Chairlift Bruises

Voila

Being Alive

Not a Big Fan of Showtunes...but this is just great!

Jumping Rope

Lately I've been jumping rope at the gym for my cardio excercise. It's a Great Workout! Very Intense and it was a little off putting at first because I would keep messing up, and I felt very uncoordinated....but after a week of false starts I was able to go for a minute or more without stopping and it just keeps getting better and better...Im not at this guys stage yet....check this video out! This guy is amazing!

Drenched

My friend Joe Fiore holds a monthly party called "Drenched" at a hotel pool....its a blast!

New York Times Gallery Roundup

Check out today's New York Times for their annual neighborhood gallery overview. i received this mention by Ken Johnson.....

You don’t have to be young to be an emerging artist. Some languish in purgatorial emergence for decades, despite the high quality of their work. Erik Hanson has been toiling under the radar for some 20 years and now has a good exhibition at Sunday L.E.S. Mr. Hanson creates paintings and sculptures relating to his musical interests, which include the Velvet Underground and disco. A set of Pop-Surrealist sculptures representing white birch logs have butt-ends fashioned to resemble vinyl records. A series of canvases bearing spirals thickly painted Alfred Jensen-style is titled “Eurodisco.” It is an infectiously upbeat show.

Thanks Ken!

Muppets Bohemian Rhapsody

Janine Gordon

Heres a photo from a new series Janine did in Fort Hood, you can see more Here

Bodies Without Organs

I had wanted to try making a Pollock for a while, I did mine to the swinging sounds of the Nordic pop group Bodies Without Organs. Alkyd and latex paints on Canvas 60 x 76 inches

Jackson Pollock

Its amazing that we have these two awesome paintings here in New York to study. I've been trying to figure out what makes a Pollock painting work and the best possible way for me to do that is to try making one, my first attempt was carted away by the garbageman yesterday.....I did it all wrong. I started by painting in a background color...that didnt work so I gessoed the canvas, that didnt work either, I opened a bottle of wine and started flinging paint around....that made it start to look kind of cool...and I used it as a backdrop for a photo of my genius but it really had none of the qualities of a Pollock, the only thing it had in common with them was flung paint.

I thought of one of the first things that a painter friend of mine, Augusto Arbizo, asked me when I told him I was going to try and make a Pollock...he said "are you going to use the same colors?"

So I went to MoMA on friday to study their Pollocks and of course every one there has its own concerns , each different than the others. But The giant Mural size "One" really blew me away....and i went across town to the Met where they have another large painting from the same period called "Autumn Rhythm". These paintings are very similar in scale and color and were made around the same time... but they are completely different in what they do and how you enter them. I ended up liking "Autumn Rhythm" at the Met much better than MoMA's "One" and I found that the Met bought the painting right when it was new, when the paint was still wet, Moma waited 17 years later to aquire "One".

The full titles of the above paintings are

"One: Number 31", 1950 Collection MoMA

Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) Collection of the Met

They are both from 1950 and if you click on them they will enlarge.

Elli et Jacno

Cerrone - Love In C Minor

Solo Show In New York

If you are in New York come and see my show! The opening should be fun too with an afterparty at The Boiler Room......


Solo Show
From The Morning
Sunday L.E.S.
237 Eldridge Street
NYC

November 18 – december 31

Reception: Weds. November 18, 7-9 PM

Food Court Musical!

I love this!

Halloween On The Lower East Side

Don and Betty draper from "Mad Men" were quite happy that I recognized them. The owners of suger sweet sunshine giving out mini cupcakes to the trick or treaters. Jeffrey , of Porto Rico Coffee giving us some hair rock and Yonah Schimmel Knishes adding pumpkin to the mix!

Paul lynde Does Halloween!

Frank O'Hara Reads "Having a Coke With You"

I Love This Poem. It reminds me that all of our lives are poetry, from beginning to end.

