Where were you 30 years ago?!? That would have been majorly cool.
I don’t think that even back then, we would have been motivated to build stairs to nowhere. Our door was free and we had left over paint and post hole concrete, so really all it cost us was a little gas and a few hours “work”. When you live out in the sticks, you find entertainment where you can.
No matter how bored we were, we never considered building stairs or a monolith. I salute the unknown artists who’s inspiration and imagination motivated them to add a little mystery to the world!
This story reminds me in a roundabout way of a story I read in a zine many years ago.
The writer had been on vacation a few years previously, and while he was in a small bar, he used the men’s room and used a golf pencil in his wallet to write “BROWN SHOES DON’T MAKE IT” on the wall next to the urinal. He left and promptly forgot about his Zappa-inspired graffiti.
Shortly before writing this story, he was once again vacationing in this town, and remembered the bar, and when he went to the restroom saw his handwriting on the wall, along with a full column of Zappa song titles all the way down to the floor, and a second column started right next to it.
The article about the Utah monolith in the Times yesterday ended with the admonition that no one was allowed to put something on federal lands “no matter what planet they are from”.
There has been a lot of argument about the NYC “broken windows” policing policy, and a lot of it was people talking past each other about what the idea meant, and what police were actually doing, and what the effect of what was on what.
I had noticed years earlier that graffiti inspired more related graffiti, and found that the people who wrote the library management textbook I was reading had found that you had to clean up graffiti in the dark back aisles of your library, before you started getting sex and smoking back there. So I never was convinced that the “broken windows” idea was entirely without merit.
I’m pretty sure that the people who run BLM and National Parks think the same thing.
I’ve seen paper taped to the walls in gas station bathrooms while traveling, and they encouraged people to leave messages. Most of them were positive - Bible verses, other inspirational sayings, people talking about their trip and the beautiful day, teenagers writing down the name of their crush, etc.
In the meantime, the monolith has been removed, IMHO by whoever put it there.
This all reminds me somewhat of https://www.amazon.com/Forgotten-Door-Alexander-Key/dp/0590431307 that I read as a kid. I thought it interesting at the time that a book with “door” in its name would be written by someone whose name was “Key”, so it’s been burned into my memory. A partially false memory unfortunately. When I googled for it, I thought it was called “The Hidden Door”, but that and the author’s full name made Google understand what I was looking for.
