I’ve been thinking of my own interactions with people over the years, where I did well and where I came up short. I feel like there are some situations and stories I’d like to share that might help me in my future interactions in the theatre and comedy worlds. One thing I’ve been thinking a lot about is status.

Pay less attention to status

I remember when I was in Chicago, I was intensely aware of status within the improv world. I was a part of many conversations that likened the ImprovOlympic subculture to a second high school. The new students were the freshman. After a few classes you might find yourself on a team and begin to feel like a sophomore. The players on house teams felt like the upperclassman, the cool juniors and seniors, with whom everyone wanted to hang out. And that was just the status within iO. There were similar communities at Second City and the Annoyance and while you might feel like a big dog at one theatre, you might be considered a peon at another.

Your status was determined by several things, your talent, how long you had been in the community, what team you were on. Your status was higher if you were a coach or a teacher. And of course, like in any community if you were well liked by your peers, that tended to raise your status.

I remember feeling at the time, that my personal status had a lot to do with how long I had been around the theater. I felt deferential to some players because they had been there a year or two longer than I had. And I also felt entitled to a greater status because someone started taking classes six months after I did. I spent six years at iO, four of them on the house team. I was a coach, a director and a teacher there. I remember feeling like I had a certain status there, one that I had earned.

Now here is where the story becomes particularly unflattering for me. Anyone who knows iO, knows there is a long running show on Monday nights which features “iO’s most accomplished performers and alumni.” I wanted badly to be in this show, but while I was respected as a performer and certainly valued as a coach and a teacher, I had to wait to play in that show.

For a long time, it didn’t bother me much. The people who were invited to play were players who had been around longer than me and were great performers. Even in the early days of that show, some people from my generation were invited to play. However, they were clearly performers who were better than me, and I didn’t mind at all that they were getting a chance that I wanted. As the months and years went by, more and more of my peers were invited to do the show. Eventually even some of my teammates were regulars in that show, but not me. I felt this was a good thing. I was getting closer, moving up the queue. It wouldn’t be long now when Noah or Charna would give me the nod to play one Monday night.

And then I got skipped over. They started inviting one or two people to play who I had coached or taught. If I remember correctly there was even someone who started performing in the show while he was still in classes. I thought I was at the top of my imaginary waiting list for the show, but apparently I was wrong. It wasn’t about how long you had been waiting to perform in that show, it was about how talented you were and how ready you were to be in that show, and really that’s how it should be.

I know I have been in other situations since where I valued one person over another simply because they have been around longer. Being around longer should mean something. If someone has spent five years performing at a particular theater, their experience and their loyalty should count, especially if that experience makes them a better performer. But ability should always trump status when we are talking about casting someone in a show.

One thing that is easy for me to forget, is that people have all kinds of experience and talent beyond what I first notice. This might be their first class in long form improv comedy, but they may have been an actor for years. Perhaps they are a musician who understands many of the concepts I am teaching implicitly already. And maybe, they have worked for years for another theater and they know a hell of a lot more than me. I have certainly taught many people over the years who had more raw talent than I did.

So, I hope I can really put this into practice. I think the older I get, the more I realize that this status is less important than I once thought. There was a time when I only wanted to be coached or taught by people who had been doing this longer than I have, but I realize now that I have a lot to learn still, and that there are a lot of people younger than me with less experience than me who nonetheless have a lot to offer.

Over the years, I’ve sometimes been in the position to cast people for shows, to pick people for teams or decide which shows should get a run at a theater and which should not. I always hoped that I was making the best decisions I could. In those positions, the most important factors should be how good are they or their show and do I want to work with them. Their status inside the theater community shouldn’t be all that important. And yet I know it is. Why? Because people get upset. The actor who has been at the theater for years might feel slighted if they aren’t cast as the lead. The most veteran team is sure to feel passed over if the most plumb time slot is given to a newer team. The politics inherent in decisions like this still makes my head hurt even though it’s been years since I’ve had to make one.

