Cinemadope
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...
by Jack Brown | Jun 10, 2019 | Articles, Cinemadope, Columns, Featured, Film
It shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone that the military mights of the world have long been concerned with what we’ve come to call “optics” — the way in which a given political action is perceived by a public that is surrounded on all sides by an endless media...
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...
by Jack Brown | Apr 29, 2019 | Articles, Cinemadope, Columns, Featured, Film
Much has been written, by better minds than mine, about the human penchant for horror. That impulse to indulge in our most deeply seated human fears and frailties is behind both traffic jams at accident scenes and modern gods-and-monsters tales about the undead (or...
by Jack Brown | Apr 22, 2019 | Articles, Cinemadope, Columns, Featured
There were always a lot of women in my family. When I think back to my childhood, to family cookouts and graduations, to birthdays and funerals, it is always the aunts and grandmothers that rule my remembered roosts. They made sure everyone was fed, slipped the...
