A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

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

The Bottom Line  Although Smetana's life ended in tragedy, his music became the foundation of Czech musical tradition. This European album highlights his best works.   Bedrich Smetana, along with Antonin Dvorak, is a composer who helped put what's now known as the Czech Republic on the classical music map; before the world heard his comic opera  The Bartered Bride  in 1866, this small Slavic country (part of the Austrio-Hungarian Empire) was considered to be a musical backwater. Like Peter Tschaikovsky and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in Russia and Richard Wagner in Germany, Smetana's music was, first and foremost, a reflection of his fierce nationalism; his use of such traditional Czech dances as the  polca, furiant,  and  dumka  in his works give his compositions a distinctive regional flavor. This earned him the reputation of being the founder of Czech musical tradition, and his most nationalistic piece, the tone cycle known as  Ma Vlast (My Fatherland ) is one of the best

When I first saw George Lucas' Star Wars (aka Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope ) in the fall of 1977, not only was my imagination totally blown away by its story, characters and fantastic visuals, but I almost instantly became enchanted by the music composed for its score by John Williams. Although I had often paid attention to movie themes before I saw Lucas' space fantasy film set "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away," I'd never been so enthralled by a film score until I listened closely to Williams' neo-Romantic styled score on that Saturday in mid-October of 1977 when I finally went to see the movie everyone and his (or her) cousin was talking about . Because I was familiar with science-fiction A and B movies from the 1950s and '60s, I expected the music from Star Wars to be futuristic, minimalist and full of electronic sounds and other-worldly ambiances. To my surprise, with the exception of the two Cantina Band tracks heard in A