In reviewing the recent electoral catastrophe, I find myself seeking answers. Am I wrong about my own views? Is it me or them? How did this train wreck happen, and why? It's similar to how I feel when confronted with cruelty and apathy on the street. I'll witness a moment of extreme selfishness and wonder, where is their best self, their considerate self? Why this instead? Selfishness happens most naturally when one's survival is at stake… or when one thinks one's survival is at stake. 

Rural white poverty has always been, numerically, the largest type of poverty in the US, and as ever, it remains the least studied. Sociological studies of the poor tend to stem from major cities and the diverse demographics within them. Many of us have relatives who live out there, with baffling perspectives we cannot share. And don't forget– they find us equally baffling. 

Perspectives come from education, whether in school or from lived experience. What sort of education do we imagine exists out in the red states? To what degree are our rural and working-class neighbors equipped to decode the clever messaging politicians send their way?

1. Breaking it Down

Literacy comes to mind as an effective unit of measure. And literacy is more than being able to read and write. Let's briefly review the PIAAC’s (Program for International Assessment of Adult Competencies) six levels of literacy (more here).

-Below Level 1: basic vocabulary only; can understand info on a familiar topic.
-Level 1: can fill out basic forms; can't make inferences from written material (unable to understand correct dosage on a medicine label).
-Level 2: able to make comparisons and simple inferences; unable to evaluate reliability. (can understand product reviews. Able to write a paragraph about your day).
-Level 3: able to read multiple pages of text. Can evaluate sources and infer complex ideas; can identify inappropriate or irrelevant info (can compare two bus schedules and plan a trip).
-Level 4: can understand non-central ideas from multiple texts to evaluate subtle claims and persuasive discourse (able to detect subtle bias and form one's own conclusion).
-Level 5: can synthesize contrasting points of view; select key info to evaluate conceptual models of ideas; aware of rhetorical cues and high-level inferences requiring specialized background knowledge (can write a PhD dissertation).

These are not measures of worth. I write the above without condescension. There are numerous types of knowledge, including all those the PIAAC system can't even begin to measure. Many of my favorite people, from the street or otherwise, are exactly those whom the above criteria would deem limited in their ability to decode written or spoken messages. I happen to like some of these people, and I respect and learn from them. I find something to admire in a certain freedom they sometimes exhibit, a freedom from the homogenizing intellect-based worldliness that becomes so tiresome after a while.

But when an election is going on with this much at stake, you need to be able to understand what you're looking at.

And as it turns out, 54 percent of the US is below a Level 3. This means they can't identify bias, evaluate reliability, or make inferences about what's irrelevant. They can read headlines, but not multiple pages of text. This map has breakdowns of literacy levels for every county in the US. You might be surprised to discover how many counties are mostly illiterate at levels 3 thru 5. You'll also notice a certain vast, recurring and undeniable correspondence between… you guessed it, counties with limited literacy levels and a high Trump voter response.

2. Feelings & Distractions

All of us humans nurse a loneliness we pretend we don't have. We yearn to belong, to be seen and heard and wanted. What vast pocket of Americans has been continuously ignored, ridiculed and overlooked, by the wider culture, by media, news, politicians and governments? You know the answer. They have spoken now. 

They don't care about your needs, because survival is a selfish act and they imagine their survival is at stake. They believe the lies they've been told, the reassuring pronouncements that their needs will finally be addressed. They've fallen for the urgency capitalism wants us to think is true: that only some can survive. 

A person who feels ignored, especially in the sense of being able to sustain their livelihood, as rural and working-class folks today do, is going to respond enthusiastically to a politician who claims to see them, not condescendingly but equally, who claims to be one of them, who will save them from the rest of the world that ignores them and their needs. Who wants to burn down the whole broken system that's sidelined them for so long. Fear and frustration: these are the ways to manipulate the masses, especially if they're not looking too closely. 

Which is where the literacy part comes in.

Trump is not “one of them,” and never was. You know this. He's an unstable billionaire with dementia seeking to make life easier for himself and other billionaires. He’s a convicted serial rapist and 34-count felon who absolutely does not care about poor white people, as his previous administration makes numbingly clear. Those folks are doing just as badly as they always were. No, he cares about rich white people. He distracts the poor with hot-button social issues that shouldn't even be political, taking advantage of people's shortsightedness on class, while making economic decisions that disadvantage everyone besides his own tax bracket. Only in a country that turns such a blind eye to class could voters fail to comprehend this massive and thoroughly obvious oversight. I'll refrain from discussing the many other oversights. 

