RIP Robin Blaser

May 18 1925 - May 7 2009

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Blaser.php

Habitus

"...created only,
not by them, but
by the idea of
institution itself
speaking through
them to you. it
is a dialogue
as old as time."
--Dorothea Lasky

That's us
In the habitus
With a face
Full of grace

And gravitas and
Fuck me any-
way while you call
My name that

Is you hail me so
That I know I am
Me each each
Other's allergy

The suffering
Entailed by
Everybody to
Be any body

A pound of
Flesh the pro-
verbial crack
Of the whip

In every-
thing one regards
As civilizing
By this are

We called
To love and
Work by this we are
Said to work.

RIP Augusto Boal

April 16, 1931 - May 2, 2009

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/5/6/augusto_boal_founder_of_the_theater

Peterson on Poetry & Architecture at SEGUE

Here's Tim Peterson's write-up and introduction for SEGUE's "poetry and architecture" event the weekend before last. Having attended the event myself, I was struck by how monoceptual the 2nd architect, Benjamin Aranda, seemed in comparison with Robert Kocik and Vito Acconci, whose presentations converged for me at many moments. As far as I can tell, Aranda's work abstracts (or eschews?) urgent architecture problems such as how to create facility (in Kocik's case), and how to confuse public and private spaces through built objects and environments (in Acconci's). In turn, the work is little more than decorative, if not a predictable twist on big name, big money architecture (Frank Gehry's work came to mind seeing Aranda's). Aranda, in short, cookie-cuts fancy mathematics to design furniture, sculpture, and structures. The result is something seemingly very far from problems of embodiment and (public) space that I feel architects must turn their efforts to presently, if not always. That Aranda has collaborated with the painter Matthew Ritchie is telling given Ritchie's own cookie-cutter appropriations of complex systems theory to manufacture his paintings.