The arrogance to ask

The history, and for that matter the prehistory of this project are sketched out in Episode 1, “Just start.” Here’s the digest version: Mat and I started working on the show last December. (I thought it was January until this morning, when I scrolled back our Slack to find the earliest entry, on December 15, in the #general channel: Hey, let’s come up with a name for this series. Among other good things, that’ll let me retitle this workspace. “Barol/Ricardo Podcast” leaves something to be desired.

I have on my to do list for tomorrow "Think of names for podcast," Mat replied. I've already got a few in a list, but they're all terrible.)

Anyway. January or December, the point is, it was a long haul to get to our launch in late June. I tell you this because it has some bearing on the monster I’ve turned into this week.

I’m pretty sure that anybody who knows me well would tell you that among my least favorite things to do is ask someone for a favor or an accommodation. My father, who was in all respects a small-town baby doctor straight out of the 1940s except that he happened to practice in downtown Philadelphia in the ‘70s and ‘80s, was all square-jawed rectitude, the only one among his peers who habitually refused to accept dinners, trips and other lavish handouts from drug company reps. In fact, he bum-rushed them right out of his office. Why? Because they were asking for something, which he felt was undignified and vaguely sneaky. I believe if you’d pressed him on it, he would have finally said it was unmanly. I inherited this belief, soaked it in osmotically, the way boys do with their fathers. What I’m saying is, I hate asking people for things.

And yet, this week I’ve been needy, clingy and beseeching. I’ve cajoled. I’ve wheedled. I’ve charmed, or tried to. I’ve literally sat up nights scheming. All to get people — people like you — to pay attention to this podcast.

Partly this is the Sunk Cost Fallacy, which Lifehack explains here in a piece helpfully titled “How The Sunk Cost Fallacy Makes You Act Stupid.” The SCF, in this case, whispers: Look, we’ve worked on this thing for six, no wait, seven months, and that expenditure of time and effort will be lost if people don’t listen, preferably in gigantic, Joe Rogan-sized numbers.

So: Production being done (we made a decision to have all of Season 1 in the can before launching), we were free to shift fully into promotion mode. There’s no getting around it: This is an undignified place to be. It’s all ask. We’ve been reasonably imaginative about the ask, I think; I mean, we’re creative people, and this is a podcast about creativity, so we both feel like we need to bring the heat a little bit. But it’s still not a place — I’m not going to speak for Mat here, just myself — it’s not a place I inhabit comfortably.

So why inhabit it at all? Because what lies behind the wheedling isn’t just the Sunk Cost Fallacy. It’s also this: a conviction that over those months we made something that’s worth your time and attention, and those commodities are precious, and we want you to spend them on us. This is a lot to ask in a world where there are, as I’ve noted elsewhere, two million podcasts listed in the Apple directory. (At the end of 2015, when I launched HOME: Stories From L.A., there were about 350,000.) It’s a noisy landscape, and we’re a quiet show. It’s easy for a show like ours to get drowned out. And although we don’t really expect Roganesque numbers, we do want Imagination & Junk to have the best possible shot at finding its audience.

So if I’ve been uncharacteristically pushy this week, and have I ever, that’s why. In one of our later episodes Mat and I talk about a trait that’s something close to arrogance, a trait creators shouldn’t feel ashamed about employing to protect and advance what they’ve created. Is art Art if no one ever sees it, or hears it? Sure, but that’s not what we’re after here. We have ideas on offer, an interplay of them; it’s a conversation, for goodness sake. And we want people to hear it. So we’re asking them — we’re asking you — to listen.

The arrogance to ask is a necessary part of the creative process, or at least of ours, in this case. It’s a kind of propulsion. You can launch your little boat out onto the water, but that doesn’t mean you’re home yet. You also have to get it past the breakers. Even if, man oh man, you really hate to row.

/BB

Image: Nils Söderman, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Indescribably yours

We’ve been out for three days and I’m starting to hear from friends about the show, and they’ve been highly complimentary, which has been lovely. One of them, in passing, referred to Mat as a magician. This had me reminiscing about the first time I saw his act. (In fact, it was the only time, what with Mat being unable to travel for work these last 15 months, and the rest of us being unable to travel for pleasure. Which also means, as Mat notes in one of the later episodes, that although we’ve been collaborating on this project since January we’ve never yet met face to face. So that’s weird.)

I tell this story in Episode 1: I was inspired by Mat’s act to want to tell people about it, but I had the hardest time describing what he does. He’s not a magician, although he isn’t above the occasional trick with a prop. I wouldn’t call him a juggler, although he’s an expert juggler. He started out as a busker, but he isn’t one anymore. “Vaudevillian” doesn’t do justice to the ultramodernity of his presentation, and “New vaudevillian” sounds like you wanted to say “vaudevillian” and lost your nerve. “Variety performer” seems to be a term he’s comfortable with, but here in the States, at least, it isn’t widely known, nor is variety much thought of as a viable style of performance.

