a screenwriter is probably having your stuff re-written all the time. Well, that and actually getting a project off the ground. That one is probably harder.

But what sounds good on the page doesn't always translate well to the screen, or it paves the way for a much better exchange. Screenplays are like blueprints in that way. All the information is there and will get you a precise, finished product, but there's always a little room for growth and change. That's especially true if you have talented people in front of the camera and a director that's willing to try things on the fly.

Some of the best scenes in movies have been pieces that weren't in the original script and made up on the fly. ScreenRant has a list of 32 of the greatest unscripted scenes. I dropped a few of my favorites below, but you should really head over and read the entire thing if you have the chance. There are tons more out there, but these are probably the most well known.

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK - Gun vs. Sword
While chasing Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen) after she's been kidnapped, archaeologist and adventurer Dr. Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) runs into a large sword-wielding bad guy dressed all in black. Instead of fighting him in what would surely be a losing whip versus sword battle, Indy simply pulls out his revolver, puts the man down with one shot and moves on. The original script called for a long sword fight but a day earlier Ford got a severe case of food poisoning and didn't have the energy to film the scene as written. After a discussion with director Steven Spielberg, the scene was changed and became an iconic part of Indiana Jones mythos.

GOOD WILL HUNTING - The Farting Wife
In this scene between therapist Sean Maguire (Robin Williams) and math genius Will Hunting (Matt Damon), Williams proves that comedic-minded actors usually give the best ad libbed scenes. The entire story about Maguire's flatulent spouse was made up on the spot by Williams and not a part of the original script.

JAWS - "You're gonna need a bigger boat."
While chumming the waters in an attempt to lure the deadly great white shark within range, Police Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) gets his first look at exactly how massive the killer shark truly is. Stunned, startled and filled with fear he stands up and utters the now famous line to Orca Captain Quint (Robert Shaw) completely off-script, "You're going to need a bigger boat.” Turns out, he was right.

EMPIRE STRIKES BACK - "I know."
As smuggler-turned-hero Han Solo (Harrison Ford) is about to be encased in carbonite, Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) reveals her love for him. The script called for Leia to say "I love you" to which Solo was supposed to respond with "I love you too". Ford decided that Solo wouldn't say something like that and instead, changed the line to simply "I know."

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE - "Singin' in the Rain"
Alex (Malcolm McDowell) breaks into a happy song as he and his "droogs" perform a bit of "ultra-violence" and rape. Reportedly Kubrick filmed this scene several times and wasn't happy with it each time - until he told McDowell to just "do anything he wanted". McDowell decided to belt out "Singing in the Rain" and Kubrick was so pleased with how much better the scene became that he acquired the rights to use the song immediately.

The story goes that after Gene Kelly, who made the song famous, actually saw the movie, he was furious. When Kelly, Kubrick and McDowell wound up at the same party at some point after the movie premiered, Kelly refused to speak to either of them.

TAXI DRIVER - "You talkin' to me?"
When screenwriter Paul Schrader wrote this scene it simply said "Travis talks to himself in the mirror" - there was no specific dialog given. Everything that insomnia-plagued taxi driver Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) says during his faux-conversation was improvised by De Niro on the spot. To this day, whenever someone walks by a mirror they can't help but utter his now famous line "You talking to me?"

10 LESSONS FOR DIRECTORS

Terry Gilliam has made some great films over the years. 12 MONKEYS, FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS and BRAZIL are probably the ones that spring to mind first, but a quick look through his IMDB page and you'll be impressed with his body of work.

He sat down with Filmmaker Magazine a few years ago and gave these 10 lessons for directors. I've kept it bookmarked ever since, and whenever I need a little creative inspiration, I pull it back out.

Since it's still movie week, I'm throwing it up here for you, too.

1. Growing up is for losers. 

As a child, I always drew funny creatures, funny characters. But I think the trick is not to grow up, not to learn to be an adult. And if you can maintain the kind of imagination you all had when you were babies, you would all be wonderful filmmakers. But the world tries to make you grow up, to stop imagining, stop fantasizing, stop playing in your mind. And I’ve worked hard to not let the world educate me.

2. Film school is for fools. 

Live and learn how to make films. I didn’t go to film school. I just watched movies in the cinemas. And probably my greater education was actually making films, so that’s all I would ever say: watch movies, get a camera, make a movie. And if you do it enough times, eventually you start learning how films are made.

3. Auteurism is out. Fil-teurism is in. 

Being an auteur is what we all dreamed of being, as far [back] as the films of the late ‘50s and ‘60s, when the idea of the auteur filmmaker arrived on the planet. And people kept using that term, and they do with my movies because I suppose they are very individual and they give me all the credit, so they say I’m an auteur. And I say no, the reality is I’m a ‘fil-teur.’ I know what I’m trying to make but I have a lot of people who are around me who are my friends and don’t take orders and don’t listen to me, but who have individual ideas. And when they come up with a good idea, if it’s one that fits what I’m trying to do, I use it. So the end film is a collaboration of a lot of people, and I’m the filter who decides what goes in and what stays out.

4. Put your ideas in a drawer. Take them out as needed. 

I do have a drawer in my desk with all the ideas that I have and that I scribbled out. I put them in there and some day I use them. At the beginning of a new film, I often go in that drawer and look at everything I’ve done and see if there are some ideas that might apply to what I’m doing. But things grow, so I just start with a sketch and then refine it. And you do it with other people’s ideas coming in. That’s the fun part.

