The Season of Giving
Uh-oh, he’s blogging, he must want something.
No no! Ha ha, it’s funny you would think that. Very funny. I only wanted to remind you that the holiday season is upon us, the time of year when you buy things to give to other people. “Gifts” they are called. Just in case you are stuck for ideas, may I recommend a few options? Having nothing to do with me of course, these are just things I think a lot of people would REALLY LOVE to have:
Many Hands: Family Music for Haiti
This is the only place you can get the newest released Jonathan Coulton song “The Princess Who Saved Herself” and some of your $$$ will go to the Haitian People’s Support Project. Even aside from that, it’s a terrific collection of family music. Also available at Amazon.
Jonathan Coulton USB Thumb Drive
If you don’t care about Haiti or helping people or families, you can always purchase the Jonathan Coulton USB Thumb Drive. It’s got all the music I’ve ever released in high quality mp3 format (except not the above-mentioned princess song, and not the DVD stuff), plus artwork, plus source tracks for everything on JoCo Looks Back. You can even buy a pre-autographed version through Topatoco.
There’s a mess o’ nice ones over at Topatoco.com, including a couple that I never have with me at shows, and so to the Jonathan Coulton fan on your holiday gift-giving list, they may be new and fantastically special. (OK, that last one is through CafePress, which we all know makes kind of terrible shirts. I mostly include it so the table is even. But still!)
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Really I am just trying to help you. I’m a helpful guy.
What Is Up
From the mailing list:
Hello! If it seems like I haven’t written in a while, it’s because I haven’t written in a while. I’ve been hard at work on a new album with all new material, which apparently means I have to write a lot of songs and do a lot of work. Which is totally OK with me! I love to work!
Here are the things I want to tell you about.
1) The New Record Album
Yes, it’s going very well thank you. We’ve got a bunch of stuff recorded and it’s very exciting to hear it coming together. I still have to write a couple more “good ones” but the ones I already have are not too shabby. The band sounds fantastic and John Flansburgh and I are bringing in a bunch of other talented musicians to play their talented instruments. It’s good stuff, and I hope to have a clearer idea of when it will actually be finished and you can hear it. Stay tuned.
2) The Cruise
Also going well – we’ve pulled together a nice lineup of entertainers and it’s going to be a TON of fun. In case you missed the late additions, here’s the complete lineup as of now: John Hodgman, Wil Wheaton, Paul and Storm, Bill Corbett, Kevin Murphy, Molly Lewis, Mike Phirman, and WAIT THERE’S MORE! John Roderick, Paul F. Tompkins, and Peter Sagal. Plus me. As I say, a TON of fun. For more details and updates check out http://www.jococruisecrazy.com.
3) Some Shows
There’s not a lot of touring happening these days, I have too much work to do writing good songs. But there are some opportunities to see me do my thang (i.e., play the guitar and sing about it). Look at this.
New York, NY – Best Buy Theater
W00tstock 2.7 (in which I play the role of Wil Wheaton)
Friday October 29 at 7 PM
Guests include: MC Frontalot, Marian Call, Jason Finn (and of course Paul and Storm and Adam Savage) PLUS EVEN MORE. I promise I will even play some new songs (Boo! We like the old stuff better!)
Tickets: http://bit.ly/acxghO
Raleigh, NC – Lincoln Theater
Jonathan Coulton Acoustic (I have to specify now, there is a band sometimes)
With Paul and Storm
Thursday December 2 at TBD
Details and tickets to come!
Atlanta, GA – Variety Theater
Jonathan Coulton Acoustic
With Paul and Storm
Friday December 3 at 8:30 PM
Tickets: http://bit.ly/1Ny2zs
And that’s it for now.
And I Couldn’t Even Get the Math Right
I heard first through Twitter, but later through many of your emails and comments that Benoit Mandelbrot died on Thursday at 85. I can remember stumbling across his book “The Fractal Geometry of Nature” in my high school library, reading it and not really understanding it, but finding it mind blowing nonetheless. To me, that particular brand of hazy understanding feels like the correct way to think about a lot of things – fractals, electron clouds, cats in boxes waiting to be poisoned – the natural world is really too complicated and beautiful for any of us to fully understand, and that’s OK. That’s in fact what makes it so beautiful.
Many of you have asked if I’m planning on changing the lyrics or retiring the song. I’m not sure yet, but I don’t think I’ll do either of those things. I like the song and it would be a shame not to play it anymore, so retiring it is extremely unlikely. Changing the lyrics, I don’t know. On the one hand, the song is now factually inaccurate. Of course that hasn’t stopped me before. As many of you have pointed out, my description of the Mandelbrot Set in the song is at best incomplete, and at worst plain wrong. This failing of mine is even mentioned in the wikipedia article about the set, so that’s great (although if you look at the Popular Culture section of that article you’ll see that Arthur C. Clarke seems to have gotten it even more wrong than me – just saying).
On the other hand, that’s the song. It’s how I wrote it, and it was true then. It’s a snapshot of a certain time. I’ve never fixed the math error and it never bothered me all that much because you know, close enough. In the Times obit Mandelbrot is quoted as saying that he didn’t really like to prove his insights, he mostly liked to make crazy conjectures to make everyone think about stuff. That sounds about right to me. I like to think that Mandelbrot in particular would appreciate the “close enough” nature of my description. (And just to answer another FAQ, I know he’s heard the song: he talks about it briefly in this Big Think Interview.)
Not to get too heavy on you, but truth itself has a kind of fractal component – you can be right at one scale, but then zoom in and discover you had it all wrong. I stopped trusting people with absolute opinions the day I understood the answer to the question “How long is the coast of Britain?” is “It depends.” Not coincidentally that was the same day I discovered Mandelbrot. That was the question that led him to invent a new branch of mathematics by creating a way to quantify and discuss this kind of weirdness, and it changed the way we think about all sorts of things.
I’m leery of writing this post because I wouldn’t feel right about becoming the artist with the Official Mandelbrot Mourning Song. But it’s true that I still get a little misty when I sing those lyrics and remember what they mean to me – that everything around us is at least a little weird and unknowable and that’s the way it’s supposed to be.
That caveat aside, I leave you with one of my favorite fan videos, chalkboard animation made a few years ago by some Cornell students. I’m grateful to geekdad for reminding me that it existed.
Thing a Week Redux
Five years ago this month I was newly unemployed and had just started Thing a Week. An awful lot has happened since then, and it feels very strange to go back and look at what I was writing and remember how I felt. I get a lot of credit now for figuring out how to do the internet musician thing, but as I keep telling everyone, I’ve never really had any idea what I was doing. Over the course of that year there were a lot of successes and failures and mood swings and it felt like the greatest idea in the world and at the same time it felt like I was making a terrible mistake.
Five years later here I am, going into a studio to work on an album with one of my heroes that I never imagined I would meet, let alone work with. And it turns out I have to write a lot of songs very quickly again. It feels harder now, there’s a lot more to live up to than there was when most of my web traffic came from my Mom. But it’s instructive to remember what it was like to just write and not care because nobody was listening – good stuff comes from those circumstances. So I’m doing my best to continue not caring.
Anyway, I’m re-running Thing a Week in real time if you’d like to ride that roller coaster again. I have set up a Tumblr for this purpose. So far two weeks have gone by in secret, I hope the 9 followers who somehow found it have been enjoying it.
Go look: thingaweekredux.com
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