The Luna Park Gazette

Movie audiences tend to get on my nerves, but I have a special fondness for people who go to the theater. Perhaps there’s something about seeing a live performance, but I find I’m able—and quite willing—to start conversations with my fellow theatergoers. It’s nothing for me to turn to the person next to me and start talking to them—something I very rarely do with a movie crowd. People at the movies don’t seem open to chatting, except with each other and usually right in the middle of the goddamn movie I’m trying to watch. This probably explains my fondness for Netflix. Now you get your clunkers amongst the theater patrons, too—schmucks who unwrap their candy at exactly the wrong time so it sounds like a forest fire or asshats who run their mouths nonstop as if they’re in their living rooms—or at the movies. But overall I’ve found theater audiences to be talkative at the proper times and usually they have something intelligent to say. I get a special charge when I sit down ...

You know you’re having a rough week when the only good news you get is coming from the IRS and the DMV. Normally I hate, fear, and despise these two agencies—even though, as I think of it, neither one has ever done any harm to me personally. Still, I’m terrified of bureaucracies because they wield so much power and speak in so much gibberish. I worry that I’ll hand in my tax return or my driver’s license renewal and some mid-level paper pusher in the bowels of a massive gray building will find some minor glitch, some little thing that I forgot to do and I’ll be sent off to a FEMA slave labor camp in the Catskills. Well, it turns out I worried for nothing. Both of these agencies did the right thing--I got my tax refund and my new driver’s license in the space of two days. Did I say “mid-level paper pushers?” Sorry, I meant “dedicated public servants.” Unfortunately, these events collided head-on with some intense disappointments. I’ve recently completed a novel and I’m tryin...

I learned a new name for an old affliction last night. Now let’s hope I don’t forget it. I had been attending a party when a new arrival showed up. He was an older gentleman and after we made our introductions he warned us that he might have trouble keeping our names straight because he suffered from CRS, better known as “Can’t Remember Shit.” We all laughed at that line and I suspect just about everybody in the room suffered from this ailment, myself included. There’s a lot of that going around. Memory slips can be scary, but I guess humor is a good way of dealing with that dark breeze that passes through your heart whenever you forget where you put your house keys or the name of your favorite actor. My father suffered from dementia and it was upsetting to watch him struggle to remember names and events or hear him casually ask for my mother, even though she had died several years earlier. I got a kick out of that CRS line, but I had more sobering experience with this iss...

"Do not abandon yourselves to despair. We are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song." -- Pope John Paul II It's been a tough couple of days, but I think I'm finally feeling better. And just in time for Monday morning. This is Easter Sunday, a time when we celebrate rebirth and renewal, but I confess I've been in something of a funk. I think things went off the rails--quite literally--on Saturday night when I allowed an abysmal experience on the New York City subway system to whip me into a 20-megaton conniption fit. The MTA got us coming and going with tortuously slow rides in and out of Manhattan. When we reached 59th Street in Brooklyn, we ditched the subway entirely and took car service the rest of the way home. It was horrible, but I made it much, much worse by raging and fuming over things far beyond my control. It infuriates me that I have to actually pay for this abuse when I know that if this were any other service I would demand my money b...

Somewhere in Brooklyn there’s an alley cat that I would like to thank. He—or she—provided the inspiration I needed for a haiku workshop I attended on Saturday—and all I had to do was look up.  I had registered for the Japan Society’s program a few weeks ago in an attempt to shake my life up a little bit. I’ve been spending too much time in front of the TV and not doing any of the funky things that are happening in New York every day of the week.  When I lived in small towns, I complained that there was nothing to do, yet now that I’m back in New York it seems that I spend more time with my DVR than I do with human beings.  I thought a class in Japanese poetry might be a good way to break out of my rut. It meant getting up early on my day off and clanging over to Manhattan on the subway to toil away at an art form that I knew virtually nothing about, but I'm glad I did. I haven’t tried to write poetry since high school, largely because the stuff I wrote was hi...

“Be liked,” Willy Loman tells his sons in Death of A Salesman , “and you will never want.” I’ve read Arthur Miller’s 1949 Pulitzer Prize-winning many times in my life, studied it in college, watched several TV productions, and even listened to a LP version of the story. But I never saw the show performed live until Saturday, when I went to see Phillip Seymour Hoffman take on the role of the doomed salesman, and it hit me harder than I was expecting. The play can seem both dated and topical, a time capsule from a distant age, but also a harsh reflection of today’s corporate battlefield, where the obsession with profits can obliterate years of hard work and dedication, all in the name of the so-called “free markets.” My father was a salesman who worked for Tobin’s First Prize Meats, an Albany-based wholesaler, for over 20 years and many scenes in the play were painfully familiar. And if I see some of my father in Willy Loman, I also see a lot of myself in Biff, the son who never becomes ...

As someone who writes for a living, I have developed a strong distaste for clichés. Falling back on a worn out phrase insults the reader and cheapens the writer. There are times when you’ll be forced to drag out some clunker--like when you’re on deadline and your editor is screaming at you to file the story this very second or he'll send you out the door in a body bag. But even in those stressful times, you can turn the pressure into fuel, letting your mind stretch beyond the familiar to grab hold of something exciting. One of my least favorite expressions is “truth be told.” It has this faux upper crusty sound to it and, more importantly, it really shouldn’t be necessary. Why do you have to tell me that you’re telling me the truth? I would hope that you’re telling me the truth all along without having to advertise the fact. Has everything you said before you dropped that phrase been untrue? This old line came to mind as I listened to the monologist Mike Daisey try to explain the ...