5. All you’ve really got in life is story. 

I think the important thing is stay true to what you believe. I mean it’s much more important to make your mistakes than somebody else’s mistakes. Like too many other filmmakers have compromised because somebody advised them [that] if you change this, the film will be more successful commercially. And then the film isn’t successful commercially, and these people get so depressed and destroyed because they didn’t ever finish making their film the way they intended it. You’ve got to believe in what you’re doing. And you’ve got to be willing to take the consequences of whatever it is. If you succeed, fantastic. If you fail, you might have to get a proper job.

6. Command the audience with your lens. 

I keep wanting to see more of the world always. When I’m looking through the camera, when we’re setting up a scene, I don’t feel like I’m in the scene. And the wide angle lens, because we see so much, it seems to wrap around me a little bit. I also like the fact that with long lenses, the director controls the audience much more because you show the audience only exactly what you want. Everything else can be out of focus. And I like it to be a little bit more vague so the audience has to be aware of the environment as well as what I want them to look at. I don’t want to really separate the character from the world that it’s in. So the world is as important, and the rooms and everything, as the character sometimes.

7. Nothing can defeat a director who is one with his actors. 

I think the key is to make sure that the cast, especially if they’re big Hollywood superstars, likes the movie. My first film in Hollywood was The Fischer King, and Robin Williams and Jeff Bridges are playing the two leads. And I knew as long as Robin, Jeff and I were united, there was no way the studio could break it, and the film would go out. Same way with Twelve Monkeys. Brad Pitt, Bruce Willis and I were one. In both instances those films went very smoothly.

8. Surround yourself with improvisers. 

I like the actor to surprise me all the time because the problem when you’re making a film, if you've written it and you’re directing it, you've been with it so long, it becomes a bit rigid. It can become mechanical when you’re shooting because you’re just trying to do exactly what you were thinking about for the last year. And what’s wonderful is when the actors come in and they do something that’s completely surprising, and suddenly every day becomes fresh. And it makes me stay awake.

9. Directing is not for the faint-of-heart. Or the sane. 

What I love about Don Quixote is that he keeps misinterpreting the world. He thinks the world is either worse or better or whatever. He gets it wrong every time. But in the end he has these heroic, epic moments, and he seems to be unstoppable. He just goes on and on and on. I think it’s a great example for people, especially in film, in how to get through life, because film can often be incredibly disappointing. What I like about the Don Quixote documentary is that so many other filmmakers when they saw that, they started telling me their stories of equally horrible disasters. It’s a very difficult business. [Lost in La Mancha] should discourage anyone who is not willing to live in a world where disasters like that occur. Don’t make films if you’re not going to be able to deal with things like that. I’m always working on it and one day it will happen. It’s changed me. If you’re going to make a film about Don Quixote, you’ve got to be as mad as Don Quixote, so the nature is helping me go crazy.

10. Be an enlightened despot. 

I expect the actors to really be totally committed to the film and to their character and forget about who they are. Get rid of your vanity. Just be whatever the character demands. I think it’s horrible when I hear stories of actors coming and they bring their own makeup people and their hairdresser. Wait a minute, what’s going on here? The power is in the wrong hands. And if you let the power go to the actor, then you’re not directing the movie. And the actor is not thinking about the entire movie. Only the director is thinking about the entire movie. I don’t ever want to be the guy that is saying, “this is the only way that it can be done.” I don’t want to be a dictator. That’s not interesting. It’s interesting if you can have a dialogue going all the time and trying to all agree to find what is the best way for this film to go.

Bonus Lesson: And whatever you do, don’t ever work with the Weinsteins. 

I suppose it would have been nice to have made more films in the 71 years that I've been hanging around this place. And if I have a regret, there’s only one really, and that was working with the Weinsteins [giggles]. That’s the only one.

"IT'S ALRIGHT, IT'S OKAY, THERE'S SOMETHING TO LIVE FOR! JESUS TOLD ME SO!"

There's been a bunch of great stuff online over the past few weeks and it really got me thinking long and hard about movies again. It got me thinking about what makes a good movie and what it takes to make a great movie.

The Dissolve, a site started by a bunch of great writers, does this thing called "Movie of the Week" where they pick an older movie and write about it for a few days. A couple of weeks ago, they chose AMERICAN MOVIE.

This has always been one of my favorite documentaries for many, many reasons. The story of Mark Borchardt trying to get his great American movie, NORTHWESTERN, off the ground is nothing short of brilliant. Chris Smith spent two years following Borchardt and his friend Mike Schank as they go through their pretty boring lives in Milwaukee. Borchardt is in his mid-30's, lives at home with his parents, works at a funeral home and is pretty much the definition of a failure.

He's trying desperately to change that perception though, and he's convinced that if he can just get a little bit of money, he can finish COVEN, use the profits from that to finance NORTHWESTERN and ride off successfully into the sunset of his life. It doesn't quite work out that way.

AMERICAN MOVIE is really a brilliant documentary about life and about the process of making movies. It's a documentary that makes me think two different things.

1) You have to be pretty talented and incredibly lucky to start and finish a movie.

