Author Archives: Alan Ilagan

It feels like October just got here, and already we’re halfway through it. Stop the world, I want to get off. As we barrel toward the release of a new project, and with the holiday season right around the corner, I ask that we pause for a moment to slow things down. Can we bring the lights low for a bit? Calm the tempo? Let me use my deeper seductive voice for this number.

There, that’s better. Fall can get entirely too serious sometimes. Let’s do a quick look-back at the week that just went by and try to sort it all out. Meet me back here later today for a fresh post.

It began with a cozy fall dish of Ghapama. 

The arrival of a new project was heralded by blood & roses. Ominous…

Follow all the antics of the Tiny Threads series here. Go back! Go back!!

Driving into the autumn mist.

A simple potato recipe from Nigella. (If I were a straight man, nah nah nah nah nah…)

Amsterdam Strong. 

The Visible Penis Line (VPL) of Pietro Boselli. 

Scarlet berries are signs of fall. 

Before October goes, some sunny shades of Iris. 

Taps for the angel’s trumpet. 

Simon Dunn’s saucy side. 

Things are about to get very Perverted up in here.

Hunks of the Day included the fine forms of Brandon English, Clément Daguin, Tadd Fujikawa, Christian Stoinev, and Simon Nessman. 

This is the first set of images from my upcoming ‘PVRTD’ project, which is a photo essay that will be captured in book form, as well as within an online album in The Projects page. In the trio of shots shown here you can see the cover shot from the book. The exact nature of this project been shrouded quite intentionally in mystery. The teasers you will see and the promotional madness about to ensue are a straight-forward bait-and-switch tactic, so before that all goes down (and my lace-covered and/or naked ass makes its grand re-appearance) here’s just the slightest inkling of what makes up the actual project. It’s not perverted in the way you may think it is, and though the promo photos may tell a different story, this is one tale you will have to tell for yourself.

“When the times are a crucible, when the air is full of crisis,” she said, “those who are most themselves are the victims.” – Gregory Maguire 

PVRTD: The New Project

Coming November 2018

The Projects Page

Capturing the fiery brilliance of the fall season, these little berries were putting on a show the last time I visited Boston. Even in the heart of that fair city, there are mini-forests like this lending their mystery and enchantment, if you only pause to look. In the perfectly manicured garden squares in front of long rows of brownstones, or the hidden plots of green scattered throughout the South End, scenes of the season await such discovery.

Shuffling along such shaded corridors and crackling through leaves that have already dried and fallen is a rite of passage at this time of the year. We pull our coats closer, hustle a little faster, and turn to face the cold head-on. The pay-off for such a turn is in the beauty of these berries. Plants go to seed to save themselves from the winter. Even the ones that come back make their fruit in the biological ritual of reproduction. Maybe some bird will pluck one of the scarlet berries, swallow it down and shit it out into a pocket of soil – instantly fertilized and given a fair shot at life, if any such thing can be considered fair.

Or perhaps they’re poisonous, and the birds and squirrels know instinctively to stay away. Maybe scarlet means danger, and the plant only wants to be left alone, Garbo-like and secretive. I can appreciate that too.

Last Saturday I was in Amsterdam at a wedding celebration/birthday bash for family friends I’ve known since birth. It was the happiest of days, and a much-needed reminder of all the good that is still in the world. At the same time, twenty innocent lives were lost a few miles away. At moments like this, when life shows you its best and worst sides, it is difficult to find comfort. There are no words.

As we were driving up Market Street, I saw the same old dilapidated building I’d seen since my childhood. It was a tall brick-sided thing that seemed to jut startlingly out of the earth, tottering and yet somehow solid on its random corner. At a red light, Andy slowed to a stop and I snapped a photo of it on our way to get ready for the wedding. Part of it was covered with a vine whose leaves were in the process of turning red.

In the design that the vine made, this splotchy blot of red on worn brick, winding with various ventricles across the crumbling facade, I saw the heart of Amsterdam. Filled with happiness and joy, love and compassion, sadness and sorrow, anger and strife, it beat with all the tender might of our human experience. We will never make sense of it all, I thought, but together, like all those red leaves, maybe we can fill in our own hearts. With tears, with laughter, with memory, with love…

When I was a kid I had visions of unicorns and rainbows and swimming with the manta rays.

When I dreamed it was of pencil sets in a thousand different colors, of feathered gowns and sequined capes and festooned headdresses.

When I walked through my days it was largely in imagination and make-believe. I held out hope that I might stumble into a hole in the forest floor and uncover a secret world of magic and monsters, tempered by beauty and fields of flowers and nearby rolling streams, all with a castle in the distance that would be warmed by fireplaces at night. When the ocean lapped at my feet on family vacations, I pictured myself holding onto the dorsal fin of a dolphin and flying through their salty environs, or barely caressing the soft slime coating the ribbon of a moray eel. These were the images I entertained in a childhood marked by wild imaginings. I much preferred the fantastical lands I could conjure in my mind than the mundane sidewalks of Amsterdam, New York.

I also had a wish to walk through a cloud before I knew what they were, thinking the thick smoke was almost solid, in which I could play hide-and-seek with friends. Then I got in a plane and flew through the clouds and they parted and dissipated and vanished into thin air.

Every once in a while, however, I’ll catch a glimpse of fog in a little valley ahead of me, and it calls to the imagination of my childhood, where anything was possible, and spells and enchantments could be cast and caught, and a pool of morning mist beckoned with the notion of what-if…

On winter snow, they bleed their precious life out.

Dry, desiccated petals and leaves, preserved at the height of their beauty.

Frozen within and without, still they bleed.

Abstract scarlet notions and memories of murderous rage.

Staining the snow with their fury,

their history of violence.

Sacred untouched snow, defiled by this bloody blight,

All the life of the world squeezed

Tight in this vicious vice –

A death embrace.

Portending and foreboding

All icy tension and terrifying anticipation

Waiting for the fall

Waiting for the madness

Waiting for the inevitable destruction.

A threat

and the chill of the world’s winter.

It sets a tone.

It paints a mood.

It bleeds warning and danger.

PVRTD: The New Project

Coming November 2018

In The Projects Page