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...

In 1968, Doris Day starred in a movie called Where Were You When the Lights Went Out? The film, which I’ve never seen, is set in New York City during the Northeast blackout that had taken place three years earlier. Based on a 1956 French play called Monsieur Masure , the movie also starred Patrick O’Neal, Robert Morse and Terry-Thomas. I had this vague memory of the ’65 blackout where I was walking down my street and getting this feeling that something was terribly wrong. While we didn’t lose power in my neighborhood, the blackout cut off all TV transmissions and I recall being so bummed because I couldn’t watch “F Troop.” Gregory Peck starred in a 1965 thriller called Mirage that opened with a blackout in New York. The film, which was pretty good, was directed by Edward Dmytryk and also starred Walter Matthau, Kevin McCarthy, George Kennedy and Diana Baker. New York had a blackout in 1977 that was marked by widespread looting and vandalism—quite until the Doris Da...

I was walking to the park a few blocks from my hotel room when I spotted the guy standing in the street. I was a little shaky, having just arrived in Montreal following a nearly sleepless night that was compounded by a Xanax haze that I endure every time I fly. But despite the fatigue and the shock at being in a new city, I noticed something unusual about this man, something a little off, and then I focused my bleary eyes and realized what was going on. He was naked. I looked again and saw that this fellow had joined a group of five other equally naked guys. Now Xanax is a powerful drug, but it ain’t that powerful, so I knew that I was not hallucinating. Those dudes were definitely nude, which seemed rather odd to me, but then I was new in town, and perhaps this was some local custom that the guidebooks hadn’t mentioned. I later learned that the naked guys were part of a climate change demonstration and I guess the message is that global warming is going to get so bad tha...

Some 40 years ago, I was working at a temp job in Manhattan shortly after I had graduated from college. I forget the name of the place--I seem to recall it was on the Upper East Side--but I do remember this older man who worked there. This was 1980 and Raging Bull , Martin Scorsese’s biopic about middleweight champion Jake LaMotta starring Robert DeNiro, was one of the top movies of the day. I had seen the film and while I was impressed with the acting and the stunning black and white photography, I was less keen on the film than most of the critics. The film seemed emotionally hollow to me and, in his review, a commentator on WCBS asked, “why is this guy raging?” One of the most memorable-and most violent--scene in the film occurs when DeNiro, who portrayed LaMotta, mercilessly pounds the up-and-coming fighter Tony Janiro after LaMotta’s wife, Vickie, mentions quite innocently that the guy was good looking. This drives the insanely jealous LaMotta to butcher the younger f...

So, like just Mark Twain, it seems that reports of my air conditioner’s death have been greatly exaggerated. The saga Five O’clock Charlie, my loudly ailing AC took another turn last week, and there was enough drama going on around here to power a week’s worth soap operas--most of which was my own doing. As mentioned in the previous post, I was forced to order a new air conditioner when my formerly reliable kitchen unit began making all manner of hideous sounds. I was less than thrilled about dropping 300 bucks, preferring to spend that dough on my upcoming vacation, but I couldn’t hack the godawful noise the thing was making, and I was genuinely concerned that it would explode and hurl shrapnel all over my home. In addition to the expense, a new air conditioner meant redoing a job I thought had been completed and bugging one of my neighbors to install the thing--something I had really hoped to avoid. He’s a great guy and very agreeable, but I hate bugging people if I ...