Great Guitar Solos – St. Vincent Plays Surgeon Live at La Cigale

Going left again, this time with St. Vincent, stage name of Annie Clark (and also the name of her band).

I love love love Annie Clark. Her guitar playing is extremely unconventional, which speaks to me as someone who adores unconventional playing. She has a very unique finger-picking style, and her use of strange effects on her guitars always makes me happy.

This song is called “Surgeon”, and it’s being performed live at La Cigale, Paris, France, on February 18, 2014. The video is an audience video (so, a “bootleg”) of the full song.

Before you catch the solo, listen to that pretty amazing riffing she does while singing… that isn’t easy. In fact, it’s hard. The solo itself, an unconventional, effects-laden masterpiece (in  my humble opinion), starts at 3:13 with that awesome riff, and ends at 4:37 with the end of the song.

Before moving on, please note that, during the solo especially, the lights flash quite a lot, so if you’re sensitive to that kind of thing, please either avoid this all together, or start the video and just listen without watching.

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Astronomy Picture of the Week – Small Wonders (Cassini’s Grand Finale)

(This is 30 minutes late because I was a couple days late with GGS.)

Still on the Grand Finale, and as I said when this started, I’ll be staying here until it’s over, because yes, I’m mourning the end of Cassini’s mission. It’s an image of three of Saturn’s smaller ring moons.

I hope you enjoy this one. As always, click on the image for the .tif download…

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Great Guitar Solos – Emily Remler Plays “How Insensitive”

Sorry this is late. I wasn’t feeling well early this week and have had to work on top of that. Not fun…

Time to turn left again, this time with some true, straight up Jazz.

Oh yes.

I’m going here.

Because a good guitar solo is a good guitar solo, regardless of the genre.

For those who don’t know, Emily Remler is an amazing Jazz guitarist who, sadly, died on May 4, 1990, at the age of 32. She died of a heart attack.

This is one of her many pieces, called How Insensitive. It’s an instrumental, so the whole thing is the guitar solo. It’s also live, so there’s video to watch. She was pretty amazing…

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Great Guitar Solos – Porcupine Tree Plays The Sound of Muzak Live

I’ve highlighted Steven Wilson before, as well as Porcupine Tree. At this point, it’s safe to say Porcupine Tree is done, despite many fans desperately wanting a reunion.

Admittedly, I feel quite different about modern music today then I did when I first heard this song. When I first heard it, I was definitely the worst kind of music snob, and so this became a sort of anthem to me. Now, I accept that there’s no accounting for taste, and that love of music is subjective. I’m not so sure that music is “going down” so much as it, by nature, cyclical. The genres and styles may change and/or evolve, but the way music is produced, performed, and made popular doesn’t ever really change… it just goes in circles…

That said, I do still enjoy this song immensely, especially for the guitar solo, which is another brilliant one played by Steven Wilson himself… it starts at 2:44 and ends at 3:38.

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Astronomy Picture of the Week – Puzzled Iapetus

Yet another one from Cassini’s Grand Finale. Yup, it’s still going…

Iapetus is a world of contrast, with light and dark regions fitting together like cosmic puzzle pieces.

Cassini Regio on Iapetus (914 miles or 1,471 kilometers across) is covered in a layer of dark, dusty material creating a stark contrast to the much brighter region that surrounds it. This leads to the moon’s distinctive, two-toned appearance. To learn more about the cause of the contrast between regions, see Encountering Iapetus.

This view looks toward Saturn-facing hemisphere of Iapetus. North on Iapetus is up and rotated 20 degrees to the right. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 11, 2017.

The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.6 million miles (2.6 million kilometers) from Iapetus. Image scale is 9 miles (15 kilometers) per pixel.

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Great Guitar Solos – Heart Plays Even It Up

About time I included Nancy Wilson. She really is such a great guitarist. This solo here is, honestly, very short and quite simple. But I’m including it because it works. It’s absolutely perfect for the song, itself a short and simple song.

That’s the thing about great solos… what makes them great isn’t necessarily how complicated they are. You can have a great guitarist playing an amazing solo, but if the solo doesn’t fit with the song, then it’s just not going to sound good. And short, simple solos can sound pretty darn amazing when they fit perfectly into the song. This one is a great example of that.

So…

The solo starts at 2:34 and ends at 2:48…

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Astronomy Picture of the Week: Mimas Dwarfed

We continue with images from Cassini’s Grand Finale. This time, it’s an image from over Saturn’s north pole, with a teeny tiny dot, Mimas, in the upper right…

From high above Saturn’s northern hemisphere, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft gazes over the planet’s north pole, with its intriguing hexagon and bullseye-like central vortex.

Saturn’s moon Mimas is visible as a mere speck near upper right. At 246 miles (396 kilometers across) across, Mimas is considered a medium-sized moon. It is large enough for its own gravity to have made it round, but isn’t one of the really large moons in our solar system, like Titan. Even enormous Titan is tiny beside the mighty gas giant Saturn.

This view looks toward Saturn from the sunlit side of the rings, from about 27 degrees above the ring plane. The image was taken in green light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on March 27, 2017.

The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 617,000 miles (993,000 kilometers) from Saturn. Image scale is 37 miles (59 kilometers) per pixel. Mimas’ brightness has been enhanced by a factor of 3 in this image to make it easier to see.

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When Social-Media Blocking Goes Political

I’ve talked about free speech often in the past. I even said, quite recently and quite angrily, that getting blocked on social media is not a violation of your free speech.

However… it would appear that some Twitter users have found an exception… and I’m not sure I can think up an argument against this…

President Donald Trump may be the nation’s tweeter-in-chief, but some Twitter users say he’s violating the First Amendment by blocking people from his feed after they posted scornful comments.

Lawyers for two Twitter users sent the White House a letter Tuesday demanding they be un-blocked from the Republican president’s @realDonaldTrump account.

“The viewpoint-based blocking of our clients is unconstitutional,” wrote attorneys at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University in New York.

The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Great Guitar Solos – Glen Campbell and Carl Jackson Play Dueling Banjos in 1973

Well, technically, guitar and banjo, but still…

I decided to include this, but I didn’t want to go for the clip from Deliverance because that would be too obvious and pretty much everyone’s seen it.

Instead, I want to highlight this performance from 1973. It features Carl Jackson on banjo and Glen Campbell on acoustic guitar, and it’s really, really good.

I’ve always enjoyed the song (no, I haven’t seen the movie, and I honestly don’t want to; that’s not a judgement call or anything, I’m just not interested), though sadly never really tried to play it because I’m really a terrible finger-picker (although hopefully that’ll be changing as I start learning Bron-Y-Aur Stomp).

Anyways… since this is an instrumental, just listen to, and watch the whole thing…

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