Hey everyone -

1) There's been a little confusion with some people I've talked to: No, it's not free admission. But we're keeping the admission cheap -- only $7. We're NOT trying to make a profit, but we ARE putting out about $700 (on two sound systems, liquid refreshment, portapotties, and a whole bunch of other things), AND we want to pay all of the 9 bands that are playing the best we can. Wouldn't it be awesome if we could pay them better than they ever got paid back in the day?

1A) Your admission price INCLUDES: Free beer & wine (for 21+), juice, juice boxes (for the young 'uns), water, chips and salsa, and of course 9 freakin' bands and hanging out with everyone.

1B) Your admission also includes (while they last) full sets of Section M back issues - all 31!!! I wanna finally clear out the back hall of the ex-secM offices. Ex-staff will get first crack at them... But get there early to get yours FREE!!!

2) Bring some extra money. There's gonna be BBQ, which is being sold separately so that people who don't want food won't have to pay extra at the door. It's being sold by a vendor who was a fan of the magazine, so he's cut the prices in half of what he would normally charge, to about $6 a plate. There WILL be vegan options, chicken, or a beef or pork option, and of course potato salad and coleslaw.

3) We're printing commemorative t-shirts (which will be awesome - promise) and selling them at cost -- probably about $6.

Okay, I hope to see you all in a little less than two weeks!

Thanks,
m

Yep, that's right. In September it will have been ten years since the first issue of section M came out. Weird, huh?

So we're going to set about trying to find all the folks who ever worked for us over those five years. And we're pretty aware how impossible that will be, what with the rather impressive diaspora that's happened since then. Thus, the hope is that some of you will randomly check back here from time to time, and we can find you by September.

We've got all sorts of ideas for it (band reunions, commemorative t-shirts, fancy booklets of writers musings about the experience, free full sets of issues for ex-staff), but the number of people we find (and who are also interested in this debacle), will have a lot of bearing on what makes sense to do. At minimum, it will be good to see all the old faces (and at this point, yes, we really *do* mean "old"), meet people we never met face to face, and reminisce about why we chose to mess up our lives so long ago.

Write me at michael@sectionm.com.

On another note, I’ve reorganized the site a little to get rid of some of the sections that are hopelessly out of date (like the “Where Are They Now” page). And to make the issues available only by full sets, and update the shipping to reflect changes in US Postal prices. If there are people that want to help me put more on this site (like back issues content, or updated profiles of ex-staff), feel free to contact me.

-Michael

3/30/06 - Well, this isn't so much section M news, as it is personal news for me, but the Love Equals Death album is out now, and you can see the artwork I did for it at my new portfolio website at www.explodingfistofdeath.com. I've also started putting up some of my writing there, starting with much of what I wrote for issue #31, which includes my Chuck Palahniuk interview. I think I'm going to go back and put some of those up on this site eventually too, but for now, you'll hae to go there.

11/14/05 - I am out of debt! Last sunday, 11/6, I wrote the final check for section M's debt and am now completely in the clear! Woo hoo! Only took two years, a nervous breakdown, bankruptcy, and a rather large amount of working my ass off at a job that is perhaps not exactly my dream for what I want to do with my life. But oh well. Let the next chapter of life begin.

In celebration, I've discounted all the prices for issues to make room in our back hallway. Full sets are now only $12.50 and individual issues are only $1.50. So buy up, me laddies and lasses.

And if you're someone who once worked for section M, really, feel free to write to me either to add or update your profile, or to get a vast discount on full sets of back issues.

I've also created a news page so that I can actually show what the latest updates are. I know that's rather optimistic, considering this is one of the first updates since i built this site a year ago.

But as of today, the only major update is just to my own little personal update.

- Michael Houghton

9/28/04

I just finished watching My So Called Life on DVD. It was the first time I had seen it since it aired for that one brilliant season in 1994 and then prematurely disappeared. I guess when I first put it in my Netflix list, I was a little concerned that maybe it wouldn’t have aged well, and that like most of Morrissey’s albums past Bona Drag, going back to it would somehow call into question a key part of my life as a young adult. Well, there were several things I found. First off, it is still a brilliant and moving show. Secondly, ten years later, I was empathizing almost as much with the parents, what with being closer to their age now than to Claire’s. Thirdly... well, there’s just so many, so I’ll get to the last one: I’m still upset that it ended on a cliffhanger, setting up for a second season that never came, leaving all of us who were so enraptured with it no ending. With no sense of closure.

