, Author at Post Road Magazine

A Rude Awakening from Dreams of Termitopia

Bill Birdsall

“Doing it right” means quality craftsmanship, according to norms of quality. “Making it new” has to do with originality. Quality and originality can seem to be exclusive of each other. Original work can sometimes seem sloppy to one who expects and doesn’t find traditional elements of good craftsmanship in the new work. Sometimes original work sets new standards of craftsmanship that take time to be appreciated.

But original work can also radically change the course of history. The more original artists are usually the ones who are remembered in history books and make the most noteworthy marks on culture.

Now that climate change and the possible extinction of the human race are factors in our future—maybe sooner, maybe later—the longevity associated with quality craftsmanship may have less importance in thirty years than it does now. If there is no audience to appreciate originality, there will also be no more history books and no lasting marks made by anyone for their originality.

Most of my creative work (painting, sculpture, architecture, and music, mostly) is done spontaneously, without a lot of planning. For ideas to work, they have to be realistic in the way they interact with physical laws governing materials. For architecture to at least remain standing, basic design principles have to be used that reflect the strengths and weaknesses of materials. Quality craftsmanship keeps refining the interface between ideas and working models of those ideas, allowing the models to work within the physical limits of reality. Originality keeps pushing our creative limits and sometimes the traditional concepts of quality craftsmanship.

My leaning lately toward climate change pessimism has changed the importance of some of the ideas I was working toward in architecture. For many years I have been trying to develop an “immortal” building material with which to build termite nest-like cities based on tunnels and domes instead of boxes. Projecting a thousand years in the future into a “termitopia” city like that, I could see lots of economic and aesthetic advantages and exciting possibilities.

For one thing, capitalism can be brutal to losers, and it tends to rape the planet’s resources as fast as it can to sell as much product as possible. Instead of everyone buying a personal hammer, we might all just share a few hammers in communal tool libraries. Similarly, we might share the “termitopia” city as nomads instead of owning fixed property within the city which we return to at the end of every day. There are lots of lifestyle variations that could be experimented with.

Climate change dropped a bombshell in the middle of my sweet termitopia dreams. Now the human race is possibly going extinct in thirty years, whether or not I would have it be that way. Quality craftsmanship used to have value in a world where longevity was an accepted factor in things, but finding immortal materials with which to build the dream is no longer necessary if nobody is going to be around to appreciate it in the distant future. If there is no human race to appreciate the quality tomorrow, why put any extra effort into it today?

As far as originality and survival in challenging times go, maybe our creativity can help get us out of this mess in ways I can’t foresee. I hope so. Much of modern medicine treats problems as symptoms and thinks that by putting a bandage on each symptom the problem will somehow be fixed. Sometimes more radical changes to the whole system—such as a leap from capitalism to socialism, or from a carnivore diet to a vegetarian one, or from box architecture to domes—is necessary to eliminate all the sick symptoms in an existing system.

Tried and true quality craftsmanship and speculative originality both have their value, but their values are variable under different circumstances. The climate change adventure we are all part of now is one of the factors in our present time. At stake is our survival, not just our aesthetics.

Bill Birdsall, a versatile artist and musician, was born in Middletown, NY and raised in El Segundo, CA. He made his own home, Casa Mucaro, in rural Puerto Rico, where he has lived for 40-plus years.

III. History

Carlo Rotella, Charles Farrell and James Parker

Carlo Rotella: I think this is actually a pretty genre-specific conversation, at least for me. For instance: Westerns. If you were to just make a Western correctly, I’d be happy to watch it. Even if it broke no new ground, no emotional or formal new ground, no historical new ground.

James Parker: Here’s another thing, though: if you make a Western properly now, it’s almost camp. Right?

CR: I don’t care, though. I’d be happy to watch it.

JP: But there’s a camp-ness that comes from playing it right when you have a dated form.

Charles Farrell: I guess so, but that doesn’t have to be the intention of the person making the film.

CR: Right, they just want to make a Western.

JP: That may be, but they can’t, because historically things have changed. You can’t be that simple anymore. It’s more complicated. Because you’ve seen all that, and you know what a Western is, you’re in a different position from the people who made the original Westerns. Hence: camp.

