Tarot Solutions: Tarot Resources for Boston and Beyond

Wrapping Up, Moving On

2010-08-21T12:10:00.003-04:00

After several years as a tarot consultant, I've decided to give up my office space and to ramp down my tarot biz.

The office decision is a logistical one. I've loved being in my adorable, serene office in Somerville for the last 3.5 years, but now that I've moved to Brookline it takes me 1.5 hours to get there by public transportation. And now that I'm paying for my own apartment, rather than living with a roommate, I really need the money I've been spending on office rent.

The decision to dial down the tarot biz itself has been a slower and more emotional process. Tarot has been an important part of my life since 1992, and I'm not planning to give it up entirely. I'll still be seeing my regular clients, and offering free readings to friends and family members when they hit a turning point or a roadblock.

But I'm a marketing professional in my day job, and I just don't feel like marketing my tarot biz as well. All my marketing creativity goes toward my gig working for a nonprofit here in Boston. I love that job, but I don't want to take it home with me.

So, I'm going to leave this blog up here as an archive of my thinking and writing about tarot over the last few years. I hope it's useful to people who have interest in tarot. I'm also happy to answer questions from other tarot practitioners or tarot fans via email (tarotation at yahoo).

Thanks for reading, and best wishes to you all!

-Anya

Reading for Coworkers

2010-06-24T15:47:00.002-04:00

I’m a part-time tarot consultant, full-time marketing writer and editor. At all of the day jobs I’ve held since I started doing tarot for money, my day-job colleagues have come to me to get tarot readings. Is it professional for me to read for them?

My instincts say yes. First of all, I make sure never to pressure a colleague to become a tarot client. If my tarot biz comes up in conversation, it’s usually because they’ve heard about it from another coworker, or because they mention an interest in tarot spontaneously (yes, it does happen in corporate settings!).

Also, a tarot session won’t necessarily bring up deeply personal issues—especially if my coworker/new tarot client doesn’t want it to. After about a decade of doing these coworker readings, I’ve never had anyone ask a question that could have impacted our business relationship (for example, by disclosing a workplace indiscretion). Personal stuff does come out in these sessions, but my clients are doing the driving, and they know the rules of the professional road.

There have been times when I’ve read for someone and they acted a bit shy around me for the next few days, as if they were worried they’d revealed too much. But that’s rare. Usually, it deepens both our personal and our professional bond. By reading tarot for them well, and proving to them that I can keep their secrets, I earn their trust. By respecting my tarot career, they earn mine.

PS This all reminds me of how some people I know won’t “friend” their coworkers on Facebook. I understand their reasoning—it takes a bit more attention to manage a FB account if you want to share certain photos and updates with only some of your friends. For me, I friend people whose voices I enjoy, whom I know (sometimes casually, sometimes deeply), and whom I’d like to loop in to my life a bit more (and vice versa). If that’s someone I happen to meet at work, I’m fine with that.

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Moving from Somerville to Brookline

2010-05-27T10:54:00.006-04:00

Change is in the air here at Tarot Solutions.

Over the last year, I lost my day job, spent 10 months hunting for a new one, and am now happily employed at a Boston nonprofit.

I also decided to find my own apartment after many years of roommate life. So as of June 1, I’ll be moving from Somerville, MA to Brookline, MA.

I’m thrilled to have found a cute place in a great neighborhood, and it will be fun to decorate my new home, have friends over for dinner, and be free to--it’s weird, the phrase that comes to mind is “jump on the bed.”

I had a dream about a year ago in which I’d found a small, beautiful apartment full of light, up in the trees somewhere. In the dream I was joyfully bouncing on my bed as if it were a trampoline. I kept that vision in mind as I was apartment-hunting, and I’m hoping my new home will have that combo of peace and pure energy.

So, how does this affect the tarot biz? For now, not much. I’ll still have my terrific office in Somerville through the end of my lease there this fall. So I’m still booking clients for my Saturday office hours.

I’ll also be scheduling evening appointments in the study rooms at the Brookline Public Library. They are private carrels, big enough for two--nothing fancy, but free, comfortable, and with a door you can close and enough space to lay the cards out.

Happy Memorial Day! I hope this holiday weekend gives you the chance to jump on the bed--whatever that means to you.

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Tarot Abstinence

2010-03-28T21:11:00.002-04:00

I recently got a job offer after ten months of intensive hunting. I had some reservations about the position, but there were also a lot of good reasons to say yes. I wound up accepting the offer, and so far the job is going great.

While I was mulling over this big decision, I debated using my tarot cards to help me. But something held me back. I wound up not seeking any tarot guidance at all, either from my own decks or from my friends who are readers.

This may seem counterintuitive—after all, what are tarot cards good for if not to guide us in making important choices? I’ve helped tons of clients weigh the pros and cons of job offers for years, so why didn’t I do that for myself?

For one thing, I knew that, even if this position turned out to be imperfect, logically I still should probably take it. It was in my chosen field, the pay range was appropriate, I'd been hunting for nearly a year, and none of my reservations were really alarming.

So if I’d asked “Should I say yes to this job?” and had drawn some extremely negative cards—I would probably still have said yes to it. And then gone in with my shields up, prepared for battle.

Somehow though, asking felt as if it would weaken, rather than strengthen, me. I’m still not entirely sure why. I believe in getting as many viewpoints as possible from sources I trust before making a great leap. And my cards are certainly a trusted source.

I did a reading for myself after accepting the job but before my first day of work, asking what I should expect from the new position. I drew a card that shows a bunch of guys whacking each other with sticks. (Oww...)

This card is about a competitive, creative, and chaotic environment. My new job does have some of those qualities. There are tons of projects going on at any given moment, and my role is to balance my time and energy among them all. But the posturing and ego-brandishing aspects of this card (so far at least) don’t seem to be in play at my office.

Part of me feels cowardly for not having done the reading earlier. I wonder if I was partially protecting myself from fear. Starting off in a new work environment, where I didn’t know anyone, was a terrifying prospect (it’s been over a decade since I’ve been in that situation). Maybe some part of my unconscious mind wanted to limit my access to “bad cards” that might have made me feel even more nervous.

Are there questions you wouldn’t want to ask in a tarot reading? Are there certain moments when it’s better to follow where logic leads, without bringing intuition into the process? Or am I simply a doofus for having held off on asking these questions until it was potentially too late?

The Super Punch Tarot

2010-03-02T08:40:00.004-05:00

John Struan over at Super Punch asked a bunch of artists to help him celebrate his blog's third anniversary by designing tarot cards. The resulting Super Punch Tarot is fascinating, with art styles ranging from Art Noveau to Pop Surrealist. Fabulous stuff!

I especially dig The High Priestess, by Tom Whalen, and The Queen of Wands, by Cormac McEvoy.

Thanks to Cory Doctorow for posting about the tarot deck on boingboing.

Tarot Client Demographics

2010-02-21T20:42:00.003-05:00

Since I love data analysis, I decided to take a look at the demographics of my tarot clients to see what patterns might emerge.

This data set comes with asterisks. My client list is fluid, and people cross from “active” to “inactive” and back again fairly frequently. So the numbers below aren’t hard science. But they are pretty decent ballpark figures, at least about the people I’ve read for over the last year.

90% of my clients are female.

Most are in their late 20s to mid-40s. 10% are 55 or older. 3% are under 22.

They’re mostly white. 3% are Asian, and 10% are Hispanic.

6% identify as gay or lesbian. The rest are straight, or don’t share their orientation with me.

15% have children. 42% have a spouse, life partner, or serious boyfriend/girlfriend.

I’ve only discussed religion with about 20% of them, but at least 12% of my clients are Jewish, and at least 3% are Christian.

The most popular professions among them are:

Writing/editing: 21%
Financial/sales/marketing: 12%
Massage/physical therapy: 9%

About 15% are freelancers or self-employed, and 18% are students (either full-time or part-time). About 6% are retired or not working.

They are united (100%!) by their curiosity, intelligence, and lively minds. And that's the stat that matters most to me.

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Owl in Flight

2010-01-31T21:26:00.004-05:00

I love this photo:

I saw it on Clive Thompson's blog, and tracking back, it's unclear who the photographer is. If anyone recognizes it, please post in the comments. I'd love to get a print of it.

There are lots of things I dig about it. Owls are fascinating and beautiful, for starters. Also, the photo quality is amazing – are those eyelids?

But what really thrills me about it is how counterintuitive it is. That round feathered body shouldn't be aerodynamic – but it actually is, in the same way a teardrop is. Someone commenting on the photo mentioned that her three-year-old thought it was a fish, which is all kinds of awesome.

Tarot can also be counterintuitive. There are fish-owls to be found on many tarot cards: creatures that are supposed to be one thing, but that leap out at my clients as something else entirely.

Sometimes that happens when a tarot artist messes up: they're trying to draw an underwater owl, so of course it winds up looking like a fish. Or, they just don't draw owls well.

Sometimes the images are deliberately ambiguous. The scarf around a woman's neck looks like a snake. The rocks in the water look like crocodiles lurking below the surface.

And other times, a client will see something in a card that the artist never intended, and that I've never seen there. And there's always meaning to be mined from what they see.

Tarot cards are not inkblots. They're representational drawings (at least in most decks). But our eyes and minds do their own shuffling. It's our uniquely skewed perceptions that really add variety to a tarot reading.

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The Virtues of Bragging

2010-01-24T09:33:00.012-05:00

I’ve been volunteering once a week critiquing resumes at a career center in Boston. And I’ve noticed two interesting trends: people are willing to lie on their resumes, but they often aren’t willing to take credit for their achievements.

First, the lying. People come in with resumes that list suspicious-looking credentials, such as “Child Abuse Preventer Certified.” When I ask them to tell me more about that certification, I’ll get an answer like, “Well, I’ll be honest with you. I made that up. I thought it would look good on my resume.”

There seems to be a widespread fantasy that making your resume look good (regardless of its accuracy) will get your foot in an employer’s door – and, once you’ve gotten the interview, the hiring manager will be blown away by your charm and will forget to check up on your credentials. Needless to say, it doesn't work that way, especially in the age of Google, where anyone can do a background check in a matter of minutes.

But oddly, though people are fine with lying, most of them don’t know how to brag. As Clay Shirky pointed out recently in a wonderful essay, this is especially true of women, who are brought up not to boast.

But a resume is a showpiece: it is a piece of elegant, streamlined boasting about your professional fabulousness. Why are people so afraid to let themselves shine?

Some of this is cultural. While most Americans are OK with exchanging praise, we’re taught to downplay our good points. For example, if a friend tells us, “Your hair looks great,” most of us won’t respond with an enthusiastic, “Thanks, I’m really happy with it!” Instead, we’ll say something self-deprecating: “Thanks, I finally got it cut. I was really sick of having it in my face all the time.”

People from other cultures are taught to deny and turn away any praise even more aggressively. (In China, the polite version of the same exchange would be: “Your hair looks great!” “No, my hair is very ugly.”)

Marketing is all about taking credit for your achievements – and make no mistake, your resume is a marketing piece. Think about all the things you did at your last job, or your current one. Did you teach someone to do something? Did you learn an online skill, such as blogging or maintaining a database or updating the company’s online news feed? Please, please get it on there.

People sometimes feel that if they did something outside of their job description, they’re not allowed to speak up about it on their rez. So untrue!

I’ve had people talk to me about how they trained several newer employees at their last job, showing them the ropes and keeping an eye on them as they scaled a steep learning curve. “So why isn’t that on your resume?” I’ll ask. “Well, I wasn’t officially their supervisor. That was someone else’s job.” All the more reason to brag about it!

Honestly and flair can and should coexist on a resume. As an experiment, try creating the most egotistical, obnoxiously braggadocious rez you can, and then tone it down just a hair. Send that one out, or just put it side by side with your tamer one and compare. As long as you’re bragging about stuff you’ve really done, a bit of ego in the job hunt isn’t just a plus. It’s an essential ingredient.

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Tarot as Improv

2010-01-10T16:39:00.005-05:00

I just watched Alex Karpovsky’s wonderful new documentary, Trust Us, This is All Made Up. The movie follows TJ Jagodowski and David Pasquesi, two masters of improvisational comedy, as they prepare for and perform a two-man improv show.

My associations with improv come from the improv teams I saw at college. Usually, the performers would have the audience yell out a location, a relationship, etc., and then would work with that info to create a scene from scratch. What Dave and TJ do doesn’t involve the audience in that way.

The two guys come on stage together, greet the audience (as themselves, not in character), and then one sits and one stands. They make eye contact in silence for a few moments. A quiet electric current seems to connect them to each other, to the audience, and to whatever is going to happen next.

Then, one of them offers a conversational gambit, such as, “Oh man, that was rough — you feelin’ OK?” And from there, they develop a 50-minute-long, multi-character play. None of it is premeditated or prewritten; if you see them three nights in a row, you will see three entirely different shows.

Karpovsky makes the excellent choice to show an entire 50-minute TJ & Dave performance. It’s exciting to watch their dexterity onstage. One of them will make a throwaway remark that the other takes up again 20 minutes later. They create characters, and then switch who is playing whom. It all feels organic and alive.

For me, the movie is as touching as it’s funny. These guys obviously love each other, and that’s what gives them the mutual trust that’s needed to do this kind of work. They also feel that they’re tapping into something bigger than themselves. TJ comments that, in their minds, they’re temporary participants in an ongoing story — one that started before they got there, and will continue after the curtain comes down.

Tarot has many similar elements to improv, though it’s less of a performance and more of a conversation. But as with TJ & Dave’s shows, it’s not about memorization. It’s about being able to listen to your partner (in my case, my client), react to their cues, trust each other, and see what story emerges. And it’s about tapping into a larger narrative, one that’s often hidden behind the daily plot of our lives.

I saw this “Trust Us...” screening via the Independent Film Festival of Boston, which shows movies all year long in addition to their stellar springtime festival itself. As producer Adam Roffman explained, b-side, the distributor, is trying some innovative ways to get “Trust Us...” out there. For example, until the official DVD release in February, anyone can obtain a free copy of the movie and can host their own screening. Creative!

Roffman also pointed out a Netflix trick I’d been unaware of: Netflix orders copies of movies based on how many people have the film in their queue. So, if you’re a Netflix junkie like me, I encourage you to put Trust Us, This is All Made Up in your Saved Queue. That way, Netflix will order more copies, which will support the filmmakers and help get the movie out there!

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Gluten-Free Tarot

2010-01-09T16:46:00.004-05:00

I’m reading Gretchen Rubin’s new book, The Happiness Project, in which she applies various formulas to create more happiness in her daily life. A lot of these ideas involve bringing something new in: new friends, a new hobby, new gestures of kindness and generosity toward her family. Others involve letting stuff out: closet clutter, rules about fun, expectations that others will recognize and praise her hard work.

I would define the changes Rubin attempts as “life-tweaking” (as opposed to the more violent-sounding “life-hacking”), and they overlap with my tarot practice. I coach my clients to release behaviors and patterns that they don’t need any more, and to invite in whatever’s been missing or depleted.

Bringing in, and letting go, are themes I've been working on myself lately. As a kind of early-2010 experiment, I’m trying some dietary tweaks to improve my digestive health. The latest attempted tweak is going gluten-free — that is, not eating anything with wheat in it. It’s really hard, especially socially. So many of our metaphors for friendly togetherness involve bread: breaking bread together, our daily bread, the staff of life, etc. Flour is comforting. Unfortunately, my insides aren't happy when I eat it. So, I’m giving it a rest.

So far, surprisingly, the largest consequences have been not digestive but mental. My mind feels clearer and calmer, measurably so. This happens quite a bit when people do a life-tweak: it may have a positive effect in a completely different area from what we were expecting.

How do we know what to usher out, and what to welcome in? Usually, one of three sources will give us a prompt: our head, our heart, or our gut. Tarot helps us get those three on the same page — or, at least, enables us to see where they’re having their differences. In fact, a useful three-card spread for the New Year is a Head-Heart-Gut spread, where one card is chosen to represent each of those three areas and to show what’s going on there.

What are you ushering out of your life in 2010? What are you making room for?

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Visual Artists in Havana

2009-12-22T17:12:00.007-05:00

Just got back from a week in Havana, Cuba. It was an incredible experience getting to explore the city, which is gorgeous, crumbling, vital, and eclectic.

Our group was on a cultural-exchange trip, so we did lots of activities centered around dance, music, theatre, film, and painting. Several of the visual artists we met have really stuck in my mind. Any one of them could create a terrific tarot deck, if they were inspired to!

We visited painter and collage artist Sandra Ramos in her home, which is one of the most tranquil places I've ever set foot. Ramos has exhibited internationally; you can see samples of her work here. She often uses an Alice-in-Wonderland-like central girl figure, sometimes twisting the girl's body into the shape of the island of Cuba itself. She also makes neat stereoscopic viewers that you can look into and see revolving, fragmented images, sort of like a self-twisting kaleidoscope.

We also checked out the studio of the lovely and gifted Rene Francisco, who does cool installations. One famous series involves Francisco collecting squeezed-out tubes of government-issued toothpaste (in Cuba, every family receives a ration of supplies every month, including anonymous-looking metallic tubes of toothpaste). Francisco transforms the tubes into little headless people; in his Tubo Sutra series, the tube people mate with one another, in every conceivable combination.

And here's me, very happy to be standing close to artist and printmaker Daniel Rodriguez. As far as I know, Daniel doesn't have a website. A lot of Cubans don't spend much time online, or even have access to the Internet. For those who do have computer access, the Internet is pretty tightly regulated by the government; as in China, Google exists in a somewhat censored version, where certain controversial terms and topics will yield no results. This is difficult in terms of allowing the Cuban people access to global information, but one positive effect is that all the Cubans I met spend a lot more time dancing and socializing (face-to-face) than they do online. This feels pretty healthy to me.

Anyway, I got to meet Daniel in the Gráfica printing studio in Old Havana, doing lithography. Flickr user ZedZap has a beautiful shot and a nice description of the studio building here. I bought a print of Daniel's called "Las Simetrías del Alma" ("Symmetries of the Soul"). Being in Cuba definitely made my own soul relax and breathe more deeply.

Heading to Cuba

2009-12-04T11:27:00.004-05:00

I'll be out of the country for the next week or so, attending the International Latin American Film Festival in Havana, Cuba. I've never been there before, and am both excited and nervous to have this opportunity.

People are always surprised when I tell them I'm not much of a traveler, but it's true. I was in the Peace Corps in China for two years, but that's different: that's not traveling, that's living somewhere.

I've visited several different continents, and fully realize how lucky I am to have done that. But I'm not one of those people who would travel all the time if they didn't have to work and had unlimited cash. I'm really a homebody, and a control freak, and the scariest thing about traveling, for me, is the loss of control.

On the flip side, there's nothing more rewarding than going to a new part of the world and talking to the people who live there. It's really moving and it shakes me out of my mental patterns in a completely different way from any other experience.

I'll be keeping my eyes open for tarot imagery in Havana. I'm not sure if there's a strong fortune-telling tradition there, but there's certainly a vibrant artistic scene and I wouldn't be surprised if I came across a tarot deck or two, and some habaneros who know how to use them.

I'll be back in Boston in mid-December and will be scheduling appointments with new and returning clients as we head into the New Year. As always, you can email me to schedule a session (tarotation at yahoo). My access to email will be sporadic on my trip, so I may not be able to get back to you as promptly as usual. But I'll be in touch when I return home.

Why I've Stopped Teaching Tarot

2009-12-01T20:57:00.004-05:00

For the last five years, I've been teaching Intro to Tarot classes at adult ed centers around Boston. This has ranged from lectures to one-night seminars to three-session courses. In a lot of ways, it's been fun, but I've decided that I'm done with it--at least for now.

Why? Well, the main reason is that I just haven't been loving the last few classes I taught. And when I don't love what I'm doing, I don't do it well. If I'm going to teach, I want to be an enthusiastic and fully-engaged teacher. And over the last year or so, I've felt like I was starting to phone it in.

Part of this is due to the way my tarot work has evolved over time. I've become more and more focused on the coaching applications of tarot cards, rather than on parsing individual card meanings. And I've found that it's pretty hard to teach my tarot method in just one night, or even three. I mean, I wouldn't expect to learn to be a life coach from going to a three-session Life Coaching class--it takes years of study, and layers of experience. So lately, it's been feeling like there's a disconnect between what I'm trying to teach, and what my students want to learn.

Yeah, the disconnect. This brings up another issue with my adult-ed classes: no way to pre-screen my students. A wonderful characteristic of adult-ed centers is that they attract all kinds of people, from all possible backgrounds, drawn by the relatively low cost and low time commitment. But these are also factors that are tough for me as a teacher. Not everyone gets what I'm doing with tarot--and I don't need them to! That's why I screen my tarot clients so carefully: I only want to work with people who really, really get what I'm doing. Because they're the ones I can help, and the ones who are the most fun for me to work with.

So when I find myself in front of a class who just can't shake their prediction addiction--heh, just made that one up! You know what I mean: people who are only interested in the dreaded when-will questions, not in really doing work and making change in their lives. They make me cranky. And I'm not good at teaching them.

I've met and taught many delightful people over the last five years, and many of them have expanded my own understanding of what tarot is, how it works, and what it can do. Thanks to all of you--and for those of you who've become my clients, now you know (if you didn't before) how picky I am about the people I choose to work with!

OCD and the Devil Card

2009-11-07T21:47:00.004-05:00

Ever come face-to-face with this guy?

I was at my therapist’s recently, and talked with her about something that had been troubling me since I was in junior high school. A recurring, disturbing thought had popped up in my mind from time to time over the last 20 years or so, and I’d never known how to talk to someone about it without sounding crazy.

So my shrink and I talked about this scary, ugly thought, and she said: “It’s an obsessive thought. It’s not a real thought, and it’s nothing to be scared of. Your mind just gets stuck in a crazy loop sometimes. When that happens, just tell yourself: Oh, there’s that obsessive thought again. It isn’t a real thought, and I don’t need to worry about it.”

This was massively reassuring to me. I’ve always had a pretty high opinion of my own sanity, but this thought had been nagging at me for years. And now? It’s not that it’s gone; it’s just that its power and venom have been extracted because I know that it’s not real. It’s a conditioned response, a biochemical reaction in my brain that gets reinforced every time I give it credence. And the best part is, I can rewire my brain so it doesn’t bother me very much at all.

I wanted to write about this here for several reasons. Some of you out there may also have a thought, a secret, or a troubling idea that you’ve been carrying with you for years or decades. Since this is a taboo topic in our culture, I wanted to emphasize how common it is, and how easy it is to get at least some relief from it.

In cognitive-behavioral therapy, it’s well-accepted that shining a light on a scary thought takes away the bulk of its power. This makes me think about the Devil Card in the tarot (the Rider-Waite-Smith version is shown at the top of this post). It’s a card about the Jungian concept of the Shadow: the darkness inside each of us that we expend so much energy not looking at. Talking about this Shadow is the equivalent of shining a flashlight in the Devil’s eyes. He’ll make a scared Scooby Doo noise and will drop the chains he’s holding you with.

I always point out to my tarot clients that, if you look closely at the card, the Adam-and-Eve nekkid people are chained up--but those chains are loose. They could easily lift them off and walk away. What a great therapy metaphor! And interestingly, the Devil is often associated with addiction. That fits right in: we can be addicted to any number of substances and behaviors, including our own thought patterns.

I just read a great book about OCD, called Brain Lock. My shrink says it’s her favorite on the topic, and it’s certainly both fascinating and practical. If obsessive thoughts or compulsive behavior impact you or someone you care about, I highly recommend it.

Could Tarot Have Saved Larry Gopnik?

2009-10-21T18:18:00.004-04:00

I just saw the Coen Brothers' new movie, "A Serious Man," and really didn't like it. Adding to my dislike was the strong sense that Joel and Ethan Coen didn't want me to like it. I'm not sure what drove them to make this movie; it seems to be a kind of exorcism, a purging of long-supressed cranky feelings around their identity as Jews and as filmmakers. Or, maybe they see it as a dark comedy and a character study, and that's it. But it made me truly uncomfortable, and I think that would make them happy.

There's been a trend over the last decade or so toward comedy that is built on the discomfort and embarrassment of both its characters and its audience. "The Office" uses this technique to generate its uneasy humor; so do Sacha Baron Cohen's movies. Paul Thomas Anderson also enjoys generating huge amounts of unreleased emotion onscreen, seeing how much tension his characters and viewers can take before they/we combust.

"A Serious Man" is about Larry Gopnik, played by the amazing Michael Stuhlbarg, a theater actor who's now branching out into film. Larry seems profoundly disconnected from his own life. He's a Jew living in late-1960s-midwestern suburbia, but his relationship to his faith is unclear. On the one hand, he seems absorbed into a Jewish community that includes his family, various rabbis, a lawyer, a dentist, and the foxy bored housewife next door. On the other hand, his son is preparing for his bar mitzvah, apparently with little or no contribution on Larry's part, and we never really understand whether Larry is observant, pretending to be a believer, or is unsure of his own faith.

Larry's wife dumps him early in the film, kicking off an extreme inner and outer crisis (even the weather is affected, a la Paul Thomas Anderson — remember the rain of frogs in "Magnolia"?). But Larry is deeply passive on all levels as his life dissolves into chaos. He is able to do little to fight back against the forces around him, and maybe within him as well. As Stuhlbarg plays him, Larry is almost a Willy Loman type: a guy who thinks that just going along, being a good, normal person, should be enough to ensure that his life won't go completely to hell. Like Willy, he is wrong.

I wasn't sure what the Coens were getting at here. Are they saying that there are no answers to life's big questions, no matter how hard we look, so we should just go with the flow? That doesn't seem to pay off for Larry. Are they telling us that to live without faith in anything will produce an unrooted and spiritually empty existence, but that to have faith in anything is pointless? Not that there has to be a lesson for viewers, but I was left feeling like something was missing — the heart of the story seems to have been bloodlessly excised.

Anyway, I was wondering if Larry could have benefited from a little tarot in his life. If I were the next-door neighbor, and I offered him a reading instead of a joint, what would have happened? Would he have been able to see his way out of the cage he had constructed for himself? Probably not. As Larry runs from rabbi to rabbi looking for answers, it becomes clear that his spiritual quest comes too little too late. Even the High Priestess would have slammed her book of secrets in his face!

Stuhlbarg, as it happens, looks (in this role) eerily like my grandad, also an emotionally repressed Jew, who died (to the best of my knowledge) encased in a shell of cynicism about human nature. I'm trying to picture myself reading tarot for Grandad Lou. Would he have let me? Would he have laughed at me? I'll never know.

New Online Locations for Anya's Writing

2009-10-12T14:17:00.004-04:00

In the past, I've used this blog to post a pretty wide range of content. I've written about tarot, but have also included movie reviews, book reviews, and job-hunt essays.

I want to get more focused with what I'm posting where. So, from now on, this blog will be tarot-focused. I'll continue to write here about my tarot consulting business, tarot applications and techniques, and any tarot-related appearances and publications.

Job-search tips will be going up at MediaBistro's user-generated blog, We The 'Bistro. MB is a wonderful resource for media professionals of all types. If you're a writer, editor, designer, online content manager, or anyone else who communicates for a living, I highly recommend checking out their email newsletters, blogs, and classes. They are the real deal and nothing they do is less than first-rate.

I share my book reviews on Goodreads. Please send me a friend request there if you'd like to see what I'm reading. I am always looking for recommendations, especially in the genres of mystery, fantasy/magic realism, and behavioral economics/sociology.

As for movie reviews, I've been in touch with a Boston paper about doing some film writing for them. This is still in the works; budget cuts there have hacked away a lot of freelancers. But I'm hopeful that this will come together sometime soon.

Thanks so much for the feedback you've been giving me about all my different kinds of writing! I love it when people let me know that something I've written has been helpful or interesting to them. Constructive criticism is always appreciated too.

Job Safari: Four Tips to Make Your Search Less Painful

2009-09-30T13:20:00.004-04:00

I’ve applied for 68 jobs over the last five months, and honestly, it’s been kind of a nightmare. The hardest part for me has been maintaining my cheerful attitude. I’m a happy, multitalented person, and in a normal economy I would not have to put myself through this, or at least not for this long. But our economy is still radioactive, and all of us job seekers are ducking the fallout.

