“You went in a circle, gave yourself endless trouble under the delusion that you were accomplishing something, and all the time you were simply describing some great silly arc that would turn back to where it had its beginning, like the riddling year itself. You wandered about, without getting home” (Thomas Mann, ‘The Magic Mountain’)

for my life, I made a cup of tea and contemplated whether or not to dig out cine-camera reels, untouched for two decades, which I knew to contain footage of me cavorting around ‘Six Flags Magic Mountain’, cowering in unspeakable terror at the prospect of uncovering a “sign”, the sign. (31) Imagine my relief upon recently discovering an original pamphlet for the theme park, obtained at the time of visiting and hidden away in a cupboard, with the legend “New Summer of 1981” emblazoned on the cover.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Combining notions of the “palimpsest” and the “akashic record” is a useful way of approximating the elusive quality that defines a sense of place, whether that place is situated in the physical, virtual or mental
universe. Self-conscious mind, approaching all three as “other”,
nevertheless encapsulates each of these spaces within itself as it
perceives, and superimposes matrices of significance in order to grasp its relation to them, and by extension, to itself. These matrices are themselves determined by memory shaped in linear time by genetic inheritance and the cumulative layering of impressions, emerging across a lifespan in a myriad of complex manifestations with varying degrees of latency. The psychogeographer is particularly keen on channelling the historical psychic reverberations impressed upon certain sites, taking topographical necessity and architectural delimitation as essential factors controlling the ritual gathering and circulation of social strata. An even denser reflexivity of reference is introduced when particular loci are transformed for the observer by the intrusion of recording media, especially when the aim is simulation, and teasing apart the intersecting trajectories present at such a node is fraught with complication.

Returning to ‘Blow Up’, we can illustrate this difficulty with the example of Maryon Park: surveyed by Egyptologist William Flinders Petrie in 1891, it was a Roman and Iron Age hill fort, a hideaway for highwaymen, a location where ships’ compasses were adjusted in the 1850s, and a place where Iain Sinclair took photographs of his photographer Marc Atkins searching for the same angles from which Hemmings as Blue 439 framed his photographs in impersonation of David Bailey while being filmed by Carlo di Palma – who was under instruction from Antonioni to adopt point-of-view and detached perspectives – as Don McCullin took photographs on set for
documentary purposes. (32).

experiences and hazy memories: a gravitational density of interest by which I could reinterpret the unfamiliar in terms of an urge for self-fulfilment, attracted to patterns of similarity to solidify the stability of my fractious ego. I felt distinctly nauseous nearing the potential completion of a 22 year cycle, as if an unknown affinity had determined the course of the intervening period and its revelation would take the arse out of time itself and extinguish my being. Curse Rod Serling and his legacy. Naturally afraid

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.GUY VEALE - "Voyeurism, Vaccum, Death", 2004 (page 10)
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