Lower Marsh, La Barca Restaurant with Alan Campbell

Media stars all over the walls – agents’ photos. A curious genre.

David Suchet – Hercule Poirot

Black and white, mannerist, smiley faces.

They say “we had dinner here and gave the restaurant our photo”.

But also these photos make me think of claims like “Henry VIII slept in this bed”.

Or, the photos, witnessing a dinner taken by someone in this very room where I too now eat, create a similar effect to the knowledge that something happened here – “a murder occured in this room”.

So these photos are another sort of archaeological media trace.

An example of located media too – a specific association of medium, place and event.

We eat at the Hayes Street Grill in San Francisco. Like La Barca, it is around the corner from theatres and concert halls and sports on its walls lots of agents’ photos of minor celebrities.

Alan and I were talking about the routes we have followed in the last twenty years from the North East of England to where we are now, Stanford and Westminster, and reflecting on Arnie in California and successors to Tony Blair in the UK.

Site specifics – it could hardly have been the same conversation in San Francisco, even if the words were the same.