Francisco provides a rare follow-up to his last podcast about success and fulfillment. In this podcast, he examines the cross-disciplinary definition of success beyond mere financial attainment. The socio-historical content of success in the end is not as important as the potential to reach the public and connect with them in a way that resonates and provides value. Whether it is Kim Kardashian, Walter Benjamin, or Galileo, the resonance of the work has serve as a kind of Cassandra, even if the tragedy of success is that it might be for posterity and not for the present day.

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Francisco compares two very different persons on how they visualized success and the contrasting degree to which accomplished it.

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One burden of being a genius is apparently turbocharging the brain. Francisco recalls his connection to Rosalind Krauss, genius of art history, Quincy Jones, genius of musical production, and Glenn Gould, genius of piano performance, and how all three touched him, while they suffered from brain aneurysms or strokes.

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A personal analysis of how a cultish German filmmaker learned his craft directing the most difficult actor in German history. No Comments on Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski: The Agony of Stubborn, Incompatible Genius

Stanley Kubrick built a legacy of impeccably produced films, most of which were realized because of his assistant, Leon Vitali, whose story of servitude and devotion is captured in the documentary, “Filmworker,” explored here by Francisco, who finds that the more he likes Vitali, the less he cares for Kubrick.

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Francisco takes in a new film about an old assassination conspiracy that leads down an endless rabbit hold to a host of other international conspiracies.

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Photography is always judged along formalist lines – depth, color, luminance – but the true landscape of women photographers has from the historical beginning been primarily emotional, implicit, and often very private. Francisco argues that a new kind of critique is needed here.

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Beginning with the clumsy term “Renaissance”, Francisco provides a tour of how the search for certainty in the methodologies of science-like fields produces narrowness, unlike the journey of creative production.

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One of the angles and pearls from Francisco’s conversation with Quincy Jones.

The name of Nadia Boulanger is incredible: she taught the greatest 20th century composers, including Aaron Copland…. and Quincy.

 

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Wooing today’s loss of discourse and argument, where civil mutuality has been replaced by aggression and abuse, Francisco reviews some rhetorical strategies used by Socrates, the greatest thinker of Classical Greece, in creating an argument and bringing a sweeping span of consideration to the art of discussion.

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