Sol Lewitt

"Conceptual art is not necessarily logical. The logic of a piece or series of pieces is a device that is used at times, only to be ruined. Logic may be used to camouflage the real intent of the artist, to lull the viewer into the belief that he ...understands the work, or to infer a paradoxical situation (such as logic vs. illogic). Some ideas are logical in conception and illogical perceptually. "

Cindy & Bert - Der Hund Von Baskerville

No Homo

A jump from a platform

Experimental Video Directed and shot by Stéphan Talneau Music by Sigur Ros and Terry Riley. Soundtrack from "Paris Texas" from Wim Wenders Senso Productions 2007

This Used to Be The Future

Mad Men's January Jones by Terry Richardson

In the new GQ

The Equality March In DC

Patty Pravo - il paradiso (1969)

Birthday drawing

Me as Blake Lively from Gossip Girl by Allen Grubesic

Viktor & Rolf & Roisin

Todo Cambia - Mercedes Sosa

“Mercedes Sosa has lived her 74 years to the fullest. She did practically everything that she wanted to do.”

thanks to my friend Eduardo for the english translation


Everything Changes

Surface things change
and so do things profound
your way of thinking changes
everything in this world changes

Climate changes over the years
a shepherd changes his flock
and since everything must change
that I should change is nothing strange

The finest brilliant thing
changes its luster from hand to hand
a bird’s nest can change
and so can a lover’s feelings

A walker changes directions
although it could cause harm
and since everything must change
that I should change is nothing strange

Changes, everything changes
Changes, everything changes
Changes, everything changes
Changes, everything changes

The sun changes in its path
when only night remains
a plant changes its garments
from the green it was in spring

Animals’ coats change
And old people’s hair
and since everything must change
that I should change is nothing strange

But my love doesn’t change
no matter how far away I travel
nor the memory nor the pain
of my country and my people

What changed yesterday
will have to change tomorrow
just as I am changing
in this distant country

Changes, everything changes
Changes, everything changes
Changes, everything changes
Changes, everything changes

Mark Leckey Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore

New York Art Book Fair

Books ready for sale at the New York Art Book Fair, scheduled to run through Sunday at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, Queens.


By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: October 2, 2009

If you harbor even a speck of doubt about the continuing viability of hold-in-your-hand-and-turn-the-pages print publications, check out the New York Art Book Fair this weekend. You’ll find thousands of new books — smart, weird, engrossing, beautiful — that will never be Kindle-compatible. They’ll make you feel good.




The fair, produced by Printed Matter, a venerable local purveyor and producer of books by artists, began in Chelsea in 2006 but this year is at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, Queens. The move meant giving up ready foot traffic for a big gain in floor space. Whether the trade will pay off remains to be seen, but for certain the fair, once a modest event and now quite a grand one, looks great.

More than 200 exhibitors — booksellers, independent publishers, artists, antiquarian dealers — fill three floors of P.S. 1’s cavernous premises with plenty of breathing room: some of the displays look like full-fledged gallery shows. The recession has scared off a few big trade publishers, but they’ve been more than adequately replaced by 60 newcomers from Japan, South Korea, Mexico and elsewhere, many of them low on cash but high on risk tolerance.

Not that there aren’t established names. Aperture, Powerhouse Books and Princeton Architectural Press are on hand, as are European museum presses (Witte de With from Rotterdam; Musac from León, Spain). Rare-book dealers like Anartist, Carolina Nitsch and John McWhinnie are back in force. You can spot them a mile away: their banks of bookcases convey the woody, lived-in air of personal libraries.

Mr. McWhinnie is doing double duty this year as dealer and curator, having organized the 30-year survey of books and posters by Richard Prince. Immaculately installed, it makes a suave, MoMA-ish introduction to P.S. 1’s largest first-floor gallery. But Mr. Prince, who is on the fair’s board of advisers, is not exactly news, and what makes this fair enticing is the chance it affords to see things seldom encountered elsewhere.

The main sources for such material are two related sections of the fair: one is Friendly Fire; the other, new this year, is Flaming Creatures. Both are devoted to young artists, collectives, shoestring galleries and other seriously indie enterprises.

