![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Nov. 20th, 2012 02:44 amWe went to DC for the weekend, which was not nearly long enough; that town wore our feet raw. I feel like I got things out of it that I can't sum up in a list of place went, facts absorbed; it's some weird, sanctified urbanisation, given how used I am to seeing the secular growing densely over the civic. Another of those click moments. This is someone else's goes-without-saying, and they don't gape at all the empty spaces and wonder how much each square metre of turf would sell for, or who decided when that they were going to do this whole vast monumental thing without having it hemmed in by stuff like normal cities do. Having seen it, a few things that never previously made sense to me now do.
The Lincoln memorial was my favourite of those shrines, because I am so used to smile-and-nodding through the version they tell at Kennesaw and Stone Mountain, in the ashes. I sat on the floor and read the allcaps on Lincoln's inside walls and saw a completely different war. It is not even kind of commensurable with the Southern war. It is two completely different events that happened for two unrelated reasons. I shouldn't be surprised, I know, but I guess it's because it's all spoken from the same language and culture. No one was out there listening.
Other good bits; everything else. We were almost relieved when we found out that the Washington Monument was closed due to earthquake damage because that gave us more time for all the other things. I really liked this exhibition at the Renwick Gallery - pity it was no-photos, because I LOVED the kevlar bulletproof baby-clothes and the dressup costumes for pigeons, seriously the pigeon dressup is the most gloriously American thing I have ever seen.
We tried out many of the Smithsonians; the American History Museum was the only one that failed to delight us, and we might just not have been there long enough. We spent a while this morning at the Udvar-Hazy Center staring up at the space shuttle and pondering how bizarrely fake it looks. I think this is because it's from the 80s. Everything looked like a movie prop then. The Natural History Museum was also great; I did two quietly silly things there, one of which was faking one of those slow, tingly sneezes in the middle of the lobby because the beautifulness of the story the place was telling made me think of Cloud Atlas and I spontaneously burst into tears.
The Lincoln memorial was my favourite of those shrines, because I am so used to smile-and-nodding through the version they tell at Kennesaw and Stone Mountain, in the ashes. I sat on the floor and read the allcaps on Lincoln's inside walls and saw a completely different war. It is not even kind of commensurable with the Southern war. It is two completely different events that happened for two unrelated reasons. I shouldn't be surprised, I know, but I guess it's because it's all spoken from the same language and culture. No one was out there listening.
Other good bits; everything else. We were almost relieved when we found out that the Washington Monument was closed due to earthquake damage because that gave us more time for all the other things. I really liked this exhibition at the Renwick Gallery - pity it was no-photos, because I LOVED the kevlar bulletproof baby-clothes and the dressup costumes for pigeons, seriously the pigeon dressup is the most gloriously American thing I have ever seen.
We tried out many of the Smithsonians; the American History Museum was the only one that failed to delight us, and we might just not have been there long enough. We spent a while this morning at the Udvar-Hazy Center staring up at the space shuttle and pondering how bizarrely fake it looks. I think this is because it's from the 80s. Everything looked like a movie prop then. The Natural History Museum was also great; I did two quietly silly things there, one of which was faking one of those slow, tingly sneezes in the middle of the lobby because the beautifulness of the story the place was telling made me think of Cloud Atlas and I spontaneously burst into tears.