Atheism, Music, and More...
Also Politics, Anthropology, General Science, and Other Stuffs
I’d like to introduce y’all to one of my current favorite guitarists. Her name is Marissa Paternoster, and she’s the lead vocalist and lead guitarist for the three-piece band Screaming Females.
This song is called “Bell”, and the video is from Audiotree. I did want to show you the official music video, but it doesn’t actually show the guitar solo, so I picked this instead.
Her playing throughout is phenomenal, but the guitar solo starts at 1:08 and ends at 2:00. Also, her voice is mesmerizing.
As usual until September, this is from Cassini’s Grand Finale…
The light of a new day on Saturn illuminates the planet’s wavy cloud patterns and the smooth arcs of the vast rings.
The light has traveled around 80 minutes since it left the sun’s surface by the time it reaches Saturn. The illumination it provides is feeble; Earth gets 100 times the intensity since it’s roughly ten times closer to the sun. Yet compared to the deep blackness of space, everything at Saturn still shines bright in the sunlight, be it direct or reflected.
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 10 degrees above the ring plane. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Feb. 25, 2017 using a spectral filter which preferentially admits wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 939 nanometers.
The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 762,000 miles (1.23 million kilometers) from Saturn. Image scale is 45 miles (73 kilometers) per pixel.
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.
(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…
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…
Another one from Cassini’s Grand Finale. And yeah, I’m a day late.
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft sees bright methane clouds drifting in the summer skies of Saturn’s moon Titan, along with dark hydrocarbon lakes and seas clustered around the north pole.
Compared to earlier in Cassini’s mission, most of the surface in the moon’s northern high latitudes is now illuminated by the sun. (See here for a view of the northern hemisphere from 2007.) Summer solstice in the Saturn system occurred on May 24, 2017.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 9, 2017, using a spectral filter that preferentially admits wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 938 nanometers. Cassini obtained the view at a distance of about 315,000 miles (507,000 kilometers) from Titan.
As usual, click on the image for the .tif download…
Also late to this (warning: that link includes the Facebook video of Philando’s death; it does not include the more recent dashcam as far as I can tell; I will not be sharing that)…
Jeronimo Yanez, the Minnesota police officer who fatally shot Philando Castile during a traffic stop last year, was found not guilty of second-degree manslaughter Friday.
He also was acquitted of two counts of intentional discharge of firearm that endangers safety.
Castile’s death garnered widespread attention — and sparked nationwide protests over the use of force by police — after his girlfriend broadcast the shooting’s aftermath on Facebook Live.
Not guilty? Fucking not guilty?
I just… I…
I’m late to this one, I know. I’m sorry.
Seattle police officers shot and killed a woman at her apartment Sunday morning in front of “several children” when the woman, who relatives said was pregnant, “confronted” them with a knife, according to a statement from authorities.
The Seattle Times reported that the 30-year-old woman had called police to report a possible burglary.
At a vigil Sunday night, family identified the woman as Charleena Lyles, according to the Times, and relatives said she had a history of mental health struggles. She was several months pregnant, her family said, and too “tiny” for officers to have felt threatened by her — even if she had a knife.
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.