, Author at Post Road Magazine

V. Oscillation

Carlo Rotella, Charles Farrell and James Parker

James Parker: Aren’t we describing an endless oscillation, or a kind of aortic valve that you’re closing between these two conditions?

Carlo Rotella: Maybe we are. My original hope was that we might just find a more wrinkly way to think about it that isn’t the obvious compromise of Well, you need both.

JP: When you compromise, you’re risking fucking up both ways.

CR: You do it wrong and don’t make it new?

JP: Exactly! You do it right, badly.

Charles Farrell: Or you do it right in fifteen different ways, which makes it wrong.

CR: That’s the How many sets of hands has this screenplay been through? problem.

CF: That’s exactly what it is.

CR: I still have a deep suspicion that it’s not just my perverse personal taste, that in fact there’s a kind of systematic logic to one’s perception of the relative merit, relative value, the relative importance of doing it right versus making it new as you go across the forms and genres. As we’ve been saying, part of the answer is that historical conditions can create a situation in which somebody needs to make it new or play it right. Market marginality or centrality can squeeze out all the making it new or playing it right, so if any shows up you treasure it and value it.

CF: There are so many fail-safes put into doing it right when there’s a lot of money involved. By the time it reaches the market it can only have been done right.

CR: You mean, like, if I was going to a big arena show of some major entertainer, I would really be hoping—

CF: You’re looking for the experience that separates it—

CR: I would hope that they would screw it up in some way that it would make it new. Like come out roaring drunk and make a spectacle of themselves.

CF: And that’s why with mainstream entertainers like, I don’t know, Judy Garland, people live for the fuckup. I mean, that’s the thing that elevates it. Because that’s the only thing available.

CR: Sort of a substitute for making it new.

JP: At that level, the fuckup is the only thing that will make it new.

CR: The halftime show at the Super Bowl might be the ultimate example of that. The only reason I would watch the halftime show at the Super Bowl with interest is if I knew that something was going to go wrong. Like the lip sync would screw up and they had to actually play the instruments. And I would be, like, Okay, let’s watch, because that would be interesting.

CF: This is all the opposite of the Little League game, which resonates for you in a very specific way, as does hearing the group at the Station Inn. And it’s quite a similar way.

CR: There are institutions involved that shape the work and the experience—a music club, a youth baseball league—but they’re not money-intensive. In both cases we’re at the margins of the market, getting together to put on a show in the old barn, essentially, which is reason enough that I will be thrilled for them if they do it right.

CF: So in a sense, doing it right is very secondary. Because doing it right is the product of what’s interesting to you. And what’s interesting to you is a kind of problem solving.

CR: Yeah, I love problem solving—problem solving in context. Let’s say Elizabeth Warren is in a TV debate and a crazy person rushes in from the audience and tries to hit her, and she makes him miss and makes him pay in absolutely orthodox fashion: she, like, double-jabs, hooks off the jab, head-body-head. There’s nothing more overcapitalized and predigested and inevitable than a presidential campaign, so there’s just about no value to me in watching her do the debate right and solve whatever debate problems it might present, like how to talk about gun control without alienating centrist independents, or whatever. But I would be immensely satisfied by watching her solve this other problem, do this other thing right—even better, in some ways, than watching her make it new with some crazy idiosyncratic martial art she invents on the spot. Because I would want to know how it came to be that Elizabeth Warren knew to hook off the jab. I would start having questions about the historical and stylistic conditions in which she learned how to hook off the jab. Whose gym has she been spending time in? Who’s she training with?JP: I watched this footage of Crosby, Stills, and Nash playing a festival in California somewhere, and basically that thing happens. A nutter arises and starts having a go at them, like, Ah, everything’s being commercialized! Stephen Stills gets so triggered by this geezer that he just comes over like he can’t handle it and is very uncool about it and ends up almost fighting with this man, who’s clearly very vulnerable himself. They have to be pulled apart, and it’s kind of a disgrace. But it’s a magical fuckup, a beautiful moment.

Charles Farrell has spent his professional life moving between music and boxing, with occasional detours. His book (Lowlife): A Memoir of Jazz, Fight-Fixing, and The Mob, will be published in July, 2020.

James Parker is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the editor of The Pilgrim, a literary magazine from the homeless community of downtown Boston.

Carlo Rotella‘s latest book is The World Is Always Coming to an End: Pulling Together and Apart in a Chicago Neighborhood. He is a professor of English at Boston College.

