On Happiness, or, Positive Atheist Philosophy #4,626

So what does it mean to be happy?

Daylight
There’s been an interesting discussion over at Daylight Atheism. A thought- experiment, posing the question: If you could hook yourself up to a happiness machine, would you do it?

On the surface, if there’s no God to please and all we have is this life, it seems like there should be no reason not to. If there’s no ultimate exterior meaning, and we create our own meaning for our own lives, then why shouldn’t that meaning be “hooking myself up to a happiness machine until I die”?

And yet most people in the conversation wanted nothing to do with that hypothetical machine. (Or, at most, they could see using it only rarely, or only under extreme circumstances such as debilitating terminal illness.)

I was going to comment; but my comment kept going and going, and got too long for a comment on somebody else’s blog, and eventually morphed into… well, into this piece.

So. On the topic of a happiness machine.

I want to talk about my experiences with heroin.

Heroin_bottle
I’ve never been a heroin addict, or anything even close to a heroin addict. But I have taken it, more than once. In my early twenties, I took heroin about six or eight times, over the course of about three years.

And the experience was about as close to a pleasure machine as I can imagine. It was more than just the complete absence of pain and unpleasantness… although it certainly was that. It was more than just a total sense of relaxation and peace… although it certainly was that. It was more than just the dissolving into a misty darkness of all problems and worries… although it certainly was that. It felt like everything was okay, like everything was right with my life and the world. There was one point during one of my experiences when I got nauseated and threw up… and throwing up was perfectly okay. Sure, on the whole I would have preferred to be doing something other than throwing up… but throwing up was okay, too. Everything was okay. Everything was more than okay. Everything was right.

Space
It seems like it should have felt fake or plastic — it was a drug, after all — but it didn’t. At the time, at least, it felt richly, deeply satisfying. It felt like I was melting into the universe, like I was profoundly connected with the very essence of goodness. It felt like the way you feel after you’ve had unbelievably amazing sex for hours. Filled with pleasure in every pore of your body, and without any need or desire for anything more. It felt like this was how life should be, for everyone, all the time.

It was as close to a pleasure machine as I can imagine.

And I was extremely wary of it.

I was careful not to take the drug very often. Not just “never twice in the same week,” but “never twice in the same month,” and never more than two or three times a year. I was careful not to seek it out, but only to take it when the opportunity fell into my lap by chance.

And even so, it scared me. I loved it, but it scared the crap out of me. I knew it was a pleasure I had to treat with extreme caution; that if I let it become even remotely a regular part of my life, I could be in big trouble.

Sad_silhouette
I had one particular experience, in which I’d felt amazing the day that I took the drug… and really, really shitty the day after. Not physically shitty — I wasn’t going through withdrawal or anything — but emotionally shitty. I was going through a difficult time in my life, and the loss of that “everything is right and okay” feeling felt unbearable. Heroin felt right; not being on heroin felt wrong. And thank Loki in Valhalla, that spooked the hell out of me. I was able to recognize that as The Obviously Wrong Way To Look At Things. I never took the drug again after that.

I had access to a pleasure machine. And I didn’t want it. I wanted it at most maybe two or three times a year; and ultimately, I didn’t want it at all.

So this, I think, is my point:

Pleasure is not the same thing as happiness.

Potter
I can’t remember now where I read this, but I’ve seen studies showing that, while people often think that what makes us happy is lying on a beach with a drink in our hand doing absolutely nothing (or something along those lines), that isn’t in fact what makes us happy. That’s nice for a little while, but it gets boring fast. What actually makes us most happy is working on something that engages us. An activity that’s difficult and challenging, but within our capabilities. An activity that we care about, and that we can lose ourselves in. What makes us happiest is engaging in an activity that shuts up our chattering, nattering, critical inner voice, and lets us just do, and just be.

It doesn’t have to be a work activity necessarily. It can be, of course — I get it sometimes with writing, when it’s going really well, when I lose all track of time, when the pipeline between the dark pond of my brain and the bright world of words on a screen is flowing like blood through a healthy artery — but it doesn’t have to be. It can be dancing. Reading. Sex. Good conversation. Playing music. Listening to music: not passively and in the background, but really listening. Rock climbing (or so I’ve heard). Whatever. If we care about it and find it totally engaging of our consciousness, then that’s what makes us happy.

