Taste in Music: Eating on Tour with Indie Musicians - Alex Bleeker and Luke Pyenson (2024)

Oeuvre rule: I'm only vaguely familiar with the band Real Estate, and Frankie Cosmos to an even lesser degree. I like Real Estate, but not as much as Sunny Day Real Estate, and they have rather different vibes. Real Estate is super chill, laid back, mellow and pleasant--not as overwrought (in a good way) and thunderous as Sunny Day. They are like the final wave from the heyday of indie rock from the 2000s (before all the bands got Spotified) and their first two albums were accordingly praised by Pitchfork. Frankie Cosmos seemed to come slightly later, though only by a couple years, and similarly does not "go for the jugular," so to speak, but again I'm hardly vaguely familiar with them. To be clear, I like what I've heard, and while I have revisited Real Estate a bit more in the course of reading this book, now I will need to do that with Frankie Cosmos in the course of writing this review. 

This is because the book is authored by a member from each of those two bands. It's not quite accurate to say that. The book is "curated" by these two musicians, and they must have edited a great deal of it themselves, but they only contribute an essay or two individually, and much of the work involved tapping connections to numerous bands and requesting their participation in the project. Beyond that, they wrote an introduction to the book, and introductions to each essay. They deserve praise in bringing this book to fruition, because there really doesn't seem to be anything else like it, but as might be expected in any book of essays collected from over a dozen musicians, the quality varies. 

***

Books of short stories or essays are always difficult to review. You don't want to give short shrift to certain contributors when they are all placed on equal footing. In this case, however, it's unrealistic to expect a review to mention every single essay (there are somewhere between 40 and 45). Many of them are very short--1 or 2 pages--and feel slightly "phoned in." Each musician/writer does consider the topic distinctly and tries to write meaningfully about it, but it feels like a creative writing class prompt, at times. 

You know what it really feels like? It feels like a big zine, the type I might have put out during college when I solicited contributions from friends, about 50% of which were musicians. It makes the book fun in a way, and it is not "amateurish" in its presentation, but yes, the content sometimes feels that way. Am I judging all the contributors that are under 40 slightly more harshly than maybe is warranted? Maybe, but I don't think so. Basically, this feels like a "coffee table book"--in terms of the photography in the book and its general appearance and production--and that's not a bad thing. 

Ultimately, the best parts of this book are the recommendations (Du Pain et des Idees in Paris for the greatest croissant, and L'As du Fallafel; Durumzade in Istanbul for durum--all of which come from Hermon Mehari ), which are also sometimes anticipated to be obsolete. I am thinking of "Sweet 16th and the Temporary Lives of Sandwiches and People" by Adam Schatz, a saxophonist for Japanese Breakfast. I can only presume that it is the most memorable essay (though I also think the closing "It's Not about the Pho" by Sebastian Modak is the most artful) because his co-worker wrote what is basically one of the greatest memoirs of the 21st century (at present), so Schatz really wanted to show up for this. Tour Food is also still an active website and may be a great resource for many people, and I will be checking it out shortly (nothing was included for Italy; it may be more US-centric). In any case, his essay topic is basically nostalgia:

"Until very recently, on North Sixteenth Street in East Nashville, Tennessee, there was a bakery right on the corner called Sweet 16th, run by a couple of New Englanders whop opened the spot in 2004. I ended up there for the first time seven years later, not because I heard it was amazing, but because it was a breakfast sandwich near me [what he usually types into his phone to find breakfast on tour]. I got the egg casserole on a biscuit sandwich, immediately translated as 'One to Go!' by owner Ellen Einstein at the counter, who shouted it back to the kitchen. A few minutes later it showed up wrapped in paper, the kind of hot that your smart brain knows you ought to count to one hundred before eating. But then your idiot hands shove it into your stupid mouth before you count to fifteen, because that's how good it looks." (116)

To be more precise, the book is about the odd "golden hour" period between Sound Check and Show Time when bands usually just have food delivered for their Rider, but sometimes venture out into the city to find something more unique and special. And also about the people along the way--the promoters and fans and organizers and record shop owners that also put bands up at their house and cook for them. I guess, if there is a definitive book for musicians on the topic of food and the concept of "family-style" dining, this is it. 

