Tuesday, December 31, 2013
Monday, December 9, 2013
Blogging With Myself With No One In Sight
The day after Nelson Mandela died, teenagers rolled
marijuana into tobacco in the littered hallways of the building my mother lives
in. After midnight, they came in and out loud as jet planes overhead. The
peephole of our apartment was like Point Of View on Channel 13. Without a camera, all I can do is record with
words the activities of those moved out of homeless shelters and into a
building of long time tenants bewildered by old age in The New Millennium.
Things have changed. Every apartment now rents for $2,800.
Greed is like a super storm.
The city of the world is paying for this. The taxpayers are
paying for this. It’s no wonder why the landlord wants my mother and me to move
out. Make us homeless to make money from the homeless? This is progress in the
21 Century? Vandals have broken front doors and our mailbox ripped out while
graffiti grew like mold on bathroom walls. Cops have been called more often
than the fumigators that always leave three glue traps for a growing population
of rodents far from a childhood fable on three blind mice.
Where do we go from this icon of poverty?
I saw the final season of Dexter.
The kids are pleased to meet you! And they don’t have to
guess your name! The DVD was on the shelves of The Public Library where I saw
The American Dream, a book written by an anchorman from the TV station with the
All Seeing Eye logo.
Now I’m Dexter with a
pen mightier than a sword.
Writing truth cuts deep into the heart. I recall tattooing
on wrist my Social Security number in case of being robbed and killed. There seems to be legions of gangsters in the
city of illegal guns and roses and stop and frisk for everyone of me who used
to carry Ann Frank in my arms when I was a child who walked in long shadows of
bullies and burnt-out buildings. The torch has been passed on to a new
generation, began a speech by a space age president killed like Super Man with
a bullet to his head. By the time you read this, I committed suicide by freedom
of expression. God bless Cyber Space.
Now media knows me and when I lived. This is the final
season. But life movies on against The End… This was my journal to be found in
2188, a future free from social ills.
This was my years of living dangerously in The South Bronx
of America
This was a historical mural of dreams for the City That
Never Sleeps.
One door closed in my Face Book…
And another one opened…
And justice for all…
Finally.
P.S: If anyone in the media failed to see my point, I’ll jab
pen into your all seeing eye.
Period.
Vast Wasteland To Vast Wasteland: An Essay By Images And
Painting By Words
By Danny Aponte
formerly of P.S 161
Copyrighted by Daniel Angel Aponte
Why is China laughing?
Tuesday, December 3, 2013
Time Traveler Seeks Time Share In Angel Fire, New Mexico
I stood on a moss-covered rock and studied icicles on twigs
and branches hung low over the roar of a waterfall in the highlands of
Pennsylvania. This is Planet Earth in
the year 1013. The cascade of waters on craggy cliffs refreshed my spirit as
the sun silently exploded in shades of autumn gold over a breathtaking vast
countryside.
I’ve been around, sang The Man In Black. Wait a second. I
just realized the typo.
It’s actually 2013, November 29.
My big brother took me with him to attend a seminar on the
joys of time-shares.
“My name is Aidan,” said a cherub-faced kid with a baseball
hat after I asked who had made the pyramid of Styrofoam cups on the counter
(where I amazed him by mixing a package of chocolate into my coffee.) I met him
and his parents in a stately house a sales representative named Joe showed
Julio, my brother, a US Army veteran. Press the button at the end of the hall
and you’ll see The Bat Cave, I said to watch Aidan’s eyes widen much to
everyone’s amusement. He went like Lara Croft for the secret passage.
Children will believe anything until they begin to question
the universe.
Back at the seminar in the midst of the mysterious woods, I
sipped my hot beverage while the kid talked non-stop about the Greek gods, Star
Trek: The Next Generation and a time traveler called Doctor Who. I pointed out
that the metal coffee makers looked like The Time Lord’s enemy, The Dareks,
cyborgs out to…”Exterminate!” said Aidan with a smile that went beyond the
borders of his face.
Then I saw the only
African-American invited to participate in time-sharing. “My name is Brian,” he
said with a firm handshake. He had watched Aidan bend my ear instead of an
episode of The Bill Cosby Show, a TV series about a doctor and his family.
The 1980s played on the plasma flat screen just a few feet
away from a holographic fireplace in the spacious lounge. Brian burst out
laughing, as did the chatty kid when I took out my shades from my motorcycle
jacket and said I’ll be back.
As evening revealed fiery lights traveling for centuries
from other galaxies, I stood on the rock and saw creativity that will never dry
up. I saw what I was like when I was a boy.
