Episode 10: Buzzing Neon

This week we're talking about criticism, including the trickiest kind: Self-criticism. We'll also look at the buzzing neon sign hanging outside the hotel room of your mind, the one that spells out your own doubts and insecurities, and how to filter it out. Plus: Humility and its plodding cousin experience, spoons, the Dunning-Kruger Effect, sleeping policemen, fixed-rate mortgages, the magical power of putting things in drawers, and the worst heckle ever. (Seriously. The all-time worst.)

Episode 9: Catch Me If You Can

In this episode we're looking at Impostor Syndrome, the conviction that you've been faking it and are always just inches away from being unmasked. We have a theory about where it came from (hint: it was the '70s), and some thoughts about how it can be turned to creative people's advantage. Plus: Penn & Teller, non-apology apologies, fresh batteries, a ridiculous excess of materials, and the Moscow Philharmonic. (Or were they?)

Me and Donald Trump

I tell a story in Episode 8 about getting assigned, in the summer of 1988, to go downtown to where Donald Trump had his big stupid boat docked and interview him about the thing, which he had recently bought because it was the latest shiny bauble to drift across his eyeline.

Trump was at the time merely a megalomaniac real estate shyster, not the global figure he would eventually become. This is important to know, because when I tell people — as I tell Mat this week — that I met Donald Trump and had a chat with him on the upper deck of his big stupid boat, they generally want to know why I didn’t push him overboard and save us all a lot of trouble. As I explain in the episode, it wasn’t because I’m opposed to murder, although I am. (In most cases.) It was because I didn’t have a crystal ball to gaze into, one that would project an outcome which seemed plainly nuts at the end of the Eighties. Instead I did what I could, which was be mean about him and his big stupid boat in the pages of a widely-read national magazine.

I wish I could tell you I have a vivid sense memory of having met the future president. The truth is, I can’t. Which should tell you something: He struck me as a deeply unimpressive person — vain, silly and vapid. This was another reason to suspect that in the grand scheme of things the guy was going nowhere except, inevitably, to a grifter’s fate of bankruptcy and obscurity. He didn’t have anything surprising to say, or clever, or enlightening, about the boat or anything else. In fact he didn’t seem that interested in the boat, except as an avatar of his own magnificence. He didn’t even seem interested in the million-dollar view it afforded him of the New York City skyline — I remember him gazing out across it with the same flat, incurious look you or I would give a blank wall — until he realized that view included some average hardworking people who were inexplicably besotted with him. That, he was interested in. That got his attention. It should have gotten mine. But in the summer of 1988 the world of 2016 and beyond was as far away as Mars, and just as unknowable.

Here’s the story as it ran in Newsweek in July of 1988. (Click image to embiggen.)

/BB

(Note: Writers at Newsweek did not, as a rule, write their own headlines or subheads. For that reason I assume no responsibility for dubbing Trump “the world’s most bouyant billionaire,” a terrible bit of wordplay that made me gag then as it does now.)

Episode 8: The Lede (and how to swing it)

How do you get your audience in the tent? And how do you send them home happy at the end? Journalists have the lede and the kicker; entertainers have the opener and the closer. But they're not the only creative people with tricks. Every art form has them, and if you dig into them you can see some of the wiring that holds all creative work together. Also: Coco Chanel, Spot is a dog, a bowler hat with a chess piece on the top, and that time Bill had a chance to alter the course of history and declined to do so.

Episode 8 lands this Wednesday, May 10

Hello! Just a quick note to let you know that Episode 8 is coming your way this Wednesday. It’s about the things creative people to do to get an audience in the tent and earn their trust. (There’s more art to it than you might think.) Also, we’ll be spending entirely too much time talking about something I failed to do in 1988, many years before I knew Mat, that he may never quite be able to forgive me for. See you Wednesday.

/BB

That time Mat hung out with the King

The life of an entertainer must be weird. I mean, one night you’re sharing a bill with burlesque artistes and guys who spin plates, and the next you’re onstage joking amiably about killing the future King of England. To his face. And the face of his future Queen Consort. Both of whom get a visible kick out of it.

