The Luna Park Gazette

Now it can be told... I was speaking with my niece in San Francisco the other day and she told me about an incident from her childhood that happened at Christmas time many years ago. She was just a little girl--she's a teen-ager now--and her father/my brother decided to do the Santa-Claus-coming-down-chimney routine for her. So he starts banging on the wall to make her think Old St. Nick is coming in for a landing. The only problem with this plan, she tells me, was that she was terrified by the noise and ran crying into her room. The next day she asked my brother who was making that awful racket. "He told me it was Uncle Robert," she said. Say what? How did I get left holding the Santa bag? I was 3,000 miles away minding my own business in Brooklyn and I have to take the rap for spooking small children? Why couldn't you just blame Santa? The guy doesn't exist anyway--sorry, kids--so he doesn't have to worry about adorable little girls hating his guts. It's...

My old Dell computer finally died on Saturday and as much I hated the damn thing, I have to admit I miss it. It seems the mother board went south and now I finally have to get that new computer I’ve been threatening to buy for over a year. The Dell had been giving me trouble for ages. There was a point where I was on the phone with tech support so often I could have run for prime minister of India. And that probably wouldn't have helped much. They pretty much rebuilt the thing from scratch and repair people were coming to my house more often than the mailman. I even threatened to sue them at one point I was so furious. On Friday I was uploading pictures from last Christmas when the thing crashed and refused to get back up. So now the thing is dead, but my holiday plans are going to prevent me from getting a replacement until early in January. I don’t think it will be a Dell. I went to an internet café in my neighborhood this weekend and it had this creepy kind of peep show feeling ...

Dillinger died for this? I finally got around to watching Manhattan Melodrama , an old movie I had recorded several weeks ago. The 1934 film stars Clark Gable and William Powell as lifelong friends who wind up on opposite sides of the law--something that seems to happen a lot in old movies. Myrna Loy plays the love interest and this is the first time she and Powell were paired up. The two would go on to make the "Thin Man" series, eventually starring in 14 movies together. The film is hardly a classic. The plot is creaky and contrived, even allowing for the passage of time, but it’s got so many great people in it that you really don’t care. But the reason that I really wanted to see this movie was because this was the last film that the infamous bank robber John Dillinger saw before being gunned down by FBI agents as he left the Biograph Theater in Chicago. FBI agents had staked out the theater, but they didn’t want to move in on Dillinger until the film was over. My first re...

The thing about buying a used book is that sometimes you can get two stories in one. The first, of course, is the book itself; the thousands of words the author has pulled together in an effort to enlighten, amuse, outrage, or otherwise entertain us. But another story--or at least traces of one--can come from the book’s previous owner—inscriptions, notes, doodles, and even the underlined sections that someone has put on the pages before they belonged to you. They are incredibly small pieces of other lives and that’s probably why I enjoy them so much. It's fun to imagine who these people were and what they were thinking when they decided to write in their book. A few years ago I picked up a copy of the “Spiritual Diary,” a book of a yoga master's inspirational sayings, at a used book stand on the Upper West Side. An inscription by the previous owner, dated Jan. 1, 2001, read “ As an art journal of sorts…all soul, babe, Love, D. ” It’s followed by something I can’t begin to make ...

Each year before I stuff myself on Thanksgiving Day I go to the gym and try to “earn the bird.” My goal is to work out like a psycho—more so than usual—so I’ll be able to enjoy a guilt-free holiday meal. It’s ridiculous, of course. The idea of me being free of guilt is kind of like an opera being free of music. Where's the fun in that? But I did my best this week and then I headed out to Long Island with my sister and auntie to have dinner with my cousin and her husband. There were relatively few glitches, even though I (naturally) worried about all sorts of mayhem, like miss train connections, psychotic parade-goes, runaway floats, terrorist elves. etc. We had one minor incident when we mistakenly got off a packed train at Jamaica Station only to learn that we didn’t have to switch trains. We charged back onto the train expecting to stand for the duration of our trip, but the three lovely people who had taken our seats immediately got up and insisted we sit back down. A few days h...

Illustration by Greg Bellamy One of the first things a reporter does when arriving at a major fire scene is find the guy in the white helmet. That’ll be the fire chief and he’s the one who will help you make some sense out of all the mayhem. Or at least you hope he will. I covered many fires during my five years as a police reporter in Pennsylvania. There were blazes where people died, where there was nothing left of the building but the foundation; one time a gas explosion destroyed an entire church in Stroudsburg. But I think the biggest fire I ever covered in all those years chasing sirens was the blaze that destroyed the Salvation Army Thrift Center in East Stroudsburg nearly 20 years ago. The building was huge and it was filled with old clothes, furniture and other second hand items. One night all of that stuff quiet literally went up in flames—and I was right there. Many of the fires I wrote about happened in some distant part of my coverage area. Often by the time I arrived the...