***

Some of the moments in these essays are quite beautiful and touching, so Bleeker and Pyenson occasionally strike gold:

"As the van rolled out of Budapest, I was overcome with memories of my baba that centered around food and eating: how she would hand-crimp her homemade pierogi with the tines of a fork; my dad, aunt, and grandparents, crowded around the kitchen table at my childhood home in Toronto, eating headcheese doused in vinegar (my cousins and I were nauseated by the smell); the year or so when Baba seemed to confuse different tomato sauces and served after-school snacks of pizza with a Tostitos base or tortilla chips with Ragu for dipping. In the backyard of that Toronto home, her vegetable garden bore bumper crops of tomatoes, cucumbers, sorrel, and herbs that were used for soups and pickling, or just picked off the vine and eaten over the sink in the middle of an August heat wave. I wept silently as I realized it was logistically and financially impossible to get back for the funeral. 'Don't worry too much,' my dad consoled me when we finally spoke on the phone. 'Baba would have been horrified that you'd skip a gig for her.'" (172, "Baba" by Steve Sladkowski)

The main introduction to the book lays out its mission statement like a thesis, and the blurby-intros are similar, but Bleeker's intro to Chapter 2, about Wellness on the Road, strikes a deeper chord of vulnerability:

"As long as I've been playing shows, people have been taking photos of me onstage, and as long as I can remember, I've struggled with my weight and with compulsive overeating. Back in 2001, future Real Estate bandmates and I started a Strokes cover band to perform at a friend's sweet sixteen. We all went to the thrift store to buy secondhand dress shirts and army jackets, doing our best to impersonate our skinny idols. The show was a resounding success, but when a photo of the band surfaced a week or so later, I spent a significant amount of time on MS Paint trying to crop and edit my belly out of it. This technique did not work." (104)

Obviously, these more melancholic moments are tinged with humor, and it is a very funny book at times:

"But because of the night-and-day difference between fast food in Japan and the US, I feel so comfortable eating at rest stops and konbinis. Not only is it delicious, but it's really cheap: It's a miraculous win-win. You're like, 'Oh my god, this was only five bucks! I got a great meal, I don't feel like shit, and I'm not gonna shit my brains out after this.' And if I do, there's a bidet at the 7-Eleven, the seat is heated, and it's singing to you." (214, "Rest Stop: Japan" by Sen Morimoto)

There is a heavy emphasis on rest stop culture, and what I gather is that they are much better in the U.K. and Japan than they are in the U.S. But the first of these "interludes" on rest stops includes a conversation with Mark Ibold and the author of a book that seems like a forebear to this one (Michael Stern and Eat Your Way Across the U.S.A.). The book came out before a certain Pavement tour, and the story of the "throwed roll" may or may not be an homage to the infamous rock throwing as depicted in Pavements: 

"I was trying to make eye contact with the people who worked there, and they were all busy doing things, but then there was a guy on the complete other end of the place [Lambert's] who kind of looked at me, and I waved to him. And when my hand went up in the air, he just threw this roll and it went straight into my palm. And I caught it from, I would say, at least fifty feet across the room....I remember looking into my hands, like, dumbfounded, and I was trying to tell my bandmates that a guy had just thrown this roll--I mean, nobody even saw it, it happened so quickly--and I was about to tell my bandmates that this had happened when another one came flying at us and hit our drummer right in the face!....And then everybody just starting cracking up, and somebody came over and gave us a table. I think they served everything in giant cast-iron pans, just, like, ridiculous portions with meat slopping over them, just gigantic, and I think once you sat down, for your rolls, they brought you these little tubs of....what's it called? It's not maple syrup....it's not honey....[MS: Sorghum, or molasses....] Sorghum, sorghum, yeah." (55)

Probably not because getting hit in the face with a roll by a restaurant worker is funnier than getting hit with a rock by a dumb festival-goer. 

