*enters the confessional* Forgive me father, for I have sinned...

I have a confession to make: I'm not Catholic... oh wait! That's not what I meant to say at all. What I meant is I am doing this update on the 13th. Shocking, non? The real shame is I have totally forgotten what I wanted to talk about on friday. On the other hand, you'll get twice the rambling today.

Is it just me or do we seem to be facing a death of aesthetic sensibilities? In this time we have more capacity to create things, ideas, art, etc of such astounding beauty... beauty the likes of which has never been seen before. Why do we seem to be so hell-bent doing just the opposite?

I would like to pick especially on architecture. What architecture most typifies our current era? I think, personally, that it can be summed up in one word: "cheap". We have no distinctive style of our own excepting, perhaps, the giant concrete monolith wal-marts and grocery stores and the four floorplans of suburban monotony constructed with nothing but the most "cost-effective" materials.

Man, these are the places where we have to live and work! Not only are they sinfully ugly on the outside they are spiritually/metaphysically ugly. They make no concessions whatsoever to livability, beauty, human psychology, etc... only to cost. This terrifies me.

I vote we step back and rethink what we are doing. Is it not more important to build places, things, and ideas that make us happy than to cut corners to save money for people/entities that don't need it? We are building a world I, for one, am not going to want to live in.

Please bear with me. I realize I sound like a crackpot but nothing is more important. I repeat, we have to live in the world we are creating. This is a kind of pollution. Pollution of our headspaces.

Go read up on Japanese attitudes about light or Frank Lloyd Wright or the classical masters of the arts. We have SO many more tools at our disposal than they dreamt of. Let's use them.