59. KAPITAL X

Kahneman also wrote in his book Thinking Fast, And Slow that: “System 1 and System 2 are so central to the story I tell in this book that I must make it absolutely clear that they are fictitious characters”. My sense of reality and identity are shaken after the events that took us from Bill Drummond’s piece Great Expectations to my revelation that The Benefaktor’s Curt Finks 1982 Edinburgh Fringe programme(*) was in fact a forgery. Like Grandfather, like Granddaughter. Did you spot the problem? If not, there are spoilers ahead. You might want to start back at Expektations including footnotes.

The focus of the Edinburgh Fringe “programme” was an area of Edinburgh. It takes us from the architect of James Gowans, and his overambitious schemes, to a sci-fi film that Curt Finks apparently watched while bunking off lectures at uni.

The excerpt that The Benefaktor sent me read as follows:

“Victorian architect’s hubris… aiming to establish… a palace of recreation, performance, and an aquarium… The great entertainment venue was not built to the original plans, and the disappointing substitute was repurposed a number of times [including as a cinema]… before being razed to the ground in the 1960s… I had sat in the cinema in the mid-1950s watching, I think, The Quatermass Xperiment with a few [friends]”.

I believe that The Benefaktor was attempting to draw parallels between Gowans and Drummond/ The KLF/ K Foundation and their magnificent/ hare-brained schemes. He will not be drawn on this.

What The Benefaktor definitely missed was a capital “E”. The sci-fi reference was the Nigel Kneale scripted movie “Quatermass Xperiment” (1955), which was based on a 1953 BBC TV series called “Quatermass Experiment” (1953). Having Curt Finks watch the film (without leading “E”) in the cinema meant that the Quatermass reference had to start with a capital “X”. And the Curt Finks Edinburgh Fringe programme template had no capital X. The Finks method of printing would simply have been to move to the closest alternative (a lower case “x”). The Benefaktor’s forgery had a kapital X. Big mistake.

If you spotted this, well done. If not, then you can konsole yourself that you were stuck in System 1 thinking and head to a comfortable darkened room and lick your wounds. When I konfronted The Benefaktor with this evidence by email he replied with a picture I had taken of Mog the cat.

GANTOB

21 November 2023

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(*) See The Kompanion Volume