Everyone thinks they just want their fair share, what they deserve because of their status. But really we all want more, more than is collectively available, and so a lot of people feel bitter in the end. If you ever catch yourself thinking something like, “I should be in that show, because I’ve paid my dues,” or “Why does she get to teach that class, I’ve been around here longer,” stop it. Stop it right now and tell yourself that paying your dues or hanging around a theater longer doesn’t entitle you to anything. At least that’s what I’m going to try to tell myself, the next time I hear myself thinking that.

For anyone old enough to remember when a Quarter Pounder was the biggest hamburger available at a fast food restaurant, this won’t really feel like news. We’ve watched the food industry evolve over the last 30 years first hand. Portions have grown, foods have become more indulgent, more flavorful, with more textures. Comfort food is everywhere, and eating it feels great, at least it does for the two minutes it takes to shovel it down our throats. What might seem like news is the extent to which the food industry knows and understands what they are doing. Just as cigarette companies want more people to smoke and people to smoke more, restaurant chains want us to eat more meals out and buy more food when we do go out. And they go to great lengths to reverse engineer precisely the kind of foods that we will crave and overeat. Many more of us are getting fatter than we used to, and it’s because this hyperpalatable food is available nearly everywhere we go.

Is it a good book? I think it has something important to say, but I have a few qualms. Kessler makes his case a little too well in the beginning of the book. I found myself salivating over his descriptions of food items. I craved the appetizers he was describing and felt my tummy rumble. I skipped over about 10 chapters because of it (they are quite short), and still he was describing the techniques the food industry used to make food delectable. I think I may have gained 10 pounds just by reading that part of the book. I would say read just enough of this part of the book to be convinced that he is right and then skip ahead to the chapters on what you can do.

Eventually he starts talking about his solution. He takes a lot of ideas from the world of addiction counseling and has some good strategies to avoiding the worst kinds of foods and dealing with it when you are faced with it. He believes we should embrace the concept of Food Rehab. He does implicitly encourage us to prepare our own food. But here is where I think he kind of ignores an obvious point.

I think we should all be unprocessing our food, or rather we should do as little processing as possible when we cook for ourselves. I’ve heard it said before that it’s healthier to make your own food at home from fresh whole ingredients than it is to buy prepackaged, processed foods. This point has been made many times by many people. But it seems like we can take this much farther. If the food industry makes food into the equivalent of addictive drugs by adding layers of fat, sugar, salt and flavorings to foods, perhaps we should do the opposite.

My new plan

We should start with simple whole foods that are as close to unprocessed as possible: Meat, eggs, fish, vegetables, fruit, legumes and nuts. We should buy them in their completely unprocessed forms. Fresh if possible, frozen in some cases, but certainly without any added flavor, fat, sugar or salt. Then we should prepare these foods as simply as possible without adding any of these things ourselves. Don’t add any oil when you grill that meat. Don’t mix in butter with your brown rice. Put away your salt shaker, all your sauces and spices. And lastly, don’t even combine foods together. Make discrete portions of spinach, grilled chicken and fish, poached eggs and steamed veggies. Eat them separately. Don’t mix them together or add a little sauce of any kind. Don’t do anything to make the food more palatable except cook it. If you have an urge to make something taste better by adding or combining, don’t do it! My theory is that if you confine yourself, as much as you can, to food like this, you will not overeat and you will lose weight.

Now of course, there are some drawbacks here. The ubiquitous nature of these hyperpalatable foods is hard to avoid. They are everywhere, so unless you work at home and are a hermit, you will be exposed to these foods and they will be hard to resist. I know… put a free pizza in front of me and you can kiss it good bye. Kessler has a lot of good ideas of how to deal with some of these issues. And it’s worth reading the book to look over his suggestions.

