End Things - 2005

Something that everyone needs is to be told that not everything you do is satisfactory, and that you have to do better. It is a life lesson.

-- Ludacris

We all fall in love and lose it over somebody, but it's 20 times more exciting to lose it over a guitarist."

-- advice columnist E. Jean Carroll

A purist will say that it was better at its inception, when the sound was an expression of something local and unique, before the money came, and strangers corrupted the music with their embrace.

-- Sasha Frere-Jones

Things always happen to me in good time, even when I can't see it at the time, whether it's meeting certain people, moving, or changing jobs. There are always signs that the time has come. So in 2004, when Boulevard Deli closed, the Music Journal lost one of our two precious full-page ads. Only Oasis Duplicating was left. For several miraculous months, I'd find a replacement ad, but then I had to scramble to find copy to put on page 2, which had always been ads. That was the first sign.

I took a month off from the paper in the fall of 2004 to move from Mechanicsville to the West End, and I didn't miss doing the paper. There was no outcry from the public. It was difficult to get back into the rhythm of the paper after the move. That was the second sign.

Then there was another price hike in the cost of newsprint! And Borders Books and Music moved their newspaper racks of local papers from a bad spot in the store to an even worse one. Finding good places to put the paper was a pain in the neck. You'd go back to some places and find another, worse paper that nobody wanted had put their pile on top of yours, and no one ever saw yours and all the copies were still there. Or store employees had moved it to some place where no one knew. That was the third and fourth sign.

When I started in 1993, I was using a black and white screen Mac Classic II computer, printing everything in Word 5.0 and cutting and pasting the copy onto big sheets of blue-lined cardboard. I didn't even have an email address. It was a slow, educational journey to shifting to QuarkXPress on an eMac and emailing an Acrobat file. 

I was excited about giving up music, about reading something besides Spin, Blender, and Rolling Stone. InSync and Britney Spears were not interesting to me. And getting married in 2001 was the end of going out to the clubs four and five nights a week to photograph local bands. I was getting too old to hang out at the places where the scene had shifted, Alley Katz and Nanci Raygun. So that was that.