Literacy. That's what this election was about. The ability to decode rhetoric. To read through advertising, to perceive the culture's political tricks for what they are. They fell for it, millions of them, to the point that they voted against their own self-interests.

3. In Summation

This great, young country of ours strikes me now as an adolescent, a fiery, brilliant, impassioned creature who seems fully formed but isn't, who has difficulty understanding basic truths, who responds not intellectually but emotionally. Puberty. It's when you make your worst decisions, when you think only of yourself and ignore the needs of others.

Sometimes there's nothing harder than having to share the room with a teenager. Especially when they get to make all the decisions.

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What lies ahead? As a society, we have no choice. It's a cancer diagnosis. 

As individuals though, we do have choice: to help the person next to us. To foster community locally. To remember we do better when those around us (different as they may be) do better. Helping others takes patience and effort. Let us breathe. We don't get to choose the times we live in, but we do get to choose how we live in them. 

I'll see you out there.

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Sources and Further reading:

Trump

• If you're curious, here's what I wrote after election day in 2016– "The Day the Music Died."
• Cosmopolitan. "Trump's victory reveals just how mainstream misogyny has become."  Didn't think I'd see the day when I'd be linking multiple Cosmo articles as further reading on my blog, but this intelligent piece puts things into perspective, including pointing out a gender divide in response to the election that I, amusingly, fall right into in my piece above. A useful balance!
• Cosmopolitan. "A timeline of Donald Trump’s many (alleged) crimes and convictions." This comprehensive list goes all the way back to Trump's 1973 actions against black renters.

Literacy

• Intelexual Media. "America's #1 Problem (RANT!!!)" (video). Fun, passionate breakdown of the above literacy data with historical context from a Black & feminist perspective.
• Program for International Assessment of Adult Competencies. Literacy Levels explained. Definitions and methodology.
• PIAAC. Skills Map. Breakdowns by literacy level and county for all 50 states, with background info and FAQs.

Rural white poverty

• Boston Review. "Who’s to Blame for White Poverty? Dismantling it requires getting the story right." Pleasingly in-depth reviews of three new books on the subject.
• US Census Bureau. "Poverty in the United States: 2022." An overview; the real meat and potatoes is in this 67-page PDF. Boring, dense, and factual, like all the best statistics are. Page 5 for race breakdown.

Although I feel compelled to share the above, this won't become a political blog, I promise! As Paul Currington said, politics and opinions push people apart... whereas stories bring people together. Right now we need the latter. 

I post at the start (or before) of every month. Check back when bills are due!

Celia just called me, a spur-of-the-minute decision as she sped down Rainier late tonight. “This is Celia,” she says in the voicemail. She adds her last name, as though I might have forgotten after all these years.

Not a chance.

“I saw you driving the 7 just now, and I thought I would call. You were northbound on Rainier at Rose. You had your light on, as usual. I was reminded of all the good times we had together, all those rides and conversations.”

I am suffused with a kind of bewilderment, the melancholy joy that comes when we are reminded of the size of existence.
Her voice brought back a flood of– not so much memories but the sensation, the bodied recall of an effortless peace, when the clutter was benign, those sections of our lives that did not feature pain or stress as their principal ingredient. You remember.

She worked at Italian Family Pizza and brought me slices regularly. Those were the days when I got so many meals gifted from passengers I didn't know what to do. Her and I, laughing at the terminal. Or the two of us quietly absorbed in the world moving by, me driving and her up front watching, one or the other of us periodically punctuating things with a comment. The genial silence of relaxed friendship, easy, uncluttered by romance or goals or futures. Or later, speaking softly in her family’s kitchen, the two of us building ideas after the rest of the house had gone to bed. Was she the sister I never got to have?

Celia sitting on top of the wheelwell because why not, she's light enough. And me so happy she made it running all the way down First Hill from work to downtown to catch me, just in time, a long jog in the dark hoping for this moment, her flustered smile still scented with cardboard and dough. She was carrying leftover slices in a box under her arm. Why do I remember this moment better than all the others?

Memories. They overwhelm me now, the surprise that once upon a time this was the biggest thing that ever was, the present, a Tuesday night bus ride home. Catching up over rain-slicked neon pavement. We echo into the deeper past, unknowingly, a gift for our future selves.