CR: One of the things I’m trying to piece together is why for me the dynamics shift around so much from genre to genre. In some genres, doing it right would be enough for me; in other genres, merely doing it right is heart-stoppingly disappointing.

CF: Well, does that have to do with the trajectory of doing it right? In some cases the language moves forward in a linear way so that doing it right is achievable, and endlessly achievable, so everybody can do it right. As opposed to, for example, boxing, where the language is no longer in existence and is receding very quickly. So doing it right becomes increasingly difficult, and in the end almost impossible.

CR: We’re essentially asking How much does the history matter? That’s what James is arguing about the Western. So, for instance: fantasy right now, another genre where I am perfectly satisfied with doing it right. Tons of fantasy being written. Most of it’s not that good. But some of it’s good. And the language of fantasy doesn’t seem outmoded or out of date at all. It seems right on the money for thinking about the world in which we live. There’s no automatic retro quality to doing fantasy right. So, in that genre, doing it right feels not only satisfying to me, but topical. In another genre, it might be the opposite, as in the case of the well-wrought, well-reviewed literary novel. I can read and reread Edith Wharton and be perfectly happy—for my money, she’s the great American novelist—but whatever her contemporary equivalent is, I can’t even face.

CF: Isn’t that at least partially because Edith Wharton is about time and place? And there is no equivalent?

CR: That’s what I don’t know. I don’t want this simply to be that I have weird tastes in some areas and conventional tastes in others. I’m trying to find a key, or a code, to how the play between our two principles works, for me and for other people. Boxing is our shared extreme example on the side of doing it right is enough; fiction writing is probably my extreme example on the side of doing it right is not enough, and jazz would be Charles’s.

JP: But aren’t we always in the position of waiting for the guy in boxing who comes along and you say This is it. He brings something that was impossible until he brought it. And then seems inevitable the second you see it.

CR: I think of it as the opposite. I think of it as That fighter brought something ancient and underrated by the current age’s emphasis on disruption and the new. Basically, that’s what happened when Anthony Joshua fought Andy Ruiz for the heavyweight title. The good-looking, well-hyped, well-tuned marketing concept ran afoul of a fat man with fast hands who can fight and wouldn’t stay down and concussed the shit out of him and made him quit. Some version of that could have happened 100,000 years ago on the savannah.

CF: But you could use somebody like Muhammad Ali, or Roy Jones, as a guy who would appear, on first glance, to be doing something brand new that’s useful.

CR: And also would appear to be doing things wrong.

CF: But, the point is, they are doing things wrong, and it’s not useful to anyone else. What you’re seeing is someone who’s so extraordinary that they can do something—

CR: Yeah, what you’re actually seeing is a stylistic mule that can’t reproduce—

CF: Yeah. And that’s something that’s only true for a limited period of time. It always catches up to them in boxing and they end up taking a beating. And, of course, it always introduces what they do into the general language of bad habits.

JP: So, these are people who are bad influences, right, terrible influences—

CR: Because they’re geniuses.

JP: Because they’re inimitable.

CR: The question remains: is there a code, is there a key, to think about how you would arrange the art forms and the genres on these two axes, or is one’s response really just autobiography posing as critical sensibility? Is there a logic other than I like/I don’t like?

JP: What I like, I like the feeling of something new happening before my eyes. That’s the ultimate aesthetic buzz for me.

CR: See, I don’t think that’s the ultimate aesthetic buzz for me. I’m walking through the park, there’s a Little League game going on. There’s a pitcher nobody can hit, throwing fireballs, a little wild but overpowering. A batter walks; the next kid up bunts the runner over to second base. The next kid manages to chop a weak ground ball behind the runner to get him to third base, and the second baseman can’t handle the bounce. First and third, one out. The next kid up hits a sacrifice fly and the runner on third scores. I would stop and watch that all happen. I would think Look at them, doing it right, solving the problem; it’s beautiful. Nobody could hit the ball hard, no clean hits, and yet they’ve managed to score a run. There’s no making it new in that. Teams that can’t make clean contact on a dominant pitcher have been doing that thing—bunting, hitting behind the runner, try to slice a pop-up to the outfield—for a hundred years. And I can’t think of another aesthetic scenario, walking past a Little League game, that would be more satisfying. That includes watching some kid totally make it new—inventing a new batting stance, pitching from right field, or whatever it is. I don’t need anything more than doing it right in that situation. Maybe the next person would be, like, Oh my god, that’s so boring. Of course they did that, that’s how you solve that problem.