Waltzing1
I think about the peak experiences I’ve had in my life: the non- heroin ones, the moments of blissful, ecstatic atheist transcendence and peace. And while, on a purely visceral level, heroin may have been more pleasurable, the other experiences were far more satisfying. I felt replenished afterwards, not drained. I felt strengthened for the difficult and tedious tasks ahead of me, not saddened and burdened by them. I felt like something had been added to me, like I had become larger and richer and more complex; not like something had passed through me and then disappeared, leaving nothing behind but a memory and a longing for more.

Heroin gave me pleasure. These other experiences made me happy. And I’d rather be happy.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve got nothing against pleasure. Pleasure is important, too. Pleasure can also connect us with our deeper selves and the world around us. (And for the record, I’m not anti-drug, either. While I do think drugs should be approached with caution and good information — and while I think heroin in particular is a serious minefield — I don’t think there’s anything wrong with taking the occasional vacation from your usual state of consciousness.)

And I’m not saying that I’ve found the secret key to happiness, which I’m revealing in this 1,417- word blog post. I haven’t.

Gears
I’m saying this: I think that a happiness machine, pretty much by definition, wouldn’t make us happy. Not for long. Not unless it magically replicated the experience of engaging with a meaningful and challenging activity in the world around us. The experience would begin to pall. The human brain being what it is, we’d either become addicted to it — which isn’t any fun — or the experience would lose its charm. Happiness isn’t about capturing a frozen moment of perfect time. Happiness, by definition, is about moving forward through time, and through the world.

And more to the point, I’m saying this:

One of the most common critiques of atheism is that, if there’s no God and no external meaning to our lives, then we have no reason to do anything other than selfishly pursue our own happiness. So I’m saying this: The pursuit of happiness is not selfish. Happiness is not about sucking up as much pleasure as you can. Happiness is about engaging with the world, and being intimately connected with it. The things that make us genuinely happy — work, hobbies, family and friends — are, on the whole, the things that make us good. They are the things that make life richer and better: not just for ourselves, but for the world that we’re connected with.

On Happiness, or, Positive Atheist Philosophy #4,626
{advertisement}

Brief Blog Break, Plus Shameless Self- Promotion Op, a Fun Game, and Blog Carnivals

Wedding rings
I’m going to be out of town for a few days, officiating at the wedding of my friends Chip and Hayley. I’m bringing my computer and will check in on the blog now and then, but it’s unlikely that I’ll have time to post anything new until after I get back. Don’t expect anything new here until Monday or Tuesday.

In the meantime, why don’t y’all use this post for some shameless self- promotion. If you want to plug your blog — either a particular post or just your blog in general — here and now is the place and time to do it. Or if you have a project you’re working on that you want to tell the other readers here about — or there’s a post on another blog that you think is keen and want to plug — you can do that as well.

There’s also a fun contest over at Friendly Atheist that you might want to check out. The rules: Replace any word from the title of, or a line from, a book about atheism… with the word “Pants.” (Example from one of my own submissions: “Pants: The Failed Hypothesis.”) Winners will get a nifty Friendly Atheist bracelet. And just reading the submissions so far is about twenty five hoots.

Finally — blog carnivals!

Carnival
Humanist Symposium #32 at A Superfluous Ramble.

Carnival of the Godless #110 at The Greenbelt.

Carnival of the Liberals #84, at Submitted to a Candid World.

And Skeptic’s Circle #105, at It’s the Thought that Counts.

That ought to keep you busy while I’m gone. Have fun, and I’ll see you soon!

Brief Blog Break, Plus Shameless Self- Promotion Op, a Fun Game, and Blog Carnivals

Ninth and Bryant Parking Garage: A Review

I’m a little slammed with deadlines right now, so I’m re-running an old piece from back when my blog was smaller, one that a lot of you may not have read. This is one of my very favorite pieces — I hope you enjoy it, too.

Ninth and Bryant Parking Garage: A Review
by Greta Christina

A Dadaist masterpiece.

