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“That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald

The day has turned cloudy and cool. Alan thrills at the shift in the atmosphere. “Finally, fall in proper form!” he proclaims to no one in particular. In the shadows of the downtown buildings, the day feels even darker. Fall indeed has descended and as much as he professes to be excited about it, a furrowed brow indicates the first tinge of worry. Shopping bags in hand, he directs us up an old cobblestone street into the lobby of the Parker House Hotel, bringing us back a full century. In the hush of the dark entrance, we pass couches and chairs where people are propped looking down at their laptops or cel phones. Even in his most outrageous outfit, Alan might go unnoticed in this modern scene. No one looks up as we glide by, even with the occasionally inappropriate outburst. (“That luggage is ghastly! Isn’t that luggage ghastly??”) He knows a cozy nook upstairs where we can have oysters and early afternoon cocktails, looking over the bustling street below and secreted safely away from the suddenly-wicked wind.

We choose a window seat, and the glass is from an era of imperfection and wavy variation, lending a surreal distortion to the people walking outside. Our server takes the order – a dozen oysters and a pair of dry martinis, one with olives and mine with a twist – and then we are left alone. If it were not for the television almost-discreetly placed in the corner, I’d swear we had gone back several decades. Alan is game for timelessness, leaning back into his chair and surveying the room.

“This is the first place my friend Kira tried oysters, and she’s loved them ever since,” he says, recounting former antics with his long-time friend. Whenever he talks of friends, his eyes are a bit more animated, and a rare glimpse of affection emerges from a typically-stoic stance. Kira has become a mainstay on his trips to Boston, one of the regular characters who populates his blog. That little village of friends and family is known to those of us who regularly follow along on his website. “God love you,” he intones in a quieter voice, “But no one close to me reads my blog with any regularity.” There is more to be said about that, but he’s not quite ready, or willing. It’s easier to talk about his artistic output, the separate entity that originates from within and takes on its own life once it’s been birthed. Distance and time, time and distance – he can address anything with enough of them. And so he begins telling of the origins of ‘PVRTD’.

The idea was seeded at the Art Institute of Chicago in the spring of 2017. He hadn’t been in the city since 2000, and as he left it in the rear-view mirror of the rental truck that he and Suzie were driving away from his busted-up relationship, the salty film over his eyes blurred it all in a haze of heartache and pain. Almost two decades later, he found himself back at the lakefront, on a sunny but windy day, entering the museum by himself. Two immense lions guarded the edifice, and he remembered a holiday shopping article he had written for the Windy City Times in which he visited the museum gift shop and was given a foam pen topped with a colorful abstract lion. At the time, conflicted by his break-up and the nagging sense that he didn’t belong in that city, he’d wanted to roar like those lions, out of devastation and sadness. All these years later he felt a kind of fondness for returning to the place where he had to grow up, but such warmth was marred by those bittersweet memories.  

“I was visiting Chicago and surprised by how moved I was looking back at everything that had happened so long ago. I went to the Art Institute and there was an exhibition called ‘Provoke’ culled from the Japanese photo magazine of the 1960’s (‘Provoke: Provocative Materials for Thought’), which featured black and white photography of the protests of the period, of the artists, of the human life that was going on. It spoke to me on many planes, and it reminded me of the purity of photography, something I’d sort of neglected or marred with the ease of iPhones and Elphs. I was inspired to focus on the photograph, and less on the gimmick or presentation. I was moved by how raw much of that work was, how there were fingers blocking some of the photos, the smudge of movement, the unfocused brutality of it all. And that style was what I wanted to attempt. Coupled with the state of the country, and the frightening situation of having such a dangerously inept and volatile leader, it made for fertile creative ground.”

By the winter of 2018, he had an idea of what he wanted to present, he had only to execute it. Test shoots were held at his brother’s new house in Amsterdam, NY, while the overall trajectory of the work began to flesh itself out. Themes of winter, outcasts, and the darkest points in our collective history echoed similar events playing out in the current news cycle. Recalling such tragic and dark points in the past – from the Ku Klux Klan to the mass-extinction of Jews during World War 2 – bled into our modern-day world, and he saw similarities that were as eerie as they were alarming. He wanted to make statements on that without hitting the viewers over the head with any overt message.

“Guilty,” is his verdict on getting the point of past projects across. “I have always worried that people wouldn’t get whatever message or statement I was making, and some of my work got a little… clunky because of it.” For ‘PVRTD’, there is no table of contents to guide the viewer through the pages, no foreword or preface to give an indication of what is about to be seen. Alan kept the whole project under the strictest secrecy, only revealing a few key images when others were employed to help with the photography and he himself slid in front of the camera (which he did far less for this endeavor than most others).

It wasn’t always easy to get people to help – his brother voiced concern over stepping onto abandoned property, while others weren’t comfortable being involved when select portions of the subject matter was described (“I purposely left out the whole trajectory and intent because I didn’t want to reveal that, but in hindsight it might have helped people understand things better”), but throughout the winter and spring of 2018, he worked diligently at getting the bulk of principal photography finished. When he took a summer break from his blog, he also set ‘PVRTD’ down for a couple of months.

When he returned to it at the end of summer, the world was in an even more chaotic place. The final set piece shot for the project was its most incendiary (quite literally, as it involved fire and burning certain objects). As he watched the country return to a 1950’s nightmare of racial unrest, sexist inequality, and blatant bigotry, he brought to life disturbing images of white supremacy, reminders of how awful our country had been, not so long ago. (As of this writing, only a select few have seen the finished product in its entirety, and no one wants to be the first to go on record as to its merit.)

Part of him wants to get deeper into the creative process of how ‘PVRTD’ came into existence, but the hour has turned tricky. “The saddest part of the day,” is how he describes our current predicament. Our oysters finished and our martinis sweating onto the table, it’s almost time to go. He doesn’t want to speak further on the topic at hand. I excuse myself for a quick trip to the bathroom.  After giving direction to the stairs that lead up to the next level, Alan gives a quiet warning that it’s haunted. He settles back in his chair and folds his arms across his chest after the decidedly unsettling comment, and I back away.

Looking it up later, I find that the Parker House is indeed rumored to be haunted, and on the third floor, deserted and empty, there is a discernible feeling of being watched, a creepiness amid the pretty surroundings. The sense of someone lurking around each corner is palpable, and I know not whether it’s simply the suggestion of a haunting or an actual ghost. Neither is very reassuring, I must admit.

Darkness comes, sooner than expected, sooner than I realized. I rush down the stairs and find him ready to go.

{To Be Continued… Also see Part 1 & Part 2}