CF: That has something to do with your affection for following rules. Well, this works! And it refutes talent—

CR: True. I like rules, at least as cones to maneuver around, and I like that there are ways to refute talent.

CF: Sure. Talent is incredibly overrated.

CR: Talent also seems fortuitous, and nothing that the batting team did in that sequence depended on that kind of luck. The pitcher may enjoy a god-given ability to throw the ball hard, but everyone else just has to figure out a way to solve that. So, my question remains, what does our list look like of things we’re looking for to see what the specific play between making it new and doing it right’s going to look like in a particular setting? Market conditions? Historical relationships, like when the golden age of innovation in that form happened to occur? What are the factors?

JP: Think about Hendrix. He was kind of a bluesman who exploded because suddenly the technology became available, and he was the guy who was physiologically, neurologically, artistically able to harness the momentum of that, and turn it into something no one had ever heard before.

CR: Okay, so what’s the principle there you can move and apply elsewhere?

JP: The principle is he was ready. At the moment that the thing struck, he was totally prepared.

CF: He was prepared because, for one thing, there’s an overlap between phases of innovation. He was the product of a really deep-down education. By the time he hit, what he was educated in would have been considered old, but was in fact incredibly revolutionary when it happened. He had been a sideman for Little Richard, who was every bit as revolutionary as Jimi Hendrix, in much the same way. So he took this language, thought Obviously I need to make it new. I can’t play like Little Richard, but I can take this lesson. It’s part of my language; I can speak this language, and now I can do this other thing. And to me, that’s sort of the perfect combination of experience and craft and figuring out something that makes it brand new.

CR: So then what do you do with his influence now? At this point, when you hear somebody who’s clearly heavily Hendrix-influenced, don’t you just find it predictable and tedious? I’d be seriously disappointed to go into a place and find out that there’s a Hendrix freak on stage replicating licks. Dude, I love Jimi so much! Gee, what a bold and surprising choice of influences for an electric guitar player.

CF: But Hendrix himself still sounds terrific.

JP: It’s impossible to replicate the power and meaning of what he did, even if you replicate the licks, because the meaning is historically conditioned, historically determined. But that’s another paradox. The music is timeless, in the sense that it will always sound incredible, but it was utterly historically determined by who he was at that moment—

CR: Now, what if doing Hendrix now turns out to be the right tool for the right job? What if you’re in a biker bar, and that’s exactly what the bikers want to hear, and the guitar player solves the problem by playing the most predictable, totally derivative Hendrix stuff. Are you bored senseless, or are you, like, He bunted the runner over to second, and then . . . .

JP: Depends on the atmosphere of the bar, right? I can imagine circumstances under which that would be amazingly rewarding to see, like if he was transforming the mood.

CR: I see that, especially if the mood was turning ugly, and the guitar player saved the day by doing something utterly unoriginal.

JP: Yeah.

CR: So in the case of Hendrix, we’re saying: conditions in that historical moment, his doing-it-right preparation put him in the position to make it new, maybe the framing conditions in which he’s referenced now—

JP: What if we remove the artist from this, and just say there are things that need to be expressed, that the universe would like to express certain things? Hendrix was the right tool at that moment—it was tremendous and unprecedented, but for a couple of years, he was able to channel that thing that needed to happen, that wanted to be said.

CR: If that’s the model, how do you cross-apply it to other things? So, Muddy Waters? Is that the same story with Muddy Waters? Got the ideal training, technology makes a jump, a highly motivated audience emerges that wants something . . .

CF: I would say so. I think that one of the things that unifies Little Richard, Hendrix, and Muddy Waters is that they all have the component of being shocking. Every one of them is shocking. And every one if you hear them now, seventy years later, sixty years later, fifty years later, depending on the context, they’re equally shocking. I mean, I know I can listen to Charlie Parker, and y’know, I’m not thinking Well, this is beautiful, or I love this music, or I love this show. My visceral response is What the fuck? You know? Goddammit, this is shocking.

JP: Still!

CF: Absolutely. That’s what makes it innovative. It retains the power to shock.

