I've been so lucky, to have 2 best friends to stumble through this life with for so long;
both my (eventual) bandmates, Mark and Malcolm.
Malcolm is gone now, and Mark and I seem to just kind of be able to blink at each other like the other 2
confused wheels on a tricycle where one just fell off. From the bottom of some ditch, from the feel of it.
And I think we're upside down...
What's happened to him and what led up to his death on Tuesday afternoon are not at all clear things
to most of us at present, and still being investigated as we speak. It's not my purpose today to get into
that here. Hopefully, some things will clarify as time goes on. For now, what is known is hard enough
to absorb without punching it up with copy of my own imaginings.
Malcolm and I were friends for 20 years. I founded our friendship by storming out of a room in
embarassment at having foolishly gone into an arguement about the Rock group The Police without
much more than generalizations I couldn't back up. That was when I learned you don't argue with MX
without chapter and verse to support yourself! Few people I've ever met relished an arguement as
much as MX while also having his level of respect for other opinions decently supported, as opposed
to a drive to convert you to his way of thinking before the conversation was done. He just loved to
take sides and explore ideas from different angles that way, however passionately held his own
opinions were to him. In many ways, our entire two decade friendship was one long, intense and
frequently interrupted conversation.
It was one of the major luxuries of my life not to just survive that first arguement, but to get to make
actual music with Malcolm whenever possible for many of those years, starting with an astonishing
weekend in Oct '87 during which, never having worked with me or heard demos, Malcolm tracked drums for 16
songs of mine on a tape I was working on, 'Colliding'. It was only the 3rd or 4th time we'd even met, but
it was a bonding experience we'd still use as a touchstone now. He worked on bits and bobs with me
from then on, but it wasn't until '99 that we finally formed a proper band, with Mark Kuntsi. Another
1000 Miles has been the happiest music making experience of my life, and we were so lucky to have
such an original and brilliant drummer in the band, who was so willing to serve the songs themselves.
He was capable of playing any music under the sun, and while I know his own listening tastes
favoured alot of things very different from what we played and there were whole other musical fields he
wished to visit as well, he was always incredibly gracious with his time, energy and ideas within the
band, and I was thrilled to have the chance to do the work we have with him.
Of course, playing in a1000m was something Malcolm squeezed in to his incredibly busy life as a
working actor, and it is the enthusiasm, depth, and empathy he brought to his primary role, that of his
very life, that make people i know now who met him once or twice seem as stunned with his passing as
those of us who knew him for ages. Malcolm was so much larger than life, it seemed he ought to be
larger than death, as well. We met in Toronto a week before all this went down, and after doing his
eat-2-complete-meals-back to back wonder, when I got up to take the transit back to where I'd parked
my van and paid so much I was disinclined to move it, he rode the subway and streetcar and then
walked me back to my van and out of the lot before I carried on wherever I was going next. My last
picture of him is in my rearview mirror, waving. He was with people all the way, and always behind
them. He did not have, or choose to erect, the normal shields and walls alot of us have in place as the
norm, and thus, seemed to experience life SO intensly all the time, and use his powerful skills of
expression to convey what he saw to his friends. It's certainly true he DID have alot of walls between
the many different parts of his life, and I learned early, as we all know by now, that while Malcolm
might freely answer any question you asked him, he didn't volunteer much, and you had to know what
to ask AND ask it to get him to talk about himself, as opposed to genre fiction, music, comics, or TV.
I think, at the end of the day, it's as a fan of our numerous shared enthusiams that I will recall Malcolm
best and most, be it talking about some obscure album by somebody, or a Spider Robinson book, or
some old lyic of mine he'd cited in an arguement, or talking Trek all night. Malcolm was the ultimate
genre enthusiast, and he had an encyclopaediac knowledge of music, SF shows and books and comics
of all sorts. It mattered little to him if a show had shaky production values or whatever shortcomings, if
the stories and spirit were there. A Shakespearean actor trained to convey the vasty fields of France
on an often largely bear stage had no trouble seeing past such things in his mind to get on with the
tale, an important lesson he taught me young. Enthusiasm, projection, clear intent... and a good tale to
tell. these were the things that mattered.
MX and I both had a soft spot for Space 1999, and often joked about whether the moon was still
around or not each day Sept 13th came around, because they used to cite that date for it leaving earth
orbit due to a nuclear wate dump explosion in a flashing credit before this show we both grew up with.
It's a dumb joke I kept thinking was funny well after 1999 passed, and I'd always make reference to it
each year if I happened to be chatting with him. At the moment, it feels like the departure of the moon
would be a less disasterous change in the cosmology of my life than the loss of this man whom I loved,
who treated me as a brother, and who was just so important in my life at large for so long. It's like even
the tide has stopped. It's like the moon's not there. It's like the rulebooks of gravity need to be
rewritten. Planet earth IS blue, man.
I will keep people posted as details form about memorials and such.
be well all,
love
Colin.
Page about MX on our bulletin board