2) I'm more talented and way luckier than Mark Borchardt, right?

I'm pretty sure the answer to number two is a resounding "yes!" but I can't be sure. For one thing, making movies in the mid-to-late 90's was WAY harder than it is today. Before everything became digital, you had to know a lot about all the different equipment. Shooting on film was expensive and editing on a Steenbeck and splicing parts together by hand was incredibly difficult - far more so than shooting on an iPhone and importing everything into iMovie or Final Cut. Borchardt may be a hapless, bumbling, drunken fool, but when it comes to actually working film equipment, he knows his shit.

I don't know how to do any of that stuff. That's why I always second guess myself when those questions arise.

If you've seen AMERICAN MOVIE, head over to The Dissolve and read all the great stuff they compiled for it. There's the keynote essay, an interview with director Chris Smith 15 years later, and a round table discussion between all the writers.

If you've never seen AMERICAN MOVIE, what's wrong with you? Call me ASAP. I own it. I'll let you come over. I've got snacks, drinks, a comfortable couch... It's a hell of deal, really.

"YOU'RE SO MONEY AND YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW IT."

I've decided that this whole week is dedicated to movies.

It's not lost on me that this blog is mostly about movies anyway, but this week we're getting specific. This is actually what I was going to do last week, kicking it off with the Oscar recap, but then I ended up having kind of a lot to do after work each day and couldn't get to it. So I pushed it back a week! Everyone's cool with that, right?

Doesn't matter. We're doing it anyway! Let's start here.

I went to college for a while. A couple of different times, actually. I enjoyed it, I learned a few things, and thought it was helpful - for the most part. I absolutely hated that they kept pressuring me to declare a major and start tailoring my class schedule around that one subject. I get why they do it. It makes sense because you can't have thousands of 18-22 year old kids wandering around a campus with no direction (although with how fucking expensive tuition is, I'm surprised they didn't encourage more students to take ultimately meaningless classes for longer period of time. College is kind of a sham like that.).

My biggest problem is that what you want to do when you're 18 isn't always what you end up doing. Most of the time you don't even get close. If you're a doctor, then sure, you're probably always going to work in the medical field, but aside from that, it's wide open. I know a guy with an anthropology degree that works in advertising. Another guy went to law school and works at Overstock.com now. I'd be genuinely shocked if "what you majored in" and "what you're doing now" is ANY better than 50/50.

It's a crap shoot, really. When I was 19, the guidance counselor (or whatever it's called in college) at the University of Utah kind of forced me to choose a major. I was wide-eyed and idealistic back then, so I chose Film. I wanted to make movies. Gradually it changed to Film Studies, because I didn't really see how you could make a living making movies, but I thought there might be a decent future in at least writing about movies. I tacked on a Creative Writing minor for good measure and went through the motions.

Then I got a job writing about movies for the U of U paper and guess what? I didn't really like doing it. I still love reading a few people that write about movies for a living, but the market is so saturated with them that you have to wade through 6 or 7 really bad, link-baiting bullshit pieces to get to the good ones. I have 4 or 5 film writers that I really enjoy reading, but don't trust them 100%. I can make up my own mind.

Maybe that's where I went wrong with my film reviews, though. I tried to write about film in a way that wasn't a straight review, but more of a conversation revolving around my opinion. That turned off a lot of people at the U and I got a lot of hate mail.

Apparently, anyway. No one actually told me how to do my job as A&E Editor, so I made it up as I went along. I didn't know there was an official email address that was collecting everything sent to me until halfway through the second semester. Then I got 6 months worth of emails in a single afternoon, and stopped reading after about 15 people were just complaining about how I sucked at reviewing movies.

That turned me off from writing about movies, but it never turned me off from writing movies or dreaming of making them.

The point of this long, rambling piece is that I'm okay with the path I've chosen, and I never really miss making movies until I read things like this Oral History of SWINGERS piece. This is the kind of thing that makes me want to just drop everything, write a movie, then figure out how to make it.

Since you've already spent time listening to me whine about the collegiate system, you may as well spend another half an hour reading this. It's a really, really great article with all the key players represented. Jon Favreau talks about how he was able to get it made, Doug Liman talks about the tricks he had to pull to get some of the shots (the part where they talk about filming the scene on the side of the road on the way back from Vegas is worth it alone), and Vince Vaughn talks about everything else.

It's movies like this that make me think I could do it. The market is so saturated now, and literally everyone thinks they're a filmmaker that it's impossible to stand out unless you end up with something transcending and brilliant. 95% of the time that won't happen, but it's nice to think about.

Maybe I'll get to it sooner or later. I didn't buy that screenwriting software for nothing.

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 fun for people to read.*

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?

Oh, please, allow me.

In the spirit of the comic books that I've always been fond of, I kind of refer to this as a "Valentine's Day: Year One" 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 and 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. Originally I started throwing it out on LiveJournal, then MySpace and now I re-post it on trevorhale.com every year on Feb. 14.)

MONSTERS INCORPORATED

Not everything needs a shared universe, but since one company has basically been printing money by doing just that, everyone wants in on the action.

Let’s call it “The Marvel Syndrome.”

