There is nothing I like more than a good science fiction conspiracy. I could read the article on Stanley Kubrick’s implicit guilt for faking the moon landing embedded in The Shining (here) over and over again. And I have. But wait. There is a real bonafide conspiracy out there involving Street Art, David Mamet, Short Wave Radio, Pigeon husbandry, raising the dead, Railroads, metahistory massive telescopes and our friendly cinematic auteur Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Sign me up! Actually, there is decades worth of evidence gathered by various folks of mysterious tiles embedded in the road way by someone. Jon Foy puts on his best Errol Morris hat and makes a great talking-head / archival footage / re-enactment documentary. I just watched it, and it is still buzzing in my head. Apparently the folks at Sundance a couple months ago also like it and award it a directors prize.

The trailer is tucked under the seat.

Filmmaker Jon Foy and Philadelphia-based artist and musician Justin Duerr began planning a documentary film about the Toynbee Tiles in 2000. Five years later, they began filming their investigation of these strange street plaques embedded in the asphalt of major U.S. and South American urban intersections that had held Duerr’s fascination for over a decade. Having appeared on hundreds of reported examples from the mid-1980s to present, the cryptic four-line message of the Toynbee Tiles read: “Toynbee Idea / In Kubrick’s 2001 / Resurrect Dead / On Planet Jupiter”. While the text on the plaques was clear enough, neither Duerr nor the numerous media outlets that had documented the phenomenon knew what these tiles meant, how or why they were installed, or who was responsible for them.