I’ve been a film addict ever since I saw “The Men Who Made the Movies” on PBS nearly 40 years ago. I can’t begin to guess how many hours—years—of my life I’ve spent in movie theaters. I like to think I have a variety of interests, but there’s something about film that just gets hold of me. I’ve always loved those few seconds when the lights go dim and the movie is just about to start. There's no drug in the world that can match that feeling of anticipation. When I was in high school and college, I used to plot my weekends around the movies. I was either going to see the latest foreign flick, or catching a classic at revival houses like the Elgin Theater or Carnegie Hall Cinema. Those theaters are gone now, thanks largely to VCRs and DVD players, and there are very few places that show old films—“retrospective cinemas,” as one of my film teachers called them in college--with a straight face no less. And yet as I write this, I am struggling to remember the last time I actually went t...

A guy wakes up in a hospital after suffering a serious injury to find the world that he knew has been destroyed and he must now struggle to survive in a hostile land. Now does this describe the beginning of: (a) Day of the Triffids (b) 28 Days Later , or (c) The Walking Dead ? If you said a, b, and c, you are correct. All three films begin with some poor bastard regaining consciousness in a hospital room and learning that he has to fight for his life against invading aliens…or raging humanoids…or walking corpses. Whatever the problem may be, it is so terrible that it makes the hero completely forget about the lousy hospital food. Triffids , a British 1962 flick, got the whole hospital wake-up thing started--I think--when murderous plants invade Earth during a meteor shower that renders most of the earth’s population blind. Our hero is a sailor recovering from eye surgery and is thus spared the loss of his vision. It’s been years since I’ve seen this movie but I remember being especia...

There’s no such thing as time travel, but a trip to the International Vintage Poster Fair comes awfully close. The event is really meant for serious collectors, which rules me out, but I enjoy looking at these fabulous images that can combine art, history, politics, and advertising all on a single sheet of paper. This may be hard for young people to believe, but posters were a primary method of getting your message out back in the days before TV and the Internet. They’ve been called the "seven-second medium," since that's about all the time they had to catch the eye of a speeding pedestrian. The artists who created these illustrations did so knowing that they wouldn’t last long. The posters would go up on a wall or fence where they might be stolen or defaced and eventually covered up by another poster. But that didn’t stop these people from doing great work. I got interested in vintage posters a few years ago when I did a story for TheStreet.com . The economy was booming...

I came out of my house this afternoon to dump some trash and walked right into the middle of a neighborhood drama. I had the day off from work and I thought I’d relax and enjoy the lovely weather. But things didn’t go according to plan. I was about to go back into my house when I saw some people standing in a semi-circle around an Asian woman who was stretched out on the ground a few houses away from mine. She was barefoot, clad in pajamas, and rolling her head from side to side, sobbing and moaning unintelligibly. One of my neighbors told me that he had seen her walk up the block, sit down on the ground near his house and lay down on the pavement. She continued to roll her head and wail, while one man dialed 911 and the rest of tried to figure out what the hell was going on. I spoke to her softly to calm her down, but I don’t think she heard me. I wondered if she had gotten out of a mental hospital, given the pajamas and the lack of shoes. If she lived around here, then somebody shoul...

“Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night, may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.” I was speaking with my aunt recently and I told her I had just rented The Wolfman , a remake of the old horror movie classic that our family had enjoyed for so many years. “Why?” she asked me with gentle exasperation. Struck for answer, I reverted to my standard adolescent response. “Uh…I don’t know.” Actually, I did know. I was hoping for an easy night at the movies where I could sit back and relax with some enjoyable junk cinema. As it turned out, the only thing I got right was the “junk” part. This wolf was a dog and the enjoyment for me came when I dumped the DVD into the mailbox and shipped it back to Netflix. What was I thinking? That today’s filmmakers could actually create something that would rival the old 1941 Universal creepy starring Lon Chaney, Claude Rains, Bela Lugosi, and the incredible Maria Ouspenskaya? No one could top Ouspenskay...

I’m always a little surprised when I walk into my dentist’s office and see that computer on his desk. He’s had the thing for years, of course, but I don’t go to the dentist as often as I should, so it takes me a while to get used to changes around the office. I was in Dr. Cohen’s office on Saturday for this tooth ache that was lighting up whenever I drank cold liquids. I decided to break with my tradition of letting problems go until they mutate into irreversible catastrophes and actually do something about this particular issue right in the here and now. As I walked into his office I started thinking about how long I've been his patient. I was literally a child, a grammar school student, when I first came here. Back then the only place you could find desk top computers was on Star Trek . I believe I was an eighth grader when I had my first appointment with Dr. Cohen. I went straight from class at Our Lady of Angeles to his office a few blocks away. Naturally, I was a nervous wreck...