It’s been a little over a year since the final issue of Section M came out, in mid June of 2003, and for almost a year now, I’ve been trying to figure out how to write this statement. Most people reading this will be aware that the issue included a “Hiatus Letter” that promised we would return after regrouping. And so now, even a year later, I still run into people all the time who ask me when we’re coming back, and who is going to be in the new issue. People still have this hope, and I hate to dash it, but we’re not coming back.

Making that decision is honestly one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, because this magazine was my baby and the plan for what I was doing with my life, and the absolute center of everything I did for the five years it was around. But in the end, there were too many things broken to be able to fix them.

I’ve struggled with how much of the truth to tell our fans, because the last thing I want to do is to snuff out the hope and excitement that people still tell me the magazine gave them. But I also think it’s important to know how much was done with so little, by people who worked incredibly hard with pretty much no financial support. And I think it’s important to explain it, so that there is closure.

* * *

We managed to fool a lot of people over the years into thinking we were a huge, successful company. I was always baffled when people I talked to at shows were convinced that we all had paying jobs. I think it’s because what most people saw was the final product, which I’m very proud of. But that final product was made that good because of the talent and hard work of a great many people over the years, not by any sort of financial success, unfortunately. We all worked our fingers to the bone to create something that shouldn’t have been able to exist as long as it did, and shouldn’t have been able to have been as superfantastico as it often was. But unfortunately, that took a toll on all of our sanity, health, and wallets, especially mine.

Section M was a sole proprietorship, run in my name, and on my credit cards. I made some mistakes early on, in the idealistic haze that we would just make a great magazine and the advertising would just come automatically. It didn’t exactly work that way, and I wound up losing a huge amount of money, largely from credit card interest, but also from never being able to hire the excellent advertising sales team we needed. Unfortunately, putting art before business resulted in no more art.

So a few months after the final issue came out, I had to declare bankruptcy. I had $60K in debt, and had lost somewhere in the range of $100 to $150K out of my own pocket, not to mention lost wages from taking a month off to produce each issue.

* * *

There’s also the human side to the story, of course. Making something that was so detail-oriented and so far beyond what we should have been able to do, with absolutely no pay for 99% of us, was pretty grueling. They say that the number one most failed business is restaurants. Number two is magazines, and we didn’t have the budget that most magazines have. Most people in the upper management of the magazine didn’t last more than a few issues before burning out. I’m not sure how many people worked for the magazine over the five year run, but I have a feeling it was into the triple digits. And that meant, generally, that when someone quit, their tasks fell to someone else who was just as exhausted, and it became a domino effect. The only person who worked on every issue from start to finish was me, and so my level of exhaustion was the greatest.

For better or worse, as soon as the “hiatus” started, I was thrown into a world of confusion. On the one hand, I was so relieved to not be living with that level of stress anymore. On the other, I was incredibly depressed that this thing I had worked so hard to keep going was going to die on me. What the hell would I do with my life now?

But it was also at a point where it was no longer an option to continue. I had been ready to quit as of issue 30, and several people convinced me to let them try to take over—I would train them, but not actually work on the magazine anymore. Unfortunately again, I wound up working incredibly hard on that final issue, and losing more money than I would have if I’d quit at #30. But oh well. I learned it couldn’t continue, and that gave me closure. I wish we hadn’t angered so many advertisers in the process, but oh well...

There was also the exhaustion, which by the end of the five years had gotten to the point where it was literally a medical problem. I’m not going to go into detail, but suffice it to say that I wound up battling several non-life-threatening, but still pretty unpleasant stress- and exhaustion-related illnesses.

What I wound up deciding, even after the bankruptcy, was that I would still pay off the people who had been good to the magazine, and who we still owed money to. And I didn’t have a choice about paying the back taxes we had been unable to pay at the time they were due. Basically, that came to close to $20K of it, and I’ve been slowly chipping away at that for the last year. We had one benefit show, the Love Sucks, Valentines Day show, but I didn’t publicize that it was a benefit show, because I was still too embarrassed to ask for help. I’m less embarrassed now, but putting on a show is something I don’t necessarily have much interest in doing myself. But I’m ready to accept it if anyone wants to hold one on my behalf.

I’m much more interested in selling the back issues to people who want to have a piece of history. All of the profit from selling those issues will go toward paying off my still-sizeable debt. And I will make sure to keep you all in the loop about when it gets paid off.

And if you want to just throw me any size donation to help out, you can do so through Paypal with this neato button: