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

What am I?

Bill sent me a message, and asked me if I fancied writing something about how he still can’t really describe what I do. Look, I’d be annoyed about that, but I can’t easily sum up what I am either, and I’ve been doing it for 33 years, so I have no high ground here.

Whenever I work a new venue, or with a new MC, they will, invariably, ask me how I would like to be introduced. “What should I say?”, they’ll ask, and I’ll shrug like it’s my first time doing this. (Although I do have to mention, my favourite ever intro, from my friend Ophelia Bitz – “Our next guest is a cabaret legend. A very big fish, in what is, admittedly, a puddle”)

So – let’s take a run at this.

I’m a juggler. Of sorts. Kinda. But it’s complicated.

See, when I say juggler, I know what you think – either a baggy-trousered dubious-looking children’s entertainer, or a spandex-clad, even more dubious inhabitant of some kind of grating cirque. But these are just what juggling has become – they’re not what it was. Back when jugglers headlined the biggest venues in the world, it was a more varied, theatrical and interesting artform.

Take modern comedy, for example. Many styles, right? You have your observational, your satirical, your one-liner merchant, your improvisers, your physical comedy acts, your sketch troupes etc… right?

Well, back in the day, juggling was like that too. No, really.

There were strong man (and lady) jugglers, who performed dangerous feats of dexterity with heavy things. Real life superheroes who could toss cannonballs around like tennis balls.

Restaurant jugglers, who would have a stage set like a restaurant, and be waiters, chefs and customers on a date, as they played out a scene where every element of a night out was a trick. Like a play viewed through the lens of circus.

How about tramp jugglers – a comedic reaction to the well dressed playboys who they shared the bill with – shabby clowns who stumbled through tricks with cigar boxes, bottles, etc.

Bonus points if you can tell me which international movie star started his career as a world famous tramp juggler, and is pictured here. You’ll have to ask me for the answer on Twitter.

And then there were gentleman jugglers. Dapper, stylish, cool characters who would casually flip their hat around, twirl their cane, maybe pull a tablecloth or two…

I’m a nerd. I used to scan through archives of Victorian newspapers in Westminster library to search out the occasional review of a touring juggling act. That’s where I found gentleman jugglers, and also found my inspiration. I loved the idea that in the world of this character, tricks weren’t tricks, they were just the cool, clever way things were done, because the person doing them was cool, and clever. The circus equivalent of Fonzie smacking the jukebox to play a record.

At the time, I wasn’t cool or clever. I was nervous and shy. So, if I could learn some of these tricks, and maybe wear a suit, and perhaps even learn how to be a cool gentleman on stage, well, then maybe I might get a little less shy off stage, too.

So that was that. Or at least that was my starting point. But since then I’ve meandered off on theatrical tangents. I’m still a juggler at heart, and manual dexterity still forms the centre of what I do, but my last theatre show also contained lockpicking, and knife throwing, and a trick with a golf club, so. Yeah…

The other half of this, of course, is that I’m a comedy performer. Regardless of what I’m doing – juggling, or something more esoteric and less describable – I try to be funny while I’m doing it. Please note the word try. Otherwise it would just be the worst kind of showing-off, right?

As an audience member, I’m not really interested in watching something where the whole message is “Here’s something I can do, that you can’t.” It seems like a waste of theatre. There’s so much more that can be communicated. Tell me why you learned it, tell me why I want to see it, tell me more…

I do tricks, sure. And I love tricks. But they’re just a reason for me to be on stage – and once I’m there, I want to have a conversation with you, tell you about myself, learn about you, make you laugh, and yeah, ideally, gasp, maybe.

Have I answered the question of how to describe what I do yet, Bill? No. I don’t think I have.

Back in the day, I would have been a vaudevillian. A speciality. People would have known what that meant, but not so much these days. I’m a gentleman juggler, but nobody knows what that is. I’m an entertainer, except that conjures up images of sequined jackets and Neil Diamond covers. One of my past shows was called “Showman,” and that’s vague but accurate. Circus artist? Well, sure, except I don’t work in a circus. Magician? Nope. Carnie? Yeah.

We’re no closer. Maybe we should crowdsource this. Tweet me. What am I? Be nice.

M

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.

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

Far Away

I am currently far away. Wait, that explains nothing as I don’t know where you are. I’m far away from where I usually am, and in all probability also from you. Where I actually am isn’t important, especially as I am contractually prohibited from telling you (really!), but I am far away. On a trip. For work.

My usual job – which Bill can’t describe any better than I can – is usually all about being close. I’m not often happier than when I’m in a small venue, where the front row is close enough to be directly affected if a trick goes wrong. But also close enough that you can have a real dialogue with them – that’s a big part of what I do and why I do it. But, as you may or may not be aware, circumstances have, in the past year or so, prevented that from being a legal or healthy thing to be doing. Hence, the internet has become the only venue still open.

But the internet, whether you’re at home or wherever the hell I am, is as far away as it is close.

Here’s what I’m trying to say.

When I work live, if I do something good, the audience will immediately let me know by making noises that have been culturally decided to signify approval. Equally, if I do something they don’t like, they will let me know that, too. I’ve been doing this long enough to have had decent amounts of both. But the internet doesn’t really have that kind of immediate, visceral, in the moment feedback.

I mean, sure, for a podcast like “Imagination & Junk” there are stats you can look at. Numbers of downloads, subscriptions, likes, shares etc – but they seem basic to me. They show you how many people came into your venue and sat down to watch, but not so much what they felt as they saw the show. The audience seem close, and far away.

The more cynical of you might surmise that this is nothing more than an overly-wordy way for me to beg you for approval, comments, reviews, and well MY GOD HOW DARE YOU

Also, you would be, to a not insignificant extent, bang on the money.

But along with that, there’s this weird “message in a bottle” kind of feeling to making things for the internet. Me and Bill have been planning, writing, editing, recording and mixing “Imagination & Junk” since January, and then this week, we rolled it up, put it in a bottle, and threw it in the ocean with our fingers crossed that people might find it.

Partly, that leaves an old stage-shmuck like me feeling incomplete, as there have been no audible laughs or applause, but also I kinda like it. It feels like a relief. Well, it’s out there now. It doesn’t belong to us any more. Go! Fly free, little thoughtful podcast!

Anyway. I’m far away, but hopefully the podcast finds you in the front row.

MR

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?