Coffeepot
This brilliant, unsettling work of contemporary installation art sets itself firmly within the Dadaist and neo-Dadaist tradition. With its blind alleys, impossible turns, and trajectories that lead nowhere, it echoes the functionless functionality of Meret Oppenheim’s “Fur-Lined Teacup,” Marcel Duchamp’s “Impossible Bed,” and, more recently, Jacques Carelman’s “Coffeepot for Masochists.” The influence of M.C. Escher on the piece is undeniable as well. Traffic patterns mysteriously blend from opposite directions; narrow passages twist in on themselves; and the piece as a whole seems to contain and entrap itself in a way that appears to be physically impossible.

Escher
Yet while “Ninth and Bryant Parking Garage” makes no attempt to conceal these classic influences, it nevertheless escapes being derivative. Both the gargantuan scale of the installation and its interactive nature give it a forcefully penetrative quality that differs significantly from smaller works of Dadaist and neo-Dadaist sculpture (which one can, after all, turn one’s back on). Once engaged with this unique work, it becomes virtually impossible to distance one’s self from it emotionally, or even physically. This quality is experienced in the details of the piece as well as in its massive scale. We particularly see it in the confusing and labyrinthine “exits” — indistinguishable from the “entrances” and even co-existent with them — compelling the participant’s awareness, not merely of the impossibility of escape, but of the absurdity of even contemplating it.

More significantly, the fact that the piece functions — although barely — as an actual parking garage merely serves to highlight the more disturbing aspects of the work. Poised on the liminal region between function and non-function, it forges a connection between creator and audience that is interactive and yet singularly hostile. Unlike typical artwork which attempts to create a bond of understanding and insight between artist and viewer, “Ninth and Bryant Parking Garage” seeks to entice and enfold the audience members, only to frustrate and alienate them. It is a self-contained paradox, a connection which seeks only to sever itself.

Towels
The location of the installation in a literal urban shopping center brilliantly underscores this contradiction. The dreamlike — or rather, nightmarish — qualities of the work are thrown into sharp relief when one contemplates this juxtaposition. One wishes to accomplish simple tasks of survival or comfort: buying towels, or a coffee maker, or even merely bread and milk. And yet the “parking garage,” a construct ostensibly designed to facilitate these tasks, instead thwarts the participant at every turn, and tasks which should connect one with the warp and weft of one’s life instead become distancing and enervating. The audience participates in the work, even becomes one with it, and yet is entirely at its mercy. It is a vivid, haunting metaphor for modern civilization and its self-negating contradictions.

Bedbathbeyond
“Ninth and Bryant Parking Garage” is located off of Ninth Street between Bryant and Brannan, adjacent to Trader Joe’s and Bed Bath and Beyond, in San Francisco. The installation is scheduled for an indefinite run.

Ninth and Bryant Parking Garage: A Review

Happy Birthday To Me!

Happy_birthday
Happy birthday to me!

Last year, when I turned 46, I wrote a silly little non-rhyming birthday song inspired by evolution and loosely based on the children’s classic (“Happy birthday to you/ You live in the zoo/ You look like a monkey/ And you smell like one, too”). It went:

Happy birthday to me
I don’t live in a tree
But I look like a primate
Because I am one.

Today I’m turning 47. (A fact that I’m ever so slightly freaked out about, as it means I am now officially in my late 40s). So I’ve decided to keep this tradition going, and have written another evolution- themed self- aggrandizing birthday song. And this one even rhymes! It goes like this:

Happy birthday to me
I evolved from the sea
I’m a cousin to plankton
And the rat and the bee.

So happy birthday to me… and Happy New Year to all of you!

Happy Birthday To Me!

The True Meaning of Christmas

So what does Christmas really mean?

War on christmas

Among all the traditions of the holiday season, one that’s becoming increasingly familiar is the War on the Supposed War On Christmas. In this tradition — one that dates back to the sweet olden days of overt anti-Semitism — the Christian Right foams at the mouth about the fact that not everyone has the same meaning of Christmas that they do, and works themselves into a dither about things like store clerks politely recognizing that not everyone is a Christian by saying “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” Because in the mind of the Christian Right, it somehow disrespects their faith and impinges on their religious freedom to share a country with people who feel and act differently than they do.

