Episode 1: Just start

[00:00:05] Speaker A: Thomas Edison said, to invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk. [00:00:11] Speaker B: This is imagination and junk, A conversation about the hard work of creativity. [00:00:19] Speaker A: I'm Matt Ricardo. [00:00:23] Speaker B: I'm Bill Barol. [00:00:26] Speaker A: Episode 1 Just Start. [00:00:41] Speaker B: Dear Matt, it's afternoon here, a crisp, cool day in Santa Monica, California, and evening where you are in the southeast of England. My day is picking up speed as yours is winding down. That gap has made it a little tough to get in sync as we've tried to figure out how to start this transatlantic conversation about creativity. So maybe I should just start. Sometimes creativity is simply about that starting. Let's begin in January 2018, three years ago as I record this. By 2018, I'd been a professional writer for and let me hold onto something, as I say this close to 40 years. I'd been good at it for maybe 30. I'd written for Newsweek in the 1980s. It was my first real job out of college, and it was a very, very plumb job for a young guy to get. You sometimes have to remind people of this. Newsweek and its crosstown rival Time, were in those days, world straddling behemoths whose reason for being that readers would buy a magazine on a Monday to find out what had happened the previous week now seems unimaginably quaint. All I can tell you is it made sense. At the time, I was living in New York City, commuting to work at 49th and Madison on the west side IRT. And when I'd climb up from the underground in the mornings and start my walk east, the early sun angling down through the skyscrapers, the smell of exhaust and dirty water, hot dogs in the air and that ambient score of distant machines and traffic and people yelling at each other in every language. I'd walk past the Time Life building on 6th Avenue and the headquarters of NBC at 30 Rock. I remember passing the news dealers tucked into the storefronts at Rockefeller center and seeing big displays of Newsweek there, and sometimes on a Monday morning, a cover story that I'd written facing back at me. Dozens of copies hung in long, crisp rows. I was just starting out and I was at the center of everything. It was a dream. Until it wasn't. There were cracks in the foundation. We just didn't know it yet. But my luck was good. I was presented with a soft exit out of the print business in the early 90s, just before the Internet caused the bottom to fall out. Somebody wanted me to come to Los Angeles and write for television. It seemed too good an offer to be true. But I did it, and it lasted for a decade or so. I got to access a different part of my writing brain, and it was great fun and the money was ridiculous. Until one day the phone stopped ringing, except for my agent calling to tell me that the agency was downsizing, which on that particular day happened to not be a lie. Except he didn't specify that the downsizing was limited to me. I remember thinking that I was lucky to have journalism to go back to, as I'd always suspected I might need or want to someday. Although I also remember taking uneasy note of the fact that the business had changed enormously during my years away, that clicks and not copies sold were the barometer of success. Now I was able to call on some old print contacts who'd successfully bridged that transition. So there I was, writing for clicks, mostly with side trips into what remained of print journalism. For the next decade and a half, I bounced all over the board. I wrote movies, I wrote books. I spent a few years contributing humor pieces to the New Yorker, which was an absolute blast. By the mid-2000 teens, when everybody was doing a podcast, I was doing one, too. Old Dog, New Tricks. So by early 2018, which I'll remind you is when our story begins, I know I'm getting to it. By early 2018, I'd done pretty much every kind of writing there was to do, and I'd been reasonably successful at all of it. I was a career professional writer, which was really all I'd ever wanted to be. My luck had held. One day, my wife, Jennifer, and I got a call from some friends who had scored tickets to An Evening at the Magic Castle in Hollywood. I'll leave it to you to describe the Castle, and I'd be interested to hear about what it means to performers. For my part, I'll just say that it's a tough ticket to get. And An Evening at the Magic Castle is one of those things people always include when they make up their bucket lists of things to do. In Los Angeles, that was where I saw your act for the first time. I was utterly knocked out, particularly by the finale, which, honestly, Matt, I don't know how to describe it, except to say that you did something I'd never seen before, something that before I saw you do it, it would never even have occurred to me that it was possible. I mean, physically possible. I started babbling to my friends about this guy. He was. I didn't know what to call it, what you do. And I'd seen him do this thing, this feat of dexterity. This. I didn't have the vocabulary for it. I've made my living with words for decades and I didn't have the vocabulary to describe that moment of utter astonishment at the skill and the audacity, the