In that spirit, here are a few tricks that seem to be helping me land interviews and (just as important) feel like I’m approaching my job safari with style, grace, and finesse, rather than abject desperation.

1. If you see a job posting, that interests you, apply within 24 hours.

It’s just so competitive out there! One position I applied for, at a high-profile nonprofit here in Boston, received 200+ applications within 48 hours of being posted. The managers took down the job listing at that point, figuring that they had more than enough fodder for their search already and that taking on more resumes would be self-defeating.

So don’t put it off while you work your connections at the company, hone your cover letter, or perfect your resume. Don’t rush your job app out there, but give it an hour or two of concerted effort and then send it.

2. Make sure the position’s still open before you apply for it.

Sounds obvious, but we’re talking about some surreally tight turnaround times here. One position, at a big-name university, was posted on a Tuesday. I applied on a Wednesday — or tried to. When I clicked the “send resume” button on the job-search website, an error message came up: the job was no longer open.

There could be several reasons for this. The school might have had an internal candidate and just posted the position publicly for legal reasons. Or they, too, might have received 200+ applications within the first 24 hours of posting the position.

Moral of the story: If you’re applying for a job off a site such as Monster, Idealist, or (especially) an aggregator site such as Indeed, make sure the job still exists. To do this, go to the source (for me, this would have been the university’s online job board) before doing your research and writing your application. In my case, I wasted an hour or so researching one specific branch of this university — time I could have saved if I’d gone directly to the school’s job page and made sure the position was still posted.

3. Dodge the trap of perfection.

My resume isn’t perfect. None of the four versions of it that I’m customizing for different types of jobs are flawless. But they’re all solid. My cover letters aren’t perfect, either, but they’re pretty good. I try to employ the 80/20 rule in my job apps: often, 20% of the effort will yield 80% of the results, and a lot of the time that’s enough. For example, spending 20 minutes on a company’s website jotting down notes and key phrases is just as effective as spending three hours on there researching every morsel of their mission, branding, and business plan.

4. Work your network, but don’t let the network slow you down.

My usual technique when I see a job posting that interests me is this:

I look on LinkedIn to see if I have any secondary connections there (that is, people I know who know someone at the company). If so, I drop my friend a line asking if they’d be comfortable e-introducing me to their contact at Company X, so that I can learn more about what it’s like to work there.

While I wait for their reply, I do my due diligence, researching the company, the open position, and anything from their branding that I can hijack in my application.

If the friend-in-law writes to me immediately, saying something like, “Don’t go through HR — just send me your cover letter and resume and I’ll pass them on,” I do that promptly.

If I don’t hear back from the friend-in-law within 24 hours, I send in my application through the usual channels. If I do wind up talking to the contact later, I can always ask her if she’d be OK with passing my resume and cover letter up the channels unofficially, or with dropping my name to someone in HR. It’s a good way to do an end run around HR purgatory.

I hope these ideas are helpful to my fellow job seekers! Good hunting, and let me know how it goes.

Package Deals

2009-09-14T15:41:00.004-04:00

Ready to Get Going With a Tarot Package Deal?

Great! Just email me at tarotation [at] yahoo, or call me at 617-314-3248. Or check out the Frequently Asked Questions below for more info.

What Exactly is a Tarot Package Deal?

No matter what the economy's doing, making sure my clients are getting their money's worth is a huge priority for me. If my clients are happy, I get repeat business and referrals and happy testimonials! Delivering results that are worth their investment keeps my tarot biz growing.

In that spirit, I offer a variety of package deals: specially priced three-session and five-session tarot packages, custom-designed for each client. I'm excited about this for a lot of reasons. First of all, working together over time allows me to really get to know my clients and to help them reach their goals sooner (and more dramatically!). Also, it works well for me, professionally, to have a more sustained relationship with the people I read for.

Why Isn’t One Consultation Enough?

Fair question. Honestly, one tarot session can be very useful — to get you going, to increase your clarity on a key relationship, to provide insight into a troublesome question. But one session is really just the first step.

Think about going to one of these professionals:
• a personal trainer at the gym
• a therapist, psychologist, or licensed social worker
• a financial advisor
• an acupuncturist
• a chiropractor

With any of those practitioners, you’ll feel better after one appointment — but you’ll start seeing results after several appointments. Tarot is no different. You’ll certainly feel calm and clear-headed after one session — but you’ll start seeing true change if you come in for a series of sessions.

How Much Does a Package Cost?

My five-session packages cost $210. That’s a $90 savings off the hourly rate. For that investment, here’s what you’ll get:

• Five one-hour private tarot consultations, during which we focus on the issues and questions that are most important to you.
• Flexible timing. Some of my clients choose to do a session every couple of weeks, while others prefer to come in every couple of months. We can set up a time plan that works for us both, and adjust as needed as we go.
• Flexible location. I usually work out of my lovely and serene office in Somerville, Massachusetts. And that’s where I meet with new clients. But once we’ve started working together, I do make house calls and meet with clients in cafés, libraries, or other locations. We’ll work out what’s most convenient and the best setting for our work together.
• Customized card layouts that I design just for you. You get to take these with you after each session, and can make notes on them so that you’ll have a record of the work we do as the package progresses.
• Trouble-shooting with me as needed, via email, in between sessions.

I also offer three-session packages for $150. We can customize and design a package that’s the right length for you.

How Does Payment Work?

Payment for the entire package is required in full at the end of our first session. I accept cash, personal checks, and PayPal.

If, at the end of that first session, you decide that the multi-part package isn’t for you, no worries. You’ll just pay my regular one-hour rate for that session ($60).

How Do I Sign Up?

You can contact me via email: tarotation [at] yahoo [dot] com. You can also call me at 617-314-3248.

How to Book a Tarot Session with Anya

2009-09-12T09:22:00.005-04:00

Ready to Get Started?
To schedule a tarot consultation, please contact me by e-mail (tarotation +AT+ yahoo +DOT+ com) or give me a call at 617-314-3248.

Tarot Services and Rates

Private Readings
30-minute tarot consultation = $40 
60-minute tarot consultation = $60  

I do in-person readings only, most often in the Boston area (although if you are want to fly me to Maui on your private jet to read for you, I’d be willing to talk!). Because of the interactive style I use, I don’t do email readings or phone readings.

I meet clients and teach classes at my office in Somerville, MA. I also do readings in cafes and library study rooms. I will make house calls for clients once I know them.  

Package Deals
I offer specially priced packages of multiple tarot sessions to help my clients really go in-depth with finding clarity and solving problems. You can find more information on those package deals here.

Lectures and Classes
 I list upcoming lectures and classes on this blog. If you are looking for a tarot teacher in the Boston area, please contact me about your needs. I teach regularly at Brookline Adult and Community Education, and have also taught and lectured at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education and the Boston Center for Adult Education. Rates for lectures and classes are negotiable depending on the hosting organization.

Payment
I accept cash, personal checks, and PayPal, but do not accept credit cards at this time.

Tarot for Writers and Creativity Coaching
  A specialty of mine is working with writers and other creative people, using the cards to help them focus on their goals, break through writer's block, troubleshoot specific questions about their projects, and generate new ideas. It gives me great satisfaction to see my clients leave their tarot sessions feeling inspired.

Testimonials

2009-09-08T13:40:00.008-04:00

Revised March 2010.

My tarot reading with Anya was great fun—a relaxed atmosphere that allowed me to pose questions, and then to hear Anya’s interpretation of the deck as a result. You will be won over by her charm and her intelligence.
-Jodi Picoult, novelist

Anya read my tarot cards while I was taking a break between film screenings at the Independent Film Festival of Boston. It was a lot of fun and gave me fresh insights into some big life questions. Anya’s warmth and good spirits made for a great experience, and I left the reading feeling refreshed and energized.
-PJ Raval, filmmaker, Austin, TX

Before my reading with Anya, I had dismissed the Tarot as a parlor trick, something akin to the fortune teller at a county fair. But what I found with Anya was an entirely different experience. Anya uses the Tarot cards as tools to focus on the questions swirling in one’s mind, and her astute observations really helped me to clarify some big picture issues. This skeptic is now a convert.
-Lisa Borders, novelist, Boston, MA

Anya poses powerful questions that give guidance on immediate next steps...Weeks after our session, in fact, I’m still thinking about it and gaining fresh insights.
-Suzanne Carter, Ph.D., Senior Research Analyst, Groton, MA
dreamcurrent.com

Anya’s reading style creates a safe place to explore hard questions honestly.
-Cathy Elcik, writer, Boston, MA

The way that Anya uses the Tarot is both inspiring and practical. She dives deeply into the images on the cards and pulls you in with her.
-Carolyn Cushing, tarot consultant and non-profit managing director, Easthampton, MA

I’ve been wary of tarot for years (a combo of resistance to occult/new age, and sheer terror). But when Anya told me that she uses tarot to help creative types think through a “stuck” place, I decided to try it. And our session turned out to be extremely productive. Anya basically used the cards to help me tell myself a story about my creative process — where and how I was struggling with my writing, and how to get beyond that. I still don’t know how I feel about tarot. But I know I’ll go back and talk with Anya and her pictures again.
-Ron MacLean, fiction writer, Boston, MA

Anya is a remarkable Tarot consultant. What makes her reading exceptional is her absolute and gentle attention to the client’s concerns and needs. She is extremely astute and wise. I went away feeling like she had helped me to cut through a thicket into an open sunny clearing.
-Maria Montenegro, Writer/Translator

You possess sensitivity, strong intuition, an ability to connect with people, and an infectious thirst for knowledge. I highly recommend your services to anyone looking for guidance or an intuitive sounding board.
-Brent Sverdloff, Executive Director, BATS Improv, San Francisco, CA

Keeping Rates Stabilized

2009-09-06T16:08:00.003-04:00

My landlords at my beautiful tarot office just raised my rent! I don't blame them; we'd negotiated a discounted rate for last year's lease, with the understanding that it would go up if I renewed again this fall.

I'd been planning a rate increase for September 1, but I've changed my mind and decided to keep my current rates. I have a few reasons for doing so.

1. Things are still pretty tough out there. My clients come from a wide range of economic backgrounds, but I don't know anyone who isn't feeling the pinch these days.

2. My current rates are on the low side, but not absurdly so. I chose my current price point with great care. I need to be paid a reasonable amount for my time and my talents — otherwise I'd get resentful, and resentment and tarot don't mix well! What I'm charging now are rates I'm comfortable with, but which my target clients can afford (even the grad students and semi-starving artists!).

3. Every time I see a rate hike — whether on organic chickpeas at the supermarket, or on washers and driers at the laundromat — it deflates me a little. I understand that people are doing what they need to to get by, but I always have a moment of, "Really? You really need to gouge me that $0.45 more for my can of chickpeas? Really, ya do?" So, since tarot is a side hustle for me and I don't depend upon it as my primary income source, I don't see a reason to charge more for the services I provide.

On a related note, it's Fall Cleaning Time here at Tarot Solutions. Over the next couple of weeks, you'll see me updating my "Basics" posts — the ones about rates, testimonials, package deals, and how I approach tarot professionally. Those basics are always accessible from the landing page of my blog, near the top on the right-hand side. Please let me know if you notice any inconsistencies or errors crop up during this revision process. Thanks!

Mushiness in Tarot

2009-08-27T20:44:00.002-04:00

One of my clients sent me an interesting question recently:

What do you do when squirrelly mushy stuff comes up [in a tarot session]? Does it automatically signal confusion about the question? Uncertainty about what the “real issues” are? How do you work with a confused/ambivalent/ambiguous client to get a workable story from the session?

This certainly taps into a deep-seated vulnerability of the tarot-reading professional! One of the worst feelings I can have as a tarot reader comes when I am looking at the cards on the table, my client is looking at me expectantly — and I have no idea what to tell her.

Truly the stuff of tarot nightmares! Luckily, such a situation is extremely rare. Since I’m super-selective about my clients, I only read for people who are willing to stretch their minds a bit. The cards are designed to be universally applicable, so if I’m doing my job well, and you’re there with the desire to find some answers, we can usually apply some pretty specific meanings to each card.

But what about the dreaded “Duhh” moments, when it isn’t crystal-clear what a card means? It’s pretty common for there to be an outlier card in a spread. For example, let’s say my client and I have seven cards down on the table; he may tell me, “These six totally fit for me — they make sense, they resonate. But this one? Honestly, I have no clue.”

Sometimes this occurs because there’s something new brewing in my client’s life that she’s just not aware of yet. It’s still too far under the radar for her to be able to recognize it when it pops up in a reading. In that case, it’s pretty common for me to get an email two or three months after our session, saying “Ohhhh, that’s what that card was talking about. Now I get it!”

Sometimes a mysterious card requires pulling a couple of other cards in order to clarify it. For instance, maybe a card comes up that seems to advise cutting something away that’s dragging my client down. But my client doesn’t particularly feel dragged down; that’s not the problem she came in with. So that card isn’t speaking clearly to her.

So we draw another card, and it’s a court card — and it completely reminds her of her girlfriend or her husband, someone important to her. In that case, the meaning might be that the dragging down is something going on with that person, and that this situation is impacting my client, though perhaps not on a level she’s consciously aware of yet.

And sometimes a reading is burdened by what I like to think of as the Runt Card. You know how a litter of animals often includes one who’s smaller and weaker, who won’t survive unless he gets special treatment, like Wilbur the pig in Charlotte’s Web? Some spreads contain a Runt Card that doesn’t pull its weight. It doesn’t deliver the same meaning payload as the other cards on the table. It feels generic: “Of course I should ‘Follow my heart and trust myself.’ Any self-help book would tell me that!”

In cases like those, sometimes I need to cut my losses and just concentrate on the other cards. Honestly, tarot decks are drawn and read by humans, not seraphim, and some cards are just better than others — shinier, more of a gut-punch, with stronger characters and a more compelling story. Not every card in every deck can be my favorite. And there are certain cards that are my personal weak points: tarot muscles I still haven’t fully developed.

So these are all situations where some “mushiness” can creep into an otherwise finely honed tarot session. They’re an occupational hazard, but if I really know my decks, and if my clients are willing to go deep with me, we can usually navigate even these murky waters.

The Art of Carlos Ramos

2009-08-15T09:39:00.007-04:00

Oh, Carlos Ramos, where have you been all my life, and will you make me a tarot deck, pleeeeeaaaaase?

Mr. Ramos's collection of art inspired by Indian history and legend is going up right about now at the Corey Helford Gallery in Culver City, CA. Hat-tip to BoingBoing's David Pescovitz for letting us all know.

The image at the top of the post is of the elephant god Ganesh. The one that follows would make a great Hermit card! (Both images are copyright Carlos Ramos, shown here via Fair Use to spread his fame around.)

Cover Letter Clinic: The All-Important Flattery Paragraph

2009-08-13T20:35:00.005-04:00

In the course of my ongoing job hunt, I've sent out 52 cover letters (and with them, of course, resumes). I've been comparing notes with my fellow job seekers, and there's something I've been doing in these letters that most of them haven't. It seems to be working, in that I've been called for 6 interviews so far, so I wanted to share it here for what it's worth. I'm calling it the Flattery Paragraph.

I used to think that cover letters were the dumbest conventions ever. What is a cover letter saying other than, "I need a job, so please look at my resume?" I always viewed them as irritating hoops to jump through.

Over the last three months, though, I've discovered a surprising level of enjoyment in writing cover letters. There's an art to it. I don't claim to have mastered it, but I'm getting better as I write more of them. The sweet thing about a cover letter is that it lets you set yourself apart from the herd--and in this competitive economy, it is truly a herd of fellow job-seekers I am going head-to-head with every time I apply for a position.

Most cover letters are yawn-inducingly generic. The writer starts out by telling how they found out about the opening ("I saw your posting on Craigslist for the position of..."); then goes on to describe their relevant skills; then closes on a poignant, hopeful note ("I hope to hear from you at your earliest convenience").

Snoresville for the hiring manager! And for the writer, what a soul-deadening process, framing yourself as a generic commodity over and over again.

So, what I've been doing is inserting a Flattery Paragraph into my cover letters. The FP (usually my second in the letter) basically extols the virtues of the company to which I'm applying. It tells the hiring manager exactly what excites me about them--why the idea of working for them makes my heart beat a little faster. It massages the ego of the hiring manager, but more importantly, it shows them that I've actually thought about their organization, admire it, and have affection for it.

Sound screwball? Well, you don't want to go overboard on the flattery; this paragraph needs to be just as professional as the rest of the letter, and is certainly an OMG-free zone. But too many job seekers are afraid to flatter a potential employer. And flattery is a powerful, powerful marketing weapon. Research has shown that, even when people know they're being flattered, flattery is still effective in making them buy stuff. (And what they're buying here, potentially, is me!)

Here's an example from a cover letter that landed me an interview at a health-care-related nonprofit in New York City, with names changed to protect the innocent:

As a former Peace Corps volunteer, it’s important to me to work for an organization I can believe in, and Health Care Gurus sounds like that kind of place. Your mission makes so much sense: to improve the quality of life of direct-care workers, and thus of the people in their care. I was also impressed to see that you train inner-city women to become home health aides.

Masterpiece? Totally not. It's a little stiff and clunky. But that doesn't matter. Health Care Gurus is now all puffed up with pride. Their mission "makes sense"; they're "an organization [to] believe in"; they're impressive. They ate it up!

This also shows HCG that I did my research by going on their website and finding out some stuff about their programs. I've been trying to incorporate the catch-phrases and key terms that I see on an employer's website into my cover letter to them, thus using the power of their own branding as an asset.

Note that this only works if the emotion behind your words is genuine. If I honestly didn't care about HCG as a company, and their mission didn't resonate with me, I would have a hard time writing my Flattery Paragraph for them. This is why I'm trying very hard to apply only to places that I'm genuinely interested in--that I have at least a little crush on, if not a swoon-inducing state of lust for. They can tell.

Fellow job-seekers, do you use flattery in your cover letters? Has it been working for you? I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Movie Blog

2009-07-29T09:35:00.004-04:00

I've been writing a lot of film reviews lately and am really enjoying it. A glance at my tags shows that I've been writing a lot more about film than about tarot over the past six months.

I think that's a natural evolution; I'm still passionate about my tarot coaching work, but I'm taking some time to rethink and redefine what it means to me. Am I a life coach? Am I an as-yet-untrained therapist? These questions have been on my mind lately, and I haven't found myself inspired to write about the cards themselves, or about tarot techniques. And there are only so many "what-am-I-doing?" posts that will be interesting to my readers!

I'm also heavily involved in the quest for an editorial day job, which has been occupying a lot of my mental, spiritual, and even physical energy (my body feels drained at the end of the day unless I make it over to the gym to recharge my batteries!). I have only so much concentration to divide up, and frankly, my tarot marketing efforts have been sliding a bit. Not sure if this is a temporary downward dip, or a longer-term trend.

In any case, I've been thinking about giving this blog a rest, and focusing my attention on a new movie blog. This is still in the planning stages. It might be fun to do a collaborative blog; I'm friends with several women who are film reviewers, so we could do a Celluloid Ladies thing. Or I might just do a one-woman movie blog. I'm trying to think of a good title for it. I was thinking of building off the Chinese word for "movie," which is "dianying" (pronounced something like "DYEN-ying"). This literally means "electric shadow," which I find cool. But Electric Shadow also sounds like a new disposable razor! So I don't think it's quite right. Any suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

Movie Review: Blue Steel

2009-07-23T09:42:00.003-04:00

In a panting state of puppy love for Kathryn Bigelow after seeing her wonderful new movie The Hurt Locker, I decided to do a Bigelow Film Fest and catch up on some of her earlier work. So I rented her 1989 police drama, Blue Steel, starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Ron Silver. And let me tell you — this movie is terrible. Melodramatic, overwrought, underwritten, confusing, and if it had been directed by a dude, it would have garnered all kinds of complaints about its sexist message. Protected by her double-X chromos, Bigelow emerged unscathed, but it’s still an anti-woman, anti-sex diatribe — whether intentionally or (probably) not.

Part of the problem is that the film just hasn’t aged well. It was shot about 20 years ago, and certainly has a late-80s look, but it channels none of the idealistic energy that’s one of the best aspects of ‘80s cinema. Even violent, darker films from that era, such as Fatal Attraction or Jagged Edge or Presumed Innocent, have a real sense of emotional purity embedded in their paranoia. For example, Fatal Attraction traps us in a straight man's worst nightmare: What if you were a married guy who had an affair, and then the Other Woman turned out to be a psycho who stalked you and your family?

Blue Steel is certainly paranoid. Jamie Lee Curtis plays Megan, a newbie NYC cop who intervenes in a robbery her first night on the job, and gets entangled with Ron Silver, a crazy stockbroker (without even Global Economic Meltdown as an excuse!). Silver steals the mugger’s gun from the crime scene and sneaks away, so no one believes Megan that she shot the mugger in self-defense. Then Silver starts assassinating people around the city, having engraved Megan’s name on the bullet casings.

This is a shaky premise. Are we supposed to believe that Silver’s always been a nut, but that he just happens to be there on the night of this robbery, grab the gun, and use that as his cue to completely kirk out? How does he learn Megan’s name after leaving the scene with the gun? Is it realistic that the store clerk wouldn’t remember the gun that was pointed at him for a good five minutes?

Usually plots stay airtight at least for awhile before they get punctured, but Blue Steel has big holes right from the get-go. Megan has a tense relationship with her parents, because her dad beats up her mom. But we don’t see her do anything proactive about this, except for one false start late in the film. People seem to react badly to the news that she’s a cop, even laughing at the sight of her in her uniform. In 1990 NYC, I’m sure the police force was mostly male, but there must have been a fair number of female cops as well. The film wants us to believe that Megan and those around her see her as a freak.

The sexual messages of the movie are even odder. Megan seems to have little interest in men; her warmest feelings are for her best friend, Tracy (Elizabeth Pena), and seem to have a physical component that’s never acknowledged. In general, Megan shies away from questions about dating; it's unclear whether she's ever had a boyfriend. But she also invites a man into her apartment at the end of their second date — a rather precipitous time frame for a guarded, perhaps-virginal New Yorker. There’s also a ludicrous sexual sequence around the movie’s, uhh, climax, where it’s unclear exactly what's happening, or why.

Bigelow is trying to explore issues of power here. If you give a woman a gun, does that make her powerful? Certainly not, Bigelow seems to argue; it just makes it more likely that the gun-toting female or someone close to her will get hurt. That theme is raised over and over: a gun does nothing for you if you’re a woman, because people won’t respect you, even if you shoot them. What a depressing message.

Anything to like here? Well, Jamie Lee Curtis is a class act, and deserved much better material. It’s fun to see a young Richard Jenkins playing a smug attorney. That’s about it, though. It’s a creepy film, but not a thrilling one.

Movie Review: The Hurt Locker

2009-07-12T18:26:00.006-04:00

War is hell on earth, but it’s also a powerful narcotic. In Kathryn Bigelow’s scorching new film, The Hurt Locker, we watch three American soldiers count down the remaining days on their company’s tour of duty in 2004 Iraq. Their mission is to defuse unexploded bombs. These guys are heroes, most would say; their actions certainly save American and Iraqi lives. They’re also being pushed closer and closer to mental illness by each day they spend on their tour of duty.

Staff Sergeant Will James (Jeremy Renner) is the newest recruit, and at first appears to be nothing more than a macho cowboy. On his first mission with the team, he turns off his headset, a visceral up-yours gesture to the other two guys he works with. Sergeant JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) operates by the book, and is incensed by Will’s disrespect. Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) cycles between cynical and scared, like a hamster running in two wheels at once. Eldridge is attending therapy sessions with a smug colonel (Christian Camargo) who tells him things like, “War is a once-in-a-lifetime experience; you should make the most of it.”

The bomb team’s last few weeks in Iraq play out in a series of vignettes. The tension Bigelow generates is remarkable, since the stories are repetitive: the guys go out to defuse a bomb. They succeed, or don’t. People die, or don’t. Reducing it to those phrases sounds like the headlines we see each day: “15 Killed by Suicide Bomber in Tikrit.” It means everything; it means nothing. We see these young men trying to cope with the immensity of their mission, with being surrounded by hostility (or even murderous rage) literally at every moment. It becomes so tense that it’s hard to sit still; we wonder how much more we can endure. And then we remember that our soldiers (not to mention Iraqi soldiers and civilians) are living this, daily.

A drawback of war movies is that it’s often hard to tell exactly what’s going on. A bunch of guys are all in uniform, making it difficult to tell them apart; there’s fast movement and machine-gun fire and explosions. The Hurt Locker is crystalline in its clarity; editors Chris Innes and Bob Murawski slice the scenes like gem-cutters. The sound is perfect; we can always hear and understand every word that’s said — a remarkable feat.

And the actors feel like soldiers, which is so rare. Even in David O. Russell’s very solid 1999 war movie Three Kings, I never quite forgot that I was watching George Clooney, Ice Cube, and Mark Wahlberg, rather than three grunts on the ground. Bigelow has cast less famous actors here. Mackie was extraordinary as a drug dealer in Half Nelson, and I didn’t recognize him at all in this movie. Renner looks like a cross between Brendan Fraser and James McAvoy; his blunt features contain a world of hurt that is revealed, subtly, bit by bit. Geraghty’s role could have edged into Radar O’Reilly wimpiness, but he shows steel in some painful moments. One of the most affecting aspects of the movie is seeing his last remaining specks of idealism get blown away like desert sand.

The Hurt Locker is exciting, grueling, and feels nothing but pure and true. As we bring our men and women back from Iraq, and continue to suffer casualties in Afghanistan, it’s important to acknowledge what our soldiers in these wars went (and are going) through. The Hurt Locker gave me a better sense than any other movie of what war actually might feel like — in itself a patriotic gesture.

Stalking the Wild Career

2009-07-09T12:16:00.002-04:00

I got laid off from my day job about two months ago. Since then, life has both greatly sped up and greatly slowed down. A friend told me that, since her own layoff, she feels as if she is "floating in the world," and I know exactly what she means. There's a sense of disconnection without my community of coworkers to see every day. There's also a wonderful freedom in being able to allocate my own time. I'm feeling both very peaceful and deeply panicky. I don't enjoy being out of control, and I've never felt more so - though this is also one of those crises that can bring huge opportunities with it.

I'm continuing to grow my intuitive life coaching business, and my clients there are keeping me grounded (as are my amazing friends and family). It's fulfilling to know that I can help other people find their footing, even as my own feels unstable. It's not that there's no ground under my feet; it's that that ground used to be made of the smooth and creaky wooden floors of my former workplace. Now it's made of the pavement I'm pounding as I network; the grass of the park where I can sit, whenever I choose; the jello (not so tasty!) of the Global Economic Meltdown.

I love my tarot coaching work, and I would also love to be paying for my life by editing and writing. If you happen to know of editorial positions opening up, either in Boston or in New York City, I'd love to hear about them.

And if you're in the same boat as me, floating in the giant pool of layoff, hang in there - we're in good company! Drop me a line if you'd like to compare notes. And thanks to all those who've been sending me their ideas and good wishes - it means a ton.

Book Review: Drood

2009-06-26T19:36:00.005-04:00

Dan Simmons’s gargantuan new novel, Drood, is narrated by the real-life Victorian novelist Wilkie Collins. Collins wrote The Moonstone, which was the first English detective novel, and The Woman in White, an overblown but entertaining melodrama. Most of his other books are unknown today, and his fame has been greatly overshadowed by that of his frequent collaborator, Charles Dickens.

Simmons, in crafting a 770-page novel around the friendship and rivalry of these two men, is working in the same long-winded format that Victorian writers often used (though one assumes that Simmons, unlike Dickens, was not paid by the word). I can certainly imagine Drood being serialized successfully, as Dickens’s and Collins’s novels were in their day. (Perhaps chunking out books will become trendy again, in much the same way that chunking out albums into individual MP3s has.)

The plot is tantalizing: Dickens, at the site of a terrible railway accident, meets a cloaked and creepy-looking figure (the description sounds like Voldemort in the Harry Potter movies) named Drood. Over the next five years, this phantom — whether real, or fabricated or hallucinated by Dickens — becomes a driving force in the lives of both Dickens and Collins. Is Drood real? Does he truly dwell in a stygian “Undertown” far beneath the London streets? Is Dickens crazy? Is Collins nuts? Simmons plays with our delicate sensibilities as the characters’ behavior becomes progressively crueler and crazier.

