[SUBSTRAINS] EP. 2 – ANGLE AT THE END OF TIME

two nations diverge in a phone booth

3 minutes, 44 seconds
Posted on 23rd Sep 2026
Mindape

[SUBSTRAINS] EP. 2 – ANGLE AT THE END OF TIME

In this episode of [SUBSTRAINS] – The MindApe spirals on Communication, Excess, and the Otherworldly Ambiguity of Jim’s Corner, the Slug’s secret hyper-fixation on this bewildering locus.

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TODAY'S SAMPLE

S09931783: “Jim’s Corner”

A mistake in the woods. A political boundary that was supposed to stop at a certain lake was completely at-odds with a small detail called physical reality. There has been ever since an obscenity, a liminal tumescence of one country manifesting within the boundaries of another. “The Angle”… You could call it, like so many other parapraxes, “an encroachment from within…”

nwangle

THE OUTLYING AREA

jim_outside

Jim’s Corner is an Outlying Area Reporting Station (OARS) for reporting in and out with Customs and Immigration, while traveling to or from the US/Canada border anomaly in Minnesota known as the Northwest Angle - cut off from the rest of the USA by land. The OARS at Jim’s Corner is a parking lot and a booth that has two similar call boxes (one outside and one inside) with videophones, shared by the US and Canadian border authorities…"

booth

"Inside the box are two buttons, one for calling the US to check in on arrival, and one for calling Canada to check out on departure. There is a camera inside too, which presumably they use to look at you, though you cannot see them. Once you have answered the usual questions on the videophone (name, nationality, place of birth, why you are there) and they confirm that they have verified your vehicle visually using cameras mounted on poles outside, you are asked to wait for them to hang up first, officially completing the call. Then you are good to go, so long as you return here on your way out." – The Centre for Land Use Communication

COMMUNICATING VASSALS

"It is important for me to show that, in 'communication,' in love, desire has nothingness as its object. It is this way in every 'sacrifice.'" – Georges Bataille

PERFORMATIVE OBLIVION

Are we witnessing an unprecedented rupture between two sufficiently lacerated entities?

As the tensions between the two Suspect Nations suffer a generational strain, our minds’ eye strays to this oblique corner where the ritual of nothing plays out its daily excess. The combination of bureaucracy, paranoia and remote territory have come together to create a work of postural unease and strange beauty.

Jim’s Corner is waiting for something to happen. Jim’s Corner is watching. Tucked away in a remote Twin Peaks-like interzone known as the Northwest Angle, this focal point invites us to project all kinds of strange attractions, characters, schemes, and especially, long bleak stretches of nothingness.

And yet it is “quiet, too quiet…”

sign

Perhaps Jim’s Corner is the secret spot, that big red attractant that will, through its occulted character, suddenly become a flare-up for a universal conflagration. Two bewildering falsities at the edge of mutual collapse… But will their strangest output, this oddball atopos at the edge of nowhere, perhaps have enough internal clockwork absurdity to survive the double destruction?

Perhaps, cut off from its administrative chain of command, the noxious air of the blasted zone will encourage rather than curtail this delicate endstate ritual. JC is a producer of nullities. And yet we can think of another bearer of that two-letter acronym.

There is a kind of a theological contrivance here. We do not think we are to read salvation into anything. Rather, we detect the retroactive lesson of the End of History Embodied, Hegelian, Backwards… The eye watching you at the corner is the same eye with which you yourself see only the dead lens of the camera. The formality at the end of all administration has, as its sole positive value, the uncanny talent of detached interest, and therefore, over any mere collapse of reporting structure, the prospect of an undead persistence beyond…