Dubious Distinction: 'NYC Discos'

Every few days, Lord Zim likes to check the traffic numbers to this humble site. Visitors come from all over, some twice a day (you know who you are) to look in on this creative ferment. Lately it's been more ferment than creative, but nobody's perfect.

Increasingly, visitors have been looking at two photos I took back in April on a visit to New York. I like these images a lot, but I couldn't figure out why so many people were zeroing in on the long-since-archived pages. Today, however, I figured it out. For some reason, when you type "NYC discos" into the search box on Google Images, those two photos are the first and second results.

This makes little sense. One photo was indeed shot in a NYC disco -- the bonkers Bulgarian disco in Chinatown -- but I'd hardly say it's the quintessential "NYC discos" image. The other, more interesting one isn't even disco-related; it shows a subway tunnel looking "just as magical as I used to imagine one might be before I stopped thinking about them as objects of wonder," as I wrote when first posting. I guess it would be exciting if discos did look like that, though it might be hard to dance around the third rail and syringes and rats.

I'm not sure what this says about Google or Lord Zim or the Italian, Japanese, and South American web surfers who comprise the majority of visitors to these photos. Speculations welcome. And yes, loyal readers: at some impending juncture, I will address the fact that I've left Israel and am back in my prickly hometown.

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