Art Access, the longstanding monthly catalogue, is comprised mostly of lists and announcements, informing readers of the month's Pacific Northwest art events. In addition to these listings, there are always (about) three feature articles which open the issue. You can pay to be listed in the directory of announcements. You can pay to have your artwork in the listings, or shown on the cover. But you can't pay to be the subject of one of those three feature articles. They decide that. How do they decide? No one knows. It's their secret sauce. I didn't invest any thought into even hoping they might choose me for their July 2023 issue, back when my solo show (more here and here) was happening. What made them decide to? How did they even know about me? Who knew Elizabeth Bryant and I would get along so well, spending an afternoon looking over work and discussing everything under the sun, going well over our allotted time in excited bonding.

Like most of the special things that happen to us, I can't explain what led to this all transpiring. To some eyes it's just another article in another publication, quickly forgotten and replaced by other matters. But for me it is a thing I cherish, not because of the publicity boost it no doubt brought (my show had record attendance), but because of the serendipity involved, the people involved, the celebration of art and a fleeting but meaningful moment of connection. More than any other piece that's been written about my work, Elizabeth gets what my work is about, and what it aims to achieve. This is the best articulation so far of what I'm hoping to do with my practice. It's short and sweet, like everything about Art Access, but what Ms. Bryant conveys in a short space is admirable for being so accurate, and so succinct.

Read it here!

I was lucky enough to meet Dr. Wirth through a mutual friend. Some people strike you deeply, if such a thing is possible, not with their prestige or accolades but with their unassuming nature. You know beforehand of their significant accomplishments, but upon finally meeting are most impressed by the their warmth and humanity. Where their CV isn't the crowning definition of their identity so much as, quite simply, their kindness. Their humanness. People like to hide behind accomplishments. I'm more impressed when someone prioritizes not their resume but goodness, putting people first. It's so easy to get caught up in what we do; but what about who we are? This blurb of his accomplishments–

"Dr. Wirth, PhD, is an American philosopher and professor of philosophy at Seattle University. He was the Theiline Pigott McCone Chair in Humanities from 2014 to 2016, and his books include Commiserating with Devastated Things: Milan Kundera and the Entitlements of Thinking, Schelling’s Practice of the Wild, and, most recently, Nietzsche and Other Buddhas: Philosophy After Comparative Philosophy."

–like many blurbs (including my own), reveals very little about the person in question. Yes, those are indeed excellent works he's written. But my desire to share his words on my film stem from a deeper appreciation for his personhood. Where the books are merely an extension of his being. I aspire toward something like that. The film is an amalgamation of things I've reflected upon while in the presence of giants. Here are further musings on those reflections, by one I'm lucky to have met.

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Reflections on Men I Trust

I have long thought that in the face of death, especially the death of another, we all become, at least for a few minutes, philosophers. Given that philosophy opens the possibility that we might speak to death and face it directly, we typically turn away, revealing our philosophy to be merely the kinds of self-deceptions that had already governed our living.

This deeply moving film, free of all sentimentality and, for that reason, all the more moving, derives its power by standing in the white heat of this moment as death exposes human living as without “why” and cancels for the dying all of the scientific “hows.” Just as life does not need to be filled with the extraordinary and the spectacular to be precious and intrinsically good, so this film concentrates on the supposedly ordinary, which, cast against the background of its loss, reappears as sufficient in themselves and boundlessly precious.

Without retreating into the abstract, this is also a film about time—yes, death proves time. As such, however, it is allows the power of the moment to appear: not how something is, or why it is (as if explaining death either justifies it or renders it more palatable), but rather the infinite preciousness—and fragility and impermanence—that it is. Mahayana Buddhists call this suchness, things just as they are—fleeting, impermanent, and yes, enough. It is enough that they are simply what they are. They did not have to be more to be worthy of cherishment.

Technically, the editing is also a marvel as it layers and juxtaposes moments of time, each moment suddenly appearing precious: drinking water at the bar, dancing with your sister, speaking French, discussing whether to have children (and the problem of legacy as if we can cheat death by leaving something behind). Even walking in the forest to scatter ashes. Despite our ecological rapacity, there are still sword ferns and western red cedars and western hemlocks and Douglas firs, and their power remains in this moment irrefutable: that they are there.

I loved this film. It is beautiful and honest and it moved me to my core.

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Read other reviews of my film here. Learn more about the film at its official page, or check out the trailer below.
Contact me via the About page if you'd like a secure link to see the film!

I. Repulsion

They slobber past you with their bodies, at once aimless and committed, a sort of slow-motion resolve in that stumbling post-COVID gait we now know so well. Never before have they existed in such casual profusion. There were more closed doors back then, places to hide, institutions to rely on. Now things are different. As long as drugs are more accessible than solutions, people will medicate their problems with the former.

You can kill yourself at Third and Pike now for eighty-eight cents.