CR: Can you locate its power to shock? Since you are completely aware of what came before and what came after, and it’s certainly not a surprise and you already know it note for note, what makes it shocking for you?

CF: Well, you have to do some work. For it to be made shocking, once you’ve internalized the language, your awareness of where the language came from is what makes it shocking.

CR: See, this seems like the impasse again. I can recognize and respect that shock, but that’s not my priority in listening to music or reading or going to the museum. My priority is expression, and I guess I feel that you can express almost any meaning or feeling simply by doing it right. You do not need to shock, you do not need to make it new, in order to create the full range of human meaning and feeling. But, you know, I get your point: things need to be expressed, and you need to find a way to express them, and sometimes it makes sense to invent a new way.

JP: Or the things themselves will find a way to be expressed.

CR: Or come at it that way, if you like. Part of our discussion that Charles and I often have is that he’s saying Somebody already did it that other way. Somebody already expressed those meanings, somebody found a way to express those meanings or those feelings. I’m done with that. I don’t need to hear that, or see that, or read that anymore—

CF: Or I can keep it, and now that’s a part of my language. It’s usable now.

CR: Discounting something because it’s already out there doesn’t feel right to me. To me, simply doing it right all over again speaks volumes about the possibility of imposing order on what is essentially a malign and confused world, and that alone is reason enough to do it right.

CF: Is this about order? I mean, should it be?

CR: It’s about making something in a world that wants to be stupid and meaningless. I guess I just feel it’s enough. If someone were to say You know what, I’m gonna learn to paint exactly like a nineteenth-century French Academy painter, I’d be, like, Bring it on. I would be totally happy to see those paintings. How about a Napoleonic battle or a scene from Greek mythology? Those haven’t been painted enough.

CF: You know, there are kits for doing that—

CR: Yeah, do the kit. I’m for the kit. I am trying to decide whether I buy the assumption that there are things that you cannot express, or that the universe cannot express, other than by making it new. Do you have to make it new in order to say new things?

JP: I think so, and because you’re in a different time, in a different set of coordinates than when the thing first happened, it’s going to have a different meaning.

CR: You’re saying that’s the only way to get the right lego pieces to make the thing you want to make—

JP: Or that it will just mean something different. That’s why I keep saying, though this might not even be the right word, that there’s a dimension of consciousness. We can’t help knowing a little bit more than whoever invented it, in a way, simply because we know what happened to the invention.

CF: But we also know a little bit less than they did, and that’s important, too.

JP: All we know about these works of art, the only thing we know more than the people who made them, is what happened next, what effect they had.

CR: But Charles is right that in some ways we also know less, because we’ve also lost all this good stuff. Boxing teaches that lesson. Whenever you gain something and separate it from its origin in order to put it into the repertoire, you lose the context and the knowledge that people had when that something came into being.

CF: And with boxing, when you lose those things, you can’t actually do it right anymore.

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.

A Real Tradition

Evan Parker

Miles Davis is reported to have commented on Wynton Marsalis’ retro “modern jazz” by asking rhetorically, “Didn’t we get it right first time?” This seems pertinent to the subject of “get it right” versus “make it new.” The most cursory look at the history of the various forms under discussion surely supports the apparently unadventurous, consensus seeking, liberal position which contends that making it new is the only way to get it right. Dull and liberal though it may sound in this arena of potential combat, in my view it is an unavoidable conclusion.

By changing and evolving, the essence of the art form is kept alive. Charles Olson’s epic poetry was not written in the language of Milton’s Paradise Lost. The language of epic poetry, which eschews a rhyme scheme in favour of rhythm and declamatory vigour, predates Milton and goes back at least to Homer and extends past Olson.

Eric Dolphy did not play the alto saxophone in the unmodified language of Charlie Parker but can be seen as his natural continuator, extending the range of the instrument by an octave and adding additional chromaticism and using new tempo superimpositions.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe did not make buildings like Palladino until we consider their shared concern with rigorous systems of proportion—a system which Palladino derived from the architecture of classical Greece and Rome. The school of Mies has been extended and arguably cheapened in the generic sameness of anonymous “modernist architecture” and reacted against in the post modernism of Gehry and Hadid.

This kind of revolt seems to happen when the dominance of a central figure like a Mies or a Charlie Parker has spawned so much generic, and inevitably inferior, imitation that the appearance of a Gehry or an Ornette sweeps the board clean for new thinking. Getting it right but adding nothing new seems always to lead to such ruptures.

