• Published on

    Nathan's TED Talk

    Picture
    What does it mean to be urbanized? What does living in a city require of us in terms of social engagement, and to what degree could we be benefitting more than we are now? Click to watch my recent speech about what strangers can give us that friends et al can't!

    A big fat thank you to every one of the lovelies who did the hard work to make this happen.     Only they will know how much had to go into the creation of this mammoth undertaking. I hardly know myself, and simply count myself lucky they wanted me to crash their party. It's about the little people.

    Thanks for watching (and sharing! Don't be shy about it!)!

    ​Please pardon the semi-intermittent nature of my posting these days. I'm in the throes of (um okay finally) finishing my latest film, as well as a lot of behind-the-scenes fun in keeping the book going big and strong!
  • Published on

    Nathan Vass, 2019 Washington State Book Award Finalist

    Picture
    Never in a million years. That's what I thought when we applied for this thing a year ago. A pipe dream. You apply for it for the same reason you apply for Ivy League colleges, the Green Card lottery, or Oscar-qualifying film festivals. It's not actually about achieving the summit of those anthemic heights. It's about being able to go to sleep at night telling yourself you tried. I like sleeping. Relishing the mundane is more important than making your pipe dreams. It's the trying of it that's the thing. 

    We applied for this award, the most prestigious literary award that isn't national, because why not. Yes, we're the scrappy underdog book applying for something that usually only goes to authors with major New York publishing deals. 

    But isn't that what underdogs do? 

    We applied, designer Tom and I, and then we forgot about it and went about enjoying our daily lives. I carried on with driving and writing, writing and filming, filming and photographing... and somehow, here we are. I woke up to an email that went directly to my spam folder. And why wouldn't it, with lines like "You've been selected..." "We're delighted to inform you..." The very same happened when Seattle Magazine named me one of their 35 Most Influential People: "You've been chosen..." Ah, spam. The folder with either the least... and some of the most life-changing missives I receive.

    What can I say here, now, that I haven't said here (Wall of Fame), here (Seattle Mag), here (book talk), here (film crew), here (birthday), here (SAM tour), here (darkroom show) and elsewhere, when enormous accolades have been thrown my way, and all I can do is blush? You know I'm no good at this sort of thing. I'm good at writing about incredible things happening to me that I may or may not deserve, but I'm no good at actually receiving them. I'm better at just driving around in a city bus...

    I bow in gratitude to every judge, every twist and stroke of fate, to designer Tom and editor Jacqueline. I bow in gratitude not simply for the sake of the book and I, but because a vote for this book is more crucially a vote for a particular way of seeing. Of thinking about people. Of treating them a certain way, taking care and compassion. 

    Contemporary politics would have us believe empathy is dead. The incredible support this lil' book of mine keeps getting, topped off (so far!) by today's announcement, stands as the perfect rejoinder. That's why this matters. To get to take part in such a statement, to reinforce the existence and value of kindness in our age, is profoundly humbling. All of which is to say–

    Ladies and gentlemen of the jury: Thank you.

    ---

    More about the Award and its other finalists here.

    Purchase the book online from Elliott Bay Books, here or from Third Place Books, here. No, it isn't available on Amazon. If you're a local bookstore, owner of any sort of mom'n'pop store or other small business, pay rent in Seattle, or are homeless, you don't need me to explain why. 

    We've sold through three print runs in record time without needing to go there. We've been a consistent top 5 bestseller in the city's largest independent bookstore for months because we haven't gone there. Supporting the little guys just feels better, doesn't it?

    I am hugely grateful the demand for this book has been so high that we've been able to afford taking this route. We'll stay this course as long as we are able, and/or until the book shifts ownership. So, again: Thank you all!

    More about the book, including a KING 5 interview with yours truly and more purchase locations, here. 
  • Published on

    Couch Intuition

    Picture
    It was the most elegant piece of furniture I'd ever seen dumped at a bus stop. How exciting! 

    "Hang on a second, I just need to look at this awesome chair," I explained to my companion inside the bus. It was midnight. You can do stuff like that during the witching hour, when things that don't make sense suddenly do. 

    I skipped out of my nigh-empty vehicle. Just my friend and an oblivious smartphone-gazing youngster back there, who never even noticed me leave. His loss. "Look at this amazing chair," I practically squealed to the homeless woman sitting nearby on the regular bus shelter bench. I forget her reply, which was a cautious affirmative. She's always like that, a sweetheart sleeper who talks like your sarcastic but loving aunt. 

