Enthusiastick Journal

One of my coworkers got a Flip Video Ultra delivered to the office this morning. Counting theferrett, that makes two people I know who have them. And now one of my other coworkers who's a bit infamous for impulse buys, went and ordered one, too.

Shiny. Waaaaaant...

I'm continuing to play catch-up with my posts, so please bear with me.

A few weeks back I caught a Jonathan Coulton show at Johnny D's in Somerville, alongside macabre_grrl and Eric & April. Of the four people in my party I was the only one with any particular familiarity with Mr. Coulton, but he's enough of a geeky good time that I figured that wouldn't matter much, and for the most part it didn't.

The show was a double-headliner with Paul & Storm (who are, I quickly realized, the guys from Da Vinci's Notebook.) And I have to say that they were awesome. Very funny, great stage presence and audience interaction. I think all the people who came in as blank slates liked their set better than JoCo's, and I have to say I can't especially blame them. They've been doing this whole live performance thing longer than he has, and they have their schtick and their patter down pretty damn well. They opened, conveniently enough, with Opening Band and proceeded to go through some of the best bits of their repetoire, including Your Town, Count To Ten, A Better Version of You, the Captain's Wife's Lament and Nun Fight. They also interspersed with their bits about rejected jingles, "If" songs and Randy Newman parodies. All in all a rocking and full set.

Then Mr. Coulton took the stage. I lost Eric & April to food at the bar and the end of Game 2 in the series with the Angels. But I honestly could have cared less because I was geeking out and geeking out hard. He got some truly excellent back-up from Paul & Storm and played nearly all of my favorites -- the good stuff from Thing A Week as well as Ikea, 1st of May, the Mandelbrot Set and Kennesaw Mountain Landis and more. The three of them also rocked out to a cover of Sweet Caroline (I believe as an encore) that was unexpected but very cool. I think macabre_grrl enjoyed herself and I certainly couldn't have been happier, except possibly if the show had gone on all night long.

I'm compelled to make mention of one particularly geeky moment: those of you familiar with Thing A Week are no doubt familiar with Mr. Fancy Pants. Coulton got up and performed that ditty, but before he did he explained that he would be putting down his guitar and breaking out his new toy, an expensive Zendrum MIDI controller. Mr. Fancy Pants is only about a minute and a half long, he explained, which made it too short for live performances. The original version was over before the audience even knew what to do with it. So he used the Zendrum to lengthen the song with a totally rocking solo. Mere words cannot do justice to the geekiness of the moment. I found a couple of Youtube videos of him performing with the Zendrum at other shows, but in both of them he's clearly still getting the swing of the instrument. That night he exhibited complete mastery of it, and it was awesome. In spite of its exorbitant cost and the fact that I'm not a musician at the moment, I kind of want a Zendrum now.