“Everyone” is an artist..”

ake a seat, pour yourself a drink of your choice and listen…

they say you meet someone for a reason a season or a lifetime. back in the day, fresh out of film school, i worked in a bookshop. and i had a crush on a girl who worked in the neighboring shop. one day a man came into her shop. this man was a director, and this man fancied her. and in true postmodern cinderella style he suggested that maybe she should stop working at this shop and work for him instead. and so she did. but the twist of the story is, he underestimated my friend. she resisted his advances and soon proved to him that she was far more important as an assistant, than a random fling. and so she advanced in her career and his interest shape shifted to professional respect.

another friend told me a story recently, about how once as a teenager she had been out walking a friends dog. not being a dog person she was suprised at how the dog made strangers come up and interact with her. and then there was one man who was really taken with the dog ) and told my friend how having a pet was like having a partner. and that you had to really watch over and take care of that partner. he went on to say that in each relationship we have we prepare the person we are with for the next person they will be with. my friend replied,

well whats the point of preparing them for someone else?

and he smiled and said
because someone else is preparing someone for you.

the thing is when you encounter someone, and you engage with them, i mean really engage with them, your world changes a little. i’m always fascinated with the journey i make and continue to make with others. sometimes when i think about how i have met someone, the way we are now with one another couldn’t be further from the way we began .sometimes there are people who seemed to resonate so strongly with me at one point, that now i would struggle to have small talk with. you never know. all i know is that when you open a door to someone, they in turn open a door to you.

and the trip you take through those doors is never a waste of time.

so i’m out last night. me and my crew impatiently ride up in the lift
twelve floors to the club weekend. as soon as we walk in i feel like
i’m in 50 cen’ts in da club video. its dark, with strobing red lights,
low ceilings, rza is mcing, the hip hop beats come fat and thick. its
well crowded and its a good looking crowd at that. with each flash of
light comes teasing glimpses of faces, fists pumping in the air, heads
in baseball caps nodding, girls in tight jeans and short skirts
swaying, winding. so this is is how berlin parties on a tuesday night.
i’m loving it, the atmosphere makes me feel sexy as hell.

and
then there are smoke breaks on the terrace, and more friends arrive,
and the view of the skyline is sick, and when I hear the beat from
downstairs, all i can think about is dancing again. and when we’re down
there, i’m back in that music video vibe. i’m dancing with my friends,
dancing with the crowd in general, totally not in the zone of picking
up anyone or being picked up. vibing off the sheer deliciousness of
random flirtateous eye contact. holding it that second too long, having
the look returned and then turning away to someone else and repeating
the game.

and then i see something that breaks the vibe. i see
a boy i met recently. i don’t know him too well, but i know he has a
girlfriend. i’ve met the girlfriend, she’s seriously hot. i had seen
her leave earlier. adn this boy. this boy is talking to this other
girl. really close. but then its loud right, and maybe he knows her
and… i’m distracted as a track i love comes on.

and then
later, its as if him and i are orbitting the same section of
dancefloor. and in these flashes of red light now i see, his hands on
her. and they’re kissing, and they’re kissing, and numbers are
exchanged. and she leaves. and three songs later he’s chatting up
someone else. and even though i don’t know this boy. and i don’t know
his girlfriend. witnessing this indescretion really bothers me. maybe
its a woman thing, or a filmmaker thing. building the narative in my
head. thinking of the girlfriend on her way home or in bed, not
knowing. maybe the next time she sees him he acts normal. maybe she
knows maybe not. all i know is after this moment, i’m not feeling so
hot anymore. I kind of want to leave.

and then i cycle home
thinking, one of the craziest things about scenes, is sometimes you’re
party to more information about strangers, than you’d ever want or care
to know. ..

I came to this city to complete a film I had shot on communication, digital communication. When I decided to move here I wasn’t that fussed about how much German I picked up. Part of the reason I chose to move here was that I didn’t know many people, and didn’t speak the language, and naively I thought I would change, be more focussed, more internal, less distracted. I did take a few German classes before I came here. But it was just survival stuff:  how much is/ I would like/ I don’t understand/ speak slower/ say it again/ do you speak English/ I’m from London\ no, \yes, and again, / I don’t understand.