By choosing Collins as his unreliable narrator, Simmons takes a page from Vladimir Nabokov’s playbook, and indeed reading Drood has some of the same cringe-inducing effects as does reading Nabokov’s Pale Fire, another story of rivalry between authors. But one weakness of Drood is, in fact, Collins’s narrative voice. Simmons does an OK job of throwing in the conventions of Victorian literary fiction — addressing the reader as “Dear Reader,” and so on — but Collins’s voice never quite belongs to another era.

I was reminded of the first story in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, set around the same time period, in which the narrator’s voice is so impeccably British (white) Victorian that it combines with and inhabits the setting. Simmons gives it a good shot, but his Collins never completely feels like someone from the Victorian age. For instance, Collins might have said either “different from” or “different to,” but would never have said “different than,” which Simmons has him say here. (Thank the gods that Simmons knows his lie from his lay, or matters would be much worse.)

The unreliable narrator convention creates its own set of problems and inconsistencies. Even when we mostly understand Collins’s increasingly irrational behavior, his actions aren’t always well supported by the plot, and his own perceptions of the events around him seem to shift according to the needs of the story. Simmons also jumps around in time quite a bit, which is jarring. The novel drags in its weighty middle, but its ending redeems that fault by being both deft and upsetting.

A lot of what Simmons does here is well played, and he obviously bench-pressed more than his body weight in Dickens research and Collins ephemera. Perhaps as a result of this research, this is a deeply horrifying book, much more so than I was anticipating. I applaud Simmons for forgoing the gaslight-romance approach to Victorian fiction, but his descriptions of the London sewage system and corpse disposal methods are a bit more graphic than they need to be. A Victorian gentleman, even one as unconventional as Collins, probably would not have gone into such nauseating detail.

My main feeling at the end was that I really need to reread Dickens’s novel Bleak House. And if you are any kind of a mystery fan at all, don’t deny yourself the pleasures of Collins’s The Moonstone. I’ve reread it three or four times, and love it more every time I do.

Boston's Best People-Watching Locations

2009-06-22T14:47:00.004-04:00

Boston is a pedestrian-friendly city for roughly 6 or 7 months of the year, when the weather’s conducive to getting around on foot. Lately, I’ve been scoping out spots where one can plunk one’s butt down and enjoy a fabulous view of passersby. These are my current top three spots for people-watching in the Boston area.

3. Chipotle Mexican Grill, 270 Elm Street, Davis Square, Somerville. I have mixed feelings about Chipotle. On the negative side, it’s a chain, it only allows its employees to play a certain variety of music, and there’s a kind of forced friendliness among the staff that feels more required than authentic. On the positive side, the food is fresh and tasty and cheap, they (at least claim to) use humanely raised meats, and their window view of Davis Square is a feast for the eyes.

Grab a stool by the window and you can watch people jay-walking across the heart of Davis, as well as the news feed from the Somerville Journal on the brick building across the square. If positioned correctly, you can even see the historic clock outside the Diesel Café up the street.

2. City Feed and Supply, 672 Centre Street, Jamaica Plain. I was here recently during one of JP’s First Thursday events, when stores display paintings by local artists and bands perform outside, all for free. City Feed is at the exact heart of the Centre Street commercial area, and the night I was there, they had an accordionist and a guy twisting balloons into hats for kids.

The level of mayhem in the store was intense; something about the combo of accordion music and popping balloons triggered a manic response from the attending children. Many of them ran around the store screaming, whacking each other with their balloon hats. However, this being JP, there was such a peaceful, loving vibe that the effect was sweet rather than infuriating. (One kid tried to stick his balloon hat into the accordion, prompting the musician to comment, “Yeah, that thing has a life expectancy of about one minute.”)

Under normal circumstances, City Feed is much more of an oasis. You can buy a freely traded coffee, a non-glutenous brownie, or a tasty sandwich and sit by the window, with a great view of the comings and goings at the Purple Cactus across Seaverns street.

1. Public Garden, downtown Boston. This is a charming park where you can take your kids on a swan boat, check out the cute Make Way for Ducklings sculpture, or sit and watch people. I recently saw a couple in their mid-30s, both decked out in circa-1987-punk garb, wheeling their baby in a Maclaren stroller. The baby was wearing an AC/DC t-shirt that was like a dress on him. Adorable!

The Public Garden is great for tree-watching, as well. The weeping willows there are astounding in their calming beauty. There’s something other-worldly about their size and serenity, and when the sunlight hits them correctly, they literally shimmer. There’s nothing sad about them, despite their melancholy name.

Those are just three of many great people-watching locations. Boston-based readers, what are your favorites?

Mind-Body Medicine Workshop at MSPP

2009-06-21T15:32:00.003-04:00

I recently went to an all-day workshop at MSPP about Mind/Body Medicine and the Relaxation Response. Two very impressive individuals ran it: Herbert Benson and Ann Webster, both of the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Mass General Hospital.

Benson, a cardiologist, pioneered research in the 1960s about how stress and relaxation affect physical health. At the time, this was considered absurd, and he was almost booted out of Harvard Med School for trying to study the cardiovascular and neurological effects of meditation on humans.

Now Benson’s work has been thoroughly vindicated; there are decades’ worth of studies measuring the strong effect stress has on many parts of the body, including the heart, the reproductive system, and the brain.

Benson’s an advocate of taking fifteen minutes a day to do a calming breathing exercise, in which one sits comfortably, focusing on a repeated word or phrase along with their breath. It doesn’t matter what the phrase is; it can be a religious prayer, a syllable such as “Om” or “Peace,” or any other word or phrase that has resonance and is calming to the meditator. So the basic action is to sit, breathe, and think the word or phrase as you breathe — for example, thinking “Peace” on every exhale.

This has measurable effects on people’s health. Ann Webster’s research has shown that cancer patients who learn and regularly use this relaxation technique experience less chemo-related nausea, as well as less depression and anger. Webster teaches breathing exercises like this one in her therapy groups for people with cancer and HIV, and for trauma victims.

Benson and Webster are both adamant that medication and surgical intervention are absolutely essential components of health management, but that self-care is an equally important component that is usually downplayed by doctors. They offer their breathing exercises as an actual prescription for their patients and clients, just as they offer prescriptions for medication when those are indicated.

Amazing work, and they’re now two of my idols. One of the many impressive stories they told: Researchers at an infertility clinic started teaching relaxation exercises to the women there, hoping to reduce the stress, depression, and anger that can often go along with trying unsuccessfully to get pregnant. The exercises not only helped with the women’s state of mind, but also greatly increased their fertility rates — much more so than any of the fertility drugs on the market today.

I like Benson’s approach to learning mindfulness, which is very difficult; it’s hard to sit and breathe and think “Om” and not have your thoughts wander from “Om” and your breath to a million other places. Benson’s advice is that when a thought intrudes, when you feel your mind wander, just think: “Oh well!” and go back to your breathing. Even if this happens thousands of times during your 15 minutes of daily meditation, you will still get a huge benefit. And as you cultivate the skill, the intervals between the intruding thoughts will get longer.

It’s so great to see these findings becoming widely accepted, and replicated in study after study. As greater numbers of scientists and doctors get behind mindfulness meditation and stress reduction, and these practices continue to gain ground on a national level, this can only be good for American health.

Mental Health and Life Coaching

2009-06-17T09:14:00.004-04:00

Lately, I’ve been pursuing my newly activated interest in mental health careers by reading psychology books and talking with social workers, counselors, and neuropsychologists, here in Boston and across the country.

There’s a lot of overlap between what I do in my tarot coaching work and what happens in a therapy session. However, I’m not a trained therapist or a licensed counselor. I’m always very clear about that with my clients, so that we don’t blunder into ethically murky waters, and I don’t overreach my grasp in terms of the help I can offer them.

But I’ve had a lot of people, from near-strangers to close friends, tell me that I’d make a great therapist. And I am certainly fascinated by psychology, especially the cognitive-behavioral model. So I’ve been wondering lately if this might be a good subject for me to delve into more deeply, maybe even entering a Ph.D., Psy.D., or MSW program somewhere down the road.

This line of thinking is exciting but also intimidating. I’m honestly not sure if immersing myself in a graduate program is what I want and need, and what would best serve my clients and take my coaching career to the next level. In one sense, I’m already doing the work that I love: working one-on-one with creative, thoughtful people, helping them break through obstacles to find satisfaction and serenity. Do I need another set of letters after my name to do that work on a deeper level?

There’s also the quackery issue. To a lot of mental health pros, tarot = New Agey, shady, sketchy, and weak. Psychologists are scientists, and therapy, while its relationship to science has always been an odd one, is based around research-supported techniques. There are certainly therapists who employ tarot cards in their counseling work, but there hasn’t been well-supported research (yet!) into tarot’s efficacy in a therapeutic setting.

However, that does open the door for me to really go in a fresh direction if I want to build my Ph.D. research around tarot. It’s unclear whether this would be welcomed in most psychology Ph.D. programs, but it’s a path that hasn’t been over-trampled yet. Bottom line: I’d want to be absolutely sure of the results I was seeking before jumping into anything as expensive, involved, and potentially exhausting as a graduate program.

So I’ve been doing a lot of processing about these topics. My decision, for now, is to read as much as I can about psychology and to take weekend and evening classes at several local schools.

Last week I went to a workshop at the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology, led by Herbert Benson and Ann Webster of the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Mass General Hospital. I’ll write more about that workshop later — it was pretty impressive — but one thing I noticed there was that, when I talked to other attendees, I described myself as someone who “runs a coaching business,” rather than as a tarot professional.

I’m at a point now where I must admit that what I love about tarot coaching isn’t the tarot cards themselves, although they are wonderful. What I love is working one-on-one with my clients to help them take their lives to the next level. Does this mean I’m a life coach? I hate that term. It has a dilettante flavor: someone who knows a little bit about nutrition, but isn’t a nutritionist, a little bit of psychology, but isn’t a therapist, etc. But honestly, “life coach” is a much more accurate descriptor of the work I do than “tarot reader” is.

This is all complicated further by the fact that I got laid off from my day job in early May, and am figuring out exactly what my next career steps are going to be. Another 9-5 job? At a college or a well-run nonprofit, perhaps? Part-time tarot coaching, part-time something else? Lots to figure out. I’ll keep you posted!

Movie Review: Outrage

2009-06-08T08:59:00.009-04:00

Kirby Dick is a muckraker; he revels in exposing the hypocrisy of people in power. His 2006 documentary, This Film is Not Yet Rated, called the Motion Picture Association of America to task for granting “R” ratings to graphically violent movies, while slapping the kiss-of-death “NC-17” on films involving sex, especially anything with gay themes.

Dick’s new doc, Outrage, puts another set of rule-makers on the hot seat: closeted gay politicians. The film’s thesis is as follows: there are tons of gay people on Capitol Hill; many of them (especially conservative Republicans) are in denial about their gay identity, and/or self-hating; thus, these closeted pols wind up creating and supporting legislation that hurts gay Americans, such as the Defense of Marriage Act or, tragically, the criminal lack of federal action to halt the AIDS epidemic during the 1980s.

This is fascinating material, and Outrage is highly appealing, in a Michael-Moore-ish, can-you-believe-this-is-going-on-right-under-our-noses-in-this-the-world’s-greatest-democracy kind of way. Unlike Moore, though, Dick doesn’t constantly inhabit the spotlight; in fact, we never even hear his speaking voice. This is a huge relief; it’s an unwelcome trend in recent docs (including Amy Grill’s Speaking in Code and Kate Churchill's Enlighten Up) to have the director provide a coy voice-over narration.

Dick falls into another documentary trap, though: he cares so much about his material that he verges into melodrama while covering it. “He’s never shared his story . . . until now,” a title card informs us at one point, with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer to the foot. The movie starts with a recording of Idaho Senator Larry Craig being interviewed or interrogated by police after his arrest for allegedly soliciting sex in a men's bathroom. Craig sounds bewildered and lost; later footage paints him in a wholly different light, but that opening audio almost makes it seem as if he’s being set up, which isn't what Dick’s trying to say at all.

Even the film's title is a bit heavy-handed. Dick, like Moore, doesn't much care if he veers into melodrama, as long as he’s able to tell a story that he feels has been squelched by the main-stream media.

Despite its occasional missteps, Outrage is useful for anyone interested in the evolution of gay rights in the United States. “Don’t tell me we have rights. We have no rights,” says ACT UP co-founder Larry Kramer; one of the film’s recurring themes is how little (if any) national legislation currently exists to protect gay and trans Americans. It’s also moving to see Log Cabin Republicans speaking about their experiences as gay legislators on the Hill, and former NJ Governor Jim McGreevey’s earnest, almost evangelical description of how freeing it was to come out of the closet.

One section of the movie involves the blogger Mike Rogers, whose mission is to out closeted pols with anti-gay voting records. I have very mixed feelings about Rogers’ work; forcibly outing people is a privacy violation and feels like a brutal act. However, Rogers makes the point that the people he outs are living quite visible secret lives that are completely at odds with their political legacies. He feels that this hypocrisy has taken away their right to privacy. I’m not sure I agree, but it’s a fascinating topic for debate.

I’d have loved to see more stats about how it changes pols’ voting records when they do come out; perhaps there just isn’t a large enough number of out pols to run the numbers on that. Another quibble is that the movie is quite guy-centric, at least in its chosen targets; aren’t there closeted lesbians wreaking havoc on Capitol Hill too? Even if not, that fact itself would bear mentioning.

Outrage is consistently engaging, and its message is important: it will injure your soul and your family if you’re a closeted civilian, but closeted politicians can do damage on a national level.

A.O. Scott's review of Outrage is here.

Fast Company's 100 Most Creative People

2009-06-04T08:28:00.007-04:00

Fast Company’s latest issue has already made my jaw drop multiple times, and I’m only halfway done with it. I’ve always been disposed to like this business magazine, both because of its cute name and because it once used the same office space as my now-ex publishing company in Boston’s North End. But I’d never bought an issue before yesterday, and I couldn’t be more pleased with what I found inside.

The June 2009 issue is themed around the 100 Most Creative People in Business, and this is neither hyperbole nor lie. The list is a stunning one, miles away from the business-suited crowd you’d expect. Those profiled include:

• Kenyan attorney June Arunga, who founded Black Star Lines, a mobile-payment network aimed at empowering and enriching African small-business owners

• Writers Neil Gaiman and Maurice Sendak, who are on the list because of their successful ventures into media (including film, theatre, and the blogosphere)

• Evan Williams, the CEO of Twitter (adorably, the write-up given to him is the length and style of a Tweet!)

And on the cover is Neri Oxman, “an artist, architect, ecologist, computer scientist, and designer” who works in the MIT Media Lab creating biomimetic nanomaterials. (Gesundheit!) Oxman is also a slammin’ hottie, and I appreciate how the magazine unapologetically showcases that without a trace of sexism or condescension. In fact, there are tons of chicks on this list, and they’re all there because they’re brilliant and extraordinary, not to fill a quota.

Wow. I love this mag. It reminds me a bit of GOOD magazine, but it appeals to me even more. GOOD profiles interesting people with cool ideas, but Fast Company requires that its subjects have already achieved financially quantifiable success. It’s reassuring and inspiring to see so many people making money through pure, rampant creativity. “Outside the box” is an understatement for these impressive souls.

Online photo gallery is here.

The Tarot Doctor Is In

2009-06-03T08:29:00.003-04:00

Lately, since I no longer have a day job, I've been able to make house-calls for my tarot clients. This has been extremely pleasant. I mean, I love seeing clients at my tarot office, but it's also fun to take the subway or commuter rail in the middle of a weekday to visit people in their homes.

It makes me feel like an old-fashioned country doctor, going door to door with my black medicine bag. As it happens, I just bought a new handbag at a yard sale that sort of looks like a smaller, more feminine version of a traditional doctor's bag. It's exactly the right size for a couple of my decks; I enjoy the notion of my decks being the "medicine" that I bring on my house-calls.

I haven't noticed a difference in the quality of these sessions; doing them at people's homes is slightly distracting at first, but once we start talking about the cards the surroundings just fall away. It also helps that the people I've been visiting are pretty well organized, so their homes aren't chaotic or dirty or anything else that would detract from the experience.

So, I like the Tarot Doctor idea. It also amuses me to think of myself as a Tarot Plumber, traveling over town to unblock people's (psychological) pipes. (Though if I were a plumber I'd be charging a lot more...Hmm...)

Movie Review: Revanche

2009-05-24T18:06:00.011-04:00

Reviewing Revanche kind of puts me in a bind. I'm a big believer in going into a movie knowing as little as possible about it, and that's especially necessary with this Austrian thriller. So, what can I tell you about it and still live with myself?

Well, for one thing, Revanche is as quiet and deadly as a scorpion in your shoe. There are scenes of extreme emotional violence, and some of physical violence. But the overwhelming impression is of the deep quiet of the countryside outside Vienna, where much of the action takes place.

The plot of Revanche is pretty simple, and some of it is predictable: whenever a movie criminal is planning a robbery, for example, it's a fair bet that Something Will Go Wrong. But the film constantly moves in surprising directions, without compromising the purity of its storyline.

The legendary film reviewer Pauline Kael used to say that a great suspense movie should rhyme, meaning that all its parts should fit together with relentless efficiency. The same can be said for movies in the film noir genre. Noir is a label that's usually slapped onto 1930s hard-boiled detective dramas, as well as their more recent descendants (such as The Last Seduction, Brick, and Blood Simple). At its core, noir usually involves people double-crossing one another, inevitably with tragic consequences.

One weakness of noir is that it often lacks a heart within the elegant skeleton of its plot. Much classic noir is cynical about human nature, which is fine, but can quickly become uninteresting. If all the director has to say is that people are craven and opportunistic, and will do each other wrong without batting an eyelid in the name of self-preservation, why should we care? Noir can also be mean-spirited toward its characters, using them as pawns in its storyline, in much the same way that these same characters exploit one another onscreen.

Revanche is noir — I guess we should call it "schnitzel noir," because of the Viennese setting — but director Götz Spielmann is merciful toward his characters, even as he inflicts terrible psychic carnage (and some literal carnage) upon them. Because of this, the movie becomes truly touching — an unusual quality in the noir family. It helps that the acting here is seamless and invisible, and that Spielmann's dry sense of humor keeps us from checking out in the film's darker moments. This is that rare shade of noir that stays with you after the lights go up.

Interview: Astrologer Dena DeCastro, Part 2

2009-05-19T15:41:00.013-04:00

The first part of my interview with Dena DeCastro is here.

What's the thrill for you in doing astrology work?
I get so excited when, during a reading, things come together in a way I couldn’t have anticipated beforehand. The unexpected things that happen, when a client shares with me how something I’ve said directly connects with an actual event or situation in their lives—these are powerful moments for me. I find myself continually amazed at how astrology really does work. And, when clients get excited about the reading, and find ways to apply it to their daily life, that is also thrilling for me to see.

What advice would you offer someone interested in learning about astrology?
One way of going about it would be to seek out a mentor whose work you are drawn to in the field, study that body of work in depth, then branch out to other related topics or teachers. By a “mentor,” I don’t just mean someone who is living, nor someone you necessarily need to meet. It could be a person whose body of work you’re intrigued by, so you read all of their books. But it could also be a living teacher, one with whom you can actually study.

The benefit of finding a living mentor/teacher is that it keeps you accountable to something external. We can be interested in a topic, but it’s hard to push through the tougher parts of learning the material without some guidance. What often can happen is that people pick up an interest in astrology, then get to a certain point, become frustrated, and give up. The amount of astrology books out there is overwhelming, so it’s hard to know where to even begin. Finding someone who has walked the path before you is a helpful strategy.

What was your motivation for starting your podcast? What have you gotten out of it?
My friend Leisa ReFalo interviewed me for her podcast, The Tarot Connection. I really enjoyed working with her, and found the interview process to be very exciting. She suggested that I could probably do my own podcast, and offered me some suggestions along the way as I worked toward launching it. I was motivated by wanting to connect with more people beyond the Portland area, and to provide a space for an educational podcast on astrology from a specifically evolutionary perspective.

What I’ve found is that I really love doing interviews, something I did not know about myself. My favorite part is getting to talk to people whose work I respect, and to dish with colleagues on various topics. I’ve also realized that, based on the emails I’ve gotten from listeners, there’s a great love of astrology out there, and a desire to understand it that goes beyond the sun sign columns. The astrological community is vast, strong, and supportive. It feels great to be connected to that community through the podcast.

What are your thoughts and feelings about tarot, and about its overlap with astrology?
I’ve used tarot since I was a kid (again, thanks to my dad). I’ve always owned a deck, or several. I don’t feel comfortable reading tarot professionally, but have gained much from using it for myself, friends and family. The two systems seem to overlap in that they both obviously come from the same root source of esoteric knowledge. And, both can be used either in a fatalistic, fortune-telling way, or as a tool for self-awareness. Tarot readings can be powerful in direct answers to questions that need more specificity than astrology can provide.

Astrology, in part, deals with recognizing repeating patterns and using them to improve our lives. Most people would agree that our society is currently in a state of flux and crisis (and, perhaps, opportunity!). Are the ongoing economic meltdown and environmental chaos part of an astrological pattern? If so, how can astrology help us deal with these big issues?
I would agree that we are in a state of flux that seems to be a pre-cursor to a “something big coming” that people have been feeling for a while. I don’t believe astrology can predict what will happen, but the symbology is lining up to pinpoint a timeframe in mid-2010 that looks like a window in which many things as we know them may be melting down. I highly recommend Richard Tarnas’ Cosmos and Psyche to anyone who’d like to do further reading on the subject.

I do see this window as an opportunity as well as a potential crisis. Our actions, combined with the karmic forces already set into motion, will as always determine the outcome. The economic crisis can be seen in the astrological patterns surrounding the time of the onset, and the environmental chaos is reflected by Pluto’s movement into Capricorn. To be clear, I don’t believe that the astrological movements themselves cause these things to happen: they are a reflection of the larger order in which these things have always already been unfolding.

Astrology can help us by giving us a larger perspective, by reminding us that we are connected to something outside of ourselves. As Hermes Trismegistus said: “As above, so below.” Through astrology, we can remember that we are connected to the planets, that they live in us, and that our awareness of their wisdom is a gift we’ve been given. With this awareness, perhaps we can allow ourselves to be guided, to ask for guidance, rather than forcing our will on the current situation. Then, we can use our free will to choose actions informed by this wisdom.

Interview: Astrologer Dena DeCastro, Part 1

2009-05-18T20:57:00.010-04:00

I'm pretty much an anti-astrology snob. In fact, I often find myself making fun of inane, bland astrological pronouncements ("Honesty is the best policy for Aries while Mercury is retrograde!"). This usually comes up in the context of explaining to my clients why tarot is so much more accurate and finely tuned to their lives than their weekly horoscope could ever be.

But once again, my stereotypes have gotten all smashed to smithereens, this time by the wonderful counseling astrologer Dena DeCastro. DeCastro offers insightful and profound consultations, both in person (she's based in Oregon) and over the phone. Her approach to astrology is spiritual without being flaky. She employs the same archetypes in her astrology work that I use in my tarot practice, and has similar goals: helping clients see themselves and their behavior patterns more clearly, so that they can make better choices and feel calmer and happier.

I emailed DeCastro some questions about her astrology work, and she was kind enough to share her thoughts about the philosophy (and psychology) she brings to the table. Because her answers were both long and interesting, I'm splitting the interview up into two separate blog posts.

I recommend both DeCastro's astrology services and her podcast, Evolutions of Astrology.

Photo courtesy of Dena DeCastro.

How did you originally get into astrology?
When I was a kid in the 70’s, my parents were interested in metaphysics. Very young, both in their twenties, and both ex-Catholics, they began experimenting with tarot, astrology, and aura reading. My dad did tarot readings for many years as a hobby, and my mom took a growing and serious interest in astrology. She learned how to cast charts by hand, and read charts for family and friends.

We always had many esoteric books on the shelves because of this. I remember being drawn to the astrology books right away. Practically as soon as I was able to read, I was into The Compleat Astrologer. I was also very intrigued by a book on the planets, the title of which I no longer remember. But what stays with me is that it had real pictures of the planets, along with artwork and mythology associated with each planet’s name.

When I was a teenager, I began to read more in-depth astrology books, and did basic readings of my family’s charts that my mom had. My mom gave me the seeds for the interest, and I have just kind of followed it all the way along.

How have your feelings or approach toward astrology changed in the years you've been doing it?
I had an awakening when I began to put myself out there as a professional astrologer. I had been coming from the more traditional, descriptive model of chart interpretation. What I began to feel was that the descriptive approach—in which the astrologer describes a person based on the planets’ placement in the chart—was limited, even though the description itself might often be accurate. For example, if someone has a Sun in Leo in the First House, with a Leo Ascendant, I might be able to describe their nature as outgoing, playful, warm and spontaneous. Well, that’s great, but even if it’s accurate, in some ways, the Leo probably already knew all that. I wondered: how does it really help someone to just reiterate what they might already know about themselves? And worse, what if it’s not accurate?

I found the same sense of limitation with the predictive model of astrology I’d mostly been exposed to growing up. In practice, it didn’t feel right to me. Of course, many people want answers about their future, and perhaps that’s why they seek out an astrologer or other kind of reader. But it felt wrong to me to try to predict the outcome for people, and as I did readings for myself and friends, I saw that prediction really does not work.

So, it seemed to me that something was missing in my approach. I felt the need to find more depth in astrology, and was actively searching for a mentor and teacher. I was led to the books of Steven Forrest, and attended NORWAC (the Northwest Astrological Conference in Seattle) to hear him, and many others, speak. Through that conference I learned of his Apprenticeship Program, and Evolutionary Astrology, which neither describes nor attempts to predict. Instead, the approach is to avail the client of their potentials, both their highest and their shadow material, and to emphasize the role of their free will in the creation of their lives. The principles of Evolutionary Astrology resonated, and I knew it was what had been missing for me.

You've studied psychology as well as astrology. What do you see as the intersection between the fields?
I’ve studied Depth Psychology, and believe that C.G. Jung’s works, as well those of Freud, Joseph Campbell, and James Hillman, have had a profound influence upon the field of astrology in the past century. The awareness of archetypes in the Jungian sense of the word particularly brings a dimension to astrology that was not there previously, and is integral to our modern understanding of it.

The main intersection between psychology and astrology is that both are ways of knowing the soul. Psychology is literally a “study of the soul” (psyche = soul), and astrology is a tool by which we can engage in that study.

Readers Studio 2009, Part 4: Breaking Down and Building Up

2009-05-16T11:46:00.007-04:00

Way back at the 2007 Readers Studio, Mary K. Greer taught a workshop in which we created a fusion of three tarot cards, making a crayon sketch that combined their images. Synthesis (or, as the marketing gurus call it, synergy) was a theme at RS07. We also worked with seeing how images in one tarot card connected to those in others, and explored how all the cards in a spread might be seen as connected within a three-dimensional space. This was fascinating, and I use those skills often in my tarot work.

At the 2009 Readers Studio, the emphasis seemed to be on breaking down the cards, rather than building them up and connecting them. Isolating a card's component elements is something I do pretty often; I frequently ask my clients to look at one of the cards in a spread and to see if any image within that card jumps out at them. Tarot cards tend to be very richly detailed, so usually there are many mini-visuals within the larger card image—so many, at times, that I've had clients point out pictures on my tarot cards that I myself had never noticed or paid attention to.

At RS09, breaking down a card into its components was a recurring theme. Geraldine Amaral suggested that we split a card into three parts: the left side representing the past, the middle the present, and the right side the future. You can also do this by looking at the top, center, and bottom zones of the card, and assigning Past-Present-Future to those regions.

I found this to be a useful approach, especially when one card in a reading isn't yielding its secrets as readily as the others. Often, most of the cards in a spread will make complete intuitive sense to my client, but there's an outlier card that leaves him or her saying, "Huh?" Using the zone division approach can be a nice way to dissect that card, cutting it up so that its juicy meanings spill out.

