Stardust Memories

Stardust memories is the name of a 1980 Woody Allen film which I had forgotten all about, but the name kept occurring to me on a subconscious level as an echo to seeing the posters for “Stardust“.

Warning: This is a rambling account of my activities yesterday, with no particular purpose other than to blog for the sake of recording events and thoughts. I spent most of yesterday in central London starting out with a Creative Coffee Club meeting at Foyle’s bookshop, which was a drift in and out kind of gathering where I met several people for the first time including Toby Moores, Sue Thomas and Karyn Romesys. We discussed the nature of creativity, the role of peer group meeting venues for random philosophical discourse during periods of historical change, online community and social networks, use of real names, intellectual property and the ownership by celebrities both dead and alive of their own image amongst other things. I’ll go again.

The afternoon I had designated for photography, with a mission to capture buildings and phenomena of the West End for a future website. A pleasant little task I imagined, strolling about taking pictures but it turned out to be much harder work than I thought. By “hard work” I just mean physically active, akin to walking up and down stairs within an old school building or supporting a roomful of people seated with technology. You can get a strange feeling at the end of the day called “tired” which doesn’t happen in quite the same way on the internet.

Back to the old London buildings. Most places need to be photographed from the other side of the street or even further back if possible. This means a lot of walking back and fore, crossing busy roads, trying various angles and waiting for gaps in the traffic, both motorised and pedestrian. I took more than a few shots of a glorious facade obscured by double decker bus until I had practiced the art of keeping both eyes open while looking through the viewfinder.

Talking of viewfinders, I’ve been looking for a replacement compact camera, the type that fits easily in a shirt pocket, and I get the impression that many of them these days don’t have a viewfinder, only the LCD screen. That’s no use to me. I can’t make out the details of an image on such screens in daylight let alone sunshine, and anyway, I like to feel the camera up against my nose, not suspended in mid air.

In another capacity I took the opportunity to look in on The Harp and was pleased to see Ross-On-Wye perry being stocked.

In Leicester Square, there were crowd barriers being erected between the theatre tickets booth and the Odeon cinema.

People were assembling, hanging about by the barriers and looking in, giving the appearance of spectators watching three Westminster Council road sweepers tidying up the ground. Some had large cameras and big bags so then it dawned that they must be papparazi waiting for an event. A glance around confirmed loads of posters for “Stardust” a new film which I surmised must be having a premiere in Leicester Square. That’s where they have them. Probably they were staking claims on the best vantage points from which to get a shot of Robert DeNiro a few hours later, as he steps from a taxi into the Odeon.

Maybe he was due to grant a TV interview outside, amongst the little tropical islands which lined a green carpet walkway, as a kind of temporary film set, leading nowhere. The most serious papparazi had bagged the line immediately outside the cinema and brought those little lightweight stepladders with them, in order to be three feet taller than everybody else, except when they all have them.

After traipsing around The West end for hours I was in need of a sit down and was lucky enough to find a seat upstairs in The Cove, above the pasty shop in Covent Garden, with half a pint of lovely Cornish Knocker, brewed in Newham, Truro. The pub above the pasty shop can get very busy at weekends but at 4.00pm on a weekday it was quiet and restful, so that was another thing I could appreciate about my new flexible lifestyle

At six O’clock it was time to make my way to Baker Street for London Wiki Wednesday. This month’s host was ?WhatIf! an innovation company, with a bright and youthful atmosphere compared with some of the corporate hosts we are more used to. The hosts made a presentation using card storyboards rather than powerpoint live slides, and asked for suggestions about the usual issue – how to improve take-up and participation. Discussion this month took a turn more towards Wikipedia, with it’s growing control culture and victims. “It’s getting more nasty” said Gordon. Another told of how he fought Wikipedia and won, and an update on yellowikis – since “Yell Ltd” owns the colour yellow the wiki can be accessed from anywhere in the world except the UK, apparently. I’m not sure how that works, doesn’t it make our internet a bit like China? And they’re moving to Wikia.

I transferred 197 pictures from my camera when I got home and began processing some but it was too much to get through in one batch late at night, so will have to be interweaved with other tasks as the week continues. Looking up the news, I find out that DeNiro wasn’t there. They must have been waiting for Michelle Pfeiffer, Sienna Miller and Charlie Cox, the other stars of Stardust. The BBC couldn’t have been there either, otherwise surely they would have noticed that the red carpet was a green one.