How Not to Get Spat Out

James Parker

I saw the Who the other night at Boston’s Fenway Park. What’s left of me saw what’s left of the Who. Pure magic. Full moon over the Citgo sign, and my face molten with tears as seventy-four-year-old Pete Townshend, in a red boiler suit, windmilled at his guitar, clanged it over his raised knee, forced gorgeous unpredictable sounds from it. They did the best bits of Tommy, then the hits, then the best bits of Quadrophenia, then some more hits. Jesus Christ, what a band. What a story. (Somewhere in there they also did a new song called “Hero at Ground Zero.” Cue mass piss-break.)

Opening for the Who was Peter Wolf, formerly of the J. Geils Band. I never liked the J. Geils Band. In fact, as a younger man I would have taken this opportunity to write something virulently shitty and vaguely militant about the J. Geils Band. But not today. Because as I watched Wolf and his band, the Midnight Travelers, perform the J.Geils hit “Must Of Got Lost”—Yeah I musta got LAWST… —I was granted a precious insight: this, this kind of comfortably catchy mid-paced mid-brained blues-based chugalong singalong, is what all of rock’n’roll would sound like if there had been no geniuses in it. No one to make it new. Kevin Barry, guitarist for the Midnight Travelers, is very very good: he peeled off a couple of exquisitely shapely solos. Talk about playing it right. But the surrounding music, the surrounding dynamic, was resolutely genius-free.

Pete Townshend is a genius. He’s a possibility channel, a conductor for the ineffable. It’s still visibly pouring though his gangling high-tensile body: even though he’s seventy-four, you wouldn’t want to get in a fight with Pete Townshend. Who-music has not dated. Why? Because the entire agon of Townshend’s creativity has been to connect the base elements of rock to the transcendent, to wire them up to the unearthly, the beyond time. The beyond the J. Geils Band.

So am I coming down on the Charles side of things? Am I, finally, of the pro-make it new party? I don’t think so. I will explain.

This is a tricky position for me, and yet it’s one I am very used to. I always seem to end up here, in the middle, at the dull heart of the dialectic: Charles has his shining radical thesis (“Make it new, ever new!”), Carlo has his barbed antithesis (“Play it right, goddammit.”), and I have my spongy and vitamin-deficient synthesis (“Uh, how about a bit of… both?”)— Zzzzz. The intellect moulders at room temperature. Revelation 3:16: “So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.”

But what if, what if, we took this discussion away from boxing and free jazz and into the realm of the personal, into the realm of (say) ME? My life. I wake up in the morning and I bloody get on with it: cold shower, bring the wife her tea, rouse the boy for school, eat the oatmeal, boil the egg, walk the dog, get to work. I love it. “Very easy to assassinate me,” I say merrily. “I do the same thing every day, ha ha!” I luxuriate in routine. The liturgy of habit. I wedge myself into layers of familiarity and sleep there like a beetle. I play it right.

And then, every few months or so, I don’t. I wake up with a demonic desire to—yes—make it new. I say “demonic” because it possesses me: it gets me between its teeth and shakes me like a dog shakes a rabbit. Shred everything. Rip it up and start again. There’s a riot in the nervous system. Shearing silver volleys of Charles Farrell piano-notes are coming at me. From the inside! It’s a wild feeling, not to be accommodated. And at such times I have to manage myself quite carefully—I have to, if possible, play it even righter than I was playing it before. There’s brimstone in the air. Head down, plough the well-worn groove.

Does that make sense? (Have you noticed how everyone is always asking that these days, as if we’re all on the verge of a catastrophic failure of understanding, a Babel-esque breakdown?) I think you know what I’m talking about, reader. The nice man who just served me my coffee advises me that this is a Taurus thing—but not exclusively. Repetition adds value, builds significance, stacks on power: it’s the science of a good riff. But something in us, with exactly equivalent force, seems to demand the opposite: the scream of ungovernable feedback. What’s to be done? Cultivate the old Keatsian “negative capability,” perhaps—the capacity to flourish in tensions and contrarieties. Or in my case, as I once heard the poet Don Bajema say (he was opening for a spoken word set by Henry Rollins): “Try like fucking hell to be a man.”

I’ve been meditating/trying to meditate, on-off, in-out, up-and-down, for eight years. Like (I assume) every other meditator, I am the worst meditator in the world. Which is to say, the most feckless, fidgety, carnal, trivial, incipiently schizoid, obsessively woolgathering and tail-chasing person ever to attempt the noble practice of meditation. I’ve felt this way for as long as I’ve been doing it; I feel this way every time I sit down to meditate. I claim it and I wear it—the wobbly, wobbly crown of worst-ness. And so (I assume) does everybody else.

