Author Archives: Alan Ilagan

The walls back then were an unabashed bordello red. I tried tempering it with a rag-off technique, but there’s just so much one can rag off when blood red is splattered over all the plaster. It didn’t translate to most photos anyway, so for all intents and purposes it was as red as the reddest rose. The kitchen, adjacent but for an occasional curtain (at the time it was purple velvet, I believe) was a bright Kelly green. The recessed lights glowed warmly, bouncing off the shiny wooden floors and lending more visual heat in a Boston fall which grew colder and colder with each passing day. This then was the condo in the fall of 1997, a mostly uneventful pocket of time – and one that is slightly hazy for its lack of memorable events. I’d just gone around the world in the first half of the year, and now I was back in Boston a little lost and a little found. 

WE HAVE A SPECIAL NEED
TO FEEL THAT WE BELONG
COME WITH ME INSIDE
INSIDE MY VELVET ROPE

On the stereo, the new Janet Jackson CD spun its challenging music and concepts, and the title track provided the aural backdrop to a photo shoot for that year’s holiday card. The song became a fall staple, bringing me back to that cozy evening, where I made myself one of the first true martinis I ever had, as much as in service to the photo as to the desire to try something new. I didn’t do a very good job. Consulting Mr. Boston’s book of cocktails, I found the requisite ingredients (gin and dry vermouth from a recent party) but didn’t have any ice readily made, so I tried it without. (I know, I know – one, how was there a time when I didn’t have ice on hand, and two, what on earth was I thinking to make a martini without chilling it?)

Early days. Fledgling kills. Myriad mistakes.

THIS SPECIAL NEED
THAT’S WITHIN US
BRINGS OUT THE BEST
YET WORST IN US
FOLLOW THE PASSION
THAT’S WITHIN YOU
LIVING THE TRUTH
WILL SET YOU FREE

It went down my throat like fire, and I cringed. What in hell was this all about? What the fuck was wrong with James Bond? And why would anyone drink this? I set up the camera and posed, the martini would mostly be a prop that night, and I sipped a few more sips for photographic documentation. Wearing an acid green 60’s/70’s wide-collar shirt in swirls of psychedelic paisley, I had on a pair of matching tights. Yeah, tights. These shots would end up on the cutting-room floor, as the outfit wasn’t quite reading the way I wanted it to – the final holiday card would show me in a more dramatic ostrich feather robe, and a blue cocktail in hand (composed mostly of Windex and quite clearly for looks only). It was the 90’s. I was a fucking mess, but I didn’t see it then.

WE HAVE A SPECIAL NEED
TO FEEL THAT WE BELONG
COME WITH ME INSIDE
INSIDE MY VELVET ROPE

Ms. Jackson sang of the need to belong, and ‘Velvet Rope’ became one of my main songs that fall, mostly due to this single evening of solitude in the condo, continuing a tradition of fall songs that came to signal the shift in seasons, and the short path to the holidays. There was a coziness to it, and a certain dramatic flair that came with the falling leaves and the harsher winds.

Outside, Boston twinkled and glowed in the night – as my head danced with visions of those holidays to come, the friends and family I’d get to see, and a time we would be together again. This distance – of time and space – kept me feeling safe. I didn’t need the martini as anything more than a prop, and on that night I didn’t even bother to finish it. Feeling a twinge of waste as I poured it down the kitchen sink drain, I couldn’t stomach finishing it, as lovely as I suddenly felt.

PUT OTHERS DOWN
TO FILL US UP
OPPRESSING ME
WILL OPPRESS YOU
OUTSIDE LEAVE JUDGMENT
OUTSIDE LEAVE HATE
ONE LOVE’S THE ANSWER
YOU’LL FIND IN YOU

The rest of the ‘Velvet Rope’ album played out in the background as I cleaned up and gathered the rolls of film for developing. (Does anyone remember 35mm film anymore? Oh you kids – you had no idea how much work we once had to go through to get a decent image…) It ended with something called ‘Special’ – an echo of the sentiment of ‘Velvet Rope’ – and this remains one of Ms. Jackson’s under-appreciated jewels. This too became a song of that fall, and every fall afterward.

“You see, you can’t run away from your pain, because wherever you will, there you will be. You have to learn to water your spiritual garden. Then, you will be free.” ~ Janet Jackson

This is when the chill in the air starts to stick, when the vestiges of summer warmth in the ground finally release their hold. In the subways of the cities, that same warmth is suddenly a comfort you can feel leaving. It is both relief and cause for concern. After a summer when the heat was sometimes overbearing and overwhelming, a little chill was something you could embrace. Part of you knew it was wrong, that you would look back at this moment as when it all began and regret your friendliness with the first snap of cold, and part of you didn’t care because it felt inevitable. 