This is all sounding much more surgical than the process actually is! You don't really "cut up" a tarot card when using this technique; you simply focus your attention on different card areas. Still, this is a bit of a departure from the "wholism" approach, where you look at each card as an intact chunk of meaning, or as part of a larger message that gets completed and amplified by the cards around it. The real trick for tarot consultants is knowing when to zoom in, and when to zoom out.

Readers Studio 2009, Part 3: Aura Gazing

2009-05-13T07:53:00.021-04:00

The most useful, and most frustrating, workshop at the 2009 Readers Studio was, ironically, the most esoteric. DC-based tarot teacher Geraldine Amaral led our group in exercises aimed at honing our intuitive skills. One of these was aura reading, or, as I like to call it, aura gazing.

This entails focusing on someone's energy, or what Amaral called their "vibration," and perceiving those vibes as a particular color of the spectrum. Amaral taught us a step-by-step process for this. As always, when ushered into the lands of woo-woo, I was skeptical. But Amaral has a common-sense attitude and a calm, clear way about her, so I felt relatively safe in her hands. It isn't hard to find guides for aura gazing in books or online, so I won't go into the process here. But it basically involves entering a light meditative state, in which your rational, logical, Mr.-Spock-like left brain slides out of the driver's seat, and lets your intuitive, perceptive right brain take the wheel.

I enjoyed aura gazing much more than I expected to. We went up to a partner, asked their permission to try the activity out, took their hands, and gave them the once-over with our third eye. Amaral told us to relax and be open to any colors or other impressions that came our way.

This was an unexpectedly intimate activity. The act of asking permission—"May I enter your vibration?" was Amaral's suggested phrase—felt respectful, rather than silly (though I didn't use those exact words). It was a good reminder for me to check in with my clients before starting a tarot reading, making sure that they are ready before we get going.

I did the aura gazing activity with three different partners, and saw a vivid color almost immediately with each person I touched. I didn't see it literally or visually—there was no hazy cloud of colored light around them or anything like that—but the color did seem to project itself across the IMAX screen of my inner eye. Who knows whether these colors were my projections about each partner's personality, or whether I was picking up on their biochemistry or bioelectricity (both scientifically quantifiable) and translating that to myself as a color. Either way, it felt as if I was bestowing a gift on them when I told them what their color was.

When people read for me, there was no consensus as to how my aura is shaded. One person said it was "a beautiful lavender." Someone else saw it as light blue. My favorite description was that my aura is silvery, like a small, fast-moving waterfall made of mercury. I was totally flattered by that one!

My biggest problem (yes, I'm always the critic) came with the inconclusive manner in which Amaral closed this session. After finishing the partner work, we simply came back to our small groups and compared notes. Then Amaral opened the floor to questions. That was it. There had been a particular moment in the step-by-step process where Amaral asked us to "open the door" in our mind (our third eye, the symbolic door of intuition, or however we chose to understand that). But there wasn't a point at the end where she told us how to close that door.

I found that to be disturbing and unprofessional. Whenever you open a door—particularly an emotional or psyche-centered one—ya gotta close that door when you're done exploring whatever's behind it. Even for me, someone who was taking this inward journey as a symbolic one, it felt inconclusive not to close the door. For my friends who are believers in energetic transfer and psychic ability, not closing the door created a very, very weird vibe in the workshop room. "It's like a giant bowl of psychic soup," more than one person told me. "I can't stand it. I need to go outside."

I felt the same way; by the end of the session, the vibes in that room were truly funky—kind of the metaphysical equivalent of having 200 people work out together, and then not be allowed to shower.

So, that was a turn-off. When I asked Amaral about this later, she said something to the effect of, "Oh yeah, oops, I should have had you close that door. Sorry about that." I did not find this to be a sufficient response.

The aura-gazing activity itself had many benefits. It helped me stretch my comfort zone to encompass a greater degree of intuitive work; it also felt gentle, intimate, and quite calming. If we'd only been able to close the door on it, it would have been an absolute highlight, and the rest of the Readers Studio might have had a very different flavor as well.

Since our teacher neglected to show us how to close the door, I made a point of doing it myself on my train ride back to Boston. I held the chunky novel I was reading open on my lap, symbolizing the still-open "psychic door." Then I closed my eyes, and told myself that when I closed the book, the third-eye door would also close, safely and cleanly. I shut the book. I opened my eyes. The train looked the same. But I felt a mild satisfaction, as if a tiny energy drain had been repaired, and I was no longer leaking.

But I was still left feeling cranky. New-age teachers need to employ the same precision in their metaphysical work that a scientist would use to run her most exacting experiments. Just because intuitive work and energetic work can be mysterious doesn't mean it's okay for them to be messy. There are rules to be followed, and the farther out there you decide to go, the more crucial those rules become.

This all made me think of a quote from the chunky novel I mentioned earlier, Daemon, by Daniel Suarez:

In general, Sebeck viewed computers as a necessary fact of modern life. His chief complaint was that they gave a false sense of precision to poor thinking. But then, technology was like religion—you either had the faith or you didn't.

Tarot, aura gazing, and other metaphysical activities, when misused, can also give "a false sense of precision to poor thinking." In fact, at their worst, they can be excuses for people not to think. I love precision, and always try to be as accurate and deliberate as possible in my tarot work. Tarot is a tool, and needs to be honed, and used with respect, like any other. I was hoping to sharpen it at RS09; instead, I saw people jousting with blunt lances—and came away uninspired.

On Being Easy to Be With

2009-05-12T11:09:00.005-04:00

My dad and I recently spent time together at a family wedding in Charlottesville, Virginia. It was weird to be at a wedding with my father; the last time that happened was when I was about twelve. (Since then I've attended a few weddings solo, and a bunch more with various boyfriends.) But it was also a pleasant bonding experience, and gave me some insights into how my dad evaluates the people he meets.

If my father meets a new person whom he approves of, the most common phrase he uses to describe that person is "easy to be with." I have never heard anyone else offer this description of a new acquaintance; many of us tend to say that someone seems "really nice," or "very interesting," or simply "cool." But I think "easy to be with" is a huge compliment—and a rare quality.

Many wonderful, admirable people are not easy to be with. Especially those people who are bright, brilliant, fascinating—it may be an adventure to spend an hour talking to them, but it isn't necessarily easy. Other people make every conversation into a fencing match, heavy on the thrust and parry, which can be either fun or exhausting, depending upon how you feel about that kind of verbal jousting. Others are shy and require being drawn out. Again, not easy.

I think what my dad is getting at with the "easy to be with" designation is that there are certain people with whom it's just a pleasure to spend time. Conversation flows easily; they know how to both speak and listen; they are observant of (and humorous about) the situation in which you've been thrown together. They are aware of your comfort level and seek to enhance it. They keep a light-hearted way about them, regardless of any tensions that exist in their lives. Their default setting is to be interested, rather than to be bored.

I've realized that, when I screen a new tarot client, one of the things I look for is that they seem easy to be with: open-minded, engaged, and willing to communicate. I've been trying to craft my marketing materials to attract clients like these, and it's always a total pleasure to meet a new one.

An open question is whether it's worthwhile spending time with people who are not easy to be with. I tend to think that it is not, since non-easy people drain my energy and offer little in return. This isn't to say that I will only associate myself with perfect specimens of humanity—that would be self-defeating! But with so many folks out there to talk to, and to read tarot for, I feel that I can pick and choose. There's really no reason I've found to waste my time on anyone I don't enjoy.

And my dad's favorite phrase has inspired me to ask myself, once in awhile, how easy to be with I am. This isn't about accommodating myself slavishly to other people's rules of behavior. It's about being open to, and engaging with, the people I meet—clients, family, friends, and colleagues. I'm certainly not 100% E2BW, and probably never will be. But it's a nice goal to keep in mind.

Readers Studio 2009, Part 2: Power of Silence

2009-05-05T08:55:00.008-04:00

The first event of the 2009 Readers Studio was a workshop called “The Power of Silence,” taught by Wald and Ruth Ann Amberstone. The Amberstones run the Tarot School in NYC, and they’re beloved throughout the tarot community. Their school is considered one of the preeminent places to learn about tarot, and they are firmly committed to helping tarot people share knowledge and skills. The annual Readers Studio is their baby, and this was the seventh year they’d put it on.

I have huge amounts of respect and affection for Wald and Ruth Ann. Their kindness and devotion to tarot are impressive, and they’ve done as much to bring tarot people together as just about anyone alive. But this workshop—my first time ever taking an actual class with them—was an enormous disappointment.

From the title, I was hoping that the class would focus on the use of sound and silence during a tarot session. Knowing when to speak and when to listen is an important tarot skill, and one I am constantly trying to hone. There’s huge cultural pressure against silence in North America; in fact, I can only think of one setting where a professional has employed silence as a tool during a conversation with me—ironically enough, in talk therapy.

Wald did touch on the impact that judicious silence can have in a tarot session. He mentioned that we often feel the urge to blather on about a card's myriad associations, but that it can be beneficial simply to sit, regard the cards, and breathe before speaking to our client. He added that this strategic use of silence can make our clients hang on our every word, which I believe. Because most people are incapable of letting silence pool around them comfortably, when someone does make that choice it is startling and makes them appear thoughtful and even sage-like. (I’m no sage, but “fake it until you make it,” right?)

Regrettably, that was the only useful piece of info to be gleaned from the three-hour workshop. The rest of the time, Wald pontificated about how it’s possible to communicate with inanimate objects, and urged us to enter a meditative state and have a conversation with a coffee cup, a spoon, a notebook, or some other incidental item on the table.

I made a good-faith effort to converse with a teaspoon, but I wasn’t able to relax into the activity for several reasons. For one thing, the connection with tarot wasn’t made clear until very late in the workshop, when Wald had us try this same communication activity with a tarot card. So I felt as if I’d been shanghaied into Zen Bootcamp without my consent.

More importantly, I firmly believe that any answers you get when you ask a coffee cup a question are projected onto that coffee cup by you. The cup does not speak. I’ve certainly had moments of communion with trees, rocks, and other natural objects, but I did not need to spend $75 to be told that an electric candle has a story to share with me. Of course it does, in a way—every object in the universe is significant, and there’s value in contemplating any one of them. But they are not alive, waiting to speak to us. To assert that they are feels arrogant and sets off my warning bells.

Wald seemed interested in whether or not we were “able to do this,” but that wasn’t the issue—it wasn’t a case of “able” or “unable,” but rather of not agreeing with his basic premise. Ultimately, I felt resentful at having an activity imposed upon us that was not very closely related to tarot, not very practical, and taught at a slow pace that made staying conscious a challenge.

This started RS09 off on the wrong foot for me. I am a big believer in getting good value for my money, and I think that presenters at a conference should always, as Elizabeth likes to say, overdeliver—give you more than you expected to get from their workshop, class, or hands-on session. “The Power of Silence” was the first of several RS09 events where I felt that people were underdelivering—offering lots of talk without many practical applications, hitting their easiest notes without stretching themselves, or simply not acting as if the audience was their priority.

I don’t remember having that sense at all at RS07, the last Readers Studio I attended, and I’m not sure why it pervaded this year’s conference. But regardless of the reason, underdelivery was an issue at RS09, and nothing is more draining for me. Sadly enough, I often felt bevampired and depleted, rather than fulfilled, stimulated, and challenged.

Readers Studio 2009, Part 1

2009-05-04T13:33:00.006-04:00

I just got back from the Readers Studio, an annual tarot conference held in Newark, NJ. I'd been once before, in 2007, and was incredibly excited to head down there on the train from Boston with my friend Cathy. We went in search of new tarot techniques, community, inspiration, fresh decks, and professional development.

At the conference, the following things happened, not in this order:

1. Three people read my aura (each of them seeing it as a different color).
2. I had to change hotel rooms at 3am due to a herd of bellowing post-prom teenagers on my floor.
3. Two necklaces of mine were stolen (not by tarot people).
4. I discovered two beautiful new tarot decks, the Roots of Asia deck and the Transparent Tarot.
5. I got laid off, over the phone, from my day job. More accurately, I learned that my company was going under and that everyone was getting pink-slipped.
6. I was almost drowned under a colossal tidal wave of self-congratulatory tarot ego.
7. I met some really great new people, and reconnected with some others I'd met two years ago.
8. I assumed the identity of a deposed empress of Pluto for a tarot role-playing exercise.
9. I was impressed by the friendliness of New Jersey Transit employees.
10. My friends and I briefly got lost in a desolate, poorly-lit maze of Newark highway on-ramps and off-ramps, before making it safely back to our hotel.
11. On our way back home, Cathy and I overheard two flight attendants on the airport shuttle mocking the New Age crackpots who would attend a tarot conference.
12. I kinda wanted to agree with the flight attendants.
13. I saw several people getting plastered on the Amtrak train back to Boston. Amtrak serves alcohol--this I did not know!
14. Several people invited me to "enter their vibration," and requested to enter mine. Stay tuned for whether or not I said yes.
15. A fortune-teller told me all about my next love--what he's like, how we will meet, and a potential stumbling block in that relationship. Did I believe her? Watch this space...
16. A number of other tarot readers told me that my next career step will be toward a mosaic of jobs, rather than one big nine-to-five.
17. I asked about my heart's desire and turned over a card showing an elephant falling off a cliff. This was actually not a bad thing.
18. I tried out psychometry for the first time, with the creator of the Aeclectic Tarot forum. It did not go well--but hey, I never claimed to be a psychic.
19. At Corrine's invitation, I served as a Tarot Ambassador, helping newbies learn the ropes and feel comfortable. This was an honor and made me happy.
20. I rebelled against instructions to become one with my coffee cup.
21. I ran an emotional gamut more surreal than any I've experienced since the Peace Corps.

Yeah. So, I think I have enough to blog about for the next month or so right there, and I'll be going into more detail about some or all of the above in future posts.

Thanks so much for all the support about my layoff from friends, family, and tarot people during the last couple of weeks and over this very eventful weekend. And in other good news, I am one of the winners in Joe Hill's Love Your Indie contest! I'll tell you all what my prize is as soon as I find out.

Classic Tarot Text Claims Tarot is Literally the Bomb

2009-04-27T21:05:00.003-04:00

At a New-Agey bookstore near my home, I came across a technicolored paperback from 1967: “How to Read Tarot Cards,” by Doris Chase Doane and King Keyes. This must be out of print; there are a few old copies on Amazon, but I can’t find any cover images online. Trust me though when I tell you that the book’s cover is both lurid and appealing, with a psychedelic orange and purple palette that reminds me of a fabulous children’s book from that same era, The Dragon Who Liked to Spit Fire.

I was tempted to buy the tarot book for that color scheme alone, and for the hyperbolic back-cover copy. I also loved this paragraph from its introduction, in which the authors equate tarot and atomic power:

Idle tarot cards and untapped inner laws of nature are as useless as an unsplit atom. But like atomic energy directed into constructive endeavor, when the cards are employed to apply the laws of nature to your character development or problem solving, their released potential mushrooms into great benefits to you.

Where do I even start loving this? First of all, “useless as an unsplit atom” is a charming and distressing simile in equal measure. Fundamentally, I disagree with it; the atoms in my own body and brain, for example, are quite useful and give me lots of pleasure even in unsplit form. But the authors’ from-the-get-go focus on tarot's constructive and problem-solving powers are right up my alley.

It’s more the laws of psychology than the "laws of nature" that are at play on the tarot table. But it’s an important observation — though a rather ‘60s one — that psychology and nature are closely knit. Everything from psychotropic substances to the neurotransmitters flowing through us speak clearly to their interplay.

But wow, the linguistic coup here is how the authors use “mushrooms” as a verb after having just mentioned nuclear power. That’s deft, and edgy, especially for a woo-woo book written in the most Age-of-Aquarian times.

If I do break down and buy this book, I’ll try to scan in the front and back covers and post them here; they are pretty seriously wonderful.

Tag-Team Tarot

2009-04-18T18:21:00.003-04:00

I just started a tarot salon here in Somerville!

My friends Cathy and Madelyn came to the first meeting; future meetings may have one or two more people as well. The salon was originally conceived of as a round robin, where each of us would read for one other person while everyone else watched (A reads for B, B reads for C, etc). But we wound up using a different style, which we dubbed "tag-team tarot." Each of us took turns posing a question. As each question was stated, the other two readers simultaneously drew cards, and then all three of us collaboratively worked toward some answers.

This was very successful and a lot of fun. One of the most interesting aspects of it was having several decks open on the table at once. Decks are most often used in isolation, though my friend Anna does mix and match hers as part of her regular reading style. It was really useful to see how the cards from one deck amplified the meanings of those from another.

It's such a pleasure, as a tarot reader, to be read for! It's something that a lot of us often forget to seek out, and it's an extremely healthy reminder of the value of what we do.

It's always hard to tell how long a new venture like this will last, but I hope this one turns out to have legs!

Neko Case as Knight of Swords

2009-04-17T18:39:00.008-04:00

The wonderful alt-country singer-songwriter Neko Case has a new album out, and this is the cover. Neko is channeling the Knight of Swords here, though without the frantic, slash-and-burn qualities often associated with that card.

Neko's a visual artist as well as a musician, and her album art choices are always idiosyncratic. Here, she's chosen to portray herself in a vacuum, rolling forward (or not) on a car that appears to be stationary. She's armed, but armorless, as she rides barefoot on her Mercury into the blank white space around her.

There's an even better Neko photo on the back page of the latest BUST magazine, though I haven't been able to find it online. In that image, instead of crouching as she does on the album cover, Neko stands tall on the car, hand on hip, sword jutting out at a low angle as if to defend the mountaintop we see in the distance behind her.

It's a sensuous photo; you can almost feel the Mercury's warm hood under Neko's cool bare feet. Neko's relationship with her sexuality and sensuality has always intrigued me. She seems hell-bent not to bimbify herself, but she's played with crime-scene imagery on some of her previous album covers, and is plainly interested in exploring the physical aspects of female vulnerability and power, both lyrically and visually.

So when Neko portays herself (consciously or not) as a Knight of Swords, I sit up and take notice. In tarot, Swords are about the mind, and they are tools of discernment, used for cutting away anything we don't need any more. Swords aren't a tarot suit I'd jump to associate with Neko's music. They're chilly and cerebral, for one thing, while her music is warm and even bloody—much more about instinct than rationality.

Neko's voice is both otherworldly and carnal, ethereal and earthy at the same time. In fact, her voice seems to embody the fire of Wands, the surge and flow of Cups, and the grounded blooming of Coins. Her lyrics often make sense in the same way that a David Lynch movie does—on an intuitive level, more closely associated with nightmares and fever dreams than with waking-life logic. Perhaps the Swords connection is with her don't-mess-with-me spirit; her heart seems to be large but also prodigiously well-defended.

Neko has always sung about people who have been driven crazy, either by love or the lack of it. "Furnace Room Lullaby" is about a woman who kills her abusive lover, only to be haunted by his heartbeat, as in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart." Another song, "Hex," is emphatically dark-witchy, and involves placing a love spell—actually, more of a lust curse—on someone wayward or inattentive.

Swords aren't about craziness; they're about cutting away what drives us crazy so that we can recapture the sanity we were born with. Maybe that's the exorcism Neko feels herself performing in her music, and maybe her music (along with nature and the wild world, which are clearly her other great loves) keeps her sane.

It's still curious to me that she's chosen such a crusading card as her totem here, though. Knights are always on a quest for something, which they pursue with greater or lesser degrees of aggression. Neko's song narrators aren't really crusaders; they tend to be emotionally swamped, slogging through a morass of feelings they'd rather free themselves from.

On the other hand, maybe it's not so curious that she's identifying herself with such a take-no-prisoners tarot archetype. It must require a proactive, even crusading spirit, like that of this knight, to bring her song characters to life. And maybe Neko is deeply cerebral and wields her thoughts like cut-glass weapons, which allows her to create narrators whose thought patterns are so convincingly, disarmingly cloudy.

In any case, her new album is a bit more difficult than some of her others—I'm not quite sure why. But it's still well worth a listen. If you're new to Neko, her "Live from Austin TX" and "Fox Confessor Brings the Flood" are classics.

Mark Dery Goes Pyrotechnic

2009-04-14T21:05:00.008-04:00

Normally, I’d be a bit wary of anyone whose job title was “cultural critic.” I'd imagine such a person to be a bit insular and pretentious, prone to throwing around terms like Hegelian and hermeneutics without due cause. But that stereotype has been exploded for me recently, as I’ve found myself in hog heaven devouring the essays of New York University journalism professor (and yes, cultural critic) Mark Dery.

I became aware of Dery through the good folks at BoingBoing, who recently posted about his 1999 book, The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium. It's a collection of essays about “fin de millennium” America, tackling subjects as diverse as the Unabomber, the Home Shopping Network, artist Damien Hirst, and the city of Celebration, Florida (a kind of company town or planned community run by the Disney corporation).

I assumed that the book’s title was a ‘90s-hipster turn of phrase for how crazy things were back when the millennium was approaching. But it’s actually a term applied to Coney Island at the very beginning of the 20th century. Dery uses Coney Island as a metaphor for the centrifugal force and adrenaline rush of a culture on the edge of an abyss. As he points out in the book, we’ve never not been living on that edge—people throughout history have believed that they were surviving in end times, though the nature of the perceived upcoming apocalypse has varied from place to place and era to era.

What makes Dery’s writing so extraordinary is a little hard to pin down. He’s brilliant, and it’s hilarious, and the well-turned phrases abound. But I think it’s also the rare combo of cynicism and affection with which he approaches his topics. Whether he’s writing about the perils of knee-jerk masculinity or about the bizarre cultural contradictions of Taco Bell, he honors his chosen subjects with true attention, rather than going for cheap shots or heading down the snarkiness waterslide.

Dery writes a lot about the body, about how our relationships to our bodies are changing as we live more and more online, more digitally and virtually. There’s an aggressive curiosity to his work that gives it more of an edge than that of other essayists I admire, such as Malcolm Gladwell (with whom Dery sat on a Time Magazine panel about the future a few years back). I get the sense that Dery was online before mainstream America knew what the Internet was, and that he would agree with William Gibson that “The future’s already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.”

Reading a Dery essay feels like having a few drinks with a really smart friend who wants to regale you about all this incredibly cool stuff he’s been thinking about—not out of any pretentious urge to prove his brainpower, but just because thinking is fun, and expressing our thoughts to others even more so. But that downplays how political Dery’s writing is; he identifies as left-leaning, maybe even Marxist, but is keenly aware of the dangers of subscribing to any kind of groupthink. He seems to approach his thinking, and writing, as a real job, and as his contribution to political and social debate. But he's also consistently playful, never smug, and knows how lucky he is to do this work (after all, being a culture writer is different from working in the coal mine, or at Wal-Mart).

Tons of Dery’s essays are available online; I’m surprised he isn’t better known, actually, though I guess his work is a little dense and eccentric for mainstream consumption. Notable topics include killer clowns, the sexual identity of HAL from 2001, Madonna’s big toe, and decapitation. Dery’s blog is also a treat. I’m hoping his lecture circuit will bring him to Boston sometime; he seems a great fit to talk at the Berkman Center.

Trimming (Defoliating?) the Facebook Flora

2009-04-11T12:52:00.002-04:00

Too often, Facebook tends to turn into a game of escalation. He or she who dies with the largest number of “friends” wins—even if those friends are the barest acquaintances or most tenuous potential business contacts. But does someone whose business card I grabbed at a networking event a year ago, and haven’t spoken to since, really belong in my FB network?

My FB friends' networks seem to contain an average of about 150 to 300 people. One person in my network just hit the 1000 mark, and of course there are stories of people with hundreds of thousands, or even more than a million FB friends. (Teenagers and young-20s people seem to skew toward having more friends, while older people tend to have fewer—either through greater selectivity, or just because older people and younger people have very different ideas about what it means to be healthily well-connected.)

Among people like me, who use Facebook as a low-key marketing device as well as a way to keep up with, um, actual friends, there seems to be a desire to accumulate as many friends as quickly as possible. One marketing consultant I know invites everyone on her weekly email newsletter to “friend” her on Facebook and follow her on Twitter. To her, she’s explained, the number of friends you have on a social networking site constitutes “social proof.” That is, if she has 700 (or 7000) people in her network and a new potential client or business partner sees that, that is proof to them that she is known, and that people are interested in keeping up with her.

But I think there’s an event horizon of Facebook friendships, beyond which they lose both their social caché and their marketing value. If I see someone with 200 FB friends, I assume that person is well connected. If I see someone with 2000 FB friends, I assume that person is a) good at self-promotion, and b) couldn’t pick 90% of those people out of a lineup. Neither of those are turn-ons for me.

Of course there are a million variables at play here. How many people friend you on FB, and how many do you take the initiative to friend? What’s your “ignore” policy? A lot of my friends feel guilty ignoring a friend request, even from a stranger or someone they don’t particularly like. Do you ever de-friend, or is that just too scary?

I am committed to preserving the purity of my News Feed. In fact, I’ve started de-friending people who update their status too frequently, or whose updates are—well, inane. Ideally, I want everyone in my network to be someone whose updates I’m truly interested in—and who feels the same way about mine.

I’ll admit to a certain nervousness when I hit the “Remove From Friends” button on Facebook. Often, the people I de-friend have over 500 friends themselves, are not people I know well, and may never even notice that I’ve removed myself from their network. But what if they do? Will their feelings be hurt? Or will they tell themselves that they must have imagined being my FB friend in the first place? Perhaps I’ll start getting fresh friend requests from people I’ve de-friended, who can’t recall if we were ever in each other’s networks. Too crazy!

Perfect Pitch and Wide Range

2009-04-09T21:19:00.003-04:00

Great singers need both perfect pitch—the ability to sing exactly on key—and a wide range of notes that they can sing. I think great actors do too, though range and pitch mean something different in acting from what they do in singing. In fact, pitch and range—at least on a symbolic level—can apply to almost any profession.

There are certain actors who have what I consider perfect pitch. Edward Norton is one who comes to mind. He nails every character, but not in a cerebral way—it’s as if he’s quietly aligning every neuron, nerve, and capillary with his character’s synaptic and lymphatic flow. I honestly think that if a Norton character were to get a cold in the script, Norton’s nose would start running.

Norton happens to also have range. Other actors have perfect pitch but not much range. Kristen Stewart, of Adventureland and Twilight, seems to be one of those. As a recent New Yorker review of Adventureland points out, she has a really lovely listening quality and density of focus, and hits her notes exquisitely, but it's just a few notes that make up her range. However, the girl was born in 19-frickin’-90, and her 19th birthday was yesterday; give her time and she’ll probably get rangier.

Then there are actors who have a great big vibrato-laden acting “voice,” but poor pitch. Uma Thurman is one of those. She’s brave and shiny, but wildly inconsistent; I don’t feel like I’m in good hands and safe when I’m watching her. (Unless she’s in a Tarantino movie; Quentin seems to act like one of those special synthesizers that can tweak singer’s voices back into tune when they wander off key).

So what’s the tarot equivalent of having perfect pitch? In theory, I think, it's the ability to look at any card that comes up, and to know instinctively exactly what it means, what message it holds for my client. And the best possible way to talk to them about that. That’s sort of the Platonic ideal of tarot expertise, and I will spend my career working towards that (how close I'll get is an open question).

And range, in tarot? Hmm. Maybe being able to read for people from all different mindsets and backgrounds. Maybe being able to help one client understand the issues in a love relationship, while loosening up a bad case of writer's block for another. Maybe being able to flip open a magazine and use whatever page comes up as a tarot card (I’ve actually done this for a friend when she requested a reading and I didn’t have a deck on me).

Pitch, you have or don’t have. Range comes down to training, practice, and study. Work. But it doesn’t feel like work, because true range can only come from doing what you love. Sounds corny, but I believe that.

What about your job—does it have its own versions of pitch and range? What are they? Is “perfect pitch” attainable in your field? How important is range to getting your job done with style, grace, and finesse?

Certification Anniversary

2009-03-30T12:41:00.003-04:00

Today is my three-year anniversary of getting certified through the American Board for Tarot Certification.

Certification is somewhat controversial in the tarot community. On the one hand, a lot of tarot readers like to color outside the lines, think outside the box, [insert your buck-authority cliché here]. We don’t want to be subject to regulation, to get strapped down into the booster seat of someone else’s notion of what a “real” tarot reader does.

