The Luna Park Gazette

Where’s Mariah Carey when I need her? A few weeks ago, I wrote about how hearing “All I Want for Christmas is You” marks the start of the holiday season for me. Despite my advanced age, I always get excited about the seeing lights and listening to the Christmas carols and watching all the old movies. But this year the spirit ain’t here. I could make plenty of excuses: the state of the world, the state of my mind, and the paralyzing fear that “Dominick the Italian Christmas Donkey” will get stuck in my head and keep on playing until the Memorial Day weekend. I know that’s not true, though. I’ve endured all those things in the past and still managed to have myself a merry little Christmas. I just don’t have the usual enthusiasm, which is no way to feel about the most wonderful time of the year. Even Ebeneezer Scrooge had some emotion about the holidays. It was pure hatred, of course, but at least it came from the heart. Is there a Ghost of Christmas Apathy? And, if s...

I knew there had to be an expression for this behavior. YouTube has become my go-to source for music. Between my job and my writing, I spend most of my time on the computer and YouTube can provide soundtracks to my various moods and personalities. Jazz, big bands, new age, Eighties, traditional Irish, you name it, you’re sure to find it somewhere on YouTube. And the automated suggestions offer even more possibilities. Be advised that the ads on YouTube are a rip-roaring pain in the ass, particularly when I'm trying to enjoy meditation and exercise videos. The site offers its own streaming service, which I might subscribe to, so I can save some money and stop screaming obscenities at my computer. Now there are times where a song will get into my head, and I’ll just have to play it over and over. I figured there must be a name for this activity and a quick Google search came up with the term “Binge Listening,” a perfect expression for the Generation Netflix. I did...

Ralph Kramden thought he had it all figured out. Of course that description could probably fit every episode of the classic TV show The Honeymooners , which starred Jackie Gleason as the beleaguered Brooklyn bus driver. It seems that every show had Ralph coming up with some get-rich scheme that invariably blew up in his face. But I’m thinking of the 1956 episode “Please Leave the Premises”, where Ralph thinks he’s found the miracle cure for aggravation. All he has to do—or so he believes—is repeat the ditty “pins and needles, needles and pins, it’s a happy man who grins” and ask himself what is mad about. Whenever he does, he says, he can’t remember what was bothering him. Ralph is convinced this line will be the answer to all his problems and, of course, he couldn’t have been more wrong. His landlord stops by to announce a rent increase, and Ralph explodes, refusing to pay and barricading himself—and his wife poor Alice—in their apartment. The episode makes me think a...

It happened at 9:50AM this morning. I was checking out my groceries at the Key Food on Third Avenue in Bay Ridge when I heard Mariah Carey’s “ All I Want for Christmas is You ” for the first time this year. Never mind Black Friday sales or card shop displays, the holiday shopping season doesn’t start for me until I hear this 1994 song—though it is surprisingly late this time out. It’s the definitive sign that the holiday snowball has begun its downhill roll and there’s no way to stop it. And I’m a bit ashamed to admit this but…I like “All I Want for Christmas is You.” There, I said it. I feel so much better now. Yes, I know the song is roundly hated by all creatures great and small, and that it is considered the audio version of a lump of coal. But I can’t help it. A 2019 survey in England named this tune as the most annoying holiday song ever. A quick google search shows “All I Want for Christmas” making several “Most Hated Christmas Song” lists, joining the like...

So, what was I doing in 1994? The question came to mind the other night while I was washing the dishes. I noticed that the towel I was using to dry off the plates and silverware was an old cloth calendar that had once hung in the kitchen at my parents’ house. That year caught my eye. I couldn’t believe this thing in my hands had survived nearly four decades. The calendar bears the image of a house with a picket fence and trees on either side. Near the top there are a pair of roosters crowing on either side of a scroll bearing the Kitchen Prayer. “ Lord, warm all the kitchen with thy love ,” it reads, “ and light it with thy peace. Forgive me all my worry and make my grumbling cease. ” I’m particularly fond of that last line since it would pretty much take an act of God to get me to cease my grumbling. There’s little doubt that my mother had picked out this calendar. She had fondness for colonial theme décor and these cloth calendars fit in much better than any of the fr...

A week ago, I had some hope. I can be a bit cynical—some might even say “hostile”—if I don’t keep a close watch on these thoughts of mine. People can get on my nerves rather quickly—if I allow them to--but every so often something happens that almost restores my faith in humanity. Last week, I went to my bank’s branch on 86th Street and 5th Avenue after the gym and found the ATMs had been taken offline. This sucked monkey balls. I had planned on doing some shopping at a fruit store one block away and I wasn’t sure if I had enough cash in my wallet. Some of the local businesses strongly prefer cash over plastic. As I was leaving, a man approached me and began speaking in Spanish, obviously looking to get some money as well. I did my best to explain the branch was out of the commission and pointed to a sign indicating the next one was 11 blocks away. It took a little effort, but he eventually got the idea. As I started to walk away when he called out to me. I thoug...

