Alan Ilagan

Greg and Mike at the Ogunquit Beach Inn always have the best vintage postcards of Maine beach scenes, so a few years ago Andy and I took a set of 35 mm photos of our own while on Ogunquit Beach. (Apologies for the scanned quality, but I think it adds to their antique inspiration.)

The post is entitled “Vintage Ogunquit” because it evokes another era – a more innocent, hopeful time, when the sun and wind were the only reasons for furrowed brows. Also, these photos were taken a number of years ago, so for me they’re vintage in that sense (hence the tragic goatee, and not-so-tragic 30-inch waist I once had).

Hopefully Ogunquit will weather the impending Hurricane Earl with pluck and aplomb, as it has countless other storms. (Though for once, I feel lucky to be far inland.)

Good luck to all our friends on the coast… our thoughts are with you.

Being that I’m back in Boston for the next few days, I decided to post a few website promo desktop photos from one of my last stays in the condo, specifically in the back-end bedroom portion, which is now one of my favorite havens.

Like the front of the condo, the back bedroom has been through a number of  transitions. It started out stark white, and back in 1995 I was not having a boring boudoir, so I doused it – walls and ceiling – in bold, deep blue. We’re talking a brilliant, some might say blinding, hue of blue. I thought that sponging a few cloudbursts of white onto the ceiling would soften it. (I won’t testify to the effectiveness of that, but it did add a whimsical touch.)

After painting myself into a blue corner, the room was dim no matter how much light I poured into it (which was a substantial bit, thanks to those at-the-time-ubiquitous 500 watt halogen college floor lamps). My solution, in an admitted lapse of taste and judgment, was to fill the place with light furniture, choosing… drum-roll-of-embarrassment… white wicker. Yes, I wrote that correctly. A bedroom of white wicker furniture. In Boston. I can’t even cry Florida foul. And one of the pieces of white wicker? An armoire. Oh yeah. The one saving grace of all this wicker? I could move it all around by myself, practically with one hand. (I won’t mention the zebra-pattern bedspread in the middle of all this.)

Needless to say, after living there a few years, one of the first rooms to be re-painted was that blue bedroom, clouds and all, and we went back to plain white, rendering the white wicker furniture useless.

Today, there is a rustic set of worn, wooden furniture – warm in the afternoon sunlight, and picking up the amber shades of the hardwood floor. On the bed is a slate blue duvet cover from Calvin Klein, officially christened “Bamboo” but more widely known as the Carrie Bradshaw cover. (It was decidedly NOT selected because of that, however.) Recently, I made a tufted headboard of dupioni silk, in a muted burnt  raw umber shade bordering on gray, that picks up a bit of the duvet, as well as the silk shade of a bedside table lamp.

It is here where we will spend the weekend. A perfect getaway at the end of summer.

Outside the forum, a crowd was gathering. It was lunch time, and businessmen in suits stood in small groups waiting for them to arrive. Hordes of children squealed with anticipatory delight, running around in small circles and tugging on their parents’ coats. They heard them before they saw them – two loud trumpet-like calls cutting through the murmuring mass, a moment of silence, then the wide-eyed wonderment and excited chatter of the children again.

            They were led out into the middle of the street, lumbering behind their trainers and parting the throngs effortlessly. Their wrinkled grayish-brown skin was dotted with hair. Everyone was always surprised by that. Plain, unadorned, and out-of-costume, the elephants were still magnificent. Their immensity was more amazing when viewed up close. Picture a wall of rough flesh rising before you, a moving mound of muscles, powerful hindquarters, and the most soul-searching pair of eyes found in the animal kingdom. You know they are seeing into you. You know they will remember. 

I cannot bring myself to watch them eat. It’s what I came out for, it’s what everyone came out for, but now that I’ve seen them I can’t do it. I don’t like being watched when I’m eating, and I’m certain they feel the same. A lifetime of being watched becomes its own circus. You end up wanting to rip your own skin off and throw it at the surrounding circle, even though you know that the circle moves around you, growing and contracting but always out of reach, out of touch. It is indeed a circus, but it’s all you’ve ever known, and after being the center of attention for so long you come to realize: there’s no other way.

The Full Project HERE.

It was April 2008, and I wanted to join the circus.

THE CIRCUS PROJECT  – From April 2008

From 2008: “For now, though, there’s The Circus Project – an apt look at the wild and crazy adventures of a quasi-fictional protagonist who doesn’t quite fit in. To this day, it’s that sense of being an outsider that fuels him, keeping him creatively fired-up, even if it’s his very strangeness that makes him so unforgettable – and if it’s been a circus, well, step right up.”

Since I’ll be on vacation this weekend, I’ve programmed a few posts from the Circus era – for the full Project, please visit The Projects Page.