The argument can go further and lead to Stravinsky’s struggle with tradition. He said in his conversations with Robert Craft something along the lines of “Music theory does not exist; it is simply derived from an analysis of practice,” but elsewhere in his Poetics he tells us “Une tradition véritable n’est pas le témoignage d’un passé révolu; c’est une force vivante qui anime et informe le présent. En ce sens, le paradoxe est vrai, qui affirme plaisamment que tout ce qui n’est pas tradition est plagiat […].” (A real tradition is not the testimony of a faraway past, but a living force that animates and shapes the present. This is the real paradox on the basis of which we say, in jest, that what is not tradition is plagiarism […])

Isaac Newton said something like, “If I have seen further it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants.”

How else can it work?

Evan Parker plays the saxophone in a way that some people hear as having a connection with the jazz tradition. Just some.

Sincerity

Josh Glenn

I’m a writer and editor; my friend Tony Leone is a designer. Since we first met, twenty years ago now, the two of us have partnered on many projects — most recently, on the UNBORED collection of family activity books and kits. When we were introduced, I had just taken an office in the old Haffenreffer brewery complex in Boston’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood, in order to devote myself full-time to publishing a high-lowbrow zine, Hermenaut. I’d been publishing Hermenaut irregularly for years; its look typified the purposely haphazard — let’s call it authentic — zine aesthetic of the era. Tony, whose apartment happened to be a few blocks away from my office, had been creative director of the punk fanzine Commodity. Given the alt.culture context within which we’d come of age, where anything short of the defiantly amateurish was suspect, I was amazed by the design of Commodity: expressive, emotional, yet informed by traditional design conventions regarding, for example, the art and technique of arranging type, the hierarchy of visual elements, well-implemented grids, and the effective use of white space.

Since their first appearance in the 1930s, zines have trafficked in authenticity. They were made possible by the invention of the “ditto” machine and conjured into being by science fiction fans (and later, fans of folk music, TV shows, horror movies, rock, and punk) clamoring for a platform unbeholden to the relatively strict conventions of pulp magazines. Their handmade, typo-filled, badly printed medium has always been the message: Zines privilege the autonomous over the institutional and impersonal. So, even though its feature articles may have snarkily poked fun at examples of 1990s-era authenticity-mongering, at the level of form, Hermenaut was hypocritical. I was keenly dissatisfied with this state of affairs, but until Tony came on board — bringing with him a wealth of time-tested knowledge about page layout, type treatment, and so forth — I didn’t have the slightest idea what could be done about it.

I wanted the design of my zine to evolve towards what Lionel Trilling calls sincerity — the effort to internalize and embody worthwhile, time-tested social and cultural norms and forms, rather than regarding these as being “of little account, mere fantasy, or ritual, or downright falsification,” which is to say, obstacles to one’s authentic self-expression. I wanted Hermenaut to say new things, to challenge conventions, but at the same time I longed for its layout and design to be almost old-fashioned…though not ironically retro. As a reference, I gave Tony several midcentury intellectual journals and digest-sized science-fiction pulps. I remember vividly the moment when he unveiled his page designs for Hermenaut. It was a revelation. He established a baseline grid, standardized headline treatments, fashioned a coherent navigation system — which meant that whenever we disrupted any of these design elements, it registered as a shock. The dialectic of the institutional vs. the autonomous was now enacted visually, in our pages.

Today, Tony and I share an office. Since the late 1990s, he and I have collaborated on three UNBORED family activity books, and four family activity kits — with another kit currently in progress. (Tony has also designed identity systems for various enterprises I’ve started, and we’ve collaborated on a series of reissued science fiction novels.) For each of these endeavors, at the level of both content and form, we’ve tried to walk the same line that we did when producing Hermenaut. To quote Tony’s description of his work on the UNBORED books: “We orchestrated a balance between clean, somewhat traditional typographic principles juxtaposed against energetic, sketchy illustrations and torn-paper textured accents.” The same sort of thing applies to these projects’ content. Whether Elizabeth Foy Larsen, who is coeditor of the UNBORED books, and I are assigning UNBORED features or writing them ourselves, we strive to communicate contemporary ideas in an old-school fashion (restrained, not trying to be obnoxiously relevant), while reviving bygone kids’ projects and free-range ways of living in a way that will appeal to today’s kids and their families. It’s a tricky tightrope act.