I struggled with this. “I’m working on a podcast with this… guy,” I’d tell people. “He’s a —” and here my voice would trail away as I realized that none of the terms my brain was queueing up were right, exactly. I sounded ridiculous. I struggled right up to the runup to release. And then, suddenly, I didn’t, because I realized something I should have known all along: Indescribability is an absolute plus. It’s a virtue.

We’re here to talk about creativity, so let me posit a theory: Creative work isn’t always indescribable, but it always ought to aim its aspirations in that direction. So much art is exactly what it appears to be if you happen to glance it at while whizzing by at 100 mph, which in an overcrowded cultural landscape is all most of us can do. It’s an inch deep, trivial to apprehend and easy to put a label to, and it leaves nothing behind but the empty calories of a sugar rush. If he could, what creator wouldn’t want to do something that confounded his audience’s ability to boil it down and toss it away? Who wouldn’t want to break people’s brains a little bit?

Mat titled one of his cabaret shows “The Extraordinary Gentleman.” That alluring ambiguity says it all. It’s description enough.

/BB

Image: Khaydock, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

The podcast and the plague

Is “Imagination & Junk” a show about COVID?

No. And yes.

I guess you could have been a maker of things in the last 15 months and been unaffected by the virus. But I don’t see how. A species-level event seeps into everything, inflects every aspect of what we do. It would have been dishonest to pretend that we were somehow making this show in a pre-pandemic world, and more than that: It would have been weird. It would have been like continuing to make pleasant dinner-party conversation while a giant forest fire licked at the windows. You don’t necessarily have to talk about the flames, I suppose, but it’s insane to pretend that the house isn’t in peril.

So Mat and I didn’t wrestle with the question of whether to touch on the pandemic; only with the questions of how, and how much. That calibration was one of the first things we talked about when we started working together, one of the first practical problems to solve, and we stumbled toward a consensus. We glanced off COVID in Episode 1, flicked at it in episodes 2 through 5, and did a sort of reckoning with it in Episode 6, the season finale. We groped our way through it, as everybody is doing right now, about everything. It felt right.

There is, though, one sense in which the virus is absolutely front and center around here: We wouldn’t be doing the show at all if Mat’s gigs for the year hadn’t been cancelled, and if he hadn’t been the sort of polymorphously creative type for whom the idea of laying down his tools for the duration was inconceivable. (I’m a different sort, and we touch on this in Episode 1 as well. I wouldn’t have stopped making things entirely, but I would have been okay with a sustained period in which I did nothing but eat donuts and tremble in a corner.) Mat took to YouTube with a vengeance, making beautiful little videos on the broad topic of creativity, which led me to approach him with the idea of a collaboration, and that led to this. Would we have come to work together under other circumstances? Maybe. But the universe definitely gave us a shove.

I wouldn’t say I’m glad about how we got here, because that would be awful. But I am glad to be doing this podcast with Mat. We, all of us, tumbled into this thing, and we’re going to improvise and imagine and dream our way out. Creativity isn’t a cure-all. But it can be one of the lamps we use to light the way back.

/BB

Hello. We’re “Imagination & Junk.” Nice to meet you.

Welcome to a new podcast about creativity, because when we heard that there were literally two million podcasts listed in the Apple directory, we thought: “You know, what the world really needs is two million and one podcasts.” That is, if the “one” is this one.

We’re Bill Barol and Mat Ricardo, and you can learn more about us on our About page. We’ll have lots more to say in the weeks to come, but for now: We have six episodes of the show ready for you, and they’re sharp and funny and thought-provoking. They twist and turn. They take unexpected digressions but they always come back because look, WE ARE PROFESSIONALS.

So we hope you like the show, and we hope you tell your friends. Above all, we hope you subscribe, because algorithms run the world and we’ve worked hard on this since January, on two different continents, and we want the algorithms to like us. You could start here.

Oh, by the way: That’s Thomas Edison up there. He was a solid inventor and a peerless self-promoter (just ask Nikola Tesla about that), and he authored the quote that gives us our name: To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.

We’re glad you found us. Stay tuned. It’s going to be fun. /BB

Episode 1: Just start

There are a million possible ways to start a new creative project, but they can all be reduced to one: Just start. In the premiere episode of Imagination & Junk you’ll meet your hosts: Bill Barol, a longtime professional writer in just about every medium, and Mat Ricardo, a variety performer who’s toured the world for decades, playing every kind of venue from street corners to theaters and festivals. Locked down by COVID in their respective home countries (the US for Bill, the UK for Mat) they begin a Transatlantic correspondence that attempts to get at some basic questions about the kind of work they do: What is creativity? Where does it come from? Why is it worth thinking about? And how much does it boil down to a magic trick?