It was my friend Tina, a priest, who taught me to meditate—who transmitted a technique to me (the inner repetition of a word), and steadily renewed the invitation to practice it. The introductory sessions left me quite rattled. Tina calls it “the first gift of the spirit”: this dramatic, instantaneous acquaintance with your own fragmentation and restlessness. What the second gift is, I haven’t yet found out.

But I have gained, in fits and starts and fallings-away, a sort of education. I’ve learned that you can’t stop thinking. The brain is a thought-generator, that’s one of the things it does, so here come the thoughts, one after another. (Don’t attach, let ’em pass, yeah yeah.) I’ve learned additionally about the physicality of thought: with what speed something that starts immaterially, up in the rafters of your skull, moves to un-ghost or embody itself. A thought, an idea, just a little waggling of the wires, can tighten the chest and coat the gullet with nausea and drench the system in adrenaline. Drizzlings of sadness, elation sparks, roaming anxiety bubbles, a rumble in the underpants. When you meditate, you watch these things happen, over and over again. And cycle by cycle you cultivate, I suppose, I hope, a certain perspective.

That’s me and meditation. By no means a hero’s journey. The point is that trying to meditate puts you right between the antlers of the make it new/play it right dichotomy. In following your practice—the word, the watched breath, whatever it might be—you are doing your damnedest to play it right. Doggedly you sit down, doggedly you settle. Your brain, meanwhile, insists on making it new: What about this? How’s this? Did you ever think of this? And so on. I think there’s beauty here. I believe that reality is the second-by-second self-renewal of the Logos, the first powerchord of Creation ringing through us with eternal sustain. All new, from beginning to end, from the utterance to the eventual silence. And playing it right—maybe—is developing an ability to get to the edge of understanding this. Does that make sense?

Racing Thoughts

Jaime Lowe

My thoughts at first raced. They shouldn’t race at the idea of a theoretical writing question. But they did. I thought: What would everyone else write? What would be the cartilage in between? What are Carlo and Charles doing with this? Do I have anything to say? Do I care about this question? Do I understand the question? What is doing it right versus breaking the form? Ugh, I have no idea. Why am I having anxiety about this? If I have nothing to say, write nothing. But I have never had nothing to say. So, here. Here is my something.

Once, a friend gave me a first draft of a profile of a musician he was writing about and it had four ledes, one right after the other; each lede, one thousand words. It was meant to mimic the spinning of a record. When he told me that, I was annoyed. I had never thought about form following thesis. While I was reading it, I just kept thinking, When does this story start?

This question of doing it right versus breaking the form feels very academic. I don’t mean that to be pejorative. It’s just not something I can relate to. I don’t debate writing very often or think about various forms. I didn’t go to J-school; I barely majored in English. My degree is in art and my writing started with deadlines for my weekly high school newspaper. I don’t write—as I should—on a regular schedule, independent of assignment. If I don’t have a deadline, I’m fucked. I just won’t write.

I guess I have done both. I have written extremely traditional newspaper reporting, pyramid-shaped who-what-where-why-when-up-top kinds of things, and some of them have been the way that story should have been written. And better for it. As a writer, I resent how hard it is to present things in a simple, clear way. To follow structure and form and let a story tell itself. Other pieces I’ve written have been fragmented and more experimental, like trying to convey what it feels like to be a spawning salmon while writing about the actual natural journey, or writing about a manic episode in the manner of having a manic episode, a narrative dictated by racing thoughts and anxieties.

But I reject the binary, I even reject the idea of a method in between. Because here’s the thing: the question, which seemed innocuous at first, and like something I had very little to say about, is really a grand-big-giant question about writing itself. How do we do it? Why? In what way? What is the best strategy to convey ideas, feelings, stories, people, life, atmosphere, color, sound? How do we use words to capture attention? Sometimes I can sneak in an experimental sentence or approach in an extremely conventional story. Other times, scientific research can be folded into a paragraph that just describes feeling. But there are so many variables. Who is reading? What is the context? What is the venue?

Most important to the process: am I bored writing it? If I’m bored, there is no right way. It’s always a puzzle, a balance, a mixture of as many perspectives and feelings and sensory explosions and details as you can get into one well-crafted, long-winded, circular sentence. Or maybe an elegant simple sentence? Doesn’t even have to be a sentence.