Whenever I griped about my various jobs, Fred the Shrink had a great response. “It funds your passion,” he’d say. Fred knew that I really wanted to write fiction for a living, but he also knew—much better than I did—that writing professionally is a tough gig and that many writers have some kind of day job to keep them solvent. Fred’s encouragement helped me get through some tough employment times, which thank God, have gotten markedly better in recent years. And I thought of him this weekend when I went to the Edward Hopper exhibit at the Whitney Museum. Born in 1882, Edward Hopper was an American realist painter and printmaker who had an incredible gift from finding drama in the commonplace subjects. He’s perhaps best known for his 1942 painting Nighthawks , which portrays four people in a downtown diner later at night, as seen from a distance through the diner’s window. These people seem so lonely and isolated, but Hopper himself said that he didn’t see Nighthawks as par...

The Happy Hour, yes, of course. How could I have possibly forgotten the name of the tavern that was pretty much my second home some thirty-odd years ago? Well, I’ve been forgetting a lot of things lately, so perhaps we shouldn’t ask that question. The important thing is that I met up this weekend with a bunch of my co-workers from the Pocono Record, where I worked from 1988 to 1992. We had our grand reunion in the Philadelphia suburb of Swarthmore. Naturally, I was a nervous wreck in the days leading up to Saturday. I was positive I had gotten my hotel reservation wrong; then convinced I had gotten the date of my bus ticket wrong; and then drop dead certain that I would get lost in Philly and not be able to find the commuter train that would take me out to this lovely college town. Do I really have to tell you that none of these things happened, and that I can find things to worry about like a truffle hog on a fungi hunt? No, I didn't think so. Anyway, I...

The scene begins with a woman facing the wall of a crumbling shack and humming tunnessly. This is from an episode of Peter Gunn , a classic detective show, entitled “Spell of Murder” and it put quite a spell on me. Created by Blake Edwards, Peter Gunn ran from 1958 to 1961, and starred Craig Stevens as the eponymous hero; Lola Albright as Edie Hart, a nightclub singer and Gunn’s girlfriend, and Herschel Bernardi as the perpetually exasperated Lt. Jacobi. The show also featured some excellent filmmaking, appearances by some of the biggest names in jazz at the time, and a slew of fine character actors, as well as appearances by such future stars as James Coburn. Mary Gregory played the woman in the shack. Over the course of her career, she appeared in such films as They Shoot Horses, Don’t They and Sleeper , as well as reoccurring roles in LA Law and Knots Landing . However, it’s her single scene in “Spell of Murder” that sticks out in my mind. She only has three minut...

And he looked like such a nice guy. David Owen sent me a friend request on Facebook last week. I didn’t recognize the name, so I clicked on to his profile to see if we had any friends in common. We didn’t. I wasn’t sure how he had gotten my name, but I’ve made a few random friends on Facebook in the past. I might make a new friend—and God knows I could use them. His profile described him as an elderly widower who lived in New Orleans. He seemed harmless. How could I turn someone like that down? If I ever go to New Orleans, I thought, I could look David up and he could show me the sites. There’s nothing like getting a tour of a strange city from a local. And if David should decide to visit New York, I’d be more than happy to show him around town. Now at about this point you’re probably hopping up and down in front of your computer screaming “ Schmuck, what’s the hell is the matter with you? It’s a scam! ” And rightfully so. I only wish you had been there ...

They called it “The Ludovico Technique.” There’s a scene in A Clockwork Orange , Stanely Kubrick’s 1971 film about a dystopian society, where Alex, a sadistic gang leader portrayed by Malcolm McDowell, undergoes aversion therapy to cure him of his violent ways. Alex’s head is strapped down so he can’t turn away and his eyes are pried open with clamps, so he has no choice to look at films portraying murder, torture and rape. It’s a harrowing scene and I could never imagine subjecting a fellow human being to that kind of abuse for any reason. But that was before I started reading Kimberly Garcia’s Twitter feed and now, I’m not so sure. Kimberly Garcia is the mother of Amerie Jo Garza, one of the 19 children killed—along with two teachers—who were murdered in the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Udavle, Tex. on May 24. The tweets are excruciating. There is no filter, no commentator sanitizing this woman's agony. Her unimaginable suffering is torn right out of h...

For over a year now, I've greeted my sister and auntie on Saturday mornings with the same question: “Did you watch our friends last night?” By “our friends” I meant the characters in A Place to Call Home , a wonderful Australian television series that we happily allowed to take over our lives. My question about watching the program was purely rhetorical, of course, as I couldn’t imagine either one of them watching anything else on Friday evenings. And I wasn’t kidding about the “friends” part because over the course of 67 episodes these characters did indeed become our friends--or at least some of them did. There were others in the show we hated with a passion. We spoke about them as if they and all their troubles—and God knows they had a ton of them--were quite real. The lives of the wealthy Bligh family at their estate Ash Park in the town of Inverness took on a very personal meaning for the three of us. I honestly can't remember the last time I...