That’s not a knock against Marvel by any means, because I love that company. It’s the only publisher I read superhero books from on a regular basis – which, even as low as three or four titles, is still more than the competition. I don’t buy a single monthly DC title.

The Marvel movies have a plan that the studio laid out and is sticking to. Phase 1 started with IRON MAN, then THE INCREDIBLE HULK, IRON MAN 2, THOR, CAPTAIN AMERICA and they all built towards THE AVENGERS.

The studio is currently in the middle of Phase 2 which started with IRON MAN 3, then moves on with THOR: THE DARK WORLD, then CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER and GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY. All of those lead to THE AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON, which comes out in May of 2015.

The studio built a long-term plan and now they have a shared cinematic universe. It feels very real and the studio, writers, directors and actors have worked very hard to make it feel that way. Every actor that signs on for a Marvel Studios movie, signs a contract that has something like 10 appearances. That basically covers three stand-alone character films, three AVENGERS movies and a handful of appearances for them to pop up in other Marvel movies. It makes it feel real and it’s a nice little surprise when one of the other characters appears on screen – even if it’s only for a second.

DC is haphazardly throwing together their own shared movie universe, but they’re not doing a very good job with it. Ben Affleck (who I actually think will be great in this role) is the new BATMAN, and he’s going head to head with SUPERMAN pretty soon. Of course that means that everything that happened in BATMAN BEGINS, THE DARK KNIGHT and THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS never happened. Probably anyway. I’m not really sure how that will work. I am certain than in the eyes of Warner Brothers and the SUPERMAN VS. BATMAN movie, everyone is probably just pretending that GREEN LANTERN never happened. It’s kind of a mess over there and probably won’t be straightened out for a while.

Since Marvel has been successful with it, and since Warner Brothers/DC is trying to get it together, every other studio in town is trying to build their own shared universe.

The latest studio to throw out such an idea is Universal, and I kind of hate what they want to do.

Universal wants to resurrect all the classic monsters – The Wolfman, Frankenstein’s Monster, Dracula, Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Invisible Man, The Mummy, and the Bride of Frankenstein – and give them their own AVENGERS-style universe.

I love all the classic monsters and those characters are some of my favorite creations of all time. But they would be terrible now. The guy that is tasked with coming up with a plan for all of them is Roberto Orci and his writing partner Alex Kurtzman – two guys I have very, very little faith in. Let’s take a look at their recent track record:

THE LEGEND OF ZORRO
THE ISLAND
TRANSFORMERS/TRANSFORMERS 2
COWBOYS & ALIENS
STAR TREK/INTO DARKNESS

As much as I liked the first STAR TREK reboot (and thought INTO DARKNESS was pretty good, save for the whole Khan thing), I don’t like what they do with the movies they write. They try too hard to make them bleak and serious, and it just becomes too much. The tone they use for every project is the same and I don’t get excited about anything they're involved with.

The lone bright spot on their resume is FRINGE, which I only saw the first season of. It was pretty good, but not good enough for me to keep going.

Devin Faraci wrote a good piece on this the other day and I encourage you to read it. Essentially, he says that what makes these monsters so special is the make-up, effects and the actors that inhabited them back when they first popped out. There’s no way Universal Studios, Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman or any director (save for a few) would let those designs pass today. They’d have to be much scarier and pushed much, much farther.

By doing that, you kind of take away the soul of the characters. He also says that at this point in time, pretty much all of those characters are public domain. I could make a movie with Dracula, The Wolfman and Frankenstein’s Monster if I wanted to (and now I kinda do).

I’m all for new stories and new movies with those characters – they’re all-time classics that I would be happy to see again. I just don’t want Orci or Kurtzman anywhere near them. But if they do, if they absolutely have to be the guys to make this happen, I’d much rather they focus on trying to tell a good story with one character than worry too much about working them all in.

There’s a small chance that this plan could be great, but I won’t hold my breath.

After all there’s no way in hell that it could be better than the last time we saw all these monsters together in one place. No chance whatsoever.

Never forget.

THE BEGINNING OF THE END

Everyone loves a good conspiracy theory, right?

Well, the CIA and the mob teaming up for the assassination of JFK was half a century ago and 9/11 as an inside job has lost a lot of steam since George W. Bush stopped playing dress-up 5 years ago, so we’re in desperate need of something new and exciting to set the Internet on fire.

There are those loons that think Sandy Hook was a plot organized and staged by the government to take your/their/our guns, but those are just shitty people. JFK and 9/11 conspiracy nuts are kind of fun, because you can just smile and nod along with what they’re saying. The Sandy Hook Truther douchebags are just reprehensible people.

That’s why we’re here to celebrate a little bit of a lighter, somewhat outlandish yet not entirely impossible conspiracy theory that popped up a few days ago.

Ready for it?

Okay, an anonymous letter was delivered to the website Hip Hop Is Read a few days ago, supposedly written by a former “decision making” employee of one of the major record labels from the heyday of music. This was the late 80s/early90s, when record labels had more power than even they thought possible.

The gist of the letter was this:

Back in the early 90s, all the major record labels made huge investments in the privatization of prisons across America. The more inmates those prisons housed and the longer they stayed full, the more money the investors would get from the government. The labels, none of which were named, gathered together a group of 25-30 people, all high-level development execs at a private residence on the outskirts of Los Angeles. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss how they were going to be asked to start pushing gangster rap and other music that promoted criminal behavior.