Okay. Insert rant here about how the Christian Right isn’t actually interested in religious freedom and respect for their faith. They’re trying to establish a theocracy. They don’t care about religious and cultural plurality. They don’t care about the fact that winter holidays mean different things to different people, and that different people celebrate different ones and in different ways. They don’t care about the fact that not everyone in the country is Christian, and that lots of people who do call themselves Christian are actually pretty secular in both their everyday life and their celebration of the winter holidays.

No, scratch that. They do care about it. They think it’s bad.

But that’s not actually what I want to talk about today.

In the face of Bill O’Reilly and company screaming hatefully about the true meaning of Christmas, I want to talk — in true grade-school essay form — about what Christmas means to me.

Because I actually like Christmas.

Lights_in_the_tree

Christmas; Solstice; Hanukkah; Kwanzaa; Festivus; “the holidays”; whatever. I don’t have a strong attachment to any particular name or date or occasion. Any mid-winter holiday around the end of December will do. Lately I’ve been calling it either “the holidays” or “Santamas” (in honor of what Bart Simpson has described as the true meaning of the holiday: the birth of Santa). I was brought up culturally Christian, though, with Christmas trees and Santa and all that, and I do tend to refer to it as Christmas at least some of the time.

And I love it. I always have. I know it’s fashionable to hate it, and I get why people get annoyed by it — but I don’t. I love it. It’s one of my favorite times of the year.

And here’s what it means to me.

Axial_tilt

I think that holidays tend to rise up naturally out of the rhythms and seasons of a particular geographical area. And in parts of the world where winter is a big nasty deal, I think it’s almost inevitable that a winter holiday, at right around the darkest, shortest day of the year, is going to become the biggest holiday in the culture.

It’s been noted many times, for instance, that Hanukkah is far from the most important holiday in the Jewish religious calendar. What’s less well known is that Christmas isn’t the most important holiday in the Christian calendar, either. Christmas is pretty much a pagan midwinter holiday shoehorned into the Christian religious calendar for convenience. From a strictly religious standpoint, Easter is a much bigger ticket. (Getting born? Big whoop. Everybody gets born. Dying on the cross as a sacrifice for our sins, and getting resurrected three days later because he’s God? Now that’s what they’re talking about.)

Xmas shopping

And yet — in parts of the world where winter is a big nasty deal — Christmas has almost entirely eclipsed Easter, for all but the most devout. Christmas gets an entire month of frenzied eating and drinking and shopping and traveling and party-going and family drama. Easter gets — maybe — a nice dinner or brunch, plus for kids it acts as a sort of secondary candy- frenzy holiday to Halloween. If the holidays were really about Jesus, we’d be having a nice quiet dinner with friends and family in late December, maybe with a hunt for hidden chocolate Santas for the kiddies… and a massive social and economic whirl in March or April. As it’s commonly celebrated — at least in the U.S. — the meaning of Christmas is only partly about the Christian religion. And a pretty minimal part at that.

So what is the meaning of Christmas? Solstice? Santamas? The holidays? Etc.?

It’s cold. It’s dark. The days are short, and the nights are long. Life is harder than usual right now, and we’re cooped up in close quarters more than any other time of the year.

So let’s celebrate.

Whoville

Let’s sing. Let’s decorate. Let’s eat and drink. Let’s light candles and put up electric lights. Let’s have parties. Let’s visit our families and our friends. Let’s give each other presents. Let’s spend time together that’s specifically devoted to enjoying each other’s company, and take part in activities — like gift- giving and parties and big group dinners — that strengthen social bonds.

Let’s remind ourselves that life is worth living, and that the cold and dark won’t be here forever. Let’s remind ourselves that we care about each other, and remind ourselves of why.

That’s what this holiday means to me.

Happy holidays, everybody!

The True Meaning of Christmas

The Great Gruesome Christmas Carols

Christmas carols

And now for something completely different.

