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Tag: book soup
Rachel True, the unforgettable star of teen witch cult classic The Craft and weed cult classic Half Baked, has released a tarot-reading guidebook accompanied with personal essays and tarot cards she helped design.
Appearing with another well-known hippie “mixed chick” actress Cree Summer, Rachel discussed her new book set True Heart Intuitive Tarot, Guidebook and Deck on Crowdcast with Los Angeles indie bookstore Book Soup. Approximately 450 attendees remained online throughout the hour-and-a-half webinar.
On her website, she describes the book and card set as “22 memoir essays from my Mixed Black Jewish chick’s mystic minded Hollywood life” that includes 22 major arcana cards. She said the set gives lessons to readers just learning about tarot or wanting to expand their knowledge of tarot.
A set of 78 cards, tarot involves the practice of reading tarot cards to gain insight into the past, present or future by asking questions then interpreting cards. Arcana is defined as “mysterious or specialized knowledge, language, or information accessible or possessed only by the initiate,” according to Merriam Webster. The major arcana cards in a tarot deck represents big themes and changes at play in your current, past and future life. The minor arcana cards represent the current day-to-day aspects that affect making decisions.
Wearing her signature turquoise butterfly necklace, Rachel described in the webinar how she became an occultist, in this case a tarot reader, as a child. She said between the ages of four and five, she would access her parents’ bookcase and pull out Beyond Good and Evil by philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung.
“When a few years later, when one of my parents’ friends gave me a deck, I was like, ‘Oh, I know these. Wait, er,'” she said. “It kind of connected with me and related back to those two books because some of them, especially Man and His Symbols, had some images in black and white and some images that are on the tarot cards. And that’s how I really began getting into tarot.”
Rachel and Cree, who admitted she really got into tarot practice only in the past two years, said that tarot doesn’t align with any religion, so it shouldn’t be seen as devilish. Even if you get The Devil card, which could mean sins such as greed may be overtaking one’s attention.
“Black people and ethnic people quite often went to the soothsayer or the card reader in the neighborhood because they didn’t go to doctors and we didn’t have shrinks, so this is a long tradition here,” Rachel said, calling the practice a “shrink in a box and spiritual Xanax.”
Released Tuesday, the book is published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt with illustrations by Stephanie Singleton. Rachel dedicated the book to Pamela Colman Smith, a key person in the early tarot movement when she illustrated the Rider-Waite tarot deck in 1909 for fellow British mystic and writer Arthur Edward Waite which became known as a standard. Rachel and Cree, who both identify as biracial calling their mothers dark-skinned Black women and their fathers White men, said Pamela’s story got buried in history as a biracial woman.
From 2002 to 2006, Rachel starred in the UPN sitcom Half & Half, which started streaming on Netflix on Thursday.
Motivational guru Marie Forleo landed in Los Angeles as a part of her Everything is Figureoutable last Friday at the Skirball Cultural Center. Though the event was not an over-the-top “Beyoncé meets TED talk” compared to her home New York event, around 400 attendees came to listen to her reasoning behind her new self-help book.
In conversation with actress Grasie Mercedes currently writing for NBC’s Perfect Harmony, Marie glowing in a neon green top said her first book has been a work-in-progress since 2011. The event started with brave audience members jumping onto the stage to dance to the hottest pop songs from Gwen Stefani’s Hollaback Girl and Vanilla Ice’s Ice Ice Baby.
After showing the audience a photo of her and Grasie in a Bring It On-era Crunch Fitness class from 20 years ago, Marie dropped wisdom about her philsophy behind the title of her book, which she said was inspired by her mother.
“This converation is really a follow-up if even we were to believe and accept this notion that everything is truly figureoutable—which again I believe in my bones to be the truth—then we need to ask ourselves what stops us, what gets in our way, what prevents us from figuring this out,” she said. “And while we can all come up with a laundry list of things that stops us, and one of the biggest things are our excuses. Those nasty little lies we all tell ourselves from time to time.”
Along with real-life stories on overcoming obstacles, the book has guidance on how to think positively in order to find solutions to everyday problems.
“It doesn’t necessarily mean we can change every circumstance to be the exact way that we want it to be—that’s not always possible,” she said. “But ‘Everything is Figureoutable’ awakens your creative wisdom, your own intiutive intelligence, so that you can rise up and meet the circumstances and challenges of your life and come out stronger, better, and bigger than you were before.”
She wants the book to make readers realize they have more control over their lives through thinking outside the box, and how not doing this exacerbates mental health conditions like anxiety and depression. Warning the book should not be used as treatment, she said it could help those dealing with mental health issues find creative and positive solutions to their predicaments.
With the event running about two hours, Marie ended the night with crowd selfies and photos with her book-purchasing fans. Book Soup was the sponsoring seller.
Renowned Black women’s book club Well-Read Black Girl is coming to Los Angeles, with the New York-based founder welcoming the local affiliate last Sunday at the Reparations Club in the Mid-City neighborhood.
Book Soup, the West Hollywood indie bookstore, will house the LA book club as a part of the organization’s program with the American Booksellers Association to create local affiliates to support Black women readers and writers. The first book is fantasy young adult novel Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi for July and the second book will be The Travelers by Regina Porter for August.
Glory Edim, the founder of Well-Read Black Girl, joined Tameka Blackshir of Book Soup and Jazzi McGilbert of the new Black artisan boutique Reparations Club to discuss the book club’s partnership with indie booksellers across the country and how it was important for the group to maintain its safe space status for Black women.
“I felt really particular about going to LA and not knowing the community. Since I don’t live there, does that mean it’s going to be less real, less authentic?” Glory said, adding she needed the local affiliates to be run by local supporters. “Does it mean I’m not investing in the way that I need to? … It just means we need conversations, and it needs to be done where it’s authentic and real and not me just popping in like, ‘Hey, guys! I’m here!’ So when the opportunity going about partnering with independent bookstores [came up], it was ‘OK, boom! You know your bookstore, you know what’s important.'”
With the base in Brooklyn, Glory said she started the book club with promoting a free space where all women from mothers to college students can afford and enjoy the book club. She also said she wants the organization’s annual festival in Brooklyn—which has featured award-winning authors Jacqueline Woodson and Tayari Jones in the past—to be a “family reunion,” uniting Black women from other cities in one place. Besides LA, these cities so far include Washington, D.C.; Portland, Oregon; and Seattle.
“We’re not excluding people, but this is a space for Black women. That question has been coming up a lot, especially in small cities that are not as diverse,” Glory said about expanding the group. “Another thing I’ve been working through is the idea of how we cultivate joy in these spaces.”
She said cultivating joy is a priority though most of the books selected for the meetings contain traumatic themes.
“When I was curating the anthology [Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves], I was very clear about I want to hear both sides of the story. I want to know the things that are troubling and have shaped an identity but also how you were able to overcome that because when you go through something that’s not the only thing that defines you,” she said. “It helps to uplift you out of that. It’s that experience and the challenge that pulls you into another space that allows you to be brighter and bolder for sharing your story without reservation.”
The first book club meeting in LA will be at Book Soup on Sunday, July 28 at 4 p.m.