“Everyone” is an artist..”

1. Timing isn’t just part of it, its most of it

2. The new lover is often the antidote to the last.

3. If your “type” is super specific, you’re probably consistantly going for the wrong one…

4. only when you truly give up on waiting for love, in fact stop caring altogether, will it knock you back unconcious.

5. its easy to fall in love when your time in a place is running out.

6. its easy to make loved up declarations when you don’t expect to get them in return

7. its fun to be chased, sure…but run for too long and the chaser will either give up the chase or be more interested in the chase than you.

8. its fun to chase, sure… but chase for too long and it will become more about the chase, or no more than chasing…

9. you cannot “protect” yourself from falling in love, and if you try to, you’re probably denying it altogether.

10.Beware of artists and all manner of creatives (although the texts will rock, the passion won’t run dry and the sex… the sex will be blinding)

11. Long distance relationships can work, but only if there comes a point when both parties agree on one place to live on.

12.Love is not enough.

13. When its truly not working out … “Recognize, Move on”

14. Never take love advice from a romantic…

P.S…
A poet is more likely to write about a crush or a heartbreaker than one they are in love with.

when the weather gets cold, this girl gets busy. here’s another cheeky teaser of something i’ve just finished cutting.

um so with all the excitement with paula making tracks and performing i must admit i got a little distracted and forgot a bit about me, and the fact that i’m kind of sort of supposed to be a filmmaker…. but thanks to the fabulous girls at Missinglingling I had an opportunity to create a little behind the scenes promo for their fashion label, and i’ll be posting clips up soon.

in the mean time i’m also in middle of co-ordinating a london vs. berlin filmmakers short film screening at ping pong bar on Dec 9th. more about that soon. What i can tell you is alongside a roster of other international talent, i will be premiering a short film i made about what was thisisnotabar in brick lane. here’s a little teaser…

add/reject/block is the title of the documentary i’m making. add/reject/block is the cycle of online friendship, the online representation of real life friendships/relationships.its the cycle we throw ourselves through time and time again. hello, do i want to let you into my life? yes or no? what kind of privacy restraints if i do? how far do i let you in? and if i begin with my guard up, when do i let my guard down and how far?

when i was in highschool sex/intimacy was dicussed in baseball metaphors, running metaphors, how far did you get? did you get to? how far would she let you? how far did you let him? door after door gently eased up, pushed through, kicked in until some kind of climax of sexual/emotional/personal space. the longer the chase the greater the “victory” the longer the chase the more it feels like you’ve given up/ given into. and somehow still even at thirty i continue to find myself flashing back into something no greater or deeper than those highschool interactions at times. the only difference is that the game has higher stakes. or for better or worse i don’t feel like playing games anymore.

hopefully this where the strength comes in. when you stop playing along with an act to avoid tension and you outright, outwardly, directly ask for clear answers, even when they can be hurtful ones. one of the things i love about the berlin mindset and about the german friends i made when i first came here is that the people i connected with may have taken a little longer than londoners to open up, but when they did i have always known where i am with them.

its changed me too. i’m as friendly as americans as known for, as polite and concerned about social niceties as my british family are, but now more than ever I like to be clear, i like to be direct. i’m not scared of awkwardness anymore. and all this results in at the end of the day is a number deleted from my phone, a contact blocked from my email. representing a door closed adn the end of an ongoing off and on thing that i’m far too tired too deal with anymore. maybe this is too personal. maybe this doesn’t make any sense. all i know is today i’ve realised as open as i am, even i have my limits. and better yet, i’ve realised there’s nothing at all wrong with that.

saying i wear my heart on my sleeve is an understatement. sometimes beneath this veneer of out of control outgoing social coordinating socialite, i’m hiding behind an affected fabulousness. because if you look the part, if you talk the part, if you walk with those who keep your energy high, maybe no one will be able to tell that sometimes its an act. and to make matters worse i’m a poet, and even as a filmmaker/writer my subject matter has always erred on the side of the personal. i hate it when i’m asked “what i do” currently i’m some kind of artist that performs what my current flatmate refers to as not really poems but talking (she means it partly in a good way). 

and i think back to before. and i think back to how this all began. i came to berlin allegedlly to complete my first feature lenght documentary. six months later i emerged as a performance poet. i still have no idea how it happened. i can’t answer ” what do i do?” so easily. so i’ll try another one. my favourite berlin question. why did i come here? 

in one’s life you come to a point, or rather, you can come to a point… you come to a point where you take all of your worldly possessions and realise you don’t really want or need any of them and then you build them up sky high and torch them, while laughing. everyone thinks you’re crazy. maybe because you are (at least a little) and then maybe that doesn’t work either so you decide to leave with only what you can carry and go somewhere far. extra points if you know next to noone, bonus points if another language is involved. super extra bonus points if it feels like a genuine restart. and its great really. you don’t look back, you don’t even think about where you’ve been. but severing the umbilical cord to who you are and your old life is not so straightforward. you subconciously find ways to keep ties. some that you may not even really need, some that are not worth the energy and heart you put into them, some that actually get in the way of you going forward. ..

