When my brother and are were kids, Mom would take us to Cooperstown to visit the Farmer’s Museum. While there we would find a spot near some water where a family of ducks swam. We’d throw them some bread and delight at their proximity. It was my favorite part of the trip. I didn’t need the boredom of the Baseball Hall of Fame or the dull agricultural history lessons of the Farmer’s Museum, or even the barnyard of animals in their working village. All I needed were a few simple ducks, waddling along and wading into water, where they took majestic form and found their metaphorical footing on a cloud of liquid. We always wanted to stay there longer than we could.

The memory came back to me when taking a couple of fun rubber duck photos in front of our current pool situation. Ducks have been a motif around the pool this crazy year, in various forms as our pool goes through various incantations. Maybe 2020 will be the nightmare from which we all awake like Bobby in the shower on ‘Dallas‘. That dates me, and to be honest I know more about it from reading about it years after it happened. I wasn’t even watching ‘Dallas’ then, aside from the opening credits. My, what a wandering along memory lane. I’m losing track of where we even are. Maybe that’s for the best. We are all itching for an escape.

The pool steps are complete, so I’m keeping a tentative wish that our pool redux is finished sometime before July slips away. I’ve been keeping in the cool quiet of the indoors during these hot and humid, but stepped out and stepped up to pose for some empty pool pics (or pool carcass as Wanda Copernicus so aptly described the current environs of our backyard). On with the recap…

Hot pink summer wilderness.

An incredibly sad picture of Andy.

Petunia panache.

A Tiny Thread found.

Summer head trip.

Some stillness & quiet.

Disregarding the rules for some beautiful music by Rufus Wainwright.

Once upon an empty pool.

Frolicking in a pool carcass. 

Our summer look-back at Projects of the Past continues with 2018’s ‘PVRTD’. 

Ending the weekend with some floral fireworks. 

Hunks of the Day included Ken Screven, Nicholas Petricca, Valton Jackson, Maarten Hurkmans, Nick Cannon and Cody Rigsby.

If you’re looking for some chill to take the sting out of all this heat and humidity, look no further than this revisit of the icy ‘PVRTD‘ project from 2018. Filled with wintry scenes, covered in snow and ice, and shot through with the frozen dagger of unblunted hatred, there is little that is warm or fuzzy about ‘PVRTD’.

Following my final tour and the colorful grandeur of delusional madness, the world took a decidedly dark turn after 2015, and for my first new project in three years, I wanted to do something reflective of the somber era, and the rise and revelation of more hatred than some of us realized was still present in our country. ‘PVRTD’ wasn’t about a perversion of a sexual nature, but rather the perverted ways racism, homophobia and ethnocentrism have ingrained themselves in almost every single aspect of our world.

As disturbing as some of the images were, that was entirely the point. Designed to draw the reader in with a gradual slow beginning of winter scenes and stark black-and-white photography, ‘PVRTD’ locks the door behind you before you realize it’s not a world in which you want to be.

There was also a contradictory sense of calm in the winter-themed project, something deceptively soothing about the photos as they whirled past as if tossed into an arctic blast. A chilly remoteness was inherent in the themes – and I was afraid that it would translate poorly to the project. It was absolutely necessary to maintain such a distance for my own mental well-being; the world had gone dark enough (who knew it would get so much darker) and I was genuinely afraid of letting this one get into my headspace. To combat that, and to bring a subtle and unseen thread of warmth to the whole thing, I enlisted the photographic aid of my favorite people: Andy, Suzie, Kira, and my brother – each of whom helped take photos for those scenes in which I played a part.

The promotional blitz of provocative and sexually-suggestive images was designed to titillate and tease, deliberately intended to confuse and pose the possibility that ‘PVRTD’ would be an exploration of sexual peccadilloes and erotic perversions. A bait and switch of the most shameless sort, with no apologies whatsoever for anyone who came looking for sex and skin and found a fully-clothed statement on the deteriorating state of our country and world.

‘PVRTD’ also marked a return to a purely photographic project, where only the photos tell the story – no narrative or expository writing to give a hint of what’s happening. Rendered in shades of gray, its colorless consistency lent a subtlety that belied some of its images, a softer take at odds with the harshness of its motifs. There is only one object in full color – a pink triangle that blazes in horrifying fashion near the very end. It is a sign of doomed hope, but hope nonetheless. That hope dissipates in the flames of a cross, and the bleak, forlorn landscape of grays that insidiously works its way around your throat, beautifully suffocating the care and expression from your eyes.

{See the entire ‘PVRTD’ project here. Also see ‘StoneLight‘, ‘The Circus Project‘, ‘A Night at the Hotel Chelsea‘ and ‘A 21^stCentury Renaissance: The Resurrection Tour‘, and ‘Bardo ~ The Dream Surreal‘, and ‘The Delusional Grandeur Tour: Last Stand of a Rock Star’.}

There’s something very evocative of the smell of rain’s first fall on hot asphalt during a hot summer day. Whether you grew up in the suburbs or the city, it is, I would imagine, a universal touchstone of mixed emotions. The momentary happy relief from the heat coupled with the realization of, well, rain on a summer day. For some reason, I’ve always loved the scent. If the fragrance brand Replica needs an idea, they should try bottling that for a summer spritz of happy memories. I think it’s a little too urban and specific for Jo Malone. (And Tom Ford likely wants nothing to do with asphalt.) 

This year the rain has been in short supply, probably because our pool remains unopened and empty, so you are so very welcome for the long stretch of sun we’ve had. As soon as the new liner is in, the rain will begin. If not the snow. Mark my words. It’s 2020. That’s the way the year has gone. And so we have a fun little photo shoot made possible only by the machinations of an empty pool. 

We take the fleeting joys of summer when and where we can get them, whether that’s in the intoxicating fragrance of a summer rain or the vast expanse of a pool that has yet to be filled. There may be fun in both if you know how to embrace the moment at hand. Summer was made for fun. Indulge.