Toynbee tiles lyrics1/16/2024 ![]() ![]() So I pretty much gave up because I was tired and just wanted to call it a day. “I got home from work one evening and looked at the Sundance deadline and it had to be in their office the next day. “We had been rejected by a few film festivals at that point and I wasn’t keeping track of the deadlines,” Foy said. When Jon (Jon Foy, the film’s director and Duerr’s friend) was sending it to film fests, I was telling him we should put it on Youtube because I thought that no film fest was going to show this.” “I can’t tell you how unexpected was,” he said. I would just go, ‘Man, another year went by and whoever’s making these tiles is still making hundreds of them!’ I almost felt that way with my creative pursuits because I never made any money doing stuff and never had any reason to do it.” “I felt I kind of shared that tenacity in a way I could relate to emotionally. “One of the main reasons I was attracted to the tiles in the first place was just the sheer tenacity of whoever was behind them,” Duerr beams with startling conviction. Duerr and his fellow investigators connect these comments to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and its famous “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite” finale, which portrays man reborn as the star child. The film invites us into the dark psyche of the tile-creator, deducing that the tiles’ message refers to famous historian Arnold Toynbee and remarks he made about social rebirth. It was a mystery that haunted Duerr for over fifteen years. The tile-maker had somehow embedded the phrase “Toynbee idea/Movie 2001/Resurrect dead/Plan Jupiter” in asphalt on roughly 400 North and South American streets over a 20-year period without ever being discovered. There’s not nearly as much leisure in Resurrect Dead, which follows Duerr as he relentlessly seeks out the creator of the tiles. Living in a modest West Powelton row house, he’s got all the essentials in place: his Japanese chin dog Ferdy loyally sitting at his side, his girlfriend and musical collaborator Mandy running errands in and out of their house, his sizable library of old books and albums in their living room. The dresses are put away, and he’s sporting a dark green collared shirt that fits his slender body nicely instead. Today, though, Duerr is able to just relax. In addition to his many band commitments, he has also held numerous small art shows in cafes, bars, and bookstores since he arrived on the Philly punk-music underground scene in 1994. He has worn women’s dresses to protest gender exclusivity while performing in several of his five current musical projects, which include the punk-rock band Northern Liberties and the electroacoustic outfit Hex Nine. The fair-skinned and fair-haired 35-year-old is calmer and dressed more conventionally now than when he performs on stage, where he’s known to prance unrestrainedly about while singing his own lyrics. “With the Sundance Film Fest, it’s pretty fascinating because I think it comes back to the people deciding for themselves whether they like something or not.” “We’d always say, even when the movie was being worked on, ‘Well, it’s not like it’s going to show at Sundance,’” Duerr offers in triumphant hindsight. Documentary category.įilmed sporadically over a span of five years, though, Resurrect Dead has shed more light on Duerr’s Toynbee tile obsession than anyone could have ever imagined. It’s an appropriately bone-dry setup for Philadelphia’s most recent and most unlikely movie star, who has spent all his life thirsting for more.ĭuerr thirsts for answers in his starring role in Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles, which was selected for the 2011 Sundance Film Festival in the U.S. Justin Duerr faces an empty water bottle on his kitchen table on a sticky fall afternoon.
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