[dovate.com] » 2006 » March
Today is my birthday. All my meals are taken care of for the rest of the day. I had an indulgent breakfast, plan to have an equally indulgent lunch and finally a nice big dinner. The good lord has also provided me with a beautiful spring day. The rest of Philadelphia and much of the eastern seaboard owes me thanks for my selfless present to you – a warm and sunny day. Feel the love. You’re welcome.
I’d like to kick off the political end of this blog with a bang.
Unreliable sources - such as this one - are reporting that savior, prophet, sanit and great and noble leader, Fidel Castro may in fact be dead. He may also be alive. Rumors of Castro’s death are about as common as Iraqi car bombs. Even so, the fucker is getting pretty decrepit. (see picture)
Whatever his status, each rumor of death does bring him one step closer to actual death. That’s all for now.
* For the record, this blog does not support Fidel Castro or death. Thank you.
Welcome.
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The Resurrect Dead team is about done with the research end of the Toynbee mystery… most of our goals having been met. Want to know what we found out? Wait for the movie suckers! Hahahaha! Here are a few of the mind-blowing revelations I can share with you.
Back on January 31st , I contacted a tile fan named Nathan. An article quoted him as having witnessed the legendary ‘street prophet.’ Nathan responded promptly to an email message, dispelling the rumor that he actually met the street prophet and with it, the very idea that an active Toynbee idea preacher ever really existed. Instead he explained that he remembered seeing handbills and whestpaste posters plastered on bus stops in Old City Philadelphia in the late 80’s. The article misquoted him and in doing so, created the legend of the bus station prophet. That legend is now dead.
Section II: Heart of Weirdness
I can’t emphasize enough that the SWL fest was a blast. (photos) The place was full of truly intelligent, friendly and weird people. We hung flyers, I took still photos, the Resurrect Dead team filmed interviews and Justin did a live interview for shortwave broadcast. But getting back to the research side of the story…
What looked at first like a total bust, reformed dramatically into the biggest series of disclosures in the history of tile research. While following a chain of sources, including a couple of coincidentally present tile fans, our presence and purpose at the convention started generating a buzz around the Best Western banquet hall. This buzz eventually led us to a person who held the most important piece of new information gleaned on the subject in decades. The interview and its earth shattering revelations are ALL ON FILM.
But moving on to other things, the shortwave folks remained an enormous resource even after the Best Western closed its doors on the 19th annual international SWL winter festival. One email included this article from a February 1984 ACE zine:
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An image showed a flyer with the following text:
And here’s the article that accompanied it:WHAT’S THIS?? DEPT.The above public notice has recently begun to appear in the center city of Philadelphia, Pa. These “stickers” have showed up almost everywhere! On USA Today boxes, telephone poles, train & bus stations, even on Communist Workers Party newspaper boxes. Mr. G. Primavera, who brought this interesting announcement to our attention, has been monitoring 6.25 MHz and says he has not heard “them” yet. He’s not sure if this station would fall under the classification of pirate or clandestine. Let’s play close attention to this frequency in the weeks ahead and see what (if anything) shows up.” ***
I say “trying to use,” because back when this article hit the newsstands, avid shortwave listeners sat at home on Saturday nights, tuning in at midnight to monitor the frequency. Sadly – no one ever heard a broadcast. Considering the attentiveness of shortwave listeners, it is unlikely that (________) ever got his equipment working.
I can say with near absolute certainty that the mystery of the Toynbee tiles is for the most part, solved. (see movie) There are still plenty of questions, but they are at this point mainly cosmetic. For example:
How does the Conrail rail line figure into the mystery. I’m not ready to abandon my Conrail theory and there’s still an outside shot of a connection between the rail line and the tiles. The map remains fairly suggestive of a connection.
I’ll leave a cryptic trail of crumbs for researchers out there. What does a physicist from Colorado and a supposed UFO crash in Aztec, New Mexico have to do with the mystery? Probably nothing… but it could lead you somewhere.
Did the same person who made the tiles also distribute them? We don’t have an answer. Also, why has he stopped making tiles? (________) if you’re reading this, YOU MUST MAKE AND GLUE TILES! YOU!!!!
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Being long, rambling and seemingly insane, Nathan forgot the exact wording of the handbills, but clearly remembered references to Toynbee, the movie 2001, resurrecting the dead on Jupiter and most importantly, advertising a shortwave radio broadcast. I forwarded my correspondence to tile scientist, 
Did David Mamet run across a handbill during a visit to Philadelphia, inspiring the short play 4AM, or were there also handbills in other cities… like New York, or his hometown, Chicago? Is the fact that he premiered his minor work 4AM in Philadelphia meaningful of its inspiration or just another minor coincidence? Last night, my friend Stephan said something that I thought was absolutely, astoundingly brilliant.. I can’t quote exactly, but in the course of our conversation he said:
“When I go downtown and watch people, almost everyone I see just walks around looking away from something. If you’re focusing so hard on looking away, what are you looking at?”
