The Luna Park Gazette

“Do not pray for an easy life, pray for the strength to endure a difficult one.” -- Bruce Lee I can’t remember the last time I drove a car, but whenever it was, you needed a key to open the door and a rearview to back up. After moving back to New York in 1997, I decided to get rid of my battered old Toyota. I didn’t want to deal with the traffic and parking headaches or the hideously high auto insurance costs. I decided I didn’t need a car in this city with its subways, buses and ferries. Yes, I hate the subways with a passion, and I constantly complain about them, but the truth is that the trains are a pretty efficient way of getting around. But I had to reacquaint myself with the latest in auto technology last weekend, when my sister, auntie and I traveled to my aunt’s farmhouse in the Berkshires. My aunt and her late husband bought this old house in Cumming...

I stood in the middle of Shore Road waiting for an approaching car to pass by. It was Saturday afternoon, and I was a bit frazzled. I was taking an all-day session with my beloved writing class—my instructor calls these events “The Chunk”--and I’d gone to my local park to work on a particularly thorny chapter of my manuscript. However, some group of…people had set up massive speakers on the nearby 69th Street pier and was blasting dance music to virtually no one. I’m assuming these twits had to obtain a permit to use public property is this most irritating manner, which makes me wonder who was the idiot who signed off on this fiasco. It was a good distance away me, but the thump-thump-thump of the sound system traveled with the greatest of unease and it was driving me crazy. Had it been Saturday night I wouldn’t have minded. Hell, I might’ve gone over there and busted a move myself or pulled a muscle. But a beautiful sunny summer afternoon doesn’t need a soundtrack. The...

I thought I’d be finished in five minutes. Last week, I joined up with my sister and auntie for a trip to the Brooklyn Museum to see “Hiroshige’s 100 Famous Views of Edo,” a collection of prints by Utagawa Hiroshige of the city that would become Tokyo. The prints were first published in 1856–58 and the museum’s website promised visitors to the exhibition that “you’ll encounter all four seasons in scenes of picnics beneath cherry blossoms, summer rainstorms, falling maple leaves, and wintry dusks.” This was the first time in 24 years that the print was put on public display and the exhibition also includes modern photographs to show how Hiroshige’s scenes morphed into today’s Tokyo. My sister and I were already acquainted with Hiroshige’s work, having seen his “Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido” at the Montreal Museum of Fine Art during our recent vacation. We’re becoming experts on this guy. The Brooklyn Museum’s collection is vast and once we were finished, we planne...