If you’re anything like the Current, you hate airports. Noisy and boring in equal measure, uncomfortable, bad-smelling, and full of the kind of ghoulish décor and lack of refinement that sugests we are, in fact, the unfeeling cattle that airlines believe us to be, the modern airport has sucked most of the fun out of travel (the actual airplanes do the rest).
It is with a hearty (and Xanax-infused) guffaw, then, that we salute the cheeky, cheerful, and always subversive Gary Sweeney for his ongoing sign installation over at San Antonio International. Whether you’re leaving Say-town for a jaunt to colder climes, or visiting here for the first time, the signs, festooned in retro-inspired travel imagery of exotic Southwestern-iana and emblazoned with slogans such as “Hill country, Texas — We have dozens of towns you can’t pronounce!” and “HemisFair ’68 — You’re way too late,” will cheer your ass up, in a perverse way. Sweeney’s signs make us Alamo City denizens seem, well, almost hipper and more self-aware than … we thought we were.
A misapprehension that tourists to the Alamo City may labor under till they get to the actual Alamo gift shop in order to purchase candied scorpions and roadkill cookbooks for the folks back home. Oh, well. You can’t say we didn’t try (thanks, Gary.)
