Toynbee tiles still fascinate

[Fansome]

http://www.southphillyreview.com/news/Toynbee_tiles_still_fascinate-257507781.html#

Toynbee tiles still fascinate

An anonymous artist with a mysterious message that reached millions started it all in South Philly.
By Bill Chenevert

It all started right here in South Philly, it seems, on the 2600 block of South Seventh Street. At least that’s what three devoted researchers discovered after years of hunting for a mysterious tiler responsible for the Toynbee tiles of Philadelphia. All three convened at the Whitman Branch, 200 Snyder Ave., Monday to talk about their long-time passion — getting to the bottom of the meaning and source of mysterious mosaic tiles embedded into our streets with an extremely mystifying set of phrases: “Tonybee Idea. In Movie 2011. Resurrect Dead. On Planet Jupiter.”

There are hundreds and they’re not just in Philadelphia. They’ve been dropped into streets with a markedly innovative technique from Boston to Kansas City and Detroit to Buenos Aires. The timeline gets a start in the late 1970s with “2001: A Space Odyssey” (the “2001” reference) and a checking-out of British historian Arnold J. Toynbee’s (the “Toynbee idea” reference) “Experiences,” published at the end of the ’60s by Oxford University Press.

The tiles themselves are about the size of a license plate and carved out of linoleum. As Colin Smith described them Monday, they’re like a sandwich.

“You have your carved linoleum, which is the meat of the sandwich, the mayo is crack-filler,” he told the Whitman audience, tar paper on the top and bottom serving as the bread. “From the pressure of car tires and foot traffic, and also the heat from the summer sun, which liquefies the asphalt ever so slightly,” you get a firmly-embedded mosaic tile melted into asphalt that emerges when the tar paper has eroded.

And what does it all mean? It’s what drove Justin Duerr mad with curiosity back in the early ’80s when he came to South Street as a 16-year-old high school dropout and runaway. Duerr, an artist, Toynbee expert and archivist, is the primary character in an award-winning 2011 documentary by Jon Foy called “Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles.”

In the piece, he says the first time he ever noticed a Toynbee Tile was on South Street; he was in a “squat on Fifth and Bainbridge [streets] at the time, a squat full of 17-year-old runaways.” He took a job as a foot courier with Kangaroo Couriers and started seeing them all over the city. It was in 1995 and ’96 that he started going to the public library to use the Internet.

“Toynbee idea was the first thing I ever typed into a search engine,” Duerr says to the camera.

Images flash across the screen in this scene as he starts to find listings for the tiles: Ninth and Shunk [streets], 11th [Street] and Oregon [Avenue], Broad [Street] and Oregon [Avenue]. He started photographing and documenting tiles with his girlfriend and found them in Times Square and at the foot of the Holland Tunnel. The tiles themselves still didn’t really make any sense to him, but it was his burning curiosity and drive to understand them that brought him in front of the camera for a Sundance-award winning documentary (for Best Direction: Documentary) and to Steve Weinik and Smith, who as a team, would come just shy of catching the mysterious tiler. Until they realized that maybe they should stop trying to find him. And that maybe he didn’t want to be found.

Like Duerr sets forth in the film, the four elements of a standard Toynbee tile make sense alone but not together. You’ve got Toynbee the historian, the Stanley Kubrick film and then there’s Jupiter and resurrection. Well, Toynbee believed that perhaps science would deliver the mythology of Heaven that religion never would or could. Yes, Toynbee, and it seems the mysterious tiler, believed in building a Heaven on Jupiter by simply reconnecting and rebuilding the molecules that make up the human body, in space. Was it because he feared death? Was it because he had a “proto-religious” experience watching Kubrick’s seminal space film? We still don’t know.

The three researchers were bound to determine the tiler’s identity and home base by a few big clues: a South Philly rowhouse address from a tile dropped in Chile (the Seventh Street address), a mysterious mention in a Philadelphia Inquirer column from ’83 by Clark DeLeon, and a one-act play by David Mamet called “4 A.M.” that was published in ’85.

It was the rowhouse clue that would yield the most vibrant clues. They went to his block (all of the suspects were male) and found test tiles everywhere. Neighbors talked of a reclusive neighbor who pad-locked his front door, took in injured birds and drove a car with a missing floorboard on the passenger side and, at one point, a huge shortwave radio transmitting antennae. He drove around South Philly with the message “Resurrect Dead” disturbing television broadcasts such as the evening news. As Steve Weinik put it, “He was tiling the airwaves, he was tiling the 11 o’clock news.”

There are endless odd paths to chase down, like the paranoid rants of a manifesto that once sat at 16th and Chestnut streets. They are too many and twisted to print here. But some of the sub-texts that accompanied the standard tiles are totally wild: “Under Freedom of Information Act, NBC Journalists Funneled FBI Information On Me To Soviet…”, “I’m Only One Man And When I Caught A Fatal Disease They Gloated Over Its Death,” and, frighteningly, “Murder Every Journalist. I Beg You.”

With an alias, James Morasco, the tiler started something called The Minority Association that sought to publicize the message of Toynbee and the tiles. As Duerr says: “He became fixated on this idea that he had found this answer to overcome death and if he just found a way to publicize the idea that the rest of the story would write itself, but everyone just mocked him.”

