Japanse New-Girl Monkey Network
More Irregularities
Everything feels random lately. I'm learning how to do vertical cave climbs and repelling from a coworker and taking ballet lessons, and that's just a small example. I suppose things will become more ordinary and less exciting when the boy goes home.
Adam and I watched K-19: The Widowmaker, a flick I probably wouldn't have chosen to watch on my own, but I'm glad I saw it. The main detraction was that Harrison Ford just can't pull of being Russian. That's not to say I necessarily think he's a bad actor, he just doesn't evoke any Russianness to me. If you can put that aside while you're watching the film, he still plays a fairly interesting character. Story-wise, there was a good dramatic arc, a nice interplay of tensions. How historically accurate it was, I have no clue, but for historical perspective purposes, it was a film that came across as appropriate post-9/11 (and by that, I mean genuinely appropriate, not that phony, ultra-sensitive, "we can't ever show the Twin Towers on film again because it'd be sacreligious" appropriate that seems to ooze from Hollywood thesa days). I didn't live through much of the Cold War, and in fact, spent time in Russia shortly after the Iron Curtain rusted and fell apart. But it was clear enough to me that from the 50's through the 80's, the Russians were the Scary Bad Communist Guys. In K-19, it was also clear that to the USSR folks, we were the Scary Bad Capitalist Guys, in a very human and recognizable way. It was good to be able to sympathize with the "Bad Guys" and see that not all of them were really so bad. The level of fear on both sides was very tangible in this film. So was the way both sides postured, spouted the rhetoric of war, shook their fists, spoke of nationalism. It was easy to see how those attitudes fed the continuation of tensions for those decades.
I made my first shot at chiming in on the mediAgora conversation (at QuickTopic). I'm cross-posting it here verbatim:
{ link me }Well, I'm going to take my first few tentative steps into the mediAgora discussion. Hopefully what I say will make sense and add something to the conversation.
Since I write, I naturally start envisioning how mediAgora would apply to a writer wishing to disseminate his/her works (poetry, fiction, non-, what-have-you) in digital form.
Naturally, I can see a direct and application for the collaborative or incorporative aspects of mediAgora for something like music or visual digital art. There are examples of songs that use looping tracks, music, or lyrics from other musicians; and Photoshopping has created a whole new dimension to incorporating images into something new and interesting.
However, in literary terms, I see this as getting potentially confusing. I'm sort of unclear how things like literary allusion or quoting another's work would fit into the mediAgora model from a writer's standpoint. The only clear application I can see is for something like adapting a screenplay / play from a novel or vice versa-- and maybe that's really the only type of derivative work this model is supposed to account for in a written-work context.
I suppose I just see this as maybe a potential for exploitation of the openness of the model. Bob writes his grand opus, and Jim writes a short story loosely inspired by it that alludes to it, so can Bob legitimately say, "You owe me money because your work is a derivative of mine?" I guess what I'm asking for is a more specific definition of "derivative"-- or is that not particularly important at this stage?