I’m one of those freakish people who actually likes Christmas carols. Not the gloppy, cutesy, “Suzy Snowflake” modern variety so much (although I do have a soft spot for “Silver Bells”), but the soaring, haunting, gorgeous classic ones. “Angels We Have Heard On High,” “The Holly and the Ivy,” “The Angel Gabriel,” that sort of thing.

And one of the things I like about them is how totally freaky some of them are.

There’s this annual Christmas party I go to every year (although I had to miss it this year, damn and blast), at which the singing of Christmas carols and other seasonal and not- so- seasonal music is a centerpiece. A few years back, I went on the Internet and pulled together a lyric sheet, so we could actually sing all the songs all the way through instead of tapering off pathetically after the first verse.

And you know what I found? Some Christmas carols are truly gruesome. Startlingly gruesome. Freakishly and hilariously gruesome.

So I thought I should share with the rest of the class.

We start with a classic: the fourth verse of “We Three Kings of Orient Are.”

Myrrh

Myrrh is mine, its bitter perfume
Breathes a life of gathering gloom;
Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying,
Sealed in the stone cold tomb.

I love that one. It rings out so lustily — especially when a room full of eggnog- tiddly heathens is belting it out.

Then we have this gem: two little lines from the 1865 “Greensleeves” parody rewrite, “What Child Is This”:

Crucifixion

Nails, spear shall pierce Him through,
The cross be borne for me, for you.

Well, it definitely reminds you of the reason for the season. You can’t deny that.

Then we have the lesser- known, but haunting and really quite lovely “Coventry Carol” (here’s the tune, in case you don’t know it). With this charming third verse:

Slaughter of the innocents

Herod the king in his raging,
Charged he hath this day,
His men of night, in his own sight,
All children young to stay.

The fourth verse is a charmer, too, although somewhat lacking in the vivid “dead children” imagery:

Then woe is me, poor child, for thee,
And ever mourn and say,
For thy parting not say, nor sing,
By, by, lullay, lullay.

But the best — the very, very best, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords of gruesome Christmas carols — has got to be the “Corpus Christi Carol,” a.k.a. “Down In Yon Forest.” There are different versions of it, but the one I found when I was putting together the songbook goes like this:

Dead knights

Down in yon forest there stands a hall
(The bells of paradise I heard them ring)
It’s covered all over with purple and pall
(And I love my Lord Jesus above anything)

In that hall there stands a bed
It’s covered all over with scarlet so red

Under the bed there runs a flood
One half runs water, the other runs blood

On the bed there lies a knight
Whose wounds do drip down both by day and by night

By the bed there lies a hound
Who laps at the blood as it daily drips down

At the bed’s foot there grows a thorn
Which ever so blossomed since Jesus was born

(Here’s a nifty folk-Goth version of it by my friend Tim Walters and his occasional project Conjure Wife; here’s a YouTube video with a more conventional rendition, although for some reason it’s lacking the verse about the vampire dog.)

So Merry Christmas, everybody! And in the midst of this terrible, disrespectful, heathenistic War on Christmas, let’s all remember the reason for the season: a life of gathering gloom, flesh pierced through with nails and a spear, children slaughtered by a raging king, and — merriest of all — a half-blood, half-water river, blood dripping from a wounded knight, and a dog licking up the blood. Let me know if there’s any I’ve forgotten, or any I haven’t heard of yet. It’s the most wonderful time of the year!

The Great Gruesome Christmas Carols

The Sorrowful Mystery of Preacher Jenkins Part 1

My brother is (a) wildly talented, and (b) a strange, strange person. Which is good, since otherwise he wouldn’t fit in very well at family gatherings. (On both counts.)

He’s lately taken up filmmaking as a serious hobby, and has put a series of his short films onto YouTube. I like all of them… but this, I think, is his masterwork so far. Unsettling, beautiful, irreverent about religion and yet fascinated by it… you can see why I like it. (And it has his Blasphemy Challenge shoehorned into it, which Blasphemy Challenge fans should find interesting.) He films under the name PreacherJenkins, but he’s not a preacher — that’s just a nom de camera.

It’s The Sorrowful Mystery of Preacher Jenkins, Part 1. Video below the fold (since putting videos above the fold mucks up my archives). Or you can watch it directly on YouTube.

