The Luna Park Gazette

When most people go home, I go to work. I work the night shift at a market research firm in Manhattan, where I am paid to watch TV shows I wouldn’t normally watch under the threat of death. From "Yes, Dear" to NASCAR, I’ll look at anything for 20 bucks an hour. Call me a media whore if you want,I won’t be offended. I’m too tired. It’s only three nights a week, but it feels like seven. I’ve only been there a month but it feels like years. My schedule varies so that I work weekends, holidays, and all the other times normal people are having fun. Going into the office, I have to fight a line of day workers streaming out of the subway station on their way home. Some nights, if I’m covering a late show, I won’t actually put my fingers to the keyboard until 11 pm. Most nights I don’t get home until 2 am. I’ve stayed out this late, even later, before but never for a damn job. When I was a kid going out for a night on the town with my buddies, my mother would always say “don’t come h...

I spent April Fool’s Day on Amtrak and I'm sure it wasn't a coincidence. I managed to avoid joy buzzers, itching powder and whoopee cushions as I rode roundtrip from New York to Albany; I didn’t take any calls for Prince Albert in a can and no one tried to pull the old looking up in the air gag on me. I had too much on my mind to even think about that stuff. I was going upstate to interview for a job I didn’t want in a place where I didn’t want to live. If you’re confused, join the club. I had answered an ad from the Associated Press—let me say that again, the Associated Press —and to my horror the news editor there called me and expressed interest. I liked the idea of working for a huge outfit like AP. But Albany? I'm having trouble with that. All I know about Albany is that it’s the state capital and it’s up north where it’s even colder than it is here. And, no slight against Albany, but after all these years as a reporter, I’ve had my fill of small towns and seco...

People die hard in Sin City. In the new film from Robert Rodriquez, characters are stabbed, shot, bludgeoned, and repeatedly run over by cars. They smash through doors and dive from windows in lieu of taking the stairs. Their genitals are shot off, their limbs are chopped away and their bodies are pierced by arrows. And their heads? Oh, gosh, their heads are chopped off, pierced, battered, mounted on walls, and crushed into Jell-o. As Marv, Sin City’s resident psychopath asks after an unsuccessful jolt from an electric chair: "Is that the best you can do, you pansies?" Apparently, yes, it is. And that’s unfortunate. Rodriquez brings Frank Miller’s graphic novel to very graphic life, taking us into the double-dealing heart of a fictional metropolis, where corruption rules, life is cheap, and the weather really sucks. It rains a lot here. Buildings, bridges and monuments loom high, dark and threatening. And there’s no hint of sunlight in this mostly black and white world (...