Republicans go for liberty, Pope Francis shows a little love and tenderness, and Selena gets a fierce tribute, as your AggreGAYtor IS AWESOME.

Welcome to South by Southwest Film, where the lines are a mess and your planning won't matter. Do you race across town for another show, or start lining up now for your evening pick? For the duration of the Fest, we're posting a few trailers for each day's films to help you make (or, you know, complicate) some of those tough scheduling decisions.

We’re halfway through Spring Break and with one weekend of SXSW behind us, we cherry picked a few gems to forge the family onward through the next.

In the wake of Lou Reed’s death last October at age 71, Thursday’s Bill Bentley-moderated panel offered a wide range of unique perspectives on a great American musical life.

On a somber day in Austin there was something healing about Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart expounding on the big picture of why music matters. “Music is not a luxury. It’s a necessity,” he proclaimed. “It’s part of our DNA.”

An annual SXSW songwriters summit, this one nabbed Bob Mould, whose group Hüsker Dü shares its final LP title with the name of this panel. Mould was in some illustrious company: Steve Wynn (Dream Syndicate), Spoon’s Britt Daniel, Nada Surf’s Matthew Caws, and rising young indie popper Jeremy Messersmith.

So the issue with this panel revolved around Goldie Blox, a company that makes toys that encourage little girls to be engineers. That’s nice and all, but they took the Beastie Boys song “Girls,” rewrote some of the lyrics, and used it without permission in an ad they put online. It’s cute and got around eight million hits in its first 10 days.

Artists getting screwed over by the record industry isn’t new, but the current state of the state might be the worst ever. This discussion led by Jay Rosenthal, Senior VP and General Counsel of the National Music Publishers’ Association, moved quickly through compensation – or rather the lack of it – with songwriters being a particular focus.

In the Eighties, Gary Numan had enormous commercial success, but wasn’t always happy with his music. He’s not interested in repeating the experience. “If I hear something and go, ‘Oh, that’ll sound good on radio,’ I instantly erase it.”