by Jack Brown | Jun 3, 2019 | Articles, Cinemadope, Columns, Featured
The Bing Arts Center building, down on Sumner Avenue in Springfield’s Forest Park neighborhood, has had its share of ups and downs over the years. It started life as Kossaboom’s Service Station a century ago, and filled tanks for a few decades before a reconfiguration...
by Jack Brown | May 28, 2019 | Articles, Cinemadope, Columns, Featured, Film
It was a scene straight out of a paranoid thriller: 1961, a Paris airport, the KGB circling ever closer around a famous Russian, bent on closing the net around their prey. A waiting plane destined for Moscow. At the last moment, a dash for freedom — with the help of...
by Jack Brown | May 20, 2019 | Articles, Arts, Cinemadope, Columns, Featured, Film
All of us have our seasonal touchstones. As New Englanders, especially, we seem to have a compulsion to carve up our years (maple season, mud season, mosquito season) and mark the moment that one quarter melts into another. For many, the spring-to-summer transition...
by Jack Brown | May 13, 2019 | Articles, Cinemadope, Columns, Featured, Film
Pride Day celebrations were just winding down in Northampton as I sat down to get to work on this column. Now in its 38th year, the event is still a powerful reminder of both the power of community and the necessity of equality and representation. But while the parade...
by Jack Brown | May 7, 2019 | Articles, Cinemadope, Columns, Featured
When Gilda Radner was in her heyday as a cast member on Saturday Night Live, I was still too young to know her hilarity first-hand; SNL was past my bedtime. But when she passed away in May of 1989, I was in high school. That was a Saturday, and I can still recall the...