June 2026 - Welcome.

You remember Gig CarShare. That was the app which, like today's Lime except for cars rather than bikes or scooters, allowed you to rent a vehicle and drive it to a location of your choice without having to return it to the pickup point. For a night owl like me who worked after the last buses and train home, I loved it. It seemed too good to be true, honestly– and we now know that it was, as Gig CarShare is long since out of business.

But there was a period when it worked, and I found it wonderful. You could reduce the price of your rental by filling up the car’s gas tank (the cost of which was reimbursed to you), and so I often found myself at various derelict Sodo gas stations in the wee hours.

Decrepit spaces in Seattle used to be abandoned; now they hum with presences of varying safety, eyes and sounds and legs and flame from over there, rustling beneath cardboard and other debris, the dark urban forest floor a place where one must tread carefully.

I was at a decidedly sketchy Arco around 01h00, waiting in line to ask for a receipt from Pump 5 after filling up– Gig CarShare required a printed receipt, and this pump’s printer was long past broken– and I regarded the surroundings. I was thankful to still be in uniform; in spaces like this it's a suit of armor. They know I'm something besides a tech worker or someone else made of money; they know I'm working class; and they know I'm not an authority figure who might do them harm. I'm just the bus driver.

A scraggly white guy was pinwheeling past, his arms doing strange things and his eyes everywhere. He didn't seem unstable enough that I should avoid speaking. Better to make friends than enemies in the nighttime.

“How's it goin’,” I said, to which he replied in kind, and I added, it being the first hours of July 5th, “Happy 4th!”

“You too!”

Two figures reclined on the ground, immediately adjacent the attendant’s heavily barred window; this was one of those gas stations you could not enter. The male of the pair had dark sunglasses and may have been Mark, a street guy I used to see around there, but I couldn't be sure; and a bald young lady in short shorts, shivering for reasons unknown to me on this hot summer night.

Someone stood in front of me in line.

A young woman with a striking physical appearance and evening dress to show it off was speaking to the attendant, and I stood at a respectful distance behind her. She didn't exactly fit in to the environment. While the attendant attended to something she turned to me. Aware of her surroundings.

I said, “Havin’ a good night?”

“I am, what about you, you just gettin’ offa work?”

“I am, you know it! Feelin’ good!”

“What're you gonna do now?”

I said, “I'm gonna tryyy to go to sleep. I try to go to bed as soon as I get home, to sorta stay in line with the rest of the world's sleep schedule. Doesn't always work though! Did you have a good holiday?”

“Yeah, really good,” she beamed. “Just workin’. I'm over at [unintelligible] if you ever want to stop by.”

I didn't hear her. “You're over at where?”

Sheepishly this time: “Dreamgirls.”

You could see the embarrassment in her eyes, wondering what I thought of her. I needed her to feel un-judged. Appreciated. Respected.

I said, “Oh, right on! Gosh, that seems like intense work. I hope everybody's treating you right over there, respecting you and everything.”

She was comfortable again as she replied, “Oh yeah, they always do!”

The scraggly guy, overhearing us, concurred, saying, “Have you SEEN those bouncers they got over there?”

I laughed. “Ha, good point!”

She exclaimed with a glowing smile, “I make them respect me!”

“That's awesome. Are you a night owl?”

“Totally.”

“Me too. I love the nighttime.”

A bill had dropped as the cashier served her a wad of bills. I pointed it out. She'd seen it already, and, seemingly also aware of the watchful eyes on the ground nearby, she handed the fallen bill to the bald woman. “Here,” she said.

She included me in her farewell as she addressed the bodies on the ground, with a wave at Scraggly: “You all have a wonderful rest o’ the night now, it was good bein’ here with you!”

And with that she strode away. I marveled at her fearless confidence. Such skill. She knew the street. That it's important to include these faces. She was dressed sexy, handling large amounts of cash, hemmed in by desperate and unpredictable people… and yet, despite all that, she somehow owned it. The gas station was hers for those minutes.

