Blade Runner, stage plays, and greed

I am living in the film Blade Runner.
I am convinced of this and no one will be able to tell me otherwise.

Last week on campus, we watched clips from a documentary called What Would Jesus Buy?  In it, you can see multiple clips of people behaving as wild animals in order to snag that discount buy on Black Friday.  And you still think that people would behave in an orderly manner during a crisis?  Yeah.  Right.  Watch that clip and then rethink that point.  Likewise unsettling is Reverend Billy, a "preacher" attempting to sway shoppers away from the evils of commercialism and materialism, but not necessarily into the arms of Jesus.  Just look at the preacher's hair and demeanor.  Even sort of resembles Roy from Blade Runner while acting as a character from a Bruce Sterling novel.  Or failing that perhaps K.W. Jeter's Noir.  Society is doomed.

There is, however, a positive that can be gleaned from my malaise.  It has further inspired my to write that play I spoke about for the venerable Bernard J. Sell.  Yes, the stage play will have several Blade Runner overtones as well as the plot being heavily tied to humanity's dependence upon the Internet, but I plan for it to be down-to-earth and accessible for the high school cast and audience for whom it is intended.  I will probably consult the book, Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner to make certain I get the sensibility down, at least to a modicum of cyberpunk respectability.  Maybe I'll have characters debate the significance of the unicorn in the film?  References to life "in the offworld colonies," "teardrops in the rain," "I did your eyes," and so forth.  Maybe that would even get the guys from io9 to cover the opening of the play?  Sigh.  I know.

In more effervescent news, we're still destroying the planet.   Discover magazine reports on projections for the future world of 2062.  It's a land of deforestation, overcrowded cities, drought, rising CO2 levels, and coasts flooded by ice cap melt.
Yay us.



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