I said there weren't many "famous" musicians in it, but that's not totally true---there is also Damon from Galaxie 500/Damon & Naomi, Chris Frantz from Talking Heads, Devendra Banhart, Kevin Morby, Geologist, Robin Pecknold, Sadie Dupuis and of course Bob Mould. I was familiar with all of them, and also Greta Kline though I had to be reminded she was the force behind Frankie Cosmos (and not a nepo-baby per se, but paranoid she might be). Her essay is rather amusing, as are all of the above. I am finding now that I want to say all sorts of things about this book. Like how there is an inordinate fascination with gas station food, and why I like Fleet Foxes more than I did before (I always liked them, to be clear) after Hunter Biden's appreciation for them became public knowledge. And Subway. Subway is mentioned at least three times in this book, maybe four--and each time it is basically almost the entire topic of the essay. I find most in common with Bob Mould on this point:

"It's not the same anymore, but thirty years ago Subway was great. It was consistent nationwide, and the bread was always baked fresh on-site. Yeah, the loaves were baked from pre-made rolls, but so are my favorite Hokkaido cheesecakes at te Westfield mall. It was high quality, it was cheap, and it was consistent. I think psychologically for me, when I'm on the road, consistency--any kind of consistency--is valuable. Every day is an iteration of the same motif, but things do change from town to town. Back then, you could count on Subway. We could all agree on it, it was fast, and we could eat it on the run. Sometimes when you're touring, those are the things that are most important." (108)

Having gone to Subway many, many times with a vegetarian resigned to Veggie Delights, Pecknold indicates that may or may not have been the right idea:

"My savior and my destroyer became the Subway 'Veggie Patty,' a gray-brown melange of unidentifiable vegetal ingredients, damp from the microwave. Mouthfeel of sieved paper pulp or marinated sponge. Flavor nonexistent to net negative; it was so powerfully antiflavor that it siphoned and destroyed the flavor of anything surrounding it. Just a volume of calories, a shape, a wet wallet of mashed peas and binding agent around which I'd pile lettuce, spinach, carrots, salt and pepper, and oil and vinegar, all encased in a sleeve of dubious bread." (183)

We learn that if you are a musician, and you can make it to the next level where you get an early afternoon billing at a festival, you must go to Osheaga Festival in Montreal--if only for the food. In fact this chapter made me want to try to be in a band again specifically so I could justify that (it doesn't seem the catering tent is available to festival go-ers--just bands--though I'm sure the food for everyone is better on the whole, too).

And in Iceland, it may not be best to go for haute-cuisine:

"The first course arrived, and I swear I thought someone was playing a practical joke on us. It was a quarter-sized piece of burnt chicken skin with a tendril of dried moss or lichen on it. Second course: one single wild carrot and two flakes of sea salt. Third course (twenty minutes later), everyone's hunger now manifesting as manic smiles and raised eyebrows: a tiny fermented quail egg on a bed of hay. Fourth course, and we're all losing it in the damp basement, silent and sectioned off with a red curtain, blond-haired servers dancing in and out of sight: a tiny mushroom cap with compost-tasting muck stuffed inside. Sixth course: one single drop of cream the size of a dime on a slate slab." (65, Flora and Fauna by Meg Duffy). [She later goes for a couple hot dogs and maybe that does not sound very appetizing but if you are in Iceland, I would recommend them just as I would in Chicago, because they are different and unique.] 

There's probably more I could say about this book, but I think that's probably enough. I think in writing this, I realized that the quality is generally higher than not. 

