It doesn't mean genius, he says, though several of his choices are, and it doesn't just mean wacko, bizarre, way-out.
In other words, we are meant to think, "Genius acrobats: They're just like us!" Except that they can dive through really high hoops that are barely bigger than their body circumferences and do single handstands atop teetering stacks of chairs and project themselves perpendicularly, midair, from the sides of tall poles.
Scemi means morons, geni means geniuses, so either he was being harsh or sarcastic.
The photographer Susan Meiselas, represented by work done in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Kurdish areas over the last 25 years, is the presiding genius here, and I do mean genius, a word I very rarely use.
That means the geniuses at A.I.G. who wrote the insurance were willing to bet more than double their company's value that defaults would not become problematic.
"By 'genius,' I mean the genius of the art of painting itself as it reveals itself through Leonardo," the show's curator, Pietro C. Marani, said at the gallery last month.
Teaching literature means working with genius every day -- but the genius doesn't all come from the past.
Marcel Breuer, one of his collaborators, described Nervi's participation in the project as "a continuous search for a system: a system of geometric rhythm," and later he said of him: "If there is a notion that arrogance and reckless irresponsibility are the very attributes of genius, a notion that to be a genius means not to be quite human, there is Nervi to disprove this notion".
The myth of the solitary genius means that creative collaging is a sorely underrated skill.
The undeniable breadth and depth of his genius means there was, it seems, no intellectual feat of which this original Renaissance Man was incapable.
It would also mean that geniuses like Steve Jobs or Albert Einstein might still be alive.