Sincerity is a balancing act, a dialectic—and sometimes that means slipping up, failing. Authenticity means never having to say you’re sorry. I’m sorry, but that’s just not for me.

Josh Glenn is a Boston-based commercial semiotician, co-creator of the UNBORED books and family activity kits, and editor of HiLobrow.com. With Rob Walker, he oversees Project:Object, an object-oriented storytelling series.

Nuance

Mike Martinez

I think this debate is only two sides of a third thing: in my mind, nuance reigns supreme over both doing it right and making it new.

I was asked to participate in this debate because I make documentaries, but by trade I’m a hairdresser, splitting my time between clients in the salon and working on big campaigns and runway shows in the fashion world of New York and Paris. Hairdressing is almost entirely subjective. It’s a mysterious combination of fundamentals, taste, and trends, complicated by the fact that you may have to sacrifice all three to appease the client. A toolkit is important, as is procedure. The fundamentals are key to a nice haircut, but they can also lead to stale and uninteresting results. On the flip side, while there’s an ingenuity built into an amateur approach, often times the results can feel clumsy and, well, amateur.

Doing hair in the fashion world is a process of unlearning procedure and falling back into very unconventional means to an end. This can lead to clumsy results (see fashion), but it can also lead to brilliant results. For example, last summer I was working on a couture show in Paris. The show was getting ready to start and I was helping the key hairdresser finish the final look. He pulled out an oversized bright orange piece of foam and said “We’re going to put this on her head.”

On the surface this sounds tragic, but in context it was quite beautiful, and with that particular model it made her look stunning. It was the endpoint of a long process in which in-the-moment inspiration based on attention to detail plays a crucial role. A tremendous amount of work goes on behind the scenes before a show starts. Designers and casting agents go to exhausting lengths to make sure they find the right models for the right looks at the show. Hairdressers and makeup artists go through rigorous test days before the show begins. They sit with the designer and are shown the collection as well as a board of inspiration references, trying out various looks on a model until the designer and stylist are satisfied. This is a delicate dance of technique, taste, and trying to decode the references. Because the process of making it all look right is so subjective, a hairdresser needs to be willing to improvise. The best improvisers often have the biggest toolboxes.

As we were finishing, a reporter from a fashion magazine approached and asked the routine, typical question: “So, what was the inspiration for this look?” The look in her eyes suggested that she expected to get a very complicated and very pretentious response of the kind that appeases the fashion crowd. Instead he looked at her and said, “Inspiration is a hard thing to find and can come from anywhere. Just last week I was walking home late one night from the pub and saw a yoga mat lying in a pile of garbage. And I thought the composition of it could look quite lovely on a model and here we are.” The reporter was shaken. In no way could she write about such a prestigious fashion event and equate it to a pile of garbage. As she walked away, he looked at me and said, “Nuance is critical.”

Without strong references, diligent research, and dedication to your craft, doing it right and making it new can both fall flat. In my mind, nuance is what elevates both sides. You can be an untrained amateur and still make great work, just as you can have strong fundamentals and make great work. But without nuance we just find ourselves treading in our own wake.

Mike Martinez is a documentary filmmaker and hairdresser. He is the co-creator and co-producer of Everything Is Stories (eisradio.org), an ongoing audio survey of tales from the underground, the underdog, the outlaw, the outcast.

II. Around and Around

Carlo Rotella, Charles Farrell and James Parker

CR: We tend to go around and around with music and writing, as a general rule, but not with boxing, for instance, where we both agree doing it right is fine all by itself. You just do the absolute conventional thing properly and clean the champion’s clock, and we’re good.

CF: We are good. But, also, that’s maybe the one field we’re talking about that is clearly deteriorating. We’re talking about a very compromised entity, and doing it right is more and more of a rarity, even a miracle, when it happens.

