Salamander approved art show

For all you closet actors - get out the extra bedsheets, fake beards, and bad teeth. Get a digital video camera - or for my European friends take the next AirBerlin flight into Frankfurt and give it your best in person.

A Muhammad look-a-like competition is slated to take place during the Frankfurt Book Fair, and it has already offended and outraged people far beyond Germany. But Titanic, the monthly satirical magazine behind the inflamatory event, insists: "It will be a blast."

Titanic, the German satire magazine, is never far from polemics, but its latest action takes its reputation for controversy to new heights: It is staging a Muhammad look-a-like competition -- and has invited the Turkish President Abdullah Gül to take part.
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According to its Web site, however, Titanic is going ahead with its look-alike contest: "Come along to the most dangerous event of the Frankfurt Book Fair ... It will be a blast," it wrote. The competition, to be held on Oct. 18, is set to take place on a specially built stage at the state-funded Caricatura Museum in Frankfurt. Achim Frenz, head of the museum, said it was designed to test of the boundaries of "jokes and fun." The museum's Web site comments: "Of course it is a sin to represent the prophet. For this reason, we are trying to do something exceptional."

Nine participants are expected to take part, including Osman Engin, a Turkish-German satirist, and Hans Zippert, a prominent columnist for the conservative daily Die Welt. During the competition there will be readings from the Koran and participants will be encouraged to mimic the Muslim prophet. "Of course you can never create a picture of the prophet," the magazine claims in a flyer advertising the event, "but you can try to emulate him."

Achim just became my favorite German first name. Sorry Franz.

Just because I like to tease the hyper-sensitive. Send me your best entry preferably in .mov format for video, tiff or jpg for pics, and I will give you a front billing posting on a temp-activated mothballed drawmohammedweek. All entries must be rated-PG for Kristin - especially if you have a 9-yr old girl in a wedding dress as an extra.

More artistic cowbell. This is how you defeat the absurd - you be absurd.