On the other hand, there are people out there practicing tarot in a destructive, exploitative way. People who call themselves psychics, who promise to return your lost love to you within 48 hours; or who claim to disperse the cloud of “dark energy” around you, purging your aura for the low-low price of only $200. Unbelievable as it may sound, I know of people who have been duped out of thousands of dollars through these kinds of fear-based scams.

Every profession has its predators. We’ve heard a lot about predatory lenders during the ongoing mortgage crisis, and about predatory priests during the sex-abuse scandals in the Catholic church a few years back. Recently, it’s been the executives at Bank of America and AIG who have been tagged as predators, but predation can happen on a micro level, too. Anyone who exerts power and authority has the ability to do that with integrity and grace, or in a way that’s abusive and disrespectful.

This is what motivated me to get certified as a tarot consultant. (Actually, the official title on my ABTC certificate is “Tarot Associate,” which I like because it sounds kinda legalistic and makes me feel like I’m a junior partner at the tarot firm of Weber, Weber, and Weber.) The certification process took a couple of weeks of work. I was required to write an explanation of how I apply meanings to every card in my deck, including how I use reversals (that’s when a card appears upside-down). I had to sign the organization’s statement of ethics, promising not to give out financial or health advice; to make clear the boundaries between tarot and therapy; and to respect my clients’ confidentiality.

The most challenging part of the application process was doing an over-the-phone tarot reading for a member of the ABTC. I really dislike the telephone, and don’t normally use it for tarot readings since a large part of my tarot style involves looking closely at the card imagery with my clients, and discussing their reactions. This isn’t possible over the phone (unless you have a video-conferencing set-up, which some long-distance tarot readers do employ).

I was nervous about the phone reading, but it wound up going well. The ABTC person told me that my descriptions of the cards were so vivid that she could picture them as I spoke to her. (This was easier for her, since she was familiar with the deck I was using, than it would have been for a client who had never seen tarot cards before, but it still encouraged me.)

I almost always have my clients pick their cards from a facedown, spread-out deck. I like involving them in the tarot process in this way; it fits with my beliefs about the proactive and empowering nature of a well-done tarot session. Over the phone, this isn’t possible, so I had to pick the cards myself for the ABTC person. Still, the cards I picked seemed to be good fits, and we were able to apply them to her life quite easily.

Part of me wishes that tarot had the legitimacy of other healing and coaching professions. For acupuncture and social work, there are state-by-state and nationwide laws about who is allowed to hang out their shingle. I would like to feel less on the fringes, because the work I do with tarot is deeply valuable to people, and helps them in much the same way that a talk-therapy session, a massage session, or a meeting with a financial advisor might. There’s really no reason for tarot not to be mainstream.

But I also really, really value the fact that I don’t have to diagnose people. If I were a therapist, I would have to slap a label on each patient, naming their problem (or disease) and creating a step-by-step plan for fixing them.

I firmly believe that people are richer and more complex than a diagnosis. I love that tarot lets me approach my clients holistically—and it also enables me to work with someone without the presumption that he or she is deficient, sick, or broken in some way. Good tarot is preventive more than it is a cure, and I’m much better suited to working on the preventive side of things.

Update: After writing the above, I blithely went to find the website for the American Board for Tarot Certification—only to find that they, apparently, no longer exist. Awkward! Is my certification no longer valid?! I tend to think that it is not, because it is through a now-defunct organization.

Hmm. I'll do some research into what certifying bodies are still out there and will keep you posted. I believe that the Tarot School in New York City gives certificates to students who complete a certain number of courses with them. It looks as if the Tarot Certification Board of America is back in business; they have branches in other countries as well. And the Canadian Tarot Association used to have a good rep, and still may, but apparently they only certify “qualified Canadians residing in Canada” these days. (Another motivation for me to marry a Canadian?!)

The World Metaphysical Association is sporting a little too much purple fontage for me to consider them respectable.

If you know of other certification options, please let me know.

Another update: OK, this Mark McElroy piece from 2006 has pretty much convinced me that none of the currently available tarot certification programs are legit, because none of them are accredited by any outside authority.

Nine Tips for Getting to Know Your Tarot Deck

2009-03-28T19:40:00.002-04:00

These are some ideas I share with my beginning tarot students, and I thought those of you with your own tarot decks might enjoy them too.

1. Choose a “Card of the Day” every morning. Ask, “What should I be aware of today?” or “Where should I turn my attention?” See what card you pull, and make notes about your impressions of it. Then at the end of the day, see if you can find any way to connect that card to your day. (Variations: draw the card the evening before; do this once a week instead of once a day, and apply the card to your entire week.)

2. Meditate on one card before going to bed at night. If you want to, sleep with this card under your pillow and see if it affects your dreams.

3. Keep a tarot journal. Write about a different card every day—what you see in it, how it makes you feel, whether it connects to your life in some way. Writers and other creative people can use the card as a story-starter.

4. Separate your deck into sections of no more than four cards. For example, look at all the 2s, all the Queens, or the first four Majors. See what relationships you notice. Go through your whole deck, systematically, in this way.

5. Find a tarot study partner. Go through the deck, each of you writing up some notes about one card to bring to every meeting. (For example, at your first meeting you could bring some notes about the Fool card, and your friend could bring notes about the Magician.) Talk about your impressions and collect your notes in a binder.

6. Explore a variety of tarot books and websites (see the Useful Links list on the front page of this blog for some places to start). Find out what tarot experts have to say about the cards—and then question it. If you’d like, go through your entire deck, reading what one or two writers have to say about each card and adding your own impressions (it’s useful to record this; see “Tarot Journal” above). You can read about a card every day, one card a week, or whatever pace feels right to you.

7. Keep a tarot sketchbook in which you draw different tarot cards, or create collages to go with different cards or suits.

8. Watch for tarot imagery in your everyday life. How do the energies of the various suits manifest? Do any people you know remind you of certain court cards? Do you see archetypal imagery around you that reminds you of the art and themes in your deck?

9. Get a tarot reading from a local professional, or from someone reputable who does online or phone readings (ask in the comments if you'd like some names). What cards come up in your reading? How does the reader explain these cards? How is his or her understanding of the cards different from yours, and from the interpretations you’ve seen in books or heard from other people? Do you like the reader’s deck and reading style? Why or why not?

If you have other tricks for getting up close and personal with your tarot deck, feel free to post them in the comments.

Reading Tarot at the Independent Film Festival!

2009-03-26T16:12:00.010-04:00

I’m so thrilled and honored—the fabulous Independent Film Festival of Boston has invited me to do tarot readings for them!

IFFB is, seriously, one of the things that keeps me living in this city. It’s an annual event, now entering its seventh year, that showcases indy cinema (mostly from the U.S., but also from around the world). (I’ve posted about it in other years as well.)

There’s a lot to love about IFFB. For one thing, it is film-geek heaven. Everyone there—from the organizers to the volunteers to the ticket-buyers to the pass-holders—is a genuine lover of independent movies. But there's none of the snobbery you might expect from a bunch of edgy cinephiles. Quite the reverse, in fact; it's one of the friendliest events I've experienced in Boston. It’s common for audience members to start chatting with the stranger standing in front of them in a ticket line—something that’s highly unusual in this reserved, distrustful town.

IFFB has been growing its reputation over the years. By now, it’s a big enough fest that you’ll see celebs (or, at least, indy celebs) at the screenings. Past fests have welcomed Eliza Dushku, Steve Buscemi, James Urbaniak, Zoe Bell, Sir Ben Kingsley, and tons and tons of talented and fascinating screenwriters, actors, directors and producers you've never heard of. (Usually the director and other contributors are present for the screenings, so the audience gets to meet them and ask them questions, which is very cool.)

Add to this the fest's genuine devotion to documentaries, and its organizers' dedication to showcasing short films, and you can probably see why I'm in love.

Anyway, I could go on and on about the wonders of IFFB, but really, your best bet is to keep an eye on their website, where the film descriptions will be up soon. And then, if you’re in Boston from April 22 to 29, nab yourself a pass or some tickets, and show some love to the world of creative, independently-funded filmmaking!

I'll provide updates as I find out more about when and where I'll be reading tarot during the festival.

Movie Review: Duplicity

2009-03-23T16:01:00.005-04:00

Duplicity, the new movie from writer-director Tony Gilroy, is a disco ball spinning in a hall of mirrors: lots of colorful sparks, but no real fire or heat.

Gilroy also wrote the Bourne Identity movies, and wrote and directed Michael Clayton. He is fascinated by human isolation, and by the ways in which loneliness can create moral conundrums. Jason Bourne, Matt Damon’s character in the Bourne films, has been programmed to be a killer, but doesn’t remember exactly how or why. Estranged even from his own memories, he winds up killing in self-defense, without really knowing who the “self” is he’s defending.

Another Gilroy protagonist, Michael Clayton (George Clooney), is also a loner who’s distanced from himself. Gilroy, in fact, went so far as to delete a girlfriend character from Michael Clayton after filming began. Giving Clayton someone to care for would have decreased the character’s isolation, making his story less haunting.

In Duplicity, for the first time, Gilroy places a male-female duo at the heart of his movie, and gives both characters equal depth—or, in this case, lack thereof. Unlike other Gilroy characters, Ray (Clive Owen) and Claire (Julia Roberts) seem to revel in their amorality; a moral code, for them, would just be an impediment. We don’t see them agonizing about stealing and lying for a living; in fact, we get the sense that they’re proud of these skills. The movie’s title is something they’d wear as a badge of honor, rather than use as an insult.

Ray and Claire are exact equivalents, eerily identical in their motivations and desires. Even their names are echoes—Ray, as in ray of light; and Claire, which means light and bright in French. They belong to one another from their first encounter, when Ray makes a pass at Claire at an American Embassy party in Dubai. They are excited by each other, not only because they are both opportunistic intelligence agents (he’s MI6, she’s CIA), but also because they are the only other people they’ve ever met who operate at such an extreme level of distrust. (Throughout the movie, we get the sense that it’s only when they’re actually having sex that they take a break from wondering whether the other is trying to game them.)

It’s refreshing that Claire and Ray, unlike other Gilroy characters, are criminals who don’t have angst about it. But this lack of self-questioning also winds up making them seem less than human. How can they not wonder about the morality of espionage? Do they consider stealing from a corporation a victimless crime? And how does their efficient pleasure in their shady profession tie in with a certain tortured sense that both Ray and Claire, in true Gilroy style, are isolated—both from normal human contact, and from normal human feelings?

Gilroy wants to have it both ways: the intricate pleasure of the heist story, and also a more complicated emotional undercurrent. The two don’t quite fit together, and Gilroy lets the heist-pleasure angle become the film’s focus. It’s probably not a bad choice—the movie is joyful in a way that other Gilroy films are not. But the moments that have a lonelier edge tend to get lost in all the game-playing. It’s too bad that the darker side of the story gets short shrift, because it’s fascinating. (Imagine that you find your perfect match, the person who is meant for you—and the reason they are so perfect is that they’re the only other person in the world who is quite so morally bankrupt.)

Similar ground (sexual tension between rogue agents set at cross-purposes) has been mined fully before, from the “bad” Bond girls in the James Bond movies to the Brad Pitt-Angelina Jolie vehicle Mr. & Mrs. Smith, in which the real-life couple play married assassins who are hired to kill one another. Duplicity, despite the virtuosity of its plot, isn’t doing anything particularly new with this formula.

Another stumbling point is that Owen and Roberts, inexplicably, don’t generate a huge amount of chemistry. They don’t make us feel the pure hormonal rush of desire that Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo did in The Thomas Crown Affair, or that George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez did in Out of Sight (two other crime films with cross-purposed lovers at their core). We certainly buy that Ray and Claire like each other a lot—a harder sell, sometimes, than believing that characters lust after each other. But they feel like an old married couple here, and there’s too deep a comfort level for sparks to truly fly.

Even with these weaknesses, Duplicity is remarkably entertaining, both as a heist movie and as a puzzle. Gilroy trusts his audience’s intelligence, and deploys multiple surprises and "reveals" with obvious relish. He and casting director Ellen Chenoweth have assembled a wonderful group of supporting actors, including Denis O’Hare and Broadway actor Kathleen Chalfant (it’s a particular treat to see an older woman in a role that would normally be tossed out to Julia Styles or another smooth-faced ingénue).

Clive Owen seems drawn to roles that involve double-crossing, from his roulette-wheel crime movie Croupier, to Spike Lee’s bank-heist caper Inside Man, to the sexual manipulator he played in Closer (in which Roberts also starred). He’s an intelligent actor with a face that you can’t help trusting, even when you know you shouldn’t. Here, he plays Ray as someone who has memorized the dance steps so well that he’s become oblivious to the fact that he’s barefoot on hot coals.

Julia Roberts is always watchable, but she doesn’t stretch herself much here. In the movie’s more emotional moments, she touches on some of the cynicism she showed in Closer; in its lighter scenes, she flashes that famous smile and widens her round brown eyes, so full of mirth and kindness. She’s deft and professional—like Claire herself—but there aren’t any big surprises in her performance.

Duplicity contains some truly inspired sequences. Early on, a stylized, wordless confrontation between Paul Giamatti and Tom Wilkinson, as craven corporate CEOs, is hilarious and bizarre, but completely makes sense in retrospect. A conversation between Roberts and Owen is repeated five times, and changes its meaning with each new iteration (a pretty stunning screenwriting feat). And even the constant switch-backs in the plot serve to ratchet up our interest, rather than to lose us in the dust.

But walking out of the movie, I felt a kind of stuffed emptiness, similar to the after-effects of a candy binge. My eyes felt dazzled by that disco-ball glitz. And I also felt as if I’d been jerked around a bit—after having hung in there through all those plot twists, in the end I’d been delivered right back to the beginning of the roller coaster track, and there was nothing much left to carry with me when I walked away.

New Tarot Class Starts Next Tuesday!

2009-03-16T09:20:00.004-04:00

I'll be teaching a three-week intro to tarot class in Brookline, MA starting Tuesday, March 24th. This course is appropriate for people with some tarot experience and also for complete beginners. From the Brookline Adult Ed course description:

In this interactive class you'll learn about the history of tarot, the standard interpretations of cards, the healing power of tarot, and how to interpret the cards yourself. Through lecture, card studies, and sample readings, you'll appreciate beautifully decorated and themed tarot decks, you'll learn how to identify and discuss the different suits and arcanas, and you'll work collaboratively on reading tarot cards confidently. If you'd like to feel calmer and see problems or concerns in a new light, then tarot might be the opportunity you've been looking for. Bringing a tarot deck to class is welcomed, but not required.

You can get more details and register right here (just type "tarot" into the catalog search box).

I'm really looking forward to this class. If you have any questions about the content, feel free to respond here or via email: tarotation [at] yahoo. Hope to see some of you there on March 24!

New on DVD--Rachel Getting Married

2009-03-15T22:32:00.006-04:00

"I can live with it, but I can't forgive myself," says Kym (Anne Hathaway), the acidic and aching protagonist of Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married. Kym is the younger sister in an affluent Connecticut family, she's a recovering junkie, and she's been sprung from rehab for her sister Rachel's wedding. Through the uncanny intimacy of Demme's direction and Jenny Lumet's script, we are also invited to the party. As the preparations unfold, we see that Kym's words could be spoken by anyone in her family, all of whom carry wounds from a tragedy in their past. Despite their best efforts, their shared pain has bled through to the present--it is the uninvited guest at Rachel's wedding.

Demme takes a real risk by using handheld digital cameras throughout the entire film. In many cases, this technique could make the audience feel nauseous, or annoyed by the lower image quality (even high-definition video doesn't have film's clarity or luster). But Demme's visual choices work perfectly here. They increase our sense, as viewers, that we are wedding guests, peeping over the characters' shoulders with a mixture of fascination, sympathy, affection, and dread.

The whole cast inhabits their roles with deep understanding--no seams are showing here. As Rachel, Rosemarie DeWitt is especially extraordinary. She exudes a quiet, full-moon glow to contrast with Hathaway's bitter sparkle as Kym.

Hathaway's performance was initially met with a kind of backhanded adulation--"Wow, who knew, she really can act!" seemed to be the general consensus when the film came out. Her performance is a pleasure because it's neither American Starlet, nor American Starlet Goes Gritty. Instead, it's the kind of subtle acting you'd expect to see in a Mike Leigh movie, with the same sense of barely-tamed improv. Kym starts out as all jagged edges and snide quips, but just when we think we have her pegged, Hathaway opens up a reservoir of pain, and we find ourselves sliding down into it with her.

Demme and Lumet mix brief, efficient scenes with long, stretched-out sequences to build tension. This unconventional (and, at times, uncomfortable) pacing makes what happens onscreen feel unscripted and unconstructed. Every moment has a beating heart and feels alive. Demme somehow manages not to veer into either melodrama or self-congratulation. This is the rare character-driven film where it actually feels as if the characters are in the driver's seat.

Demme and Lumet are clear-eyed about this family's kindness, privilege, suffering, and denial. The movie never judges any of them, and it also doesn't let anyone off the hook.

Working With the Big Seven

2009-03-12T20:51:00.006-04:00

There are seven major categories, relatively equal in importance, that most people are pretty focused on and build their lives around:

1. Romantic and/or Sexual Love
2. Physical Health
3. (Platonic) Friendships
4. Family and Home Life
5. Career(s) and Finances
6. Spirit and Mood
7. Intellectual and Creative Stimulation

I used to find that when three or four of these were really thriving, one or two of the others started to slide. When the social life was booming, I didn’t eat as well, and my physical health took a downturn. When career and finances were flying high, spirit could get drained because I didn’t see my loved ones enough. Familiar?

It isn’t surprising that we often think of these seven categories as a zero-sum game of sorts, where the energy devoted to one major life area detracts from the energy available to the others. Each of these Big Seven, in isolation, can take up our complete attention. And if we treat them in isolation, being on top of all of them is not a realistic dream.

Lately, though, I feel as if my Big Seven are much more magnetized to one another than they used to be. Thriving in a couple of areas no longer means chucking my wellbeing in the others out the window. I've worked hard to get to this point, and I feel very fortunate that my life is this sane and pleasurable. But it was only recently that I realized how big a role tarot has played in helping me do this juggling.

It was when I started creating tarot spreads that I really began to see how all these life areas fit together. Tarot makes that explicitly, visually obvious. Over years of seeing how tarot cards connect with one another in a layout, and helping my clients do this as well, it’s become a habit for me to feel, in my heart and my gut, that the Big Seven are intimately connected.

For example, let’s say I’m doing a reading for you, and we notice a visual connection between two of the cards--a character on one might be looking at a character on the other, or a tower in the background of one is being struck by lightning in the foreground of the other. This makes it clear that the two life areas represented by these cards are playing off each other, feeding into each other, and that any change you make to one will emit a deep resonant twang that makes the other vibrate too. And all the cards in the layout will reflect meanings off of one another in this way.

Now, when I talk about having the Big Seven all up and running at once, I’m not talking about multitasking. Multitasking is a terrible idea. Human beings just can’t do it well. Oh, of course the more adroit of us can walk and chew gum at the same time. Or do work with music on in the background. But when we genuinely try to intersperse one task with another, we fail. Consistently. Spectacularly.

So how do we integrate the Big Seven Life Areas, without falling into the frenetic trap of doing too many things at the same time, none of them especially well? I’ll have a list of techniques in an upcoming post!

On Making (and Taking) Decisions

2009-03-08T12:07:00.006-04:00

My friend Joanna and I were talking recently about the challenges of being decisive, and about how hard it can be to choose a path with conviction. She pointed out that the word “decision” literally means cutting things away that we don’t need any more. (“Decide” is from the Latin word “decidere,” which means “to cut off.”)

This is what the suit of Swords is about in tarot; I posted awhile back about how Swords are tools of discernment, letting us eliminate unwanted elements from our lives. And Swords are certainly linked to decision-making; they’re all about how we can wield our thoughts like light-sabers, choosing to excise things that no longer serve us.

Different cultures have divergent attitudes toward decision-making. In Britain, for example, you don’t “make” a decision; instead, you “take” a decision. This implies that there are always multiple paths to follow, and that decision-making involves stepping onto the best one available to you.

“Making” a decision, as we United Statians like to, implies that no paths are there at the outset; it’s our job to create them. This feels more pressureful, to me, than choosing one path from an already-assembled array. Rather than travelers on established routes, we define ourselves as explorers, striking out in big clunky boots across unstructured “virgin” territory.

This brings my thoughts to the current collapse of North America's infrastructure. Our roads and bridges and tunnels are in terrible condition, and some of the recent stimulus-bill money is allocated for repair of those, as well as for construction of new ones.

Some environmental groups are opposed to creating new roads, saying that this will only encourage American car culture, which is already so rampant and destructive. Their view is that we should focus on repair, not construction. Other groups counter that any “shovel-ready” project, whether repair or construction, is a source of new jobs and thus is absolutely essential to our economic recovery.

When we face decisions as individuals, we must confront similar questions. Do we do the British thing and “take” one of the options that are already clearly labeled in front of us? Or do we do the American thing, and “make” a decision that strikes out in a new direction, perhaps laying waste to what’s already there?

I have no easy answers for this, but I have noticed that it’s often been useful for me to find and follow a path of least resistance. I don’t mean being lazy; I mean searching for a path that’s not obstructed, that looks pleasantly well-traveled, that my hiking boots will be fine for, that I won’t need ice-picks and crampons (oww) to conquer.

This is totally un-American of me. Think about that Robert Frost poem where he takes the road less traveled by, and that makes all the difference. Taking a well-worn path is often seen as a sign of conformity and lack of creativity. As good Americans, we’re each supposed to do our own thing, be true to ourselves. There’s not much emphasis on walking on roads that others have already cleared.

There’s a balance to be struck here, of course. You can spend your life flailing away against an enchanted briar-patch, convinced that there’s a sleeping prince or princess at its center who needs rescuing. Or, you can slide down the well-greased chute of conformity, never deviating into the lands of the creative, the original, the strange.

What’s the middle path? I think it’s being as aware as possible of which paths look attractive, and why. Which are the roads you want to walk on? There’s rarely just one, for anybody. It’s more like striking out into an abstract maze, where all the other paths alter around you as you walk, and the end goal keeps shifting.

Perhaps the best way to choose a path is by taking Anne Lamott’s driving-at-night advice: You don’t have to see the end of the road. You just have to see as far as your own headlights, and drive slowly.

Great Animated Film: "Sita Sings the Blues"

2009-03-03T09:44:00.006-05:00

I just watched the best film I’ve seen so far this year: Sita Sings the Blues, directed by Nina Paley. It’s a semi-autobiographical movie that fuses the Indian epic “Ramayana” with 1920s jazz vocals, using several different animation styles. I think it’s an instant classic. You can watch it here for free and make a donation here to help defray the filmmaking costs.

Many of the expenses Paley incurred are related to copyright. The film uses an abundance of songs by 1920s jazz singer Annette Hanshaw, and due to some tangled copyright issues Paley had to pay $50K for the “sync rights” (one of the four major musical copyright categories, involving the right to synchronize a vocal with a moving image).

Even having paid off this (argued-down) fee, the legality of distributing the film is in question. Hence Paley’s decision to give it away for free online under a Creative Commons license, thus building hype and heat for the film by letting its fans become its distributors and its publicity department.

To describe the film as a Hindu epic with Betty Boop vocals is accurate but limited, kind of like describing the Taj Mahal as a pretty building. “Sita” took five years of work and Paley’s passion, dedication, and sense of humor show in every frame. I hope I get the chance to see it on the big screen sometime; it’s been shown at dozens of film festivals, and now that it’s earning acclaim from big names like Roger Ebert I imagine it’ll be getting more numerous public screenings.

If you check it out, either online or in a theater, please let me know your thoughts!

My First Readings for Strangers

2009-02-27T12:23:00.002-05:00

Flashback! It’s the spring of 2000. I’ve been living in Boston for a few months, and have decided to start reading tarot for strangers instead of just for friends. So I make a sign out of an old cereal box saying “Free Tarot Readings—Just Ask,” and set up shop at a table at Algiers Coffee House in Harvard Square.

No one approaches me for a reading. Thinking back, this makes sense—unless it’s at a job fair or in some similar setting, I would pretty much never go up to some random person with a sign on their table and talk to them. In fact, I’d probably assume they were a bit eccentric, and give their table a wide berth.

After an hour or so of waiting fruitlessly for people to come by seeking wisdom and guidance, I decided to be more proactive. I approached three teenagers at a nearby table, and told them that I was doing free tarot readings and that they could come by if they wanted one.

The girl I spoke to said no thanks (politely). I told her to come on over if she changed her mind. Five minutes later, she came over, with her entourage in tow. “Um, I like, changed my mind,” she told me.

I read for her for about ten or fifteen minutes. I’m guessing that I used a simple three-card or five-card spread. The teenager didn’t put a lot out there for me as I talked her through the cards, and I don’t remember anything she said about the card imagery. It was probably a less-than-ideal tarot experience—I never asked her what she was hoping to get out of it, and hadn’t yet learned to check in with a client frequently to make sure they were on board with how the session was progressing.

Still, at the end of the reading, when I asked for her thoughts, she said that the reading had been “wicked accurate.” She looked a little spooked, actually. She and her friends thanked me and left. (I had no concept of follow-up at this point, so I’m not sure I even got her name.)

Then a guy in his early twenties came by my table. He had overheard the reading I’d done and wanted one for himself. My memory of the reading I did for him has been completely axed by the fact that he asked me out as soon as it was over. We wound up dating for a few months—the closest thing to a boyfriend I’d had at that point.

My pagan friends would say that this is an example of how, when you put energy out there, the universe bounces it back at you (usually multiplied). It’s interesting that I was getting ready to read for strangers at the same time that I was getting ready to start dating. That afternoon at the cafe is as good a point as any to mark my transition from overgrown teenager (albeit one in her not-so-early 20s!) to freshly minted adult (admittedly a very green and unformed one).

It’s funny to think back on my embryonic attempts to become a pro reader. I don’t mean to mock myself; it took a lot of guts to go up to strangers and offer them tarot readings, or even to put that sign up at my café table. It just strikes me as amazing how far I’ve come since then—I now have a tarot office, a brochure, business cards, and some solid marketing skills. And about nine more tarot decks! Of course, that was nine years ago, so it would be kinda sad if I hadn’t made progress since then.

Think back to where you were, professionally, nine years ago. Were you doing the same job then as the one you do now? Were you already comfortably established, or were you a beginner? How has your career changed since then? Where do you think you’ll be nine years from now?

Backstage at the Psychic Auditions

2009-02-26T13:17:00.003-05:00

A “Talk of the Town” piece in the March 2 “New Yorker” tells about a current revival on Broadway of Noel Coward’s comedy “Blithe Spirit.” The play involves a medium who conjures the spirit of the protagonist’s dead wife. The hero also has a new, living wife, and she and the dead wife’s ghost compete and spar. (This plot has been revisited periodically since Coward wrote the play in 1941, most recently in the Eva Longoria Parker movie “Over Her Dead Body.”)

For this Broadway revival (which stars Angela Lansbury and Christine Ebersole), the producers auditioned psychics, looking for one to serve as an official consultant on the show. This is bizarre; the play is a piece of magical realism, not a documentary about occultism in mid-20th-century Britain. Like most Coward plays, it’s a glittering fluff explosion; in the right production, it also rings true about universal emotions such as jealousy. But its focus is certainly not the occult, or psychic powers, or whether or not ghosts are real.

The “New Yorker” descriptions of the psychics’ auditions are pretty funny (unfortunately the piece isn’t up on their website, so you can only find it in the print magazine). The article also made me think about the concept of proving yourself, especially when your skills involve something that most people don’t believe in. How could a legitimately intuitive person prove her abilities to a crowd of skeptics?

Auditioning people for their intuitive powers is somewhat like auditioning people for their empathy. Everyone has intuition, just as everyone has emotions. With intuition, as with emotions, some people are much more attuned than others to their own inner state and the states of those around them. But an “empathy audition” would feel forced and fake--and an “intuitive audition” faces those same pitfalls.