There’s a thousand years of inspiration in that idea. Right now, I’ll pair it with this photo:
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A little less than a year ago, while taking photos for Ju-Yeon Ryu’s Lost Spirits, in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art – I was distracted by a beautiful vision of spontaneous convergence elsewhere on the terrace. I ran over, dropped to the ground and hit the ‘shutter’ on my non-SLR Panasonic Lumix FZ20. What my Panasonic’s autofocus speed may have lacked, I think I made up for in composition. Anyway, Happy Spring!
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I found this juxtaposition on Kelly Drive this morning. A few months ago, the love tile people filled Rittenhouse Square with their heart shaped placards. They were gone by the evening.
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There’s a flickering fluorescent light in the bathroom at work. Flickering fluorescent lights are like magical portals into despair and isolation. Not the despair based on a singular tragedy like violence, torture or war, but the despair brought on by the slow erosion of personal dignity. Their flickering serves as a metaphor for that grey area between the death of hope and the fear of death. One props up the other, until at last they consummate in the final breath of ultimate resignation. The flickering stops.But anyway – I’m actually feeling fine. To my readers, my fascination with the invisible, shuffling souls I call living ghosts is something rooted in observation more than subjective experience. While empathic tendencies pull me towards the romance of this sort of darkness, it’s really not something I desire to exist in.
But as a person and a writer, I’m absolutely in love with the lady high on crack who wandered into a bar with a 6-pack of beer under her arm and tried desperately to take me home. In real life, I kept a safe and healthy distance, before walking home quickly and alone.
What I enjoy is the idea that the distance I maintain is as artificial and as fragile as the illusion of civilization. Imagine an empty city and the strangeness of its existence. Or imagine a city of rubble full of people and the strangeness of its broken structures. Some of the most powerful photos in the aftermath of Hurricaine Katrina showed abandoned stores, floods of Wal-Mart goods lying in dirty gutters. Ruined houses reduced to shards of wood, mud, broken glass, and religious idols – but with a family portrait hanging crooked on a crumbling wall. The hurricane broke all illusions.
Maybe it’s impossible, but I hope the things that draw me to these thoughts and feelings aren’t entirely selfish or condescending. I am after all, on the other side of that imaginary line. Illusion or not, the perspective comes with the full gambit of comforts, choices restrictions. I may have once lived on the line, but I decided long ago not to cross it.
Even so, when I stand under a flickering fluorescent light, the experience is transporting. The flashing is enough to make me feel unhinged; the arrhythmic strobe of pale light throwing dead shadows over a closed room can take me to any invisible place… a gas station bathroom on some oil-soaked highway somewhere near a desert strip-mall, or last call at a neglected center city diner’s cocktail lounge. These places are invisible to people lucky enough to be unaware of their existence. They only come alive after people like myself lie down to dream.
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Even though I have hundreds of words to say about the magic of underground cities, Philly’s original mural artists and our city’s desperate need (and golden opportunity) to build a legitimate subway system, I’ll save that for later. This essay will be short on words and heavy on pretty, pretty pictures. The series documents my trip beneath Pennsylvania Avenue with a great bunch of photographers. See their photos: (Albert)(Andi)(Judd)(Maria)(Mike) My series starts with some amazing graffiti. The tunnel was like an underground gallery.
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I was lucky enough to be down there with some of Philadelphia’s most accomplished street-art photographers. If you want to see what else is down there, check out thier galleries.
There was also a train line down there . Here’s one of my favorite from the day:
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And another of the same theme
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Alongside the active tracks was a dead passageway:
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Saplings grew:
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From one side:
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From the other side:
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While we were down there, a train came through. That’s what this is:
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Anyone want a Schwinn to fix up?
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And finally, paying homage to this image, here’s a similar one of its photographer:
~ The End ~
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On my way home this afternoon, I passed the broccoli dumpster. Once again, it was being filled with broccoli. If I hadn’t been on my way home sick and if I wasn’t afraid my stomach was going to lose structural integrity at any moment, I would have stopped and asked the man on the loading dock why he was heaving box after box of broccoli into the garbage. But I didn’t. Perplexed, I made my way home.
Once safely in my own apartment, I found the phone number of the broccoli dumping business and decided to give them a call. The lady who answered was confused at first. “It’s trash day.” She said when I asked why they were throwing away the broccoli. I tried a different approach asking why they were throwing away just broccoli. “hmmm…. can’t explain.” She said.
I pressed on, asking if it was contaminated or rotten. She struggled for an explanation. Behind her, I could he