Reference point: London

What a week.

I've been writing about my fabliau with the Big Project, and this past week, my reference kept returning to London.

Live 8, Ernie Fritz (the documentary filmmaker with whom I had been working) gets to go on a whim to London. He paid for a costly plane ticket to go with VH1 and manage the control room and hang out with Sir Bob et al. I was jealous.

Here in New York City, West Side Stadium plans aside, we still pushed forward with our NYC 2012 Olympic bid, for which CBGB was featured in NYC 2012 advertising. We lost. To London.

And then, G8. What a lesson for A. Who are the G8 leaders, A? I asked, on a whim, with no agenda at all. "Um, what is G8?" he asked. It stands for "Group of 8" leaders of the world. Can you guess who they are? We hadn't even talked about it while watching the Live 8 footage from last week. "Chirac, Putin, that guy Koizumi whose son likes CBGB, Bush, Tony Blair who played guitar and looked like a hippy and used to book bands as his job, Berlusconi, Schroder, and the guy in Canada." Yes, and now G8 includes the European Union.

OK, there was absolutely no prep for that, so I give him credit for at least knowing the countries of the G8. Paul Martin I'll forgive him. What was on the G8 agenda? We searched here.

And then there was this film. I highly recommend watching it, particularly as Richard Curtis directed it. Which means, a few surprises. Bill Nighy and Kelly Macdonald star in it, who I love. A watched it with me, but mind, there is an implied sex scene. Some questions we asked: Is it possible for one person to change the world? What do we have as a reference for such change? What is DATA? What was on the agenda for this year's G8? Did it achieve what it set out to do?

Unfortunately, the London bombings could have clouded all the eventful and positive stuff that happened in London earlier.

I did, however, watch repeats on television of all the good stuff that happened before the bad stuff. And I logged on to www.one.org.