Assuming that the earth survives the present global warming and escapes nuclear attacks, will there be a need for archaeologists a few hundred years down the line? How well are our post-modern lives documented? I wish I could discuss this with Carrie Bradshaw over Cosmopolitans or mocha cappuccinos, but since that isn't possible and my day job doesn't include a newspaper column, I will introduce myself now.
The Urban Anthropologist has a Madison Avenue day job, often with long hours. When going through another episode of Clients Behaving Badly, there isn't a lot of reward. Consumer behavior is reported to us and studied by us in ways never dreamed of by the Mad Men of AMC's brilliant series, but we haven't stopped taking notes on cocktail napkins. The only difference now is that the napkins are usually those light brown ones from Starbucks which allow us more space and we're drinking iced Americanos instead of martinis. Well, most of the time anyway. Sorry to disappoint anyone wanting to enter the business, but the 3-martini lunch is dead in the age of accellerating technology and client expectations.
These observations and ruminations are posted from New York City, a microcosm of the human universe, the tossed salad, the advertising capital of the world. All cultures meet, greet, date, mate, relate, contemplate, and otherwise interact here, sometimes with amusing results. City life is deliciously complex, filled with choices upon choices upon alternatives that draw people into its noisy embrace. But for all that we complain about the noise, we get very nervious when it's too quiet.
Thoughts of an urbanite on life in the greatest city in the world, with the hope that others will do the same for their home cities.
