the Beatles’ apprenticeship
Fareed Zakaria (CNN) had Malcolm Gladwell on today. Gladwell,
in case you don’t know, is the author of Blink, Outliers, and
The Tipping Point. He was on to talk about his newest book,
Outliers. This is a study of what makes for success in a
variety of disciplines. He tells an interesting anecdote about
the Beatles: in 1959, they went to Hamburg, Germany for two
years to play in a strip club for eight hours a day, seven
days a week. Gladwell maintains that this period of intensive
practice was, in fact, an apprenticeship that allowed them to
develop virtuousic skill, mastery of different genres and
boundless experience collaborating with each other. He says
that this is what gave them their edge.
He goes on to argue that talent is not some inborn, native
ability, but simply the desire to practice, to make enormous
sacrifices and compromises to be able to do what one loves. He
says that it was the Beatles’ genius to see the Hamburg gig as
an opportunity, and not as an invitation to indentured
servitude.
Few people recognize this as the truth about acting. What we
associate with actors is the glamour and the slick
presentation of the movies, but most actors never see even a
moment of fame, and the ones that do find that it isn’t what
it’s cracked up to be. What doesn’t get seen is the endless
hours of blood, sweat and tears that go into doing anything
well. My class gives people a taste of that: an enormous
amount is asked of the students in the way of time and
preparation. I do my best to communicate the happiness of this
challenge, this burden. “We must do what is difficult because
it is difficult”, wrote Rainer Maria Rilke. It is a message
that not
it’s the
ask for
creative
everyone is ready to hear, much less to embrace. But
ones that can lap up that vinegar like it’s honey and
more that will come to know the true rewards of a
life.
The Gladwell piece:
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2009/04/26/gps.fareed.intv
.malcolm.gladwell.cnn
Andrew Wood Acting Studio
we don’t know what we know
I had resolved to make it to the gym on Tuesday, as part of my
current campaign to not have to buy larger jeans. Then, a
coaching session materialized. For the coaching session, I was
going to the actor’s residence, which was in the part of the
Mission closer to Potrero Hill. Now, I usually go to the gym
at the 24 Hour Fitness near Church and Market. It occured to
me that I could instead go to the 24 Hour Fitness at Potrero
Center, which would be on the way home from the coaching
session, whereas getting to Church and Market from the
studen’t place would be a bit of a production. But i found
myself unsatisfied with that solution: I didn’t want to go to
the Potrero Center 24 Hour Fitness, although it wasn’t
immediately obvious to me why. At first, it seemed like
perhaps I just want to go to my usual place, for the
familiarity of it. Also there is a pool at the 24 at Potrero,
which means the locker room smells like chlorine, and in
general the facility is not as nice. But were these reasons
for an out of the way effort to get to Church and Market?
.
Then it dawned on me: Church and Market is close to the
Castro, and there was some part of me that was looking forward
to ogling, and being ogled by, the other gays at the Church
and Market 24. But the funny thing is, my thoughts prior to
the coaching session materializing about going to the gym had
had nothing to do with this: I had been dreading the hour on
the bike and the accompanying discomfort of the bicycle seat,
the ennui, the CNN rightwing spokesmodels on the monitors with
close spationing that didn’t work as often as it did, and
hoping the podcast I had in my iPod would make the time go by.
I wasn’t aware of contemplating potential eye candy ogling.
And yet, somehow, I was banking on that prospect, because when
it was potentially yanked away by the prospect of going to
Potrero instead, I found myself mentally bemoaning that loss.
The point is that we have instinctual, preconscious ways of
weighing prospects, possibilities, people, relationships, and
courses of action. This is a big reason why the work of
finding appropriate objectives to pursue is as challenging as
it is: our real investment in our world and our practices and
activities is often grasped only at this preconscious level,
and yet grasping these things is often precisely what is
necessary to unlock a scene. When it is our own world, we
understand these things instinctively and, of course, require
no explanation, except, perhaps, in situations where we find
ourselves inclined to conduct ourselves in way we neither
understand nor desire. But when embodying a character in a
fictional world, we don’t have the same automatic
understandings, and often need to work things out in order to
fully enter into them.
And that, my friends, is what they pay me the big bucks for.
you never know
According to this article, 10 women across America were asked
about how they met their current boyfriends.
Here’s what one of them said:
“He sat next to me in my acting class. Our instructor paired
us up for a scene, so we exchanged numbers to rehearse. He
kept sending me flirty texts and asked me out that weekend.
Our first date was a picnic dinner in Griffith Park and a
visit to the Griffith Observatory. We had an amazing view of
downtown LA and the Hollywood sign. We kissed under the stars
and were surrounded by city lights. It was so romantic and
felt like it was straight out of a movie.” –Adrienne Tilden
And as a dating pool, you can’t do better than my students. If
I do say so myself.