Some of us idolize the lifestyle of the touring musician because it's an incredibly difficult thing for regular people to make their way around the world and see all there is to see--travel is one of the key defining "interests" or "hobbies" of regular people. "I want to travel," they say. Meanwhile many of us working stiffs get 2 weeks out of the year to squeeze everything we can into it. You really need to be strategic, and patient, if you are aware of all that is out there, and want to see as much of it as you can. Of course, the downside to this for musicians is that they don't have the the time to properly explore (this is what I also here from regular working people that travel for work, which I've always been envious of but maybe not so much as before). If there is any "message" to this book, it is to explore whenever you are able, absolutely--and to even prioritize that exploration, rather than submitting to the grueling city-per-day schedule that international touring sometimes demands. As I recall, Shellac did not really tour the U.S. much at all. They would go to Europe once a year for Primavera, and then play wherever they wanted to go on a vacation. That to me is obviously the ideal arrangement, but not everyone is so blessed to have that option. 

And musicians may not alway be blessed to have a generous per diem, and though tours are not likely to make a stop at Burlington (local musicians are more prevalent in the back room there, though I believe it's not unheard of to have people in from out of town), if they do, as long as I am in this apartment, I will humbly offer a place to stay and my own "basic" recommendations in the surrounding area. Because now I know just how meaningful that can be, and the types of lifelong connections of the most beautiful sort that can be created through this act of generosity. I think reading this book will cause others to act accordingly. 

James - Percival Everett (2024)

James won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award last year. I can hardly call myself an authority on whether it was deserved, but it certainly feels like it. I'm getting ahead of myself.

Oeuvre rule: I was unfamiliar with Percival Everett until American Fiction was nominated for Best Picture, and I began trying to see all nominees each year. I would have watched that regardless, and it's certainly on the cusp of greatness and worthwhile. It was based on Everett's novel from more than 20 years earlier, Erasure, and Everett has published a lot more. He has basically been as prolific as Philip Roth. So it feels as though he is finally having his "moment," after getting a big-screen adaptation and then dominating the literary landscape with this novel, which cannot be denied. Few books in recent years have been more celebrated than this.

The first thing I'll say is that I have never read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and while it is not necessary to have done that to appreciate this, it probably would enhance enjoyment. The closest referent I can think for this is Foe, which I believe I've mentioned before on this blog (in the review of Disgrace), along with the circumstances of reading it (in Paris, at University of Nanterre, in an English-language class). That is J.M. Coetzee's re-imagining of Robinson Crusoe, except told from the perspective of a woman that told her story to the author Daniel Defoe, who hijacked the narrative. There is no such literary trickery involving Mark Twain in this, and it is simply another version of Huck Finn told from the perspective of the runaway slave Jim, here known as James and revealed to be putting on an act that also seems to have a reverse-referent in the recent film Sorry to Bother You. It is odd to say that, but does feel like Sorry to Bother You is in fact a big influence on this, as is the experience of having American Fiction adapted. I'd be rather surprised if James does not get optioned. If anything, it may rekindle interest in Twain's work too, and it is never a bad thing to have people in 2025 stretching their perspective to try to appreciate something from the early 1880's. It made me want to read it more, at least. But for now, the Cliffs Notes will have to suffice. 

***

I reviewed those previously and from what I can gather, some of the episodes in this novel are taken straight from the source material (notably, a scene with a house that has been ripped from its foundation by a storm and is in the river, where Jim sees something that he doesn't tell Huck until later). Also, the episodes with the King and the Duke. And some of the characters on the periphery of James may play a larger role in the source material (Tom Sawyer, for example, is barely a factor here, mentioned at a few random moments, acknowledged as Huck's best friend, but they do not appear to share as deep an emotional bond as he does with Jim). For a fair stretch of the novel, the two are separated, and reunited during a duel scene involving some jealousy between older "young adult" characters that probably looms larger in the source material.  This is neither here nor there, but is to say, it made me want to read the original more, and there are few better aims in literature than to turn people onto the classics that are almost 150 years old (and sometimes much older) by reinvigorating them with a fresh perspective. 

