¤ milky moon ¤

Hi all. Long-time lurker, infrequent poster here.

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It seems to me that the Joanna Newsom web-o-verse is getting more and more spread apart and harder to keep up with. Time was that Milky Moon was the hub of it, containing in-depth discussion of songs, useful references such as track listings and lyrics, links to interviews, and so forth. Now, there isn't a great deal of activity on here: much analysis of the lyrics is now found on Genius; Facebook and Tumblr house much of the ephermal discussion and external content aggregation; official lyrics and limited information on the albums is on the JN Lyrics website.

I was thinking we could do with a go-to reference website that brings many of these things back into one place and hopefully gives them a longer-term home. This is especially true for information around Divers, such as the tour set lists, which often never made it further than the Facebook group and are now a pain to track down. I'm taking as inspiration here sites like NinWiki, Nirvana Wiki, Leonard Cohen Files, Diamonds in the Lines, Gaffaweb.

The one thing I would definitely like to exist is a 'Diamonds in the Lines'-type section* as I think there are a lot of intriguing 'diamonds' in interviews that don't get enough airing. And imagine if we had a page like this for the Ys album artwork, or like this for Sapokanikan. Then there is the matter of unreleased or unofficial things like the Good Intentions music video or the early EPs that could easily get forgotten unless we give them a proper write-up.



I am posting this here because I think the people who still frequent this forum are the ones who will most see the merit in a project like this. I understand that there are problems with the admin set-up here and I am worried how long it might be before this site is only accessible through divination of the entrails at archive.org. (eg. I tried to make a new account in order to make this post and it kept throwing an error up.)

Anyhow, this is just a first testing-of-the-water. Please let me know a) if you think this is a good idea or not, and b) if you would be willing to contribute in some way (and if so, how).

Personally, I would be able to contribute a fair deal of time to getting this off the ground over the summer and am happy to take the lead with regard to the technical side. I am going to let this discussion (if indeed there is one) brew for a few weeks as I'm pretty busy IRL right now. Just thought I would submit the idea while it was fresh.

~ Adam

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* 'Sawdust and Diamonds in the Lines', if you will

I love this idea. I am new, new, new to Joanna since the winter and I've been furiously scouring the web for information. this board has been great in some ways, but I can only imagine how much was lost during the transition to this new board a couple of years ago. I hate that Facebook now takes the place of message boards, which I grew up using and found so helpful, but they've kind of lost their way in a lot of ways for many artists. Not sure what the heck I could do to be of any help with this except adamantly support it here in this post. But huzzah!

Hi Adam

I share your concerns about the lack of a go-to site for all things Newsom, and about the sad decline of Milky Moon. Over my long period of membership here, I've got to know at least two of the administrators to a degree, and know that they're intelligent and motivated people, but I guess maintaining the site became somewhat unrewarding owing to the small amount of traffic here.

I don't do Facebook or twitter, and in a universe where everything seems ephemeral, I feel that a site like this is better suited to being a repository for information - if only people would use it! It's a downward spiral, though, as only traffic will generate traffic.

That said, I would be interested to read more of what you have in mind, and would like to contribute in some way if I can.

And I do intend to run another JNST, probably starting in June, and would welcome more votersvthan in 2015.

Good luck
-Steve

Well, am I glad to find I'm not just talking into the void! Thanks both for your replies.

And I do intend to run another JNST, probably starting in June, and would welcome more voters than in 2015.

I must admit, I haven't joined in with the competition in the past. It certainly has a comprehensive song list! That is exactly the kind of thing I wish weren't so hard to come across. I'll definitely take part next time, though I'm unfamiliar with quite a few of the songs.

__________________

Anyhow, I've been thinking about this for a couple weeks now, so here is a preliminary plan/description.

Content
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First thing is to gather together all the material that one might want for this reference. This will be a mix of URLs and text-based references.

URLs
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Things needed here include: interviews, reviews, official websites, fan websites, forum threads

I have made a start on aggregating Divers-era interviews and reviews on a public Pinboard page, https://pinboard.in/u:rufousii. I'm sure there are plenty I have missed, and I still need to go through everything pre-Divers (largely through following the links of the 'Inflammatory Writ' section here on Milky Moon). It's a Pinboard archive account, meaning that anything saved on there should (hopefully) be safe in perpetuity even if the original site goes down.


