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Strange doings in Obscuristan
One of the greatest pleasures of my years as the theater critic for the SF Examiner was the opportunity to cover the work of the San Francisco Mime Troupe each year. This theater collective with a distracting name (they don't do what's conventionally understood as mime at all) has been carting its free outdoor shows to Bay Area parks in the summer for over 40 years now. It has managed to invent its own tradition, mixing sharp political satire and musical comedy in the vein of 19th-century melodrama -- think Gilbert & Sullivan meets "Dr. Strangelove" meets Brecht, with doses of vaudeville and Mad magazine thrown in for fun. The motivation is progressive politics, but the method is pure comedy.
This year's show, "Mr. Smith Goes to Obscuristan," borrows its plot structure from Capra's "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," transplanting the action to a mythical Central Asian country and transforming the hero into Jefferson Smith, a firefighter-hero of 9/11 who gets drafted by the Bush administration to observe the first "free" elections in Obscuristan. There are jabs about the U.S.'s last "fixed" election; merciless mockery of President Bush, Dick Cheney and even Barbara Bush; gags about Internet-connected mullahs and a shadowy opposition candidate named "Ralif Nadir"; and, beyond the jokes, a thoughtful tracing of the distinction between honest post-9/11 patriotism and good old American jingoism, self-interest and hypocrisy. The script is co-written by my old friend Josh Kornbluth, so I cannot offer an impartial review, but I can offer a highly biased recommendation: See it if you're in the area.
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August
This week Salon takes its annual summer break, known to the editorial staff as "dark week" -- a week in which we update the site with fewer articles. It's a chance during the dog days of August for those of us who basically work around-the-clock most of the year to catch our breaths and take a real vacation. I'm doing the same -- though I'll keep updating this blog, perhaps a little less regularly. Don't worry, though; Salon will have a new cover story every day, the wires will continue to be updated, and of course the blogs will keep rolling.
If you stay tuned you can catch my cover story tomorrow -- a double book review, of John Motavalli's "Bamboozled at the Revolution" and David Weinberger's "Small Pieces Loosely Joined" -- that uses those books as a chance to look at the state of the Net in general. I've tried to write (at least) one such piece a year.
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OK, so Salon contributor Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo blog does not have the reach of, say, Time magazine. But it's still a well-established site by a reasonably widely read D.C. writer. Today Marshall notes that the Washington Post has begun running an online column with the name "Talking Points." Talking point for Post editors: Time to rethink that.
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