But some of you might also be screaming, “But Kevin, I can’t eat plain steamed vegetables and poached eggs with no cheese or sauce. That will taste bad!” Well, I hear you. I think that is true to a degree. But I don’t think food tastes bad when it’s prepared like this, it just doesn’t taste awesome! But that is the point, you won’t have cravings for this simple unprocessed food, like you might for chicken nachos dripping with cheese or the latest crazy ice cream combination from Ben and Jerry’s. I have been trying this for the last week and it feels like it’s working. I am feeling a bit of withdrawal at the moment, and I’m still indulging some of my cravings. I had a nice hot cocoa last night, for instance. But I do think I might be finally losing a little weight after months of running four times a week.

For instance, here is what I ate and drank yesterday (except where noted, I added no salt, butter, oil or anything else to the food):

• A few glasses of water
• Coffee (milk and sweetener)
• Steamed asparagus
• Steamed spinach
• Brown rice
• Grilled chicken (twice)
• Two poached eggs
• Cup of flavored yogurt – not in the plan
• Four pieces of whole wheat bread with butter

Now, I did feel hungry through most of the day, or rather I felt a little like an addict who wanted something I wasn’t getting. It reminded me of those first few days of quitting smoking. As I drove home, I thought it would be good to eat some toast with butter. And I think I might keep that as a way to really shut off my hunger. By the way, I’m talking about actual real whole wheat bread, not the brown wonderbread that companies try to pass off as whole wheat. If the bread squishes when you squeeze it and feels soft, it ain’t whole wheat bread in my book. The stuff I’m eating is that sprouted grain Ezekial Bread from Food For Life. Four pieces was definitely too much. It extinguished any feeling of still wanting to eat, and made me feel a little sick actually. My new rule will be this, if I feel unsatisfied after eating, I’ll toast one piece of bread add some butter and wait 20 or 30 minutes, and repeat until I don’t want another piece. This morning I had one piece with some coffee and I still feel full three hours later.

I don’t expect anyone to only eat like this forever. I’ll still be going out to eat with friends, but as much as I can, I want to prepare my own food in this way.

Today I weighed in at 190. My goal weight is somewhere between 165 and 155 (I’ll know when I get there). I’ll try to update this to let you know how it goes.

It’s an interesting idea. If you are like me and interested in evolution, but haven’t read much about Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, you should take a look. But I’ll leave it Miller to actually lay out the argument. He does a much better job than I could.

Near the end of the book came the following passage. As an artist, this passage jumped off the page.

Among competent professionals in any field, there appears to be a fairly constant probability of success in any given endeavor. (Psychologist Dean Keith) Simonton’s data show that excellent composers do not produce a higher proportion of excellent music than good composers—they simply produce a higher total number of works. People who achieve extreme success in any creative field are almost always extremely prolific. Hans Eysenck became a famous psychologist not because all of his papers were excellent, but because he wrote over a hundred books and a thousand papers, and some of them happened to be excellent. Those who write only ten papers are much less likely to strike gold with any of them. Likewise with Picasso: if you paint 14,000 paintings in your lifetime, some of them are likely to be pretty good, even if most are mediocre. Simonton’s results are surprising. The constant probability of success idea sounds counterintuitive and of course there are exceptions to this generalization. Yet Simonton’s data on creative achievement are the most comprehensive ever collected and in every domain that he studied, creative achievement was a good indicator of the energy, time, and motivation invested in creative activity.

Let that sink in a little bit. No really. Let that sink in. Ponder it for a little bit before you read on.

I think most creative people I know would think something similar to this. If you want to be good at something, do it as much as you can. But I think we all tend to temper this by thinking that there is such a thing as talent, and talent is what separates the great from the good. Of course there is some truth to that. We have all met people who seem to have some special innate talent for music or art or comedy. We think they are great, just because they have a great talent.

