Got some more pearls of wisdom from Bruce Mau's An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth... Mau, who colloborates with Rem Koolhaus, has a few good generalizations for human and beast alike that go beyond architecture...
Speaking of the arts - I woke up this morning and read an arcticle in Index Magazine about the artists MacDermott and MacGough, who have been living in period detail to the point of driving horse-drawn buggy's and living w/out electricity. They are truly 1900-House and it amazes me that they manage to keep this up. I suppose if you are really in tune with a particular time period, you can withstand anything (doing laundry for 5 days as opposed to 2 hours)... I think it also takes someone who is meticulously neat (MacDermott remarks on how he can't get anyone to do an authentic starch anymore and how Gosford park didn't get "the laundry right".) Me personally - I am a child of the times: messy, disposable, all over the place. I guess my post-modern squalor is the future... Too much trash, and not alot of durable products... I thought about this earlier last night as I wandered around the aisles of RITE-AID. How much crap do we honestly buy? Oh well, I've got to go recycle...