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Storms knocked out the power last night, keeping me from the computer till this morning

PERSONAL / PSYCHOLOGICAL / POLITICAL

Got an axe to grind? Got an ulterior motive? Got an agenda? These pretty much mean the same thing. But "axe to grind" suggests a grudge or habitual gripe; "ulterior motive" suggests sneakiness; "agenda" generally refers to a covert political goal underlying the ostensible topic. In any case, all of these are things we say about other people.

ALL ABOUT I

As unlikely as it seems, I must have really heard this because I jotted it down on one of my bits of paper. It says here that musician Bela Fleck, in an interview, referred to "Edgar and I's relationship." That urge to capitalize oneself and be a subject, not an object, in most grammatical constructions leads to so many verbal disasters. It's only fair to say that he was attempting an intrinsically awkward construction. How to say it?

Edgar and my relationship

Edgar's and my relationship

Edgar and my's relationship

Edgar and me's relationship

Edgar's and mine relationship

It can't be done. "Edgar's and my relationship" is the only one in this list that's grammatically correct, but it's clumsy. "His and my relationship" is also correct, but Bela wanted to use the man's name. If you use a pronoun instead of Edgar, along with a pronoun for yourself, it has to be a possessive pronoun. Not "he and my relationship" or "me and his". There are lots of possible wrong combinations.

To use the name Edgar, you have to take the long way around, and say something like "the relationship of [or between] Edgar and me" (never "between Edgar and I"). The easy way is "our relationship" but if you really want to get Edgar's name in there, there is no shortcut.

RAGE THE SOUP

A local weekly interviewed boys and girls on the street about their favorite restaurants. One fellow, who looked majorly, maybe permanently, stoned in his photo, said he liked a particular Thai restaurant: "I like to rage the coconut soup on the daily." Urbandictionary.com doesn't give rage as a verb, but the coconut soup may have inspired him. But I suspect he exaggerates.

Otherwise I've heard rage used as a verb just once, and then not as a transitive verb, in the Dylan Thomas poem "Do not go gentle into that good night" where he says "Rage, rage against the dying of the light." OK, then why is it a "good" night?

As for "on the daily," this must be a cool new way to say "daily."

INSURGENT ART AND RESPONSIBILITY

You may have heard about a University of Oregon student newspaper, The Insurgent, which ran some offensive cartoons of Jesus Christ a few weeks ago, rather childish drawings that look like the work of untalented 12-year-old boys sniggering and saying obscenities. (If you want to see them you can do the search yourself.) Supposedly the cartoons were a sort of editorial comment on the Muslim protests against the Danish cartoons, but, you know, safer because they offended Christians. But I'm not getting into a free-speech discussion right now; I want to know how they picked the name of their paper, but what seems to be the only Insurgent web site is dated 2001. I'm assuming that the guy or gal on the staff who knew how to work the Internet graduated after that.

And I wonder why our government has chosen to call the Iraqis hostile to the American war and the new government there "insurgents", which does mean rebels but always sounds to me like someone "surging" in, which isn't exactly how they operate. If American college students call themselves insurgents, what do they mean? Solidarity with those who are fighting American soldiers, apparently. Or maybe they think of themselves as insurgents within these borders, i.e. enemies of Americans who don't agree with them.

But back to art: A local alternative rag featured an editorial this week about the plight of artists in Cincinnati. The writer, Stacey Recht Czar (!), is disturbed by the "nationwide abandonment of the individual artist ~ that's the burden and legacy we face."

I didn't know they'd been abandoned. I always thought artists are independent, and moreover are expected to struggle unless they're lucky enough to attract a rich patron. Suffering develops their character and their art, and forces them into an independent, unbought vision. "Gone are the days," Czar continues, "of individual artist support, choked out of existence by conservatives enraged by what they perceived to be sexual and anti-religious excesses on the part of publicly supported individual artists in the 1990s. That's the Mapplethorpe legacy."

Some of Mapplethorpe's photos were sexual excesses. (I do think the lady mentioned in the story linked above didn't need to show her 5-year-old the catalog so she'd know what it was all about.) But this week's article, while invoking the Mapplethorpe scrap, suggests that artists deserve more than legal freedom to exhibit in a gallery. Did all local artists have lots of financial support before the Mapplethorpe incident? Stacey wants financial support for MFAs. "We can't seem to find a way to make being an artist and making a living mutually inclusive, and doing so is no longer even a part of our discourse."

The artist as "public intellectual" who "interprets culture" for the rest of us has a "responsibility of translating culture", says one painting student who doesn't think "it should be some pressure on your work" (i.e. a job shouldn't put pressure on artists), and "the people in Cincinnati have a responsibility to engage themselves with the art." Which means pay for it. Stacey asks if it's enough for the public to "simply recognize the efforts of highly trained, monstrously talented and deeply dedicated working artists as they pose questions and interrogate the living crap out of contemporary culture."

Well, I often ask myself the same question about the plight of English majors. (Send money.) God knows I'm highly trained, and I try to interrogate the crap out of contemporary culture.

Stacey is troubled by art students who've been supported throughout school ~ kept off the streets and away from jobs at McDonald's by parents and grants ~ now forced to support themselves after graduation. It's so unfair. Artists are important, even if their work is "not changing government systems" which apparently is what artists are supposed to do. A heavy, heavy responsibility. Our responsibility is "to provide an environment where they can live comfortably." Well, that goes for all of us. We all should let everyone live comfortably (unless they have political and religious views we don't like). Maybe a cool loft apartment and a decent car and enough money for lattes on the daily.

Mapplethorpe's legacy is not Cincinnati's only claim to art fame. A man named Thomas Condon got in trouble for taking photos of bodies in the morgue. He didn't have permission, supposedly, from whoever was in charge of the morgue, and certainly not from the families of the deceased. Condon was so misunderstood, and the media that picked up his photos used the raw film, he was going to crop them and soften them and other sensitive artistic stuff.

The article winds up: "Then perhaps the world will recognize the truth Taylor sees: 'We're not a bunch of rubes that get all upset about some photographs'."

I thought art was supposed to be upsetting. But if you're upset by mere photographs you're a rube. But they're not mere photographs, they're vastly important interpretations of culture. Culture is not what rubes have. Culture is what people with MFAs have. Or at least they have the opinions about culture that count, and everyone one else should put a nickel in the slot.

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The poet Muriel Rukeyser said the universe is not composed of atoms, but stories.

The physicist Werner Heisenberg said the universe is not made of matter, but music.

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