My new favorite Musical Artist "Joanna Newsom"

Joanna Newsom on Wikipedia

I was fortunate enough that one of my co-workers, Dave Sullins, turned me on to Joanna Newsom this past week. She is now, by far, my new favorite musical artist. My previous favorite musical artist was Sheila Chandra but, considering the fact that I own every single CD Sheila Chandra has ever produced, she is still holds a firm location in second place.

Before I had read anything on the Internet here was my own personal impression of Joanna Newsom. Imagine that Bob Dylan had a harp instead of a guitar and that he was female with a high pitched voice rather than a man with a low gravely one.

Yes, Joanna Newsom has an unconventional vocalization technique but then, so does Bob Dylan and Patti Smith. I had read somewhere that Joanna Newsom is an acquired taste. If so, it took me all of thirty seconds to acquire that taste.

She plays a harp while singing poetry with a with a sing-song style. She reminds me a great deal of both Bob Dylan and Patti Smith; perhaps more Patti Smith than anything else. It is a form of folk-music-poetry that I find very captivating. I strongly recommend listening with headphones since it is such an immersive experience.

Here is a link to her Amazon page where you can sample some tracks.

My friend Dave told me an anecdote about seeing her perform locally and he was surprised at the overwhelming response to her performance. Having become an instant fan myself I am sure I would not have shared his surprise since I would have been in the front row.

Now, to continue this post with a recap of what is going on, yesterday and today I am finally getting around to a task that I have been putting off for over a year. That is scanning in my parent's ancient photographs so that I can retain them in digital form as best I can before they fade away entirely. In a future post I will most likely include a number of my favorites. After having scanned hundreds of photographs I am now in the middle of the process of doing my best to restore each individual image one at a time.

Later today I will be going to my parents home to celebrate Christmas and I plan to make a slide-show presentation of all of the images I have been able to clean up so far.

Last evening we celebrated Christmas with my wife's family. I went ahead and gave my daughter her present which is, in large part, a present for Terry and I as well. For Christmas my daughter Lauren found out that she gets to travel to Paris and Rome sometime this summer. We have not booked the trip yet, but I am finally confident that we will be able to take this vacation. Even though I have been fortunate enough to be able to travel to Europe on business a few times in the past couple of years my family has not had a proper vacation in well over three years, in fact it is now almost four.

My daughter is at an important time in her life trying to decide whether or not she wants to pursue a career in art or medicine. I believe it is extremely critical that she have the opportunity to experience all of the incredible art offered in these two great cities. Rather than trying to pack many cities into a single trip I prefer we focus on just Rome and Paris with sufficient time to delve deeply into everything each has to offer. I know from personal experience that even five days in Paris lets you barely scratch the surface.

Needless to say Lauren was very excited when she heard this news. Now we have months of planning ahead of us and I look forward to a great life experience in this next year.

One other thing happened yesterday, which is neither here nor there, but since it does mark an event I think I will comment on it here anyway.

A little over two years ago a popular message forum on the Internet began exercising excessive levels of moderation and over the course of a few weeks banned dozens and dozens of people. Now, while it was well within their right to ban anyone they wanted from their own forums, my thought was that you can hardly ban someone from the Internet itself. Shortly after the great purge I set up a new message forum in about five minutes. I just clicked on the first thing that Google brought up and set up a message forum with no great thought or effort. Like the Jews wandering in the desert this group migrated to the new forum and, over the course of two years, eventually formed a nice little community that forged friendships and spawned often profound intellectual debate (but mostly a whole lot of light chit-chat).

The thing is, those folks who kicked people off of their forum in the first place held a grudge. It seems their primary goal of suppressing all forms of criticism ate at them a little too deeply. There were numerous 'flare-ups' and even several Wikipedia wars.

After two years those who wanted to suppress the free speech of others had a flash of insight and realized they could do exactly the same thing I did and create their *own* forum. In one of the most dazzling displays of hypocrisy in Internet history they created a forum so they could lash out in the most hateful way to show how hateful they perceived their detractors were being. Somehow, both the irony and hypocrisy of this behavior was lost on these self-professed Christian apologists. They posted personal and private information and impersonated real people in an effort to trash their professional positions. It was one of the ugliest displays I have ever seen but I just assumed the entire thing would implode and I ignored it.

Unfortunately, some of those who felt hurt by the attacks did not ignore it. They complained to the Web hosting service and were nearly immediately successful in having the message forum shut down. Of course, turn about fair play, and it took hardly 24 hours for the detractors to reciprocate and attempt to get my *own* forum shut down.

Now, I have made the point before and will most certainly make it again that a community is not a URL. A community is a group of people and, just like the wandering Jew, all you have to do is find a new URL to tie your camel up to. I received a letter from the web hosting service yesterday informing me that I was in violation of their terms of service since I did not practice active moderation of the forums. Moreover, and more to the point, I was informed that it was their policy that I be held personally accountable for everything anyone else might ever post on those forums. So, apparently, I am supposed to read every one of tens of thousands of posts and actively monitor, edit, and manage anything said, whispered, or intimated. Last I checked (I think) I still have a life. It seems, I should have read the fine print a couple of years ago.

I shut down the forums immediately since I have absolutely no intention of moderating everything a bunch people might post there. You see, these forums were a social experiment. Everyone left the original forums primarily because of what the viewed as heavy handed, unfair, and highly restrictive and repressive efforts at moderation. The experiment of the new forum was to ask the question "Could a bunch of individuals take part in theological debate without any form of enforced moderation; could they self moderate or would it implode?" In large part the experiment was successful as, over the course of two years, the forum found a strong community and sponsored many friendships and interesting discussions. That said, there were plenty of times when there were horrible flare ups, not the least of which was caused by virulent troll attacks that tried to bring the forums down simply by virtue of the no moderation policy. As an act of compromise on my part I created a special section that I called 'hell' where I would move (but *not* edit) all intentionally disruptive posts. Of course, all this did was make 'hell' the most popular forum on the site.

Now the wandering Jews of AARM are off to a new URL and my involvement in this bizarre little social experiment has ended. Once they are relocated in the promised land where the terms of service more closely match the original intent of our grand social experiment I'm afraid that those who are determined to launch a pogrom of extermination and genocide on free speech rights are about to learn the hard way that you cannot easily suppress 'the Internet'. Good luck with that guys......

Merry Christmas