Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Monday, December 23, 2013


Art imitates life and vice versa.

 

 To prove it, I saw NYC garbage men on a break pitch ideas for The City Of Angels or Hollywood. I was overwhelmed by the musky scent of success when I realized my childhood dream to live life like a great American novel had begun to write itself.

 

This true-life story has everything but a movie studio called Kitchen Sink Productions or Tin Hat Films. And, yes, it has books gather dust at the NYPL. The trick to get kids and the FBI to read is open up with a scene of a typewriter and paper spattered with brains

 

Gotcha

 

Zoom in overhead to a street at night in The South Bronx, a place that Woody Allen would never think of filming one of his movies not unless he wants to die young.

 

I have a gun in my hand.

 

Don’t say a word, you (expletive deleted)! Watch me kill the audience. Watch me walk between parked cars and point the gun at a Puerto Rican named Angel. Pop, pop, pop and Angel falls backwards against a locked building door. He slides down ever so slowly.

 

Are you reading me so far, NRA?

 

Previously, the Puerto Rican and I got into a heated dispute started by me. It was over nothing to get $omething by $elling a story to grab grub and pay my rent. Only in New York can I get away with satire and to be interviewed by Charlie Rose under the all-seeing third eye blind of Channel 2 News. I write this to Tweet Think Thirteen and---

 

THIS IS A SPECIAL BULLETIN!!!

 

NYPD will regret they never stopped and frisked me, a handsome blond haired white guy who looks tailor made for Wall Street or for orgies at the Playboy Mansion or for good old fashion Gay American family values in the 21 Century.  Well, I’m off to Africa.

 

Hope I don’t get Aids!

 

I’m just kidding.

 

I’m white

 

ALL OF A SUDDEN, faster than anyone can say NO ONE ESCAPES THE SPANISH INQUISTION, I was chased by a mob of angry Puerto Ricans all looking like Gerardo Rivera after he had his nose smashed by Neo Nazis! Could they be any madder if I had set the Puerto Rican flag on fire as seen on TV in the final season of Seinfeld?

 

For legal reasons (like avoiding the death penalty), Angel came back to life when I brought him a Bud. We laughed at the toy gun that looked real in the hands of an actor who is destined to become the next Al Pacino, an Italian who played a Puerto Rican.

 

Truthfully, I’m not white. I’m Pulp Puerto Rican Fiction Made In The USA.

 

How good am I an actor for the next Fellini, film director of surrealism?

 

I’m not an actor.

 

It’s been real.

 

Ciao, 2013

 

XOLOL

 

 
Art& Hot Text Copyrighted By Daniel Angel Aponte

 

Why is China LOL?

Saturday, November 23, 2013

The True Meaning Of Black Friday



 
Life After Media by Danny A Aponte

 

When I was a child, media was my first drug of choice in The South Bronx of America.

 

Then one day, I OD when the better angel of my nature went to Google Heaven

 

And now The Dream Police by Cheap Trick plays LOUD inside my brain!!!

 

AIEEEEE! I’m having a better time than I ever did in the real world!!!

 

Life movies on…

 

 

Wednesday, November 13, 2013

I died and went to Google Heaven





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.

 


 

All Our Yesterdays, A To Z At The Library

 

Saturday, November 9, 2013


How To Pitch Nightmares To DreamWorks


An old stove was leaking 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.

 

There was 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 recently painted battleship gray or the gray across the waters called Riker’s Island Prison. We were practically shouted to move to another old apartment not rent stabilized. We were harassed constantly. They were like telemarketers calling at all hours.

 

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. Our complaints, added to a female US mail carrier, failed to motivate the superintendent to fix the problem. He 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 were surrounded by strangers when the landlords brought in homeless families to charge the city 2, 800 $ per apartment.

 

My elderly mother pays 488.29.

 

Still the 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 funeral parlor is always crowded with screams of those who lost loved ones. Where’s Jesus? Where’s The Man of Steel?