My late father always had a strong dislike for the word “interesting.” It was his unshakeable belief—and he had many of those—that this word meant absolutely nothing. If you told him that anything from a movie to a plate of food was “interesting” he maintained that you hadn’t told him a damn thing. I think of the times I've used this word and it's usually when I don't want to come out and say something negative. So, I went to my grammar school reunion on Saturday and it was really… interesting . I hadn’t been to this Catholic school in Brooklyn in years and I decided I would join my sister and some friends and revisit the place where I spent eight years of my childhood. The event was held in the gymnasium, where the school used to put on dances and where Mr. Keating, my gym teacher, once ruled with an iron whistle. I still remember him walking up and down the rows of boys twirling his whistle on a long cord, which would wrap around his index finger and then promptly unwind...

When you’re a police reporter, the scanner becomes your constant companion. That’s where so many stories begin. You’re sitting at your desk, making the daily phone calls to the various police departments you cover, looking for news. And then that scanner starts beeping over your shoulder. The dispatcher calls out the numbers, the codified mayhem that tells you if there’s a fire, car wreck, or armed robbery happening somewhere in your coverage area. You listen for the location, who is responding, and then decide if it’s worth going out there yourself. Some days that scanner can feel a lot like a ball and chain. I was a police reporter at the Pocono Record in Stroudsburg, PA for five years starting in 1988 and it didn’t take me long to memorize the important numbers. Back then an armed robbery was a page one story—“page one all the way,” as my editor used to say; but, given the way the Poconos have grown, I don’t think a stick-up rates more than a fewer paragraphs today. There was a brie...

I was making breakfast this morning when I heard a plane fly overhead and I felt a chill go up my spine. That happened a lot in the weeks after 9/11, when every jet coming in for a landing sounded like a missile attack. Of course it was crazy; the plane traveling over my house this morning was flying too high and moving too slowly. It wasn’t like on 9/11, when the jets streaked through the sky and exploded right in front of me. For weeks after that I would look up whenever I heard a jet, half-wondering if it was going to happen again. The feeling gradually faded, but I guess that since this is the ninth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center, I shouldn’t be too surprised that I get a little jumpy. Today is also my late father’s birthday; he turned 80 on that terrible day and all I had planned to do that morning was to go home after work and celebrate with him and my sister. Of course we all had no idea that just getting home that day would be such a struggle, that our cit...

I began the summer in a crowd, so it seems only fitting that I would wrap the season up in the middle of a mob scene. It seems like only last week that it was June and I was hyperventilating my way through the throbbing mass of humanity at the Mermaid Parade in Coney Island. And then I turned around and it was Sunday of the Labor Day weekend and I was crammed into a waiting room in the Battery Maritime Building, hoping the Governor’s Island ferry would hurry up and dock before I had a 20-megaton panic attack. I wanted to do something different on this last weekend of summer and I saw that there would be a parked food truck event on the island—it was billed as “Eats from NYC’s best food carts & trucks and specially crafted local beer.” There was also an art exhibit happening on the island as well, so I had a chance to get some culture, stuff my face and drink myself into a stupor. Plus I had never been to Governor’s Island before, so how could I say no? And then I arrived at South S...

What do I know from art? Not much, apparently, but I still had a good time. I went to the Park Avenue Armory on Friday for the last day of a 5-day “Open Studio” featuring the work of Yoshitomo Nara, a Japanese artist who is having a show at the Asia Society . The armory’s website said that the artist and his collaborative team, YNG, “will undertake rebuilding the structure of the installation work, Home , and Nara will establish a temporary studio to create new drawings and other works that will be included in Asia Society Museum’s exhibition Yoshitomo Nara: Nobody’s Fool .” According to WNYC, “Nara's appearance at the installation on Monday elicited sobs from one of his young Japanese fans; they just managed to drown out the sound of drills and hammers.” Sounds like quite a guy. The site also carried this advisory—which I heard on WNYC as well—“All visitors must wear closed-toed shoes with a hard sole and shirts that cover their shoulders. Hard hats will be provided.” Hard hats? ...

All I wanted to do was buy some turkey. I walked into a butcher shop in Bay Ridge yesterday and found myself in the middle of the Ground Zero Mosque debate. Now, of course, it isn’t a mosque and it isn’t located at Ground Zero, and there already two mosques located in the neighborhood—along with a topless bar. And the politically motivated lies, distortions, and blatant fear mongering being spewed on the airwaves and the Internet bear absolutely no resemblance to a debate. Now back to the butcher shop... I was buying some cold cuts and pasta when the cashier—we’ll call her Maggie—rang up my order and then promptly whipped out a newspaper to show me a story about the first Muslim Miss USA who happens to believe that the Islamic cultural center should move from its planned location on Park Place. "You see," she said. "This woman's a Muslim and she thinks they shouldn't build it there." What this has to do with the price of eggs—or sliced turkey in this case—I ...