Continue reading “The Sorrowful Mystery of Preacher Jenkins Part 1”

The Sorrowful Mystery of Preacher Jenkins Part 1

A Patchwork of Income: Making a Living as an Artist

Writing

I had this revelation recently about making a living as a writer. It came to me kind of absurdly late in my career, given how obvious it’s now seeming. And it’s occurred to me that, if it took me almost twenty years to figure this revelation out, there might be some other struggling writers and artists who haven’t figured it out yet, either.

So I’m going to share the wealth. If you’re a writer — or any kind of artist — trying to make a living at it, here’s the advice I wish I’d gotten ten or fifteen years ago.

OceansEleven

For years, I’ve been thinking about making a living as a writer in terms of the One Big Score. The major- publisher book deal. The regular gig for the big-name magazine. That sort of thing.

And as a consequence, I’ve had a tendency to think of littler scores — moderate bits of income from smaller publishers — as a low priority. I’ve always been happy to get them, of course; but I’ve tended to look at the littler scores as stepping stones, ways to get my name more widely recognized, so I could make bigger and bigger scores… which would also be stepping stones, on my way to the One Big Score.

(I should know better. I’ve seen enough crime/ adventure movies to know how dumb it is to stake your life and career on One Big Score…)

But I realized recently — somewhat to my surprise — that I’m actually making a fair living as a writer. I’m not yet working full- time at it, or making my full living off of it. But I am making something that vaguely resembles real money — a substantial portion of my income, money that I use to pay actual bills and stuff — from my writing.

And it’s coming from lots of small and moderate -sized payments, from lots of small and moderate -sized publishers and sources.

In no particular order, it’s coming from:

Advertising income from my blog
Donations and subscriptions to my blog (thanks, everybody!)
Regular columns for online periodicals
One-time projects for anthologies or other publications
Royalties from book sales

(And I’m not counting the fact that about 75% of what I do in my day job is copywriting and book editing.)

Calculator

No one piece of this is hugely substantial. But it all adds up: not quite to an income, not yet anyway, but to a genuine part-time job. (And a nice side benefit of a patchwork income is that, if one piece of it falls through, it’s not a disaster. It’s a temporary annoyance.)

Oh. One more essential thing. (She said sneakily, saving the zinger for last.)

Many of these little pieces?

I wouldn’t have them if it weren’t for the blog.

Money

And not just the obvious pieces, either: the ads, the donations. Both of my current regular gigs for online publications — the Blowfish Blog gig and the FriendFinder/ Alt.com gig — I got, at least in part, because publishers or friends of publishers knew about my blog. Some of my anthology pieces and other one-time paid gigs are reprints of blog posts… and that’s becoming increasingly true as I build a larger body of work here. And the blog — and the fact that I can do ad trades with other blogs — is becoming one of the primary ways that I promote my books.

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: If you’re writing, you have to blog. You just do. I — don’t look at me that way. Point that gun somewhere else. Get off the window ledge. I know that blogging is a time suck. I know that it feels like you’re giving away for free what you’re trying to make a living at. I know that a blog takes a lot of work to do right… and an insane amount of patience to stick with for long enough to get any kind of traffic and traction out of it.

But here’s what I’ve said before, and will say again: If you’re a writer in the early 21st century, and you don’t blog? It’s like being a pop musician in the mid 20th century, and refusing to let your songs be played on the radio. You’re denying yourself what is probably the single most powerful outlet currently available for publicizing your work.

That’s all something of a side point, though. It’s an important side point, and one I’ll continue to evangelize about; but it is a side point. So let me get back to the main point.

Which is this:

Patchwork quilt

Building a writing career, or any sort of artistic career, is very rarely about getting the One Big Break, scoring the One Big Score. It’s more like sewing a patchwork quilt. No one piece of a patchwork quilt is going to keep you warm… but all of them sewn together can do a pretty decent job of it.

By all means, keep trying for the Big Score. But don’t neglect the little scores while you’re at it. If you can get enough of them, the little scores can add up to a genuine career.

A Patchwork of Income: Making a Living as an Artist

Things I Like: Santa Fe

In the interest of fending off incipient crankhood and occasionally writing something positive and not critical, I am hereby inaugurating the “Things I Like” series. Ingrid and I were in Santa Fe recently for a family gathering: I was very struck by the city, which I’d never seen before, so I’m going to start there.