    My thought was, who would pass up the incredible opportunity to sit in this thing? Would you sit on the regular bus bench if this beaut was right next to you? Or maybe do something silly like drive the bus right past without smelling the roses, as it were?

    I plopped down on the plush black leather and loved everything about it, giggling at the absurd angle of the recline– clearly some rear supports were missing, making things all the better. When it comes to comic value, shifting any chair to a forty degree backwards tilt is a major improvement. We were looking at the world's first mid-century modern La-Z-Boy.

    The woman explained that it'd been there all day. "That's fantastic," I decreed. "This is definitely the best bus stop in Seattle right now. Look at this thing!" I exclaimed to another passenger who was walking up, a young woman who rarely speaks but always smiles. She grinned, chuckling at my enthusiasm. "Here," I said. "I'm gonna angle it so that they can see the bus coming more easily..."

    Yes, it could've been wet. It could've smelled. It might've had chemicals or paraphernalia or stains or razor blades or animals... But it didn't. Sometimes what-ifs and paranoia are important, worthwhile. 

    And sometimes they're for the birds. 

    You've gotta go with your gut. Your intuition is the amalgamation of all of your life experiences, and it always knows more than your conscious mind does at any given moment. You can always reason yourself into doing something, and your emotions can always come up with cause for fear and holding back. Your gut is in between, and it's quieter and deeper than either. Wiser. Sometimes it knows that getting excited about a broken couch with a couple of chuckling strangers on a dark night will be just fine.

    That's all.
  • Published on

    Nathan on NPR: III

    Picture
    Did you miss Wednesday's broadcast? It's all here. Host Deborah Wang and I chat about "who (really) rides the bus" in Seattle, and so much more. Click here for KUOW's page with a link to the full radio hour (fascinating stuff!), as well as a direct link to my piece; scroll down for my segment. 

    Huge thanks to everyone at KUOW who put this together, to you who stop by the site and take an interest, to Metro for letting me be me, and to the peeps out there for being exactly who they are.
    ​
    Enjoy!

    For other interviews with me on NPR, various podcasts, television, and print outlets, click here. 
  • Published on

    More NPR, plus Expanded Bookstore List

    Picture
    ​Real quick– I've got a few upcoming stories I'm particularly excited to share, including a four-part series covering an event that turned out rather differently than I expected. Stay tuned.

    Radio

    For now, I invite you to tune in to KUOW once again, tomorrow (Wednesday the 3rd) at noon!! You'll hear me on The Record then with what are hopefully some interesting tidbits both factual and anecdotal regarding who, really, rides the bus in Seattle.

    Deb, Adwoa and the KUOW crew went way beyond the extra mile this time to host me. If you knew the circumstances... I'm still falling down with gratitude. Show them and their terrific station your support by tuning in! Listen to previous appearances with me and a whole lot more here.

    ---

    Coming from NPR and new to my site? Hello! Here's a primer on my book, and here's a curation of popular posts from the past year! Welcome!

    ---

    Bookstore Location Updates

    Lastly- the book is now available at more locations. You'll find copies for sale at

    Third Place Books in
    -Lake Forest Park,
    -Seward Park, and
    -Ravenna (buy from Third Place online here!);
    Phinney Books;
    Elliott Bay Books (buy online here!); &
    Madison Books.

    Is your bookstore not listed above? Pester them about my book! I'm super excited to support any local bookselling enterprise that isn't, you know, named after a rainforest...

    ---

    Photo by Quinn Hallenbeck.
  • Published on

    On Second Acts

    Picture
    I regret writing about him the way I did, here. Scoffing about his bravado for a chuckle. Shouldn't I know by now that men are among the most fragile of creatures, who at every turn are taught* they must vigorously pretend otherwise? Today I know that Anger is simply Hurt held in for too long, and that "fronting," as it were, is merely a means for concealing insecurity. 

    Four years ago, my reaction to that highly imperfect method would be to point and laugh. Isn't it so much easier to judge people when everything in your life has gone well? Ah, for the days when things were so simple.

    ---

    It is possible, sometimes, to get through adolescence without anything going hugely, catastrophically wrong in your life. (Any teenager would disagree, but I'm talking about actual major life events here.) It's even possible to make it through most of your twenties– sometimes all of your twenties– without any of your goals being sucked out from under you, without any of the irrevocable thudding blows that crush your ideas of a future with unforgiving permanence. It isn't just that life is unexpected, in the sense of the famous Yiddish proverb.**

    It's that it doesn't play by your rules.