In this video, Mat recalls the night these things actually happened, right here on planet Earth, and reflects on the considerable challenge of disentangling an affable pair of human audience members from the bloated pyramid of privilege whose pinnacle they occupy.

New episode of the show lands Wednesday, April 10.

/BB

Thanks for your support

You might have noticed, down there below, that we’ve switched on a page at Ko-fi that allows you to materially support Imagination & Junk. We’re not trying to get rich here, just defray some of our production costs. We explain the thinking that went into this decision here.

If you’re a fan of this podcast and choose to support us at any level, with a one-time tip or a monthly donation toward our expenses, we sincerely appreciate it.

Episode 7: Struck by Lightning

How do we measure success in creative work? Is it about the reception the work gets, or is the scale more elusive? Answering this question takes some clarity of thought and a good grasp of expectations. This week, in the first episode of season 2, we're talking about meter-setting. Also: Explosions, sleepy Labradors, and coffee with butter in it.

Imagination & Junk returns this Wednesday, April 26

Season 2 premieres April 26, 2023

Phew! It’s been a minute. But we’re back with a new season of all-new episodes on Wednesday, April 26. We hope you’ll help us spread the word via, you know, all the usual means:

• Like us on social media, if you have a platform that hasn’t turned poisonous since you last heard from us!

• Subscribe! It’s easy, and still free! And if that’s only because we haven’t yet figured out a way to crassly monetize it, it’s still a good deal for you!

• Tell your friends about us! In fact, tell your enemies about us, because life is short and this may be a last precious opportunity for reconciliation while there’s still time before we all tear each other to bits in the post-apocalyptic wasteland!

Thanks! /Bill + Mat

Season 2 is here. (Almost.)

It’s been a minute, but Season 2 is in the can and we’re preparing to launch. Watch this space and we’ll see you very soon. /Bill + Mat

Season 2 is coming…

…in early 2023. Mat and I are working away on the writing and editing and we’re looking forward to bringing you a new season! /BB

Episode 6: Elephants in rooms

Is it frivolous to do creative work when the world seems to be falling apart around you? Or can it be a palliative -- for both the creator and their audience? In the last episode of Season 1 we're looking at creativity in hard times, and peeling back the curtain on some decisions we're made about how to approach the hulking coronavirus-shaped elephant in the room. Also: Way too much talk about how to get an elephant out of a room.

Season 2 comes your way in 2022.

Episode 5: Angry playtime

A decade ago a group of Dutch researchers postulated that anger may under some conditions be an effective spur to creativity. We’re unpacking that eccentric idea this week, and comparing it with our own histories as creators. Do anger and other negative emotions unlock creativity? Also: How and when can arrogance be useful? Plus: Bad sitcoms, toxic bosses, Jetskis and a standup desk you definitely did not want to explore.

The thing with the hat

Mat, who’s had, to say the least, an interesting career, recently posted a video recalling his appearance in the 1992 video for Annie Lennox’s “Walking on Broken Glass.” (Spoiler alert: he’s the juggler.) His video is delightful and you should watch it, and you can, just below. But what I want to talk about is the little introductory headpiece he put on it to encourage viewers to subscribe to his YouTube channel. He does a thing at 00:05, a thing that lasts all of one second, that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. It isn’t the point of the video; it isn’t even the point of the headpiece. It is, literally, a throwaway. But in its fleeting way, it’s a master class.

That little hat toss. It kills me with its elegance, and its apparent effortlessness, and its narrative nerve: there is absolutely no reason for it to exist in that spot except that he can do it, so he does. And we haven’t talked about this (Mat, weigh in if I’m off base), but I’d suspect it’s also there to arrest the viewer’s focus right off the bat, to fix it in amber: Eyes front, please. Professional entertainer here. I’d like your attention.

