“Why JEFF BECK is UNCOPYABLE” goes the title of a video discussion from three years ago that has garnered 2.9 million views and 11,271 comments for all-purpose music pro Rick Beato’s You Tube channel. Beato, a musician, producer, sound engineer and educator with a graduate degree from the New England Conservatory of Music, came to that conclusion over years of listening to Beck play but never quite being able to figure out how he produces the sounds that come from his guitar. “No one sounds like Jeff Beck and no one could sound like Jeff Beck,” he says. “He plays the…
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Some films catch you right up and hold you close from the opening scenes in a kind of intimate, magic-of-the-movies sense, the outside world gone gently incommunicado as you settle into something resembling a trance state, putty in the hands of the film’s creative team and the alternate—or in some cases, more real than “real”— universe they are bringing to life in front of you. Director Clint Bentley’s “Train Dreams,” based on the 2011 novella of the same title by Denis Johnson, is one such film. For his third feature film, Bentley offers up an intensely personal portrait of one…
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Sometimes you’re shuffling back toward bed or the couch with a second cup of coffee in the stillness of early morning when you turn the corner and there it is: a confluence of light and object as the barely risen sun pierces a window and you behold a kind of brushless painting in progress, a still life built of the earth’s slow-but-inexorable orbit made all the more precious for how fleeting it is, impermanence (and beauty) its very essence, like a meticulously rendered sand castle doomed in mere moments by the incoming tide. Could be a chair and pillow, a…
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Attending a memorial service yesterday for a longtime friend of Mary’s gone too young, I beheld at the subsequent wake in a spacious social hall a looping video of still images from Peter’s life, scores of them showing endearing portraits of him paired sometimes individually with his son or daughter, other times with both of them, still others with his wife and children as a family unit. All of the photos collectively, in the spirit of this cold gray December day dedicated to honoring one man’s life, exuding the sweep, the presence, the intrinsic and undeniable power, the wide magisterial…