Clothing, Despots and really really good Villians are always British

Sure, when you think of Die Hard the late 80s action film opus, you think of the last of the archetype villain who is German, Hans Gruber.




Within a year, Lethal Weapon 2 would be released and the villains were no longer Germans, our post war animosities were put to rest and now it was the South Africans, with Apartheid, who were the baddies, trading Krugerrands on the streets of LA.



Of course what made Die Hard villain so devilish was Alan Rickman's acting, a classic Brit. He is suave, the first wave of Euro trash we see in Hollywood and this suaveness is shown by his talk of clothes, he mentions how Yasser Arafat has 2 shirts from Brooks Brothers himself. Man, is this guy evil, he knows what a former terrorist wears.

Yasser had a far better idea of how to dress than Gaddafi, like Castro, he decided never to stray from his initial fashion success and stayed with the military olive drab by and large. Why did he not call Muammar up and lecture him on his outlandish fashion sense, I'll never know. Anyways, what is done is done, Gaddafi needs to dress like he is a friend of Diane Keaton, making his own dresses for the red carpet on Oscar night.

Here is the Tyrant who brought us the rumble in the Jungle and his fashion sense:

On the other hand, have a look at these jackets, this is Military influenced fashion that is bang on the money

You can tell these styling of these jackets are just perfect. Many come from a now defunct place in NYC called Operations. These paintings are from my series on Jan's Jackets, and at about 12 Watercolour and Ink, that is pretty much the whole run that I will do of them.

The original idea came from some jackets of mine that were destroyed and I worked on repairing them, then from there, I started painting images of them but abandoned the project. The title came to me in a flash at the time, Battle Dress, as my clothing was often military styled or a military jacket and appeared to have gone through the wars, I will not elaborate.

Here is one of those paintings from about 2 years ago, soon I'll post some more as they are completed.

Lastly, as those who know me, you will remember my Lethal Weapon 2 phase last year where I could not stop making references to it, Alma Varda...9 o'clock. Like that.

Anyways, back when we all sat in a car watching LW2 back in 1989 at a drive-in we all laughed at the scene where the evil South African Diplomat shoots Riggs (Mel) and then shouts "Diplomatic Immunity" as a defence.

Well of course, Murtagh was gonna waste him!

But yet again, proving that life is stranger than that thing that Hollywood claims is art, is the recent news that a US diplomat shot and killed 2 men in Pakistan, he may be a CIA operative and the US says that Pakistan has no right to hold him as he has diplomatic immunity!



here is the BBC article

Libya, Gaddafi and the passage of time

You know, this guy has always been a piece of work, not the least reason being that it appears that his form of plastic surgery/botox was some treatment where they hold a blow torch to your face, Yowzers Kaddafi (as he was called in the 1970s) burst on to the scene in the 1970s and looked relatively normal

This would be exhibit A if you will, contrast that to this footage, it looks like he is wearing a skin mask that he got a la Silence of the Lambs.

In exhibit B, the footage, he exhibits all the traits of a dictator as described by Norman Mailer in "When we were Kings" something to the effect of Ugly, brutal and a ridiculous panache for dressing themselves- I am liberally lifting from what I remember but hey, i saw the film once in 1996 so cut me some slack.

Part of my lament for passage of time that this fool has been around, is that I remember a Saturday Night Live skit they did for a Gaddafi line of clothing " for when you are on the way to an execution" but I cannot track it down, I think it had Bill Murray walking around modeling the clothes around a Jeep.

To think he has been in power that long and able to keep fooling the world, blowing up the plane over Lockerbie Scotland, and then having the audacity to call the protesters "terrorists" by that turn he should be loving them. Not to mention his making nice with the US and the West in general by or is that buy giving 1.5 billion dollars as compensation for the country's collusion with terrorist, which of course they deny but just wanted the US sanctions to end. It is rather hilarious in a mad way. Now of course, no longer a terrorist, Libya took the role of representing the human rights chair at the UN, its true, as Mordechai Richler said, the need for a satirist is over, every day is satire.

So this may not directly relate to the arts, but is more on the reflections on culture; and in closing-

In the spirit of SNL, this is my David Spade tribute:

"Hey Mo Mar!
Guinan called from Star Trek Next Generation, she says she wants her clothes back, Pronto!"