TED New York (part 1)
The combination of being broke, tee-total and desperately lonely has recently led me to seek out alternative forms of entertainment around the five boroughs. This has mostly taken the form of free lectures on the most random possible subjects, kind of like a live version of the website TED, but delivered by slightly less daunting, although equally eccentric, intellectuals.
Last week I hauled ass to a tiny room at the back of a pub in Williamsburg to hear a man named Justin Duerr give a talk about his obsession with the Toynbee Tiles. The Toynbee Tiles are, in short, a three-decade long publicity campaign to promote the idea that in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey there are hidden messages that propose that one day the dead will be resurrected on the planet Jupiter, as was initially postulated by the astrologer Arnold Toynbee. The publicity campaign takes the form of linoleum tiles that have been implanted into the asphalt at road intersections of major cities all over North and South America. I’m not making this up.
Mr. Duerr has dedicated the majority of his life to unravelling the mystery of these tiles. He even made a film about it with his friend Jon Foy, and together they won the best director prize for a documentary at Sundance Film festival a few years back. Again, not joking.
While the subject matter was fascinating in itself, it was the strange and beguiling Mr Duerr who really made it memorable. He had facial tattoos, and proudly mentioned his obsession with Cyndi Lauper. During the talk he actually failed to describe basic elements of the mystery, meaning that the Q&A session afterwards was longer than the talk itself. At the end of the Q&A, he told us he was selling his own strange wall-sized art prints in order to cover the cost of his Greyhound bus return ticket from Philadelphia. It became clear that he wasn’t getting paid anything to give the talk, this was just another extension of his obsession. Additionally, he spent the entire lecture hidden behind a laptop, speaking into a microphone with a heavy reverb effect, thus giving the impression he himself was talking to us as a resurrected corpse on Planet Jupiter. Particularly strange as vocal amplification was completely unnecessary given that we were in a room about the size of an average family car.
The whole evening was fascinating, and I have since spotted a few of the tiles on my travels around the city, including in places I’ve already walked past several times. Proof indeed New York is a strange city, one that will reveal itself differently depending on how you look at it. It is also a haven for grade-A crackpots.