If the only intelligent response to the incredible gift of life is gratitude, then the only meaningful interpretation of the past is through forgiveness. We must forgive, others for their hurtful actions and ourselves for our faults. Why dwell on ignorance, laziness, selfishness?

There is no time. The time that was is gone. Let the gauze of selective memory paper over the pain, work its magic, that we might more fully recall the rest of the picture: all of the joy, the lightness and normality, the neutral afternoons and the textures that become real when we forget to rush.

Tonight she continues in the voicemail, telling me she tried to make my recent art show, plus an update: she has a newborn now. It was going to be a surprise at the gallery, but here we are. Her voice is at peace with itself.

The times we shared could only have happened then. That was our season. She makes no mention of “we should get together.” We humans drift closer and then apart, pulled by the tides of ourselves, new projects and people. It is the way of things. Friends once, now acquaintances. They're living their life now and so are you, and you're busy.

But you find yourself pausing, now. You tarry tonight in a still room, alone with your memories even if someone else is sleeping nearby. You go to the kitchen for water and remain a bit after turning out the light, appreciating the darkness and the liberating fullness of time. How the faint light catches the rim of the water glass.

You say to yourself, “She was a good friend of mine.”

I've got two interviews for you this month, both centering around the creative process. These were conducted in relation to my Gallery 110 solo show from last year, which you can learn more about here (including video of a very fun art talk!).

• UW Magazine. Ordinary to Extraordinary: Nathan Vass slows down time with his photography and writing, by Aleenah Ansari. This one's an overview of my photographic process and how it relates to bus driving.
  
• International Examiner. Q&A: Engaging ephemera with imagemaker Nathan Vass’ “Present Perfect,” by Kevin Phan. This piece dives deeper into process and philosophy behind artmaking, discussing specific approaches and things I try to achieve in photo.
  

I post once a month, at the beginning of the month– check back soon for an epic piece about the very last 7/49, which by super special request I was lucky enough to drive!

My jaw dropped in amazement and pleasure.
“Sho Luv!!!” I exclaimed, as he stood before me at Third and Columbia, a resurrected friend from my bygone 358 days. "Oh my goodness!!!"

He burst wide with a grin, the same grin he's always had, the kind of beaming smirk you feel is letting you in on a secret. Maybe he shares that with me because we hail from the same neighborhood in South Central LA, South Gate. I exclaimed, “I'm so happy to see you!"

Sho Luv was too, and told me about recently seeing a driver just like me, getting his keys replaced, and other sundries of the morning.

He settled in, sprawling out in the front side seats. Reflecting. “Last I seen you I think you was goin’ through a breakup,” he said. “Did you end up findin’ someone new?”

I was impressed by his memory. (I'm just the bus driver!) The reality of the mess he alluded to was, and remains, too complicated to sum up in a sentence. You've been there. I’m in a better place now than I was, and by way of so intimating I said aloud, “I sure did!”
He cackled. “Ah knew you would! Tha’s my dude! I knew it, you're still young….”
“Your prophecy was correct!”
“They say when somethin’ is taken away from you, the next thing to come around’ll be that much better.”
“You know it! It's just so hard to see in the moment, right?”
“Yeah, you were in deep feelin’ it. I remember. I used to call you Chris but your name is Nate, right?”
“Yeah!”
“Nate the Great!”
“Exactly, Nate the Great. I'm not that great though!”

He moved to deboard, here at 3rd and Pike (or simply "Ross,” as we call it out here), but changed his mind upon seeing the melee outside, which was a touch worse than the already unsightly norm.

“Naw, I'll go to Virginia.”
“Let's go to Virginia. Let all this mess die down a little.”
He was looking outside. “What d’you make of all these zombies?”

Maybe the term sounds derogatory from the remove of an office or home armchair. I know how using the right vocabulary is of utmost importance in today's more educated circles, and I appreciate such well-meaning value. But things work differently out here on the street. We find ourselves putting greater emphasis on action. The words don't have to be so perfect. If you spend enough time at “the Blade," not passing through it or going around it or reading about it but in it, Sho Luv’s intention reveals itself as less pejorative than mere descriptor: a blend of observation, sarcasm, dejection and concern. These are buddies of ours out here.

