No writing today, just recovering. There were no babies on my flight home and I had Jason Starr’s latest FAKE ID to keep me occupied. I had fun in New York, but I’m very glad to be home.

After the madness of the Edgars was over, I had a swell time just relaxing with friends and family. I ate at some of my favorite restaurants and tried some new places too. Friday I took the ferry out to the Statue of Liberty and then walked around lower Manhattan in the rain. That night I had good greasy NYC pizza with Jason Starr and then we parked ourselves at a Lower East Side bar and marveled at how much things have changed in that area.

Saturday, I started off with lunch at Jean George. None of my photos came out worth a damn, but the meal was absolutely top notch. Here’s what I ate:

Amuse - fresh Mozzarella with pickled rhubarb, crab fritter with mango and 5 spice aioli, and a shot glass containing a bright green herbal broth

1st - Hamachi sashimi and Japanese cucumber served with a soy-basil tea poured over it at tableside.

2nd – Peekytoe crab with asparagus ribbons in a lime-melon broth.

Dessert – chocolate covered coffee-cardamom ice cream pop and roasted pineapple sorbet with caramel curd.

Plus tiny chocolates, tiny macaroons (apricot, caramel and peanut butter and jelly) and fresh marshmallows (ginger, vanilla and rose) cut from long ropes using scissors.

From there, a quick visit to the Museum of Modern Art and then a stroll through Central Park and a ride on the carousel.

As much as I love my adopted city of L.A, I do really miss NYC. I feel at home there in a way I don’t think I ever will anywhere else.

Photos are up on Flickr, one set of general NYC snaps here and another of the Edgar Award banquet here.

I’ve noticed an odd, baffling trend on Flickr. I work fairly hard organizing my photo sets. Many times the titles and captions only make sense in context of the set and rely on the assumption that the viewer has seen the previous photo. Yet I notice over and over that certain photos in each set get way more views than their neighbors. Clearly people are not looking at the whole set, just picking and choosing.

Here’s the photo from the Black Dahlia set that got the most views, more than double the views of its mates in the set:




The title of this photo is “In Front of the House.”

What house? Out of context this photo is meaningless. It’s not a bad photo, but not particularly good either. I’m just standing there, not dressed in a sexy or unusual fashion and the house behind me is certainly not all that interesting if you don’t know that it was built on the site where Elizabeth Short’s corpse was discovered. I just don’t get it.

Looking back over my sets, a consistent trend is revealed. For the most part, the photos that get the most views are those in which my full body is visible, even if there is a more flattering close up photo in the same set. I can be wearing a sexy low-cut blouse in a close up shot and a full body photo of me in a bulky winter coat will still get more views. Photos of beautiful scenery get almost no views compared to blurry point and shoot snaps of me just standing around.

I know there’s no point fighting it. People just don’t have the attention span for more than one thing in sequence. So I’m not gonna stop building sets for the five people who actually look at every photo in context, but I do need to start labeling each photo as if it stands alone. And if there’s something I really want people to see, I’ll make sure I’m standing in front of it.