    Eventually the realization will happen, and when the blows come along to break you, I say take your time reacting. Respond with intention. You're on the cusp of determining what may very well be the mental framework of the rest of your life. 

    "There are no second acts in American lives," Fitzgerald famously wrote, foolishly (he would later retract the statement). The question of who you'll be in your Second Act is less a question of what you do than how you think. 

    Revered philosopher-filmmaker Terrence Malick pointed out in a 1979 Sight and Sound interview, "    The movies have kept up a myth that suffering makes you deep. It’s not that way in real life, though, not always. Suffering can make you shallow and just the opposite of vulnerable, dense."

    How you choose to address the hurt, the vulnerability, the confusion... These are the quandaries for which there are as many solutions as there are people. Some become bitter, nursing a grudge against the world. Others turn their hatred inward. Still others search for a lightness that's stronger than the light they had before, moving toward that place where you can be at peace not knowing the answers.

    ---

    For me it was a series of calamities. You know one of them. The details matter less than the sensation; being lost in a life that was once familiar, which you used to understand but seems now to have all new rules. I don't know much, but I do know this: nothing will humble you more than having your concept of a just universe destroyed. 

    The cocksure confidence you didn't know was annoying, gone like chaff in the breeze. The grief. The grief that blinds you from what you'll realize years later, and still feel guilty admitting: this is the part where you became a better person, at the expense of stupid gigantic loss, loss for which you'd give up your newfound wisdom in a heartbeat to have redacted. Where you tried hard and succeeded without noticing. Don't I wish all those young people were still alive?

    For myself, I've become softer. More forgiving. Life is more extreme than I thought it was. All these humans are struggling just like you, to be loved, respected, to not be lonely. They struggle mightily in their imperfect ways, and they deserve to be forgiven endlessly.

    Don't get me wrong: I'm still the person I was before, who thinks the Man Game is silly, that overblown egos and pretending to be cool are a waste of time. I stand by every word of my Man Game monologue as written in the above-linked story. But the need to condescend has subsided. It's easier somehow, to understand where they're coming from.

    "Stop trying so hard, bro," I thought to myself when I saw folks like him in 2015. "Get over yourself." Now, the line in my head tends toward something like, "You don't need to try so hard, bro. You're okay just as you are." You were a child once and you have feelings and passions and hobbies, like the rest of us. You don't need to try to convince the world otherwise. 

    ---

    He got on my bus the other day, looking rather different than before. Gone was the anxious bravado; he relaxed now with an air of calm, like me, that manifested in his apparel choice as well as demeanor. Just a baseball cap and plain T-shirt today, with jeans that actually fit. He was like the young lady who used to wear a lot of makeup, who's prettier now just being herself.

    "There he is," I said.
    "Hey!" 
    "How's it going."
    He pounded my fist slowly. "You remember me?" 
    "Yeah, my buddy from California!"
    "Damn, dude," he said, pausing. His face opening up in a heartfelt grin, the sort of unironic expression that stops time, even if briefly. "Thank you, bro. Hey listen, I got a spot now. I got a job, and I got a spot, an apartment just down on uh, Cloverdale."
    "Man, I'm so happy for you! You're doin' great!"
    "Yeah, better than I was before, huh?"

    He gestured back at the middle-aged African-American woman he'd been sitting with. "S my mom. I'm treating her!"

    ---

    What was I thinking, writing him off as a caricature before? Doubting him? Even if he postured more at the time... People grow. They can be many things at once. I was grateful to learn a few more of his sides. This blog would be missing something if its only record of him was as a wannabe gangster whose most memorable trait was pretending to be from a hard neighborhood.

    Had he grown? Or was it me, learning a little more, how to see? Did we perhaps both "go through some stuff," age-alike contemporaries that we are, and come out the other end similarly chastened, humbled, and energized?

    Hopefully all of the above.

    ​--

    *For more, search out landmark feminist writer Susan Faludi's gigantic Stiffed: the Betrayal of the American Man, about society's demand that men have all the answers, know how to fix everything, be heroes, and exist above society rather than take part in it; about how nearly all men feel they cannot live up to those ridiculous demands and feel emasculated as a result; and about how feeling emasculated doesn't sit comfortably with a gender that's been taught to hide its emotions, and to pretend to not have any problems rather than dealing with them.

    **    Mann Tracht, Un Gott Lacht. "Man plans, God laughs."     Best popularized by Woody Allen, who paraphrased it as, "If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans."

    Above image: That's me in Hong Kong, circa 2011, on Nathan Road. Yes, there really is such a place!