What is the right way? I have no idea.

What is the wrong way? Not doing it at all.

What did we learn here? Jaime should probably never think too hard or too often about writing! Because my brain goes explode.

Jaime Lowe is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine, the author of Mental and Digging for Dirt: The Life and Death of ODB, and a contributor to This American Life.

The Perfect Country and Western Song

Philip Deloria

            Well, it was all
            That I could do to keep from crying
            Sometimes it seemed so useless to remain
            But you don’t have to call me darlin’, darlin’
            You never even called me by my name

“That’s it,” my father said, twisting the volume up. “The perfect country and western song!” I was doubtful. The rhyme in the very first verse (“remain” with “name”) is technically an “imperfect” rhyme, putting a hard stop on perfection right there.

Still, the key line in the verse, set to a perfect honky-tonk swing beat, struck me as quite smart. Its first words (“You don’t have to call me…”) seem to telegraph one of those phone calls that does not come. The next word (“darling”) immediately shifts the meaning from phoning to naming: “don’t call me darling.” This is how good lyrics work, unfolding changing meanings at the level of the micro-second. And then, even better, the second “darling,” spins the line inside out. Singer tells listener they are under no obligation to call him darling—even as he uses that very term of endearment. That “darling, darling” is a fine little piece of irony that presents a question: should one read the verse as sarcastic or as crying sad? The last line offers an answer: pissed off.

The song was “You Never Even Called Me By My Name” and the singer was David Allan Coe, a Nashville songwriter with an attitude. He’d done time in prison, would later record country metal music, and in the 1970s found his sweet spot in the meeting of the humorous and the offensive. His biggest song—”Take This Job and Shove It,” recorded by Johnny Paycheck—was the essence of pissed-off country. But while Coe sang “You Never Even Called Me . . . ,” he did not write this particular attempt at the perfect country and western song. That honor went to folkie Steve Goodman, one of the outstanding songwriters of his generation, and (though he purposefully went uncredited) to the equally gifted John Prine.

The second verse, however, bears little trace of such talent at work, settling for mere cleverness. It’s a novelty turn, with Coe doing impressions of Waylon Jennings, Charlie Pride, and Merle Haggard. The chorus that follows announces itself with a raucous transition and a big beat, and it plays to strength, returning again to those concluding lines of the first verse, the best in the song. And then, after another meandering verse, Coe starts talking. Goodman, he says, sent him the song, claiming he had written the perfect country and western song. Coe rejects the claim, defining the genre around critical themes (trains, drinking, trucks, prison, mama, etc.) notably absent from the song. Goodman sends another verse, and Coe now admits that his friend has written the perfect country and western song:

            Well, I was drunk the day my mom got out of prison
            And I went to pick her up in the rain
            But before I could get to the station in my pickup truck
            She got run over by a damned old train

Another chorus or two, and then out. My father—a knowledgeable fan of country music—laughed and laughed and said that, yes, this was indeed the perfect song.

But, I wondered, perfect in what way? Was it trying to be a perfect example of the genre, distilling its forms, styles, and themes to a representative essence, flawlessly performed? Or did it self-consciously assert country’s rules in order to subvert and transcend them on its way to being something else—more like parody or critique?

The folklore surrounding the song suggests that we should hear it as a diss of the Nashville music industry, which saw Goodman, who had followed a different set of rules in producing songs like “City of New Orleans” and “The Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request,” as too folky to be part of its scene. Listen to “You Never Even Called Me . . .” as a pissed-off hate letter to Nashville—and thus to the formal rules of the genre—and the song takes on a wholly new character: “Well, I’ve heard my name a few times in your phone book” (Nashville! Why don’t you call?); “I’ll hang around as long as you will let me” (ouch); and, of course, there’s the title line, in which Nashville blithely forgets Goodman’s name. In that sense, the last verse that makes the song “perfect” was not a goofy novelty riff at all but a well-crafted dig at the ways in which tradition, rules, and the institutional flow of money had combined to turn Nashville into a soulless stereotype of itself.

As a distillation of the genre, “You Never Even Called Me…” was not the perfect country-and-western song. It easily mastered forms, styles, and tropes, but did so in order to reject the very premises and rules that made the country tradition possible. And it was not only Goodman who felt outside to Nashville. Wanting in and never quite getting there, Coe instead sought to build a career on wanting out. He was part of “Outlaw Country,” a loosely-identified cohort of supposed Nashville rebels led by Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings who fled to Austin, Texas to set up an alternative shop. The very premise of the outlaw, literally, was to be outside the law—stepping beyond the rules of a particular context—into a place where they could ignore tradition and make it new.