Thank you, Aidan, for believing nothing is impossible. I needed to hear that.
Now let us find answers to Earth’s difficult problems shall
we?
The Doctor is in.
Wink
Copyrighted By Daniel Angel Aponte 2013
Tuesday, November 26, 2013
A Mural For Myself
Don’t Let The Sun Catch You Crying and other undying music
seemed to take me by the hand to Camelot after injuries caused loss of
memories.
When I was a first grader, I was let out early from school
with other children that ran into the arms of parents with solemn faces. With
no one to pick me up, I quickly learned independence. I walked alongside the
quiet freedom of Saint Mary’s Park, the former estate of The Founding Father
who came up with We, The People. There were no sweet bird songs, no roar of
planes from Idlewood Airport and skies were battleship gray.
With my beloved books, I walked long steps of our home and
past the milk box next to our apartment next to the door of a white –haired
woman, all I had in the way of a doting grandmother. In the living room, I saw
Uncle Walter. He took off his glasses to look back at a clock and marked the
passing of the country’s first TV president in The Space Age.
Super Man died again with a bullet to his head.
In crowds of disbelief and swelling grief, John John
saluted, as did I and other kids. We put up a brave front. It’s what heroes do.
Later on, the better angels of our nature had a dream for the city that never
sleeps and beyond borders like that mechanical wing and a prayer called Voyager
bringing the blues to the universe. “God bless every one of you on the good
green Earth,” said an astronaut after reading the first chapter of Genesis.
“And his mother cried,” softly sang The King over a sick baby born in the
ghetto.
Live long and prosper, Elvis.
You are so cool an American next to John F Kennedy and John
Glenn. The coolest that made the boy I was dance to The Jailhouse Rock in The
South Bronx of America.
It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to.
This is for my mother, who worked in a pen & pencil
factory.
She drew me my first smile.
This is for my English teacher who believed I would write
The Next Great American Novel. Just write what you know, she encouraged a six
grader in The Wonder Years.
Easy as ABC and, “3…2…1--- liftoff of Apollo 13!”
Wednesday, November 13, 2013
The Persistence Of Memory
Undercover cops
assaulted me as I was walked home from school activities that were designed to
build character or good citizenship. I suffered a concussion when one of the
cops forced my head into a brick wall that exploded with graffiti.
As blood crossed my face, they rifled through my belongings.
My bus pass and membership card in GO (General Organization
at I.S 155) drifted to concrete as one of them shouted,” F**k! It’s not him!”
They ran to their unmarked car, as I stood still in the middle of the entrance
of the building I live in. One of them stopped and looked back like he wanted
to say, “Sorry, kid”. Then they were gone. Quietly, I sat at the edge of my bed
with ice pressed to a growing head bump.
I almost forgot my homework on The Underground Railroad.
Years later, holiday vacation from NYU and homework to
create a tour book for the South Bronx began by guns pulled out by cops behind
squad cars. They yelled while I dropped a shoulder bag and lifted my arms up. I
was smashed against the back of a car and violently patted down by a white cop
while others looked through personal items. When he hit my crotch, I pushed him
several feet back with one hand. I turned and stared into the barrel of a gun
held by a black cop whose nostrils flared like a bull about to charge and gore.
I sensed an unearthly cold light of a stare from my mother’s other son, who,
minutes before, had tried to kill me with Colt 45 malt liquor beer. Had the
heavy bottle connected, my eyes would’ve been wrenched out, nose and teeth
shattered in a gruesome death. Possessed
by the demon Schizophrenia inflamed by Crack, he had ran with an awful shriek
to a coffee shop on Prospect Avenue where he told cops I had a gun.
The way they roughed me up was nothing compared to my
mother’s husband who belted me across my face and back when I was a boy. His
son learned this behavior so well he upset his father when he put me in a
chokehold and later attempted murder again that caused lacerations on my neck.
It’s hard to live in the real world that made me the captain of the USS
Escapism. Reality bitch slaps when his father tried to drown me in the bathtub
where I pretended to be Namor, the prince of Atlantis, a mutant from Marvel
Comics.
Once upon a time, I felt the mystery of life when I went
deep into the waters of Orchard Beach, the French Riviera of the Bronx. Unlike
other kids, I could hold my breath longer and went far for freedom. I saw
people as points of colors on sands of time and myself as washed up on the
shores of the future free from abuse, free to evolve into someone different,
someone who wanted to get others to where common sense was religion.