In my field of comedy, I’ve often heard it said that some people are just funny. You can’t teach it. There have been a number of people I’ve met who were hilarious in their first improv class. I met Tina Fey and Jack McBrayer (of 30 Rock) years ago, when they were just starting out in improv, long before they were famous. They both seemed amazingly talented right from the beginning. Comedy seemed natural for both of them, and their success is no surprise to anyone who knew them years ago.

But maybe even then, they were simply more prolific than the rest of us. Perhaps they spent a lot more time when they were kids making people laugh or telling stories to their friends. By the time I met them in their early 20s, they had already spent much more time and effort developing their sense of humor than the average competent improvisor, as a natural part of their daily interactions.

Of course, we are talking about a correlation here, not necessarily a causation. It may simply be that those who are great at something are driven to be prolific. Perhaps those who are merely good are just naturally less prolific. In fact, that thing we call talent might not be what we think it is. Instead of talent being this innate ability to create, maybe talent is simply the drive to devote lots of time and energy to the things we feel passionate about. But I don’t that is the right conclusion. That’s not what Simonton is saying. He is saying that as long as you have reached a certain competence the chance of any one piece of work being great is generally about the same. Since we can’t really know if there is a causation either way, it’s reasonable to suppose that being prolific has a good chance of resulting in greatness.

I’ve always thought that determination and perseverance are much more important than talent. Writing is a great example. I’ve known lots of people who dabbled in writing and seemed competent at it. I’ve also known people who are great writers. What is the difference between the two? The great writers have spent much more time and energy writing. If you are competent at writing and think you can’t be great, you are wrong. The only thing that separates you from being great is time and energy.

Want to be a great actor? Act in a lot of plays, the more the better. Want to be a great playwright? Write lots of plays, hundreds of them if you can. Want to be a great songwriter? Write a new song every day. Eventually you will write some great ones.

The first interview is with the author of the novel on which it’s based, Walter Kirn. Recorded in 2001, Kirn talks about the genesis of the novel and what he thinks about “air world”, the setting for the book. The second interview was with the director, Jason Reitman, who also directed Juno in 2007. He talks about his own experiences with air travel, getting George Clooney to do the film and the interviews with real people who have lost their jobs which frame and punctuate the movie.

Here is one of the trailers for the film:

The book is a short one, telling the story of a professor from a South African technical college, David Lurie, who falls into disgrace. The story begins with the dissolution of his relationship to a prostitute, then leads into a rather tactless and boorish attempt of his to start an affair with a young student. When the affair is revealed, he deals with the inquiry badly, leading to his dismissal. From here the professor goes to the South African countryside to live with his daughter on what remains of a communal farm.

There are several reasons this book produced such a good discussion I think. First, the general opinion of the book was all over the map with some people absolutely loving the book and other despising it. One woman said that when she finished the last chapter, she threw it across the room in disgust. While another woman said that she was mesmerized by the prose. Several people agreed with her and it seemed that a few people finished the entire book in one night, in one sitting.

Another reason the book produced a good discussion was that nearly all of the characters, besides the professor, were difficult to fathom. The motives, desires and intentions of the student who sleeps with the professor, of his daughter Lucy and of Petrus, Lucy’s nearest neighboring farmer, are all hard to discern. While there are plenty of salient hints as to what they are thinking and why they make their choices, they remain just beyond our understanding. It is clear that Professor Lurie does not understand those people who are close to him, and so these characters also remain partially closed to the reader. This left a lot of room for us to discuss these characters and try to figure out what was going on.

One thing that we all seemed to agree on is that Lurie may be the most unlikeable character in any book we have read. There are other characters in the same book that do more despicable things, but Lurie is unable to recognize that he has done anything wrong and his arrogance in dealing with the college authorities, his daughter and Petrus is particularly unappealing. Still it is different to dislike a character than to dislike a book. This is definitely a book I would recommend for a book club if you are looking for something that will spark an interesting discussion.

