Bullseye!

I didn't know weather to cheer or cry when I saw this snippet in a local Santa Cruz, CA paper.

"At the closing party of this elegantly displayed show, Darryl Ferrucci is lowering the brow level with a sort of home-grown recontextualization--he's bringing the spaghetti Western music, cheap beer, guns and people back to his objets d'art formerly known as targets, and car doors before that. The shooting range will be equipped with a high-powered CO² pellet gun chained to a pedestal inside a Plexiglas case, making it impossible to shoot anywhere except downrange. And downrange will be completely blocked off, save for a narrow aisle, at the end of which will be a bale of hay adorned with your choice or target: pictures of old cars and pickup trucks, cans of Coca-Cola and Budweiser, all yours for the taking after you've riddled it--or missed it--with your 10 shots at Ferrucci's nostalgic take on the American Dream."

As a lifelong gun freak, it's easy for me to see what Ferrucci is trying to tap into. Shooting guns at junk (plinking), is just plain fun. What I find so funny and a bit sad is that they have to dress it up like art and get their patrons all jacked up on Ennio Morricone and Bud Lite just to touch a freakin' air pistol. In my perfect little world, everybody would get to shoot their fist gun (a .22 rimfire) out in the boonies at old tin cans and rotten fruit.

On further thought however, I have to give artist Darryl and his friend Marcus major props for doing their part to put a gun into the hands of one of the most radically hippified towns in California. Get this, Marcus is "a 41-year-old card-carrying NRA member, hardware engineer and Buddhist who will play the roll of rangemaster". Extra bonus points to Marcus and his balls of steel for even letting the cat out of the bag that he's an NRA member. He'll be lucky if he doesen't get doused with organic llama piss before the show's over.