antipopper

Last night’s dream: I enroll in a weird kind of social geography high school, where they go on field trips around the world, mapping social flows, patterns and stratifications. The principal introduces us new students at assembly, thanking us for joining the team. The school princess is Jessica Alba, who makes me kiss her feet as she parades past. Eminem is also a student here. A field team have brought back gold plated ears of wheat. I eat them all.

It isn’t hard for me to find meaning in this. Last week I decided to quit my job, forsaking the world of marketing to return to study. We met Joseph Grima from the Multiplicity collective at Empires, Ruins + Networks, and despite their tendency to reduce socioeconomic phenomena to aesthetics, I find their project of mapping complex and shifting new geographies fascinating. Again, it reminds me of the Exploded View project I’ve been toying with for the last, um, decade, and it’s the kind of thing I wouldn’t mind going back to university to research.

And Eminem’s been on my mind lately. I brought up 8 Mile at Empires, but unfortunately I got blank stares from most participants. Simryn Gill had presented her melancholy, haunting photographs of empty, unfinished construction projects in Malaysia, accompanied by readings that included J.G. Ballard’s Drowned World. This immediately brought 8 Mile‘s evocation of Detroit’s ruination in the wake of the auto industry’s downturn: a city full of abandoned buildings, available for torching. And as Deleuze notes in The Time Image, post-catastrophic cinema, such as post-war neorealism, is full of empty buildings and missing populations. There are only mutants and scarred humans, desperately surviving. Here Comes Tomorrow.

And as for Jessica Alba, there’s no reasonable explanation.