This just screams corporate brochure, doesn’t it?:

Not to mention this one:

I am a corporate shill.

I guess this is my meditation on swimming pools. They to me have sort of a hidden dark side. I don’t necessarily mean just the fact that one can drown in a pool, but more of something about how they can look very fresh and new and very ruined. I have long thought that a great idea for a book would be just on different swimming pools, but with some kind of underlying story. I am not original at all because there is a book out there called “Pools” and its all photos of pools from around the world. I’d say it was one of those style over substance books because it ties really all tie together.

I have long been playing with this concept of empty pools, full pools, pools through windows, different pools in my mind. This pool isn’t exotic at all. It is a pool at a condo complex that I spotted and decided to go to town on as only I know how.

Can’t you imagine some kind of shady dealings going on there? I guess this meditation on the pools probably has to do with another thing that rolls around in my head often, the un-obvious darkness, in particular in the film world. The pools to me go into the same category as a film like Insomnia, a little Swedish film noir that relies on light to portray darkness.

The pools to me can be the same thing:

BTW, thank you David Hockney, for this one:

Well, I guess this is mine:

Some advertisements absolutely do not match the product. Some are so funny that they defy long explanations. This photo below is from an ad for Timberland sneakers and it just said “if you are not fast, you are food.” I wanted to capture the whole aspect where this is predator and prey in the ad:

This one too:

This guy didn’t look too scared. Too bad.

That is a good ad in my opinion. I am not going to run out and buy any Timberlands, but I’d consider them were I not to already have running shoes.

In the pantheon of strange things I have seen written on signs by street performers and others, this is one of the stranger:

On the other hand, there is an economic crisis we are the midst of and to get money, you must get creative. You must!

If it is 1890 and your name is Vanderbilt or Dupont or some other fancy name:

Life before taxes and hedge funds:

This last one just stopped me dead in my tracks. It was one of those photos that just slaps you in the face and tells you to stop and take it.

And to end:

Morocco? Tunisia?:

New England. Yup.

After that darkish entry, we get this:

To me these are kind of exuberant and wonderful. Don’t you agree?

Oh, Mr. Dershowitz, you have no idea. Let’s say that this will be a longer and wordier entry than my usual “photo, here, yeah, uh, whatev.”

I guess some of you are wondering where oh where is this reference from up top. It is from this movie by Barbet Schroeder called “Reversal of Fortune.” It about the Von Bulow case of the 1980s, where bon vivant Claus Von Bulow is accused of trying to murder his glacial wife Sunny. Jeremy Irons, a man who I could listen to reading the phone book, plays Claus in the movie and Glenn Close plays comatose Sunny. In real life, Claus was played by a balding European guy and Sunny by a blond woman in a coma.

Not an unlikely line for me to write on this blog, but the movie has long fascinated me on several levels. Of course my love for the people of Scandinavia is well known, but also despite the movie’s tragic subject matter, it has some really interesting dark humor in it. And well as anyone with a really deep morbid fascination, I had to visit the place where it all went down:

Two more views:

Yes, the post production is just this side of morbid, but I wanted the darkness in there. The darkness and the light. The darkness and light that makes up our lives.

Just, uh, Breakers?:

No, the photos of New York are not done, but in the meantime while sifting through the thousands of them, I took these. Breakers is a “cottage” in Newport that features, no joke:
70 rooms
A covered court yard
45 foot high central great hall
33 bathrooms
numerous chimneys

OK, fine, but seriously, in my opinion, just too much house. Waaaay too much house.

That is the ones not written in a book whose secret hiding place is only obvious from reading the back of the Declaration of Independence.

If you have to put Intelligence in the name of anything, it is stupid. If you have to put the word Democratic in the name of a country, it probably isn’t. And if you have to make a big, fake neon sign with word “chic look” on it for a car commercial, that commercial is for a Gremlin, or a Yugo:

OK, but this car doesn’t scream chic. It screams Mad Men, but not in a good way. Where is Don Draper when we need him?