That newness, though, was not translated (much) into harmony, melody, or rhythm. It most often took thematic form in the lyrics of songs about literal outlaws (Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger, for example), metacommentary tributes to the Nashville escape (the Jennings-Nelson duet Luckenbach, Texas), bodacious boasting (Hank Williams Jr.’s Oedipal anthem Family Tradition), band names (The Outlaws, natch), or shake-it-up professional moves (Nelson’s Stardust album of Tin Pan Alley standards). David Allan Coe was a minor star in this firmament, but he had the attitude right.

It was a blast growing up with country rock and outlaw country music in the 1970s. Banjos and electric guitars competed for space. Deep-voiced, gravelly-throated men proclaimed themselves outsiders to it all, and they did so through the standard medium of I-IV-V-I harmonies and ABAB rhyme structures. Like most popular commercial forms, outsider country was always splitting the difference between well-crafted formula and a genuine effort to do something new. Isn’t that the essence of the popular song itself? It must hew closely to the familiar, establishing repetitions that grab the listener by the cultural ear, while also offering little surprises that defy—usually at the smallest scale—the listener’s expectation. Both are good impulses. The familiar captures a listener in one way—when we effortlessly slip into singing along—while the surprise captures us in another—the slightly odd little hook that we want to hear again. Introduce too many new things and the song collapses out of its pattern and falls into incoherence and chaos. Repeat too many old things and the song yawns with repetitious boredom.

For Goodman (and Prine) and Coe, the “perfect” verse was the new thing. Indeed, the song may not have been the perfect country song, but it might have been the perfect country novelty song—a genre all its own, with uncomfortably intimate ties to serious mainstream country. Novelty, I remind myself when I hear the song, is goofy—and also another name for newness. Outlaw country was a novelty act in both senses: an institutional revolt straight out of the marketing tradition of Nashville itself. Outlaws like Coe (and perhaps Goodman and Prine) expressed their rebellion through an unwavering commitment to the rules of craft, down to every tic of lyrical cleverness and honky-tonk shuffle. In that sense, maybe Coe and Goodman had actually built the perfect country and western song—a perfect representation of the tradition in its form, style, and affect, and a perfect transcendence in its rejection of Nashville, made through an equally traditional claim to the newness of “outlaw” innovation. Like the riff on “darling, darling” in the first verse, the song folded back on itself, and then folded again and again. Perfect.

Philip Deloria, a recovering middle school band instructor, teaches history and American studies at Harvard University.

IV. Genre

Carlo Rotella, Charles Farrell and James Parker

Carlo Rotella: Part of my faith in genre—part of why I find genre fiction more rewarding than literary fiction, and genre movies more rewarding than art movies—is that I believe genre is a deep well of language and gesture and other moves that allow you to express just about anything. So, to follow James’s model, an idea or an emotion in the universe is trying to express itself, and somebody figures out a way to make a Western or a romcom or a barroom weeper or a landscape painting or whatever so that idea can express itself. I think that’s more likely than someone invents some new form so that idea can express itself. We’ve got these tools, and the resources that the genre brings you are deeper than the resources that almost any single author could bring, especially to figuring out some totally new form in order to express her feelings. The question is whether we need somebody sitting down at the piano and doing something nobody’s ever done before—that’s one model—or can we go back to genre to get the equipment to open a portal for an idea that’s floating around in the ether, waiting to be born? Or does going back to the genre well inhibit the ability to say something new? What’s that idea’s or that feeling’s path to being born? Somebody has to make up a new way of doing things, or somebody can take some way we’ve already got that’s supple and flexible and deep, and use it to give this idea a pathway to enter the world.

James Parker: One ultimate problem with making it new is that it may be completely unrecognizable. It would have no context if it was truly, genuinely, mind-shatteringly new. And you wouldn’t be able to digest it at all.

CR: But that might be the purest expression of this idea that’s looking for a way to be born, right?