CR: One thing to consider is that every discipline, every genre, has a different relationship between doing it right and making it new. So for instance, in blues, in Chicago blues, I think one of the reasons that making it new has been generally so unsatisfying over the past few decades is that almost nobody does it right anymore. If more people did it right, the people making it new—like the people who started pairing rock-flavored guitar with funk-flavored bass in the 80s—would be reacting to that stronger center in more compelling ways. The dynamic between margins and center would be more generative. That’s why to me someone like Magic Slim, who pretty much only did it right in a recognizably classic Chicago-tradition way and had no interest in making it new, was so important and valuable. He was dead set on playing a shuffle right, and the assumption out there is that anybody can play a shuffle right, but in fact it’s hard to do and not that many people do it well. There weren’t enough people doing it right. That whole situation is opposed to the way Charles sees jazz, which is that way too many people are doing it right and not enough people are making it new.

JP: So now I’m thinking about rock n’ roll, where the teleological aspect is completely compromised. And that’s why it’s now dissolving, because of this great, floating simultaneity of sound and access through the ears at once that everybody’s living in now. It used to be This is punk rock, and then I’m a post-punk rocker, then I’m the next thing, I’m the next thing. It was always about the thing before, or had something to do with the thing before, post this, post that. That’s over. That’s finished.

CF: Except maybe in its very early stages, rock has almost never been about music. It’s almost never about music.

JP: What do you mean by that?

CF: That’s a medium where, aside from pop stuff, craft can devalue very quickly.

JP: Yes.

CF: And maybe for good reason.

JP: Yes.

CF: So the argument is never about who’s a good musician, it’s—

JP: Personal?

CF: Yeah, yeah, or about meaning. Stripped of everything else, maybe no music is really about pure music. Maybe, all music is about what it means to someone.

JP: So maybe rock n’ roll is just this mad tangent, which has now exhausted itself.

CR: But everything sticks around, and there’s all this scaffolding and apparatus out there that means it can’t truly exhaust itself. There are recordings, and YouTube, ways of preserving the music and extending influence, so there are people who still aspire to play in that way—for aesthetic reasons, or because there’s money to be made or notoriety to enjoy, or whatever. So there’s going to be some version of it. And that’s true of every form that you might see as getting creatively tired. Somebody’s still going to want to do it, right? And it will still mean something. I was in Nashville this week, and I went out to see a band at the Station Inn, a hallowed place of bluegrass and “real country,” a place that thinks of itself as the aesthetic real thing in a city dominated by commercial considerations. The band on stage was completely, entirely committed to playing it right. They played only covers, but they weren’t interested in reproducing specific recordings. It wasn’t a tribute band. They were interested in nailing an aesthetic. And their aesthetic was not just the 50s and 60s thing you might expect, Merle Haggard and Patsy Cline and George Jones. It was more 60s and 70s. So they’d do Tammy Wynette, but they’d also do Ronnie Milsap or Gene Watson or someone else that some hard-country types tend to think is not so close to the Hank Williams ideal. Everybody in this band could sing, everybody could play, and they were all committed to an established aesthetic—doing it right, with no interest in making it new at all. They weren’t trying to revive these songs or find a sly hidden meaning in them, they were just trying to get it right. Essentially, this was a record collection band. Listen to this. It’s important to me. This is what my taste sounds like.

JP: Yeah. I listen to this. Do you have the same taste as me? Oh, good.

CR: I found that whole experience perfectly satisfying, and I bet Charles would not.

CF: I would not.

CR: So why—

JP: Wait a sec. Is there a possibility that the point of making it new would be to generate some kind of unease, so that you’d never be satisfied by it in the way that you were by that band in Nashville?

CR: I was just as satisfied when I went to see Charles play some seriously out-there make-it-new shit at a gallery in Cambridge. I was unsettled, but I was very satisfied by how confused it made me. I’m happy with being confused or with that thing that happened in Nashville, where I was the opposite of confused.

JP: Charles, when I think about your music, it’s like you’re building these beautiful citadels and shredding them. Building and shredding, building and shredding. What’s going through your body when you’re doing that? I hope that’s not a mischaracterization.

CF: No, I think that’s very close. I think what happens when I play, I have a basic idea that I’m going with because, at the most basic level, I have time to kill and I have to kill it in some way. I want to go in with as little as possible. What I have is this background, and the background is the craft.

JP: So you go in with your skeleton of craft.

