Donna Freitas: November 2008 Archives

A few weeks back I posted about how people are turning to yoga for comfort during the economic downturn. Apparently, now people are turning to psychics for economic advice--predictions about the stock market, that is!

Ruth La Ferla reports in her New York Times article, "Love, Jobs & 401(k)s":

On a good day last summer, Thomas Taccetta, a stock trader, might have checked his financial charts before plotting the day's investments. Today he is likely to check in with his psychic as well. "I'll play the broadest index, the S.&P. 500," Mr. Taccetta said, "and if she tells me she is getting a negative view, I will sell." Since September, when the Dow collapsed, Mr. Taccetta, who trades for his own portfolio in Boca Raton, Fla., has talked with his psychic about once a month, roughly twice as often as a year ago. "There is no rhyme or reason to the way the market is trading," he said. "When conditions are this volatile, consulting a psychic can be as good a strategy as any other.""

I like blogging for Idol Chatter a lot, especially since it gives me great excuses to go to the movies and watch TV on a regular basis. But I wouldn't exactly call the experience of posting about themes in pop culture and spirituality online a meditative practice.

But some people do.

In the article "Haste, Scorned: Blogging at a Snail's Pace," The New York Times' Sharon Otterman reports about how certain bloggers are engaging online as a contemplative, spiritual practice:

"When Barbara Ganley wants to collect her thoughts, she walks in the Vermont countryside, wanders home and blogs about it....If her blog, bgblogging.wordpress.com, sounds slow and meandering, it is. But that's the point. Ms. Ganley, 51, is part of a small, quirky movement called slow blogging."

Ganley is not alone--in fact, there is a "Slow Blog Manifesto" about the trend:

"A Slow Blog Manifesto, written in 2006 by Todd Sieling, a technology consultant from Vancouver, British Columbia, laid out the movement's tenets. "Slow Blogging is a rejection of immediacy," he wrote. "It is an affirmation that not all things worth reading are written quickly." (Nor, because of a lack of traffic, is Mr. Sieling writing this blog at all these days.) Ms. Ganley, who recently left her job as a writing instructor at Middlebury College, compares slow blogging to meditation. It's "being quiet for a moment before you write," she said, "and not having what you write be the first thing that comes out of your head.""

The New York Times movie critic A.O. Scott counts no fewer than five Holocaust movies coming out this holiday season--speculating that it's the end of the year Oscar hopefulness that has sparked this spate of films capturing the horrors of the Holocaust. The five include:

1. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (David Thewlis)
2. Adam Resurrected (Jeff Goldblum)
3. The Reader (Kate Winslet)
4. Valkyrie (Tom Cruise)
5. Defiance (Daniel Craig)

"The near-simultaneous appearance of all these movies is to some degree a coincidence, but it throws into relief the curious fact that early 21st-century culture, in Europe and America, on screen and in books, is intensely, perhaps morbidly preoccupied with the great political trauma of the mid-20th century," writes Scott. "The number of Holocaust-related memoirs, novels, documentaries and feature films in the past decade or so seems to defy quantification, and their proliferation raises some uncomfortable questions. Why are there so many? Why now? And more queasily, could there be too many?"

Good questions. And the trend can't only have to do with Oscar season, can it? Scott speculates:

True, vampires are by nature predators. Also true, in Stephenie Meyer's novel "Twilight," Edward Cullen, every teen girl's romantic dreamboy, is heavy on the brooding and, of course, the entire story turns on Bella and Edward as star-crossed lovers.

That said, while there is no doubt Robert Pattinson does a good job with the impossible--bringing beloved Edward Cullen to life on screen--I found myself as equally turned off by this unsmiling, sad, despairing creature, as I was enamored of him. There is something creepy about the movie's Edward Cullen, a creepiness that does not come across--or at least not to such a disturbing degree--in the novels (which anyone who follows my posts on Idol Chatter knows I've read again and again and yet again). Stephenie Meyer's Edward is despairing at times, yes, he displays bouts of hostility and viciousness when Bella is threatened, but he also is dashing and debonair, and he spends a good deal of laughing and smiling, too. Meyer injects a playfulness to the Edward Cullen alive in my imagination that Robert Pattinson (under Catherine Hardwicke's direction) fails to capture.

Okay, "Twilight" fans--if you are an Edward-and-Bella junkie and a Christian, you've got some work cut out for you.

Apparently, the "Twilight" movie (and the "Twilight" series) are helpful for bringing "unbelievers" to Jesus, and The Christian Post will show you the way to use "Twilight" toward this end.

I remember Prince for his risque lyrics and videos back in my middle school and teen years, when "Purple Rain" was his claim to fame. My mother forbid me to see the movie and listen to his music, at...

As anyone who reads my posts on Idol Chatter knows, I'm a huge vampire fan (gigantic even!). That's why I post so much about Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight Series" and the forthcoming Twilight movie (this Friday! I'm counting down...), and that's...

Religion in the public square has caused countless lawsuits and raises the ire of many an American in one direction or the other, pro or con. As a kid I remember our own town controversy about a nativity scene (literally)...

If you are like me--obsessed with Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight Series" and eagerly anticipating the film version of book one, "Twilight," then you'll be happy to know that Entertainment Weekly is doing a three-issue feature (with "collectable covers") as the release...

Okay. I'm not sure if I can recover from seeing photos of everyone's favorite film vampire Edward Cullen (sigh) as painter Salvador Dali. The actor, Rob Pattinson, wears a little skinny mustache for which the surrealist artist was so...