I will probably never see you again. But you're a role model. You didn't just give out kindness and respect. You beamed it out, when you didn't have to.

Thank you.

I post on the blog on the 1st of every month, or before– check back for more! Or read my book for more stories!

As you may know, I once worked briefly as a film critic in Hollywood. This is an essay about the first film made about the communities and spaces I now work in. A meeting of my worlds!

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I won’t try to convince you it’s a great film. You can decide (watch the trailer here). But it is a special film, and not just for us Seattleites, nor just for East African immigrant communities. It will be both of those things for many of us, because it offers delights unique in our current cinematic landscape.

1. The Big Picture

As with American discourse historically, explicit mention of class is subdued in today's culture wars. You know that identity politics have experienced a renewed and forceful attention to race and gender, but what's often left out of the conversation is what every ethnic studies student knows: it's never just race, but always race and class. Films nowadays tend to depict either the incredibly wealthy or the spectacularly destitute. Now that the middle class has become the working class, where are the films about that vast swath of American life? The films about people who drive Honda Civics? Not everyone lives in either a back alley or a high-rise.

Know Your Place is, to its great credit, not a political film. It makes its points by showing, not telling. The title reminds us of the pronounced importance that geography has in the identity of working-class peoples, but this isn't something the characters reflect on; they're too busy living the realities of their lives to academically analyze their inclinations. When a Black boy gazes upon John Gast’s painting American Progress, that symbolic epitome of White westward expansion, we are invited as viewers to reflect on the ironies and losses implicit; but the boy remains silent, and the filmmakers wisely refrain from telling us what, or how, to think about the moment. Contemporary studio pictures are desperate to tell us what we should believe; director Zia Mohajerjasbi feels instead more like a student of 1970s New Hollywood, wherein the audience was assumed to be perceptive, a crucial ingredient in ‘completing’ the picture, adding to it by supplying their own interpretation.

2. The Concept

Know Your Place depicts a milieu without judgment, involving the viewer in Seattle’s Ethiopian community in all its rich complexities. We follow two boys over the course of a day as lessons are learned, friendships are tested, and insights are gained. The familiarity of this underlying structure is a useful counterpoint to the intense specificity of the world shown. Seattle's Rainier Valley, Central District, its ethnic enclaves and their secrets and joys– these have not been seen in American film before. We need the archetypal journey to grab onto, the better to be able to appreciate the local detail. Also, Mohajerjasbi goes further in his structural gambit, attempting and somehow succeeding in the deeply implausible prospect of a coming-of-age that happens within a single day. Our heroes, two teen boys with preciously undeveloped emotional registers, go about their day as many of us once did, deeply unaware of what we will later cherish and value.

Do you remember the youthful days of careless abandon, both restless and happy, when the opinions of peers felt like the only thing that mattered? None of us were our best selves then, and the same is true here. Joseph Smith and Natnael Mebrahtu, nonprofessionals playing versions of themselves with impressive verisimilitude, exude the blustery aimless confidence they haven't yet realized would benefit from direction, introspection and vulnerability.

As in many immigrant communities, these children are desperate to be “American," to separate themselves from their families, refusing to speak their parents’ language and dressing, walking and talking in an inarguably West Coast urban vernacular. Only we viewers are made aware of the vast cultural knowledge these youngsters are throwing away. When an adult family friend and community member encourages them to embrace their heritage, pointing out that it's ultimately the central element of their identities and always will be, they are unable to respond with anything but dismissive humor… but in a beautiful moment of nuance, you can sense the idea is landing within them, a first seed settling, destined to one day take root. The ego death that cements one's coming of age may be a long ways off for these two young friends, but the birth of that journey is hinted at throughout the day depicted, beautifully, subtly, and with great nuance.