and before you know it, you realise how much time has passed. how quickly its passed. the wondrous hellbent hedonism of summer, the sex, the substances, the twilight through daylight conversations with strangers. the moment you realised that even though you hadn’t ridden a bike since the age of fourteen, that now you can ride a bike one handed drunk in the rain while carrying a phone conversation, drinking a beer and smoking the ciggarette that hangs from your lips. and you’ve been up for almost 20 hours, but you’re still going to the afterhour (extra points if its an open air that you found out about by word of mouth/myspace) and the partying the excess was is how it starts, but then the weather turns and you turn, and all these experiences pour through a creative filter, you can’t stop creating. and you need for balance means the outlandishness of all that revelry transforms into a work ethic stronger than one you ever had. and suddenly this place, this city, this…. escape…
has eclipsed the life you once had, the home you once had, and even the friends who’ve known you so much less longer than those you’ve loved for years, have a sense of you, know you in a way, few of your old friends can. 

and its scary/unsettling/heartbreaking at first. but then you stop and see you’ve been reborn. and even if it took a bit of pain to get there, the person you are in this life, is by far a new and improved version of the last. 

i havn’t just closed a chapter, i’ve started writing a whole new novel

a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/mochachild/3021742791/” title=”11-11-08_1625 by mochachild, on Flickr”>

sunday night was the monthly performance extravaganza fuel, hosted by the inimitable lady gaby, and i was was also honoured by debut readings from ryan nash and james wheatley. as an added suprise the night ended with my friend marty and tony doing a musical improv rendition of a james and ryan poems. here’s as much as i could get on the camera phone.

maybe you had to be there. maybe you were.

p.s. my ladygirl lauren has informed me the next collection of paula varjack t-shirts will be heading my way soon. if anyone likes the look of these holla, i’ll be selling them at a pocket friendly price.

my relationship to my right to vote changed in the last month. i found myself in a tedious and drawn out email battle to get my absentee ballot (complicated by having no record here of my social security number). finally resulting in a sympathetic (or sick of me hassling) election official authorising my ballot request, only to have it emailed to me after five pm on friday, to then have a couple of german postal officials tell me there was no service that would get it posted on time, only to have fed ex get difficult over my lack of landline, only to to get very very lost in the outskirts of neukolln on monday in an island of industrial estates, only to fiinally find the fedex depot within ten minutes of their cut off point…. maybe because it wasn’t made easy for me, this battle to send this little piece of paper to america made me suddenly care very much about my vote, and my right to vote.

and with that piece of paper out into the ether. i then found myself last night sitting in the living room of a friend of a friend’s house. a mixed crowd of europeans and americans. watching cnn and bbc until five am as teh election results slowly but eventually grew to a landslide victory. (it was all made slightly more amusing by the inspired decision of a mexican-jewish-sanfranciscan to play a drinking game where we had to take a shot of vodka whenenver sarah pallin was named… joe bieden’s name merited two shots)

my cultural identity is fractured. and my accent and the blue passport that gathers dust are foreign to me at times. but this whole experience, which in some ways started with finding close friendships with american friends here, has brought me closer to the american part of my identity and the importance, for an american abroad, of voting. i feel like i also have to say here, that as much as i’m inspired by total exuberance this win has brought to my american friends, i don’t fall into that camp that feels everything will suddenly drastically improve (Or that oft used word now.. change) . but something very exciting has happened, on many many levels, and that is still profound to me.

in some way and for many, America has proved to itself and the world that it is not behind the disaster that was the last administration. Its never been easy being an american abroad in europe, the advice to backpackers to wear a canadian flag patch rather than american one has relevance. for me and many of my friends, the moment you speak with an american accent outside of america, you are often met with a challenge and tirade to politics and policy you may not even support or have ever voted for. And in recent years global opinion of america fell to such lows, that i found friends i grew up with visiting me here, completely embarrassed of the country they came from. I think the global response in recent years is totally just, but i’m happy that finally america has had a chance to begin to rebuild itself in the eyes of the world again.

and as much as race in this election has not meant as much to me. (although i will admit that i was one of the disbelievers in the beginning who truly felt america would never elect a black democratic president). i can’t help but finally take on board how much it means right now not just to african americans, but to africans, and to people of colour across the world that they will be reflected in the face that will now represent america. This is a young mixed race liberal academic president. THis is a man who in his acceptance speech names ALL who put him there, not just all ages and races but gay and straight. his appointment is emblematic on such a powerful level, that it even had to be recognized in mccain’s concession speech, which i also have to say was remarkable and moving.

but more than anything i think this sends a message to my generation, to people of colour and to americans who live abroad. we are a new voice and we are speaking. we have stopped just complaining and we have galvanised. and all of our votes have mattered. i’m feeling very humbled. Because as smug as those of us from the east and west coast are about being the “liberal elite” watching a state like virginia weigh up the issues and open up past their republican past is astonishing. I will never forget being half awake, drunk and exhausted by waiting only to see that good news come in. in the same flat, a small baby berliner girl woke up without crying, sat with her german mother and american father and opened her eyes wide to her future.

if nothing else its a very good sign of the times. And i may be less of a fan of the much hyped and overused noun

“change” .

But I”m a hundred and ten times behind the word
HOPE…