Episode 15: Mousetrap

In the last episode of Season 2, we're recalling the worst things that ever happened to us as creative people, and trying to excavate whatever lessons we can from the wreckage. Featuring: Murder in Encino, and a near-international incident in Beijing.

We'll be back with a new season of Imagination & Junk after a short break.

Episode 14: The Gorgeous Notebook Store

In this episode we're talking about tools of the trade. Every creative trade has them. But they function in a variety of ways: As tools, yes, but also as signifiers of membership in a group, and as objects of desire. Also: Man purses, puppies, promiscuous scribbling, snappy suits, Japanese dining tables, Toots Thielemans, custom juggling balls and cricket.

Episode 13: Six Feet From Genius

Here's a creativity brain puzzler: Is it better to break new ground or to keep polishing the same act until it gleams? It depends, to a degree, on for whom you create in the first place. Also: Jackie Chan, treading water, private eyes, the changeup pitch, Eurovision, litigation, the verdict of history, singularity, space shoes, The Shipping Forecast and quite a bit, actually, about the eternal villainy of The Beach Boys' Mike Love.

Episode 12: Chaotic Playtime

This week we're looking at Getting Things Done, and at the cult of productivity that's sprung up around David Allen's original GTD methodology. It looks good, it sounds good -- but is it an aid to creative work or the exact opposite of what creativity calls for? Once again, we have thoughts. And this time we've put them in a nice list, with checkboxes. Also: Raccoons, stone tablets, Starfighters, making a mess and tidying up, disresepcting the Bing, shallots and where to put them, things that are too good to check, and the night Bobby Flay made a mockery of Kitchen Stadium. 

A city of creativity

Glastonbury is not my thing. That’s what I always said.

People are sometimes surprised that in three and a half decades of doing what I do, I’ve never performed there. But I never had, until last weekend. Now don’t get me wrong, they asked, but every year I politely declined, listing them the reasons why I thought I wasn’t the right booking. And they were real reasons. The older I get, the more I learn about myself, the more I know which situations are kind to my mental health, and which might bully it – and Glastonbury ticked a lot of the bad boxes. Being in the middle of nowhere surrounded by hundreds of thousands of people, unable to run away? Tick. Socialising with friends, colleagues and, frankly, not friends from all over the world? Tick. Camping? CAMPING? Bloody TICK.

But, apparently, what I’d been doing by saying “no thank you” annually, for decades, was playing hard to get, because they started making better and better offers. And I don’t mean monetarily, I mean emotionally. They understood my fears, and valued me enough to try to lessen them, and honestly, that alone made me much more interested.

The final straw came when they offered three things:

I could arrive the same day as my show;

I could leave the same night;

There would be good coffee waiting for me backstage.

They knew what was important to me. I said yes. And I’m glad I did.

So, if you’re unfamiliar with Glasto – or to give it its full name “The Glastonbury Festival of contemporary performing arts” – it’s, well, a city. A city that appears for one week only, on a farm in Somerset, England. A city made out of tents and caravans and food trucks and venues and fields and art installations and megalithic stone circles and overpriced beer and terrifying toilets. A city that was founded, and continues to exist, because of creativity.

The 200,000 tickets sell out almost instantaneously, and they’re not cheap. AND YOU HAVE TO CAMP. But people snap them up for one reason – whether they know it or not. I mean, sure, it’s a five-day party, and you hang out with friends, and get drunk, and get other things, and have awkward and regretful hookups in flooded tents, but the real reason it is what it is, is simple. People go to Glastonbury to see, hear, feel or whatever, something they haven’t seen, heard, felt, or whatever’d before. Something artistic.

And the beautiful part is that this is just as likely to be something like Elton John bringing thousands together in a perfect moment of everyone knowing the words to every song and sharing the now, as it might be an odd little forest glade of home-made automaton sculptures. And, of course, literally, actually, everything in between. I only had a couple of hours to wander around, and even in this short time, I saw kinetic art projects, flamenco ping-pong ball mouth jugglers, acrobats doing handstands on the roof of a cocktail bar, traditional African dance troupes, fake Australian life guards pretending the field was a swimming pool, crusty old folk singers covering Taylor Swift, a strolling Bhangra band who had become pied pipers for an ever-growing following of people lost in the drums and the dancing, a pretend grandpa with his walker decked out like a mod’s Vespa, and Blondie.

Even if you only go to Glastonbury to see Elton and wear funny sunglasses, you’ll find yourself wandering around, and you’ll discover something unplanned, that you love. There’s just too much going on, and too much wandering around required for that not to happen. The whole thing is a machine for organic artistic discovery.

Sometimes it’s easy, as someone who has eventually learned to feel alright with calling themselves an artist, to feel like it’s all a bit of an affectation. We call Imagination & Junk the “podcast about the hard work of creativity”, but occasionally, when I’m feeling less than, my mind lets those questions seep in. You know the ones: “It’s not really work though, is it? You’re not down the mines.” “I mean, is it actually of worth?” But Glastonbury shuts all that shit down really fast.

200,000 people who look forward to this all year, who barrage that website with clicks on ticket release day, with their fingers crossed so tight they turn white. All because they know that when they’re there, on top of the warm beer, pricey burritos, sunburn, mudslides, and TERRIFYING TOILETS, they’ll see some things that they haven’t seen before. Things people made.

/MR

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.