The oceans were near to flying in the heavens and second to
the mystery of the human brain that could eventually figure out how to walk on
water. Even though my mother is Catholic, I was never one of those kids that
prayed to a crucified Jew who suffered after giving people Universal Health
Care. I wanted to take The Son of God to the hospital and get Tetanus shots
like me when I stepped on a rusty nail that was hidden like a snake in the
grass in Saint Mary’s Park where I romped in my Lone Ranger cowboy hat and
silver cap guns, a gift from a merchant marine uncle who lived for the open
seas.
This how my holiday vacation from school ended and homework
resumes: I saw red-faced cops handcuffed my mother’s other son and take him to
Lincoln Hospital.
Merry Christmas, baby Jesus, and peace on Earth for children
of all ages.
Amen.
‘
I don’t have a business.
I have a hobby.
I dream.
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
All Our Yesterdays,
An old stove leaked gas in an old kitchen.
I fixed it.
Three days before Thanksgiving Day, in the year of super
storm Sandy that made many people lose homes to floods, the pipes of the sink
burst in an apartment my mother had lived in since the last days of Watergate.
Then came a furious barrage of knocks on our door in the
morning.
The new landlords told her to move to the other side of the
building where long time residents were being concentrated. Democracy faded
into the courtyard walls that were painted battleship gray or the gray across
the waters called Riker’s Island Prison. We were practically shouted to move to
one old apartment to another not rent stabilized. We were harassed constantly
like being with sharks in a feeding frenzy in a small tank.
We had our bathtub removed for a week and a-half in the
wintertime. For a month, we were cut off from the outside world when our
mailbox was ripped from the wall. The tampering with Federal property happened
two days after the landlords’ workmen saw a housing inspector in our humble
home of broken windows and cracked ceilings that mirrored walls. The official warned them not to barge in or
else NYPD would be called.
Our complaints, added to a female US mail carrier, failed to
motivate the landlord to fix the problems except to order the Salvadorian
superintendent to knock on our door and dangled keys to another apartment
devoid of stove and refrigerator.
Move in now and we’ll get them for you, I was told indifferently.
“Leave your furniture behind. I’m giving you bunk beds,”
ordered a Dominican employee of Paradise Management. The last time I heard an
offer of free bunk beds was in Schindler’s List, a movie that branded itself on
my mind. I think of the scene where peoples’ belongings were thrown out of
windows when our courtyard looked like the Fresh Kills landfill in Staten
Island. We had to endure noises and smells of renovation on the building. We
were surrounded by territorial strangers when the landlords brought in homeless
families to charge the city 2, 800 $ per apartment.
My elderly mother pays 488.29.
Still a Dominican did promise 500 dollars if we moved
quickly like the Indians that sold Manhattan for 24 dollars and trinkets. It
was an offer better than the previous Italian landlords’ final solution of
fixing the old building by soaking the rooftop with gasoline to collect on
insurance money. Babies were spared by the intervention of Blue Angels.
Home is not far from Happy Land where over 80 human beings
were burnt alive.
Across our bedroom windows, the Ortiz Funeral Home gets
crowded with screams of those who lost loved ones. Where’s Jesus, a good Jewish
lawyer?
On an eerily silent night, I opened the window and sensed a
sickening light scent of cremation that drifted from the remains of the
WTC. It had lumbered miles on mild wind
to remind us we are all connected as sure as the air we need to survive.
I have a Ken Burns on the brain mentality.
“It was the worse of times…”
At an early age, I learned to tattoo words and watched them
bleed in a paper garden of good and evil. The urban myth of hell was a real
city of illegal guns and roses. This is
a mural for myself as well as afterimages of other dreamers. Optimism was our
painkiller next to Saint Joseph’s Orange Favored Aspirin For Children.
When I was a boy, I carried Anne Frank while shadows of
bullies and burnt-out buildings fell over us after school. At P.S 25, Mr.
Marks, my white-haired English teacher, a grandfather figure slightly hunched
with a burden of quiet grief, gave Anne to me to keep. “The torch has been
passed on to a new generation,” said the country’s first Space Age president.
This is my journal, an essay by images and painting by words.
Chapter 1: It was a dark and stormy night.
“We don’t publish
stories by minorities! Anything else,” a woman said before hanging up in a time
of great prosperity for the country because of the newly invented Internet. I
improvise with what she said like I did on golden trumpet in music class.
