Author Archives: Alan Ilagan

Have we perverted society, or has society perverted us?

If you glanced at yesterday’s newspaper headlines without seeing the date, you’d be forgiven thinking we were back in the 1940’s. White supremacists are rallying, neo-Nazis are banding together, and we are witnessing the emergence and rise of a fascism that wants only to foster hate and division. What a stark difference this day is from one of those that existed in ‘The Delusional Grandeur‘ stretch of 2015, the last time Alan Ilagan released a project, and how much the world has changed in three short years…

The very act of loving can be a revolutionary act. It is a revolt against all that is ugly and base and mean in this world, an argument against all that is hateful and wrong. It strikes back at the heart of apathy, taking deadly aim at the notion of not caring. It engages and demands a response, far more than a hateful attack or wanton dismissal. Yet love is outwardly lacking in ‘PVRTD’, the new photographic project by Alan Ilagan; the images are diabolically lonesome, many are simply empty, static as death, and eerily silent. A mouth taped shut. Eyes taped closed. Hands taped still. Page after page of black and white contemplation. A series of an eye-patched general madly roaming a run-down factory. A gas mask in a duet with a Chinese hopping ghost. The haunting image of Ilagan having his head shaved by a menacing, faceless figure.

‘PVRTD’ brings him into hazardous new territory and is already being heralded as beautifully disturbing. The themes and images he touches on – the Holocaust, white supremacy, the Ku Klux Klan – are cultural totems, each rife with layers of historical hurt. Playing around with such images can be a hazardous business, and many artists have been burned by getting too close without understanding or realizing the deep-seeded connotations and offense that might result.

Yet now more than ever such a reminder may be needed. It’s dangerous folly to think that something similar won’t happen again – gay men and women are being killed around the world, even more transgender people are attacked and murdered – and the suicide rates for both groups are exponentially higher than heterosexuals. What if the real perversion is not of nature or of being different, but a man-made symptom? What if the most perverted thing is the hatred that separates one person from another?

‘PVRTD’ offers no such up-front explanation to its mysterious images, and even less of a defense for the more controversial photographs. Anyone who is brave enough to face the past, and more importantly anyone who is brave enough to own up to the present, knows what is being conveyed. It is a test of our own moral turpitude as to what we are going to do about it. ‘PVRTD’ posits, provokes, and projects – staking its claim in the pantheon of art as social revolution.

{‘PVRTD’ will be released online at ALANILAGAN.com in November 2018.}

Call me Mr. M or call me Skippy Day, because this Halloween I went to work as my boss’s husband, Skip Montross. You know and love him, and today I was him. From the worn baseball cap to the distressed jeans and beaded man-bracelet, I embraced all the little details that go into making one Skip M. It coincided with the Boston Red Sox parade, so it was a win-win wardrobe situation. It also brings to mind all of our Boston adventures, so here’s a linky look back:

— BroSox Adventure 2014: No posts or links exist documenting this first foray into the #BroSoxAdventure, and it’s probably for the best. 

— BroSox Adventure 2015: Part One, Part Two and Part Three. (Thus far, this was the only time we had a police encounter on any of our excursions, and it happened in Loudonville so it doesn’t really count.)

— BroSox Adventure 2016: Part One and Part Two – in which our hero installs an air conditioning unit while Alan looks on while sipping a gin and tonic, and no one wants to dance with somebody. 

— BroSox Adventure 2017: Part One and Part Two – The year I spit beer onto the human beings in front of us at the Red Sox game. I’m still ashamed. And The Karate Kid. 

— BroSox Adventure 2018: The Only Part – because I took the summer off from blogging and we went later this year than usual. It was still awesome. Skip planked, even if he didn’t mean to. 

Soon all our pumpkins will be as lost as the ones seen here. Personally, I’m not sorry. For most of October we’ve had our fall and it’s been a relatively fine one. After today, the eye wanders to the start of the holiday season, extended and early as so much of our world seems to be these days. 

The arrival of Halloween is viewed with mixed feelings in our house. Andy and I will arrive home after a work day and there’s usually already a group of kids waiting eagerly to demand candy before we can even pull into the garage. I despise the eager as much as I despise the tardy. This season my Halloween costume is Hateful Creature. I’ll be wearing it all year. 

A few people have asked what I do at my job.

This clip pretty much sums it up. Just call me Juno, your happy Human Resources case worker. 

And here’s me at a typical meeting. 

“Will you get out of here?! Men’s room, are ya kidding?!?”

