“They Got Lost” live, from Severe Tire Damage
They Might Be Giants Arrive In ‘Stereo’
Why does the sun shine? What is a shooting star? Where have all the flowers gone? They Might Be Giants relentlessly crisscrosses America in our chartreuse microbus, asking the kind of probing musical questions that have earned us all those obscene, angry letters from high school science teachers. Arguments routinely break out en route to our next gig about the nature of the Van Allen radiation belts or whether a human could subsist only on Nutella. Most of us didn’t do all that well in school and it is perhaps for this reason that there are never any ultimate conclusions as we careen down the interstate. One of our longer running bus arguments was about how the hell a geostationary orbit works. Nobody was really sure of the correct answer, though we each talked as if we were, which made the debate all the more intense.
Perhaps unfairly, we have been given the opportunity to present our explanation of various scientific matters on a new DVD for truth seekers of all ages called ‘Here Comes Science.’ Up until this point, TMBG’s output has consisted almost entirely of unverifiable poetic assertions such as ‘The Statue Got Me High,’ ‘I Can’t Hide from My Mind’ and ‘Youth Culture Killed My Dog.’ With our new release, we have been forced to fact check each claim using methods beyond our old standby “because I said so.”
Somehow the ability to entertain while singing about testable information wins the day and our imperfect grasp of the subject is forgiven. Maybe we even score points with the rest of the laymen for our charming naiveté. This might explain why Ira Flatow, who hosts ‘Science Friday’ on National Public Radio was so friendly to us as we chatted it up with him and played our songs on his show recently. He even deigned to pose for a picture I took of him and Mr. Flansburgh with my old fashioned 3D camera, a 1955 Stereo Realist, which takes a pair of images a few inches apart. To view a stereo photograph in 3D one normally looks through a viewer that merges the two images by sending each to one of your respective eyeballs. There is, however, a way you can enjoy the effect without a viewer but with a little effort. By leaning slightly away from your computer screen and crossing your eyes until the two pictures overlap many of you will be able to see Ira with all the depth he actually possesses in person when he’s behind the microphone. Don’t worry if you don’t get it right away. Stare at the picture and relax. Oh my god! It’s like he’s right there!
-John Linnell (source)
There are many occasions when life on the road with our band (the five main lads and several adjunct musicians that variously form They Might Be Giants) needs to be viewed as a whole, embraced as it were with both arms, swallowed in one gulp. To get the full picture, one normally has to take so many steps backward that there is a very real danger of falling off the stage or crashing into some obstacle behind you. Another way to take it all in is to get multiple views and stitch them together to make a crazy quilt. Most appealingly, you can take a picture of everything at once with a swing-lens, which turns like a lighthouse glass to sweep across the field of vision and produces a deliciously long image without any edge distortion. Enter the Horizon, an inexpensive swing-lens camera invented by the Russians in the 1960s and still being produced.
Need for such a wide perspective arose recently when the band hired not one, but two euphonium players in addition to a baritone saxophonist to execute a low-horn-heavy track called ‘Seven’ from our [cough, Grammy award-winning, cough] children’s album ‘Here Comes the 123s.’ Left to right we see Dan Miller (guitar, peeking out from behind euphonium #1), Dan Levine holding euphonium #1, John Flansburgh (guitar, vocals), Stan Harrison (baritone sax), Marty Beller (drums) and the euphoric Kurt Ramm on euphonium #2.
Another gig that called for the broadest possible view was one in which John Flansburgh required guitar playing assistance from some of the throngs of kids who came to see us in Kansas City. Budding guitar distortion enthusiasts are shown here to extend beyond the curvature of the earth.
-John Linnell (source)
“Shoehorn With Teeth” with the new avatars.
Avatars of They.
Avatars of They.
“Ana Ng” - October 8, 2009 St. Andrew’s Hall, Detroit
They Might Be Giants Celebrate Canon’s Dial-35
As our tour bus noses its way across America, I continue to document our journey with a battery of obsolete 20th century camera gear. The stringent needs of the traveling photographer are here met with a wide array of specialized tools, ranging from the not-too-shabby to the barely-working-even-with-tape-holding-it-together. Leaning towards the former category is the spectacular Canon Dial-35, a truly odd-looking camera produced in Japan in the early 1960s, when, in their quest for the ever-more miniature, the Japanese embraced the half-frame format. Making the frame half as big meant that you could get twice as many shots on an ordinary roll of film, plus the film didn’t have to move as far between shots. This enabled cameras like the Dial-35 to have a spring motor do the advancing. (See photo, modeled by Mr. John Flansburgh. Yes, it’s supposed to look kind of like a rotary phone.) The idea was you could get 20 shots off in a few seconds — a feature that’s still rare in modern digital point and shoots.
This feature is useful when I’m standing onstage next to our drummer Marty Beller during a part of the show when he attempts to wreck his own drum kit. This crowd-pleasing moment is as hard to capture on film as the ivory-billed woodpecker, chiefly because I’m up there performing next to him and have other important duties like singing and playing the accordion, but the Dial-35 is at the ready when I have a moment to spare.
For fans of the old British TV series ‘The Prisoner,’ that’s the same camera Patrick MacGoohan uses to shoot clandestine pictures of the Village. I don’t think a spy camera could be much more conspicuous than that. You could pretend you were just chatting on the phone, but I suspect the faux-rotary dial without a cord attached would give you away.
(source)
