It’s official. I’ve seen enough video clips of Moammar Gaddafi’s battered body being dragged through the streets of Libya to last a lifetime. I’m nauseated and relieved — but not surprised — since this is what a person can expect during his golden years if he’s a delusional, narcissistic despot who annoints himself “King of Kings.” Lest we forget Italy’s Fascist “clown prince,” Benito Mussolini.
Mussolini and his cohorts were executed by a firing squad on April 27, 1945. Two days later, after being shot and kicked repeatedly by happy, liberated Italians, the bodies were driven to Milan (reportedly without seat belts) and hung upside down from the roof of an Esso gas station, where additional happy Italians pelted them with rocks from the street below. Whatever was left of Mussolini’s body was finally buried in an unmarked grave. Nobody was sitting shiva.
If this is all a little too graphic and disturbing maybe you shouldn’t watch the weird William Shatner video in my
previous post.
And now, let’s recap last night’s episode of Bravo TV’s “Work of Art,” where the artists/contestants were divided into two teams and asked to create a gallery show suggesting movement.
One team decided to call itself “Poop” and proceeded to focus on bowels and intestines until the show’s mentor (Simon) told them to start over because this was so stupid he almost couldn’t verbalize his horror. He also commented that the process of excretion was “too slow” to be artistically interesting, so they switched their theme to “Play with Me” and created equally stupid playground art out of plywood. Two of these included Dusty’s life-size photo of himself stapled to the end of a see-saw and Sucklord’s “flip the rat” arcade game where you fling plastic rats into buckets with a catapult.
The other team’s theme was “Loop,” although none of the judges could figure out what this had to do with movement. Lola drizzled hot-glue onto a mountain of shredded medical documents from a dumpster. Tewz wrapped a spray-painted garden hose around a bucket and pasted a tiny yellow hand to a circle on the wall. Kathryn, staying true to her obsession with internal organs, videotaped wads of blood and gore landing on a plastic tarp. Shockingly, she lost last night’s challenge and got sent home, crying hysterically.
The winner, believe it or not, was a dude from the “Play with Me” team named Bayete who — get this — videotaped himself from the neck up spinning around on the roof. No kidding. Judge Jerry Saltz found Bayete’s art “strangely mesmerizing” and judge Bill Powers was “impressed with the simplicity.” Everybody else was just outraged that running in a circle and shouting “whee” qualified as art.
Monet is throwing up in his grave. Thank you for reading this.