Santa fe

Santa Fe completely surprised me. In the course of about three days, it went from a city that I had almost no feelings or opinions about whatsoever, to one of my very favorite cities and a place I’m dying to go back to. Mostly because (a) it’s extremely beautiful, and (b) it’s extremely beautiful in a way that I’m not at all familiar with.

Most beautiful cities I know are beautiful in a pretty similar way: sparkly lights, magnificent towering architecture, gingerbready Edwardian/ Victorian/ Georgian houses with lots of fiddly little details. Santa Fe is beautiful in a completely different way from that. The architecture is simple, yet striking and distinctive: all smooth surfaces and rounded corners, with a style that seems both space-agey and incredibly ancient.

Santa fe 1
And it’s uniquely harmonious with its natural surroundings. I’ve never in my life seen a city that seemed so much like a natural outgrowth of the land: like a geological formation, or an odd form of plant life.

Plus it’s lousy with museums, and the food kicks ass.

A few high points:

Mxmusicians

The Museum of International Folk Art. The main gallery of this place is simply astonishing. It’s an immense, insane, exuberant jumble of brilliantly colorful folk art from every part of the world. The displays are set up less like standard museum displays and more like dioramas, giving them a look that’s alive and welcoming. Many of the displays aren’t even organized by country, but by theme — toy trains from around the world, or fake food, or angels and devils — again, giving it a feel that’s less like a museum and more like a visual version of a mix tape.

And just when you think you’re done, you look up, and you see more art hanging over your head.

It’s a subsuming, overwhelming experience, one that completely envelops you in astonishing, hilarious, wildly inventive, brilliant beauty. It made me want to laugh out loud the second I walked in, and made me want to applaud when I left.

Cup-of-chocolate

Kakawa Chocolate House. This is the chocolate shop that makes me want to spit on all other chocolate. It’s almost more like a living museum of chocolate history, recreating hot chocolate drinks from both European and Aztec history. You have to be adventurous — the flavors are spicy and strong and often quite unusual, with flavorings like chili, agave, pepper, rose, orange blossom, and cardamom. Ditto the truffles. Let me put it this way: our favorite truffle was the rosemary.

It may sound weird. But it completely works. The chocolate — both in hot chocolate and truffle form — is intense and vivid, yet delicately balanced. It’s chocolate that makes you sit up and pay attention, chocolate that makes you savor it, chocolate that reminds you that you’re alive. It was chocolate with the power to astonish and delight. It was a completely unique experience.

Ghost ranch 2
Ghost Ranch. Not so much the center itself, which was closed the day we were there. But the landscape in the area was a revelation. Like the city of Santa Fe, it was not only beautiful — it was beautiful in a wonderfully unfamiliar way. It wasn’t the beauty of lushness, of green forests and mountains and oceans. It was starker, and stranger, almost like another planet. I could see why so many artists get so ga-ga about the place. It looked like it had been sculpted and painted. It was magnificent.

Four stars. Greta-Bob says check it out.

Things I Like: Santa Fe

On Not Being a Crank

How do you be a critic without turning into a crank?

Any kind of critic. Social, political, cultural, whatever.

George carlin

When George Carlin died, HBO ran a marathon of all the stand-up specials he’d done for them, from the late ’70s until shortly before he died. We didn’t watch all of them, but we tuned in and out throughout the day, getting sort of a smorgasbord of his career over the decades. And I noticed a pattern.

In his later years, Carlin had improved his craft by leaps and bounds. His mastery of language, his perceptiveness about society, the cleverness of his barbs… all had sharpened to a razor-like edge over the years. (Not that they sucked in his earlier days…)

And yet, his later performances were not nearly as much of a pleasure to watch. The content had become increasingly negative, to the point where the shows got overtaken by jeremiads… not just against great social ills and hypocrisies, but against anybody who didn’t do things the way Carlin did, or who cared about things other than what he cared about. He’d turned from a fiery, uncompromising social critic using his extraordinary skill with language and humor to chip away at the greed and lies of the power structure, into an old man railing about modern technology and how nobody does things right anymore, and yelling at kids to get off his lawn. (Doing it exquisitely, I hasten to add.)

