Oh Mike, they made a movie about you!
Well, about you and Newfoundland of course, but you know, just the way you would have had it, would have insisted that it be.
How lovely it was to be with your voice again for an hour or so.
I can still see clearly the day I met you in that office at NFB Headquarters in Montreal – you were in town doing the sound mix for Secret Nation, and I was more or less living there, working on the Chomsky film. You already had the grey grizzled beard at that point, and you made a comment about my footwear – well, I mean you were such a flirt, you would always find an angle. Who knew then what a long-lasting friendship it would turn out to be.
I can’t quite recall the details of the next big scene a few years later – as I remember it, I was riding the bus down St. Urbain, you were walking up, right near the corner of Sherbrooke where it slopes down abruptly, and did we shout out our email addresses to each other? Was the bus moving slowly enough that we were able to launch the essentials? And then… how many hundreds and hundreds of pages did we write to each other over the years.
But anyway, this movie they’ve made – they had so much footage of the hilarity of the world you inhabited back in the day – the riotous deliberately silly outrageous ways of your crowd, that nascent St. John’s cultural scene… what a treat to see the world you came from in its youth in the 70s when you were all wildly creative long-hairs.
They spent a fair bit of time with Faustus Bidgood, then with Secret Nation, and then the later “eccentric” years. I saw a bit of those years. The tumultuous friendships. The state of the house.
Visiting you in St. John’s it was rather startling to realize you had an entire house to yourself and yet you basically just lived in the kitchen – the rest was a kind of storage and or renovation zone that never actually got renovated. A state of affairs I hadn’t really understood from our email exchanges. From emails I’d gathered you had a passionate writers group, you were growing wheatgrass, you would date here and there, and you would go for long kayaking trips and describe them in exquisite detail.
The movie had only one photograph of you in a kayak, which was a bit disappointing, but I came home and dug out the photos of you and Benj from that summer we went to visit you in Halifax while you were house sitting at Cathy’s. Kayaking through those little bays, each of us with our own kayak, and the minke whale coming up in the water between me and Benj… Benj staying cool as a cucumber… it’s gotta be one of my fave stories of all time. You gave us that.
The friends who told me about the screening are old friends of Andy’s, and of course Andy pretty much narrates the film, he’s the main storyteller of those early days of CODCO, those early days of what they called the “Newfoundland Renaissance”.
Walking out of the theatre, I was trying to remember a funny moment to tell my friends – was it the Montreal film co-op, that in its fundraising efforts one year, was auctioning off a one hour conversation in a St. John’s pub with the one and only Mike Jones? I feel like Pete Wintonick set that one up – as a stunt, it has his sense of the great in the apparently ordinary.
I did have to wipe away tears by the end of the movie. I was pretty shocked when you died – happened to see a notice on Facebook. I always thought you cut me off cause that’s what you did with quite a few people, and I figured it was just my turn. But in the movie it sounded like maybe there were health problems you probably didn’t want to talk about, family you wanted to focus on. I get that.
My buddy Mike Jones died in 2018.
For many years we were quite dedicated penpals and managed to hang out in person sometimes too.
I’ve often felt like this blog is a kind of latter day Letter to Mike. I don’t know if any of those thousands of words we wrote to each other is anything anyone would ever want to read, but… I sure as heck learned a lot about “voice”.
