TFI Friday

Interesting day. Got off to a skidmarky start as I overslept and missed 'Silver City', the new John Sayles satire. All forgiven with a wicked salt beef sandwich (yes, the 'special') at Gaby's on Charing Cross Road while everyone else was on terror alert.

Spent plenty of time around Embankment, chilling at the NFT while I waited for the main event - the Karl Bartos lecture, 'Interpositions of Media'. I think D would have liked this, and for a moment, I thought he was there - D is a dead ringer for Eddie Berg, artistic director at the NFT, although one is from Manchester, the other from Liverpool.

Bartos was a member of electronica pioneer group Kraftwerk (come on, everybody knows 'Tour de France', right?). It was a wide ranging lecture, taking in Plato, Stockhausen, Grandmaster Flash, Susan Sontag, Neil Postman and of course Marshall McCluhan ('The medium is the message').

It was good to be reminded that photography is about 'writing with light', and for the rest of the evening my mindscape went off on a tangent, as I was thinking how film so often dictates a plot, whereas music allows my imagination free reign - and it doesn't always have to be that way.

Good to see a mixture of media students, DJs, VJs, writers and electronica freaks in the crowd.

Tale of the evening - shortly after joining Kraftwerk in 1975, Bartos and the others embarked on a coast-to-coast US tour. One evening they were surprised by the sheer size of the crowd, and also realised that they didn't have enough material. They were terrified, but one of them recognised that the audience were mainly stoners, so they played their material at 50-75% speed to stretch it out. Everybody was happy.