Free-floating genius
On Monday morning Sept. 19, a Seattle commuter saw something afloat on Lake Washington with three disheveled guys aboard. He called 911, figuring it was a capsized craft. The harbor patrol arrived. Commuters stopped to gawk. Sixteen fire engines waited to help in the rescue. But what the emergency workers found was not an emergency but art. John Sutton, Ben Beres and Zac Culler, wearing two weeks' stubble and tattered business suits, had set sail on their desert island, carefully assembled with sand-colored canvas, foam rocks, a fake 12-foot palm tree, a plastic crab and starfish and real coconuts. It was outfitted with food, water and beer to last four days. By the evening rush hour, a traffic reporter was alerting drivers that "some kind of performance art island was causing a huge distraction."

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Sutton, Beres and Culler, also known as SuttonBeresCuller or any combination thereof, have been performing art for five years, mainly creating environments and taking them out of context, for example, a desert island. The plan was to write a constitution and form a government by Thursday, but their anchor got stuck on the lake bottom and pulled away from the floating island. As the merry pranksters careened toward a bridge, art indeed turned into a reasonable facsimile of an emergency. They were helped to shore that night, after a mere 24 hours at sea. Undaunted, they focused on their next project, towing a living room around town, titled "There Goes the Neighborhood." All this was just days after SuttonBeresCuller were told they were recipients of a Seattle "genius" award, though their genius clearly was not in navigation.

The local angle
Apart from The Morning File's weakness for floating desert islands in urban areas, we mention this because one of the trio, Zac Culler, got his art-start in Pittsburgh, and you might want to remember the name. Zac, 28, grew up in the North Side's Mexican War Streets and attended city schools. After graduating from CAPA, the Pittsburgh High School for the Creative and Performing Arts, he traveled to California. Months later, he bicycled up the coast to Seattle and enrolled at Cornish College for the Arts, where he met his partners. Last month at the Seattle Art Museum, BeresSuttonCuller got their $5,000 genius award from the Seattle alternative newspaper, The Stranger. They've done land-based installation art in Nebraska and Florida. Next year, in Salt Lake City, they'll spend two months confined in an art space and may well wind up longing for that desert island.

From the mundane, wonder
Regina Hackett, Seattle Post-Intelligencer art critic: "SuttonBeresCuller set the audience in motion. What they provide is an arena in which the audience can act. Last weekend, they presented 'Three Day Weekend.' Built into the walls and suspended near the studio's ceiling is a beat-up old trailer. The wheels are spinning, but the trailer's frozen inside the architecture. A trailer nobody would look at twice in a poverty-stricken trailer park becomes notable when inserted like a thermometer in the mouth of a gallery. Gazing up, the audience sees through the clear-glass undercarriage families kicking back at home. Instead of reality as presented on reality TV, the people in the trailer (all friends of the artists) look like people who might watch reality TV: humdrum with time on their hands, just like the audience. . . .

"From the mundane emerges wonder. I stood around both Friday and Saturday nights and felt as if I were watching Kurt Cobain before he was famous, playing in a garage band. These three could go far."

Pittsburgh Genius
That's the name of a Web site and cable television production that will showcase Pittsburgh as "a world-class intellectual center with cutting-edge academic research." The enthusiasm comes from Dan Handley, a doctoral candidate in human genetics at the University of Pittsburgh and a "Pittsburgh Genius" founder. The show makes its debut in a few weeks on Pittsburgh Community TV Channel 21 and will also be available on pittsburghgenius.com.

And what is Dan looking for in a host? "Most shows that talk about science and technology seem to be hosted by some overly exuberant guy wearing a bow tie. This just reinforces stereotypes and probably turns off viewers who otherwise might be fascinated by intelligent, thought-provoking television. . . I'm also intending to include more women and minority guests to help dispel the myth that intellectual pursuits have to be dominated by bespectacled white males who wear pocket protectors. My motto for the show is, 'Absolutely no bow ties!' "

Prodigy
Tudor Dominik Maican, an intense 16-year-old from Potomac, Md., started playing piano at age 3 and began composing two years later. Now, he has four symphonies plus a number of piano pieces and other works to his credit, we learn from The Washington Post. He travels to New York every Saturday for pre-college courses at the Juilliard School, and Andrew Thomas says Dom, as his friends call him, is one of the most extraordinary composers of symphonic and chamber music he has seen in his 35 years teaching. His mother, a music teacher, started him on the piano. Dom used to travel with her to nursing homes and shelters to entertain those in need. When he was 12, his mother got cancer, and he told her he was taking over the job. That's when he started an organization called Heart to Heart and rounded up other young musicians to play for people who could use some uplift. It makes him feel good, Dom said.

Musical savant
Tony DeBlois weighed less than two pounds at birth and became blind within days. Doctors suggested to Janice DeBlois that she let her son die, but she never considered that. Janice noticed Tony's musical ability at age 2. "I used to teach him vocabulary by singing songs to him," she told Boston.com. Diagnosed as autistic, Tony never really spoke conversationally until he went to the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Much to the amazement of the "experts," Tony graduated with honors. A musical savant, Mr. DeBlois, now 31 and living in Randolph, Mass., plays 20 instruments and knows more than 8,000 songs. His story is now in the pages of a book Janice wrote -- "Some Kind of Genius." And Tony has recorded his fifth CD to go along with it.