If everyone that was present for this secret meeting – all of whom were asked to sign a confidentiality agreement and did – helped make this plan into a reality, they would all be given the opportunity to invest in some of these prisons they were going to help fill. Essentially, “you put people in prison; we’ll put some money in your pocket.”

Not entirely impossible, right? Well, the guy that wrote the letter quit the record industry a few years later, because he was sick about what had transpired. He only knew a few other people at the meeting and never searched anyone else out. He stayed quiet all this time and refuses to name anyone else, but his hope is that everyone sees this letter, realizes what’s transpired over the past few years and does something about it.

Like, possibly building a time machine to go back and not let impressionable kids listen to N.W.A. and Ice T.

All in all, this makes total sense and it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if it turns out to be true. But come on, this guy is 25 years removed from having anything to do with the record industry and won’t own up to it? In the letter, he states that the confidentiality agreement he signed would result in termination if he broke it. Well, he quit the industry two years after the meeting and moved back to Europe.

Just spill the details already and let’s see what happens. I’m guessing that any and all record execs that had something to do with this plan are either out of work, dead, in jail or broke because very few of those guys actually survived the total collapse of the record industry a few years back.

Might as well call them on their shit and see what they have to say about it. They’ll probably admit the whole thing. Nothing they did was illegal, per se. It was merely frowned upon.

But I guess naming names would only lead to these same guys making more money with book deals and talk show appearances, so maybe he’s actually doing them more harm by not coming clean.

Either way, it’s a pretty good story, right?

I love a good conspiracy theory.

You can read the entire letter over here. I didn't read the comments, but I'm sure they're awful, so you probably shouldn't either.

*source - Hip Hop Is Read

*UPDATE* - A friend of mine—Dan Fletcher, the guy that lives on my couch—works with a guy at an ad agency here in SLC that, once upon a time, worked for one of the above mentioned record labels. Dan asked him about this and got a "definitely not true" response. That's not the end of this by any means, so let's keep spreading this and see what happens.

MR. PRESIDENT...

It's President's Day today, so in honor of that, here are a few random facts about the men that have been in charge of the country over the years.

- Warren G. Harding once bet the White House China collection on a poker hand and lost.

- If you're the President, you're allowed to have extravagant pets. Thomas Jefferson had two bears given to him by Lewis & Clark, James Buchanan owned an elephant, John Quincy Adams had an alligator, William Henry Harrison had a goat and Teddy Roosevelt had a pet zebra.

- Abe Lincoln is the only President that was also a licensed bartender.

- Harry S Truman doesn't actually have a middle name. That's why there's no period after the 'S' when his name is typed, because it doesn't actually stand for anything.

- Teddy Roosevelt, an avid hunter, refused to shoot a bear cub on a hunting trip. The news picked up the story and a manufacturer invented the Teddy Bear, named after President Roosevelt.

- George Bush Sr. once vomited on the Japanese Prime Minister. Afterwards, the Japanese invented a new word, "Bushusuru", which means to vomit in public or 'do the Bush thing'.

- George Washington had to borrow $600 from his neighbor in order to get to his own inauguration. He then turned down the Presidential salary of $25,000 a year.

- John F. Kennedy's brain has been missing since the day it was autopsied and the coffin that transported him from Dallas to Washington was dumped in the Atlantic Ocean at the urging of his brother Robert.

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.)

OLD

Gregg Popovich is hilarious.

You might not believe me since the San Antonio Spurs play pretty boring, straight-forward basketball. They win a lot of games and have a lot of really, really good players (unlike the Jazz, who have assembled the biggest collection of average players with zero personality).

The problem with the Spurs though, is that most of their great players are pretty damn old. In basketball years, anyway. Tim Duncan is 36 and Manu Ginobili is 35. Tony Parker is only 30, but he has a bad ankle so that kind of ages him up a few years.

So yeah. A little up there in years and a lot of mileage on those legs. Because of that, Popovich sent all of those guys (including 25 year-old Danny Green) home after their Wednesday night (11/28) victory over the Orlando Magic. They were in the middle of a six game road trip (which they had won every game so far) and were finishing off their fourth game in five nights against the Miami Heat. A lot of noise was made and a lot of things were said about this decision.

David Stern, the NBA Commissioner even went so far as to release a statement saying, "I apologize to all NBA fans. This was an unacceptable decision by the San Antonio Spurs and substantial sanctions will be forthcoming.''

But here's the thing, this is exactly what Popovich has always done. He did it more than once last year, in the abbreviated 66-game schedule and he's done it before that.

At least he has a sense of humor about it. Check out these stat sheets that I found floating around the Internet. If you can't read them (they're a little blurry, sorry) the top one says R. Horry - DNP - OLD AGE, the second one says T. Duncan - DND - OLD and the bottom one, my personal favorite says B. Barry - DNP - TUMMY ACHE.

A great coach with a solid sense of humor. That's my kind of guy.

KUBRICK

Every once in a while, I get that flash of inspiration that a younger me once had all the time. That feeling that I'd get every time I watched a great movie that made me think, "Yeah, I want to quit everything and make things like that for a living."

Of course, I was younger then and living in my parents house with no bills to pay. I still think about it from time to time, especially when I see a video like this.

