
Mark Halaway, 3rd from the left, 1997.
I found out rather abruptly that my old friend Mark Halaway died back in January. He was listed in the Memorial section at the back of our high school alumni magazine. When I was done being shocked, I began to remember very clearly all the good times we had, and what a positive influence he was on me as a early twenty-something, and then I sort of had a meltdown.
My belated heartfelt condolences to his family. Words are not available for how sorry I am to hear of his passing.
I had no idea that he was sick, or that he was getting care in the states. When he passed away, I was in the middle of packing up my house and family and moving in with my inlaws, all while searching for a new house. I wasn’t paying attention to anything but that and keeping my head above water at work.
A few things about Mark:
I went to high school with him. He was a senior at the Prep when I was a freshman. To be honest, he was better friends with my eldest brother Ed then. But in the fall of 1991, I went to my first big rock show in NYC was a benefit for WFMU at the Roxy. Sonic Youth headlined, after about 30 other bands. I wandered around the show, noticing that everyone at the show looked familiar, but aside from some of my classmates from school, I knew no one. It was one of those New York things. You know, Alone in a crowd. Except in this case, alone in a crowd of familiar faces. Its a bummer.
Anyway, Sonic Youth comes on and I worked my way up to the stage to watch. Time passed, things got louder. During the encore, someone right in front of me turned around. It was Mark.
A number of years later, after college was over, after I moved back to Philadelphia, I ran into Mark at Silk City. A few months previous, I had stopped publishing a skateboarding magazine. I’d tell you that things had not gone as planned if there had been one, but there wasn’t. It didn’t end very well and I was a bit down in the dumps about what to do next.
Anyway, Mark and I are sitting there drinking. And he says to me ‘I have this guy working for me who wants to start a magazine. He’s about your age. You have to talk him out of it or at least talk to him about what’s in store for him…’ I agreed without thinking about it.
A week or two later, I went by the studio where Mark worked on Corinthian street in Fairmount. That was when/where I met Laris Kreslins for the first time. He was working for Mark, scheming to start Sound Collector. I’m not sure if I could have dissuaded LK if I wanted to. Which I didn’t. I think I gave him a list of magazine distributors, and eventually an article and some photos.
This was the era in which Mark and I were closest. A couple times a week, at the end of whatever BS job I happened to be working then: dispatcher at a moving company, temp work, marketing shill for a major English beer company, etc, I would come over to the studio, and convince the two of them to go get a drink.
We’d hang out. We’d bullshit. Here were two people who were making a living doing work that they enjoyed, self employed. It was a glimmer of hope in the otherwise not so awesome job market of the mid to late 90s.
A few things I remember about this era and Mark in no particular order:
#1)He gave me my first (one of very few I admit) paying gigs as a photographer. They were doing a brochure for a campus debit card at Penn. They sent me off to campus to stage a few photograph. I did some long exposures. They liked my stuff. The brochure came out pretty nice.
#2)Mark showed me how to crack the case on my Power Mac 7100 and put in more RAM. I remember thinking: This is a guy who does graphic design and yet somehow knows how to take apart and put back together a PC. The two skill sets seemed so incongruous at the time.
Meanwhile, the whole time were removing screws and taking apart the chasis, he was making jokes about how terrible MAC’s industrial designers were. (Today replacing ram in any MAC requires the removal of 2 screws. Then it was more like 20. Someone somehow got the memo, to be sure.) I’m pretty sure that what seemed like 2 skill sets to me, were one and the same to him.
Mark and I fell out of touch when I moved back to New York in 1998. We’d touch base every so often. I knew that he went to the Ukraine to do video and design work. I knew that he had started a coding shop. I expected that he would return and we’d get a drink again at again at some point.
Rest in peace.