In Friendly Fire the artist-dealer Edie Fake, for example, is selling radically cheap-looking books by solid-gold writers. Red 76, an Oregon collective, has, among other things, a freshly harvested stock of found and distressed paperbacks. This year Darin S. Klein and Friends is hawking books by the box, though very small books in very small boxes.

For collectors of gay material , there are several specialists to consult, most of them clustered in Flaming Creatures. The zine editor Billy Miller and the designer Jan Wandrag handle the queer classic “Straight to Hell” and a new zine called “No Milk Today.” Goteblüd of San Francisco is a central supplier for all manner of vintage zines — rave zines, punk zines, low-rider zines, bike-messenger zines — along with Wuvable Oaf comics and customized skateboards.

And in the fringe areas, one-man bands get a chance to shine. Charles Clough, whose paintings from the 1980s recently appeared in “The Pictures Generation” at the Metropolitan Museum, has a table by himself in Friendly Fire at which he introduces new work in the form of a multimedia package. It includes an abstract painting, a facsimile print of the painting, a book of images of the picture in progress and a movie made from those images.

His project is so much more interesting than most of the painting on the walls in Chelsea that I can’t think why someone doesn’t give him a show.

In certain sectors of the publishing industry, multimedia is now considered to be crucial to the survival of books; the fair tests the waters with a decent helping of videos. Electronic Arts Intermix has continuous screening of artists’ tapes in the P.S. 1 basement. And two veterans of alternative media, Deep Dish TV Network and Paper Tiger Television, are showing old and new documentaries in a shared first-floor space. Want a replay of recent protests against globalism in Pittsburgh? Step right this way. And while you’re at it, grab a Paper Tiger sales catalog. It’s a cool read.

Mark Leckey

I saw mark leckey's performance piece tonight, "The Long Tail" is was mostly a lecture on the dissemination of information via the internet...but really fascinating with really cool effects and a reproduction of the first transubstantiation of a solid into matter...the early television transmission of a felix the cat sculpture. It made me think of my earlier work where I took ephemeral sensory experiences, smell and sound and recorded them in a two dimensional form.....more information about that work on my other blog Erik_Hanson here

Waning Days of Summer

I had a really fun couple of days at Asbury park on The NJ shore. My friend Robert invited me to spend the night at his really cool house there and we made dinner and caught up on all the comings and goings of our lives, then went to see the Kareoke singers at Georgies. Yesterday when we woke up it was HOT , like summertime hot, the sun was out and we thought, let's go to the beach! It was a perfect beach day and there were maybe 15 other people on this huge beach. It was great, but it seemed kind of crazy too, to be canceling appointments and work to go hang out at the beach 2 weeks past labor day, when all the kids are back in school and most adults have put summer behind them. It felt like we were trying to hang on to something that most people had already let go of.

It was the only time I went to Asbury this summer and the summer before I went there only once too. I used to have so many friends there and would go down almost every weekend, but slowly things have been changing. Some friends moved away, others just changed and my world changed too. I miss some of my old friends even when they are still around, I miss who they were, but I have to accept those people are gone, inhabiting a past that's never to return. Of course change is a good thing, some of my friends have given up their old destructive habits, moved on and become the person they were always meant to be, some of them have become bitter recluses emerging from their shell every once and a while to rail against the world and all of the changes and the injustices that they feel have been piled onto their shoulders. It can be hard to remember that change really is good, or at least it's inevitable...and when I think of all the opportunities that have been presented to me, it's much more amazing than anything I could have asked for. I'm looking forward to what ever's next.