In many ways, October is the anti-thesis of March – it comes in like a lamb and out like a lion. A lion in costume and Halloween splendor. Some of the year’s most beautiful days can be found here, when sunlight sifts through the canary yellow leaves of the trees after a rain, and the sidewalk reflects it all in brilliance you somehow don’t see in summer or spring. It’s a beauty found only in October. 

Ropes of goldenrod drape the highways, while explosions of asters perform their shows like echoes of the Fourth of July. The light still carries some warmth, sometimes quite a bit, and the sky is likely the bluest it will be for the remainder of the year. It’s the blueness of the sky I will miss most, at least at first. 

Slowly, and then quickly, it all begins to change. The leaves go first, just a few here and there, only in the strongest gusts of wind, and then a storm will come, maybe the remnants of hurricane, and suddenly just a few added drops of water tear them all off at once. Thrilling and obscene, it’s a striptease that’s over too quickly.

Like spring. Like the cherry blossoms. 

October
And the trees are stripped bare
Of all they wear
What do I care?

Greeting October this year gives me pause, like it usually does, but I’m a bit different than I was last year. Actually, I’m probably a lot different, and so my guard is up in new ways, and down in others. Over the past year, I’ve managed to deconstruct the forty-five-year-old fortress around me, while building an inner stability and sense of self that was somehow always there, but hidden and disguised, even to my bifocal-demanding eyes. And so as October arrives, I feel both naked and fortified. It will not be like last year, or any other year. 

Goldenrod gets a bad reputation, blamed for the evils of ragweed when its own pollen is sticky and not airborne. It puts on the fiery show when it is the ragweed that is making everyone sneeze. I’ve always dreaded the arrival of goldenrod’s blooms, the way they signified school starting up again, the way they promised more people and more interactions, more stress and more worry, and more distance from the safety and sweetness of summer. 

When you get older, that shit doesn’t just arrive with the fall, or go away with the summer – it’s there always. The stresses of being grown. The perils of being an adult. And so, goldenrod has become something of a comfort, a reminder of when the worries were never quite as worrisome as my mind made them out to be. 

October
And kingdoms rise
And kingdoms fall
But you go on and on…

Yes, this year will be different, because I’ve shone a light in most of my dim corners, and driven away the shadows, mostly because they were make-believe, composed out of my own fears and perceived injustices. The ones that turned out to be real, the ones I had to confront, were dealt with and dismissed. Some proved stubborn and difficult to eradicate, and I had to work a little harder. Some are in a perpetual state of progress. 

The work is challenging, but the work is good, and in spite of all the outward appearances I have carefully orchestrated over the last forty-five years, it turns out that I enjoy working hard toward something. My hands are as happy digging in the dirt of the garden as they are swirling the whipped body cream of the Beekman Boys into each other. 

Fall is about hard work. Harvesting and preparing, stocking and baking, hunkering down and fluffing up the winter nest. October is when that process syncs and clicks. September contains more summer than fall – October finally gets to fully flower. Like the goldenrod, nodding along roadsides and forest edges, October is both showy and subdued. By the time the first hard frost arrives, it too will be laid bare.

The music of Schumann’s ‘Ghost Variations’ was supposedly sung to him in a feverish dream near the end of his life, and it comprises his last written work. In the midst of writing them he tried to drown himself in the Rhine, only to be rescued by bargemen, and a day or two later he reportedly finished the music. After that he voluntarily entered an asylum where he would die two years later.

There is something very ghostly about this music, fitting for the eve of October, fitting for the time of the year when the veil between worlds is at its thinnest and most easily penetrable. Unlike some ghost stories, this one is more soothing and consoling, resulting in calm and acceptance, a resignation to the customary line between the physical world and the spiritual world, and those elusive moments when the line is blurred or erased.

Shadows of the past are my usual ghosts. They haunt and vex my every step, and no matter how hard I have tried to shake them, their release only comes with a hard-won and well-earned understanding of why they remain. It’s best to make peace with such ghosts, to embrace the aches of the past and to gently but deliberately untie their tethers from the present. Like so many people, sometimes all they want is acknowledgement – a nod and a kind word of forgiveness or apology – and this is a perfect time of the year to do so. A winter is best spent stark and bare – it is the natural way of the world, which wants to strip everything down starting with the leaves, and leave its own mark in ice or snow until it’s ready to clothe us again.