It's a small New York

What a week. I just spent the last five days courting my advertising colleagues from LA around New York City, but I forget sometimes that ten minutes walking around the city in a big group is the equivalent of an hour alone in any other smaller city. And now I have the most wicked cramp in my left shoulder.

But that is one of the nice things about New York, I realized - you can feel like a tourist or a native at any given moment. It's like that optical illusion where you see either a vase or two profiles.

And the other thing about NYC, is this phenomenon of "networking," aka "it's a small world."

Many years ago someone introduced me to an architect whose first name was something Arthurian like Galahad, or Excalibur (no joke), and he said it best: The city is organic. You can go out for a walk downtown and end up in a political rally in midtown, then finish the night with some random new "best friend" in Bushwick.

But that's all just a preamble to my name-dropping (another big New York thing, probably) in 3,2...

Monday night I took the Asian-American ad agency crew to Tokyo Bar where we met and talked to Taeko from New York-Tokyo, who ran into and subsequently introduced us to DJ Spooky, who was meeting with an Asian-American Arts fundraiser. That to me, is the most complete example of that vase-profile optical illusion/small world phenomenon. Someone casually looking into the restaurant could have either seen an accomplished mixer or a group of Asians, but we were all doing the same thing.

Now, it'd be one thing if we just exchanged names, but the dude was actually really nice and we all had a nice long conversation about everything from MIT's publishing company to the sound of ice in Antarctica. (BTW, he's just made a documentary called Terra Nova, about the sound of ice and the consequences of breaking icebergs. Apparently it's debuting at Sundance.)

I need a back rub.