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The Voyage of Donald Crowhurst
 This is one of the central myths of mythogeography. Crowhurst left Teignmouthin Devon, UK, in 1968 on a double journey.One, from a to a, a round-the-world yachtrace, The Sunday Times Golden Globe Race;the other, triggered by his failure to leave theAtlantic and the necessary deceptions thatkept him in a race he had to win, led him firstinto moral, and then in his own mind intophysical, relativity. He began to embodyEinstein’s Special Theory. He became a living
Gedankenexperiment 
.Crowhurst’s story is one of few modern tragicindividuals; for his predicament is partly oneof his own making; there is hubris, but thereis also heroism. And he is an example tomythogeographers, not in some sick, ironicalway, but as someone who, when he lied, wasreleased to genuinely live an impossiblephysics. Faced with victory, he (probably)picked up his boat’s chronometer andstepped into the ocean. His sacrifice allowsus to experiment without self-destruction. Hetook the chance; today, thanks to him, wedon’t have to.
City
“I put on shows for policemen. Always thesame routine… They were like sheep. They 
 
always fell for it. I got myself picked up by one of them. To pay for my English. I knowhow you’re going to feel about this… But Idid it for the English language, OK! Whenwe were doing it I thought about theothers. Everyone thinks of someone elsewhen they come. Because coming isn’t intime. That’s why coming in the movies issamey. Coming isn’t part of history.Coming happens in a different time zone.Hong Kong ain’t six hours ahead of London. Munich ain’t one hour behind Paris. Anyway, it’s only cheating if youthink of one bloke. It’s OK if it’s millions.That’s obviously not possible. All thosemade up stories in the newspapers. Whenthey say so and so and so and so really did it in that scene, that’s just to sell themovie. All this phantom loving is going on.I feel like I shagged a whole city!! I feelreally tired.” 
“Confessions of a Perfume Paratrooper”from
Slippery Suitcases
Spectacle
 The Spectacle is not a ‘curtain of illusion’draped across reality, hiding the ‘real evils’of capitalism.
 
In Howard Brenton’s play ‘Magnificence’one of the characterstells a story about adrunk throwing abottle through acinema screen, as ametaphor for piercingthe Spectacle (thehole remains as theaction moves on).However, suchpiercing has been adevotional tactic sincethe pyramids: an“obelisk” (or more correctly a “tekhen”,from the ancient Egyptian verb “to pierce”)punctures the sky, the home of the gods. The Spectacle – despite the name – doesnot describe the distraction of people fromthe ‘truth’ of their circumstances throughthe deployment of Hollywood. Rather, it isa critique of the relations between peopledriven by the production and exchange of images, accelerated by a culture of visuality in which the image has replacedthe commodity as the main object of desire. Simple, really, and yet it is ‘odd’how many clever people get it wrong.Makes you wonder about their motives…(anyone can win an argument if they candefine their opponent’s terms for them).
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03 / 09 / 2010<span class="translation_missing">en_US, this_document_made_it_onto_the</span>Rising List!
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