I don't like all of his films, but Stanley Kubrick was one of the greats.

Kubrick // One-Point Perspective from kogonada on Vimeo.

SCIENCE FICTION LAND - THE MOVIE

Remember this post? The one about the great Jack Kirby's Science Fiction Land?

For some reason, that post got picked up by Reddit and is officially the most popular thing that's ever been on trevorhale.com.

Go ahead and read it and then we'll get to the next part.

I'll wait. I've got plenty of time.

Done? Good. Let's go.

Did you see ARGO? You should, because it's fantastic. SCIENCE FICTION LAND is a documentary about the movie within the movie that ARGO is built around.

The fake movie that Ben Affleck and John Goodman set out to make was actually a real movie—as you know from the other post. There were tons of drawings and concept art for the whole thing all put together by Jack Kirby (who is actually in ARGO for maybe 5 seconds, but never mentioned by name). Then it all fell apart in the scandal that I mentioned in the other post, also.

What I didn't know was that for over a decade now, there's been a guy by the name of Judd Ehrlich researching and filming a documentary about the book LORD OF LIGHT and the Science Fiction Land theme park that was supposed to go along with it.

From the look of the video they put together, it's really going to be something interesting. They've got interviews with Barry Ira Gellar, the mastermind of the whole movie/theme park that was busted for embezzling the money for the movie and a whole bunch of other people that were originally involved with the project.

It just sounds like a really interesting story and I'd actually like to see the documentary.

The team has set up a Kickstarter, but it only has a few days left. Head over to check out the video and donate a few dollars if you want to.

SCIENCE FICTION LAND Kickstarter page.

Or if you don't really have any money to donate, you can go here instead. There's a whole bunch of Kirby's drawings for LORD OF LIGHT there and they're just as amazing as you'd hope.

FILLER

I'm way behind on this stuff.

Craft Lake City came and went and I had a lot of fun. I wish I'd had more stuff to sell and a more coherent table, but since I didn't have any of the comics done, I kind of had to make some stuff up as I went along.

The mini-comics were a pretty good idea and we probably gave away a hundred or so. Hopefully people liked what they saw enough to check out this site (which I've neglected to update and therefor probably missed a pretty good opportunity, but oh well).

After CLC was over, I had 4 weddings over the next 5 weeks and the Salt Lake City Film Festival right after, so each one of my days off was dedicated to all that. Now that it's finally all over, everything from the last month and a half caught up with me, I got sick and pretty much been stuck to the couch for the past three days. Though I did have a chance to re-watch John Carpenter's THE THING, so it hasn't been all bad.

Anyway, here's a little bit about FILLER.

I've always loved zines. I have a little collection of the old HC and art zines I used to pick up back when they were popular and always wanted to make my own. I kind of did that with Grudge City Activities for a while, but that was the Internet and not quite as fun. I wanted to make something you could hold in your hands, throw on your coffee table and look at again and again.

Now, getting content that people wanted to look at again and again proved to be a little trickier than I'd thought.

Since I'd spent so much time on GCA writing about music, I kind of wanted to avoid that subject all together for FILLER. That, and I'm a little bit out of touch with the music scene around SLC right now, so that's kind of the way it had to be. I recruited a few of my talented friends and we put something together that, while it's not a game-changer by any means, I'm still really proud of.

I got my friend Makena to write a quick little piece about his journey to South America. and my friend Mikey contributed a section of the novel he's writing. I did a little interview with Andy from Pangea Speed and a really talented photographer named Candace Christensen. I even threw in a little poem I wrote a few years back. That's probably the thing that scared me the most, strangely.

I tried really hard to keep the content original. I toyed with the idea of taking some of the stuff I wrote on here and putting it in, but ultimately decided that it would be a lot cooler if it everything was created just for the zine.

It ended up being about 20 pages and I'm actually really happy with the way it turned out.

There were a few more pieces that never quite came together, so hopefully I can use them for issue 2. And there definitely will be an issue 2. I'm thinking December-ish and then try and keep to a schedule of one every 4 months. April, August and December sounds pretty good. The December issue might be a little easier to put together since I won't have a job after next month (more on that later).

I'm keeping my eyes open for more stuff from people I know, so hopefully issue 2 will be even better, but for now, here's a look inside the first issue. If you want a copy, just head over to my Big Cartel store and pick one up.

Hopefully you like what you see. There's more where it came from.

Mike Farfel's drawing

Candace Christensen

OH HOLLYWOOD

So THE AVENGERS just ended. You're sitting in the theater, happy about what you just saw and now the credits are rolling. Of course you're staying through the credits, because it's a Marvel movie and you always stay through the credits.

The credits fade to black and the mysterious figure that supplied Loki with his army is talking to someone. He cryptically says, "To attack Earth would be to court death."

That someone turns around and smiles. The credits roll again.

Seventy Five percent of the theater goes, "Who the fuck was that?"

Fifteen percent of the theater freaks out then and there.

The other ten percent, guys like me and my friend Casey, look at each other and go, "Oh, that guy. What's that guy's name again? I've gotta look that up real quick."

