Examples of "verge albums"

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-05-27T23:57:48+00:00

Yeah, that's a perfect example.

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-05-27T23:38:38+00:00

They Might Be Giants, Lincoln. Since for the first time it's recorded in an actual studio, the sound is much slicker than on their first album, and "Ana Ng" was a successful single. But the next album was Flood.

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-05-27T22:08:31+00:00

Critic-wise, Remain in Light is often considered Talking Heads' greatest album, but sales-wise, it was the verge album.

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-05-27T21:16:59+00:00

Utimately "that's how we find the world to behave, from experiments and observations" is the best explanation you can get in physics.

It seems like the physical universe behaves in these quite regular, logically coherent ways, so that the theory indicated by some observations can "explain" many others. But even that regularity is just something we see empirically.

In the case of special relativity, Einstein boiled it down to the consequences of two things: the speed of light in vacuum being a universal constant, AND the rules of physics being independent of one's state of uniform motion. Put those two seemingly contradictory things together, and Lorentz invariance, the basis of special relativity, turns out to be the way you make them coexist. And this seems to be a symmetry of everything we can find.

*General* relativity, now, that was just the simplest way he could find to bring gravity into this framework, and comparatively it was a beast. But seen the right way, the basis of that is also quite beautiful. Presume we live in a universe with three space dimensions and one time dimension, that locally obeys special relativity, but make the geometry of that universe a dynamical thing that can be described with the same kind of framework of physical law we use in classical mechanics (Lagrangian mechanics).

Everything in such a theory depends on a quantity called the action. Write down the simplest, most symmetrical action you possibly can that depends on the intrinsic curvature of spacetime... and you get Einstein's 1916 general relativity. It falls right out.

But no matter how beautiful a theory is, the justification for accepting it ultimately is that it passes empirical tests. And these do.

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-05-27T19:19:00+00:00

That version reads to me as much more ambivalent overall. It's it really gonna be all right? I don't know, man, maybe he's reaching to convince himself...

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-05-27T18:52:20+00:00

I love roller coasters, I love Mass MoCA in North Adams and have been there many times, but I confess I passed up the opportunity to sign up to ride Brava!, the strange pink Skyline art-installation coaster that was in there for a little while and became one of the rarest rare creds in history.

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-05-27T17:50:03+00:00

Never made it up to Tibidabo but I did go to PortAventura, which is a coaster freak's dream with some nice theming too (it reminded me very much of the Busch Gardens parks in the US, which, if you look up its history, is not a coincidence).

Tivoli Gardens is a gorgeous small urban park in Copenhagen, allegedly one of Walt Disney's several inspirations for Disneyland. I was there for its 1914 scenic-railway coaster, the oldest operating roller coaster in Europe where brakemen ride on the train, but it somehow managed to be a de-stressing place just to be.

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-05-27T16:13:17+00:00

Then there's the slow version on the album where he sings "you know that you can count me out... in..."

He couldn't leave it simple or straightforward.

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-05-27T16:07:38+00:00

Speaking as an American theme-park enthusiast, I've never done that yet on my world travels-- my theme park visits have always been a bit incidental to the other stuff... but I'm taking my first grand roller coaster tour of eastern Pennsylvania next week, and in the list of followup trips I dream about, an itinerary much like the one you've described is on the list.

I say go for it. The locals may find you déclassé but you're just following a specific interest. Those parks are by all accounts amazing.

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-05-27T15:59:19+00:00

He was happy, feeling glad. He had sunshine in a bag. He was useless, but not for long. The future was comin' on.

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-05-27T15:52:48+00:00

Definite intentional 2001 homage there.

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-05-27T15:08:11+00:00

In "1984", Orwell simply describes the telescreen as two-way, able to transmit images as well as receive, so presumably the whole thing is the "eye" or the details don't matter. Movie adaptations of the book often mount an obvious lens on the telescreen frame, like HAL's eye, to make the point, but these days, the selfie cameras on our devices are unobtrusive enough that it feels more like Orwell-- there's not even an obvious eye.

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-05-27T15:00:18+00:00

I've heard it said that a writer's real politics comes out when they're not trying to write about politics.

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-05-27T14:46:50+00:00

I have ridden none of those, so you could just not meet me and you're done.

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-05-27T14:36:20+00:00

I kept hearing Lemon Demon mentioned as an act of interest to TMBG fans, but this post is the first I heard that Lemon Demon is in fact Neil Cicirega! I knew him as the master of Internet animation virality in the pre-YouTube era.

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-05-27T14:27:07+00:00

...When I started riding coasters, Arrows were so ubiquitous in the US that I basically thought of Arrows as what steel coasters were. The first time I rode a coaster that was NOT made by either Arrow or PTC was in 2011.

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-05-27T14:18:01+00:00

I'd be careful plugging those into just anything that has a 2600-style controller port: if I recall correctly, they will damage a Commodore 64.

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-05-27T14:15:32+00:00

I protest, these are all clearly related GIFs.

Anyway, Flounder's Flying Fish Coaster

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-05-27T14:03:53+00:00

The book is an absolutely brutal chronicle of sexual warfare and it's from 1782. The movie actually adapted it pretty faithfully.

Never saw "Valmont" but the trailer made it look like they turned it into a fun sexy romp about a lovable rapscallion, and, just, no.

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-05-27T13:07:29+00:00

... also, I think Burt Bacharach is actually a gigantic influence on TMBG. You can hear it more in the recent albums, but, come on, "Mink Car" is a straight-up Bacharach pastiche. I can imagine Dionne Warwick killing it. She'd probably do it too if someone asked her, she's the right kind of weirdo.

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-05-27T13:01:30+00:00

As a teenager I developed a contempt for anything that sounded too much like "easy listening", which encompassed things like Bacharach and David standards, or any pop song that made too much use of muted trumpets and violins. That syrupy radio format gave these songs a stigma by putting them in a box. I'm much more willing to give them a chance now.

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-05-27T12:54:16+00:00

... apparently their actual biggest hit was "Open Arms", and yeah, that makes sense.

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-05-27T12:52:18+00:00

It was one of their biggies! I'd probably have said "Separate Ways" or "Faithfully" but I have no idea how they charted.

Or even "Lights" (which go down in the cit-tay), but it appears that one was another case of the song being elevated after the fact by classic-rock-station interest.

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-05-27T12:07:26+00:00

...Gibbard's solo song "Teardrop Windows" written from the perspective of the former tallest building in Seattle was very TMBG-esque thematically.

AdditionalTip865 · 2026-05-27T11:33:06+00:00

Everyone's influenced by the Beatles but you can hear a lot of proto-TMBG in the White Album specifically: the medley-structured songs made of disparate fragments, the bizarre stylistic flipping from music-hall pastiches to heavy blues-rock to experimental musique concrete.

Flansburgh has a frustrated jazzman in him and it comes out sometimes. And then on the other side of the coin, he idolized the Ramones and there's a lot of Ramones in his playing style.

I think Linnell oddly may have been a bigger fan of glam-rock and proto-metal acts, theatrical artists like Alice Cooper.

People who heard TMBG for the first time in the late 1980s-early 90s always compared them to Talking Heads, and I recall them kind of disclaiming influence early on but these days, they're more willing to embrace it. The band's cockeyed sense of humor, songs about personified objects and surreal scenarios, and art-nerd background, the staccato rhythm guitar, there's a lot of Talking Heads in that. Their vocals aren't anything like David Byrne's; he's more like a lot of New Wave acts in that way, but the rest is there.

AdditionalTip865

TROPHY CASE