The Luna Park Gazette

There’s no better way of celebrating the holidays than watching an old-time horror movie—at least that’s what my family did this year. I got together with my sister and auntie on Thanksgiving Day for the usual blast of turkey, stuffing, potatoes and apple pie. And wine. Oh, yeah, plenty of wine. The food was fabulous and I ate like it was my last meal. I know people always say that on Thanksgiving, but this time I really broke the record. Even my loose pants couldn’t handle the strain of my bulging waistline. It was bitter cold in my part of the world on Thursday, so I was extremely thankful to be indoors spending time with the people I love. And the wine. Really thankful for the wine. After dinner we waddled over to the living room to watch some tube and relax. This is the start of the Christmas insanity and there are plenty of holiday movies and specials to watch, but it just so happened that my sister had recorded Carnival of Souls , a horror movie cult classic that never...

It must have been the longest night of my father’s life. My dad was a veteran and I grew up hear his stories about fighting in World War II. These stories were frightening, tragic, and occasionally funny and I never tired of hearing them. There was this one time when he was trapped in a foxhole during a lengthy attack. The shells kept on falling and my father had nowhere to go, so he was forced to take cover in this wet, filthy hole in the ground all night long. I can’t begin to imagine how terrifying that experience must have been, to be trapped in the freezing darkness while the whole world blows up all around you. When the sun finally came up and the explosions ended—for the moment, anyway—both my father’s feet were so badly frostbitten that he couldn’t walk. A pair of medics eventually showed up, loaded him onto a stretcher and began taking him to the nearest field hospital. As they walked the artillery fire started kicking up again. The two medics panicked, dropped ...

It feels like someone broke open the gates of Hell. Wildfires have been ripping through California, killing at least 25 people and burning more than 100,000 acres. California was the site of our latest Second Amendment massacre, which happened in Thousand Oaks, where a deranged gunman shot up a local bar on Friday, killing 12 people, including Ventura County Sheriff’s Sgt. Ron Helus, who was planning to retire in a year or two. The slaughter was committed by yet another loner psychotic with a gun who also killed himself. There were all the usual elements of a mass shooting: footage of survivors and family members sobbing in each other’s arms; lines of police cars and ambulances streaking up to some blood-soaked location, and, yes, thoughts and prayers for the victims. There’s also the mini-biographies of the victims, most of whom were so young and ready to start their lives. Several of them had actually witnessed last year’s Las Vegas mass shooting and one of them, Telemachu...

There’s a scene in Martin Scorsese’s mob classic Goodfellas where Ray Liotta’s uber-paranoid gangster is convinced a helicopter is following him. As the coked-up criminal frantically tries to escape the mysterious chopper, Harry Nilsson’s “ Jump into the Fire ” cranks up on the soundtrack. I always loved that scene, but recently I got a chance to experience what that guy was going through. I had gotten up nice and early one morning for my daily meditation. I’ve been meditating for a few years now and I am slowly seeing the benefits of this daily practice. I set the timer for 20 minutes and do my very best to be mindful and present. And I think it’s helped me a lot. I’m a little better at taming the anger and reining in the depression. It’s been an extremely slow process, but I’m encouraged by my progress and I want to continue improving. Now some sessions are better than others and on this particular morning I was really nailing it—if I do say so myself. I was breathing so ...

I was sitting in the theater yesterday when I had this stray thought about the outside world. While I was thoroughly immersed in The Ferryman , Jez Butterworth’s riveting drama about a rural Irish family that gets caught up in The Troubles of sectarian violence, I briefly wondered what was happening in the so-called real world. The play runs over three hours and I was unable to appease my I-phone addiction and, given the current political climate, I had this strange feeling that something major could be going on. Well, I found out a short time later over dinner that “something major” was yet another mass shooting in America, this time at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, where an anti-Semitic psychopath shouting “All Jews must die!” allegedly shot 11 people to death and wounded six others before the cops shot him and took him into custody. I almost wish I hadn’t looked at my phone. I keep saying that it’s pointless to write about these slaughters, that nothing will cha...

It seems like it just a minute ago we were all so young. I met up with some friends from high school earlier this month and I can’t stop doing the math. Was it really that many years ago that we all first met? Are we really that old? And, for the love of God, can we get a recount? The mini-reunion got me thinking about other people I knew back when I was a teenager and I decided to waste some of the time I have left by poking around on Facebook. I noticed that one of my friends had friended a guy I knew in high school who was nicknamed “Pooch.” We weren’t close, but we were friendly enough, at least for a while. At some point, though, things soured somewhat between us and I’m not sure why. I am certainly partially to blame for the rift because back then I was quick to take offense and all too eager to hold to it. This is still a problem, by the way, but at least now I acknowledge it and I’m trying to improve. I never saw Pooch after high school and I didn’t think about...

If I knew I was going on an adventure I would’ve worn a pith helmet. I met up with a friend on Saturday to check out an old building and wound up doing some serious time traveling. We were enjoying the annual Open House New York event, where hundreds of the city’s normally off-limits sites and attractions are open to the public. My aunt suggested checking out the old Dime Savings Bank of Brooklyn on DeKalb Avenue, a building I had spotted a few weeks ago while running an errand downtown. At the time I snapped a photo of the outside and wondered what the interior looked like. Here was my chance to find out. So, I contacted my buddy Maria for a little urban exploring. Now I have to confess that I was a little concerned that I was inviting my friend to view a musty old mausoleum. What a great way to spend a Saturday, right? However, I couldn’t have been more wrong. The second we walked into the place I knew we had discovered a real gem. Designed by Mowbray & Uffinger a...