The other night I was having dinner with some friends and one of them has a girlfriend who is heavily into enviornmentalism. She made the mistake of bringing up the subject with me and ruined my steak by going into how bad cattle raising was for the earth and the animals. The whole graphic imagery bit. She did it on purpose.
Now I don't hit women, or men really, ever. But when you go out of your way to ruin my $40 steak...you better know deep inside I want to kill you, your mother, your father, and your entire family in ways that would make even the most hardline serial killer go "eww dude that's sick". I have few pleasures in this world left to me and my dinners are one of them.
The question came up about how I saw the future of the enviornment and how I wanted to see it. Any know me it's pretty simple...Bladerunner. She thought I meant the sci-fi heavy, monolithic, style architecture and neo-noir sensebilities or as you said "the look" of the film. No. I really really want cities like Bladerunner.
The beauty of those cities is in their decay, lack of nature, and mass of people who shouldn't be able to breathe let alone live in such enviornments. They are about as unhuman as you can get since they go out of their way to kill off the sense of space as opposed to sheer mass making a human feel like an ant. NYC combats this with it's central park and open aired areas (like balconies and rooftops) but in sci fi cities like Bladerunners L.A., The mega cities of Judge Dredd's world, or even SW's Coruscant you have a very H.G. Wells kind of vibe...the rich and powerful near the light and sun....the fucked and damned in the bowls of a sunless metallic hell filled with man made lights, machines, sensory overloads, and a feeling that nothing is ever quite clean or cared for as it should be.
I went into more detail about this and she was thuroughly disgusted by how sick a world that would be. In a way she IS right but from the first moments I saw these images as a kid in comics, imagined them from books, and saw em on screen...I liked it...mainly because of it's heavy flaws and oppressive feel. It was beautiful for all the wrong reasons...
The only cities on this earth close to that Bladerunner look are really only in asia and it was clear that's where the creators of these cities looked for insperation...you see Shanghai, Hong Kong, Tokyo, etc. far more than you see L.A or even NYC in future visions of those places...odd as that is.
The night ended with me looking at my cold unfinished plate of flesh...and she drinking some soy milk heavy gormet coffee. She enjoyed her meal...and her enviornmentalist ways that made her one with the earth as she put it.
I excused myself and left wondering why people like that make it seem like everyone is on the "winning side" but them? They always play the underdog and victim when it was clearerly not the case since the entire dinner party was pretty much in line to her way of thinking.
I took a cab home and just looked at the sprawling city...more dissapointed about it than I have ever been before. Cause realy neither of us had a realistic ideal...just a Utopia that neither could have or wanted to share.
Yet people work toward it day after day...with a handful trying to keep what we have from falling a part all together.
Are any of you happy with the places you live in (in terms of over all style and feel)? would you rather be somwhere else? Do you want to see it transformed? or would you simply want something smaller that you can control like a ranch, house, shack?
