1: Shinichiro Watanabe directed and storyboarded Samurai Champloo. This is the show we are currently watching. Before this we watched seasons 1 and 2 of NYPD Blue. Samurai Champloo is glowingly, astonishingly beautiful. It’s about hiphop-flavoured and brazenly anachronistic Samurai rebels, traveling with a funny and tough girl to find the Samurai who smells of Sunflowers. In each episode of Samurai Champloo there are scenes that I’d like to hang across my wall, and out my window, and across my front and back.

A few days ago I interviewed Barbara Layne, an artist-researcher in the Fibres program at Concordia University and director of Hexagram about wearable technology. She showed me a huge Mimaki printer that she uses to print photographs of storm clouds and lightening onto huge stretches of cloth, which she and her grad assistants then electrify with their bioluminescent thread. The wearable technology article and the interview with Barbara Layne will appear in the next issue of Worn, but I bring it up here because all I could think about yesterday was using that printer to print scenes from Samurai Champloo. I also thought about scenes from Nausicaa, and Spirited Away- (remember the train running through the water and the reflections of the white clouds?) But in these films, by Miyazaki, the moments of beauty are more intense, religious almost, less funky. Today, I want to hang out with funky.

2: In Samurai Champloo episode 11, Gamblers and Gallantry, one of the main characters spins off from the group into a mini plotline with a woman who is forced into prostitution to pay off her husband’s debt. The law has her trapped- she gets sold to her husband by her parents and now gets mauled by perverts because women aren’t allowed to get divorced. The system does not treat men and women equally, and our soft-spoken Samurai hero rebels. I never get tired of seeing good guys (or ethical badasses) defending human rights. Warms the cockles of my heart it does, and fuels my desire to hang out with Watanabe.

3: The music is so genius in Samurai Champloo: the long musical segments between episodes are actually increasingly pleasurable. Tsutchi, a hip hop artist who worked with Watanabe on Samurai Champloo and Cowboy Bebop, says :

“There are similarities between some aspects of a director’s work and a DJ’s work, you know? Choosing which song to use in which scene is similar in feeling to how a DJ selects a record by watching the reaction of the audience. (…) During some magazine interview some time ago, he said: “I re-did the editing because the music was distorted. I decided to do that only by listening with my ears” (…) Rather then saying he did something because it was OK according to the meter, he valued the point at which he felt thoroughly good. That is an extremely important thing. That part of about him that creates while valuing that kind of a sense is musician-like or music-like, and I feel that’s what’s different from regular filmmakers.”
(from the liner notes for DVD volume 4.)

I don’t know much about dj’ing or editing film, but I know that feeling when something is good. And I also know it’s hard to stop and recognize that feeling when you’re in the midst of creating. Once you get a ball rolling, it’s hard to stay objective- or maybe what’s hard is staying quietly inside yourself (extra subjective?) so you can really feel the feeling of a good thing when it comes- either way, Watanabe knows something about it, and I want to meet him.

One Neck Hates You is the work of Edinburgh based comix artist and illustrator Iain Laurie. When not working on his childish, seedy little drawings he enjoys watching the Chevy Chase film “Fletch” on a loop and solving crimes with a supernatural element.

“Here’s a wee xmas card to you and all at Open.
Seasons best from the Neck.”

by Risa Dickens.

Part 1.
Editing Openness: Lessons from Open Source.

I’m really glad Christian drew the issue of edited openness into the comments about space and scale which followed his recent post from Yellowknife.
Personally, I think a lot about how public spaces can become healthy ecosystems, instead of slipping towards inequality or control. I am half of the team that’s spent the past month building Indyish, and some of every day for the past two years building Open. And I am the one who most often edits our Openness.

Building Open is an idea that bumps up against every one else’s ideas about what Openness is or should be. Building this site and evolving it has challenged my own thinking-through of the processes developed in the open source community (the subject of my MA thesis, still in draft form). And that was sort of the original intention.

Often, questions ethical and practical that I’ve encountered here have sent me back to open source, looking for suggestions.

Open source development has played out in as many different ways as there are different, successful open source companies. For Open Journal I have been following the templates created by Open Source leaders like Linus Torvalds- the genius coder and “benevolent dictator for life” behind Linux, the kernel of the central open source operating system. (Linux sits at the heart of most open source-enabled innovations, including the Apache servers that run most of the Internet and the small computers that coordinate the self assembly of the floating blimps in Julien’s arty robotics.)