The skill to execute that move, and the wit to make it an unremarked-upon grace note, those are Mat’s. But the bit isn’t. Not entirely, anyway. A number of performers have shared its custody; it was done most famously by the great stage clown George Carl. I came to love Carl before I understood the place of reverence he holds for guys like Mat, when I saw him in Peter Chelsom’s indescribably great comic drama “Funny Bones.” (You can see in the film, among too many other amazing things to count, Carl doing the same move; and separately, if you don’t blink, a younger Mat in a tiny part, because time is a flat circle.) Carl is a hero of Mat’s, and he acknowledges his debt to him in this video about legacy and remix in the life of the artist.

What do we owe to the people who did what we do before we ever did it? Something like this, I think: A little humility, and some respect. An acknowledgement that even as we put our own spin on the thing, we stand in their shadows. When Mat bumbles heroically with his suit jacket, he’s stepping into a lineage that points straight back to Carl. And when he tosses that hat away, he’s tossing it into a timeline that includes not only Carl but every other performer who ever did the same. He’s standing on stage with ghosts.

/BB

Episode 4: Stupid, stupid genius

"Forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable." -- Octavia Butler

It's almost impossible to get creative work done without discipline, but not all of us are naturally disciplined creators. That's where habit and routine enter the scene -- they're ways we impose discipline on ourselves. And they're more important skills to develop then ever before in a world where the old structures propping up creative careers have fallen away. This week we're looking at ways habit and routine help keep us on track -- and at some ways in which they don't. Also: Mat recalls working a street pitch with Eddie Izzard, and Bill recalls a near-brush with greatness involving Bob Dylan and a fancy wedding venue. Plus: Hats!

I stayed up with Jerry

It’s hard to describe the now-defunct annual telethon of the Muscular Dystrophy Association to somebody who didn’t look forward to it, who didn’t spend the last part of every perfectly good summer planning to camp out by the TV over the long Labor Day weekend. Where do I begin? On the most basic level the telethon was a tricked-out variety show; there were performers, and there were musical numbers. But nobody watched it for those. You watched it for the spectacle of host Jerry Lewis, a guy whose ego and temper were towering even on a good night, slipping deeper and deeper into a mind-melting sleep deficit (remember, telethon = television + marathon) until finally, in one inevitable moment, he would unhinge the top of his skull and let the snakes out. You never knew when that moment would come, or what would light the fuse — God help the poor stagehand who moved a bit of set dressing into the wrong position, or didn’t have Lewis’s milkshake stashed in his podium when he reached for it — but you always knew it was coming. There are clips on YouTube and they give you some of the flavor; here’s one from 1987 in which Lewis gloweringly, and apparently seriously, solicits donations from the guys who control drug traffic into the port of Miami.

But clips really don’t do justice to the telethon’s deranged majesty. It was theater. It was a dumpster fire. It was a picture window straight into a famous person’s id. It was impossible to watch, and impossible to look away from. It was terrible. It was glorious.

We reference the 1987 telethon in this week’s episode, “Gorilla Position,” and the Newsweek story I wrote about it after flying to Las Vegas and sitting in the audience for over 21 hours. Here are two versions of that story: The one that got published, and the longer and considerably more nutso original draft. If you really want to experience some of the flavor of the thing as I lived it, get jacked up on espresso and chase it with cough syrup before you read. I’ll see you on the other side. /bb

Episode 3: Gorilla position

Style is the beautiful face we put on what we do. It goes hand in hand with technique, but they inflect each other in a complicated dance -- technique without style can be dull, but style without technique is something worse; it shreds the all-important trust that has to exist between a creative person and her audience. In this episode we talk about what style is, the critical distinction between style and technique, and how style helps a creative person stake her claim on a place in the lineage of people who do what she does. Also: Mat goes all in on professional wrestling as metaphor, and Bill talks about writing the weirdest thing to ever appear in a national newsmagazine. Plus: Bananarama!

Hamburger Madness, by Jack Ziegler

The “Angry Bill” Takes: A case study

A couple of days before we published the first episode, Mat and I started to kick around some ideas for post-launch promotion. It was Mat’s idea to put together a little video of us talking straight to camera about the show — me in my office in Santa Monica, CA, and Mat in an Undisclosed Location. It seemed straightforward. It was straightforward. But it also proved to be a useful lesson in how an idea pushes itself along, spinning off other ideas in the process.