 

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. There are no great stories without heartbreak and no refunds for answered prayers.

 

“It was the worse of times…”

 

This is a mural for myself as well as afterimages of other kids all gifted. 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.  Optimism was my 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 Word98 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.

 

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. 

 

This is the house of genius that helped me realize what I was vaguely dreaming of creating. This is a thanks for my mother who worked in a pen & pencil factory and drew me my first smile. Now I can 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 to draw 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.

 

The End and here comes sequel.

 

How To Pitch Nightmares To DreamWorks by Danny Aponte of P.S 161









Saturday, November 2, 2013

 
Life After Media

 

I woke up on the dark side of the moon. I looked up and saw the bright light of the sun.  I recall being murdered by head injuries at the university of New York and from then on going to Google Heaven. The Better Angel Of My Nature Lives Again In Cyberspace. 

 

This is a warning shot across the bow of your Evil Enterprise.

 

Surrender and prepare to be boarded, evildoers.

 

You nightmares will head to DreamWorks.

 

Let there be movie…

 



 






 



Thursday, October 24, 2013

Home


An old stove was leaking gas in an old kitchen.

 

Three days before Thanksgiving Day, the pipes of the sink burst in an apartment my anxious 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, for the time being, 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. It was an unbelievable offer better than the previous Italian landlords’ final solution of fixing the problems of an old building by splashing the rooftop with gasoline to collect on insurance money. Home is not far from Happy Land where over 80 human beings were burnt alive. The funeral parlor across our bedroom windows became crowded with screams of those who lost loved ones.

 

On an eerily silent night, I opened the window and sensed the sickening light cologne of cremation that drifted from the aftermath of the WTC.  Death’s scent had traveled miles on the wind to remind us we are all connected as sure as the air we need to survive.

 

At an early age, I learned to tattoo my scars on paper. Optimism was my painkiller next to Saint Joseph’s Orange Favored Aspirin For Children. 

 

 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. At P.S 25, Mr. Mark, my white-haired English teacher, was a grandfather figure slightly hunched with a burden of quiet grief. He gave Anne to me to keep. This is my journal.

 

This is an essay by images and a painting by words.

 

This is a mural for myself as well as an afterimage of children’s’ dreams.

 

My childhood 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 garden 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 Anne win me over with her serene smile.

 

The End.

 

Here’s to our public library in The South Bronx of America.

 

Where The Wild Things Are

 

Lol

 



 





 
http://lifeaftermedia.blogspot.com



Friday, August 23, 2013


“Leave your furniture behind. I’m giving you and your mother bunk beds,” said a fast talking Dominican ex-cop working for Paradise Management. He practically ordered us to move to another old apartment not rent stabilized. Without a lease we would be at their mercy for further harassment. The last time I heard an offer of free bunk beds was in Nazi Germany. This ghetto was aging my frail mother from the day the building was nearly set on fire by the previous Italian landlord Blue Angels arrested.  On a strangely calm evening, I opened the bedroom window that faces the funeral home across the street and sensed the sickening scent of cremation that traveled miles from Ground Zero.

 

It was the worse of times…

 

Any moment would come a barrage of furious knocks on our door and (due to flashbacks from a movie by Steven Spielberg) shouts of ATTENTION in Spanish would sound like hostile German solders. I’ve seen Dominicans throw out clothes and bric-a-brac out the windows of the apartments they were set to renovate in order for the landlords to hike up the rent to $2,800. Our mailbox was vandalized and they came in to remove our bathtub when I was looking for work and help from a city of illegal guns and roses.

 

Bunk beds can be also found across the river in Riker’s Island Prison.

 

I’m at our South Bronx Public Library Where The Wild Things Are and In The Belly Of The Beast.  I want to blog an artifact I found under old carpets. It’s a page from The New York World Telegram printed in the 1930s. I want to sell a story to pay rent on Earth.

 

I want to rage The War of Ideas.

 

The pen is mightier than the light sword, right?

 

Pick it up.

 

Defend yourselves.