The collaborative process that built Linux is layered and complex now, but it still boils down to this:

Anyone is welcome to submit bits that they think will work. Linus Torvalds, recognized for having built the entire first draft of the kernel on his own, and for having made a beautiful and smart thing, has final say on what goes in and what doesn’t, and what needs fixing for it to work.

Decisions are resolved pragmatically- does this work well, logically, efficiently, does it work well over time, does it scale, does it allow for and enable growth..?

If a contributor fundamentally disagrees with the decisions being made by Torvalds, they are welcome to attempt to fork the code. “Forking” is to take all the openly available material from the Linux code (which is all the Linux code) and build it in whatever new direction you like, and see if you can get people to work on it with you. Forking is an essential function in the ecosystem that is Open Source. And it’s something we’re open to as well, because our interest is always in building and being part of healthy ecosystems.

The importance of the right to fork makes sense when you think about the open source system on an extra-large scale. (And thanks again the Christian, for drawing our attention to differences in scale.)

Thinking about open source requires a kind of sliding scale- one that can see the individual creative spark alongside the enormity of the network.

Open source is bigger than any one project, (and many projects, like operating systems, are massive in size); it’s bigger than giant networks of projects like Sourceforge; bigger than the legal and business realms of open source and things like Creative Commons; bigger than it’s subtle role in enormous battles like the ones playing out in the music and motion picture industries. Open source is big, and so this question about scale is huge because it points to how hard it’s going to be to build things that will survive the size of the open source network. Not to mention how hard it can be to know which directions will prove right in the long run.

Will a choice continue to seem smart as it gets applied to increasingly various scenarios, in all kinds of chaotic and tugging contexts? Will a system stay quick and light across the infinite variations of software and hardware?

Will an idea that seems brilliant to me in my bubble of books continue to be meaningful when it’s read against knowledge from other disciplines? Or will I then hear in it what I couldn’t before: the repetition of super-sized buzz words, beneath which I have hidden my secret confusion.

Sometimes I think people do this: bury big haunting questions in fascinating twists of words.
Sometimes I think this is the result of individuals or groups believing they should build an operating-system-sized theory on their own.
Challenging this misconception is, in part, the idea behind OpenJournal.

Part 2:
Our Working Philosophy.

As I wrote in the copy for Indyish, I’m interested in editors. I think everyone needs an editor- every idea needs to get shaken up by other perspectives and also needs to get reworked a few times by its original fashioner. Good, complex things don’t get built by one person in one try. As Torvalds pointed out, it generally takes one set of eyes to see the spark of a new idea, or to correctly identify the crux of a problem that needs solving, and another set of eyes to solve it. An organized but open network is necessary to connect the eyes and minds that together can solve problems. People, I think, flip back and forth between both sides of this job all the time, but wherever they are on that road they still need those other perspectives to bounce off of.

I want Open to provide the time and space for theories to be considered, tempered, and reworked. And I want the people behind Open to get to play whatever useful role we can in that process. And if at any time someone would like to fork the theory we’re working on, or would like to post an unedited version of their writing on their own website, or would like the entire history of the edits we’ve made together to be published alongside their final version, then Open would be super into that.

Part 3:
Why Edit?

Because we are trying to bring out the best in each other’s theory and writing.

Open is not just a blog- it’s not a group diary where anything goes. If there were no spaces like that- if it were impossible to get access to your own space for publishing on the web- then we would have felt the need to provide that. But Blogger, Myspace, and the Mac version of blogging tools – not to mention free and open source systems like Wordpress- answer that need bountifully.

So instead, at Open, we’re building theory collaboratively. And a project that big needs a project manager. And that’s been me.

Part 4.
The Flaw in Systems.

I stand by my edits and by the careful and continuously evolving thought that’s gone into Open so far. And in general, people seem to find the fact that an editor will look at their work to be quite reassuring- it allows them to take chances. And we love that. But it means that there’s always more editing to be done. And so it seems there’s a flaw in the system. And it’s a flaw linux encountered eventually as well.

Linus Torvalds is fricken smart but he isn’t perfect. (nobody is, hence the title of my thesis: “no one knows everything.”) At one point in the now-nearly-mythic linux history, Torvalds made some mistakes and got tired and defensive.

But actually, maybe this wasn’t a flaw. Maybe it was just the rumblings of a system getting bigger and approaching a phase transition. And maybe we’ve reached this kind of a stage with Open as well.