My guess is that most of the people reading this are either in the first group or the last group. By now, you've figured out that the guy is Thanos, the Mad Titan and he's a little bit nuts. I'm not going to give you a breakdown of who he is or what this might mean for the future of the Marvel movieverse—there are plenty of great posts that do just that—but I am going to give you a little insight as to why Marvel went with Thanos as the big bad of their biggest franchise.

Short answer: Their options were kind of limited.

Right now, Marvel is riding the wave of THE AVENGERS and its record breaking couple of weeks and just two years ago, the company was purchased by Disney for around four billion dollars. They're not exactly hurting for money right now, but that wasn't always the case.

Back in the 90s, Marvel comics kind of sucked, they were going broke and had to find ways to stay afloat. The easiest way to do that was to sell the rights to certain characters to studios to be made into a movie. DC Comics is owned by Warner Brothers, so all of their characters have always been housed under one roof for films. Marvel, on the other hand, created their own studio so they'd at least have a hand in the development, but since they had no real money, the bigger studios had most of the pull because they were the ones footing the bill.

This led to different studios all over Hollywood getting the rights to different characters. Fox bought up the biggest chunk, getting X-MEN (which means any and all characters described as a mutant), FANTASTIC FOUR, DAREDEVIL, ELEKTRA and SILVER SURFER and Columbia Pictures (Sony) owns SPIDER-MAN and GHOST RIDER. Universal owned the rights to THE HULK but had no interest in doing another one because the box office for Ang Lee's film was so bad that the rights reverted back to Marvel—who made their own version that was almost as bad. Universal also owned NAMOR at one point, but that might not be the case anymore. New Line used to own BLADE, but those have reverted back to Marvel and the same goes for Lionsgate and THE PUNISHER.

A few years ago, Marvel Studios scrounged up enough money to start independently financing their own movies and only needed the bigger studios for distribution. They used the 10 characters they still owned as a starting point to get the money they needed and went from there. Slowly, they started reacquiring the rights to characters that hadn't been adapted for films yet, starting with IRON MAN, then THOR then BLACK WIDOW until they had THE AVENGERS assembled.

Having spent so much time building towards THE AVENGERS, they didn't want to shoehorn in any old villain, so the logical move was to just put Loki at the forefront. No one really had a problem with that and it worked out pretty well. But at the same time, they wanted to set the tone for the next wave of Marvel movies, so they inserted the bad guy at the end that was probably the easiest to build up over the next few years even if he wasn't as well known as some had hoped.

Thanos works just fine in this regard but he's not even the best AVENGERS villain, let alone the biggest bad guy in the Marvel Universe. That title belongs to none other than Doctor Doom, but unfortunately, he comes with the FANTASTIC FOUR along with another great Marvel villain Galactus—who is much cooler than a fucking cloud, Tim Story (though to be fair, Warren Ellis kind of made him a cloud in the Ultimate Universe and did a much, much better job of it).

It seems that by consensus, the top two AVENGERS villains from the comics are Ultron and Kang. They couldn't use Ultron because he's a robot built by Hank Pym, a character that hasn't been introduced yet. That may change soon though, if Edgar Wright's proposed ANT MAN movie ever finally gets going. Kang is another that they would have loved but probably wanted to avoid because everyone is terrified of making time travel movies and Kang is a scientist and scholar from an alternate version of earth in the 30th century. And that kind of thing confuses people that just want to watch stuff blow up.

Other notable AVENGERS villains include the Kree/Skrull (which is what everyone originally thought the aliens were going to be), Baron Zemo (a Captain America nemesis), and the Scarlet Witch.

The last one is an interesting choice because the Scarlet Witch (and her brother Quicksilver) are the children of Magneto and Marvel president Kevin Feige has stated that both those characters are available to Marvel and Fox.

This is where it gets tricky but weirdly optimistic.

Hollywood is a stupid, stupid place and the people in charge only care about one thing and strangely, it doesn't involve making good movies. Studio executives only care about not looking like an idiot. The way these rights usually work is that if there's not a film in active development at a certain date, the rights revert back to the previous owner. That's why we keep seeing crappy GHOST RIDER movies popping up, it's why SPIDER-MAN all of a sudden started over and why they keep hiring people to write and develop new DAREDEVIL, FANTASTIC FOUR and X-MEN movies. To be fair, I loved X-MEN: FIRST CLASS, though.

The people at Fox would rather waste money "developing" a FANTASTIC FOUR movie that they have no intention of releasing rather than see the rights go back to Marvel and have them make one that fits in to their shared universe and be potentially great and a box office success. That's really all there is to it—no one wants to be known as the guy that got rid of a potentially huge movie just because he didn't know how to make it himself. It's the most frustrating thing in the world because how great would it have been to see Tony Stark mention Latveria or Wolverine stroll into the Shwarma place at the end of AVENGERS? You know Hugh Jackman would have paid his own way to NYC to do just that.

That's why the Scarlet Witch being usable by both Marvel and Fox is so intriguing. It could potentially heal a bit of a rift between Fox and Marvel which could pave the way for Reed Richards hanging out and talking science with Tony Stark or Matt Murdock showing up somewhere for a chat with Steve Rogers.

So there's always a chance, however slim it may be. It's possible that good business decisions and giving fans what they want will trump massive egos and blatant selfishness, but this is Hollywood we're talking about, so on the other hand, it probably won't.

