|
Adam Savage, host of the tv show MythBusters,
has a workshop in San Francisco’s Mission District. The walls and shelves—pretty
much every surface, actually—are covered in movie and TV costumes and props,
some actually used in filming and some replicas Savage acquired or made. Every
time I go there I turn into Rain Man, compelled to silently identify and catalog
everything I see, names and metadata popping up in front of my eyes like in the
Terminator’s head-up display. Gun from Blade Runner. Glove from Hellboy. Go bag
from The Bourne Identity. Time travel watch from Voyagers!
 At a party at the workshop one evening I find myself talking to a Noted Writer,
familiar from magazines and radio, a star of a kind. She is sitting on the edge
of Savage’s brown-felted pool table. I introduce her to Paul Sabourin, half the
comedy musical duo Paul and Storm, and explain that I’m about to write a story
about the fan cruise he helps organize, the JoCo Cruise Crazy, named after its
cofounder and headline performer, singer-songwriter Jonathan Coulton.
After chatting with us for a few minutes, Sabourin moves on, and I’m left alone
with the Noted Writer. “Do you know what all this stuff is?” she asks, motioning
at the display cases with her drink. “I have no idea what any of it is.”
“It’s kind of my thing,” I say. “You know, there’s a lot of overlap between
liking this kind of stuff and the JoCo Cruise.”
“Right,” the Noted Writer says, frowning. “Nerds.” She puts her drink down on
the pool table.
It has been years since I have heard anyone say that word, nerds, with contempt.
It’s been a compliment for, what, a decade now?
“I’m really sorry about this,” I say, reaching to move her glass. It’s wet;
it’ll hurt the felt. And even though it’s not my party and not my workshop, I’m
suddenly feeling very defensive.
Photo: Ian Allan - Cruisers Paul.((((F.
Tompkins (red tie) Jonathan Coulton (hat, bearded) Paul Sabourin (far right) and
several hundred of their friends.
Jonathan Coulton loves cruise ships. He loves the weird artificial mall running
down the middle, and he loves staring off the back of the ship into infinity.
That’s not to say that David Foster Wallace’s famously dark assessment of
shipboard vacationing (“There is something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise
that’s unbearably sad”) is unfamiliar. The lanyard that holds a laser-cut wooden
JoCo Cruise name tag around my neck came printed with the phrase “A supposedly
fun thing I’ll never do again.” Inside jokes are the coin of the realm around
here.
We’re sitting in the courtyard of a Fort Lauderdale, Florida, hotel; our ship
departs tomorrow morning. Around us, other cruise-bound performers are
gathering—Grant Imahara of MythBusters is introducing himself to NPR host Peter
Sagal. The comedian Paul F. Tompkins is filling a plate with nachos at the
buffet. This trip, Coulton says, he might break his rule not to go Jet Skiing,
but he’s not sure what he’ll do with his glasses.
Coulton has built a career out of self-released albums and podcasts. Gentle and
bearded, he’s the “one-man house band” on an NPR quiz show and was the
“contributing troubadour” for the magazine Popular Science. Coulton used to be a
software engineer, a nerd in a cubicle, but he dreamed of being a musician—and
unlike most people with those kinds of dreams, he made it happen. Perhaps more
impressive, he did it without a record label, through persistence and online
savvy, including a year in which he podcasted a new song every week. That heroic
origin story resonates with white-collar nerds who feel their spark of
creativity getting dimmer while they screw around in IT or at a lab bench.
When Coulton was at Yale and a member of the Whiffenpoofs, the a cappella group
had a gig on a cruise. They befriended a blackjack dealer and cadged an
invitation to a crew-only party, a whole secret world belowdecks. Coulton says
the party was a sweaty, dancy good time. So maybe it makes sense that for the
past four years he has run his own alternate world on a cruise ship. “We think
of it more like a convention than a music cruise,” Coulton says. “Actually, I’ve
never been on a music cruise. I should probably go on one.”
Read the rest of the article
---> |