“Keep your face toward the sunshine and the shadows will fall behind you.” Maori proverb. Trixie Flagston was on to something. Now it’s true that she’s an infant appearing in the comic strip “Hi and Lois” but that kid knew how to pick her friends. Specifically, Trixie is best buds with a ray sunlight of called “Sunbeam”, whom she communicates with through thought balloons. Mort Walker, the strip’s creator, said he got the idea for Sunbeam by watching his own children. “It looked so cute," he said, "seeing a baby sitting in the sunlight, luxuriating in the warmth and brightness, with sparkly dust flying around, glistening in the sun’s rays.” Debuting in 1954, "Hi and Lois" focuses on the Flagston family and offers "a portrait of a wholesome family with traditional values," as one website described it. "Wholesome family" is enough to turn my stomach, but then this was the Eisenhower Administation so I shouldn't be surp...

The words of the prophets aren’t always written on the subway walls and tenement walls. Sometimes they’re right at our feet. I learned this lesson on Saturday while standing at the express bus stop on 23rd Street and Fith Avenue. I was waiting to get the X27 back to Brooklyn when I looked down and saw a sentence written on the sidewalk. “ What opportunities have you provided for your child ” The line—I’m assuming it’s a question—was written in neat white lettering and it appears the author had taken his or her time, which is interesting as this is a rather busy intersection. I was wrapping up an afternoon in the city that began with a visit to Rennert’s Gallery on W. 17th Street where I saw a fabulous collection of vintage posters for “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.” This was a bit of compromise since my conscience was telling me to attend a Meetup event in Queens where I could see something new and enjoy some human company. But I also wanted to visit the gallery. ...

"If you don’t ask, the answer will always be no.” It’s amazing how the simple can suddenly become sacred. My mother’s been gone for 20 years now and I’m still reluctant to part with anything that she’s written. I still have many of the birthday, Christmas, and Easter cards she gave me over the years, as well as a handful of newspaper articles that she thought I could use, and a yellowing copy of a poem called “Don’t Quit” that I taped on the wall just above my computer. It was much worse in those terrible days immediately after her death when I couldn’t even part with her shopping lists. A scrap of paper ticking off such everyday items as milk, bread and eggs turns into a priceless artifact when the person who wrote those words is gone forever. It was an entirely different story when I was a kid and I’d go shopping with one of her lists in hand. I was extremely self-conscious back then, determined not to cause a stir, and whenever my mother put something on the list ...

I was walking home from the gym this morning when I heard church bells ringing. The tune was “God Bless America,” which struck me as an odd choice for a Sunday until I remembered what day it was. Today is September 11, the 21st anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. My father would’ve been 101 years old today. Each year I try to get down to Church Street and find the spot I was standing when that second plane hit the World Trade Center’s South Tower. I say a prayer for all those who died and for their loved ones who have suffered every day since. I’m listening to the reading of the victims’ names as I write this, and I sincerely wish I had put off the damn gym for a little while and gone downtown. I feel like that I owe much to the people who never came home. Watching the ceremony on TV doesn’t begin to compare to walking those streets and recalling that horrible day. The awful explosions, people running for their lives, the towers collapsing and the hideous clouds of...

There’s nothing like working out with Old Blue Eyes. I’ve been going to a new gym for the last few months, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the owners’ musical choices. Of course, there’s the usual health club mix of dance music, rap and other such pump-you-up ditties. But in the wee small hours of the morning, you can actually hear a string of Frank Sinatra songs. Listen Here At first, I thought it was a fluke. Somebody must’ve hit the wrong button as no self-respecting gym would play these ancient tunes. I waited for the Chairman of the Board to be cut short and replaced by some screeching techno thump-a-thon. But no; the morning seems to be reserved for what I call “The Sinatra Hour”, when a lot of a geezers like your truly work out. Whatever the reason, I love shadowboxing and pounding the heavy bag with "My Way" or "Learning the Blues” as my soundtrack. This morning I was doing my warm-up when the song “Goodbye (She Quietly Says)” ...

Victor McLaglen was one of my father’s favorite actors. The British actor had starred in such classics as The Informer, The Quiet Man —for which he won the Academy Award--and She Wore A Yellow Ribbon . My father loved to quote a line from Gunga Din where McLaglen, as Sgt. McChesney, tries to negotiate out of standoff where he and his buddies are hopelessly outnumbered by suggesting both parties go their separate ways and “no ‘arm done!” I recently watched McLaglen in his last role, where he portrayed Harry Wittman, a punch-drunk prizefighter in an episode of Rawhide , which starred Clint Eastwood as Rowdy Yates. Keep Those Doggies Movin' The episode, entitled “Incident of the Shambling Man,” was directed by McLaglen’s son, Andrew V. McLaglen, opens with a chilling scene of the old boxer staggering around the plains throwing punches at non-existent opponents. Victor McLaglen was a fighter in his younger days, touring in circuses, vaudeville shows, and Wild Wes...