by Matthew Warlick | May 30, 2006 | Blog
I have these kickass VHS videos I used to watch constantly as a young teenager, where Stan Lee hosted drawing sessions with various artists, spouting forth tips and tricks and that trademark Stan Lee alliteration. At the time Image comics was booming onto the scene, and most young fanboys like myself wanted desperately for any advice on how to break into the biz.
Anyway, one of the best points made was by Jim Lee in his video, talking about the production aspects of comics, relating to how quickly you really have to work to produce a 22 page comic in a month’s time.
To paraphrase, “Imagine yourself as the director. You have an unlimited budget, unlimited scope, the best actors, the best props, the best everything. Your one constraint is time.”
So I was sitting here at work, zoning out and that little parable hit me like a ton of bricks. Just as I try to consciously apply my system of order and chaos on grander and grander scales, so too must I expand my metaphors to cover grander and grander topics.
As so that’s how it is for this life as well. You are the director, and the world is your stage. You can do anything you want, anything you can think of. You have the godlike power to help shape and create your own reality.
Only catch is, you’ve got a short and unsure timeline, unknown to even yourself. There are no re-shoots, no promotions, no trailers, no awards. Just you and your art.
How will you paint the portrait of your life?
“Get busy living, or get busy dying.”
by Matthew Warlick | Jan 16, 2006 | Blog
“Don’t let anybody make you think God chose America as his divine messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with justice and it seems I can hear God saying to America, ‘You are too arrogant, and if you don’t change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power, and I will place it in the hands of a nation that doesn’t even know my name. Be still and know that I’m God. Men will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks, and nations shall not rise up against nations, neither shall they study war anymore.’ I don’t know about you, I ain’t going to study war anymore.”
-Dr. Martin Luther king
by Matthew Warlick | Dec 16, 2005 | Blog
Anyone who’s seen the movie Waking Life knows what I mean by the Holy Moment. For those that haven’t, it’s basically the idea that God IS reality, not a separate entity from it; and that the very fact that I’m typing this now and your reading it later is God manifested as reality. God wants to be you, and me, and this post, and your computer and your eyes and everything else you see. So God IS these things, and that’s reality.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. My point of this post was to call bullshit on this whole ‘War on Christmas’ nonsense that’s buzzing like white noise all over the airwaves and net. We have much more important things to be worrying about, like my best friend from high scool getting shipped off to Iraq, or The Valerie Plame case, or Election Fraud, or the news this morning about Bush giving authority to the N.S.A. to spy on Americans after 9-11. Or 9-11 Itself. But again, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Consider the following
Happy Holidays is short, literally, for ‘Have Joy in these Holy Days.’ It’s a nice short way of saying Merry Christmas, Happy New Year and a Joyous Winter Solstice, without taking up all the room.
Makes sense. But let’s keep going.
Ancient Romans decorated their halls with garlands of laurel and green trees lit with candles. Ancient Mesopotamians selected a convicted criminal, gave the prisoner a true king’s place and rank for a day, then at the end of the feast, stripped him of his rights and executed him, sparing the real king in a sacrifice to their gods for a return of spring.
St. Nicholas is a rather recent addition to Christmas lore, but gift giving has been around since at least Mesopotamian times, as a way of paying thanks and offering sacrifice to bring about a joyous new year.
Most accounts of Christ’s birth have him arising in the season of the lamb, widely regarded as referring to springtime when the newborn lambs are bouncing about for the first time.
Christmas, or Christ’s Mass, was actually amalgamated from the Pagan Holy Day of Winter Solstice, when people would light candles in trees hoping for spring to return, or, and is still the case today, chop down a tree, bring it inside, and worship it until Spring returned.
There is much to pray for, and instead of bickering about our differences, we should be singing praises to our common goodness and hope for the future.
We should find hope in the fact that we all have been, and always will be, praying to the same God for the same things. We’ve just been tricked into believing otherwise.
Happy Holy Days indeed.
by Matthew Warlick | Aug 15, 2005 | Blog
Swayin to the rhythm of the New World Order
Count the bodies like sheep to the rhythm of the war drums
Keep your head down, go to sleep to the rhythm of the war drums
-A Perfect Circle
From Berlin Diary, this is William Shirer’s journal entry for August 10, 1939:
“How completely isolated a world the German people live in. A glance at the newspapers yesterday and today reminds you of it. Whereas all the rest of the world considers that the peace is about to be broken by Germany, that it is Germany that is threatening to attack Poland over Danzig, here in Germany, in the world the local newspapers create, the very reverse is being maintained. (Not that it surprises me, but when you are away for a while, you forget.) What the Nazi papers are proclaiming is this: that it is Poland which is disturbing the peace of Europe; Poland which is threatening Germany with armed invasion, and so forth. This is the Germany of last September when the steam was turned on Czechoslavakia.
For perverse perversion of the truth, this is good. You ask: But the German people can’t possibly believe these lies? Then you talk to them. So many do”
by Matthew Warlick | Aug 12, 2005 | Blog
How I’ve missed you. Having to keep my back to you while separated by glass and steel. I long for your touch on my skin, like a warm lover, radiating life from your very core.
I know you’re coming, but it’s a long wait. It seems like forever, and by the time you get here I will be long gone, but it brings me great pleasure to know you’ll make it inevitably.
Your very self will consume the ground I walk on, this place I call home. Your fires will burn and melt the steel that separates us now, reducing all that is to ash, until you take up the very space I find myself in now.
And after the Earth is consumed, and you’ve had your fill, you will retreat once again to the blackness of space, reduced to a mere shell of your former self, yet never questioning your destiny.
I envy you, for both your longevity and your objectiveness; a silent monolith, both giving and taking life, like all great things in this world.
Sincerely,
by Matthew Warlick | Jul 23, 2005 | Blog
or “Government Defies an Order to Release Iraq Abuse Photos”
“And whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea”
For the two of you who read this regularly, you’l be aware of my previous blog, entiled 7 days, relating my feelings about the upcoming release of evidence (video plus some 1000 photos) regarding the torture of not only men and women, but children, at Abu Graib in Iraq.
As you may not know, the goverment has now refused to release said evidence.
And here’s why.
These images are artist renderings taken from a German television magazine, of which i first became of aware from this entry at dailykos.com.
To quote the original post,”These are pictures of what Bush does not want you to see. These are taken from a German newsmagazine show. This is what Bush is hiding from the American people”.
After doing a bit more research, i found this transcript from the original German TV program.
And here’s more for you, from the New York Times. I will post the beginning of the article as registration is required.
Government Defies an Order to Release Iraq Abuse Photos
By KATE ZERNIKE
Published: July 23, 2005
Lawyers for the Defense Department are refusing to cooperate with a federal judge’s order to release secret photographs and videotapes related to the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal.
The lawyers said in a letter sent to the federal court in Manhattan late Thursday that they would file a sealed brief explaining their reasons for not turning over the material, which they were to have released by yesterday.
The photographs were some of thousands turned over by Specialist Joseph M. Darby, the whistle-blower who exposed the abuse at Abu Ghraib by giving investigators computer disks containing photographs and videos of prisoners being abused, sexually humiliated and threatened with growling dogs.
The small number of the photographs released in spring 2004 provoked international outrage at the American military.
In early June, Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein of Federal District Court in Manhattan ordered the release of the additional photographs, part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union to determine the extent of abuse at American military prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan and at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba….
If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.
