The latest Woody Allen film, Sweet and Lowdown, features a fictional 30's jazz guitarist named Emmet Ray (played lovingly by Sean Penn), who is the 2nd greatest guitarist in the world (after Django), and is also a total self-centred bastard. What makes the film interesting is that for about 99% of the film, the story raises the question whether you can be a monster and still make beautiful music. At the end of the film, the typical Romantic theme takes over: he will never be a top musician (i.e. better than Django) unless he comes to terms with his emotional limitations, and learns to love. This seems to fly in the face of the facts: and the lady musician I saw it with last night happily regaled me afterwards with stories of hideous bastards who were deeply emotional in their music, capable of tugging at the heartstrings of everyone in a hundred mile radius. I know poets and writers better, and I can think of many examples of geniuses who were not remotely in touch with anything that resembles normal human feeling. Such are the vagaries of art.