creativity of what I'd seen you do. Fortunately, you had and have an active social media presence, so I was able to point people your way and I kept an eye on you from afar. That's where things stood until recently and that's where I'm going to let you pick up the story. I hope you're enjoying a good evening Scotch in a heavy tumbler. I'm going to go have a grilled cheese sandwich. We're going to have to figure out some way to get around this time difference. In the meantime. Regards, Bill. [00:06:15] Speaker A: Good afternoon, Bill. It's 3:42pm as I write this and England is on brand this afternoon. It's drizzly and the Tupperware grey sky is already starting to darken as I sit here drinking good coffee from a stolen cup. And now I'm also thinking about January 2018. You asked what it means to perform at the Magic Castle. Now, I can't speak for every conjuring schmuck who works that stage, but but I'm a sentimental type, so for me places like that are special. For me, it feels like somewhere to have got to a marker of, if not success, then at least competence. Not that I'd heard of it. When I first started out on the path that led me there, I was an only child and a shy one. I was always happiest locking myself away on my own in my room and making something or learning something. That hasn't changed. As a teenager. If you'd asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I wouldn't have had a clue. I remember once at school we were all given forms. Printed at the top of the form in big block letters, were the words Jig Cal Job Idea Information Generator, Computer Aided Learning. We were told to fill in the forms, tell the forms our likes and our dislikes, our academic strengths and weaknesses so that a computer in Oxford could analyze them and then divine for us the occupations for which we were most perfectly suited. We all did as we were told and then waited a couple of months and finally my destiny was delivered onto my desk in a little brown envelope. My mathematically ideal job, Funeral director. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I was fairly sure it wasn't fun. That. And then while I was on holiday with my parents, I saw A street performer, a juggler, a charismatic showman. And he did something that, to my young eyes, was genuinely magical. Using just his wits, craft and some clever tricks, he turned a patch of pavement into his venue. I was besotted. I made a point of watching every show he did. And by the time I was home, I'd gone to the pet shop at the end of our street and bought three hard rubber dog balls and got a book from the library that would teach me how to juggle. I kept practicing through school, then college, and then finally washing up at Covent Garden in London, home of one of the only legal street performing pitches in the world back then. And like Timothy Leary said, I found the others. Acrobats, dancers, mime artists, clowns, jugglers, escapologists, all drawn to this place where they could find themselves and develop their art in front of an audience who might, if they were lucky and good, give them actual money for it. I've never been very goal oriented, never had a career plan. Maybe that's to my detriment sometimes, but I've always been one of those people who just tries to do good work. Whether I succeed or not is another thing entirely. But that's as much of a career plan as I've ever had. So I kept working and kept learning. Over the years and decades, I graduated from the street to indoor venues and then to my own shows in West End theatres and international tours. My stupid job has given me more than my fair share of ridiculous adventures in far flung corners of the world. I get to travel to places the teenage me would only have dreamt of and meet new people by doing silly tricks for them and making them laugh. It's such a damn privilege. And the castle was for sure one of those adventures. It's the kind of place that America does really well. It's authentically its own thing. There's no ironic detachment. And if that's how you go into it, then you're missing the point completely. It's a big old house full of dark corners, surprises, cocktails and people who can do impossible things. It's a place for adults to feel like kids. And everyone who goes there the next day will be telling their friends about something they saw that baffled them or made them laugh or squeezed a gasp out of them. And I love that I was that thing for you. You said some very nice things about my act and my finale. And I'm quite tempted to not fill in any more details about what it is I actually do. I mean, it's easily Googleable, but It's fun being a little enigmatic, right? It's interesting that you've found my work hard to describe. I still find it tricky myself after more than 30 years of doing it. To sum it up in a simple sentence that often feels to me like a negative. But perhaps I should learn to embrace the fun of the mystery. January 2018 seems like a long time ago, and the Castle seems like a long way away at the moment. But talking to you and planning this little collaboration certainly makes those distances feel a little less. Stay as safe and as sane as it's reasonable to expect, and I'll talk to you soon. Matt. [00:11:46] Speaker