The auditions in this case did not involve on-the-spot demonstrations of psychic prowess. An empirical test would have been fascinating; imagine if the producers had hidden an object somewhere in the building and had asked the psychics to tell what it was and where it was located. Instead, they had the psychics give a spiel about their resumes (“I’ve helped the police locate 100 missing persons,” for example). The producers ultimately went with a psychic who fit the Noel Coward stereotype: a middle-aged white woman with a British accent. (It’s uncertain whether a turban was involved; the piece says that the auditioning psychics were “dressed to varying degrees of witchiness.”)

I rarely feel that I’m being called upon to prove my tarot skills to a skeptic. The only time this happens is at parties, where a skeptic or tarot newbie may come to me for a ten-minute reading out of curiosity, or possibly out of a mild urge to debunk. Frankly, when someone comes in with very low expectations, it’s quite easy to wow them; anything I say that rings true wins me points. So reading for skeptics can be quite relaxing--provided, of course, that they’re not actively hostile.

But I’m also upfront that I’m not a “psychic” (it’s a label I dislike, and even a better-chosen label, such as “intuitive,” wouldn’t apply well to me). I’m pretty tuned in to my intuition, but have never received unexplained insights or vibes during a reading. I have never seen images generated by the ether, heard spirit voices, or in other woo-woo ways been made privy to secret info known only to my client (or known to no one).

Instead, I serve as facilitator and counselor, helping people see their situations more clearly so that they can make better choices. Since most of my clients come to me looking for those results, they don’t apply much “Wow me!” pressure. It’s more like, “Hey, can you help me figure this out?” Which I can, and do. Not as dramatic as summoning foxy spirits, but a much more reliable way to make a living!

The Moon As Agitator

2009-02-24T12:29:00.005-05:00

These sentences jumped out at me from an "Economist" article about exobiologists, who search for life on planets outside our solar system:

An exoplanet that had a large moon would be of particular interest [...] Tides churn the oceans. That is reckoned to be good for life as it mixes up chemicals and organisms, encouraging small ones to grow, which provides food for larger ones.

The Moon card in tarot is associated with a surprisingly wide range of meanings, including the following (the embedded links will take you to images of various Moon cards):
• the unknown depths of the soul
• turmoil caused by what's brought up from those depths
• secret, arcane, or esoteric knowledge
• yin, right-brained, and/or feminine energy
• intuitive wisdom (as opposed to rational logic)
• information that's currently hidden, but is about to be revealed

That "Economist" quote helped me understand another Moon meaning: the Moon card is about upwelling. Upwelling, in science, refers to the movement of deep, cold, nutrient-rich waters toward warmer areas near the ocean's surface.

Upwelling can be a bit of a mixed blessing, according to the NOAA article linked above, because while it infuses coastal waters with nutrients, it also moves surface water offshore, taking small organisms with it, and thus lessening their chances of survival. So upwelling "can infuse coastal waters with critical nutrients that fuel dramatic productivity, but it can also rob coastal ecosystems of offspring required to replenish coastal populations."

I am in love with upwelling as a metaphor for what happens during a tarot session. Tarot work involves stirring our depths. There is so much energy inside each of us that is untapped and stuck. If we never access it, it builds up, like sludge on the sea floor of our unconscious. Or...well, these similes are getting more and more inelegant, but like plaque.

But this spiritual detritus can be a great fertilizer as well. Tarot helps us stir our own deep waters, and thus releases nutrients: increased clarity, fresh perspective, and heightened awareness.

Getting back to the "mixed blessing" idea--If you stir these psychic waters excessively, you can muddy them, and be even more confused than you were before! An example of this might be asking the same nagging question over and over again in the same tarot session. Sometimes there won't be a clear answer given the first time the question is asked, and attempts to clarify seem to draw the questioner farther and farther away from a coherent truth or action path.

When this occurs, it's best to step back, table the issue, and give your mental tides some time to readjust their flow. I've seen people ask questions in tarot sessions that they weren't ready to hear the answers to. I've asked those questions myself. If the deck's answer isn't satisfying, even after pulling some clarifying cards, that's a sign to step back and let a few more lunar cycles go by before asking again.

I've also had tarot readings pull up uncomfortable truths--inconvenient truths, to quote Al Gore. But I've never had a tarot deck tell me something I couldn't handle. Decks don't work that way, and responsible tarot readers don't either. Also, most healthy people have a strong self-protective instinct, and know how deeply to stir their own psychic soup.

The human mind has its own depths, and its own tides; the Moon card comes up to illuminate them, and to help us plunge down into them as deeply as feels right. Tarot is a flexible vehicle, and can serve us as both submarine and surfboard. And the healthy aeration and circulation and oxygenation associated with upwelling are all true of tarot--it's a breath of fresh air, even in the lunar reaches of space. Or deep, deep underwater.

CORRECTION: I got a little too breathlessly metaphorical in that last paragraph, and would like to officially clarify that I in no way condone doing tarot readings underwater! (Tarot on the International Space Station could work, though.)

Unpacking a Dream

2009-02-21T14:14:00.002-05:00

Here's an example of how I use a Q&A technique for dream interpretation.

Part 1: I’m standing on the edge of a huge throng, on a downhill slope. I’m right by some roped-off stairs, down which Obama’s inauguration procession will be coming. But I can’t really see much. The mood is anticipatory.
Q&A:
What’s an inauguration? It’s the ceremony during which an elected president officially becomes the leader.
Is there an aspect of myself that I’ve “elected”--raised to another level of power or responsibility--lately? Yes, my identity as a tarot professional. I’ve become much more official in my thinking about my tarot business; I’ve started listing it on equal terms with my day job when people ask me what I do.
Is there a level on which I’m still waiting for that transition to happen? Sure--my day job currently provides much more of my income than my tarot career does, so a true inauguration would mean bringing the tarot work up to that level in terms of earnings. A scary but exciting concept.

Part 2: I accidentally fall out of the roped-off area and onto the processional stairs. I call out to a yuppie guy nearby, and stretch out my hand to him, so that he can pull me back into the crowd, where I’m supposed to be. He ignores me, so I say something rude. No one else seems to notice I’ve fallen out.
Q&A:
What’s a yuppie? A young urban professional; someone who is more interested in making money than in doing work of value.
Is there a level on which I’m a yuppie? Sure. I work for “The Man” as part of the educational publishing industry.
How did I feel when he ignored me in the dream? Annoyed, but not surprised. The “yuppie” side of my identity (the part that works a 9-5 job, has a 401K, gets company health insurance, etc) has less and less to say to the “real” me lately. And it isn’t providing much assistance in terms of reaching my tarot goals--except for that whole “paying for my life so I can afford to do tarot” thing. Yeah, there’s that.

Part 3: I manage to haul myself back up into my seat. Then there’s a roar from the crowd, and a bunch of people rush past us down the inaugural stairway. They’re holding the coffins of past presidents, really running (so fast they’re almost falling) down the stairs. I decide that this must the right way to haul a coffin down a flight of stairs. Maybe you fall over if you go too slowly.
Q&A:
What’s a coffin? A vehicle for removing a dead body, for getting rid of something no longer vital.
What am I rushing to get rid of? My identity as a yuppie professional, perhaps. Now that my tarot business is growing, I am feeling some guilt about holding onto my conventional job, instead of throwing caution to the winds and striking out as a full-time tarot consultant.

So, is the dream telling me--I mean, is my subconscious telling me--that I’m in too big a hurry to make this transition? Or that I need to go faster? Or simply that this is an issue I’m dealing with, and that my subconscious is also “on the case”?

Any thoughts or other takes on this dream are welcome!

Haruki Murakami Works the Weirdness

2009-02-20T11:42:00.003-05:00

I just read an eleven-year-old interview with one of my favorite writers, Haruki Murakami. Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is one of the few novels I own and reread; it’s almost incredibly rich (and very strange), with the unsettling power of a dream, or of a David Lynch movie.

The interview helped me understand Murakami stylistically. His work feels both very Asian and very Western, and he explains that he takes genres and art forms that he enjoys--such as the detective novel--and then applies those genre structures to his stories, without inserting the expected content. You can certainly read "Wind-Up Bird" as a detective story, but it’s also a magic-realist epic about a disconnected Japanese 30-something slacker. There is little traditional noir content, but there is a noir structure imposed on content that would not normally be noir. This overlay technique helps Murakami create his deeply disquieting stories.

I was also struck by this quote:

I write weird stories. I don't know why I like weirdness so much. Myself, I'm a very realistic person. I don't trust anything New Age -- or reincarnation, dreams, Tarot, horoscopes. I don't trust anything like that at all. I wake up at 6 in the morning and go to bed at 10, jogging every day and swimming, eating healthy food. I'm very realistic. But when I write, I write weird.

I love the idea of weirdness and realism being deeply linked. It’s probably because Murakami is so healthy, physically and mentally, that he’s able to do weird so well. If a spaced-out, disconnected guy who was obsessed with New Agey stuff tried to write a novel with a Murakami plot, it wouldn’t work. The necessary contrast wouldn’t be there, and the strong foundation of sanity would be missing. The whole tower would topple, or burn.

Murakami also says that the subconscious is important to him, but that he doesn’t want to analyze it, but rather to “take it as a whole. Maybe that's kind of weird, but I'm feeling like I can do the right thing with that weirdness.”

To “do the right thing with that weirdness” is such an impressive goal. Life is weird; people experience strange things all the time, whether in their external lives or just in their own minds. Storytellers (and tarot consultants) mediate between the mundane and the bizarre, in a way that helps people understand that none of us are alone in our weirdness.

Perhaps this is my ego talking, but I bet that if Mr. Murakami watched me doing tarot, he wouldn’t consider me New Agey or untrustworthy. However, I wonder if he would enjoy the process of delving into the imagery of the cards. He might engage with tarot purely as a visual experience, and allow any emotional resonances to just reverberate freely, rather than trying to capture them in the net of an explanation.

The closest American artist to Murakami is David Lynch, whom I also love (though also occasionally feel betrayed by). I wonder if Lynch is using a similar overlay technique to Murakami’s. Actually, on Twin Peaks, he certainly was--he took the structure of a police procedural TV show and filled it with completely unexpected, even deliberately misplaced, mystical content.

Both Murakami and Lynch are interested in (even obsessed by) the concept of following a character down into darkness. Lynch, in particular, seems to be playing a game with the audience at times, seeing how nonlinear and ungrammatical his stories can get before we get so confused that we won’t follow them any more.

And Lynch, like Murakami, believes himself to be grounded by something real and sane. Where Murakami has his healthy eating and jogging, Lynch has been practicing meditation for years. Perhaps that provides a springy enough launching pad for his own brand of narrative weirdness.

Now if these two guys were to collaborate on a movie--can you imagine how cool? And how weird?

Food for thought: What does it mean, on a practical level, to “to the right thing with the weirdness”? Is that mostly a writerly project--or one that we can all engage with daily?

Boston Organics Home Delivery Service

2009-02-19T12:55:00.002-05:00

Michelle just told me about Boston Organics, who describe themselves as "an independent organic produce delivery service. We work directly with farms and wholesalers to deliver boxes of fresh fruit and vegetables conveniently to your door, year-round, on a weekly or biweekly basis."

What an astoundingly fabulous company! Their philosophy is similar to Community Supported Agriculture, but they offer greater flexibility in terms of the size of the box you get and what's in that box. Their website is also extremely helpful and user-friendly.

Seriously considering signing up for this!

How I Cope With Betrayal

2009-02-18T10:26:00.003-05:00

I recently finished watching the first season of the TV series "Dexter" (which I posted about, enthusiastically, here). I really disliked the way the writers and producers chose to end the season. I won't go into too much detail here (though saying anything at all is a one-way ticket to Spoilerville). But let's just say that, on a show which usually is razor-sharp and incisive in its writing, the season finale included some really dumb TV clichés--for example, a strong and powerful female character being reduced to a whimpering hostage who then needs to be rescued by The Dudes.

This alone would have been bad enough, but the finale also included several instances of normally bright females acting clueless, and a vicious scene of a hooker being captured and readied for her murder, in which we as viewers are invited to take a lascivious view of her naked body before its dismemberment.

Yuck. It's stuff like this that made me think I wouldn't like this show in the first place--and then I was lulled into a false sense of security because all these appalling clichés had been either neatly avoided, or twisted in interesting ways, in the preceding episodes.

My primary emotion coming off this is a sense of betrayal--of me, by the writers (it feels very personal, though I've never met them!); of the characters by the writers; of the actors by the producers (or whoever calls the shots about plot arcs on serial dramas). My heart, as silly as it may sound, feels wounded, in much the same way it does when I recall kids being mean to me in junior high school. Perhaps the linking factor is vulnerability and powerlessness--I couldn't control other people's behavior in the junior-high cafeteria, and today I can't control a story line that is in someone else's purview. Nor should I be able to.

I'm lucky enough not to deal with betrayal by my friends, family, or other loved ones in my day-to-day life. Betrayal by my coworkers and clients is also rare, though I suppose having a client no-show, or call me the morning of a scheduled session to tell me she can't afford to pay for it, are mild betrayals, and they do also make me angry and make me ache.

But a story-telling betrayal feels, again, so personal. I guess this is because I'm a screenwriter and playwright, and because my tarot work also involves helping my clients construct narratives in order to solve problems. Creativity is sacred to me, so it makes sense that a creative violation hits me where it hurts.

I've been thinking and talking with friends lately about the portrayal of female characters on TV shows. Joss Whedon has gotten a lot of lauding as a feminist firebrand because of the strong females he places front and center on his shows; my friend Ben takes exception to this, saying that a truly feminist show would have a female lead "who isn't smokin' hot." This brings up an interesting question--is it automatically objectifying characters to have them be played by beautiful actors (either male or female)? I tend to think not, but Ben's point is well taken nonetheless.

I guess the distinction in my mind between a sexist show and a pro-woman show is how much power and independence the show gives its female characters, and how realistically it portrays their human weaknesses and neediness. When a show crosses the line to using its women as plot devices, rather than people, I feel the hurt. Actually, I've seen shows get sadistic with male characters as well, and it's just as distasteful to me. Maybe that's the bottom line: does a writer love her characters, even as she puts them through hell? Or does she abuse them just to see how they'll react, like a lab scientist shocking rats?

Guided Tour of Some of My Tarot Decks

2009-02-16T20:18:00.010-05:00

I currently own ten tarot decks. Some I've bought, some have been gifts; some I use regularly, and others I might unwrap from their cloth once a year. I've also owned other decks that I gave away when it was clear they weren't working for me as reading decks--that is, even though I liked the imagery on them, I couldn't easily sit down with them and do a tarot reading for myself or a friend or a client.

This happens surprisingly often. One of the most beautiful decks I own, Kat Black's Golden Tarot, has this problem. I find the imagery seductive and intriguing, and it's a pleasure to hold and shuffle and leaf through. It definitely wins the prize for the most stunning card edges I've ever seen--they are printed gold, and the entire deck shimmers and draws the eyes and hands of anyone in the general vicinity to touch, divide, and turn over its cards.

But the Golden doesn't read well for me. The images--well-integrated collages, composed digitally from European paintings of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance--are a treat to look at, but don't grab and transfer meaning well. The deck doesn't feel interested in my clients and their problems and questions. It's like a set of gorgeously perfect geometric proofs--elegant, tidy, and so self-contained as to be insulated from any real interaction with the souls of outsiders. I hang onto it for its beauty, not its usefulness.

The deck I use most often these days is the World Spirit Tarot, which has just about the opposite attitude. Its images are made from linoleum block prints, and they feel warm, slightly crude in a wood-blocky chunky way, and very personal. Where the Golden is a serious, don't-mess-with-me deck, the World Spirit seems to love everyone and want to gab with them about their issues. There's a goofiness to some of the cards; the art is not perfect, and it's all the friendlier for that. It's a deck that connects directly to the heart, while the Golden is head-centric.

My most recent deck acquisition is the Intuitive Tarot, designed and drawn by Cilla Conway. I fell in love with the backs of these cards before I even saw the fronts. The backing pattern is a pure, electrified purple with a glowing egg outlined in the center. The egg looks like the number zero, and reminds me of the Fool card, which is numbered 0 in the Major Arcana.

On the fronts of the cards, Conway has maintained this egg motif. The scenes on the cards take place within a sphere shape, though the colors extend beyond this enclosed space. This egg serves as much more than just a picture frame; it contains and amplifies the energy of the images. Conway uses this motif creatively. For example, the Five of Wands usually shows people competing, fighting, or whacking each other with wooden sticks. On Conway's version, the people are desperately using their sticks to prop open the egg shape around them--literally trying to prevent their world from collapsing. It's a potent visual reminder of why people are often driven to conflict, and of the sometimes-thin dividing line between conflict and collaboration.

I don't love every card in the Intuitive. Conway makes some very odd choices in how she draws her people. Some are naturalistic; others are distorted, with tiny wedge-shaped heads like those of Henry Moore's sculptures. The effect is disorienting at times--are we looking at humans? At aliens? At monsters?

Conway also makes the choice to have most of her people be either European-looking, or of ambiguous ethnic identity (there's one guy who might be Asian, another who could conceivably be Middle-Eastern, etc). But there's a ton of white people in the deck, and the only jet-black one is a really terrifying Devil. Now, this Devil isn't drawn with African-looking features at all; in fact, he bears a resemblance to Voldemort in the Harry Potter movies. But it still gave me pause that the only really, really dark figure in the deck is also the only dark-skinned one.

I'm not particularly into political correctness and don't demand the same distribution of ethnicities from a tarot deck that I'd expect to see in, say, a fourth-grade reading textbook. I'm mostly spoiled from using the World Spirit, which has an abundance of people of every conceivable race, yet somehow avoids being self-righteous or smug about this diversity.

I've gotten some good results already using the Intuitive, and even though I'm not crazy about every card, I think there's a level where that's a positive thing. It makes me work a little harder with the deck, and approach it more as my clients would--as something new and strange, speaking an unfamiliar language (or at least an unusual dialect). And even though I have some reservations about individual images, I trust the deck itself pretty deeply already.

Oh, something else really cool about the Intuitive is that Conway often draws her Coins (which she calls Discs) as mandalas. Beautiful, and very appropriate (Jung would be into it)!

The Five DVDs I Own, And Why

2009-02-16T10:26:00.003-05:00

I don't have a TV. During the nine years I've lived in Boston, I've been TV-less about half the time (the other half I was living with roommates or boyfriends who had TVs).

I like being TV-free, but I do sometimes watch movies or TV shows on my laptop, either via DVD or via online services like Hulu. I am very selective about the DVDs that I buy. Most movies and TV series I'll only want to see once, even if I really like them. My collection of books is much larger, since I'm much more likely to reread a novel, or dip back into a nonfiction book, than I am to ever re-watch a DVD.

Having said that, I do own five DVDs. You can draw your own conclusions about what these five choices say about my personality and pop-cultural tastes. In order from first-acquired to most recently acquired:

• Stop Making Sense, Jonathan Demme's concert film about the band Talking Heads. This is gorgeous just as pure film--incredibly well shot and edited with ginsu-knife precision--and the music is some of my favorite of the last 30 years.

• Double Dare, Amanda Micheli's documentary about two stuntwomen: Jeannie Epper, who was Linda Carter's stunt double on "Wonder Woman," and Zoe Bell, who doubled for Lucy Lawless on "Xena, Warrior Princess." Hands-down the most exciting documentary I've ever seen, and feminist in a completely joyful, playful way.

• The complete Firefly series--Joss Whedon's sadly short-lived science fiction show. This is surprisingly hard to describe, I'm finding. It's about a small band of mercenaries, about 500 years in the future, and their adventures as they evade both government forces and other outlaws. Whedon pushes the Wild-West themes very strongly, even down to the low-slung gun-belts his characters wear (for the sight of Nathan Fillion in a low-slung gun-belt, Joss, we straight and semi-straight ladies of the 'verse heart-feltedly thank you). There's a lot to love in "Firefly," from its cast to its sharp writing; I also like the fact that most of the characters are completely self-serving, without any of the high-minded scientific-exploration ideals of the various "Star Trek" series, for example. And that this self-serving crew, of course, bonds and winds up taking care of each other.

• Dexter, Season One, which I wrote about recently here.

• Flight of the Conchords, Season One. This show has been making me really happy recently; it's impossible to feel depressed or annoyed while watching it. It's about a hapless duo of aspiring New Zealand musicians and their ill-fated attempt to hit the big time in New York. The two guys, Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie, are totally lovable and their many songs (every episode contains one or two) are brilliant genre parodies (of everything from reggae dance-hall to overblown R&B to hip-hop). Function in my life: Prozac equivalent.

I don't know if I'll ever grow this collection bigger. I could picture myself wanting to have a film library, when I'm more settled somewhere someday. For the moment, I like traveling light, and this handful of DVDs could fit in my backpack in the event that I ever need to make a fast getaway!

Jack Cady's "Road Dog" a Science Fiction Classic

2009-02-15T15:07:00.003-05:00

Picture a desolate Montana highway at night, surrounded by desert, occasionally haunted by headlights like fireflies or taillights like embers. The road seems to hum with a quiet, subtle mystery, though you could stand on the berm for an hour and not see a soul other than a coyote. The highway feels more low than high, embedded in something, like a line across the palm of an old man's hand.

On most nights, ghosts do not show up beside the metal crosses, and they sure don't show up in owl light. Ghosts stand out on the darkest, moonless nights, and only then when bars are closed and the only thing open is the road.

My buddy Alex hooked me up with the latest issue of "Fantasy & Science Fiction" magazine, in which is reprinted a short story from the mid 1990s: "The Night We Buried Road Dog," by Jack Cady. It's a beautiful piece of American genre writing, and you can take your pick of which genre that is: SF, ghost story, magic realism, or simply a lovely period piece set in the early 1960s about guys way out in the bleak Midwest who really, really love their cars.

It's just a wonderful story. Alex says he wants all his friends to read it, and I feel the same.

In Search of My Ideal Client

2009-02-14T15:21:00.006-05:00

In Elizabeth's Abundant Business Workshop, we talked a lot about finding our niche and identifying our ideal client. The idea behind this marketing principle is that you can make your marketing materials much more powerful and highly targeted if you are aiming them at a very specific group of people.

A lot of small-business owners and solo practitioners have some natural resistance to defining their ideal client. Especially in times of economic stress and uncertainty, the fallback option is to say yes to anyone who might want to be your client--after all, who can afford to turn down business these days? If their money's green, shouldn't that be enough for me?

Turns out, the answer is no. What Elizabeth taught us--and I agree with her--is that understanding the population you are serving is a really basic first step toward building your business. If you're trying to serve everybody, it's pretty likely that you aren't serving anyone as effectively as you might be.

I read tarot recently for two wonderful women, both of whom fit my model of my ideal client perfectly. They are quite different from each other, but they share certain qualities: exploratory minds, an ability to focus and listen, a desire to help others through their own professional work, and wonderful senses of humor. If I could always only work with people like that, I'd love my job!

The punch line, of course, is that I can choose to work only with people like that. Now that I know what my ideal client is like, and what she or he wants (clarity, perspective, a fresh outlook on areas where they're stuck), I can gear my marketing materials to make them what Elizabeth calls "client magnets." I can edit my brochure with my ideal client in mind, and then, when the next ideal client comes along and picks up my brochure, she'll feel I wrote it just for her.

This all reminded me of what a friend told me about the lingerie company Victoria's Secret. They have an ideal client--she's a real woman, one woman, and they gear 100% of all their marketing efforts toward her and only her. The end result? VS marketing has been extremely effective at attracting this same type of woman to buy their products. VS saw a gap in the market--medium-price-point lingerie to help 20- and 30-something women feel like the "Sex and the City" ladies--and they jumped all over it to create their brand.

I've gotten more and more selective about screening my clients. I can pretty much tell from one phone call if a potential client and I are a good fit or not, and if we're not, I won't take a them on. If I work only with my ideal clients, I'll do a better job reading for them; they'll be pleased and will come back for more tarot sessions and will refer me to their friends. So this will lead to abundance in my business--paradoxical, since it involves saying no to potential clients who aren't right for me.

I also often am able to refer non-ideal clients to other practitioners--someone who isn't ideal for me (and vice versa!) may well be an ideal client for someone else I know.

The end result of all this is that, when I have a session with a new client lined up, I find myself approaching it with anticipation and excitement, instead of nervousness (or even dread). It was very empowering to realize that I can say no to someone who wants to give me money to read tarot for them. It brought home to me a fundamental principle of my tarot business: that I do tarot work in order to be of service to others, so it's my responsibility to realize when I'll be able to really help someone, and when I won't.

Photos of My Tarot Office!

2009-02-05T20:14:00.006-05:00

I realized recently that I had no pictures of myself in my tarot office! I’ve been running my tarot consultation business out of this space for almost two years now, and it just seemed wrong not to have any shots of me doing my thing in my natural habitat.

So, now that’s all fixed. Many thanks to photographer (and friend) James Wang for giving me the chance to “Work it, baby! Make love to the camera! Beautiful! Give me more!” Hee hee, just kidding. Actually, James is very low-key, and his instructions were more like, “Can you sit in a less awkward position?” and “Okay, look happy, like you just saw some good news in the cards for one of your clients!”

James’s wife, my friend Becky, also helped by chatting with me during the shoot, and by putting on some music to relax me. It’s rather disconcerting to be the center of lensed attention for a couple of hours!

The closest experience I’d had before was when Meera did this photo essay a couple of years ago, of me doing tarot with our friend Regina. That felt different, though; it was in my apartment, quite informal, and Meera was documenting an actual tarot session. And there were no big mysterious black umbrellas directing the flow of light!

(Of the photo above, James commented, "I should photoshop something into your hand--like a crystal ball!")

I’m posting just a few of my favorite shots here, and will post more on my Facebook page, so if you “friend” with me there you’ll be able to see the full album.

The blue cloth on my tarot table is from Yunnan province, in southwestern China. I bought it when I was a Peace Corps Volunteer there. The deck is the World Spirit Tarot, my favorite deck to read with.

You can see more of James Wang’s photography here and here.

New Tarot Class Starts March 24th!

2009-02-04T19:39:00.002-05:00

I'm looking forward to teaching my Intro to Tarot class at Brookline Adult and Community Education, starting on Tuesday, March 24th. Details are here; just type "tarot" into the search box and my class listing will come up. I'd love to see some of you there!

Tarot as Narrative

2009-02-02T18:59:00.002-05:00

Here's something the novelist Jodi Picoult wrote in the January issue of Oprah's "O" magazine:

[T]here's a tendency to assume that a story must be ingested in a certain way, that it must mean one thing. So readers are always trying to ferret out the truth. I want to argue that this idea is a raging and utter lie. The reader brings as much to the book as the writer does: you're bringing your past, you're bringing your thoughts, you're bringing your future [...]

To me the mark of a great book is that it can move a variety of people, even though each person is connecting in a different way.

What Jodi says is true for tarot as well. The exact same card layout can mean dramatically different things to different clients. The value for the client lies in the experience of interpreting the cards; it's the practice of applying them that holds significance and value, much more than the individual cards themselves. As a tarot consultant, I guide people in making those connections and gaining that perspective.

The cards, like a novel, are a powerful force for the externalization of inner truths. Traditional healers sometimes will apply a poultice to "draw out" a disease or to make a fever break. Books and tarot cards can also draw out truths that would otherwise remain embedded. The tarot reader Mark McElroy talks about tarot as "answer mining," and he's right--there's a lot of digging involved, at times, in making meaning from what the cards show us.

A good tarotworker uses the cards as a connector, a conduit, and a channel. My intuitive friends use them to tap into their awareness of what's going on outside their clients' awareness--just under (or, perhaps, over) the radar. I use them to tap into what's going on inside my clients' awareness, cluing them in to knowledge that isn't--well, acknowledged.

I enjoy Jodi's use of the term "ingested" to talk about how people read a narrative. We often talk about movies and books in terms of food, calling them "delicious" or "brain candy" or "spicy" or "tough." All these terms imply a couple of things: the reader is a consumer, and they're eating the story; also, it's their job to digest it, and some narratives are easier to digest than others.

Tarot readings tend to have a spiraling narrative force, rather than a linear plot. In other words, it's pretty rare for a reading to show a really clear progression of: "You used to be here; then you were here; now you're here; you're heading here." This isn't unheard of, but it's more common to have a card layout tell you: "These are the forces that are always moving you, the engines of your behavior. Here's a recent event that really threw a wrench into the works for you. That tripped you up, like so, but it also taught you Deep Hidden Life Meaning X. Now you have to reconcile these two competing forces of your own nature..."