Sources: Screenrant, BadAss Digest, Newsarama

P.S. I don't have an editor or a fact checker so I'm doing my best here. Don't rip my head off if things aren't 100% accurate. Also, it's a blog.

DIARY

I have a thing for notebooks.

I buy them, find them, get them as gifts and start writing in them. The plan is usually to use one for one thing and another for a different thing, but soon after I start, I forget which is which and just grab whichever one I feel like carrying that day.

The best part about having all these random, half-filled notebooks? That I still have them all.

I have the spiral notebook with a sacred heart on it that I bought from Hot Topic when I was 19 where I recap a trip I took to Portland where all of my vegan friends decided we were on "road trip rules" and could eat anything they wanted. A few pages later I write about having seen Converge for the first time and how in awe I was. Thing is, I was still a little in awe the last time I saw Converge in 2009, too. Some things don't change.

There's the red U of U notebook that has a partial outline/notes and reading parts from the first screenplay I wrote back in 2005 and a first person narrative story that I never finished.

I have four different notebooks with GCA podcast notes, SLCFF suggestions, movie review slug lines and Comic Con notes.

There's the notebook in which I used to outline every issue of the second half of Red Pulse back when I was the editor.

A little black one with a "Sharks Are Scarier Than Terrorism" sticker on the front has pages and pages of different line breaks and the formations of the poems I wrote back in 2007. Those were later typed up neatly for my poetry class and I think I still have the critiques I got from my classmates that were too scared to leave their names.

All of them rest on the top shelf of the bookcase right behind my desk, that way, every once in a while I can grab a random notebook and see what I was thinking at any given time over the past 13 years.

I can't bear to part with them. For damn good reason, too.

WOLVES & MARTYRS: THE ORIGIN OF VALENTINE'S DAY

Let's talk a little about Valentine's Day. If you want to get all comic book-y, we can call this kind of a "Year One" type story.

Shall we?

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." Use your imagination for that one.

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 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. He signed a farewell message to her "From Your Valentine."

Soon after, 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 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. Warren Ellis is responsible for me looking further into it. He has some cards and such available on his site if you're interested. Also, it's entirely possible that none of this is true or historically accurate at all. But it's far more entertaining.)

TEDDY ROOSEVELT WAS AWESOME

I love this story.

"October 14, 1912 -  

Minutes before giving a speech on a campaign stop in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Theodore Roosevelt is shot in an assassination attempt.  

The would-be assassin’s bullet is slowed down after travelling through a steel eyeglass case and the folded, fifty page speech he intended to give, stopping in his chest. Realizing that he wasn’t coughing up blood, Roosevelt figured he was well enough to go ahead and deliver his speech rather than rush to the hospital.  

He spoke for the next 90 minutes, opening with the words: 'Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.'  

Doctors deemed it too risky to remove the bullet, and Roosevelt carried it with him inside his body for the rest of his life."

SOUND AND FURY (2011) VS. HELLFEST (2001)

Click to Enlarge

The Internet is buzzing with the second Sound and Fury announcement this morning and it's also the day I realized I don't like hardcore as much as I used to. It's kind of sad.

S&F is a three day HC music festival in Santa Barbara, California and it's the thing that everyone (that listens to that kind of music) is looking forward to this summer. I looked at the first announcement and the only bands I even kind of wanted to see were Ringworm, The Suicide File and Harvest. I looked at the second announcement (that happened this morning) and the list of bands I wanted to see didn't change.

Looking at this year's Sound and Fury line-up, I can safely say I've never heard 85% of the bands playing. Some of them are probably great (like Twitching Tongues, who I heard a few days ago) and some of them are probably just... there. Not good and not bad, but just generic enough that I won't remember them five minutes after I've heard them.

I made some jokes about it on Twitter and what not, but I don't really have the right to do that. It wasn't Sound and Fury, but 10 years ago, I got really excited for a different summer festival called Hellfest. This is where S&F has me beat—it's in Santa Barbara, which is a beautiful place. It's a little bit more north than I like to be in California, but it's still in California. Hellfest was in Syracuse, New York which, if I'm ranking the cities I've been to that I hate the most, is right near the top.

But there were bands that I had to see. Earth Crisis playing their last show (supposedly) Burn It Down's last show, Martyr AD, Hatebreed (when all they had out was Under the Knife and Satisfaction is the Death of Desire), SkyCameFalling, Arkangel, Length of Time, etc. Those were the ones that got me on a plane to New York. I don't regret it, either. That was an awesome weekend.

But, times have changed. If you put the Sound and Fury 2011 line-up next to the 2001 Hellfest line-up, you'll get older guys like me that will take Hellfest 9 out of 9 times. But I'm almost positive that anyone just coming up in the hardcore scene (probably 22-23 years old or younger) will take Sound and Fury without any hesitation.

And that's fine. The excitement for Sound and Fury (and ensuing Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr posts) just got me thinking about how excited I was when the Hellfest line-up was announced ten years ago. Of course, that was through a really well done Geocities website. Then we all had to jump on AIM and talk to our MakeOutClub friends about how excited we were to see the bands and finally meet up.

Some things never change.

You can find the Sound and Fury line-up everywhere on the Internet this morning, most notably here. And you can click that picture to see the Hellfest schedule from 2001.