As it came closer to moving here and I thought about all the time I would have and the lack of social network I would have, learning German here seemed like a good idea. A kind of why not/ while I’m here idea. And then I moved here. I was cleaning the flat the other day and found a piece of paper where I had scrawled my thoughts on my second day, Friday night and I was in, and feeling kind of lonely and strange. I had three or four friends then. All were busy. It must have been the first Friday night I’d spent by myself indoors, in months, if not years.

Four months later, my phone rings regularly. More often than not I’m invited out rather than ringing round to make plans, and most nights I’m busy. Recently a friend teased me that for someone who moved here seeing the language as a practical barrier to my addiction to nightlife/subculture, I’ve been going out of my way to learn the language as much as I can.

The funny thing is that Berlin is not a city where speaking and understanding German is essential. You really can get by without it. But whenever I met people who had been here for years and not only didn’t speak the language, but had no major desire or interest to, for that matter a kind of arrogance in not needing to, I found myself pulling back. I made things more difficult in a way. I held back from the groups of Americans and English people I met here.

In London most of my friends are foreigners, in Berlin I found myself drawn more to Germans. And before I knew it I had a group, and then groups of German friends. And from time to time they would forget to speak English, or it just would be too unnatural to, and I suddenly would be left out of conversation. After two months of living here, I had a strange dream. In my dream I was in London for a party, excited to see my friends, and as I walked up to one and then another, I realised they were all deep in conversation with each other, in German. I woke up feeling very disorientated. I made a decision to sign up for a course where I would take German four hours a day, five days a week.

After a few weeks of my course, I found myself talking one night for thirty minutes with a group of foreigners out at a gig who could not speak English. They were so understanding of the struggle I was having, that I wasn’t scared to speak, and they were ultra patient and helped me get the words out. And then I found myself having mini conversations in clubs with people who were too drunk, in a place that it was too loud for them to notice my accent or grammatical mistakes. And then I found myself really liking someone who could not speak any English. And then totally by coincidence I ran into this person in a bar and ended up speaking German (horrifically broken, totally creative grammar) for several hours. And I was shocked at how I much I understood, and how I well I could keep up with the conversation, and with the fact I could speak so much at all.

I became a little more confident. . And with some friends started to speaking a mixture of German and English, and instant message in a mixture of German and English, and send texts in German. And now when my friends here spoke amongst each other, rather than tuning out because I could understand nothing, I found from time to time I could follow the conversation, and it was like a light switching on from time to time.

I ask my non English-speaking friend out on a date. The whole night feels like a social experiment. And I’m amazed how much fun I’m having and how concentrated I am as a listener, and how I become a slightly different person. More shy, more of a listener than a speaker, and in this somewhat gendered role of being taken out, being taught. Being led. In London if I liked someone I would be direct and forward, with the German it call comes out a bit coquettish/girly. Friday night we repeat this experiment, where he speaks German and I speak German and English. We end up at a party where everyone is speaking English (but no one really interests me so I dance rather than talk) and end up leaving with a two other friends. We are now two Spaniards, a Britt American and an Italian. We drunkenly argue in all languages about where to go next. When the Spanish boys speak Spanish and I don’t understand, the Italian boy translates it to German so I can. And the night ends in the morning with a different kind of communication altogether…

Then Saturday night I run into a friend in the afternoon, who is delirious from lack of sleep, he is speaking German to me, and then together we have a surreal experience where part from delirium, lack of sleep and intoxication I am also speaking German non stop for the better part of the night. Yesterday I saw an American friend who said that my English was slipping a bit. And by the end of the night there were moments that speaking in any language was completely beyond me.

So today I wake up, twenty minutes after my class has started. I cycle over at breakneck speed. The four hours of class are completely beyond me. And after class I see this new friend I’d made, that had really pushed me to learn and speak so much in the first place. And he can barely look at me, and its clear any further conversation is unlikely.

And then I think bilingual, trilingual, and multilingual. When it comes to some interactions, words in any language are lacking, and meaning can be clearer with the briefest of glances, than any words, sentences, or paragraphs at all….