shard liggers

In a seemingly improvised bar at the back of the BFI they're handing out free beers. The art crowd who have just been to see a screening of a film about an obscure art-saint-fool who was the Goons before they were the Goons and was Duchamp after he was Duchamp and like everything unusual and British has been stuck in a margin somewhere that now equates to this bar - This art crowd. A crowd who should be too cool for free beers but isn't. Creating a surge at the bar which reaches its waveform peak within three minutes of the bar being open and then elides, fades aways, diminished until only the potted few, including us, return for the red wine which is all that now remains, the surge having washed the beer away. We prop up the bar and observe and discuss, as half-forgotten faces from London's demi-monde are remembered; as people talk with overstated enthusiasm about things that can't be heard from our vantage point. A film critic, one of the mavericks, appears. His film script has been eviscerated by a modern-day script guru. Who has told him that there needs to be three reasons for every shot. As though there are three reasons for every word. Or thought. Or tear. Perhaps there are, in the guru's world. There's so much Vivienne Westwood on display that the room collapses under its post-punk weight. People are fleeing. They're going to see the Shard lightshow. A transformative event. In the history of London. With three reasons for every laser. Later, after cheap Thai, we stand outside Waterloo and look up. A few half-hearted lasers are still ligging across the sky. As though searching out the last of the free beers.

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