Writing on old tech Word95&98 helped me recall a photographic memory in
childhood. In an sixth grade English class at P.S 161, I made a wish to live
life like a great novel, one that would read like the sci-fi of a great comic
book. It should be one that breaks the
law that states there are no second acts in American lives and the lives of
others around planet Earth. There are no great stories without heartbreak and
no refunds for answered prayers.
I finally returned to my Fortress of Solitude where I saw
Waiting For Super Man and Childhood’s End. This is The Hunt’s Point Public
Library, a place of many endings and new beginnings. This is where I found The
Lost Boys and A Winkle In Time.
All Our Yesterdays, A To Z At The Library
This is the house of genius that helped me boldly go what I
was vaguely dreaming of creating. This is a thanks for my mother who worked in
a pen & pencil factory and drew my first smile. Now I fly in cyberspace and
aspire to be like a mild-mannered reporter working at a great metropolitan
newspaper. This story is really on finishing my homework assignment to make a
tour book that draws the highlights of our town.
Truth, justice and the comic books!
Here’s to our public library in The South Bronx of America
Where The Wild Things Are.
How To Pitch Nightmares To DreamWorks by Danny Aponte of P.S
161
The End and here comes sequel
I hope it’s great for you.
http://lifeaftermedia.blogspot.com
Thursday, November 7, 2013
How To Fly Nightmares To DreamWorks by Danny Aponte of P.S 161
Three days before Thanksgiving Day 2012, the pipes of the
sink burst in an apartment my gray-haired mother had lived in since the last
days of Watergate.
Chapter 1: it was a dark and stormy night.
“We don’t publish stories by minorities! Anything else,” a
woman said before hanging up in a time of great prosperity for the country
because of the Internet
Now I have access to fly free in cyberspace and aspire to be like a mild-mannered reporter working at a great metropolitan newspaper.
Truth, justice and the comic books!
Here’s to our public library in The South Bronx of America
Where The Wild Things Are.
Lol
Saturday, November 2, 2013
Why I Was Late For My Computer Appointment At The Public
Library
The Hasidim and two of their Dominican henchmen knocked on
my mother’s door. They came bearing gifts: 5,000 dollars to move to a smaller
but renovated apartment on the other side of the building. My timid Puerto
Rican mother called out my name as I wondered what else to report in my log on
Win98. Act I: Our shabby living room with a view of the funeral parlor becomes
a stage for the cyber audience to see. Jacob! Michael! Shalom! Behold a script that
writes itself! What a comedy of errors!
What actors we are!
Come outside to the hallway. I want to talk to you in
private, said Michael.
I keep a journal like Anne Frank, I said, as his emotionless
eyes got BIG.
That’s life, sang Frank Sinatra on Media Player 98 from my
bedroom.
My dream to live life like A Great American Novel came true!
And I did my way in The South Bronx! Thank you Moshe!!!
Curtains fall as Old Blue Eyes sings New York, New York.
And no laugh track need apply.
LOL
The Further REAL Adventures Of Captain Ame-Rican by Danny
Aponte
Monday, October 21, 2013
Saturday, September 21, 2013
The Next Great American Novel Is Just A Sound Bite By Danny
Aponte
The old stove was leaking gas in an old apartment in The
South Bronx.
Three days before Thanksgiving Day, the pipes of the kitchen
sink burst in an apartment where my mentally battered mother had lived in since
the last days of Watergate. The new landlords told her to move to the other
side of the building where long time residents were being concentrated without
leases. “Leave your furniture behind. I’m giving you bunk beds, a Dominican
employee of Paradise Management barked with the look of a Doberman Pincher. I
stood there stunned by an offer that was better to the final solution of the
previous Italian landlords. They had tried to fix the problems of an old
building by splashing the rooftop with gasoline to collect on insurance money.
When I was a child, I carried Anne Frank while shadows of
bullies and burnt-out buildings fell over us in The South Bronx of America. Mr.
Mark, my white-haired English teacher who was what I had in the way of a
grandfather figure, gave her to me to keep. This is my journal. This is an
essay of images and a painting of words.
This is a mural for myself.
My life came to an end at The Hunt’s Point Public Library, a
place of many endings and new beginnings. Once upon a time, I walked into the
knowledge of good and evil where a dictator waved me over like a stranger in a
car who said he knew my mother. I looked at the table to my right and saw my
beloved Ann seduced me with her serene smile.
The end.
Here’s to our public library in The South Bronx of America.
