Showing posts with label Live Video. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Live Video. Show all posts

Friday, June 21, 2013

A Tribute to Gandolfini

by Gregg Chadwick

Yesterday in Coventry, Bruce Springsteen dedicated a live full-album performance of Born to Run to the recently-departed actor James Gandolfini. Born to Run is a cinematic album that conjures up the noirish romance of New York and New Jersey seen through the eyes of a youthful protagonist. Unspoken desires and Jersey lowlifes haunt this character as he roams a landscape of broken dreams from the break of day until the dark morning hours. Gandolfini's characters seemed to embody this endless search for something more, something bigger, something more real.  Gandolfini will be deeply missed.





Video: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band Play Meeting Across The River for James Gandolfini in Coventry on June 20, 2013



Little Steven and James Gandolfini on April 7, 2002, during a Hard Rock Cafe Presents "Little Steven's Underground Garage" radio show at the Hard Rock Cafe in New York.
photo by Kevin Mazur / Wire Image

 

Video: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band Play Backstreets  for James Gandolfini in Coventry on June 20, 2013


Thursday, April 11, 2013

Incident at Hanging Rock

by Gregg Chadwick



At the Hanging Rock  by William Ford (1820–1886)
1875, oil on canvas, 79.2 x 117.5 cm
Collection of the National Gallery of Victoria


As March drew to a close, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street band played a concert that Australian music writers have lauded. I wish I could have been there to see Springsteen and the band rip it up at Hanging Rock. 




Incident on 57th Street in Australia 
Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band 
Live at Hanging Rock - Second Night - 31-03-2013

 Major international musicians often perform outdoor concerts at the Hanging Rock reserve. Leonard Cohen graced the venue in 2010 and last month Springsteen performed two shows at the conclusion of the Australian leg of his 'Wrecking Ball' tour. The musical venue at Hanging Rock is temporary and currently used about once a year for large concerts. 

Though I have spent quite a bit of time travelling through Australia over the years, I have not been to Hanging Rock in person. But, I have been there in the visions of painting and film, especially Peter Weir's remarkable Picnic at Hanging Rock. Weir's film, based on the novel by Australian author Joan Lindsay, focuses on a group of girls at a fictional Australian women's college  who vanish during a Valentine's Day picnic at Hanging Rock in 1900.




Roger Ebert described Picnic at Hanging Rock as "a film of haunting mystery and buried sexual hysteria" and remarked that it "employs two of the hallmarks of modern Australian films: beautiful cinematography and stories about the chasm between settlers from Europe and the mysteries of their ancient new home." That chasm between European culture and indigenous Australia especially revolves around the conception of time. Joan Lindsay in her autobiography, Time Without Clocks, describes how these mysteries felt to her:


"There were certain days when I sat at my typewriter in the empty green-aired room feeling like a deep-sea fish suspended in its natural element. Not only in my fish tank but outside in the sheltered valley all natural objects seemed in a state of suspension as they do immediately before an earthquake. It was a characteristic of the Marsh and perhaps had something to do with the old volcanoes seething and boiling so far below the earth’s crust that even the geologists hadn’t discovered them." 

- Joan Lindsay,  p124 (Time Without Clocks)

Art in all its guises evokes the mysteries of time and the most compelling creations leave the questions unanswered.






The Darkness - Leonard Cohen
Live at Hanging Rock - 21-11-2010




Friday, February 22, 2013

Nick Cave Live From Los Angeles: Feb 21, 2013



Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds Live In L.A. on February 21, 2013
 24 Hour HD Re-Broadcast  (Full Video)

"It was another title track, though, that represented for me the night's most profoundly emotional moment: A massive, knee-wobbling, tear-inducing version of “From Her to Eternity,” his great song of obsession with a woman living in the flat above. It’s a sparse, menacing track that suggests Elvis Presley possessed by a demon Kurt Weill.
I never thought I’d see him play it live, and its performance — with Ellis leading a scraping string section, Savage poking out that off-kilter piano melody and Adamson offering keyboard clusters — was overwhelming, music that conjured heaven and embodied the kind of bliss only present in the purest of expressions. The heavens opened over those five minutes, and I'm still buzzing about it."
-  Randall Roberts
Los Angeles Times Pop Music Critic