Blog

“It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald

The next morning dawns beautifully in Boston. Alan has decreed that an early bowl of phở will be the perfect way to begin our shopping excursion, even as he frets over the fact that it’s not quite cold enough to get the full warming effect of the Vietnamese soup. A few minutes after our appointed meeting time, Alan arrives at the designated restaurant, a corner landmark in the heart of Boston’s Chinatown. A rust-colored top coat is flung over his chair as he sits; a sculptural scarf of felt flowers encircles the coat’s collar and spills to the floor. Practiced nonchalance would be how he would describe the entrance; to the rest of us it looks like careless confidence. A floral shirt runs over the top of his pants, untucked and uncharacteristically lending an unkept aspect to his countenance. In Boston, on a shopping spree, he is dressed to work: digging out bargains, flitting from store to store, and hurrying along to beat the coming crush of college kids who are sleeping in on the weekend. This is his happy place; this is his native soil. “I grew up in the retail world,” he chuckles. “Made me who I am today!” It’s impossible to take it too seriously.

Against some odds and bets, he’s a chipper morning person. One might assume he’s a creature of the evening, but these days he likes to be in bed by 11. “I’m too old for late nights,” he sighs at one point. On this morning, despite the lines around his eyes, he is bright and engaging. “I just love the phở!” is one of several exhortations he makes during the course of ordering the meal. Reports of moodiness seem, once again, to be quite missing the mark, and though he maintains he prefers solitude to shopping with a buddy, I am one of the trusted few he’ll deign to bring along, provided I “tow the line.” We both laugh a little at that.

As much as his appearance and guises have changed over the past couple of decades (yes, it’s been that long), it feels like the young man I met long ago is still intact and that life, in spite of the typical bumps and bruises it doles out, has allowed him to remain the person he’s always been. Not that there hasn’t been growth, particularly when it comes to his creative expressions.

Returning to the notion I was just realizing from the afternoon before, it struck me that Alan is once again in a different place from where he was the last time we met. That was when he was about to embark upon ‘The Delusional Grandeur Tour’ way back in 2015 – his self-proclaimed final tour (the seventh of such endeavors) and he was finally realizing that the manifestation of his creative artistic output need not influence his own emotional and mental well-being. For quite a while, I think we all worried it might, so strikingly autobiographical were his projects, so vainly self-centered and self-serving some of them seemed. Yet by the time ‘The Delusional Grandeur’ spectacle rolled around, it seemed as if he had made the leap from living his artistic output to managing it from a place of control and safety. It was a deliberate and hard-fought battle to reach such a space, and though there was the occasional veneer of calculation and manipulation to it, the execution and artistic intent was of such purity that the power of the piece bled through. Arriving at that point, however, may have scared him on some level. In previous modes he would put out a new project about once a year; this time he’s waited for about three trips around the sun before releasing something new.

Not that he’s been idle during that time. If you think about it, producing an average of 1000 words a day for his website was the rough equivalent of creating one previous project per month. His output was more substantial than ever, but the official ‘project’ – that all-encompassing behemoth of artistic creation – kept getting pushed off in service of his blog and website, as well as the more pressing concerns of a marriage and a job and maintaining a home and yard. Andy’s health had taken a downward turn, and while Alan was notorious for clamming up for fear of inviting the universe to wreak more havoc, he took a more active role in helping out and being a better husband. For someone who’s led a very charmed existence on many levels, this intrusion of real life into the fantasy of how he was portrayed was a drastic change, but he stepped up to the tasks at hand. I’ve always had a sneaking suspicion that he could do it; it was just a matter of whether anyone had the trust or know-how to let him prove it.

That most recent project, ‘The Delusional Grandeur Tour’ had been drawn out over two years. With “tour dates” being scattered fewer and farther between, and Alan finding himself at home more than away for the weekend, the tour book itself was posted in regular installments on ALANILAGAN.com, signaling a transition to online output, a major shift that will finally find full fruition when the new project premieres online in November, with in-person viewings of the photo book to follow. More telling is the fact that the online version contains about 100 more photographs than the physical book; proof that future projects may find themselves more web-oriented. That means more content, less interaction, and greater reach.

“In a way, my website has come full circle,” he explains as he rips up a bouquet of Thai basil and squirts some sriracha sauce into his bowl of steaming pho. “In the very beginning, the website was only going to be a repository for my work, an online representation for anyone who wanted to see the real thing. I would use it as a back-up for the physical copies of my projects, or a sort of virtual store-front for the kind of writing I did. Since then, it’s evolved into a blog, and a diary, and a place where new projects are born. Now, the physical book, which I just had printed for the new project, is sort of the repository and representation of a larger project that can be viewed in its entirety online. In that respect, things have flipped.”

That new project, entitled provocatively and mysteriously ‘PVRTD’ (yes, it’s short for ‘Perverted’) is taking up most of his promotional time. As he was coming to terms of being home more, and the end of his “touring” days, he was also feeling the familiar nudge of creative restlessness. By the winter of 2018, he’d formulated the general idea for ‘PVRTD’, and it would be as provocative as anything he had ever done.

{To Be Continued… See also Part 1}