Assassination Vacation

3 of us on TG just returned from a much needed 4 day break in northern VA. Somehow, while it was a holiday, we didn't end up sleeping much, and are now more tired than when we left. Still, much relaxation, talking, swimming, tanning (for Angella), drinking and viewing of art & artillery were had. We even watched a TLC marathon on medical anomalies -- conjoined twins and enormous goiters, anyone?

One day we took the 10 min. drive into DC and visited some museums -- we love that museums in DC are free - so much better than paying upwards of $30 for crap as you do here in NYC. And somehow, the quality is generally better at museums like the Hirshhorn and The National Gallery. Or maybe we just don't get as mad looking at bad art since we haven't paid for the privilege. Anyway.

At the Hirshhorn we viewed an amazing amount of terrible video art (is there any other kind?) thanks to the current exhibition, "The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality, and the Moving Image." This exhibition was so silly that we are going to stop talking about it right now.

The recent acquisitions of the Hirshhorn are usually quite interesting. While in that section we saw a sculpture with what we decided was the most ridiculous title of an artwork ever:



I mean, seriously? Postmodernism is like, sooooo over dude. Here is a photo of the sculpture itself:



We say: huh? It's sort of like the artist just threw some junk together and then needed to come up with a title that would make a junk pile appear more arty and meaningful. OK.

After leaving the Hirshhorn we went to Air and Space and bought some space ice cream and marveled at how 3 astronauts managed to smush themselves into the Apollo spacecraft. We then noticed a bizarre assortment of tanks, mobile field units, helicopters and bomb robots on the mall across from the museums. We wandered over and found a strange police/army/CIA informational bazaar going on sponsored by... Target. We found this bazaar way more interesting than anything more interesting at the museums -- we viewed a pretend meth lab, children posing in flack jackets, a small child in a CIA hat, a group of children in "We are Mega Conservative Kids!!!" t-shirts and people posing in front of gun-racks. We also got lots of free stuff -- plastic fireman hats, target water bottles, disaster preparedness booklets (What do you do if hit with mustard gas? Die.) and photos with the Target dog mascot. There were also many stern looking members of the law running around. As we were walking out Cyndi and Kristiina had these lovely images taken:

On our drive back to NYC we stopped in a town in MD for some delicious snacks and noticed this sign.



Liveable? Wow. Marketing in that town should probably work a little bit harder on their slogans. Just saying...