In college I was an English major, but I never loved literature back then. I had a great class my Freshman year called Introduction to Poetry. This was mainly because the instructor, a grad student at the time, was so jazzed to teach the class. He also held office hours at the local bar. He would make you play pinball with him while you discussed your paper. It was that first semester that I decided to couple an English and Rhetoric major with a Cinema Studies minor. Despite many tedious English classes to follow, I plowed ahead with that plan.

I did have a few other good experiences in literature classes. I spent a year in London studying lit and there were a few lectures that stick with me to this day. But somewhere along the line, I lost my love for reading fiction. Oh sure I would occasionally pick up a book and read it. Mostly I read a book it was non-fiction however. I read plenty of books about science, math, poker, current events and politics, but novels were rare.

Then last year I was in a book club and when I moved back home I started one here in Peoria. Here are the books we have done and are scheduled:

• June: Little Children by Tom Perrotta
• July: The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
• August: Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
• September: The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
• October: Old School by Tobias Wolff
• November: The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory

The discussions so far have been some of the most interesting and pleasant conversations I’ve had in a long time. Books provide a context to have intelligent, impassioned conversations, where everyone can have a point of view and get behind it without stepping on each others toes. I’m sure it’s possible to leave a book club offended, but it certainly doesn’t have the inevitability of a discussion about politics or religion.

If you are looking for a good conversation with some interesting people, a book club is probably a good bet.

We have just given Amazon permission to create kindle-books from Hold ‘em Poker for Advanced Players and The Theory of Poker. We’ll see how these do and then decide if we should do any more.

Finally some decent quality books on poker will be available for the Kindle. These two books by David Sklansky are must reads for any student of poker.

So I downloaded about a dozen samples of novels. I finally zeroed in on one by Tom Perrotta, the author of Election. A friend suggested the Abstinence Teacher, I read the sample and bought the book. But after reading a bit, I thought it might be too political and too religious for a first book, when I have no idea who will be showing up to this club. The last thing I want is a heated debate about Evangelical Christianity and sex education in the schools. Besides I realized that it isn’t out in paperback yet. Still, I liked his writing style, and decided to try Little Children instead.

I think this one is a keeper. It’s a quick read, funny, with lots to talk about. I’m a bit nervous about all the adult content in the book. There are several very frank scenes about sex, perversions and a character who is a child molester. It’s probably not a huge deal, but it feels strangely vulnerable to recommend a book to strangers.

The next book will likely be The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak. I’m almost done with that and have really been enjoying it too.

These ideas that obesity is the result of eating too much or exercising too little or both is treated as a self-evident truth. People invoke the First Law of Thermodynamics and people who argue otherwise are marginalized as not understanding the First Law.

But what if it’s wrong? What if the causality is all mixed up? What if you eat more because your body is getting fat? What if you don’t feel like exercising because you are already obese? What if simple calorie restriction is not particularly effective in losing weight? It isn’t and yet it’s repeated over and over again, “You are overweight because you overeat,” and “If you just eat less, you will lose weight.”

In this lecture by Gary Taubes, he does a great job of showing the fallacy of the conventional wisdom:

It’s a longish video, about 70 minutes, but it’s a nice introduction to his ideas. If you find it all compelling I highly recommend his book, Good Calories, Bad Calories. It’s not a diet book, it’s a science book, and it sets out to demolish some of the conventional paradigms we have about diet, obesity and disease.

UPDATE: Changed the title because we don’t need a new paradigm really, we need an old one. If you watch the video, you will understand what I mean.

What are the requirements for inclusion on my list? Books must be in paperback and ubiquitous enough to be found in a local library. A big bonus if they are available for the Kindle (I may only use Kindle-available books for purely selfish reasons). Oh and they must be good books, hopefully with a bit of an edge.

I’m also considering doing some kind of virtual version of the book club. Perhaps I would do it in SecondLife, or via a group in Facebook or on my message board. Sounds like fun and not that much more work since we would read the same book in the different locations.