Cinemadope
by Jack Brown | Aug 19, 2019 | Articles, Cinemadope, Columns, Featured
I could hardly have imagined, back when I was a gangly middle schooler, how far into my adulthood one of my favorite stories would reach. But here it is some three-plus decades later, and it seems that every year there is some new tale that bears the influence of...
by Jack Brown | Aug 12, 2019 | Articles, Cinemadope, Columns, Featured, Film
As I was getting ready to write this column, the news came over the radio that filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker had died. Never really a household name, Pennebaker nevertheless contributed to our shared cultural vocabulary in ways that nearly anyone will recognize: if you...
by Jack Brown | Aug 5, 2019 | Articles, Cinemadope, Columns, Featured
Like so many others, I spent a short but richly rewarding stretch of my July binge-watching the third season of the Netflix series Stranger Things. If you don’t know it — and to my surprise, I found at least a couple of people this month who still hadn’t heard of Matt...
by Jack Brown | Jul 29, 2019 | Articles, Cinemadope, Columns, Featured, Film
All of us have those sounds that touch some deep part of our souls, triggering memories and emotions that might otherwise lay dormant. Like scents tied to childhood — the smell of a censer for lapsed Catholics, or the perfume of a grandmother gone too soon — sounds...
by Jack Brown | Jul 23, 2019 | Articles, Cinemadope, Columns, Featured, Film
It can be interesting to track how new editions of popular books change with the times. Even the titles, sometimes, can reflect the state of the era. When Lewis Hyde’s now-classic book The Gift was first published in 1983, it carried the wonderfully evocative subtitle...
by Jack Brown | Jul 16, 2019 | Articles, Cinemadope, Columns, Featured
Everyone has their own idea of what really makes it summer in New England. For some, it’s getting that first soft serve, melting in the after-dinner sun. Another might mark it with the first visit to a favorite swimming hole, when the water is still just a little too...
by Jack Brown | Jul 9, 2019 | Articles, Cinemadope, Columns, Featured
We often consider our visual artists in terms of their medium — a watercolorist, a sculptor, a portrait painter. But whatever their chosen tools, almost all artists share one thing that is so fundamental that we often overlook it: the gift of vision. And here I’m not...
by Jack Brown | Jul 1, 2019 | Articles, Cinemadope, Columns, Featured
Since its inception in 2007, the Ashfield Film Festival has become an annual gathering point for film lovers of the Valley. With an emphasis on local filmmaking, the fall festival — co-founded by Ashfield Cultural Council chair Tamsen Merrill and film editor Harry...
by Jack Brown | Jun 24, 2019 | Articles, Cinemadope, Columns, Featured
The trope of the working-class-hero has long had a place in American music, but particularly so since Bruce Springsteen’s career began to take off in the mid-1970s. Things only got more blue around the collar when his megahit album, “Born in the U.S.A.,” was released...
by Jack Brown | Jun 18, 2019 | Articles, Arts, Cinemadope, Columns, Featured
Living in the age of Instagram has meant — for better or for worse — that everyone is a photographer, or thinks they are. Which in the end has been a great win, I think, and one that has opened the door to creativity for an untold number of people who otherwise might...
