The Luna Park Gazette

I walked down Sixth Avenue in the rain on Friday night and watched the Empire State Building disappear into the mist. It was an eerie, film noir kind of setting and it fit so perfectly with my evening. I had just gotten done viewing the International Center of Photography’s Weegee exhibit, "Murder is My Business" and I was in a B-movie state of mind. Weegee, the nom de flash for Arthur Felig, was a famous New York press photographer of the 1930s and ‘40s who captured the soul of the city in all its glorious mayhem. Gangland slayings, four-alarm fires, car wrecks, raucous celebrations, Weegee recorded it all in screaming black and white. This was my second go-round with Weegee, having gone to an earlier exhibit at the center back in 1997 when I first moved back to New York. But that’s okay; I can never get enough Weegee. Legend has it that Weegee, a phonetic rendition of Ouija, got his handle because of his uncanny ability to show up at the scene of the madness—sometimes bef...

I’m a sucker for cult movies. I've always loved obscure, low budget flicks that nobody's ever heard of. They often put Hollywood blockbusters to shame with their inventiveness and originality. I remember going to see Jimmy Cliff in “ The Harder They Come ” in a theater on the Upper East Side when I was in high school. And then there was “ Once in Paris ,” which came out in 1978 and, if my memory is correct, played at the now defunct 68th Street Playhouse for over a year. Watching these movies, you feel like a member of a select club, one of the in-crowd. You just can’t wait to leave the theater and go out into the world where you can drop the title of an obscure film and enjoyed the puzzled looks on your friends’ faces. The trouble is that, like anything else in life, what makes a good cult movie is a matter of opinion. One person’s brilliant piece of work can be the next person’s pretentious pile of crapola. Recently I recorded a movie called “ The Town That Dreaded Sundown ....

While vacationing in California last year, I spotted an adopt-a-highway sign that been put up by an outfit called the United Atheists. United Atheists? What unites them, I wondered—their belief in nothing? If that's all then the meetings must be awfully short. Please understand—I strongly support freedom of religion and that includes the freedom not to have any religion at all. But I suspect that a lot of people who say they don’t believe in God would suddenly see the light if their car blew a tire on that highway while they were doing 70 mph. There are no atheists in rollovers. You can’t turn in any direction without running into some religious issue. Recently I made the mistake of reading the comments section of a news story about some horrendous disaster and one of the posters had put up the usual “God help the victims” line. And, like clockwork, this brought sarcastic responses from the non-religious types and a holy snark war quickly broke out. “Good luck with your Sky Wizard...

Terry WetWet wants to connect with me. I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised. I find a lot of these messages when I look through the old junk email bag in search of the web’s least wanted. “I have updated my fuckbook page with new photos,” she wrote. “Check it out and tell me what you think.” Fuckbook? I never heard of it, but if they’re having an IPO anytime soon I want in. But I didn’t check out the new photos and I don’t think I will. I’d rather not get involved with someone named Terry Wetwet and I really don’t want to make Georgia jealous. Georgia also wrote to me recently, starting off with a hearty cry of “Privet, my dear friend!” Privet means “hello” in Russian, but it can also refer to a European shrub called Ligustrum vulgare and after reading Georgia’s e-mail I’m still not sure which one she means. “When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody,” she wrote, “you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible. This twenty-first century lett...

I walked into the community affairs office at the 68th Precinct and approached the cop behind the desk. “ You fuck! ” He roared before I had a chance to open my mouth. “ You didn’t bring us any coffee! ” I stood there in shock, trying not to wet my pants or run out the door. I didn’t know what to expect when I entered this place, but I surely wasn’t expecting this. It was sometime around 1986 and I was working as a reporter for a weekly paper in Bay Ridge. I had been sent there to get some stories for the police blotter and this cop, Larry, was the guy to see. I don’t think I had ever been in a police station prior to that day. I hardly had anything to do with cops at all. Shucks, I was a good Catholic boy living in a quiet neighborhood. Why would I get involved with the police? It turned out Larry was just breaking my cojones , something cops the world over like to do to reporters. I later learned that if cops yank your chain it usually means they like you. If they’re curt and profess...

When I first started blogging, I decided that I would allow people to write whatever they wanted in the comments section. I wasn’t going to silence critics and only retain the positive remarks. I wasn’t going to stifle anyone’s freedom of expression or be a cyber-nun parsing each and every word someone left behind. Say whatever you want, I thought, it won't bother me a bit. But then the “Cheap Viagra” ads started and I couldn’t seem to stop them. They were particularly annoying because they were often worded to appear as if a real human being has read your post. “You’re so right,” they’ll say, or “that’s really funny,” before launching into their shtick, which, of course, involved logging on to some website and buying whatever they were peddling. (No, I didn’t and shame on you for asking.) So now I monitor the comments and occasionally I’ll be forced to zap some bit of digital drivel to the ninth circle of Internet hell where it belongs. Recently, though, I got a comment that was ...

The year has just begun and I’ve already lost a friend. My sister’s cat, Tuxedo, crossed that Rainbow Bridge after suffering a stroke and left this life on the same day our father did in 2007. Tuxedo had a heart condition and the vet had warned my sister that he could go at any time. But that doesn’t lessen the pain of losing him. I had a special fondness for Tuxedo. I used to drive him and his brother, Smokey, to their vet's office in Manhattan. They weren’t happy about being packed up in their cat boxes and hauled over to the city, but it had to be done. Both Smokey and Tuxedo were very shy around strangers and would run like hell whenever I came over. Often the only sight I had of them was their rear ends disappearing under my sister’s bed. But Tuxedo surprised me one night shortly after our first vet run. We were sitting in the kitchen and he came walking in like he owned the place. And being a cat, of course, he did own the place. I was stunned because usually if I wanted to...