I've always found plot to be the most difficult aspect of playwriting and screenwriting. Maybe I enjoy tarot so much because it's always putting a new spin on my ideas of plot and narrative. And also because, every time I read for a client, I have a collaborator in unraveling its layers of stories.

Book Review: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

2009-02-01T10:50:00.003-05:00

This novel has been hyped to me by friends and strangers endlessly over the last year. So I finally gave in and threw myself onto the (also almost endless) waitlist at the library. Just started reading it, and my friends, it is amazing. It's challenging and mind-expanding without ever losing its sense of fun. Anyone with even one molecule of interest in Caribbean culture, the Spanish language, or science fiction will be in hog heaven reading it.

The author, Junot Díaz, is a local boy (well, I think he lives in NYC, but he teaches at MIT). With this book, he's pulled off some of the most ingenious and engrossing wordplay since...well, since Vladimir Nabokov. I remember being blown away by Nabokov's bilingual (and even trilingual) punning when I first read "Lolita," and Díaz is just as adept at that. He coins words--my favorite so far is his chosen term for dirty dancing: "hip-motism." His sentences are pungent mashups of New Jersey street talk, literary erudition, and palabras Dominicanas. I'm not getting every word, but I'm loving every word.

I think Díaz is associated with Grub Street here in Boston, so hopefully I'll get to meet him at an event there sometime and tell him how happy his book makes me. (Though I will have to get in line, I'm sure.)

Tarot as a Trip

2009-01-30T19:33:00.002-05:00

The paper catalog for Brookline Adult Ed's Spring Term 09 just came in the mail, so I eagerly flipped through it to find my tarot class listing. (It's in the paper version, but not on their website yet!) I was wondering idly what section it would be in. Personal Awareness, along with the Meditation and Mindfulness courses? No. Health and Well-Being? Nyet. Turns out they've lumped me into Hobbies, Recreation, and Trips.

So I started asking myself which one of those three things tarot is. I don't like calling it a hobby. I don't like the word "hobby"; it sounds dated to me, and a bit condescending, with a connotation of an arcane or highly involved way to kill time.

"Recreation" makes me think of the rec center where I learned to play soccer and tennis, and also of recreational sex and drugs. None of those associations really resonates with how I do tarot.

So, I guess tarot must be a trip. That makes the most sense to me out of the three. Many tarot readers speak of the cards as tools for understanding the Soul's Journey. Some writers think of the tarot as a story, and of a card layout as a somewhat mysterious plot waiting to be revealed.

A good tarot session does feel like a journey, both out of yourself and deeper into yourself. When I'm reading for someone, it's a bit like traveling at light-speed--I lose the sense of time moving forward, and seem to float within it instead.

Other Trip destinations in the BACE catalog include the Charles River, Newbury Street, and the Franklin Park Zoo. All worthy destinations. But what about the wilds of your own soul, citizens of Boston? C'mon, you know you want to go on that safari--with a good guide and some satellite maps, of course.

OK, I believe I just originated a new tarot metaphor: the cards as one's intuitive GPS system! Love it!

TV Review--"Dexter," the Shadow, and the Mask

2009-01-25T17:35:00.003-05:00

I'm watching the first season of the Showtime series "Dexter" on DVD. It's completely fascinating. I originally resisted watching it, since the premise--the main character is a serial killer who's also a crime-scene expert for the Miami Police Department--seemed distasteful and exploitative. But the show, while gruesome at times, isn't about delivering shocks or about portraying acts of violence with a wink and an ironic nod. Instead, it's an exploration of two universal human qualities--the shadow side we all carry within us, and the masks we wear to hide that from the world.

This may make the show sound a bit more cynical about human nature than it actually is. Dexter Morgan, the main character, considers himself to be a monster--something other than completely human. Since childhood, he's been filled with the desire to kill--a desire sparked by an almost unspeakable childhood trauma, and nurtured by his foster father, Harry, a cop who taught Dexter to channel his killing urge into something constructive (he kills only the most vicious and sadistic murderers), and to cover his tracks.

In the first four episodes of Season One--and indeed, from the very first episode--Dexter's killings are portrayed as highly moral, and as logical responses to heinous acts of violence. Harry saw a killer go free on a technicality, and he groomed Dexter to become a one-man judge, jury, and executioner of similar people--horrible people who would otherwise be getting away with their deeds scot-free.

Dexter sees Harry as his greatest protector, and the skills Harry gave him as his survival skills. Without what Dexter terms "The Code of Harry"--take the lives only of the guilty; you need to be sure they are guilty; never get caught--Dexter believes that he would long ago have killed an innocent person, and been caught doing so.

It's a wonderfully twisted premise, made more brilliant by the fact that Dexter has also channeled his knowledge of killing into a highly respectable job as a blood-spatter techie. His job as a lab tech, helping to unravel the trajectories of people's final aortal spasms and to help finger their killers, neatly parallels his side hustle bringing murderers to justice on his own time.

The show draws no neat answers about what Dexter is doing. He's not a monster; as played by Michael C. Hall, he's someone deeply confused about his identity, yet absolutely rock-solid-certain about his mission. Dexter claims not to feel emotions as normal people do; he has learned (through Harry) how to fake appropriate responses to every human interaction. So in one sense, every time we see Dexter express pleasure or interest or affection, it is all part of an act.

But is it, really? It makes me think of the Tin Man in "The Wizard of Oz," who maintained that he had no heart, but behaved as he thought someone with a heart should behave--with loyalty and love toward his friends. Dexter certainly is confused, and by society's standards is absolutely sick--but one of the show's deep ironies is that he is so functional. He's a good brother to his foster sister Deb; he's a supportive boyfriend to Rita, the wounded and defensively-perfect single mom he dates. And he is devoting his life to bringing killers to justice--albeit in a profoundly unacceptable and gruesome fashion, the only fashion that makes sense to him.

We all have our shadow side, our secrets, the side of ourselves that we don't show to others and don't even like to acknowledge to ourselves. In tarot, this side is represented by trump 15, the Devil. For most of us, this shadow is nothing as extreme as what Dexter carries inside. But like him, we all spend our lives learning to function around whatever those secrets and dark spaces are. And we shield this dark space with the colorful masks we create to show to those around us, so that we can function in the world.

There's enough pop psychology in one episode of "Dexter" to power New York City for a week--if pop psych could be converted into kilowatts, that is. I'm loving the nuances that the writers and actors keep bringing, I'm into the Miami backdrop as a rich and pungent setting, and I can't wait to see where the plot goes.

Oh, and Michael C. Hall has an absolutely beautiful body. That doesn't hurt either!

Did Harry Clarke Pilfer from Pamela Smith?

2009-01-22T14:24:00.011-05:00

Drooling my head off over these sumptuous illustrations by early-20th-century Irish artist Harry Clarke. His scenes from Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales, and from Edgar Allan Poe's short stories, are sublime--and, apparently, all in the public domain! Gonna make so many DIY greeting cards out of these images!

As I was browsing through them, I noticed several that were distinctly reminiscent of Pamela Smith's artwork for the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck. Part of this is probably because they were contemporaries, and were both working in the English-Irish visual tradition of their day. But some of the Clarke images are so Smith-like they made my jaw drop!

Check out this image, so similar to the Magician in the R-W-S deck:

And this one, which reminds me of the Three of Cups:

Even this butterfly looks a heckuva lot like an Ace:

Were Clarke and Smith aware of each other's work? Did one lift from the other? How much did Clarke know about tarot? There are multiple images of cups, wands, and swords in his work, but those are pretty standard fairy-tale stuff, and could easily have shown up even if he'd never heard of tarot. I'd love to learn more about Clarke's life and about these potential influences and connections. In any case, his art is absolutely gorgeous.

UPDATE: The edition of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales illustrated by Clarke came out in 1916, about seven years after the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck. So if there was pilfering, it was probably on Clarke's side, not on Smith's.

A Patriotic "Non-Believer"

2009-01-21T07:41:00.004-05:00

I was happy to hear President Obama acknowledge the existence of "non-believers" in his inaugural address yesterday, especially after having invited the evangelical Christian minister Rick Warren to give the invocation. I thought Warren actually did a really nice job--I was surprised. His genuine affection and admiration for the Obama family came through, and did not feel manufactured for the event.

But it still bothers me that God gets name-checked so automatically in political situations, in courtrooms, and in other places where religion and faith(s) shouldn't be relevant, but still are. It's nothing compared with the ways religion dominates politics in many other countries. But it's a pro-faith prejudice, nevertheless, and a bit hard for me to swallow on the occasions when I notice it.

As a semi-practicing Pagan Buddhist with strong Jewish and Unitarian family influences, I am full of faith. I am the opposite of a non-believer. I believe in the infinite energy of the Universe, and that human beings participate in that energy intimately. I believe that love and connection with each other and with the natural world are holy. I believe that universal energy cycles through us all, and everything around us, and that it's best to respect that, and to marvel at it.

But in our new President's eyes--and they're highly perceptive eyes, and I admire and respect Obama greatly--I'm a "non-believer." Kinda strange. But, at least he made a point of including me. During Warren's invocation, I did feel a subtext of, "If you don't believe in God--my God--you're not really patriotic." And Obama defused that nicely with his speech.

I'm scared that Obama will only be able to make a dent in all our ongoing national emergencies. But I'm so happy we have someone in office who's moral, articulate, and a pleasure to listen to.

Yes-No Questions in Tarot

2009-01-18T09:53:00.002-05:00

There's some controversy around whether it's advisable to ask a tarot deck yes-no questions. A lot of readers who take a psychological approach, as I do, tend toward self-empowerment questions--“Where does my power lie in this situation?”, “What can I let go of?”, "How can I move forward?", etc.

These questions are extremely helpful, but there are a couple of problems that can come up with them. First, there's the danger of getting annoyingly personal-growthy at the expense of really finding answers for the client. If a tarot reader keeps asking the deck questions like "What journey is Julie's soul on right now?" or "What's the true nature of Julie's life path?", the answers that come up will probably be more vague than the client wants. It's not that those aren't good questions--it's just that Julie probably didn't come in to learn about her soul's journey. She came in to find out whether or not getting back together with her ex is a good idea.

Secondly, sometimes non-predictive readers get so into this proactive approach that we get a bit snobby about anything approaching a "psychic" question. While I'm all about keeping the focus on empowering choices the client can make, it’s also nice to just really cut to the chase and break things down. “Is it a good idea to get back together with my ex?”, in Julie's case, is really the issue at hand--regardless of how self-aware and empowered she is. And I'd put that question right in the center of the spread I design for her.

It's also nice to have a spread include both the more abstract, soul's-journey questions and some very specific or even procedural ones. In other words, there's often a place in a spread both for "Where does my power lie?" and for "Should I accept this job offer?"

I'm realizing as I write this that there are really two issues at play here. One is the issue of yes-no questions themselves; the other is the issue of what kind of questions are useful and empowering for a client. As I've said above, I have no problem with yes-no as a question format, but on the other hand, it's certainly possible to craft a yes-no question that would not be especially useful. "Will my boyfriend come back to me?" is a yes-no question that takes all the power in the situation away from the client, so that is one I would avoid.

So how do you know if the answer to a yes-no question is yes or no? Usually the card that comes up to answer the question will make it obvious. Aces are unequivocal yeses, since they’re the purest energy in the deck. A card showing people fighting with sticks indicates that there may be conflict if Julie gets back together with her ex-honey. The Emperor (#4 of the Major Arcana) is all about control issues, so those will probably come into play if the relationship in question is reignited. With attention to the card's imagery and to the client's reactions, it's usually not much trouble deciphering the deck's opinion on the question being asked.

So I see no reason to shy away from yes-no questions. The when-will questions are another story…

Artists Who Should Do Tarot--Mark Ryden

2009-01-16T13:31:00.003-05:00

Mark Ryden could, without troubling himself greatly, create the single weirdest, creepiest, most hallucinogenic tarot deck unimaginable. Ryden is a highly successful pop surrealist painter whose themes include carnivorous stuffed animals, nubile-yet-ferocious nymphets, and lots and lots of meat. Paging through his website yields images of a nurse grieving over a dead mandrake plant in her lap; a kid riding in a carriage drawn by an enormous centipede; a little girl getting eaten by a tree; an extremely disturbing series of underaged yet erotic wood nymphs; a Santa worm (just what it sounds like); and Abe Lincoln, over and over. And meat. And Abe Lincoln juggling cuts of meat.

I have no idea what it's like to live in Ryden's head, and I'm not quite sure how I feel about his work. But his images are really something, and I'd love to see his take on the tarot.

P.S. I like this Ryden print, called Silence, very much.

Top Ten Rules for Facebook Use

2009-01-15T20:13:00.002-05:00

I’ve been spending time on Facebook lately. I never would have pictured myself frequenting a social-networking site; I try to do my networking non-virtually as much as possible. But as Elizabeth pointed out, during the excellent Abundant Practice Workshop, Facebook is a great venue for subtly, non-obnoxiously promoting yourself and your business. So I’ve been trying to take advantage of that.

Here are some rules I’ve worked out for myself about my use of Facebook. These aren’t admonitions to other FB users--they’re for me, and I thought they might be interesting for other users to consider, and to spark discussion.

1. Maintain clarity about Facebook’s purpose in my life. People use FB for many reasons, including marketing their business, getting back in touch with people from their past, and amusing themselves by chatting with friends, uploading photos and videos, posting useful and interesting links, and joining groups (on Facebook, you can “become a fan” of everyone and anything from celebs to foods to political causes). It’s easy to get sucked into all this and have FB become a gigantic time-waster. In order to keep myself focused, I’ve decided that I’m going to use it a) to promote my tarot business, and b) to maintain and renew communication with people I’ve lost touch with, or am infrequently able to talk to or see.

2. Check it only, literally, once or twice every 24 hours. It’s way too easy to get sucked into exchanging inane messages with friends and acquaintances, following myriad links, etc. I go on Facebook daily, usually once, for a total of about 20 to 30 minutes.

3. Have a game plan for each visit. Aimlessness can lead to the dreaded suck-in. While there, I read whatever status updates and news feed items are on the first page; write responses to interesting items; answer any outstanding friend requests; and post anything necessary or relevant related to my tarot work or my life.

4. Don’t be gratuitous in the personal info I share. Yes, I sometimes post silly status updates; I don’t believe that updates on FB need to be of epic or earth-shattering consequence. But I only update my status if an answer readily comes to mind to the automatic question, “What are you doing right now?” Even though FB is a “walled garden,” so only friends can see my posts, it is a public forum. If I’m on the fence about whether an update is too silly, too personal, or “over-sharing,” I just don’t post it.

5. Be focused about promoting my tarot biz. If I’m offering a new class, attending a tarot event that’s open to the public, or writing a blog post about tarot, I’ll post those items to my Facebook profile. This is a way of keeping myself on people’s radar screens as a tarot professional; my hope is that these updates will serve as reminders or gentle nudges to people who have been considering taking a class or scheduling some sessions with me, but who haven’t gotten around to it yet.

6. At the same time, don’t be obnoxious with the self-promotion. I don’t post tarot-related things more than once or twice a week--aeons, in FB time, and deliberately so. If I were to post about my tarot biz daily, that would get annoying to people, or at least lessen the impact of every tarot-related update. So I try to keep it relatively infrequent, yet consistent, to walk that line between staying in people’s consciousness and getting on their nerves!

7. Ignore friend requests from people I don’t know well, don’t remember, or don’t like. I often get friend requests from people whose name I vaguely remember--from high school, for example. If nothing about them rings a bell with me, I ignore their request. I don’t think there’s anything inappropriate about only inviting people to join my FB network if they’re someone I know and am curious to keep up-to-date with. A lot of people are afraid to ignore a friend request, for fear of seeming rude, but it’s far worse to find myself reading status updates from someone who brings back bad memories, or to whom I feel absolutely no connection.

8. When deliberating whether or not to send a friend request to someone, I ask myself one simple question: “If I were in this person’s country, city, town, or neighborhood, would I want to sit down with him or her over coffee to hear about what’s going on in his or her life?” If the answer is yes, I send the request. If no, I don’t. (To be completely honest, I am somewhat more open to "friending" people who are professional contacts in my editorial career. Since staying on their radar screen and in their network may mean that they could help me find future employment, even if they are not someone I have a strong sense of connection with, I will still “friend with them.” But if I don't like them, or don't consider them to be a trusted professional contact, I won't.)

9. Do not send virtual gifts, “poke” people, ask people to join causes, or do any of those other bell-and-whistle things. For some people, these may be fun; for me, they’re pure time-wasters.

10. Don’t be shy about plundering friends’ friend lists. When I befriend someone on FB, the first thing I do is go through their friend list to see if someone I want to connect with is on there as well. This is an easy way to build my network and to make sure I’m not missing connecting with someone I’ve forgotten about, but would like to be in better touch with.

What about you all? Do you have rules-and-regs for Facebook use? How much time do you spend on there, and is it satisfying to you? What do people do on FB that really annoys you, and what traps have you managed to avoid?

Inflatable People in Contemporary Fiction

2009-01-11T10:06:00.003-05:00

What's up with the recent fascination with inflatable dolls?

The first blow-up doll reference I noticed, admittedly a few years back, was in the brilliant Dan Chaon short story “Safety Man,” from his collection Among the Missing. In the story, a recently widowed woman buys an inflatable, man-sized doll to ride next to her in the car, sit by the window when she and her kids are home alone at night, etc. In Chaon’s usual style, the story is slightly surreal, funny in an uncomfortable way, and feels as if it’s going to become a horror story, or dark fantasy, but never quite gets there.

Then the film Lars and the Real Girl came out a couple years ago. I haven’t seen it, but in the movie, Ryan Gosling plays a guy who’s in love with a blow-up doll he finds online. At least one therapist I know really loved this movie, finding it convincing about human nature (I believe that in the film, the main character's friends play along with his delusion, pretending that they also believe the doll is alive).

Then, in Joe Hill’s 20th Century Ghosts, the story “Pop Art” deals with an inflatable kid. In this story, inflatability is a genetic condition, and the blow-up kid, Arthur, gets harassed and bullied by his classmates, and eventually makes friends with the narrator, a tough kid from a troubled home. Hill takes what is an almost unworkably absurd premise, and makes it funny, touching, and poignant.

And to top it off, the always hat-tippable bOINGbOING posted this story not long ago.

So, people. What is going on with this inflatability complex? Why are people suddenly caring about blow-up dolls? Most of the focus in these stories isn’t sexual at all (except for the true-life one). In Chaon’s story, the blow-up doll is a symbol for the main character’s vulnerability, and the futility of trying to protect oneself against mortality and loss. In Hill’s, it’s a meditation about friendship, and about accepting someone who's different from us.

My guess is that people are feeling less real to one another, as we connect more and more online and less and less in the flesh with those we care about. There's also a lot in our culture that's artificially inflated, or puffed up, from the salaries of investment-bank CEOs to the hype levels surrounding only mildly talented starlets. Perhaps pop culture is responding to that by trotting out blow-up dolls as metaphors for vulnerability and social disconnection.

Book Review: Joe Hill's "20th Century Ghosts"

2009-01-09T18:42:00.006-05:00

I’m hip-deep in Joe Hill’s extraordinary short story collection, 20th Century Ghosts. It’s my fave magical-realist dark-fantasy collection since Kelly Link’s Stranger Things Happen (somewhat coyly, Hill name-checks Link in the first story, “Best New Horror,” using her as an example of what horror writing should be).

There's a lot to admire in Hill's writing. It's unsparing, sometimes graphically violent and grotesque, but never quite purely cynical. His dad is Stephen King, and it's hard not to notice the many, many absent or neglectful or crude or otherwise distasteful fathers who fill these pages. Moms don't fare much better. But the bitter distaste for humanity that comes across in some of King's writing isn't present in his son's work.

Hill seems to agree with the protagonist of "Best New Horror," a horror-fiction anthology editor who believes that "whenever writers introduce a threat or a conflict into their story, they create the possibility of horror." Genre barriers are porous at best, and writers like Hill and Link make the most of the "slip-stream" nature of contemporary fantasy, horror, science fiction, and magic realism. So even people who would not consider themselves horror fans might appreciate Hill's writing.

That said, be prepared for some harsh twists of the knife; some of the stories are pretty brutal. Not all of them are; "Pop Art" and the title story are more gentle and reflective (though by no means perfumy). Experiment for fans of genres like these--read the first three pages of "Last Breath" and tell me what author Hill is making explicit tribute to. It's almost uncanny if you've read that author's work.

One more note--I made the mistake of reading this while eating. Umm--just don't.

Tarot Dream

2009-01-08T20:34:00.003-05:00

I had my first dream explicitly related to tarot cards recently. In this dream, my dad and I were clearing ice off of my parents' garage roof. The garage was also made of a huge living tree, whose branches had become iced over and which we were trying to clear off. I felt constructive, like I was doing something worth doing, and was enjoying working with my dad on it.

Then I was reading a mystical book by a great, but not famous, author. I imagined this author (a man) at the mansion of a scary, mute genius (also a man), flashing big bright tarot cards in the scary mute genius's face. At first I felt the mystical author was doing this to provoke a reaction from the SMG--literally getting up in his face--but then I realized the author was trying to warn the SMG about something, rather than to hurt or provoke him.

The cards the author was flashing were somewhat intimidating themselves, rather Crowley-like, with feverish imagery and aggressive coloring. This is part of why I felt the author was getting all up in the genius's grill. The author didn't seem to be asking the genius to interpret the cards, but was expecting that flashing them at the genius would get his message across.

The dynamic between the two characters (author and genius) could be reflective of a friendship of mine where the communication has been difficult lately. They could also be two sides of my own personality--the author side is the part of me that wants to communicate clearly, and the mute genius is my instincts, which are not always explainable, or easy to articulate, and are thus sometimes scary.

Scary Mute Genius is a bit like the Devil card in tarot--the shadow side that holds more and more power over us the more we look away from it. But it's also a genius side of ourselves--the id knows a whole lot, and we ignore it at our peril!

The dad-ice section of the dream was probably triggered by a real-life event: my dad leaning out his bedroom window to scrape ice off my parents' roof over Christmas. As a dream symbol, scraping off the ice connects to the idea of keeping my relationship with my parents fresh and growing, which it currently feels like it is--rather than icing over, as family dynamics can, into a set pattern that's no longer evolving.

I've recently started recording my dreams again, writing them down during the night in a notebook I keep by my bed. This feels satisfying, though often I can't read my own half-asleep writing and have to make guesses the next day as to what I meant! The key emotions and images are staying with me somewhat better, though, as I practice this more.

Advanced Beginner Tarot Class Starts Saturday

2009-01-05T12:48:00.002-05:00

The next series of Advanced Beginner tarot classes will get underway this Saturday, and there are still a couple of open spots. Here's the current class plan. If you own a tarot deck and know your Major Arcana from your Minor Arcana, you have the background you need.

Sat Jan 10--Major Arcana, Part I
Sat Jan 24--Major Arcana, Part II
In these sessions, we'll take a look at the Majors as archetypes, and examine the concept of the Fool's Journey--and the Soul's Journey. We'll look at how different artists depict the various trump cards, and how these renditions enhance and deepen the cards' meanings.

Sat Feb 7--Court Cards
We'll tackle these enigmatic and intriguing rulers of the deck, finding ways to apply them to people we know, to different professions and personality types, and to sides of our own personality.

Sat Feb 21--Creating Spreads and Questions / Card Interactions
We'll wrap up by looking at empowering, robust questions you can use to get great results from your tarot work. I'll reveal why yes-no questions can work wonders--and how to avoid the dreaded "When Will ... " questions! We'll also look at the strange alchemy of cards in a spread--how do they affect each other? Do they change each other's meanings? Can they contradict each other? And how do reversals play into all this?

These classes will be held at my office in Teele Square, Somerville, from 10 AM to 11:30 AM. The total cost for the four classes will be $160 (as usual, I'll be accepting cash, personal checks, and PayPal, but not credit cards).

Any questions, or if you'd like to enroll, drop me a line: tarotation AT yahoo.

On Inviting Oneself Over

2008-12-31T14:07:00.002-05:00

I love visiting people, and I think I’m a pretty good houseguest. One of my resolutions for 2009 is to travel a bit more, to places where I can stay with a friend or family member instead of in a hotel. This has so many benefits--financial, obviously, but also emotional. I am lucky to know tons of interesting, generous, good-natured people, and I don’t see them often enough.

Part of the reason that I don’t do much overnight visiting is that I don’t want to impose upon or inconvenience people. There are certain homes in which I know I’ll always be welcome, where the people will always be genuinely glad to see me and where it doesn’t put them out any to have me stay there for a few days. But I also have lots of acquaintances and casual friends, and often with them, I’m not sure how welcome a visit from me would be.

Nothing personal against myself here--I’m a considerate visitor and will almost always find a way to bring a little gift and take my hosts out for a nice meal to thank them for letting me crash at their place. It’s just that opening up one’s home is so...personal. I know of websites that allow people to open their homes to complete strangers, and I know that comfort with houseguests is all relative. Some people really enjoy hosting, while others don’t. Some have enough space--or feel they do--while others don’t, or worry that they don’t. And some people are very independent and protective of their time and their territory.

So my policy, when thinking about a potential visit to someone, has several steps.

1. I think about whom I’d really like to see, especially people I haven’t seen in over two years, and see who pops naturally to the top of my mind. I try to avoid the pitfall of feeling that I should visit someone. I ask myself whom I really miss, and who’s fun to spend time around. My dad likes to classify people as “easy to be with” if he likes them; I think that’s actually a very useful yes-no check as to whether someone would be fun to visit.

2. I think about what I know about their living space. While I’ve been made comfortable by friends who have everything from studio apartments to big houses, space is relevant. If you’re considering a trip to New York City, and are thinking about looking up an old high-school friend who lives there, find out if she is currently sharing a one-bedroom apartment with two roommates. If so, this isn’t necessarily a deal-breaker--she’s obviously comfortable sharing her personal space, and might have a “the more the merrier” attitude. But it’s something to be aware of in terms of your own needs and comfort zone.

It’s good to push this zone a bit when traveling, but push it too far and the pleasure of the trip can diminish greatly. Is your friend a big slob? Does he have--shudder--small children? Will her place be gross, dirty, and potentially hazardous to hang out in? Or are they obsessive neat freaks who will not be able to deal with an extra towel hanging in their bathroom for a couple of days?

3. I think about logistics and expense of getting to them. Honestly, a lot of times what you can save on three nights’ hotel costs makes up for what you spend on the plane ticket. With someone in a much farther-off location, the cost of getting to them is higher, but so is your incentive--you’ll get to see a new place as well as an old friend. And if they’re teaching English in Inner Mongolia, trust me, they’ll be glad for the company.

4. I ask nicely, and give room for an out. Email is great for this. I often phrase visiting requests like this: “Hi, I’m planning a trip to [country/city/location] in a couple months and would love to see you if you’ll be around. I’ll probably be there from about [date] to [date]. I’d love to stay with you, if that would be convenient, or just meet up for a meal--whatever’s best for you [and significant other, if applicable]. Let me know what you think, and if this time doesn’t work out, hopefully we can get together in the near future!”

Note that it’s important to do this BEFORE buying plane tickets or officially scheduling vacation time! It’s an option to send out a few emails like this to several people you’d like to see, and see who sends back the most enthusiastic responses. Even though it can be hard to read tone in an email, it’s pretty easy to tell the difference between a luke-warm response (“Of course we’d love to see you, though things may be a bit hectic since we’re renovating the kitchen and my sister’s staying with us for a month as well...”) and a joyful invite (“Awesome! Can’t wait to see you, and of COURSE you can stay with me as long as you’d like!”).

Bottom line is that it’s easy to be lazy, especially if you’re a homebody Taurus like me. Traveling is a pain. It’s never going to be as comfortable or easy as being in your own home. But it’s so important to actually see your friends, instead of just socially-networking yourself into a cyber-stupor. I may have a googolplex of “friends” on Facebook, but how many of them have I actually sat with at their kitchen table recently, or on their futon, or on their front porch, and heard their real voice, and looked into their smiling face instead of at their profile picture?