JP: In the Book of Job there’s this terrible bet between God and the devil. God is basically boasting: Look at Job, look at this great guy! He’s the best man, he thinks I’m fantastic! And the devil says, Well, I bet if you treat him badly enough he’ll curse you to your face. And God goes, Ah, you try. So the devil goes and afflicts him, and his children die, he gets open sores, sits in a dung hill, his wife is disgusted by him, and finally he curses the day he was born, he curses the whole of his existence. And God’s response is shockingly new. God’s response is just to stand on the effects pedal and shout at Job, Did you do this? Why were you . . . ? [incomprehensible noise]. Mind-shattering. There’s not a moral to it. There’s no theory to it. It’s pure, unmitigated experience. That current is always coming at us in one way or another. So how do we manage it? That’s the impulse to make it new itself.

CR: When Charles says, We have to think of a new way to do this, I hear [incomprehensible noise that God made]. And my instinct is to go in the opposite direction, more like, Which of our preexisting Lego pieces can I use to fit together to make this thing that wants to be made?

Charles Farrell: Well, I think that innovators always make obsolete their own creation. To me, if something is stated once, the only way you can use it at that point is to add it to language. But it cannot be recreated. It has no value if it’s recreated. So, if you can do it, you’ve done nothing. If you can technically improve on it, you’ve got nothing. You’re missing the point.

CR: So what would be getting the point?

CF: There are two ways, I think, to get the point. One is that you understand that this is now part of language—this we can use. So you’ve extended your vocabulary. That’s fair; it’s workable. And then there’s also the message. What is this person trying to tell me? And how can I incorporate what I’m being told? And this is separate from technique. And again, that’s something that goes on, that doesn’t stop.

CR: Okay, I can see that that’s the way John Coltrane, for instance, worked on a lot of people in other art forms. A lot of writers said, I listened to Coltrane and I realized you could touch on that same message, that set of meanings, as a writer. You see what I’m saying? They’re trying to make portable the meaning of the technical innovation, not just trying to find a writerly analogue for the musical breakthrough.

JP: They’re trying to assimilate the existential stamp. [James would like the record to show that he now has no idea what he meant by this.]

CR: Whatever that is, that feeling, I think you could also get there with words. So, what happens when that thing that is new, that molten stuff, finds its way down into genre, either by finding its way into preexisting genres or by way of a new genre, which is essentially created in its image? Can it still mean what it meant, and then can it also be available to others, if it finds its way into genre?

CF: It can. But the established form that it finds its way into probably won’t carry the same meaning.

CR: So if jazz guys are listening to Coltrane, and trying to incorporate some of his moves into their fairly genre-bound work, isn’t that following the spirit of the innovation? Rather than just trying to copy it?

CF: What you ask there is: Can we extend the original impulse at all?

CR: Can we take the new stuff and incorporate it into our idea of playing it right? I write profiles for magazines, and let’s say I read a work of fiction that tells me something I didn’t know, changes how I think about writing. And I think, Can I do some of that in the profiles I write? And I turn this into a craft problem that I can solve. Maybe I need a new kind of lead or something. It’s like I’ve heard Coltrane and, even though I play this other kind of music, can I do something so that some of whatever’s trying to express itself through Coltrane expresses itself through what I do, even though what I do is play it right in some other form? I think that happens all the time. People who are much more bound by genre, more bound by a canon and an orthodoxy, hear something and it blows their mind, and they say, I’d like to do some of that somehow. Like, I write country songs, but I heard whoever—Joni Mitchell, say—and now I want to somehow get some of that feeling. How do we fit that into our dynamic?

CF: I think they’re doing something new if they’re doing that. Again, they’re taking vocabulary—

CR: That’s what I’m saying. They’re turning it into language—

CF: And they’re doing something new. Take Chris Whitley. You know Chris Whitley? Okay, Chris Whitley doing blues. Great guitarist, great vocalist. I think he’s doing something new, although he’s deeply indebted to the blues language that has existed for a hundred years.

JP: The market is worth thinking about.

CR: Yes, it’s a crucial part of the historical conditions component. Take film, which costs so much money to make. I think that’s why I treasure crazy-ass, badly made Hollywood films. I mean, I am happy to enjoy a smoothly executed Michael Curtiz movie, the genius of the Hollywood system and all that, but I like a crazy-ass bad movie just as much or more.

JP: How’d they manage to do this?

CR: Yeah, how’d they manage to get that past the gatekeepers? Stiff dialogue, weirdly improvised dialogue, bad special effects—often, that’s the best part of the whole thing for me. And there’s nothing more dispiriting than a well-wrought action movie. Say, John Wick 3. Suicidally depressing.

JP: What stops that from being enjoyable as genre? Can you not appreciate it as They’ve done this thing exactly right?