Mohajerjasbi favors a cinemascope frame and wide lenses, together with a filmlike tone curve, to capture a lived-in authenticity that recalls both New Hollywood and the Italian Neorealists. There are echoes of Cassavetes in the naturalism of the performances– entirely by first-time actors and friends of the director, who is deeply embedded in the communities he depicts– and the quality of these performances is uniformly excellent, a testament to both the actors and Mohajerjasbi’s ability in coaxing such talent out of newcomers. As a director myself the challenge of pulling this off can't be overstated. Of particular note is an extended monologue delivered in a kitchen, in simple close-up, which has all the power of Ibsen or August Wilson.

3. The Place

I had the fortune of seeing the film theatrically, and as an audience we gasped at the beauty of our city onscreen. This is not the Seattle of Sleepless in Seattle or Singles or even the wonderful Lynn Shelton pictures. It's the city of my passengers, an aged, ethnic and multi-seasonal beast, sometimes awash in fog and autumnal hues, other times blazing with hard winter light, alive to our famously mercurial atmospheres.

Additionally, no film has shot in the neighborhoods Know Your Place goes to: the CD, Rainier Beach, Little Saigon, Brighton, Sodo. Over and over I found myself struck by the emotional authenticity of the location scouting: when Mebrahtu steps outside of Sunset Café, the Ethiopian restaurant on Rainier and Rose, and gestures toward the train station for the next plot point, he's pointing in the correct real-world direction. When the boys miss their bus in Chinatown and we cut to them completing their walk at 26th and Alder, I heard the audience sigh at the reality of that distance. Some of us have walked it.

Things like this help a film feel grounded, even if we don't know the local geography. It helps the performances. Even moments that are geographically fanciful, such as a clever match-cut involving 4th and Edgar Martinez Drive, strike us as ingenious, causing us to see the city in a new way. In the most subtle bit of insider baseball, the first intra-bus dialogue scene, although shot on a diesel coach, actually features the sounds of an electric trolley bus in motion– as would be the case on a route 3 heading east on Cherry Street. They had to have known almost no one would notice that detail. But they did it anyway (did they know I'd be watching this??).

The significant presence throughout of public transit, as a liminal but essential space where life happens, is likewise not commented on, but remains noticeable in its contrast to other films, which often lack awareness of this reality in working-class life. There are things a Hollywood screenwriter just isn't going to know.

4. Broadly

There are these decisions and others, of which I'll leave you to discover. I'll mention just one more– the scene in which our heroes are accosted by an overzealous police officer. Depicting such moments on film is a fraught enterprise, as audiences often interpret them as broadly representational rather than specific, and the grating temptation toward preaching to the converted is strong. Mohajerjasbi chooses to intercut the interrogation with various adults of color confronting the camera silently, with calm and resilient dignity. He both undercuts the scene’s tension and deepens it, tying it to universal histories and asking us to consider the larger picture, in a way that lets us decide how we feel.

Mohajerjasbi and his crew have created something that, in earlier times, would have made a huge splash. The corporate obsession to try to remove cinema from the domain of art and plant it firmly in the realm of product, of satisfying the quarterly bottom line, has reduced its cultural value. We used to expect films to comment on society, to reflect and refract the best and worst of our times in ways that were complex, edifying, and artistically trailblazing. Such work is now relegated to the margins, but our future film historians will celebrate, dissect, and advocate for these works with a vigor that will make us wonder how audiences ever bothered to watch anything else. (For a precedent of this, look at the highest grossing films of each year in the 1980s, a decade similarly obsessed with finance, and notice how many of the titles aren't even recognizable to us now.)

Time sifts out the dregs. Know Your Place may not join the pantheon of canonized classics, but it will remain special for Seattleites for a long time. Is it a masterpiece? I use that word sparingly, so I have to say no; but does it need to be a masterpiece? Do we always have to rate everything, evaluate, have a “hot take?" Can't an artwork just be what it is, and can't we just appreciate what it has to offer, and what it makes us think about? Because there's no doubt Know Your Place does all that and more.

Scrappy Beauty

Seattle's "Know Your Place": Film Review