It feels like it was a long time coming, for Jim. Even though I hadn't read the book, I was familiar with the character, and that he represented something about the American South. Perhaps Jim Crow had some connection. But no, Jim Crow was a character created for a minstrel show nearly 50 years before Huck Finn was published, which both that novel and James also depict in an extended episode (one of the several songs performed is about him). This is another reason James is great, for those that have read both books. I am not sure but I am reasonably confident that the depiction of minstrel shows in 1880 and 2025 are quite different. And those minstrel shows were created while slavery was still very much a thing. While James/Huck Finn takes place some 20 years prior to 1880, with rumblings of the Civil War also percolating at various points (Huck wants to fight for the Union), the two novels are not about the American South. They are about the Midwest, and the odd boundaries in play in Missouri and Illinois as slavery is abolished or simply against the law in certain areas and not others, very close to one another. 

Thus, as far as historical novels go, not only for true American history, but also for the history of American literature, this pinpoints a crucial moment. For all of the horrible things this country has been put through over the past hundreds of years, one can at least admire the artists that have exemplified its greatest qualities, and laid groundwork for a humanistic progressivism. 

It's not really a safe time in American to make that claim, that the history of our country is steeped in genocide, class subjugation and white supremacy.  Most recently, it was decreed that the Smithsonian will be getting a makeover to wipe its "wokeness" away. We live in the greatest country of the world, and we are no worse than any other country. Every other country is racist too, and hates people that are not from there originally, too. This is what those in power want us to believe, and this is what their sycophants preach ad nauseum to the point that the lie becomes the truth, for very many people to the point that it shifts a political tide. 

So this is additionally why James is such an important novel, and got so much of the love that it rightfully deserves--and the backlash against it as well (somewhat limited as it is) further underscores the urgency of its "message," or what I understand it to be. We've undergone massive waves of panic in "post-racial" America from absolutely being ashamed of racism and doing everything we can to acknowledge how we have been and what we have learned and how we can do better as a people, to now being validated in feeling that stereotypical views of non-whites are actually the true picture of reality, and not the "whitewashing" that "libtards" have shoved down the throats of Real Americans. It's been a horrifying thing to witness, and the only comfort we may take is that there really are just a lot of bots on X that spew hate that the algorithm promotes and the problem is not as bad "on the ground" as it seems on the Internet. Yet unfortunately, dozens of mentally ill people with guns kill hundreds of innocent people every year, and such incidents are flashpoints for opposing viewpoints on gun control laws and family values. There are plenty of reasonable conservative people that recognize the propaganda being utilized by MAGA and disavow it, and the debate between those that have not yet totally gone off the deep end and the more compassionate amongst us is what can still drive our country towards Real Greatness, and provide a glimmer of hope for the future. Debates with MAGA "conservatives" are, unfortunately, often given to straw man arguments that devolve into name-calling and line-drawing. Because if they've been duped and are being told they've been duped, they throw it back on the other side, and claim the other side is the one projecting. We get nowhere except hating each other more. There probably would be a civil war if there was not too much other shit going on around the world that people had to argue about, but sadly it appears that will always be the case now until we all destroy one another in a mass act of stupidity. 

The world has become impossibly complex, and yet still, smaller and smaller minded. It is good to have a book like James that goes back into the past and offers up a simple story, a parable of sorts, to remind us of the prior state of affairs in this country, and to help us recognize the parts that have been bubbling up ever more often since 2016, and really, post-Covid 19 (because I think most everyone acknowledges Trump 2016-2020 as not nearly as bad as Trump 2024-?). We are REGRESSING as a country and it is absolutely terrifying and artists are more important than ever in their role of moving the culture towards greater enlightenment.

***

Some window into the language of the novel is appropriate, as the performance of "slave speak" is one of its key defining features. That is, when James drops the ruse of Jim--either as a slip-up or intentionally, to shock and frighten--the novel reaches its critical moments of suspense. Relatively early on, we learn of James's literary designs. After being bitten by a rattlesnake, shortly after they have run away, he lays down to rest and has dreams of a kind:

"I was in Judge Thatcher's library, a place where I had spent many afternoons while he was out at work or hunting ducks. I could see books in front of me. I had read them secretly, but this time, in this fever dream, I was able to read without fear of being discovered. I had wondered every time I sneaked in there what white people would do to a slave who had taught other slaves to read? What would they do to a slave who knew what a hypotenuse was, what irony meant, how retribution was spelled? I was burning up with fever, fading in and out of consciousness, focusing and refocusing on Huck's face.

Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire put a fat stick into the fire. His delicate fingers held the wood for what seemed like too long a time. 
'I'm afraid there's no more wood,' I said. 'Which is fine, because I am hot enough. Too hot.' 
He reached in again and moved some charred pieces around. He looked at his blackened fingertips. 'I'm like you,' he said.

'How is that?'

He wiped his hands on his pants, left smudges. 'You shouldn't be a slave,' Voltaire said, sighing. He sat beside me, moved to feel my forehead with the back of his hand and then thought better. 'Like Montesquieu, I think we are all equal, regardless of color, language or habit.'

'You do, do you?' I asked.

'However, you must realize that climate and geography can be significant factors in determining human development. It's not that your features make you unequal, it's that they are signs of biological differences, things that have helped you survive in those hot, desolate places. It's those factors that stop you from achieving the more perfect human form found in Europe.'

'Is that right?' 

'The African can be easily trained in the ways of the European, of course. He can come to be more than he naturally is, to learn those manners and skills that will allow him to become equal.'
'Yes?'
'That is what equality is, Jim. It's the capacity for becoming equal. The same way a black man in Martinique can learn French and so become French, he can also acquire the skills of equality and become equal. But I repeat myself.'......

'How do you explain slavery? Why are my people subjected to it, treated with such cruelty?'

Voltaire shrugged. 

'Let me try this,' I said. 'You have a notion, like Raynal, of natural liberties, and we all have them by virtue of our being human. But when those liberties are put under societal and cultural pressure, they become civil liberties, and those are contingent on hierarchy and situation. Am I close?'
Voltaire was scribbling on paper. 'That was good, that was good. Say all of that again.'" (48-50)

This is one of the more blatant entreaties to post-Covid racism (we might say post-George Floyd, but we conflate those periods), and gives heed towards those armchair intellectuals that justify despicable views on the basis of rather dubious anthropological precepts. That is a mouthful but maybe you know what I am talking about. We look back on Voltaire and think of him as one of the great humanists in history, a philosopher that also wrote amusing novels and is responsible for many famous epigrams, and it is true that many such Europeans in the Enlightenment Era couched white supremacy in this mix of science and philosophy--which on the one hand, acknowledges basic humanity, and on the other, mass-generalizes any entire continent of people that can be "trained." We don't need to start going down the list of famous thinkers from that era. 

(Rousseau is the one that comes to mind, and he is referenced elsewhere in this text, and "On the Origin of the Nature of Inequality" is, in my opinion, a great text. I am also sure if we learn more about the lives of such thinkers, we may see that they hold other beliefs that are not as great, but I prefer to leave such investigations for another day and take the text at face value--that is, a depiction of Savage Man, pre-civilization, not a depiction of "savages" in undeveloped nations that exist adjacent to a "more civilized" brand of people that find glory in conquest. As man created more structures to make life less harsh and untenable, so too did machinations of inequality enter into the picture.)

Suffice to say, there is a philosophical element to this novel that additionally puts it into a higher echelon, on an issue that sadly continues to be evergreen, even if I thought in say, oh the 1990s, that such lessons had already been learned by all (or at least in Chicago, and thankfully, we have not lost our collective minds in 2025--though I am sure down by say, oh Cairo, IL, we may find views only slightly advanced from the 1880's, though it's a ghost town now, and has a ghastly history). 

Here too, Kierkegaard is invoked, then just five years deceased, and perhaps his work had yet to be translated into English, but there does appear to be some limited awareness of him at the time:

"'Kin you ax for more wishes?'

'You know, that was what I said, but it seems you cain't have but three. What would you wish fer?'

