A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

"As I suspected, you're a rank sentimentalist." - Capt. Louis Renault to Rick Blaine, Casablanca Hello there, Constant Reader! Welcome to another edition of Odds and Ends, an occasional feature here in A Certain Point of View where I write about other things that aren't necessarily my usual Review of the Day fare. I was hoping I'd have that review of John Carpenter's 1983 adaptation of Stephen King's Christine, but I haven't gotten around to it this week. I received the Blu-ray via Amazon Prime and I've watched it once, but I think I'll have to watch it again at least one more time. I liked the movie well enough, even though 36 years have passed since I saw it in theaters back in Miami, Florida, but if I'm going to review it, I need to see it again, this time paying attention to the acting of the cast and the differences between the original novel by King and Bill Phillips' screenplay. Anyway, I've been feeling a bit senti...

On October 26, 1987, Columbia Records released Billy Joel's second live album,  Концерt, which is Russian for "Concert." Recorded during his six-performance gigs in Moscow and Leningrad (now called St. Petersburg), Концерт was the first American rock-and-roll album ever recorded in the then-Soviet Union.  In its original 1987 version - Columbia re-released it in 2014 as an expanded album titled A Matter of Trust: The Bridge to Russia - Концерt is a 16-track recording released as a double-LP vinyl set, a double-length cassette, and on compact disc. It presents one Russian song ( Odoya ), 13 songs from various Billy Joel albums, including 52nd Street, An Innocent Man, and his then-current The Bridge, which Joel was promoting in his "The Bridge Tour." Концерт also includes two covers: The Beatles' Back to the USSR , and Bob Dylan's The Times They Are A-Changin' .  Track List: 1. Odoya : Performer – Zhournalist: 1:17 2. Angry ...

(C) 2018 Alex Diaz-Granados and CreateSpace (an Amazon company) It is February 1998. 33-year-old Jim Garraty is a respected history professor and bestselling author who lives in New York City. Popular with both students and readers, Jim seems to have it all. Fame, a nice apartment in Manhattan, and a reputation as one of the best World War II historians in the U.S. But when he gets a cryptic email from his best friend from high school, Jim is forced to relive his past - and a trip to his home town of Miami reopens old wounds he thought had healed long ago. Q.: How - or why - did you choose your characters' names? Did you go through a phone book and choose names at random or did you name Jim, Marty, and Mark after people you know? A.: Jim Garraty - or as Stephen King would put it, my I-guy - was, in every iteration of the story (from a CRW-2001 assignment to finished product), Jim Garraty. I'm not sure why I chose James/Jim/Jimmy as his first name; I just knew that...

Well we all have a face That we hide away forever And we take them out and show ourselves When everyone has gone  - Billy Joel,  The Stranger   When Columbia Records (now part of Sony Music) first released Billy Joel's fifth album, I was 14 years old and still having to cope with the aftermath of my first serious breakup, the stresses of what was then called junior high, and my mom's decision to sell our house and move to the condominium where we still live. To my teenager's world-view, all of these "issues" seemed to loom over my life like an army of avenging demons, and I was lost in a fugue of sadness, anger, and confusion.  I mention this seemingly irrelevant bit of autobiographical detail because at the time my older sister Vicky was on a pop music kick, and though she had moved out of the house, she had not, thank the Force, taken the family's huge Zenith stereo cabinet, which had a turntable for LP records, an AM-FM radio receiver, and a state of the ...