CR: That’s a good question because it challenges me to be systematic and not just dislike one thing and like another. Part of the answer is that I don’t think much of the way they do it right. I think the action’s boring and unimaginative and cruel for one thing, whereas if I see a Hong Kong movie that cost 1/100th to make but Yuen Woo-ping choreographed the action, I’m like, Oh, they really did that right. That was very satisfying, and kind of formally joyous.

CF: Is it possible that with a movie like John Wick, that’s done right—I haven’t seen it, so I don’t know—the market demands for what would be considered done right are so vulgar and so horrifying that doing it right, doing a big-budget film right, requires so many terrible things that you’re going to make a horrible movie.

CR: That might well be one of the secret code items I’m looking for. The more money it takes to do that thing, the more money riding on doing it right, the more I tend to value doing it wrong. So, I really like it in big-time professional team sports when somebody does it wrong, when somebody’s freaky and weird and they just play the game wrong, because I’m so tired of the well-funded, well-wrought normal way of doing things. Whereas that band playing at the Station Inn, we’re at the far edge of the market, way down there. They just need forty people to show up and pay a cover charge.

JP: So okay, who are you making it new or playing it right for? If you’re making it new in front of forty thousand people, that’s quite something.

CF: You know, to play it right at that really highly monetized level, you’re answerable to so many people by the time it’s done right that it’s almost impossible to make something of value.

CR: Of value by what standard?

JP: If you’re playing it right in front of forty thousand people, you’re just behaving yourself.

CR: Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

JP: It’s a bad thing, I think.

CR: I’m okay with behaving myself.

CF: It depends who’s asking you to behave yourself. If the industry’s asking you to behave yourself, and you’re behaving yourself—

CR: A fair point. That would gall me. But I don’t think of it in terms of the size of audience; I think about it in terms of how much money it costs. The more money it costs, the more dispiriting I am likely to find doing it right, basically. And the cheaper it is, the more satisfying I find doing it right. I find it stirring if a bunch of amateur musicians get together at somebody’s house and manage to play a Bakersfield tune.

CF: Me, too.

CR: That pushes all necessary buttons for me. I recognize that there are endless inconsistencies in how that works for me. I mean, for instance, being satisfied by a Western done right but having no use for an action movie done right, even though action movies clearly descend from Westerns. Or enjoying Michael Curtiz’s version of top-dollar Hollywood style but not Michael Bay’s. Or being equally bummed out by competent action movies that cost a zillion dollars to produce and competent literary novels that cost almost nothing at all to produce. Or loving the competent literary novels of previous eras but not the present. All that opens me to the charge that there’s no system to my thinking on this subject other than perverse personal inclination, or that the system’s so arcane and complex that it’s a mystery to me and anyone else who tries to figure it out. I wonder if everybody’s like that, or it’s just me.

James Parker is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the editor of The Pilgrim, a literary magazine from the homeless community of downtown Boston.

Carlo Rotella‘s latest book is The World Is Always Coming to an End: Pulling Together and Apart in a Chicago Neighborhood. He is a professor of English at Boston College.

The Villagers

Charles Cherington

Most people are only vaguely aware of the private equity industry, which consists of several thousand firms buying and selling companies with investors’ money. The goal is to generate profits along the way. In the popular imagination, Gordon Gekko comes to mind: a predacious sort with pomaded coif and an appetite for dismantling family-owned businesses after loading their balance sheets with debt, dispatching their former employees to eternal hell as Walmart greeters.

Private equity does have more than its fair share of sociopaths, narcissists, and other unsavories, but for most of us the battle is not to ace out fellow predators in the race to debt-laden prey but rather with our own novelty-seeking, magical-thinking homo sapiens brains. Doing your job well means never leaving the mental confines of your cognitive medieval village. Invest only in companies you understand. When buying a business, always follow the checklist, known as doing your “due diligence,” roughly translated as turning over every rock to ensure that the deal you are evaluating is not your last.

Are the company’s managers honest? Competent? Inclined to stay once you’ve bought their business? After all, sellers often sell their business just once, and they want the highest price for it. Truth, or lack of embellishment, can cost them real money. If the company makes kewpie dolls, are they special in some way? Will competitors outflank you, slash prices, and wipe out your profits? Will the herd of kewpie doll enthusiasts move on to the next shiny object, leaving rows of unsold dolls in the warehouse, causing your company to go bust and your career to end?