Let’s work backwards. Here’s the finished video:

Mat cut this together, as should be obvious, from our individual takes. My individual take, however, differed from his in the respect that when I flubbed a line — which I did a great deal, having made the preposterous decision to wing it — I got flustered. I got visibly and loudly flustered. There was some, and when I say “some” I mean “quite a lot of,” angry profanity. No problem: Mat would, I figured, cut around it. I sent him the raw video.

It was, I think, a couple of days later, in the context of another conversation entirely, that Mat said this, in our Slack:

He lobbed this up in the idle, speculative way of someone who’d had an oddball notion tickling at him for a number of hours but wasn’t quite ready to say it out loud. I can’t tell you how many times, in how many late night writer’s rooms, I saw this dynamic play out — somebody offering the rawest germ of a notion, a germ they weren’t quite ready to professionally endorse (I’m not really pitching this, this isn’t a pitch because this isn’t really an idea, it’s just a random thing), and somebody else immediately seeing where it could go, because sometimes it takes another, wholly separate working brain to recognize an idea springing up in the wild. I thought: Of course. At which point the whole enterprise took on a different flavor. We started to talk about the “Angry Bill Takes,” the way people talk about The Basement Tapes or The Zapruder Film.

We had other things going on at the time; by sheer coincidence, this happened to be almost the exact moment Episode 1 went live to the world, the culmination of seven months’ work on two continents.

So we didn’t follow up on it right away. We talked about launch issues for a bit, about infrastructural stuff like DNS propogation and subscription links. But clearly we both had this worm of a silly idea gnawing quietly away at our brains, because about an hour later I wondered whether some version of the outtakes might qualify as bonus content for the website. Some 90 minutes after that Mat, apropos of nothing, popped in to say “Sidenote — I genuinely think that the best example of ‘the hard work of creativity’ would be to upload your complete take to camera, unedited.”

We didn’t end up doing that. We got pulled away into other business, and I told Mat again that I trusted him and he should do whatever he thought worked. And when he came back with the results, I saw right away that he’d done something so much better than simply pouring out the raw takes: He’d edited the Angry Bill Takes, and his own, into little freestanding Warner Bros. cartoons, mini-arias of error and frustration. He built them from the raw material, giving them pace and rhythm, a beginning and middle and end. They became their own things. (The thumbnail frame on mine was a happy accident. Sometimes you get lucky.)

One of the things I love about the outtakes is that you see the difference between the way Mat, a performer, reacts to fluffing a line and the way I, a writer, do it. Mat simply lets the mistake float away into the ether, you can almost see him let it go, and then he goes again. And I — don’t do that. I get self-conscious. Hence the profanity. Which led to the final refinement: I messaged Mat to ask if he thought a torrent, or at least a rivulet, of angry cursing would present any problems with the social media platforms. Before he could answer, though — in fact, as soon as I pushed Send — I realized something: Whether or not there was a practical requirement that the profanity be bleeped, it’d be funnier if it was. I couldn’t explain why, but it just would be. I knew with 100% certainty that this was true: It had to be bleeped, because bleeped is funnier. This would end up being my contribution. I would have insisted on it, I would have fought him physically on it, if he hadn’t been some number of miles away in an Undisclosed Location. Fortunately, he agreed, immediately, which led to a highly entertaining 15-minute exchange on the semiotics of the “bleep” sound. We laughed a lot. We’ve laughed a lot, about a lot of things, making this podcast.

You start someplace, with something that may not yet be fully formed enough to call an idea. You end up somewhere else. Creativity is like this, when it works. And when it does, man, it’s fun.

/bb

Episode 2: The squeeze

There's a misconception that creativity means coming up with ideas. But ideas are one thing, results are another, and the distance between them can only be traversed by work. How do creative people sort ideas, develop them and emerge on the other end? That's where process and technique enter the picture. Also: Mat makes the first of several references to professional wrestling, and Bill explains why, if you're a comedy writer, the name "Nakamura" gives you night sweats.

BONUS: Here’s the cigar-box trick Mat talks about in this episode. You can find it at 9:02 of this TEDx talk he delivered in London in 2017.