Speaker 0:00

I'm Alejandra Russi, and this is The Russi Hive. Conversations with people who treat their work and life as a creative practice. As we enter the late summer haze, I'm wrapping Season One with a trilogy of shorter solo episodes about the podcast itself. The spark, the launch, and the living creature finding its next form. First up: The Spark. The research labyrinth, perfectionism as avoidance, an imaginary assistant in the liberating trick of doing the obvious thing before a thesis exists. This podcast is presented by Ricco /Maresca.

Speaker 0:37

Have you ever had an idea for something you wanted to create and carried it around for years before moving one finger in the direction of making it happen? I am one of those people. I am a horrible perfectionist. I make endless notes and lists. Brainstorm is the middle name I was never given. Before I start anything, I will have mapped the hell out of it. And before that, I will have lost my mind in the labyrinth of my notes app, my "notes to self" emails, my voice memos, my camera roll albums, my digital diary, my word lists, the physical notebooks where I will rip out an entire page because I don't like the way my handwriting looks. I log ideas, plans, timelines, schedules in documents and pages on the computer, in the cloud, online workspaces. You get the idea. If this train of thought is giving you a special kind of anxious vertigo that you've never experienced before, I'm really sorry. We all have our own highly personal ways of not getting shit done. Mine is color-coded, well researched, and overly organized in a way that makes it remarkably and almost completely inaccessible to me. Sometimes when I think about the process of creating and launching The Russi Hive, I realize that the key was learning to ignore the part of my brain that believed I needed to have it all figured out , and continuing to ignore it by simply doing the next most obvious and urgent thing. But in order to do that, I had to invent an imaginary assistant. Or more precisely, a B version of myself. So let me tell you about Ale B, the version of me you never see. Because the person in front of the camera is always Ale A, the insufferable A-type who jumps in to claim all the glory when it's actually Ale B who has done all the thankless grunt work. Whenever Ale A experiences artistic paralysis, existential dread, or on a good day, productive procrastination, Ale B steps right in. And when I say she steps in, I mean I actually summon her. I'm like: "Okay, Ale B, let's get to work: Research this person. Dump everything into thematic containers. By the end of the day, you need to have the interview arc." The phrasing isn't perfect? No problem. The questions still need polishing? No problem. You thought of 12 external connections and references that now need more research? No problem. Ale B will do all of that tomorrow, step by step, cool as a cucumber, because she doesn't care about creativity, originality, illumination, the full picture, or the credit. She lives to put a damn check mark beside the next thing on the to-do list. That is her life's purpose. That is her fulfillment. But putting all my little gimmicks aside, I often wonder why it was this project that somehow made it through the inhospitable atmosphere of my mind alive. Honestly, the complete answer probably contains more confessional layers that I am prepared to peel back right now. But the question makes me think of something Laetitia Barbier, my wonderful guest, said to me off camera. And that is that she saw in me a desire to be seen. In other words, I'm a little closeted diva. And yes, I could give you the more respectable answer, a variation on what I said in the spoken trailer that I published right before the podcast launched: that I am fascinated by the inner mechanics of creativity. How ideas are born, how people bring private visions into the world, what happens to those visions every step of the way, and all of that is true. But maybe creating a show about how other people make their inner worlds visible was also a way of allowing it for myself. I will say though that visibility comes with responsibility, and you have to show people that you are the captain of the ship if you want them to go on a voyage with you. So at the very beginning, I announced departure dates before I could change my mind. Once I had enough of the technical side figured out, the cameras, the audio, the beginnings of a post-production workflow, I refused to stop to formulate some grand thesis for the podcast. It was going to be about creativity and creative people, and that was enough. And I started sending emails to actual humans and putting recording dates on the calendar at a slightly alarming pace. And the dates forced the rest into existence. An interview on the calendar requires questions. Questions require research. And a camera pointed at your face requires you to face the very uncomfortable fact that you now need an on-camera presence. I learned mine on camera. Slowly I developed what I call video brain, or the ability to see yourself from the camera's point of view as you simultaneously perform for it. About four interviews in, I realized that I had no idea how to package any of this. So I reached out to Talia Cotton and her team at Cotton Design and described the podcast as though it were considerably more developed and cohesive than it actually was at that point. Around interview six, I decided I also needed a sonic identity. So I reached out to Antfood Music. Both teams jumped on a semi-imaginary ship that was already moving and helped me discover what I was actually building. To Cotton, I said, I want hot pink. A black and white, old Hollywood type portrait for the podcast cover. And for the general visual identity, they played with the idea of precision colliding with unpredictability, as well as with the visual of the beehive, which I love. When I contacted Ant food, I told them that the podcast was still forming and that it would define itself in the process of happening, and that I wanted the music and the sonic logo to somehow capture that. And then I sent them a creative brief asking for something anticipatory, luminous, quietly ecstatic, inwardly charged, tender but powerful, reflective yet propulsive, intimate but expansive, like a thought-taking form. This apparently is what it looks like when I don't stop to formulate an elaborate thesis.

Speaker 8:34

So, why am I sitting here in my apartment alone under the supervision of a little girl and a very large dog, Sans guest? August is a strange time to release podcast episodes, which is why a lot of people take a break, I hear. Everyone is away, distracted, mentally on vacation, actually on vacation. So I made the executive decision to move the interviews in my bank to the fall. August, pretty much exactly around this time last year, was a time when all of this started taking shape in my brain. So it felt fitting to reconvene with myself and with you in the form of three creative dispatches or shorter solo episodes that will close out season one of the Russi Hive and carry us toward season two. The second dispatch coming next week is about what happened when it left my head and entered the world. And the third, coming the week after that, will be about the exciting and unexpected places where I want to take it from here. It's going to be nuts in the best way. And because we began with a question of how we finally move toward the things that we have spent years imagining, I will leave you with this. What is the next most obvious and urgent thing you could do for the idea you keep postponing? See you next week.

Speaker 10:21

If this conversation resonated with you, follow the show wherever you listen and find me on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Substack @russihive. If someone came to mind for The Hive, send guest suggestions to guests [at] russihive.com. And if you just want to say hi, it's hello [at] russihive.com. Original music and sonic identity for the Russi Hive by Antfood. Until next time, let your life be a creative act.