Word: savants
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...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...
...says the three albums they made together (Low, "Heroes," Lodger) "hurt. Those songs came from a very aching source. My whole cleaning-up period came through that trilogy. And I think I was successful at dropping my personas completely." Perhaps; or, anyway, dropping them as much as a showman-savant like Bowie ever can. Some lines from Ashes to Ashes come to mind: "I've never done good things/ I've never done bad things/ I've never done anything out of the blue...
...monkeys. In The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser (1975), a young man appears in a Nuremberg square in the 1820s, with no recollection of his past; the townspeople attempt to "civilize" Kaspar, treating him as their pet, their lab rat, their ignorant savior. In Heart of Glass (1976), a mountaintop savant predicts the fall of a small village's glass industry; panic and madness ensue. Herzog paints his pictures in colors as vivid as dream life and instructs his actors to proceed with the elegant gravity of silent-film stars. Aguirre, Kaspar and Heart of Glass are three solitary landmark...
...genuine love of risk and an abiding faith in the value of competition, win or lose. He trusts his own vision and scorns prudent measures like market research. He loves to cast himself as a hapless crusader or starry-eyed underdog, and revels in emerging as the triumphant idiot savant...