Total Eclipse of the Heart: Literal Video Version

Rem Koolhaas and CCTV architecture porn

I did finally get to see the Rem Koolhaas China Tv building...it's massive, we could see it from our hotel window as soon as we arrived in Beijing. I thought that since I could see it , I could walk there. I did and it took over an hour...it's so cool! I've never seen anything like it, it did not dissapoint! It's still surrounded by fences and the burnt out shell of the hotel which was destroyed in a fire over Chinese New Years. There was a big debate about the resemblance to genitalia, which I had never thought about until seeing the picture above. That makes a pretty good case I suppose, but everything comes from somewhere, ideas don't just pop up out of thin air, so I suppose maybe these buildings could have been inspired by sex, why not? As my friend Bill Arning says, sex is a great motivator.

New Glasses

I got these awesome new glasses in China, thats real wood on the side!

9-11

APRIL 10--Under pressure from the September 11 commission, the White House today declassified and released an intelligence digest given to President George W. Bush weeks before the 2001 terrorist attacks. The confidential President's Daily Brief (PDB) for August 6, 2001 contained a two-page section entitled "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US," and refers to possible hijacking attempts by Osama bin Laden disciples and the existence of about 70 FBI investigations into alleged al-Qaeda cells operating within the United States. The August 6 PDB, an excerpt from which you'll find below, was presented to Bush while he vacationed at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. The digest is prepared by the Central Intelligence Agency, an official from which briefs the president on the report's contents. While Bush critics have described the August 6 PDB as a warning of an impending al-Qaeda attack, Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser, testified Thursday that the document contained "historical information based on old reporting. There was no new threat

Lower East Side Openings

Sombody made a video at openings in my neighborhood on weds night, its from the website loren munk.com, the james kalb report. So if you've ever wondered what its like to wander around New York openings on a cool autumn night this should give you a pretty good idea. If you are wondering who that handsome guy in the flourescent striped polo shirt is at minute 9:22 that's me! In my new chinese glasses, talking with Liz Jonckheer

Lanvin

The clothes that Lucas Ossendrijver creates for the label Lanvin fascinate me. When ever I see them in a store I'm inexplicibly drawn to them, I want to touch them , feel them and try them on. I want to be the person that wears these kinds of clothes. The prices are ridiculous, way out my ballpark, 700.00 for pants, 600.00 to 1,200.00 for a shirt, 4,000 for a jacket. I was at the Barney's warehouse sale last summer with my friends Van and Mark and AA, mMark had found a Lanvin jacket marked down to 500.00 we all tried it on, I fell madly in love, I had no money and I realized right there and then that a white sportcoat with lace and netting sewn on and a ruched front had no place in my life, I would never wear it, but still I loved it. Mark still regrets not having gotten it.

At this years Barneys sale there was Tons of Lanvin, a polka dot polo shirt for $200.00, a rumpled Linen Tuxedo jacket (no pants thou) for $100.00 shiny cotten trousers for $80.00. I tried these all on and realized that they were all fairly impractical, though it was great fun trying them on...it would have been a bit of a stretch financially to buy any of them, though with creative financing I could have pulled it off...but in the end I realized I wanted the lifestyle, the persona embodied by these clothes and not the clothes themselves. Owning the rumpled linen tuxedo jacket wasn't necessarily gonna make me the person who gets invited to the kind of events where you wear one...and so I passed. Maybe I'll check back tomorrow though and see if those pants get marked down just a little bit more....those might just fit into my lifestyle.

Chinglish

My Favorite Meal In China

It was in the province of Guangdong , aka Canton, In the City of Guangzhou in a restaurant right next to our hotel. I went in to this big multi level palace of food, looked at the pics in the menu and decided on 3 dishes, fish, noodles and vegetables....the waitress told me no, no and no, they were out? It was too late? ...who knows....then I found this dish with beef and vegetables, it was all deep fried with no batter, just deep fried in oil...the vegetables in neat little piles and along with the beef were some kind of vegetable chips and something like deep fried mayonaise. The whole dish was heaven,clean,light and fresh tasting, lots of variety perfectly married. The second best meal I had was the night before just as we arrived in Guangzhou, our plane was late and someone was at the airport to pick us up...since we got in late , there was no time to go to the hotel and drop me off before the business dinner so I was graciously invited along. We had a private room in a big dining palace on the pearl river, with giant windows overlooking the brightly lit modern art museum across the water.My friend's associates ordered and ordered and ordered some more and everythung was on a giant lazy susan in the middle of the table....fish, chickn, vegetables, noodles, beef, rice....it was all outrageously good...even the chicken head in the center of the plate that held the cold chicken dish didnt bother me, that much...but I kept picking at the fish, getting every last scrap of flesh but not wanting to turn it over as that would seem so....obvious or something...instead it just sat there and went home in somebody's doggy bag, but those few bits I had were unforgettable....

