Ruby Stark

I can’t stop watching this video of Des Ark:

So, I went to see Matte in Leeds. The train from Cambridge to London was delayed, so I missed the train to Leeds, and then the one I got broke down. Train rage welled up. I watched Jim Jarmusch’s film, Stranger Than Paradise. It’s in black and white and each scene is filmed in one static shot and nothing really happens, but not in a good way.

I arrived and Matte and I were deferential and danced around each other. We went for some Japanese food and she told me about being in the forest. It sounds like she is happy: she is exactly where she wants to be. She mentioned that she is hardly seeing Abel anymore. Apparently, things kind of fell apart after they started spending extended periods of time together.

We wandered around in the cold and then went to a pub that had a fake fire. We talked about how things felt a bit weird. I figured it was because we were seeing each other for the first time where there was no romance. It was so fucking different from when we last saw each other again after we broke up the first time and we couldn’t stop touching. I said something, and I can’t remember what it was, and tears welled up. Later, I said I missed her so much, and that I was really worried about meeting the paramedics who saved me, and that I was totally discombobulated by the thought of moving to Berlin. And then I got even closer to crying so I went to the loo to do that in private.

The thing that became clear, and that made me cry repeatedly over the next few days: she has basically moved on.

I wanted to tell her about this scene in Stone Butch Blues where Jess takes two children to the zoo. It’s snowing and freezing cold and the animals are forlorn. One of the children asks her whether she’s leaving and she says, Yes because I have to, and the children cry. And the whole scene is suffused with that strange hopeless sadness of childhood that comes when something bad happens that is completely beyond your control. My Mum said that when my Dad left home, she told me, Daddy’s leaving, and I cried and said, No, and, though I don’t remember that moment, when I think of it now I get the same feeling as that scene.

So, I wanted to tell Matte, but I kind of knew in advance that, like some of the other really strong things in my head, she just wouldn’t get it. Very few people do.

We wandered around in the snow by the canal. She showed me where she used to smoke weed and snog her friends, and her favourite bridge to stand on and look at the old factories (now all office buildings). At last, we went to the station and hugged and kissed once on the lips and then I got on the train and cried most of the way home.

I listened to the recording I made of Efterklang’s Cutting Ice To Snow, and thought about how tears rolled down my cheeks as they played, and that the lyrics, which I heard as, “You’ve gone too far, despite my city walls”, were, for me, about Matte becoming a person I was no longer compatible with, who existed outside my borders: in the wild, away from big cities, polyamorous.

Last Monday, I went to see my favourite noise boy play. Snow and ice still covered the pavements in London and the traffic outside my house was standing still. The weekend before, my sister had told me she is pregnant. I was so pleased I could barely contain it. I felt close to crying: crying with joy, crying with excitement, crying that she was doing something I never can. I rang her to check she was OK and gave up waiting for the bus and walked down the hill to the tube. I didn’t slip, which was a miracle.

I took the tube to Liverpool Street and then walked up to the venue. I went inside, bought a glass of lager at the bar and asked where the gig was. The guy told me upstairs and I went up the spiral staircase to find dusty wooden floor boards, twenty people, someone doing a painting and a guy setting up. I leaned against the wall, the cold, exciting feeling of the beer creeping up the back of my neck. The guy played a droney, guitar and reverberated-screams set with unintelligible images playing against the wall behind him. I relaxed into another secret-life night, feeling anonymous and lovely and alone.

Then, the guy who had just played came up to me said, “Hi Ruby”, and it was an old acquaintance I met in Leeds who also has a solo acoustic project and numerous punk bands. We swapped our bands’ CDs and talked about making music.

Noise boy got stuck on the motorway and didn’t turn up, so I set off home in the snow, reading David Foster Wallace’s essay about David Lynch and getting that nervous, opening-up-of-intellectual-possibilities excitement.

This evening, I walked along the road between my work and the bus stop with my coat zipped high and my collar around my cheeks and my hands in my front jacket pockets. I hadn’t slept properly for three days, and I felt blank and very cold. I felt like Richard Papen walking home from the supper where his friends had been plotting his friend’s murder in The Secret History.

I don’t know why, but I decided to put on Bruce Sterling’s Webstock talk. I fell asleep one night in hospital whilst listening to my iPhone, then awoke from a dream about being on a secret mission with some friends, and killing a policeman, and stuffing myself into a dumb waiter, and Bruce Sterling’s talk was going and I still had the dream feeling and that mixed with Sterling’s revolutionary words and him alternating his delivery from sombre Lee Marvin to the soaring music in that Godspeed You! Black Emperor song. When I think back to that moment of lying in bed, I get the same feeling of possibility that, unlike most nostalgia, comes from the associative trigger itself, rather than the time, and I think it’s the same for that Des Ark song and Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex and L’Auberge Espagnole.