Gaddafi plays with Libyans as if they are Toy Soldiers

Yes, Mr. Gaddafi, your people love you.

Yes, you are proving each day that they lay down their lives as you mow them down.

No matter how much of an insane megalomaniac Gaddafi seemed in the 1980s, he is outdoing himself in the present.

What really irks me with the SNL send up of Gaddafi recently is that they just straight mimicked his Africa pin rather than making that in the LIVEAID logo, as so much of that money was un-tracked and no one knows how much went to starving people and how much went to despots.

By the way, did you ever watch LIVEAID? That Saturday was really hot in Toronto and the last thing I wanted to be doing was staying at home watching a concert so I popped in a VHS tape ( my Dad always kept the Beta to himself)turned on the VCR and promptly forgot about it for about 10 years. SO, somewhere between 1995-2000 I watched the concert of the decade. It was, merdeloaf. Anyway you cut it, it was MERDE. For serious.



But I still have the tape and the commercials are the bomb, you cannot believe it was 1985, it looks like the 1980 or 1979. Commercials for Vodka Cooler and crap like that. Ok, ok, Queen was ok, Bono was already the Bono he is now, but we were 15 years away from realising that.

Anyways, back to tyrants....

But as Brutus was to have said and more recently John Wilkes Booth, who shouted Sic semper tyrannis, after shooting Lincoln and then jumping from the presidential box at the Ford theatre and onto the stage during the performance of My American Cousin (Sic semper tyrannis = thus always to tyrants {their brutal endings} is the translation ) but, in relation to Gaddafi, when I ask you, when???

Of course this is a mixed message as the senate behind the Julius Caesar assassination were a bunch of a holes and Booth was a racist narcissist.

Still, I hope you get the idea.

While we wait for some form of brutal ending for Gaddafi, I would prefer he played with toy soldiers instead of real people. He seems to be obsessed with toys, he has a cadre of expendable toy soldiers around him and his famous 40 female virgins that are his Amazon body guards.

Maybe what he needs is a few ACTUAL toy soldiers and less toying with real people.

Here are a couple of toys I painted a few months back. These 2 watercolour sketches show some GI Joes, both clothed and naked like Helmut Newton's photo of models from years gone by.

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!"