“It's crazy,” I replied. “Yeah back then, that was, I was doin’ the E Line, it was the breakup, and it was pandemic, lockdown…”
“That was the bad time. Everybody so dePRESSed.”
“That was rough. All of it mixed together, I couldn't see straight.”
“Whole city falling apart. And now we got all these zombies, kids killin’ kids, killin’ themselves, I don't even know.”
“You know, I was driving this route, past Garfield last week when that kid killed the other kid. I was there right as it all got shut down.”
“They were friends, too!”
I said, “WHAT?”
“Yeah. He intervened to break up the fight, and boom. All three of ‘em were friends, just horsin’ around. Kid was eighteen years old, jus’ ‘bout to graduate. And now, it's like they both dead now.”
“Oh my goodness. That’s a heartbreaker. I had no idea they were buddies. He just got in there to break it up!”
“Yeah.”
“Like any reasonable person. Oh, man, that's heavy.”
“And Garfield’s a Magnet school!”
He'd read my mind. “Exactly Garfield that's one of our best schools!! I mean shootings shouldn't be happening anywhere, but they definitely don't happen at Garfield. It's Garfield!”

And then it was time to answer someone’s question, how to get to the Trailside Apartments, route 24. I heard Sho on his phone: “I be there in a couple minutes. Ah ran into my buddy from the bus line. Nate from South Gate! Yeah!”

Sometimes the fact that Life has to keep going on feels insulting. Why can't the whole world pause, and take stock of itself? Sometimes you just want to sit and watch the rain. A young life was pointlessly wiped out. Where is the space for the paralysis we feel?

But eventually life begins calling out to us, calling us back into the fray. It happens gradually. The grocery list. Phone calls, errands. Then friends. Maybe Life’s continuous, nigh-maddening onward march is exactly what we need. What are we to do, but learn and move forward? Do we stay paralyzed, or do we tend with care to those who are still around?

We will choose to help them. We will tell them how to get to the Trailside Apartments. It's about the person next to us.

I know that's what gotten me through my own hard times, comfortable though they are by comparison. Receiving that energy from others, but most of all giving it out, or trying to. Love. It is a thing we attempt, a verb, a project, and finally a noun that we acquire by giving away, giving it all away, all the time.

Tending to the living. These can be the first steps.

***Stand by~***

Due to popular reaction this post will soon be reappearing here and elsewhere in more exciting fashion! Stay tuned!

This is a revised 2016 article focusing exclusively on Wiley's art and its relationship with craft and labour.
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Some weeks ago I posted a glowing review of SAM's recent Kehinde Wiley show, which I loved. I stand by that review, but wish to add some context which I find troubling enough to consider necessary.

I knew when I saw the show that Wiley didn't paint everything in the paintings, but the implications of both Wiley's and SAM's blasé attitude toward this enormous fact didn't hit me until after taking in the show a second time.

The most disappointing element is the lack of demand by writers, thinkers and viewers to know who made the paintings and how. When concept takes center stage in the appreciation of art, talent, skill, and craftsmanship get relegated to secondary levels of importance, which means the authors of that skill and how they accomplish their work becomes less consequential. 

To look through every one of the books on Wiley at the show and have none of them even address the multiplicity of authorship question is not simply an insult to viewers (does SAM really expect us to think a thirty-six year-old is this skilled and prolific in painting, glass, bronze, and marble?), but an embarrassment on the part of the authors and curators themselves. It guides the discussion into that tiring realm where concept is king, and craftsmanship is discussed only with superlatives because critics who have no experience in the art form can't talk about it in depth, and thus focus only on what they, and anyone else with extensive knowledge in realms besides painting and sculpture, can: content. 

This divide becomes immediately apparent when listening to the difference between how tour guides talk when discussing art before vs. after the Modern period. Take a look at Fred Wiseman's mammoth fly-on-the-wall documentary National Gallery and listen to how the tour guides discuss Vermeer and Hans Holbein II. They talk about 1) craft and 2) how it expresses ideas. Tour guides of the Wiley show are saddled with the awkward task of discussing only the second part. I recall a particularly embarrassing moment at SAM wherein a viewer who happened to be a skilled stained-glass artist asked how a human hand could possibly accomplish the texture and shading of denim jeans on a single pane of glass, to which the poor tour guide had to reply that she had neither any idea how that was accomplished, nor who, or what, had accomplished it. 