Where The Wild Things Are
Orinoco Flow sung by Celtic Woman
Thursday, September 12, 2013
Thursday, July 18, 2013
“How would you like 5000 dollars to take your mommy back to
Puerto Rico,” said a troll of a woman with a plastic smile. She first made that
offer to my mother who waited for me to come home to approve her signing a
contract to give up her apartment she has lived in since the 1970s. The sum was
a lot to a shut-in senior citizen who told me with the eyes of a kid on
Christmas morning to take the money to move us to an apartment with better
service in The South Bronx. 5000 dollars can’t even move my mother across the
street to the Ortiz Funeral Home. The new landlords’ representatives than began
a covert campaign of harassment. Why not? My mother pays close to 500 dollars
in rent.
Today, apartments in the building goes for 2,800 dollars
paid for by the city to house homeless families. The quality of life went down
with graffiti appearing on walls like mold and garbage items such as soiled
sanitary napkins that trailed down the steps like the aftermath of landmines.
And noise levels went up to disrupt dreamtime.
Then they made us another offer. Without a new lease, they
wanted us to move to the other side of the building where they had concentrated
most of the old timers that were convinced to give up their apartments. I must
have looked retarded to one representative because he practically ordered me
leave our furniture behind. With the eyes of a Doberman Pincher, he said he was
giving us free bunk beds and wooden tables. The last time I heard an offer like
that was in the days leading to The Holocaust as directed by Steven Spielberg.
And across the dark river, there is Riker’s Island Prison, a place of many free
bunk beds. He then sweetens the pot by offering two months of free rent. I was
on the verge of being able to play one of the Indians that sold Manhattan for
24 dollars and for some blankets. What I needed was a lease for the old
apartment to establish identity for the city to help me back on my feet. If I
don’t produce residency I don’t exist.
I’ve being in limbo for a while that feels like an eternity
and here comes the holidays.
The pipes broke three days before Thanksgiving and I had to
jerry rigged it to fix turkey dinner like a pilgrim with the accent on grim.
After banging on the door, they came in and ripped the bathtub out of the floor
with the promise of reinstalling it in one day. Instead they gave us the keys
to the apartment they wanted us to move in. It went on for a week in the winter
crossing the courtyard to bath only to find lack of hot water on certain cold
nights. Then our mailbox was vandalized and the super didn’t inform us nor did
he intend to make repairs. I had to make a report of the destruction of federal
property to the 41 Precinct on Longwood Avenue. Again we were offered keys to
the other apartment after a US Post Office employee complained that all of our
mail was being send back to sender including health care notifications for my
mother. I went to Housing Court and was given a computer print out of the
company giving us hell in Fort Apache.
It’s called Paradise Management.
This is the good and evil in a musical: the son of Tony and
Maria vs. corporate gang-bangers in The South Bronx of America. This is the
sequel to West Side Story.
Enjoy your popcorn while we suffer for you like the
criminals nailed next to a good Jewish lawyer. And Golden Oscar goes to in The
City of Angels…
Wednesday, July 17, 2013
Thursday, May 16, 2013
Monday, April 15, 2013
Saturday, April 13, 2013
Thursday, January 31, 2013
Once upon a time, I stared at a
typewriter until a gunshot was heard and blood spattered across a sheet of
paper. The End began when the boy I was saw a dog on top of his house.
Chapter 1:
It was a dark and stormy night.
It would be so cool to see that
sound bite on his tombstone but he’s immortal now.
Lucky bastard.
As for me, I have to dig deep
until words begin to bleed like fresh tattoos of Pit Bulls on the back of a
drug dealer in the city of illegal guns and roses. This is what I remember
about The Wonder Years Of Living Dangerously.
In my childhood, I saw the bombings on my train of thoughts by the
legalized graffiti artists of Madison Avenue and how life movies on in The
South Bronx of America .
I saw we had all the time in the world. And I say to myself, like Louis
Armstrong sang, what a wonderful world this is.
I love you, honey bunny…
Art & Hot Text by Danny
Aponte
Now that’s Puerto Rican Fiction!
Friday, January 25, 2013
After holidays faded, I found a
ray gun on a street of The South Bronx.
It triggered a memory on making a wish on
telling a story about living life like a science fiction book. I took idea to
cyberspace and made dream science fact.
Good things really do happen to
children who wait.
P.S: I finally got to finish
homework on creating a tour book for The South Bronx that went beyond what I
imagined. I wonder if I’ll get extra credit for overachieving.
This blog is dedicated to the
memory of Ray Bradbury, author of The Illustrated Man and more on the art of
tattooing words on paper. Thank you for being family to a child at the NYPL.
Adobe Alien Artwork by Daniel
Angel Aponte Designer
Birth of Venus by Botticelli
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