Episode 11: Super Auto

Can creativity be malign? Or is it always just... creativity? In this episode we're looking at what researchers call "dark creativity," or the use of creative tools to gain an unfair advantage over another person. And yes: We have thoughts. Also: Con artists, hammers, work snacks, spoon-bending, Bond villains, Stevie Wonder Wednesday and the trouble with ponds.

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.

OK, so... the thing with the hat

Like I’ve said before, sometimes I like to show the effort – to make sure the audience knows how difficult something is, so they feel more connected to me through the struggle, and root for my eventual success. Other times, though, it’s fun just to make something look effortless. And that’s so much harder. Unless you’re doing it for a camera.

Part of circus (and by extension variety, cabaret, burlesque.. and most of the shiny little worlds in which I rent a space) is to convince the outside world of our differences. Of how we’re not like you – we’re cooler, more colourful, and able to do things you cannot. We’re a different race of people, who do things differently. It is of course, as we say in London, bollocks. But it’s the kind of bollocks showbusiness has always been based around. It’s the kind of bollocks that sells tickets.

I often think that circuses are like zoos for low-level superheroes.

Anyway. The hat thing. The plan, of course, as Bill correctly surmises, was to make it look completely effortless. As if that’s just what I do whenever I take my hat off. That’s just how someone like me does something that someone like you would do in a less cool way. The truth? Well, I can land the hat on a hook pretty much every time if I’m facing the hook. But blind? While talking? When the hook has to be in a very specific place for the camera shot? Let’s just say that may or may not have been the first take.

And of course, I put it at that point in the video because otherwise it’s just a guy asking you to subscribe to his YouTube channel (and if you haven’t then stop reading this right now and rectify that, you absolute monster) and the chances are that you’ve had someone asking you to that before. But if I can throw something in (sorry) that will both be different to every other time someone asked you to subscribe to their channel, and at the same time perk you up and give you a little reason why you might want to click that button, well, then that seems like a smart thing to do.

Street performers often do a little trick up front to help convince their crowd that it’s worth sticking around for the bigger tricks later on in the show. Same deal. Trust-earning, I guess.

Two of the takes of the hat trick that I didn’t use were of me landing the trick perfectly, but being so surprised that I had, that I fluffed the next line.

I once worked with a magician who did a trick with a piece of food. It was a complicated trick, and a lovely little effect for the audience. You could tell that the crowd, every time, would be trying to work out how he did it. The only way they could figure that it would be possible was so time consuming and convoluted, and would have involved so much almost impossibly complicated preparation, that they immediately dismissed it. But I was the one sharing a dressing with him, watching him spend literally hours, painstakingly doing exactly that, for a 5 second moment on stage. A lot of what we do is patience and practice.

George Carl is a huge hero of mine. I even once got asked to go to Japan to help a TV star recreate his act. Owner of the funniest 9 minutes in the history of everything. Honed over a lifetime. I wish I’d met him, but I never did, even though I was technically in a film with him.

I have some friends who did, though. They did a season in a variety show with him. Every Friday night, he’d cook spaghetti for the whole cast and crew.

/MR

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!

The F word

Listen – only an idiot says it’s fake.

The slams are real. Diving from a turnbuckle to crash and burn, folded in half across a steel guardrail is real. The blood is real. The injuries are real. The passion is real. The emotions are real. The moments of high drama, low comedy and can’t-catch-your-breath spectacle are real. The sacrifices are real. All the important stuff is real.

If you fixate on the little bit that isn’t, then you’re missing the point of wrestling.

I mean, come on now, it was 1938 when American newspapers stopped reporting the results of wrestling matches, when it slowly dawned on them that it might not be, as they used to say back then, “on the square.”

It’s theatre. And it’s one of the most unique and fascinating theatre forms in the world. If it wasn’t so populist and working class, more people would realise that, but just like my beloved street performing, people who should know better are often guilty of judging the quality of an artform by its venue.

All you have to do is look at its roots – carnivals and music halls. It shares more with circus and carnival acts like me than it does with the sporting events that it emulates. A cast of performers – beautiful, muscular, athletic – performing feats of strength, or dazzling acrobatic tricks. Clowns selling the hell out of slapstick schtick. Grumpy ringmasters trying to keep order in the ring. People – real people – performing death-defying stunts in return for a cheer from the crowd. Families who have grown up in this bubble of superhuman spectacle and know nothing else. A travelling show, seemingly populated by people of a slightly different strand of humanity, who live by alternate rules. Wrestling is circus. And circus is theatre.

All good theatre – of whatever type – strives to achieve one simple thing: To make you, while you watch it, forget everything else. To enchant you into the moment. Its moment. To erase your mind of your worries and stresses, to hypnotise you into forgetting that you’re sitting in a seat in a theatre that you travelled to by train. To take out of your mind the idea of past and future, and instead to grab your head in both hands and point your eyes only at what is unfolding in the now.

When wrestling is good it can do this better than anyone else. (And it’s not always good. Not by a long chalk. But then again, I once saw Derek Jacobi in a theatre production of Cyrano De Bergerac which was so bad I had to literally bite the inside of my mouth to stay awake, so... )

The unique thing about wrestling is that, at every point, at every level, it’s real and not real at the same time. There are weeks, months, sometimes years- long storylines about the characters of wrestlers, travelling around the world from show to show – performed by real wrestlers, often with the same names, who really are travelling around the world from show to show. The outcomes of the matches are predetermined, so the storyline can continue to play out, of course. Yes, the people in the ring are working together, rather than against each other. But they’re still doing the things it looks like they’re doing. They’re still high-level athletes, working to exhaustion, and, putting, literally, their necks on the line, to tell a story.

Sure, it’s people in tights, pretending. But have you seen Shakespeare?

When someone tells you how much they enjoyed The Avengers, do you snarkily say “You know Iron Man can’t really fly, right? It’s just special effects”?

Wrestling is fact and fiction dancing together to the music of your suspension of disbelief. When a character climbs the turnbuckle and leaps off, gracefully spinning in the air to land, hard, but somehow safely, on their opponent – you cheer and clap the person for what they did, and the character for why they did it, all at the same time.

When a villainous scumbag does something fittingly despicable – you boo the character because you hate them, but your boo is also secretly a cheer, telling the performer they’re doing a good job in making you hate them.

You’re in on it, and that doesn’t ruin the illusion, because it’s not about the illusion. Like any good magic trick, it’s really about the performance.

At the top levels, the matches aren’t choreographed. They’re improvised. Wordless plays created in the moment by the performers. Like a jazz band listening to each other, giving space for solos, a chorus, and knowing how they’ll take it home. It’s astonishing.

Wrestling, just like theatre, takes the complicated terrain of real life and simplifies it into something that tells resonant stories with familiar archetypes, who sometimes get hit by a steel folding chair.

And who hasn’t wished that real life afforded such clear solutions to its problems?

/MR

(And to hear more about wrestling, art and life, don’t forget to subscribe to “Imagination & Junk” wherever you get your podcasts!)

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