Have I really not written about this? Ugh, what a busy couple of months.
First off, Past, Over ended at Gawker. Not that anyone wanted it to do so other than myself. It was reaching a point where I was running out of topics. In its place I proposed that instead of The Past calling, now The Future would call. I've created a landscape of a New York circa 2018, exponentially extrapolating current events in local and national news.
But don't call it a feature. The key thing about everything at Gawker is that it must always be reporting. Past, Over told the story of what some 1990's icons of New York have become. Future, Tense tells of potential outcomes of the present.
This week's installment tells of the Bleecker Street Mall. On a random afterwork stroll with a friend, the changes in this area were striking. Brash and vapid women filled the streets with shopping bags in tow shouting out, "Oh my god" like a poorly trained macaws of fanciful plumage. As we walked down the street we noticed all the shops that evoked excitement from the shoppers. And began to make parrot noises at them. The experience stuck in my head and evolved, in part, to this piece. (Other influences include riding a Colonial Transport van with Jason Preston and Sex and the City shooting near my office recently.)