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Fifth Column
Noam Chomsky, the Man and His Music
2004-06-24
Tales from "you can’t make this up"-land: a review of the stage play "The Lonliness of Noam Chomsky." (Hat tip: Damian Penny.)
The performance begins with Chomsky (played with remarkable accuracy and great skill by the Asian-American actress Aya Ogawa)
I told you you couldn’t make this stuff up!
seated center stage, looking away from the audience at a wall of mirrors. . . . When Chomsky begins talking it is in the incoherent slow, halting, nearly inaudible patterns of moonbat nonsense that are familiar to those who have heard him speak. He discusses the very problem of being filmed and televised, how he is troubled by the focus on him. He says he never watches his televised or filmed appearances as they make him queasy
He has that effect on everybody.
and he only focuses on what he could have done better or said differently. Enter "The Media": Judson Kniffen and Alanna Medlock dressed as newscasters, replete with napkins tucked into their collars, as if they had just left the make-up table and sat down behind the newsdesk. A Tom Tomorrow cartoon appears on the monitors as Kniffen and Medlock perform the dialogue from the strip . . . [and then] Medlock pulls out a small two-foot high skeleton and proceeds to hang it from a noose front and center.
"It’s a symbolic representation of . . . uh . . . ummmm . . . you know . . . "
"What the audience wants to do to the writer of this drivel?"
"Ah, yeah. I think. Maybe."
This sets the contradictory tone of incoherence reverence and moonbattery self-mockery that makes The Loneliness of Noam Chomsky such a nauseating compelling performance. . . . This is evident in "The Larissa MacFarquhar New Yorker Devil’s Accountant Dance"
"Is that anything like ’The Chicken Dance?’"
in which Kim Garoon’s militant choreography seems to limn the media bias against Chomsky in a New Yorker article, but then gives way to a more honest pointed and haunting moment in which Chomsky is portrayed as an almost-sadistic professor who won’t allow his students to voice their opinions, cutting them down before they’ve even spoken. . . . While this tension between the perceived and the real, between Chomsky as brilliant iconoclast and deluded egomaniac, undergirds the entire performance (The "Christopher Hitchens Silent Genocide Air Quote Dance" was also very clever and well executed) . . .
. . . we’ll draw the curtains of mercy over this scene while we still have our sanity intact.

There’s an expert fisking of this review (and by extension, of the play itself) at the "Diary of an Anti-Chomskyite" blog. Me, I’d rather go to the Summer Stock Amateur Dinner Theatre production of "Camelot."
Posted by:Mike

#5  Regardless of the merits of the piece itself, Christopher Hitchens Silent Genocide Air Quote Dance sounds like a title Zappa could have been proud of.
Posted by: eLarson   2004-06-24 10:46:57 PM  

#4  Like the man said, " I know art when I see it."
This ain't it.
Posted by: tu3031   2004-06-24 8:51:38 PM  

#3   I imagine a lot of en-pointe with arms in the air, crooked at about thirty degrees, index and middle fingers bent sarcastically.

All done deliberately so as not to spill the drink in one's hand. Cigarette in the corner of the mouth is optional(but it does help with the squinting)...
Posted by: Pappy   2004-06-24 8:46:37 PM  

#2  "Christopher Hitchens Silent Genocide Air Quote Dance"

Some things are beyond parody. But I still want to learn the steps to this one. I imagine a lot of en-pointe with arms in the air, crooked at about thirty degrees, index and middle fingers bent sarcastically.
Posted by: Mitch H.   2004-06-24 3:58:12 PM  

#1  I was at the World Bank book store today (don't ask why its nerdy and stupid) and noticed they have one of Chomsky's anti American anti Israel books on a prominent display (away from the technical stuff).

The World Bank book store also sells world bank hats and world bank t shirts, fyi.

Posted by: mhw   2004-06-24 1:39:31 PM  

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