He’d become a crank.

A brilliant crank, but a crank nonetheless.

And I want to know: How do you avoid that?

I’m beginning to see crank tendencies in my own self. And I don’t like it. I’m finding myself more and more likely to see, and think about, and talk about, flaws. In everything. Movies, music, food, books, bourbons, blogs, decaf lattes, ideas, people. Even things that I like, I’m finding myself critical of: not entirely negative, necessarily, but hyper-aware of their imperfections… and hyper-willing to talk about them.

And I’m doing it in situations where it’s not always appropriate. Increasingly, I’m having to remind myself that I am not being asked for a thorough, unblinking, rigorously honest analysis of pluses and minuses when I’m asked a question like, “How do you like the soup?”

And I’m wondering: Is this a natural result of the work that I do? Is one of the job hazards of being a professional critic that you start turning into a personal one? Or a permanent one?

Your movie sucks

The way of crankery can be very tempting. For one thing, it makes life as a writer so much easier. Any writer worth their salt can write about things they don’t like, in a way that’s entertaining and funny. Witness the success of the Roger Ebert books, “I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie” and “Your Movie Sucks”. (Both of which have pride of place in our home, on the shelf in front of the toilet.) The hard job is writing enthusiastically about things that you do like without just stringing together a list of superlatives and sounding like a sap. (And the insanely hard job is writing about things that are mediocre. How many ways are there in this world to write “Formulaic but passably pleasant” without wanting to shoot yourself?)

And some of it is that being critical is a quick ‘n’ easy way to feel smart and superior. Especially if you have any sort of connection to hipster culture, which defines itself by what it doesn’t like almost as much as by what it does. (If not more so.)

And, of course, it could just be that I’m getting older. And for reasons I don’t at all understand, an awful lot of people get crankier as they get older.

And then, some of it may just be that I’m having a very, very, very long year, the sort of year that I hope I’ll be able to look back on one day and laugh grimly about, and my natural perky “glass half full” realistic- optimism has been getting just a tad irritable.

But I think that a lot of it is just habit.

Anatomy of criticism

I’m a critic. Professionally, I mean. It’s my job to, you know, criticize: to look at pros and cons, plusses and minuses, goals met and unmet, goals worth and not worth reaching in the first place. And I’m writing a lot on a topic about which I am very critical indeed — namely, religion.

All of which I’m basically fine with. I’m definitely not of the “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all” school. I think many not-nice things are important and need to be said.

But I feel like I need to watch this trend. I need to watch the degree to which it affects my personal life. And I don’t want it taking over my professional life completely. Thirty years from now, I don’t want people reading my blog (assuming that I have a blog in thirty years) and thinking, “Wow, she sure is a good writer — but she sure does complain a lot.”

Any thoughts?

Olympics

The best idea I’ve come up with about this is to make an effort — a conscious, disciplined effort — to at least sometimes write about things that I like. I’ve even thought about turning it into a series: the “Things I Like” series. That’s sort of what I was doing with my recent Olympics piece. I could easily have written a piece of that length — hell, longer — about all the things I don’t like about the Olympics and the media coverage thereof. It would have been interesting, and it would have been valid. But it wouldn’t have been all that original — my critiques have all been made before, many times and by many others. And mostly, I just didn’t feel like going there. I was already starting to think about this crank issue (I’ve been thinking about it for a while now); and since I was, in fact, having a good time watching the Olympics, I decided that this time, I wanted to go to my happy place.

But I’m looking for other strategies for crankery avoidance, other than just Occasionally Write About Stuff I Like. And I’m wondering how other incipient cranks deal with this. Writers especially, but really anybody. How do you stay critical of society as the years go by without turning into a curmudgeon? How do you stay realistic about the half-empty part of the glass without getting absorbed into it?

What are your thoughts? What are your strategies?

And while I’m thinking of it: Would you, in fact, like to see a “Things I Like” series in this blog?

I’d love to know. It would take me to my happy place. Thanks!

On Not Being a Crank