Eating In Shanghai

Hard to believe I'm back already, the month flew by. It was great being in China! Sightseeing during the day, then cooking dinner and watching Mad Men. The food was great there and cheap. Stayed by the Portman Ritz Carlton, the Hotel where celebrities and politicians stay at. The Hotel itself was part of a big complex catering to visiters and ex pats, with a Tony Roma's and California pizza kitchen (never went), a franchise of the french bakery Paul (went twice) a Starbucks, but those are everywhere in China (went often) and a grocery store in the basement (City Fresh) where a box of cereal would set you back 10 or 12 bucks but they also had great food, fish and vegetables, all pretty cheap. I cooked often and we ate out often too, which was great and much cheaper to do than here in NYC. The street food was amazing, steamed buns and soup dumplings were available every couple of blocks, 4 dumplings for 75c, a steamed bun with greens and tofu was about 15c and whenever I would pass one of these stalls I invariably bought something....all delicious! If you have ever had soup dumplings you know how amazing they are, inside is a ball of meat and hot soup...if you ever wondered how they are made....they put some gelatin in with the meat and when they are heated the gelatin becomes sticky liquid soup. You nibble a bit off, slurp up the soup and eat the rest, although there was a place in a tourist mall in the YuYuan garden complex that had an alternative way to eat them....

Back from Shanghai

Glad to be back from the place where my blog is considered anti communist propaganda...hell I wasn't even gonna write anything about that square where the tank and the student so fatefully met 25 years ago, but that didnt really happen. See me smiling as I visit the birthplace of communism in my 25th anniversary Margiela t shirt above!

China

Tomorrow morning at this time I'll be making my way to the airport for a nonstop flight to Shanghai. I arrive Saturday afternoon from the 14 hour flight, and the time difference is 12 hours later....so for the next month I'll be in the future. Contact me if you want to know what's coming. Actually, I am a little concerned that I might not have access to this blog, or facebook or some of the other ways that I like to stay in touch....I'll do what I can, but I might not post as regularly. On Monday I'll be going to Beijing till Friday...then back to Shanghai and just winging it from there.

I can't believe I get to take all these incredible trips, last year Hungary to see Eduardo and meet Bence, my new best Hungarian friend, before that a month in Brazil....which blew my mind...and will always remain one of the most incredible experiences of my life, and all the beautiful people I met there and awesome things I saw thanks to my great friend Eduardo....and now I get to spend a month in China, the worlds most populous country, in August, where it's hot and soupy.....

ctrlw33d

If you like the pic above, In a kind of "WTF" kind of way....check out this website...probably not if you are at work though....It's totally rad...!

http://w33d.tumblr.com/

Helmut Newton

as good s that lady gaga video is, and its REALLY good...I feel I have to point out how great Helmut Newton is check out this image..

Lady Gaga - Paparazzi

Thouroughly entertaining! If you like this, check out Helmut Newtons photos

One and The other

Every hour, 24 hours a day for 100 days, a different person will step up to the Fourth Plinth and help make a living portrait of the UK now...
Live feed here..

morehttp://www.oneandother.co.uk/

Fire Island

I spent most of the last week at my friend's house in Fire Island....s beautiful sliver of sand, a mile or so off the coast of long Island. The weather was perfect, I finished a John Updike book, cooked a lt and went to Low Tea at the blue whale everyday...it was pretty perfect! Thanks Mark!