The list of questions that must be answered before buying a business runs for a number of single spaced pages, in small font. It’s a flight manual for the pilot whose job it is to fly new planes sold by people who have no incentive to tell you about loose flaps, faulty fuel lines or anything else that gets in the way of their once-in-a-lifetime payday.

Do it right, follow the due-diligence checklist, and over time, you will make a good living and live to fight another day. Give in to magical thinking about eternal growth in the kewpie dolls market, get duped by the surefire winner the company has in its new line of Democratic primary bobble heads, fall in love with a charming CEO whose narcissism only becomes obvious after you’ve written your check, and things can go wrong almost instantly. Always follow the checklist, and walk away when you can’t tick every box. The conventional wisdom reminds us that nobody’s career ends because they didn’t do a deal. It ends when they do the one they shouldn’t, either because they gave in to magical thinking or because they didn’t check all the boxes.

Trust nobody. Verify everything. Don’t get seduced by people, products, or financial statements. Let other people cure cancer, start Airbnb, and crack nuclear fusion. To succeed in buying companies means spending a lifetime in your small, familiar village, obeying the ancient rules. That’s doing it right in the world of private equity. It can be so stultifying that, explaining their departure from the trade after they burn out, veterans will say, “If I have to check the boxes one more time, part of me will die.”

What happens if, rather than doing it right, you want to do it differently? Let’s say, for instance, that the planet on which your village is situated is getting hotter. Doing things the same loses its purpose if sameness means your crops wilt, your well dries up, and your cows die of heat exposure. Time to do things differently—maybe even to make it new. As a private equity practitioner in late middle age, I’ve decided to leave my village. I handed over the keys to my old firm to the smarter, younger Turks who were ready to run their own show, and launched a new one that will invest in companies decarbonizing the industrial economy. We can still buy a kewpie doll maker, but only if it makes carbon negative dolls, meaning that the manufacturing process must consume CO2 rather than produce it. Maybe they will be made from recycled plastic, or plastic made from carbon dioxide, among other ingredients.

The sum total of my new work won’t amount to much. Not even enough to save my cows. The size of the greenhouse gas problem is staggering. Electric cars and solar power won’t get us there. The way we make and consume everything has to change, and change fast. Beef? Out. Plastics from petroleum? Gone. Conventional building materials? See ya.

Here’s another problem: we need our money handlers to finance a replumbing of global civilization, but they don’t like doing things differently. All the right answers on how to decarbonize the world are out there. Cheaper, safer, next-generation nuclear power plants. Chemical companies that can make products from carbon dioxide and plants instead of gas. So are all the wrong answers. Picking the winners is not easy. Nothing ends a career faster than spending a billion dollars on a new chemical plant that doesn’t make money. Governments are famously bad at picking winners from the supermarket of new ideas. Investors around the world are better at it, but they like doing things the same, not differently, especially when different comes with a big price tag and several years of waiting to find out whether you made the right call.

In the world of private equity, big global pools of capital have started looking for investors willing to do things differently when it comes to curbing the rise of planetary emissions. New firms are forming, and new funds are being raised. The amounts of money at stake so far are not consequential, but the trend is unmistakable. Has the global money machine finally dedicated itself to solving climate change? Not so fast. When investors put that money to work, everything boils down to doing it differently versus doing it right. Doing it differently means investing money in a new enterprise, one that has never existed before. It may be a plan in a document, or a small pilot plant ready to be scaled to ten or one hundred times bigger.

The risk of failure in these new enterprises is substantial. Rather than buying an established business that makes money, or building another wind farm using proven turbines, private capital will have to invest in big ideas. Think of it as Silicon Valley meeting smokestack industries. Instead of an app for picking vacation houses, these investors will have to decide which chemical plant will remake, say, the polyethylene market in a sustainable way. A different kind of due diligence checklist is required. Investors will have to rely on engineers, scientists and a host of unfamiliar experts to help choose the winner from a pile of also-rans. The size of the bets they make will be large enough to end a career if the wrong choice is made. That type of bet will have to be made several thousand times before we have the roadmap for building a carbon neutral economy.

As our species tackles “the big problem,” it has become increasingly clear that we are at war with ourselves. Can we learn how to do things differently? Can we step back and appreciate that our deeply entrenched behavior may be fine for a small village, but that doing things right in the old-fashioned sense may well wipe out most of our species? Dunno. But when the sun rises tomorrow, I’ll be cinching up my tunic, heading out to the fields, and doing things differently.

Charles Cherington is an investor living in Texas.