Category Archives: General

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

PVRTD: The New Project

Like you’ve never seen him before.

~ Coming in November 2018 ~

Premiering on The Projects page…

Previous projects:

*Sex ~ October 1993 *Depression ~November 1993

*Love ~ February 1994 *Family ~ March 1994 *Fun ~ April 1994

*Darkness ~ September 1994 *Apology ~ October 1994

*Whimsy ~ January 1995 *Preference ~ February 1995

*Chameleon in Motion: The Friendship Tour ~ March 1995

*Joy ~ April 1995 *The Attic’s Secret ~ May 1995 *disenchantment ~ Fall 1995

*Loss ~ February 1996 * The Magical Mystery Tour: Master of Manipulation ~ March 1996

*Happy ~ April 1996 * The Royal Rainbow World Tour: Alan Is King ~ 1997

*Spin Control ~ March 1998 *The Agony and the Ecstasy of Apathy ~ August 1998

*Of Heart & Home ~ August 1999 *A Man of Mode ~ September 2000

*Man-Boy ~ August 2001 *Words of a Gardener ~ February 2002

*The Talented Trickster Tour: Reflections of a Floating World ~ 2003

*Shades of Gray ~2004

*The Revelation ~ 2006

*StoneLight ~ 2007

*The Circus Project ~ 2008

*A Night at the Hotel Chelsea ~ 2009

*A 21^stCentury Renaissance: The Resurrection Tour ~ 2010

*Bardo: The Dream Surreal ~ 2012

*The Delusional Grandeur Tour: Last Stand of a Rock Star ~ 2015

*PVRTD ~ 2018 

In a lifetime of controversial projects,

this may be the most provocative of them all.

PVRTD: November 2018

If you’ve read ‘A People’s History of the United States’ by Howard Zinn (and I highly recommend that you do) then you probably wouldn’t want to give Christopher Columbus too much credit either, but I digress. On this day off from work, a quadruple collection of blog posts will see us through the wilderness. First up is the traditional Monday morning recap of all that went down on this blog during the previous week.

Fruit of the dogwood.

Barefoot, not pregnant. 

Freak it. 

Apple memories.

A fountain in the fall: Boston.

Lost cherry.

Madonna falls again. 

My ‘Aunt’ Elaine turned 80 while her son Stephen turned married. 

Follow the Tiny Threads.

Hunks of the Day included David Lim, Jay Mohr, Beto O’Rourke, Dallas Keuchel, Michael Avenatti and Steve Gold. 

Ahh, the apple. Fine fruit of the forest, or at least the carefully cultivated orchard. Fruit production is largely a messy scientific battle against pests and disease, and the apple trees of my youth – as sour and bitter as they were so sweetly forbidden – did not translate into any love for growing them as an adult. Leave that to the experts and the ones who can afford to keep the villainous insects at bay.

These days I’m happy just picking up a basket and having them on hand to snack on or put into a tart or crumble. If it’s an especially good day Andy might make an apple pie from scratch – a wonder of culinary execution, as he turns a buttery dough into a flaky crust, and the apples melt magically into their sweet sauce. (I’ve never had much success with cooking apples – they’re either hopelessly mushy in overdone overkill or quite crunchy and raw, entirely at odds with the soft slide of a properly-executed dessert confection.)

Their scent reminds me of fall afternoons after school, when we’d return to the garage and smell the white bag of them perfuming the dusty air as the sun slanted into the space and lit up the floating particles like magic. It was one of the happier memories of fall – all coziness and warmth – and though this likely never actually happened, it set to mind scenes of nibbling on a Macintosh while lazily reading a book beneath a brilliantly-hued tree. There were a few such places that might have afforded the opportunity – but if indeed it happened, it was only to eat the apple in a place of beauty – not to juggle the reading of a book along with it. I remember a patch of high field grass near a small grove of pine trees, where the pine needles dropped and dried in the warm afternoon sun, and a collection of pine cones littered the ground. I did stop there once or twice, but only to collect a few of the pine cones. How the space related to the apples, I cannot accurately recall. Memory fades…

This coat was a find from a trip to Seattle, in a funky store in the Market. It’s more spring-like, with its soft cream color and delicate floral accents, but it can work in fall too, especially when the days still cling to summer’s lingering warmth. That’s the magic of October. Some of the best days of the year are to be found here. (It’s no coincidence that my husband was born in this month.)