Text
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Things needed here include: discography, extant bootlegs, derivative works, print-only appearances

By this category I mean it'd be nice to have a definitive reference on what's out there with respect to these categories (eg. the Visions of Joanna Newsom book, the recent interview in Q magazine that isn't online). I don't necessarily think the site should host this stuff but its existence should be acknowledged and catalogued.

Structure
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After all this stuff is in one place, we need to organise it.

Lists
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A lot of the content from the 'URLs' section can be put into fairly simple pages consisting of a list of links (maybe with a little commentary highlighting some of them). Alternatively we could just link to the relevant Pinboard tag in some cases. Some of the text items, such as the set of derivative works, could probably just be listed on a single page too, again perhaps with a little commentary on each item.

Reference essays
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This stuff would take a bit more time to do. I already gave a couple examples earlier, but what I mean here is to have some 'final word'-type reference pieces that are the kind of thing you would expect to find somewhere like Wikipedia (maybe they'll even make it to Wikipedia eventually).

Annotated discography
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This will be another big job but can be broken down quite easily on an album-by-album basis. This is the part that I personally wish existed because I know I'd use it all the time. For each song, have annotations that represent everything we know for sure about it. eg. I'm interested to learn that poorwill is a type of nightjar, and that JN said such-and-such in an interview about the song, but I don't care that one fan thinks the last verse is about how Andy Samberg hides in his bedroom before mealtimes (that can be saved for the next section)


Criticism essays
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This is more a blue-sky idea than something that I think is important for the website to work -- I'm thinking the site might be a good place to host longer-form criticism pieces, the writing of which might be helped by all the reference material that will then be easily-accessible elsewhere on the website. NB. I mean literary criticism here, like the (excellent) works posted over at http://allthebirds.tumblr.com/

Technical
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The hip way to make a website these days seems to be using a static generator. What this means is that most of the content can be written without too much HTML-fu, using Markdown. My current thought is to use Pelican to compile the website (which, incidentally, might be what Joanna Newsom lyrics uses; I should really find out...) and host it on Github Pages (free). Here is an example of a site made with Pelican. Note the mix of "Pages" and "Articles", which on the proposed site might see essays as Articles (so we can attribute date, authorship, etc) and everything else as pages. Also note Disqus comment integration.

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So those are my (slightly jumbled) thoughts on the matter so far. Criticism is welcomed of course, especially on the technical side as it is new to me. Hopefully it gives an indication of the different tasks that might be involved in getting this off this ground.

I might give this thread a shout-out on the FB group at some point soon too, but I'll encourage people to come over here if they want to discuss it.

PS. just realised I didn't exactly address the rest of your comments.
Steve, do you know if the admins/moderators or owner check in here at all any more? (I don't know squat about running a forum so I don't know what could be done here. The FB group is still quite active.)

followerofmen, the old forum is here, if you're interested. Beware that a lot of it isn't archived, and other parts rely on PHP code that doesn't work properly within the Wayback Machine.

Hi again Adam

Thank you for setting out your thoughts - they look very comprehensive and include everything I thought of and more!

I believe Jordan~ still comes here, and I would start with him as the most active of the moderators.

Well done on tracking down the old forum! One project might be to rescue whatever posts on it were of continuing relevance, and get them duplicated here, even if unsorted on an archive page.

Not a post escapes my notice. That's not to say I always read them, but I am here!

Oh hi! I just sent you a PM but it appears to be trapped in my outbox (as is another one I sent to someone else back in March...) so I guess I can just paste it here too.

[DELETED]

I'm not sure what the outbox thing is about (I think it doesn't move to sent until the recipient logs in), but I got it and replied!

I guess it just seems like everyone's migrated to FB for discussion (much of it a little pointless), Genius for song annotation, other sites for lyrics. It is a shame, but I'm not really sure that changing this site will really bring the community back.

Yeah, I think we still have kind of a niche - transcribing lyrics and analysing songs immediately before and after the release of a new album. That's fine, really.