And of course, being all karmic-n-dharmic I love hosting visitors, too. But that’s a whole ‘nother story...

Movie Review: Benjamin Button

2008-12-29T19:55:00.001-05:00

“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” has its funniest, most illuminating moments during some (literal) flashbacks, in which an unlucky fellow gets struck by lightning over and over again. The filmmakers shot these as sepia-toned, almost subliminal moments, and they’re completely effective; they really do feel like flashes of memory from a bygone era. Unfortunately, the rest of the movie is ponderous and syrupy, lacking in both clarity and zing.

There’s a fair amount of squandered potential here. The plot, adapted from an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story, is about a man who is born old and ages backwards--concepts don’t come much higher than that. And the cast is full of consistently strong performers like Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, and Taraji P. Henson. (Honestly, who can explain to me why Taraji P. Henson isn’t at least twice as famous as she is? If you’ve never heard of her, see “Hustle and Flow” or “Talk to Me”--you’ll be wondering the same thing.)

But the movie feels like a fugitive limping off the chain gang with shackles dragging from its ankles. The biggest problem is that the protagonist, the chronologically-challenged Benjamin, is an extremely passive main character. It takes the first two hours of the three-hour movie for him to show any desire or initiative; like Forrest Gump (also not my fave film character), he mostly just goes with the (backwards) flow, and lets stuff happen to him.

Filmmakers seem to feel that, because our lives happen as a string of moments that are often connected haphazardly, it’s a legit choice to have a movie be about, you know, some stuff that happens to this guy. Never OK! Not even if the guy is Brad Pitt, who always seems to be thinking and reacting and does his best to imbue his flat character with some verve and dimensionality. The reason we go to films is to see a story--not to see some dude living his life (whether backwards or forwards doesn’t much matter).

I was also irritated by the framing device, a death-bed confessional in a New Orleans hospital right before Hurricane Katrina. It felt like such a movie cliché--an actor (here, Cate Blachett) fakely aged with makeup and CGI, telling her character’s life story in barely comprehensible mumbles as we cut back and forth from present-day to various moments in her past. Also, if you’re going to bring up Katrina, you better have a really powerful reason--as with 9-11, it’s not a topic to casually refer to on-screen (or off, for that matter). Tragedy (especially fresh and recent tragedy) deserves the respect of a solid story-line. Here, it’s used as cheap emotional shorthand.

The director, David Fincher, also directed “Se7en,” “The Game,” and “Fight Club,” all of which are way edgier than this. Perhaps he was trying to do something more heart-warming, or more easily accessible, than his previous work; however, the end result feels like a lot of talent and money were tossed into the wind and left to blow around until they dissipated. Too bad--it could have been much better than this.

Wonderful Anti-Prop-8 Pro-Christianity Billboard

2008-12-28T16:11:00.004-05:00

This billboard was put up by a San Diego church in response to the passage of Proposition 8 in November (that's the prop that re-illegalized gay marriage in CA). The quality of the image isn't top-notch but it moved me very much. Thanks to JD for posting the link.

The incredibly lovely and talented Vienna Teng has a great song called "City Hall" on her album Dreaming Through the Noise. The song's about the wonderful vibe in San Fran several years back, when gay couples thronged the city center to marry their longtime partners, honeys, and sweethearts. Not a dry eye in the house when she played it at Club Passim recently, and though she didn't say a word about Prop 8, it was the most effective (and least self-righteous) protest song I've heard in ages. Additional props to Ms. Teng for citing Dolly Parton as an inspiration!

Swords as Tools

2008-12-21T10:00:00.004-05:00

I was teaching a tarot class about the suit of Swords recently. This is a problematic suit for many readers (and readees) because so many of the images are violent. For example, check out this one from the Silicon Dawn Tarot:

The artist, Egypt Urnash, labels this card "Sorrow," but I see tons of rage and self-hatred in it as well. The most disturbing thing about it is how the central figure seems to be laughing uncontrollably as she plunges the swords into her belly and reproductive organs. Pure self-destruction, beyond the point of logic or control. Scary!

So in my Swords class, I was going through the whole suit card by card (using the Rider-Waite-Smith deck) with a student who is very seriously studying Jungian psychology. I was struck by the fact that she kept referring to the swords in the cards as "tools"--like most people, I'd always thought of them as weapons. I asked her what she meant.

"Well, you said this suit is about the mind, right?" she said. "It's about what Jungians call the Thinking Function. And you said swords are about mental energy, and about cutting away bullshit. So I think the swords in this suit are tools of discernment."

I boggled at this info, but when I gave it more thought it completely blew me away. If we think of Swords as tools of discernment--as symbols of increasing awareness of the truth--then it makes sense that this suit shows imagery that is intense and, well, cutting. As my student pointed out, as we become more discerning, this separates us from those around us. This is an important part of the process of becoming an individual--cutting away what we don't need. But it certainly hurts! This suit acknowledges the difficulty of this process.

I'd always explained the vicious side of this suit to myself by saying that Swords are about how we can torment ourselves with our own minds. But I think my student hit on something much more subtle. As we see the world and ourselves more and more clearly, we destroy our past selves. One moment of clarity and understanding can rip off an old layer of my identity, leaving me exposed, vulnerable, and in pain--but also with new room to grow, to become who I'm supposed to be next. That's the pain this suit is about--not the pain of over-thinking things.

I really have to check out Jung more deeply. That guy was onto something!

Frugal Tips--Don't Send Xmas Cards

2008-12-20T13:03:00.004-05:00

Sending Christmas cards, or holiday cards, is a source of stress in December. We rush around spending money on cards, realizing we need stamps, ordering stamps online or standing in line for them at the post office, flipping through our address books (either virtual, paper-bound, or both) in vain search for the latest address for a friend or relative who moves every year or two, and finally sending off cards that just contain a bland holiday greeting because we're too exhausted to do more.

A fun alternative to this is to send New Year's cards. In the week between Xmas and New Years, check out some bookstores and stationery stores--they'll probably have holiday cards at a steep discount. Buy a box or two, and make a list of some people you really miss, haven't seen or spoken to in awhile, and who live too far away to make hanging out an easy possibility. It should be a short list, maybe five to ten names or so.

Then, choose two or three days in the New Year--maybe starting with New Year's Day itself, which tends to be quiet--to spend writing not just a card, but a letter to a couple of the people on the list. You can use the holiday cards you bought, but this isn't something to just sign your name to--it's something to devote a little bit of time and energy to. January (and even February) are good months for this, since the holiday madness is over and they aren't huge months for socializing.

Don't do more than two of these card-letters in a row. Handwrite them. They don't have to be long. Just make them more specific to the recipient than the average Xmas card. Ask questions about them. Tell them some random factoids about yourself that you know would amuse that person--and perhaps only that person, among all your friends. If you feel like it, tell them something you find awesome and delightful about them. It sounds corny, but how often does that actually happen?

I highly advocate writing paper letters and handwritten cards throughout the year. People absolutely flip out for them. We're all so used to email that having a letter or card appear in our mailbox is a complete thrill. Something that helps with this is to keep a running list of friends and family members you find yourself thinking about, and then pulling that out once a month and writing one of them a letter.

Where does frugality play into this? Well, time is money, and your time in December will by necessity be a bit compressed. Even people who don't celebrate Xmas are usually drawn into some level of holiday planning and socializing. It can be fun if you don't take it too seriously. But if you drain your dwindling supplies of December time trying to get Xmas cards or Hannukah cards out the door to people "in time for the holiday"--well, you're draining yourself of energy and good spirits as well.

Wait till 2009 and then send out a few thoughtful cards and letters. Your loved ones will appreciate them so much more than a holiday card sent out of a sense of duty.

Book Review: The Shadow of the Wind

2008-12-14T18:51:00.002-05:00

"Before we knew it, we were walking along the breakwater until the whole city, shining with silence, spread out at our feet like the greatest mirage in the universe..."

Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind (not to be confused with Patrick Rothfuss's The Name of the Wind) is an unironic, unashamed, deeply romantic melodrama. It's easy to imagine it illustrated by pre-Raphaellite artists like Dante Rossetti, and if they'd lived in the right era I can clearly picture either Mary Shelley or Daphne du Maurier staying up late reading it.

It's set in Barcelona around the time of the Spanish Civil War, and concerns used book shops, publishing, family secrets, ghosts, thwarted passions, and the decline and recovery of a magical city betrayed by its citizens. The many plot twists get a bit absurd after a certain point, but there is so much pleasure to be taken in the characters and the post-Gothic story that it hardly matters.

A good companion movie to this would be the gorgeous and mystical Pan's Labyrinth, which takes a magical-realist approach to this same era in Spanish history.

Unexpected Ways to Save $$ in 2009

2008-12-10T20:06:00.004-05:00

I’ve started thinking about some fun, easy ways to save some bucks in the new year. I’ll be posting some of them here.

With all frugality tips, the big question is--Does it feel right for me? For example, many of us have heard the admonition to cut our daily Starbucks grande nonfat skim mocha latte--“You’ll save yourself $5 a day! That’s $25 per week if you drink one every weekday!! That’s $100 a month you were throwing away!!!” etc. But ya know, if I really, truly enjoy my Starbucks drink, and it delights me, and helps me get through the day with my spirit buoyant--that’s totally worth $5. So the advice to cut that out of my day is unrealistic and depressing.

So with frugality, it’s always a question of the little things you can do to trim the fat. Maybe little money leaks that were making you vaguely uncomfortable--plugging those up, even a little bit, feels awesome and is very energizing. It’s not about axing pleasure from your life; it’s about trimming away stuff you don’t need, and enjoying that resulting energy burst.

Bearing that in mind, here are some tricks that will save you some money--but ONLY if you want them to! The first one involves doing a tiny bit of pre-planning before eating out.

In a nutshell: If you know you’re going out to dinner tonight, carry a small plastic container with you when you leave the house this morning. This will motivate you to take home part of your meal, so that it can become part of your lunch or dinner tomorrow.

It’s so easy to decide not to take leftovers home--it’s such a pain to lug them; it doesn’t seem worth it to have the restaurant wrap them up in Styrofoam or something equally noxious if it’s not a full meal’s worth that remains on your plate. But the truth is, it’s always worth it. A few nights’ worth of mini-leftovers equals a full lunch or dinner later in the week.

By bringing your own container, you have a psychological motivation to fill it (whether heavily or lightly) with food at the restaurant. This helps you pace yourself as you eat. Remembering that you’ve already planned to bring food home with you makes it easier to stop eating when you’ve had enough--rather than when you’re uncomfortably stuffed.

And it’s infinitely better environmentally to bring a reusable container. This doesn’t mean you should guilt yourself if you forget--it just means you should congratulate yourself when you remember!

Another great leftovers option is to pass them on to someone on the street who’s asking for money. This is a painless way to help someone in need, without worrying about whether they’d buy booze or drugs if you gave them a buck or two. I’ve gotten lots of true appreciation from people when I do this; it’s meaningful to pass on part of your own meal, which you could have kept for yourself.

I've never been to a restaurant so fancy that they gave me attitude for bringing my own container. In fact, most places are honored that you enjoyed their food enough to take the leftovers with you.

Side note: If you ate something truly awesome, don't forget to ask your server to tell the chef it rocked. This kind of feedback too often gets lost; we often only give feedback on something if we have an issue with it. So pass on a little love, if you're feeling generous. It'll bounce right back at you somehow, so it's good vibes well spent--even for the most self-interested among us!

Favorite Books of 2008, Part 3

2008-12-07T21:05:00.002-05:00

In the Woods, by Tana French
Genre: Mystery

I used to write mystery reviews for a pretty amazing fan publication, and I still feel it's one of the most diverse genres out there. It's so eclectic--everything from a hard-boiled police procedural to an Agatha-Christie-style "cozy" to an avant-garde unreliable narrator spinning a distrustworthy story can be stamped with the "Mystery" label. And any of those subgenres has its own multiple gradations as well.

My favorite mystery I read this year is Tana French's "In the Woods." I disapprove of the title, which is too close to that of the Sondheim musical "Into the Woods." And there is one plot point that I take issue with. But other than that, this is pretty damn close to being a perfect novel--a completely absorbing crime story, with the two most likable detectives in recent memory at its heart.

The buddy-cop story, in which police partners are portrayed as being as close as, or closer than, a married couple, has been overdone. But until I read this book, I never really understood on a gut level the reasons for that bond. This novel explores it, playfully at first, and then turning and twisting it around itself. It feels as if the author both loves her characters, and loves testing them, pushing them to various breaking points. She loves them for their strength and their vulnerability--those two great detective clichés--and we feel the same way.

It's also an interesting examination of a close platonic male-female friendship, between heterosexual characters, that doesn't fall back on sexual tension as an easy, and lazy, plot device. There's plenty of tension here, but none of it feels cheap or manufactured. We always feel how high the stakes are, and care how things turn out for the protagonists as much as we care to see the central mystery resolved. Like Dennis Lehane's "Mystic River," a very different kind of novel, the mystery is as much internal (within the characters) as it is plot-driven. And that makes everything all the more moving, and all the more chilling.

Favorite Books of 2008, Part 2

2008-12-07T16:51:00.004-05:00

The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss
Genre: Fantasy

I wrote about this here while I was reading it, and still feel the same way. This may have been the book I enjoyed most this year, just in terms of PRPPP (that's Pure Reading Pleasure Per Page). It's definitely the book for which I will go out of my way to get my hot little hands on the sequel the moment it comes out.

This is also the book with the most over-the-top jacket copy you'll ever see. Noted SF and fantasy writers were vying to out-blurb each other, offering more and more outlandish and exaggerated praise. And you know what? They did not lie! It's fun stuff, with no strings attached. You can geek out reading it all night...and still respect yourself in the morning!

Favorite Books of 2008, Part I

2008-12-05T11:28:00.004-05:00

I've started tracking what I'm reading on Goodreads, but my list there doesn't go all the way back through this calendar year. A lot of what I've read has receded into distant memory, but a few books really swept me off my feet and are still pretty near the front of my brain (and my heart). I'll be posting about them one at a time. If you've also read these, I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow
Genre: Young Adult / Science Fiction

This story of smart, thoughtful, techno-hipster teens who take on the sinister Department of Homeland Security blew me away, for many reasons. One is its appealing narrator, Marcus Yarrow. Marcus is a teenage boy. I don't particularly like teenage boys, for the most part, so I was expecting to have resistance to a story told in his voice. But Marcus is the coolest. If even 1% of the adolescents in North America are as witty, heartfelt, brave, and savvy as him, our civilization may not be going to Hell in a hand-basket after all.

"Little Brother" raises a wide range of questions about privacy rights in an age of terrorism. It also shows how paranoia about terrorism can become its own kind of terrorism. It does occasionally stray into the realm of caricature, especially with its villainous characters, but its young heroes are completely authentic at every moment. Also notable for its genuine and unforced feminism--tons of strong girls and women here, both lovable and hatable. And check out the pithy, hilarious explanation of the "paradox of the false positive," on pages 128 and 129 of the U.S. hardcover. It will splinter your brain--but in a nice way.

Swedish Vampires

2008-11-23T22:06:00.003-05:00

Alex and I saw Let the Right One In last week. The only thing I can say about this movie without spoilerizing is that it's a Swedish vampire film. And that I'd highly recommend it, even to people who don't like vampire movies. I'll say a bit more below, and won't give away too much, but I'd suggest waiting to read the rest until you've seen it.

"Right One" is set in a small Swedish town in the 1980s, and it's the story of a pre-teen friendship with a dark side. This movie is opening on the art-house circuit at the same time as the much-hyped (American) teen vampire movie "Twilight." I thought Stephenie Meyer's novel was overrated and generic, so I wouldn't be surprised if "Twilight" the movie is better than the book. But there's no way it's anything like "Let the Right One In," which is deeply strange, touching, and disquieting in a manner that few movies are. (The Korean psychological thriller "Oldboy" is another such exception.)

When Alex and I discussed the movie after watching it, it turned out that our reactions to it were identical--admiration and a freaked-out feeling. Usually with horror movies, I'm thrilled and involved during it, but not haunted afterwards. "Right One" works like a parasite, though, or a sinister seed planted in the mind of the viewer. I was enthralled watching it, but didn't feel scared at all. Walking to the subway afterwards, however, I knew that my mind had been imprinted by something delicate, icy, and sharp. I was very, very glad that I was going home to a warm, bright apartment with a roommate, rather than to a cool, dimly-lit, empty flat like the ones in the film.

It's strange for me, as an American, to see the influx of incredibly dark Scandinavian crime fiction--absolutely brutal and vicious, some of it--and now, perhaps, the beginning of a Scandinavian horror film wave, similar to the Japanese horror wave of the 1990s. Scandinavia seems so pure, clean, snowy, and socialist in the best sense of the word, just as Japan seems all technology, eccentricity, and kawaii schoolgirls carrying Hello Kitty purses. But I guess every society has its seedy undercurrents.

Even though Alex and I agreed about how the film made us feel, we completely 180'd each other on what we thought it was about. I thought it was about how, when you're in love with someone, you accept everything about them--even their most dysfunctional features. Alex thought it was about innocence being drawn into the thrall of a timeless and inescapable evil.

If you see it, let me know what your take is!

Taking it up a Notch

2008-11-23T11:10:00.004-05:00

Over the last couple of weeks, there's been a lot more action going on in my tarot life. People have been picking up my brochure and emailing me about sessions; contacting me on Facebook; stopping by my desk at my day job. It's been great!

Success and exposure are also a wee bit terrifying. One of the big questions I've been asking myself during my marketing class is--how big a role do I want my tarot practice to have in my life? Do I ultimately want this to be my day job? What would that look like and feel like? Could I really deal with being self-employed?

At the moment, I'm enjoying my day job and loving my tarot work. So I'm content to have the regular paycheck from the former while I bring the latter into my life more and more.

In our marketing workshop, our teacher Elizabeth has asked us to define our niche--the ideal clients that we want to work with. Her philosophy is that we should only work with these clients, never settling for high-maintenance or difficult ones, of for ones who don't "get" the work we do. (For me, the UN-ideal client is someone who wants me to tell their fortune or to give them easy answers about their life.)

At first I had my ideal-client niche pegged as "writers and other creative people," and I do enjoy working with that population. But lately, I've been realizing that the greatest pleasure I take in tarot comes from helping people--especially women, and especially young women in their 20s and 30s--really come front and center in their own lives, acknowledging and enjoying their responsibility and their power. That is thrilling to me! So I'm reworking my marketing materials to reflect that.

It's weird how marketing suffuses every aspect of daily life. As I mentioned, I've been using Facebook for marketing; my outgoing voicemail greeting also now includes a marketing message; my email signature for marketing is in development. This feels like I'm making myself very vulnerable in a way, like I'm admitting to how seriously I take tarot (though hopefully this doesn't spill over into taking myself too seriously!). It's taken some getting used to, but it's getting me more and more excited about my tarot biz. I like feeling like a professional!

Neil Gaiman Reads from his "Graveyard Book"

2008-11-16T21:57:00.006-05:00

I'm reading Neil Gaiman's newest young-adult novel, The Graveyard Book. I know a book's good when I find myself reading it quickly; I know a book's really good when I find myself consciously slowing down to savor it and to make it last. This one I'm trying to pace myself on, but it's difficult. I don't have that much self-control!

Neil's a legend in certain circles, notably in the world of comics and graphic novels for his "Sandman" series, which I haven't read. I was charmed by his interviews in the Harlan Ellison bio-documentary Dreams With Sharp Teeth; to my Yankee eyes, he's possessed of all the best aspects of Britishness (wit, dexterity with language, cool accent). Plus an obvious warmth and the ability to wear a black leather jacket and look cool, rather than like a doofus.

Here, you can see Neil read aloud from The Graveyard Book. He did a book tour a month or so ago, reading a chapter at each stop, and they're all archived online now. It's a total pleasure hearing him read. It's best to go into the story knowing as little as possible, but appropriate background is that it's a YA fantasy and that it borrows some themes from Rudyard Kipling's beautiful and evocative (though oh-so-colonialist) Jungle Book.

Watching online is great, but this is also a book where it's a pleasure to turn the pages. It's illustrated by Dave McKean, and the illustrations spill from page to page as if a kid were doodling around his homework.

Gaiman's writing shows his sources, in the same way that steampunk jewelry shows its tiny, sharp-toothed cogs and wheels. The start of the novel will resonate with Harry Potter fans, though JK Rowling must have borrowed the set-up (a brutally orphaned child who may have special powers) from a long line of other writers. And I'm wanting to read the Jungle Book again when I'm done with this, to see how closely Gaiman's book really lines up with it. (I did also notice one line that was unintentionally lifted, almost word-for-word, from The Magician's Nephew, by C.S. Lewis.)

But even when his sources show, Gaiman's writing is deft and irresistible. (I'm serious--just try to resist him. If you succeed, let me know a) how you did it, and b) why you bothered.)

Giving the Suits Their Due

2008-11-08T18:33:00.003-05:00

Today I taught my first Advanced Beginner tarot class. Some of my students from my Beginner/Intro class wanted some more class sessions, so I've designed an extension for them.

I'd been planning to have the first 90-minute class be about the suits of Cups and Coins, and the second class about Swords and Wands. I thought it would be interesting to pair the suits according to their traditional masculine-feminine associations. (Cups and Coins are usually considered the "feminine" suits, and Wands and Swords the "masculine" ones.)

It turned out that talking about Cups took the entire 90 minutes! And we didn't even look at the court cards--just the number cards (Ace through Ten). We went through the cards one by one, talking about their symbolism, comparing the Rider-Waite-Smith rendition of the image with the one in the World Spirit Tarot, and occasionally flipping back and forth between cards as we noticed motifs that got repeated, or themes that evolved as the numbers got bigger. Just that part of class took well over an hour.

Then we focused on applying some questions to the suit--questions having to do with the Cups themes of emotions, relationships, and the unconscious mind. That spilled over into homework--the time really flew, which felt great!

It's always better to have too much material than too little, when you're teaching. But this class really brought home to me the richness of Pamela Smith's images, and how much meaning you can mine from them (I've started giving out Mark McElroy's useful "answer mining template" in my classes). I've just celebrated my 15th anniversary of reading tarot, and I am still learning new things about the cards from books, students, and clients. Very cool.

Anyway, it's become obvious that going through the four suits will have to take the entire four weeks of the Advanced Beginner class, so hopefully my students will be interested in extending again to look at the Major Arcana, the court cards, and spread-crafting.

Something I'm Lacking

2008-10-31T12:46:00.002-04:00

I went to my doctor for my annual checkup about 10 days ago. I’d been feeling very stressed out recently, and talked to her about how that seemed to be affecting my digestion and my energy levels. She told me that I should expect to feel much better after the election, which both amused and made sense to me.

I had some routine blood work done and was expecting everything to be normal, so I was surprised to get a voicemail from the nurses’ office telling me that I needed to talk to them about one of my test results. They mentioned in the message that it wasn’t anything serious, but I was still bewildered.

Turns out my vitamin B12 levels are pretty low. I’m still in the normal range, but not by much. When you get below that range, they do things like bring you in for B12 injections. My first step is to start taking B12 supplements; I’ll then get retested in about a month. If my levels are still low at that point, they might have to start shooting me up with the stuff!

This came as a bit of a relief to me. I haven’t been feeling great for the last couple months, but hadn’t even considered the fact that there might be a simple physiological explanation. Apparently, at least part of what I’d been reading in my body as stress was actually exhaustion. People with low B12 levels often feel tired all the time; in extreme cases (I’m not one) they can’t even stay awake through an entire day. What I’d been putting down as pre-election, post-breakup malaise may be as simple as (or at least, partially caused by) a deficient vitamin. Weird.

It makes sense that I’d have trouble with B12, since I don’t eat much meat or dairy, which are really the only reliable sources of it. (The nurse mentioned that my cholesterol levels were the lowest she has ever seen--which is the positive side of these exact same eating habits!) So I am going to start taking a chewable supplement, and also work some eggs into my diet. Also, this is a great excuse to eat a lamb kabob, some Portuguese clam stew, and a mega-bowl of Vietnamese pho!

I don’t know how nutritionists keep track of all this madness.

Tarot Syllabus

2008-10-26T08:43:00.006-04:00

I just finished up a three-part tarot class at a local adult ed center, and the students and I are figuring out a plan to extend it for four more sessions, which is pretty cool. I've had students in past classes say that three sessions was not enough, but this is the first time that students have been motivated enough to follow up with me about a class extension.

This means that I'm going to get to teach tarot on a deeper level than I have before. I've only ever taught one-session and three-session classes. I'm pretty excited about this. Yesterday I made up a rough syllabus. Below I'll put a short summary of what we did in the first three sessions, and later I'll get into what I'm planning for the next four. If you're a tarot teacher or student reading this, I'd love to hear your feedback.

Class 1--Overview. I talk about my approach to tarot, and how I use the cards to help people get clarity on their questions. I discuss fortune-telling and free will, explaining that tarot gives a snapshot of where you are, and where you're heading, but certainly doesn't say that anything HAS to happen to you. I do a sample three-card reading for a student volunteer, talking through everything I do, from shuffling to having the student cut and choose cards to card analysis.

Something I did this term that was new for me was handing out loaner decks to students who didn't yet have their own deck. I own about ten tarot decks and there are several of those that I don't use in my own work with clients. I still hang onto them, though, for sentimental reasons and because the variety of deck art is useful to show in class. I decided that this term, I would give students some options--they could either use a deck they already had, or I would loan them a deck to use for the three weeks of the class.

I was a bit scared to do this, frankly. Even my infrequently-used decks are important to me. Last year, when I had just moved house and ended a long relationship, my friend Brent made my day by sending me a copy of the Halloween Tarot that he picked up in San Francisco. I don't read with that deck very often, but I love its mischievous spirit. My mom gave me the Spiral Tarot for my 33rd birthday, and while I think that deck is wildly inconsistent--and also, the images are super tiny!--it has some stunning cards.

So the idea of passing out my decks to strangers was a bit alarming. But I thought I would give it a shot, and it worked out great. One student wound up not enjoying the deck she chose out of my options--the Universal Goddess--but she went out and bought herself a deck that was better suited to her. Another student worked with the Spiral for the three weeks of class, and said she's now planning to buy herself a copy. I could tell that these were people I could trust, and I was perfectly comfortable handing them my decks.

In Class 2, we focused on the Major Arcana, the 22 cards in a tarot deck that signify deep changes or profound personality aspects. These are the archetype cards, such as the Fool (a trickster archetype) and the Goddess (the divine feminine, or anima, or big mama archetype). I also went over some tarot history, showing one of the oldest decks--the Visconti deck, from Italy in the 1440s--and comparing it to the early-20th-century Rider-Waite-Smith deck, off which most contemporary tarot decks are modeled.

I also brought in some sample spreads, or layouts, for this class. A spread is created when you assign specific meanings to the positions that the cards are in. For example, I could lay three cards down in a row, and assign each one a meaning--Past, Present, and Future, for example, going from left to right. This is always done before you turn the cards over. Then when you turn them over, you're able to combine the position of the card--for example, the Past--with the meaning of the card that turns up in that position--for example, the Six of Swords. It sounds a lot more complex than it really is!

I generally use layouts of five to seven cards, which I customize for each client before they come in for their sessions with me. It's not unusual for five to seven cards to take an entire hour to analyze and discuss, but if we do wind up with extra time, my client has the option of choosing more cards to clarify any areas of the spread that are confusing.

In Class 3, we worked with the Minor Arcana--the four suits, which in most decks are assigned the names of Wands, Cups, Swords, and Pentacles (or Coins). We talked about the traditional associations for each of these suits, looked at some positive and negative aspects of each, and did some comparisons of how these cards' meanings can vary from deck to deck, depending on how the tarot artist has depicted them.

That was really all we had time for over three 90-minute classes. I barely touched on the court cards, and we didn't spend as much time as I'd like on crafting useful questions that can get the most specific and useful answers during a reading. That's all stuff I'm planning to cover in greater depth in the four-class extension.

I'll post more about the syllabus for those upcoming four classes shortly. There is still room in them, so if you have some background in tarot and are interested in a kind of "advanced beginner" tarot course, email me at tarotation [at] yahoo and I'll give you the logistics!