This will also serve as a programming notice for regular readers of this blog. I’m about to switch into self-promotion mode (you won’t even be able to discern the difference) in support of a brand-new project. It’s the first since 2015’s ‘The Delusional Grandeur Tour‘ and it’s going to get a big promotional push because that’s what I do best. This has been one of the longer breaks between my creative projects and, truth be told even unto its innermost parts, I missed the creative process. My mind is able to rest better when it finds such an outlet. Anyone close to me can tell you that. Now that the project is done, I can work on the promotional stuff, which, if done properly, is an art form unto itself.

This year the squirrels have been going mad over the dogwood trees in our yard. At any given time over the past few weeks you could find at least three perched in the branches, reaching out and nibbling on the pretty fruit that’s all but been devoured by this point. Personally I’ve never found the dogwood fruit appealing as far as taste and texture go (and I’ve tried it in a cocktail – if it doesn’t work there, it won’t work anywhere). The squirrels, on the other hand, are loving it. 

There you are, October. 

You always show up sooner than we seem to expect, perhaps sooner than we’d like. 

You with your time trickery (not that I’ve ever minded an extra hour of anything) and the gradual descent into deep fall. I see you and your burning maple leaves, I see your pumpkin insanity and gourd gore, and for the most part I enjoy every last bit of it. Before we get to the meat of the month, let’s do our usual Monday morning recap of everything that happened in the first full fall week of posts on ALANILAGAN.com. Here we go.

It began, as most things have, with the cosmos. 

Tuesdays always meant fucking religion class. (Guess it sort of backfired.)

How are you liking the #TinyThreads posts? Is it worth linking each of them here? 

(I don’t think it is.)

Boys and girls and freaks in the middle. 

You know I’m right. It’s there in black and white. 

(Yeah, I like the feature, but not these little links.)

Here’s what makes me beautiful. 

(Then again, maybe this bears reposting.) 

Our ‘Naked Male Celebrities‘ category got a jolt from John Krasinski, who bared his naked ass in this shower scene. 

September doesn’t fade, it flares. 

(I mean, isn’t this too much?)

Sunday in September. 

(From here on out, I’ll post one #TinyThreads link and let you follow them all back on your own. We’re all adults here.)

The Hunk of the Day feature – probably the most popular part of this website, returned in fine form with Henry Golding. Fellow hunks followed out-of-suit, including Chris Hughes, Ammar Campa-Najjar, Tim Bish and Brandy Martignago.

A fiery close to the flaming month of September! This is the month we returned to resume the 15^thyear of ALANILAGAN.com, and it feels like everything’s as if we never said goodbye. It remains to be seen whether that’s a good or bad thing, but I feel we’re leaning toward the good. During the summer, I found that I missed writing. The project in which I was immersed was mainly focused on photography, but I was longing for the opportunity and impetus to work with words again. At its heart, that’s what this space has been for me, and I’m grateful for such an outlet.

As for the end of September, what more is there to be said? It’s never been a favorite month of mine, coming as it did with the arrival of school, and the slow die-off of the gardens. I’ve not been kind to it in turn, writing it off as one of those purgatorial waiting periods when you’re waiting for the real snap of autumn to arrive. It’s never wise to rush the summer off the stage, but sometimes the push and pull of teasingly lovely weather wreaks a greater havoc with the heart than a simple clean-cut cleaving. There’s nothing more maddening than a blurry line of demarcation.