We can be blunt and overstate the point by quoting Tom Stoppard: "imagination without skill gives us modern art." But I argue the real villains in this case are not the artists but those who shape the discussion. Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word is instructive here. To forget that content and form are inextricably linked is to miss much of what is beautiful about art and the decisions artists make. We've heard the phrase "style over substance" leveled against films as a criticism; as I've written elsewhere, you generally hear that phrase from people who aren't filmmakers. The style in a worthwhile art piece is the substance. Style, or form, is the language through which the content is relayed to a viewer. Form lives and dies on the strength of the artist's talent. 

Wiley's works would remain striking, in my opinion, after learning that he only paints touch-ups on the faces and some of the skin tones, that the figures and floral pattern work are painted by Chinese laborers, that the sculpture work is done by assistants, that the models are only paid a measly $20, and that the stained glass works are created entirely by individuals skilled in that realm (using photographs by Wiley as a base). The only thing that would suffer is Wiley's massive ego. We might also more easily understand the strange lack of passion one always detects upon inspecting a Wiley up close; an intricate but flat, uninspired collection of brushstrokes. No wonder. That the above authorship information is difficult to come by is disappointing on the part of Wiley and SAM, but so too is the lack of outcry on the part of viewers. 

It thusly becomes understandable that Wiley declines journalist's visits to his studio, unless it's to have Martin Schoeller take a picture of him dabbing at a canvas while sitting atop a horse; that he tells reporters he doesn't want us to know to what degree his actual involvement is in the painting process, evading questions with coy comments about preserving his "secret sauce." This is where he differs from Brueghel and Botticelli. No artist of great skill hides his talent behind a cloak of coy false modesty. If you didn't paint it, but your students did, it gets signed "School of Michelangelo." There's an understanding that it was a group effort. Practices like these have remained better documented throughout history in part because the students et al nearly always, unlike the case with Wiley, hail from the same language and culture as the primary artist.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, Chihuly. Koons. Crewdson. I say close, but no Kehinde. They're not quite  corollaries; these artists and others like them, who heavily involve assistants, don't shroud their processes in secrecy, but hold it open for all to see and determine the worth of the works. For heaven's sake, we all know Koons doesn't make his own stuff. 

There's another, more troubling reason why Wiley stands alone here. Unlike the folks above, Wiley's work is explicitly intended to counter the subjugation of marginalized (black) people in Western Art. Personally I love the idea. So far, so great. How does he accomplish this? 

By subjugating and rendering nameless the marginalized (Asian) peoples who create these artworks for him. 

He's eliminating subjugation one heroic step at a time, using: subjugation. Let's flip the races around and see how it sounds. The twenty-first century's wealthiest white artist creates enormous volumes of high-impact portraits of Asians, rescuing them from repression and facelessness, by farming out the work to nameless black laborers in developing countries worldwide. In gut-busting levels of hubris, said artist refuses to credit or acknowledge the specific contributions of these black men and women in the name of preserving the mystique of his "secret sauce." 

We're in the middle of what should be the biggest conversation in art right now.

Most items we consume are created by hardworking poor people across the world who get zilch recognition. As China continues to develop and labor costs gradually rise, many manufacturing entities are opening plants elsewhere in the continued search for cheap labor. I don't appreciate this exploitative trajectory, but I can understand it. Wiley follows the trend, citing cost savings. However, he's in a financial position where this behavior is unnecessary. Kehinde Wiley is quite possibly the richest American artist of his generation. He doesn't need to be using social constructs of oppression in order to righteously attack social constructs of oppression. As one of many thousands of struggling artists of Asian descent, you can guess my perspective here.

No, the fact that Wiley is barely involved with the hands-on element of his final works is not the scandal. The scandal isn't even that the authorship is kept an unanswered question. It's that the laborers, painters, stained-glass workers and sculptors are kept nameless and repressed, and no one notices, or even thinks to ask about it.

That's the scandal. 

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Further reading:

Outsource to China, a detailed NY Magazine piece on Wiley, who candidly admits he often abandons his celebrated "street-casting" process.
Kehinde Wiley's Dilemma: How the Artist Painted Himself Into a Corner With His New Works​. Ben Davis explores Wiley's portraits of women at Sean Kelly.
Background Considerations: Christian Frock considers the issues during Wiley's 2013 launch at the Contemporary Jewish Museum. 
Nay Sayin': John James Anderson explores the degree to which Wiley "keeps it real."
Stop Lionizing Kehinde Wiley's Paintings. Stop Dismissing Them, Too, ​by our own Jen Graves.