Entertaining such discussions in character was exhausting, but I had thought about such a thing many times before and, just like a story I'd read in the judge's library, I could see that anything I thought was good could entail some bad consequences. For example, living forever would mean you'd have to watch everybody you loved die. The question I played with, but certainly couldn't share with Huck, was what would Kierkegaard wish for. 'I dunno, Huck. I reckon I'd be scared to wish fer anything.' 

'Think about it.'

'I reckon the genie be white. I ain't got no need to wish for sumptin' dat ain't gone happen. Good story or no.'

Huck let that sink in, then he looked at the sky. I kin tell you what I'd wish fer. First, I'd wish fer some adventure.' He smiled big. He looked at me. 'Then I'd wish dat you was free like me.'

'Thank ya.'

''Course. Well, I'd wish all slaves was free.'

I nodded.

'Don't every man got a right to be free?' Huck asked.

'Ain't no such things as rights,' I said.

'What say?'

'I ain't said nuffin.'" (71-72)

In any case you have a distillation of the modus operandi of the novel in this exchange, a fairy tale within the heavier philosophical context of free will and self-determination. James does ultimately pursue that path, and the novel also works on this second level as an allegory of sorts. Even after we get what we wish for, the very notion of wishing for anything begins to appear problematic, as it unleashes other consequences which necessitate further wishes. And yet, this is not about making peace with one's fate, but rising above it and achieving what was thought impossible through sheer persistence and belief in personal destiny.  

Apart from that, there are just several touching moments, such as this:

"Big Mike slapped a small hand on my shoulder. 'Help me take down this here tent,' he said.

Everyone worked to collect their things, large and small. Emmett stopped for a second and looked at me. He said something that confused me. Confused me because I wasn't quite sure what it meant. Confused me because I had never heard anything like it before. He said, 'I'm sorry.'

I had been about to help take down the tent, but this white man's apology screwed me to the ground." (179)

There seems to be a derogation of the apology in our time, a belief in the strength of never apologizing, seen as a sign of weakness of one's own character and rationalistic behavior. In truth, the inability to apologize--driven, no doubt, by the hordes that decry them as never being good enough--is another key factor in the devolution of society. We can all feel safe and secure in the knowledge that what we are doing is right, we can deny the cruelty and pretend that it never happened, or that it was deserved, and we cannot bring ourselves to forgive others, even when they ask for it, because everyone is hopelessly flawed and will never truly change for the better. Emmett is not a "white savior" in this novel, but just slightly less evil than others, "buying" Jim but telling him that he has actually hired him as a performer and that he will be paid and later freed as an indentured servant of sorts. While this does turn into something of a fantasy, the depth of this very small gesture felt rather moving (particularly if the reader is used to never hearing apologies in their own life, as may be the case for many now, even if the context is wholly different). 

Ultimately, this is a simple story with rather complicated angles that reflect on history and how we have advanced in certain regards and yet not in others. For hundreds of years, basic humanity was conveniently ignored, until we finally grappled with it, and tried to take accountability for the cruelties inflicted, undo them to the extent we could, progressing all the way up to the point of issuing reparations--until the counter-narratives and backlash drove political organizing in the opposite direction, back towards cruelty, denial of basic humanity, unwillingness to understand where people came from and where they want to go and why. The novel symbolizes how far we have come, and how far we still have to go, and the constant obstacles that are wedged throughout the path. At the very end, like Voltaire said, we must tend to our garden, and James does have something of a happier ending along the lines of that notion. We cannot change how others think of us. We can only exist among them, chameleon-like, and forge our own paths, finding that freedom within ourselves, driving us towards a destiny that only we define, and not one decreed by those in power. This type of freedom--to be left alone, to be respected as a human being, rather than labeled or boxed-in by stereotypes--should be seen as a natural right. When we are not so lucky to have that, fighting for it is a good and noble cause. 

Still, we shouldn't have to fight for basic human decency, and once those in power recognize the obvious results of this paradigm--that violence borne out of race-based thinking only begets further violence--we may finally set forward on a path towards greater peace for all, and true greatness.