Emotionally, I do much better whenever I’m working on a creative project. (That may explain my pissy mood of the past three years, which is the length of time since my last project.) The labor of love that was ‘The Delusional Grandeur Tour: Last Stand of a Rock Star‘ is up in its entirety on The Projects page of this website. Check it out and bookmark it for later, because that’s where a new project will be posted by (fingers-crossed) November 2018. That means I’ve been creatively sated for the time being, and now it’s time for all the fun promotional stuff.

I’m not going to lie, there’s a bit of bait-and-switch on the way regarding the promotional images about to be posted and the actual content of the project itself. That makes it more intriguing though, so stay tuned for what’s to come…

In the meantime I invite you to check out previous projects below:

StoneLight

The Circus Project

A Night at the Hotel Chelsea

A 21st Century Renaissance: The Resurrection Tour

Bardo: The Dream Surreal

The Delusional Grandeur Tour: Last Stand of a Rock Star

It’s been a while since I’ve posted on Tuesday.

Give me a bit to get back into the groove. (I’ll let you prove your love to me.)

Tuesdays were always worse than Mondays when I was a kid, mostly because of Religion class that extended the day for an extra hour of Catholic chaos. At 2 PM we’d ride the bus to the old St. Mary’s school, and walk into a dusty room where everything – the carpet, the walls, even the chalkboard – felt frozen in an amber glow of outdated travesty. An ancient copier was put to further shame thanks to the pile of copied prayers – a hand-written version of the ‘Act of Contrition’ on the weird paper where if you scratched the print with your fingernail it would come off in the most grating and upsetting fashion – a variation of fingernails on the chalkboard.

We went through prayers and Bible stories as the sun moved slowly across the floor. I remember watching the dust fall through the sunbeams as the minutes slowed in excruciating fashion. Sometimes when the teacher left, the boy behind me would kick my chair, then look around with a stupid grin when I turned around. From an early age, I found religion to have an inescapable air of torture to it. While a nun headed up the program, it was usually a student’s mother who did the actual teaching. I was too young to understand that my (and others’) non-enjoyment of the classes might have been due to the poor field of candidates from which the church chose to appoint as teachers. Not that there were any cruel or mean ones – these were Catholic people for Christ’s sake – but there’s a different kind of menace that comes from supposedly-well-meaning people.

I was never a badly-behaved child, and most of those teachers doted on me since they knew my parents. That didn’t ease the drudgery of having to stay in a dull and dank classroom while our sinful, non-Catholic counterparts got to run outside and play. It ruined religion for me, even more than being forced to be an altar boy a few years later, but it also ruined Tuesdays.

I don’t suppose this post has helped anyone as far as the latter goes.

You may be noticing a slight change in our posting schedule right about now. Last year when I came back from my first summer sabbatical, I took off two days – Tuesday and Wednesday – in the middle of the work week. But those days are tough enough, why should I make anyone suffer more by denying you fresh content and entries when this is my joy as well? That means we are returning to our original daily programming, with a slight twist.

Given that I have more job responsibilities, and that by the time I get home I’m pretty much spent (especially on those nights when I have to cook myself dinner – God how I wish Andy could work his culinary magic with fish) I am not going to promise long-winded or exceptionally meaningful words, but rather punchy, smaller entries that are just as good as hanging out with me over a glass of wine. (Minus all the nasty judgment of your clothing!) But I still like the idea of a Monday where the main posting may be spent ruminating over what came before, so we’re going to keep the Monday recap for the start of the week, then return a bit later in the day for the whole thing to start up again. This first one is going to be shorter, since we only just returned on Thursday and how much can you expect to happen in a weekend? Stick with me, kid, and I’ll show you.

It began with a trio of return posts: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. 

I like a banana. 

A new Tom Ford for a new season: Fougere D’Argent. 

A tale of two brothers.

The newest feature is a tiny little thing. 

Beginning with my rear end. 

Still dreaming of Madonna.

Summer Speedos and such.