After he lost faith in the media, he started experimenting with tiles and, according to the experts, is alive and in the area, even still putting down fresh tiles.

We chose not to use his name for this story with the slight hope that he would read the South Philly Rreview and that his privacy deserved to be respected. But the question remains – what does it all mean and is he absolutely that far off?

Duerr believes he shared a bus with the tiler, he’s almost certain, but when they deboarded and exchanged nervous glances, he walked away, thinking “You can’t force someone to open up to you.”

Contact Staff Writer Bill Chenevert at bchenevert@southphillyreview.com or ext. 117.

[Fansome]

"Tommy, can you use the word 'fascinate' in a sentance?"

"Sure teacher: 'My sweater has nine buttons, but I can only fasten eight.'"

[paranoid dxer]

http://temple-news.com/arts/mystery-of-tiles-on-city-streets-solved-in-philadelphia-documentary/

Severino “Sevy” Verna was so obsessed and afraid of death that as a kid he would take dead pigeons, cover them in cement and put them in a bucket. It is believed he did this in hopes of preserving, or perhaps resurrecting, the birds. This might have stemmed from his parents owning a funeral home, but it was an obsession that carried him throughout his whole life.

Verna is the supposed artist behind a series of mysterious, cryptic tiles appearing as early as the ‘80s originally in Philadelphia, then along the East Coast, to as far as South America that read: “TOYNBEE IDEA IN KUBRICK’S 2001 RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPITER.”

An investigative team, comprised of 2011 alumnus Colin Smith, Justin Duerr and Steve Weinik, searched for the answer in their 2011 documentary, “Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles,” which took about six years of thorough research to create.

“I figured it was some street art campaign, but it turns out it’s a mystery,” Smith said at a free screening of the documentary at The Reel on Nov. 8. “And over a couple years, you start thinking, ‘What do they mean?’ and ‘Why don’t we know who made them?’ And then at some point, you get extremely obsessed with that question, and it keeps you up at night and you seek out other people thinking that same thing.”

Duerr, who has been investigating this since 1994, described the tiles in his film as one of the Top 5 wildest things he’s ever seen in his life.

After hitting many dead ends in their search for an answer, Smith, Duerr and Weinik began getting clues from websites, letters and ordinary people who shared the same curiosity. They ended up having three strong leads: A 1983 Philadelphia Inquirer article, a play titled “Four A.M.” by David Mamet and a Philadelphia home address. All three connected to the philosopher Arnold Toynbee’s idea of resurrection, Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssesy” and to one man: Verna.

“I think that they began because [Verna] had this idea that came to him in the library that seemed like he had found this way to beat death,” Smith said. “That humanity needs to figure a way to beat death, and [Verna] figured out a way to do it.”

Smith said Verna would desperately try to contact the media to share his idea, and they would laugh at him, leaving him embarrassed and bitter. He had to find a way to bring his message to the public and the tiles were the only way he knew how.

The proof of his hatred and resentment toward the media lies in various subtexts of the tiles that read such cryptic messages such as: “MURDER EVERY JOURNALIST! I BEG YOU.”

“There were moments where you get into the tiler’s head,” Smith said.

His resentment from others caused him to become a recluse of sorts, refusing to answer the door, phone calls and neighbors who had claimed he would do his grocery shopping at 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. This made the team’s journey increasingly difficult.

Even though the three had no proof from Verna himself that he’s behind this, they remain confident because of their work.

“I was the most skeptical person working on the movie,” Smith said. “There would be periods of six months where we would run out of leads. Then suddenly, kind of magically, these new leads would come in. Just when we would get frustrated, almost unbearably, a new lead would come along.”

The biggest clue that gave Verna away was his car. The tiles seemed to appear in the middle of busy streets, and that’s because Verna’s car didn’t have floorboards, claimed neighbors, which allowed him to go essentially unnoticed.

“It was a case of putting together what we had,” Smith said.

The team has sent letters to Verna after the making of the documentary expressing their sincerity, interest and respect for him. They’ve also sent him a finished copy of the documentary, but none of them have ever gotten any sort of response.

Smith claims they’ve all seen Verna in the city, but no one has ever said anything. They now understand they can’t make him explain if he doesn’t want to. But Smith has a feeling he knows exactly who they are.

These messages can be spotted all over Philadelphia, from Chestnut Street to South Street. There was even one on Main Campus near Anderson and Gladfelter halls that was paved over, but remnants of it can still be seen.

It’s a strange phenomenon that’s appeared in the city, and the irony is that even though Verna wanted his message known, he made it very difficult for anyone to get any further information. The theater was crowded with Mosaics I and II classes, and when asked who had ever seen the tiles, few had raised their hands.

Though many students left as soon as their allotted class time was over, a few stayed for the Q&A to ask questions not covered in the documentary, which was also shown in the 2011 Sundance Film Festival.

“[The documentary] was very interesting,” said Ani Soghomonian, a sophomore speech pathology major. “I’ve never noticed the tiles before, but now I’ll be on the lookout.”

[Fansome]

There's been a lot of evidence recently that the Toynbee pirate has been directly accessing the minds of those in the #pirateradio IRC channel.

[paranoid dxer]

he better be careful
or he will get lost in yours