B: Dear Matt, I'm looking at your town on a map and I've discovered that if you took a rock and threw it due east, you could hit Bruges, which is pretty cool. Although it would mean clearing about 100 miles of the North Sea, so you'd have to have a really good arm to do it. Maybe you should try it like me. You have some extra time on your hands right now. You said that January 2018, when you played the Magic Castle, feels like a long time ago. I know what you mean. It does to me, too. I don't think any of us were prepared for what was coming in March 2020 when the virus hit. Over here in the States, we were told that if we could, to the best of our abilities, stay home for a couple of weeks, just stay home and watch movies, bake cookies, maybe even spend some time working on ourselves, hey, it won't be so bad. If we could just stay home, we could probably knock the thing out and we'd be back to normal by April Fool's Day. Well, April Fool, I guess. Now it's many months later and the world has been turned upside down and shaken out, and we're in the thick of another surge and both of us are living in hot zones. I've been lucky in lots of ways over this time, one of them being that I can continue to do what I do, even in lockdown. I sit at my keyboard and on the good days I make the clackity noise. As Merlin Mann once said, making the clackety noise is how Mann describes the conscious act of will by which we get our stories out of our brains and into our fingertips and down onto a screen in glowing pixels. It's a solitary pursuit, and it is, to a degree, a mechanical one. It's about sitting your ass in the chair. What you do, though, that getting up in front of people and making something before their eyes in real time and forging a community, if just for a short while, from a bunch of strangers, that feels to me like magic. I have very, very little personal experience with performance in my adult life. It's been limited to just a couple of times. Once when I did a live storytelling show at a downtown LA performance space, and another time when I was a TV writer and I got drafted to read a Single lion at a Table reading because we hadn't cast an actor for it yet. And I managed to get a huge laugh with the line, I like that hat. The laugh went on for longer than it had a right to. I remember hearing the sound of it bounce off the walls, ebb a bit and then redouble. It wasn't just a laugh, it was a rolling laugh, the comedy writer's white whale. And I remember thinking, oh, I get it. I get why people like this. It was the same reaction I'd had many years before when I tried cocaine for the first time. To have that rush be a regular part of your job, I can't imagine what it would be like to have it taken away, to have the universe say, you know what? I'm just going to take this special thing you do and put it up on a shelf for a while. Looking at it from the outside, it's tempting to assume that performance isn't just what you do. It is, to a degree, who you are. But you may disagree, and anyway, that's not for me to say. What I do know is that you found a way to keep, if not performing, then creating. I was so inspired by the videos you've done in lockdown, videos that are generally about how to keep creating in hard times, that it led me to send you an email out of the blue asking if you'd like to collaborate on a podcast about creativity. What it is, where it comes from, why it matters. The idea, insofar as I had one, was to take what you do and what I do and put them in a blender and whirl them around together and see what came out. I was thrilled when you said yes. And here we are. So let me ask why was it so important to you to find a way to keep making things, even now? Especially now? Maybe. And for bonus credit, how can I glom onto some of whatever it is that makes you so maddeningly prolific? I hope you're hunkered safely down by your piece of coastal real estate, as I am mine, and that you're looking out over the grey North Sea waters toward Bruges and thinking, as I am here about what comes next and what part of it we can manage to make and why we should try. Take care, Bill [00:16:26] Speaker A: Dear Bill, Yep, you certainly nailed it when you said that performing isn't just what I do, it's what I am. I mean, it's not all of me, but it is a big part and an important one. This shy, nervy kid who learned to juggle also learned through portraying a confident grown up on stage to be more of a confident grown up off stage. So I feel that somehow I owe it. You're also right when you say that what I do is about forging a community of strangers. That's always been important to me to make something that is more than the sum of its parts. But isn't that also exactly what you do? To arrange letters and words on a page, using your mind and your heart to create something that somehow makes people laugh or think or feel? People read the shapes you make on paper and because of the order in which you assemble them, they hallucinate pictures in their heads. How is that not magic? It was hard to have my shows taken away. Not just the shows, but all the things around them. The travel, the meeting new people, the hanging out in dressing rooms and post show bars with other