CF: Right. That’s the playing it right part. There, I’m borrowing. It would be probably from Coltrane more than anybody. But it also depends on the night. For example, the night you heard me play solo, I almost didn’t play piano. I had just listened to Marvin Santiago doing a tune called “El Pasajero.” I thought, That’s what I’m hearing right now.

CR: So what would you have done if you didn’t play piano?

CF: I probably would have played the record. And I probably would’ve said, “So okay, this [smacks table in salsa rhythm] is what I’m hearing.” And it would have made no sense, and it would have been horrible as a performance, but that doesn’t bother me. Being good, being bad, to me is completely insignificant.

CR: I’ve heard that from you enough that I’m convinced of it. You’ll see somebody play and you’ll write to me about it with great enthusiasm and you’ll say—deep into the email—It was very bad, not that that really matters. Where you and I are farthest apart is in music, and where I’m closest to your position is in fiction writing. I’d rather read bad DIY fantasy fan fiction than yet another well-crafted literary novel that got respectful reviews in all the right places.

CF: A novel like that, published now, gives you absolutely no information that you don’t already have. It doesn’t jolt you in any way, it doesn’t add to what you know in any way, it doesn’t teach you anything. And because you write, a well-constructed piece of writing—just on its own—it’s not going to mean much to you.

CR: But I don’t write fiction, and it’s fiction I’m talking about. I’m a bad musician, and I’m perfectly happy to have a well-constructed piece of music, and I’m happy for whoever did it. But in nonfiction writing, which I do for a living, I’m also perfectly happy to have a well-constructed piece of work. When my nonfiction writing students lay some pipe that doesn’t leak, I’m thrilled. The tricky part for me is that in reading fiction, as opposed to the other two, I find the same level of competence dispiriting. I find it dispiriting to imagine the process of constructing it, and to see that this result is all that came out of that process. Which I suspect is what happens when you listen to jazz.

CF: It’s exactly what happens when I listen to jazz. When I was in my late teens, for a while I thought it might be interesting to try and engage with jazz musicians. I played with a bunch of guys who all ended up being relatively famous, and all they cared about was mastery over pre-existing language. They had no interest in expanding it, no interest in what the language meant, culturally or emotionally or spiritually. The saw notes as notes, construction. And their goal, and these are young kids, was, first, to get rich, and then their ultimate goal was to work with Miles. That’s it, that’s where it stops. So you’re a kid for the rest of your life, you’re producing wonderful craft, but absolutely no meaning. You’re thinking of this thing—music—that really exists for emotional meaning, but you’re thinking purely about its architecture. And that’s as far as it goes, and I think you’ll never produce anything of real value.

CR: Does it work that way in rock? Does it work that way in metal?

JP: Well, metal is special because there’s a more athletic component, like physically what you can do. Especially a drummer. Metal drumming has evolved literally like a sport. There are teenage kids doing now what the best metal drummer once wouldn’t have dreamed of doing. The result is there’s something in the music itself that just demands this constant escalation. Not evolution—escalation. It’s got to go heavier, it’s got to be harder. It’s got to be stranger. It’s got to be more challenging.

CR: So, as a result, does metal have a whole lot of making it new or is everyone just laboring to play it right?

JP: I think there almost is no playing it right, because of the inherent escalation. I took my friend Jeremy Eichler, who reviews classical music for the Globe, to see Meshuggah—

CF: They’re good.

JP: Yeah, they do extraordinary things. Extraordinary things. Jeremy had never even been to a rock show before, so this was almost like I was guiding him through his first acid trip. Because they’re a shudderingly intense kind of live proposition. I mean, the light show alone is a battery of sensations. And Jeremy said, “Do you think this is a violent experience? Do you think the crowd is violent?” And I said, “No, I think this is actually a very loving experience. I think the crowd is very grateful because they’re getting exactly what they want.” And maybe that is kind of playing it right. But also, it has to go beyond. It has to achieve this level that only the very best band can—

CR: A technical level?

JP: Well, the ideal is a simultaneity, like a marriage, between the ultimate technical ability and the thing that you’re trying to express, right?

CR: The technical escalation is enabling new ways to make emotional meaning.

JP: Yes, quite right. I think Meshuggah, in particular, are conjuring this complete other world of oppression and domination and alien-ness and at-home-ness and strangeness and familiarity that not many bands can manage. The escalation is going somewhere.

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.