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