performers. People I consider part of my odd feel. Fascinating diverse worldwide family of carnies and strippers and circus daredevils. I started making stuff on YouTube because it seemed to be the only stage still available to me. It's not quite the same as having a live audience. It's clearly the methadone to a cabaret club's heroine, but it's an interesting new thing to get to grips with. But why did I feel the need to keep making stuff at all? It's a good question with a lot of answers. Is it ego? A need to still be seen by an audience, even if it's an online one? Well, I'd be a liar if I said that wasn't in the mix somewhere. You don't spend a lifetime as a solo performer and an only child without that being a factor. But I've always made things as a way to escape, as a distraction from when my world, or in this case, the world, feels dark and scary. So there's always been that making something is to me, simple and soothing. So I guess my hope is that whatever I make might be distracting or soothing to someone else too. There's also a lot to be said for the act of taking one's half baked thoughts, feelings and opinions and forcing them through the filtration system of trying to make something out of them. Having to put them into actual words that make actual sense has the effect of clarifying them, sharpening them, or showing them up to be hogwash. Either way, you learn about yourself. I sometimes wish I could spend more time sitting and reading, just being, and I'm working on that because it seems healthy and mindful. But there'll always be a part of me, a large part, that derives self worth from being able to walk away from something that didn't exist before I made it. I think that probably isn't super healthy, but before I had much, I had that. So I guess I owe that too. I looked at where you live on our map as well. It looks like we're both not too far from the beach. I've been to Santa Monica a couple of times. I have a picture of myself and my agent being attacked by a green screened shark that was taken on Santa Monica Pier last year. I really hope that shark's doing okay without the tourists to give it an audience. You asked how you can be more prolific, but maybe the real question is why? For me, everything I make at the moment tells me something new about how I feel in this very strange, unsettling time, even if it's just an unintended side effect. The fact that things are so different now, well, that seeps into everything. I guess. YouTube is as much a mirror as it is a window. Stay safe and sane. I'll talk to you soon. Matt. [00:20:19] Speaker B: Dear Matt, There's a certain kind of person who collects quotes because they appreciate them, I guess. Or maybe because it's easier to appropriate someone else's wisdom than it is to come up with their own. I am such a person. And something you said reminded me of one of my favorite bits of appropriated wisdom. It's from the historian David McCullough, who said, writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard. I agree with this. So first of all, I appreciated what you had to say about how difficult it is to organize thoughts and arrange them on a page in such a way that they have an effect on people. To write well is to think clearly, and that is why it's so hard. That doesn't just apply to writing, though, it's true for every kind of creative work. If you want to do it well, you have to bring to it a clarity of thought and purpose and a mastery of the material you're working with, whether it's clay or juggling balls or words. One of the journalism maxims that trickled down to me when I was a young News Weekly writer, was you can't simplify it until you know it all. So rigor, craft, experience, they're all part of the story. So are those motive forces you cited. Ego, escape, A desire to soothe ourselves. There's something else, though, and here's where it gets weird. Because what all those things, important as they are, fail to account for, is something that lies utterly beyond the reach of logic. It's mystery. It's magic. I don't use that word lightly, and I don't think it's a coincidence that you and I have both used it to describe the creative process. We're certainly not the first ones to have done that. Among many others, Bruce Springsteen did, too. He opened his Broadway show by talking about his magic trick, by which he meant the ability to conjure that inexplicable moment in which a skinny kid from a nowhere town becomes a rock and roll star and a transcendent shared experience gets forged out of a stage and some amps and guitars, which are, after all, nothing more than wires and wood. Magic seems about right for this. You must have had that experience of thinking back on some bit of business you've improvised on stage, or a particularly quick comeback to a persistent heckler. The same experience that I have looking back at a felicitous bit of writing and wondering, where the hell did that come from? You can retrace your steps, but only so far before you find yourself standing in a spot where the thing simply appeared. It descended on you, and it was whole or close enough to it that you could, by the application of rigor and craft and experience, make it whole and polished and ready to be released