There’s an episode in the last season of The Larry Sanders Show in which “Hey Now” Hank Kingsley, concerned that his days in show business are numbered, runs into singer Andy Williams in the makeup room. The legendary crooner gives Hank some advice: when Larry retires, move down to Branson, Missouri and open up your own theater. Kinglsey is incredulous. “Wow, it’s packed every night?” “Every night,” Williams intones.

I don’t blame Hank for his skepticism; the transformation of this little isolated Missouri town -- population 10,000 -- from a modest homesteading community into one of America’s premiere tourist destinations is an unlikely phenomenon that befuddles most non-Ozarkians. In 2009, 7.8 million visitors swung through Branson and 85 percent of them took in at least one stage show while there, generating $3 billion in tourism-related spending. The region now boasts 50 theaters and a larger nightly seating capacity than Broadway. Not bad for a city many Americans could not identify on a map.

Branson’s entertainment infrastructure developed relatively rapidly, beginning in 1959 with the establishment of the Baldknobbers Hillbilly Jamboree Show, a variety show combining country music and “hillbilly humor.” Over the next decade, several theaters catering to visiting fishermen opened up shop along Hwy. 76., now known as The Strip, hosting live shows similar to WLS’ famous National Barn Dance. As Aaron Ketchell describes it, “entertainment was built on … innocent country and gospel music, the promotion of antimodern nostalgia, civil religious patriotism, and a distinct construction of domestic appropriateness expressed though the rhetoric of ‘family values.’” Their business was steady, if a bit narrow in appeal.

It was in the early 1980s, after celebrity country music star Roy Clark came to town, when the game changed. Around that time, Nashville record companies hoping to attract a younger, hipper audience started dropping established artists from their labels. Clark and his dissed compatriots moved 450 miles west, and their audience came with. From the journal Organization Science:

The process accelerated when “people from Nashville started coming,” beginning in 1983 when Roy Clark opened his own theater. By booking stars for limited engagements and continually rotating them, Clark’s theater acted as an “incubator” that introduced them to Branson’s possibilities, encouraging many to set up local theaters and driving a “Country Music Explosion” Celebrities who founded theaters in Branson attracted other celebrities, some of whom also founded theaters after seeing the available opportunities, and these in  turn attracted others. Among the “big name country music stars” who settled in Branson were Boxcar Willie, Mickey Gilley, and Mel Tillis. According to informants and documentary sources, Branson offered these older stars a place to be “classics” instead of “has-beens”; a ready market of loyal and adoring fans; a respite from the tedium and rootlessness of years of touring; a vehicle for unfettered artistic expression; and a chance to reconnect with family, community, and friends with whom they had grown up in the business.

Seeking the same accepting atmosphere as their country contemporaries, aging mainstream stars like Williams and Wayne Newton followed suit, drawing more fans (and national media attention) to southern Missouri and establishing it as the self-proclaimed "Live Entertainment Capital of the World.” If the likes of Yakov Smirnoff can consistently sell out 2,000 seat amphitheaters, the title may actually be apt.

What a country! And what a weird town.

Unlike several other autocrats in Eurasia, Kazakhstan’s Nursultan Nazarbayev isn’t being pushed out of public life in 2011. Over the weekend, the Central Asian president won another five-year term, taking home a record 95.5 percent of the vote in an election that exhibited "serious irregularities” according to international observers. The allegations should come as no surprise; in this oil-rich nation of 15 million, which Nazarbayev has lead since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, corruption is common and dissent not encouraged.

Now that his position atop the Kazakh government is secure for the foreseeable future, the former Communist boss has promised to fight poverty and raise compensation levels for low-paid public sector employees like doctors and teachers. A high-speed rail line is in development, as well. But I’m excited to see what changes Nazarbayev has in store for Astana, the nation’s capital and the president’s personal architectural playground.

Fourteen years ago, the Kazakhs moved their capital from Almaty to Astana, a city known only for its old Soviet penal colonies and wild temperature swings. The ostensible reason for the relocation was that Almaty was too close to China and prone to earthquakes. But like Ataturk and Kubitschek before him, Nazarbayev really just wanted to build from scratch an eye-catching capital in his own image. In 2001, the strongman hired the late Japanese architectural pioneer Kisho Kurokawa to develop a master plan, which more or less serves as the foundation for the city today. And over the past decade, fueled by a booming (and recently liberalized) economy, Nazarbayev has filled it with some of the most outlandish buildings and monuments on the planet:

Astana's ornaments include a 62-metre-high silver pyramid, designed by British architects Foster + Partners, giant gold-green cones and a gold orb resting on a structure of erupting white steel. At night its buildings go purple, pink, green and yellow. Astana's latest, most technically ambitious addition is a 150-metre-high translucent tent, also by Lord Foster. Called Khan Shatyr, a single leaning mast props its roof, which offers shelter from a harsh climate to a shopping and entertainment complex underneath. It follows a familiar Foster strategy, to be seen in the Great Court of the British Museum, or his airports at Stansted, Hong Kong and Beijing, which is to create an impressively engineered roof – a thing to be looked at and admired but not inhabited – hovering over a lower, less ordered, zone where the activity of the buildings, in this case shops and theme-park rides, takes place. This strategy, derived from the geodesic domes which the visionary American designer Buckminster Fuller once proposed throwing over whole cities, makes for striking architecture but also for awkward clashes where the two zones meet. Top and bottom seem to be different worlds.

My personal favorite is the Bayterek Tower, which Nazarbayev actually designed himself. Standing 345 feet tall, it symbolizes a holy tree at the center of a famous Kazakh creation myth. Perched on top is a giant golden egg, which doubles as an observation deck.

It’s almost a crime that Borat has never taken his American viewers on an official Astana tour. Check out some of the wonders in this Guardian slideshow.

I’ve been reading this interesting travelogue about life in the little Russian town of Marx after the fall of Communism. (Appropriate, eh?) In the opening few chapters, author Susan Richards paints a grim picture of a nation struggling to come to terms with the political and economic revolution its just experienced. Crisis forces people to grasp for something comforting, and in a land where mysticism and shamanism have deep roots, the dramatic transition provoked an explosion of interest in psychic healing. Or as Richards calls it, “spiritual quackery.”

No quack was as famous or as influential as Anatoly Kashpirovsky. This Ukranian-born psychotherapist became a household name in the late 1980s after several of his seances were broadcast in prime-time on state television. Kashpirovsky claimed he could make scars disappear and cure ailments as serious as AIDS remotely and without, you know, actual medicine. Here’s how David Remnick, then writing for the Washington Post, described the spectacle on October 11, 1989:

If there is a new "cult of personality" in the Soviet Union, it is centered not on Mikhail Gorbachev but rather on a Ukrainian psychologist who "applies anesthesia from a distance" and has an audience of up to 200 million people whenever he appears on "Good Evening Moscow."

Through the "power of suggestion" -- a method that in his hands looks very much like a coffee-crazed parent telling his child to "clean up your room or die" -- Kashpirovsky claims to have led hundreds of people through abdominal surgery without anesthesia, the change of hair color without Grecian Formula, the removal of four or five teeth without Novocain and, over 10 months, the loss of 350 pounds without liposuction.

Here’s a video of his demonstration. Even the poor quality can’t obscure those beady, piercing eyes:

Kashpirovsky leveraged his fame to win a seat in parliament with the ultra-nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, though he was ousted from the Duma after just a two-year term and subsequently moved to the United States. (Itar-Tass reported at the time that a bitter Kashpirovsky promised to “use psychic powers to make anyone trying to evict him from his government flat impotent.” Classy.)

In 2009, Kashpirovsky made his triumphant return to the Russian airwaves as the host of a show dedicated to "paranormal investigations." And last year, with the Russian economy still reeling, he started hosting mass healing sessions once again. The Guardian, in an entertaining June profile, talked to some countrymen who question the timing of his reappearance:

Or was there more than mere coincidence to the timing of Kashpirovsky's second coming? There are those, among them Kashpirovsky's one-time professional colleagues in the field of human psychology, who believe that the psychic healer's comeback is an attempt by the authorities to placate Russian society, to divert attention from falling living standards and rising state brutality.

While some sick Ruskies will likely fall prey to Kashpirovsky’s gambit, Putin et al. would be silly to put lots of eggs in that Ukranian basket; one 2010 opinion poll found that only 13 percent of Russians old enough to have caught Kashpirovsky’s sessions in 1989 own up to watching them. That’s what political pollsters call high negatives.