It is easy for we the sober-minded to laugh, to marvel at the stupidity of strangers. Look at them, sagging their pants below the knees, fishing through litter, pawing at the cement not for scraps of food but for the smallest, most unlikely hint of a fix. Here is one sitting in a pool of his own excrement, another huffing down stolen ice cream to rebalance his blood sugar, snot glazing across his mustache and lips, feeding into blood from open sores. “They pay money to look like that,” a scruffy but drug-free passenger on my bus chuckled as he watched them outside, incredulously. “They actually pay money to fall asleep! Idiots. Dumbasses!”

Look at their muscles collapsing from the hips up, a new generation that stands with head and knees at equal height, legs bent and bending lower, keeling over from a high finally, reaching for the earth’s opposite horizon. The comical walk and Dickensian squalor of their clothes and skin, almost a dress code by this point; we call them lost, these haphazard solipsists, slinking ever onward in their knock-kneed gait.

They are so easy to ridicule. 

II. However

There is always a however, and never moreso than here. We the Sober can involve the future in our decision-making. We can consider others. The addicted brain does not. Its comprehension of the future only extends as far as acquiring its next fix: an hour maybe, or less than that. Life is measured in blinkered minutes. Only in such a tunnel can the decisions we see out here begin to make sense.

Do you know what an accomplishment it is, to resist a pill? To flush your supply down the toilet, say no, ask for help?  These are actions harder and more worthy of our praise than winning the Nobel Prize. The trepidatious tender courage needed moves me more than those who win elections, run companies, more than lofty resumes and mantles stuffed with trophies. Is an achievement somehow less, because it goes unrecorded? Particularly with what I know about addiction’s effect on brain chemistry, I bow to the person who finds it in themselves to refuse a drink, pill, straw, needle, powder, patch. 

These are the silent accomplishments. Imagine regarding your strung-out self in a bathroom mirror (at a gas station, at a mansion), and seeing those gaunt eyes staring back, as you remember who you thought you could one day be. Not this. You remember you can still start over, and then you do so. You act.

That is the battle these people are trying to win. It is a shameful and humiliating battle but they fight it in public, ignominiously, while the rest of us shake our heads and judge. These people deserve pity, not ridicule.

“They” were all you and me once, children with prospects and dreams, things that made them excited and sad and hopeful. They did not know they would one day start fights over nothing, soil themselves in public, walk into the road not caring if they live or die. 

They did not know the halfway point of their lives when it whizzed right past them.

III. Personally

I attended elementary and junior high school with a girl named Alana. Being the same age we shared many classes, sitting next to each other in Math and Language Arts, and again in Social Studies. She was pretty and kind and smart enough. Many years later she'd board my 3/4 with her Shih Tzu in tow, surprised when I remembered her full name. She recalled mine as well. We trundled down Third Avenue in good spirits. She was searching her cluttered bags for her phone, thrilled when it began ringing. “Bye, Nathan Vass!” she called out as she left. 

Everything seemed fine.

Then I would see her intermittently, across several years. A decline was underway. I began seeing her in the unforgiving back alleys of the city, too much makeup now, a puffy jacket and flip-flops in cold weather; with different men each time. Shame crept into her gaze, and then the rest. The only constant was her smile to me and the dog, always her faithful Shih Tzu accompanying her. 
“I'm glad he's always at your side,” I'd say.
“We've been through a lot together,” she'd reply.
Alana would die before either of us reached twenty-five. Alana McCrawley from Math class and Language Arts, who remembered my full name. Her dog would end up outliving her.

What was her final thought?

I stop for the people at 12th and Jackson. I don't pass them up, and they know that. I want them to know that. Somebody there will always wave if they want me, almost frantically, because they’re so used to being passed by. I respond with my own wave. Some of my favorite passengers out here. “Aw, it's Nathan,” one said recently, with happy relief. “He's not gonna fuck with us!” I want them to know my bus is a little different. This is the guy who cares, who doesn't look down on us. That's what I'm trying for.

Some of them will make it out and live to tell me about it. Some already have. Others of us don't know that we'll unravel, a paycheck or a bottle of pain medication away from Western society's most slippery slope. Maybe it'll be us one day, stumbling against glass and concrete dirt, another slipshod pants-sagging drifter in search of joy, meaning, conscience, belonging… wondering where it all went, baffled by how elusive those things are now. Who among them used to have it easy? Who among them once snickered, looking outside, really believing themselves as they laughed, that'll never be me.

Do not be too quick to sneer. The story is not over yet.

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More on this whole situation here: State of the (Seattle) Union

We are still in the era of virtual events. Here's another, now passed but recorded for your pleasure– wherein I discuss all things transit, COVID, writing, kindness, and the condition of the street. Like all Zoom videos it's not up to snuff in terms of the cinematography and image quality that we might prefer, but hopefully the content is enough to maintain interest. Huge, huge  gratitude to Brock Howell and everyone at SnoTrac for putting this together and hosting me. It was an honor and a treat to meet you all!

For more speeches and talks of mine click here.

Enjoy!