into the world. You can walk your mind back toward that moment, but you can never get all the way there. So what I think is creativity is alchemy. Whether it's you coming up with the idea of your signature piece, the one you stubbornly but nobly, I think, refuse to reduce to words. Or me writing something for the New Yorker that made somebody I'll never know laugh over their coffee. Or a painter or a sculptor, a photographer, a dancer, a kid with a spray can. The thing that makes them all one thing is an element of mystery, a magic trick, except its inner workings are obscure, even to us, the magicians. Maybe the reason why we create at all costs is that this drives us nuts. We have this gift, but it arrived without a tag, and we don't know who to thank. Or maybe it's simpler than that. We create because we simply don't know how not to. It's hardwired into us because stories in the broadest sense are how we decode the world. And that's why that alchemical moment is so universal. Now I am the farthest thing from a philosopher, although parenthetically, I think I would have liked the job. It's a lot easier to lob questions up than to try to answer them, just as it's easier to glom onto other people's wisdom in tiny bite sized bits than it is to accrue your own. So it's okay with me if we don't quite crack this one on the first try. I'm looking forward to kicking around more of the many aspects of creativity with you in this series. And if we don't definitively answer the questions we pose, well, that's in the spirit of the thing, isn't it? We're living in a plague season, a time of many more questions than there are answers. Maybe in a plague season, recognizing the unknowable is enough. Take care and stay safe. Bill. [00:25:11] Speaker A: Dear Bill, Some magic tricks, most, in fact, are much, much less interesting. Once you know how they're done. And I've been around magicians long enough to know how most of them are done, it's almost always a dull disappointment. Something simple and banal. The reaction to finding out a magical secret is almost always really. Oh. It swiftly becomes obvious that what was really magical about the whole thing was all the stuff surrounding the tone trick, the charisma of the performer, the wit, the theatrics, the context. To see all of that and then want to know how the trick itself was done, is to kind of misunderstand why you were entertained in the first place. But maybe that's the real trick. But a few tricks, once you're trusted enough to be made aware of the incredible sleight of hand involved or the absurd amount of preparation the magician went to, well, they become somehow even more impressive, but in a completely different way. A friend of mine, a brilliant magician, used to do a street show. The finale was him producing dozens of playing cards from thin air. They would appear in a blink of an eye in his previously empty hands. Whole fans of them. But on the street, the audience surrounds you. So halfway through the routine, he'd look over his shoulder to the people standing behind him and say, whole different act from where you are. Right? But just as impressive. My finale, which I am now starting to enjoy being needlessly mysterious about, often gets mistaken for a magic trick. People assume that there's something going on that they're not aware of, a hidden gimmick or secret mechanism. But there's not. The truth is much more basic. I just learned to do, took a long time and it wasn't easy and the practice was boring, but I thought it would be cool, so I learned it. You say that stories are how we decode the world, and I've always enjoyed the story that piece tells. That occasionally, not always, of course, but occasionally, you can do something seemingly impossible just by deciding to and finding a way. The thing itself isn't magic, but on a good day, the effect it has on an audience might be, and the effect their reaction has on me might be too. I think that's what's interesting about, in your words, the alchemy of creativity. It's the balance between the work type stuff of craft and skill and technique, and the play of experimentation, collaboration and inspiration. The real trick seems to be to combine these things to make something bigger. And perhaps for that to happen, the final ingredient has to be something from the maker themselves. A little heart, humanity. That final element that everyone has a different version of, that's perhaps what makes the cake rise. And I think that's also where you can surprise yourself with the where did that come from? Moment. The thing about your humanity is that it's kinda amorphous and constantly changing. So if you get good at reaching into it to pluck stuff out, well, then you might be surprised what your hand comes back with. Hopefully, as we do this, we'll learn which tricks are worth peeking behind the curtain at. Which are the ones that only get more interesting and more impressive once you know how they're done. Stay safe and even killed. I'll talk to you soon. Matt. [00:29:08] Speaker B: Imagination and Junk is written by Bill Barol in the US and Matt Ricardo in the uk with audio production by Bill Barol. For more information, show notes and bonus content, it's imaginationandjunk.com.