19 Years Late

2001, that is.

Yes, I’m referring to the monolith discovered in an isolated corner of Utah’s desert. How totally Kubrickian! (OK, ‘cept Kubrick's monolith was black and this one was silver)

A helicopter crew with the Utah Department of Public Safety’s Aero Bureau were out counting bighorn sheep (wouldn’t counting sheep while flying be, emmm, dangerous?) and discovered a 12 foot tall shiny thing embedded in the rock floor of a basin.  

It’s gone now. According to the Utah Bureau of Land Management, “we have received credible reports that the illegally installed structure, referred to as the “monolith” has been removed from Bureau of Land Management (BLM) public lands by an unknown party…on the evening of Nov. 27.”

Fine. Left unanswered, what was it about? What did it mean? What was its purpose?

 Roger Ebert asked rather on-the-nose questions AND answered them in his1968 review of 2001:A Space Odyssey:

Q. What's that big black monolith?
A. It's a big black monolith.
Q. Where did it come from?
A. From somewhere else.
Q. Who put it there?
A. Intelligent beings since it has right angles and nature doesn't make right angles on its own.
Q. How many monoliths are there?
A. One for every time Kubrick needs one in his film. Now it would seem that these are obvious observations. But audiences don't like simple answers, I guess; they want the monolith to "stand" for something. Well, it does. It stands for a monolith without an explanation. It's the fact that man can't explain it that makes it interesting. If Kubrick had explained it, perhaps by having some little green men from Mars lower it into place, would that have been more satisfactory? Does everything need an explanation? (source)

Yeah baby – what Rog said.

Maybe the Utah monolith was an allegorical kind of a thing, meant to spark discussions on topics deeper than 45’s flaming incompetence, Melanoma’s latest “kidney” surgery or which of Mango Mussolini’s sons is Beavis and which one is Butthead.

I believe that’s the second biggest thing I’m looking forward to in the upcoming post-Preznint Shithead days – a return to convos that don’t inevitably devolve into angry, exasperated rants about what Orange Psycho Beast and his Renfieldian Republicans have fucked up today.

The first big thing? That he’ll be gone, baby, gone. He should be banned from social media and completely ignored by the media. At least.

Back to the monolith though…

“This thing is not from another world,” said Lt. Nick Street of the Utah Highway Patrol, part of the Department of Public Safety. (source)

He sounds just SO damn certain. Is this because he’s actually the alien who planted this spy device, death ray emitting, mind controlling “sculpture.” This is RILLY obvious, isn't it? He’s rockin' a cleverly designed, ultra mundane male, human suit and wearing a badge. The aliens totally KNOW the predominantly white Mormon population of Utah will auto-trust and NEVER question the word of a bland, uniformed Caucasian dude.

Humans – we’re not the smartest bulbs in the Milky Way.

There are ongoing debates that the monolith is by John McCracken but, even if he created it, the man’s been dead for almost ten years now.

Also, given Kubrick, Hepworth, Noguchi and countless other artists working the monolith theme, is the specific sculptor the most important bit? Instead, maybe the ideas, the questions the piece and its placement give rise to are, at the least, more fun.

No matter who the creator is, I wonder who hauled stone cutting equipment into that remote basin, 20 miles southwest of Moab, Utah. Who did the sweaty heavy lifting and cutting to embed this in the hard red rock?