There were three of them and one of me. The day was pouring rain – you remember the recent Saturday when the Nor’easter was hitting – and I figured if I was going to make the Price Chopper run I’d at least have a Starbucks coffee out of it. There I sat, next to a table of two older men chatting over their newspapers. Typical upstate New York politics – they liked Trump’s policies and that’s what they were voting for, who needs another lefty! Their hatred of Cuomo. Their disdain for Delgado, and how they weren’t worried about Faso. How they felt New york City should be separated from the state because they could never beat them based on numbers.

I focused on my coffee and didn’t turn around. A third gentleman sat down across from them, enjoying their talk. One was complaining about a recent treaty that Trump was pulling out of.

“They should do away with treaties,” said the guy who was doing most of the talking, not bothering to say which ones.

Then they started talking about the wall, and how it needs to be built. “There are drones that could see for miles and know when people are coming from the other side.” Some bit about a flame-thrower I couldn’t quite make out. (Yes, a flame-thrower.) And then this: “They should build it out of a slippery material, and then have a ditch of oil, maybe two feet deep, so when they get across the ditch they will be covered in oil and be too slippery to climb the wall.”

Yes, I busted out laughing. But they didn’t notice. They were too busy solving the world’s problems safely from their vantage point in upstate New York.

There’s a whole lot of Eve going on right now, and Bette Davis is likely throwing a tantrum in her grave as only she can. All fire and brimstone and things that go bump in the night… I have nothing more to add. Let’s look back at the week that came before.  

The decadence and the lace.

Breathing new life into peppers. 

It’s all an illusion. 

It was a Monster Ball.

The chain of #TinyThreads.

Madonna and water sports. 

Hot twist.

Dipping candles in the fall.

A shirtless Ben Cohen returns to the calendar game.

A bit of the ultra-violence.

Family by the fire pit. 

Caught in the act.

Shirtless Sunday fun-day stuff. 

A ghastly business.

Hunks of the Day include Matty Lee, Mark Ballas, Rory McIlroy, Randy Rainbow, Titanius Maximus, Matt Dallas and Daniel Newman (again). 

“Homosexual practices were actually very widespread in the camps. The prisoners, however, ostracized only those whom the SS marked with the pink triangle. The fate of the homosexuals in the concentration camps can only be described as ghastly… Theirs was an insoluble predicament and virtually all of them perished.” ~ Eugen Kogon

Shadows in shadows,

turned the blackest night

next to sunlight on snow…

Ominous darkness, foreboding

and criminal.

Stains of history,

implacable

stubborn

doomed.

Stains in shadow,

stains in complicity,

stains in conspiracy…

Shadow takes us all,

suffocating

smothering…

Choking on

smoke rising

from the bodies,

Breathing in

your charred brothers and mothers and daughters and sisters and uncles and grandfathers and sons

our charred brothers and mothers and daughters and sisters and uncles and grandfathers and sons

burnt hair

flesh

bone

floating into the sky

onto the snow

mud or blood or ash, who can tell…

?

PVRTD

The New Project

November 2018

www.ALANILAGAN.com

We are on the verge of the month that my new project ‘PVRTD’ gets released. It’s all happening online, right here on The Projects page, which ushers in a new era of how these things may be done from this point forward. It also marks a departure from most of what I’ve done thus far in both style and substance. Here are a few peeks at the change in tone, and a look at what goes into the creation of something new.

Much of the promotional stuff has been typical strip-tease mining, and while that’s fun for some of you, it doesn’t encompass what the bulk of ‘PVRTD’ is about – and that’s been quite intentional. Before every big fall there is a rise to the giddy heights of decadence and freedom. Here, the very first peek at what happens afterward… and some behind-the-scenes shots of how we made it all happen.

For this work, I got my friends and family to help out. It’s such a dark project that I wanted the warmth and light of those people who mean the most to me to seep in somehow. On this particular weekend in Boston, Kira aided me in the photographic duties, and we traversed Chinatown seeking out the appropriate settings and scenes.

It was a dreary and damp night, but she made it fun and bearable, and we ended it with a bowl of soup. Sharing such a meal at the sleepy tail-end of a cold evening out is one of my favorite things to do. A necessary one too. The subject matter, while it had not yet been fleshed out fully, would be weighty, and knowing this imbued our work with a seriousness that most of my projects often lack, particularly in the creation portion. (You should have seen the hysterics involved in shooting some of my holiday cards. The darker those were, the funnier it was to make them.) For this project, there wasn’t as much laughter.

The fatigue from a night of shooting shows through here, and I love that. My guard is down when I’m with Kira. I can ease into a subway manspread (it was practically empty!) and let the outside wind fuck up my hair and it’s all ok. We got some good shots and in my mind I was already figuring out what part they would play in the new project.

We walked from the subway to the condo, the night promising the end of winter but neither of us quite believing it.

I think I’m at my most alive when I’m in the act of creating.

PVRTD

November 2018

The Projects Page

www.ALANILAGAN.com