There must be places on-line where, for example, various interpretations, thoughts, analyses of various art-forms are being discussed intelligently, apart from the SD, I would imagine. Places where people interested in saying something more meaningful than “Omigod, I love this, its SOOOO graet,” I just haven’t found many, other than here. The discussions about “You Can Call Me Al” here or on 'Chinatown" the last few weeks have been satsifying, but it seems to me that there may be more than just searching for a title on the Dope and seeing whether a thread already exists. Is there a Paul Simon site out there that goes into some depth? A Polanski site? A general music or movie resource?
I’m particularly interested in song lyrics, which are often obscure and possibly incoherent, but which sometimes make sense to some people in a way that makes me appreciate what they’re about. In a way, I’m probably asking about poetry as well–is there a source where people discuss, on a reasonably intelligent level, interpretations of poetry and literature in general. (This is pretty well covered in the gross amount of books that interpret, analyze and criticize poetry, but there may also be on-line resources that I’m unaware of.) Wikipedia seems to discourage any sort of analysis or anything that is opinion rather than factual, even in links (which seems a foolish policy, but that’s a whole 'nother WIki discussion) and for music Pandora.com provides a little interesting analysis but not quite at the level I’m thinking of.
Anyway, what are your own personal recommendations?
I think it will be hard to get the quality you’re looking for without going really narrow in scope. Some of the best online discussion I’ve seen in terms of analysis and insight is on forums dedicated to single authors. The SF author Gene Wolfe has a dedicated site with some very knowledgeable and inventive posters - scintillating discussion when I was last there a couple of years ago. Likewise, there’s a forum for discussing Thomas Pynchon online that is formidable.
These type of places are not as restricted as you might think, and can be good for more general stuff. Obviously, if you’re not a fan of the writer you probably wouldn’t go there, but take the Pynchon example - he’s hardly the most prolific writer in the world. So rather than re-hash the various sub-texts of Gravitys Rainbow for the nth time, there’s plenty of discussion on modern literature in the wider context.
There are a few such poetry boards, though many of them are more focused on creating and workshopping poetry than analyzing extant work. I’d rather give board links via PM if you’d like.
There are also a TON of poetry blogs where you can get into all sorts of fun discussion. I’ll just link you to a couple: