Word: savants
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...idiot savant has a long tradition in the U.S., much of it as victim. A typical 19th century savant, Tom Bethune was sightless and barely able to grunt monosyllables. But he had the ability to play complicated classical piano pieces by ear, and promoters exhibited him in vaudeville as an amusing freak. Since that time, savants -- retarded and autistic people who have inexplicable gifts, usually in art, mathematics and music -- have been the objects of diversion and exploitation. But at a unique institution called Hope University in Anaheim, Calif., they are being trained to reveal their surprising gifts and develop...
...young, but it is unlikely that any title in 1987 will top this one for mystification and intrigue. Fair enough: its subjects are the oddest achievers in the history of show business. Here is Blind Tom, born to slave parents in 1849. Sightless and retarded, this exemplary idiot savant could play most pieces on the piano, classical or popular, after a single hearing. Here is Harry Kahne, who could write five words on a blackboard simultaneously, holding chalk in his feet, hands and mouth. Here is Matthew Buchinger, who was a marksman, conjurer, artist and musician. Not exactly headline making...
...upscale drug. So it is salutary for a film to examine and embrace those anachronistic, ever-so-'60s extremes. Bliss wants to pose the biggest questions -- about life, death and the twilight state in between that passes for existence -- in the weirdest way. It fulminates like a bag-lady savant on the toxic dangers of technology and moral compromise. It has big, randy dreams about its hero's search for a bucolic haven on earth. Extravagant or exasperating, Bliss puts nobody to sleep. At its world premiere at last year's Cannes Film Festival, more than half of the international...
...comparative inexperience bothers some voters. Bush has an impressive resume: CIA director, U.N. ambassador, envoy to China. His greatest political strength is that voters currently find him more credible than Ferraro as a possible President. Yet despite his Government service, Bush has not often come across as a savant during the campaign. Last month in remarks at a Vermont college, he committed an elaborate fumble concerning the 1979 Nicaraguan revolution. "The Sandinistas came in," he said. "They overthrew Somoza, killed him and overthrew him. Killed him, threw him out." In fact, ex-Dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle was assassinated in Paraguay...
...painters, mad scientists all live inside the quarantine of their own superiority, distanced by their difference from the world they illuminate and help-recreate. To 19th century romantics the genius was a superman; to most of us today he may seem both more and less than human, an idiot savant, a freak of nature...