With every nail, a little genius leaks out The musician Brian Eno has coined the word "scenius," which in its simplest form is the belief that the Renaissance-era idea of the solitary, isolated, tortured genius is a myth, and that artistic breakthroughs actually come from (in Eno's words) “a whole scene of people who were supporting each other, looking at each other’s work, copying from each other, stealing ideas, and contributing ideas.” Obviously true, right? It certainly seems so. What's more, it FEELS GOOD. Not only does it dismiss all the Dead White Males at a throw, it opens the [...]

(I just wrote some of this in a comment responding to @Paul, and while the sentiments are ones I've expressed before, I expressed them particularly succinctly here, and so wanted to surface them as a post, in hopes they'd elicit some discussion.--MG) I'm staying with a friend of mine who is getting over a stroke, and she doesn't know much about The Beatles. I mean, she knows plenty, but she doesn't KNOW about them like you and I do. So after she told me her favorite Beatle was George, we took a couple of nights to watch Martin Scorsese's Living in the [...]

Reading Starostin's part one analysis of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, I realized that I've never wondered for a second about "the concept" behind that LP; it's so clear to me I'm a little puzzled when people -- John Lennon among them -- profess that there is no concept whatever. But I'm finding it difficult to write. I've spent the last two days writing paragraphs and discarding them, and this post is a final attempt to blast through, share my idea, and continue hashing it out in the comments. Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is an album designed around a [...]