No more Ellis Brooks Chevrolet, it seems. The longtime dealer on Van Ness Avenue is apparently switching to used cars only, which probably means it will be gone and replaced by a big box retailer within a year or two. The really sad thing will be the loss of all those great bits of neon on the building, most of which will now refer to a brand the dealer no longer sells and will have to be removed.

It’s like watching an old friend die all over again.

S-Express
Theme from S-Express, 1988

There’s always a point near the end of the semester when you have that sort of breakthrough and realize that, even though you still have a ton of stuff to do, you will  get it done and live through it all. That point came at about 3:00 this afternoon for me.

Unfortunately, it was also tempered by some sad news as I found out that my friend Taylor Green had passed away this weekend. I met Taylor via email back in 1997; he’d wandered into the website and noted that we were both Greensboro expatriates, and conversation ensued. I met him in person on the 1997 US Tour a few months later, and several more times over the years, often when I was visiting North Carolina over the holidays, etc. He was a truly original sort, and at the same time something of a archetype representing much of what is intriguing about southern culture. He was fun to be around, and he’s probably the only person I’ll meet in my lifetime who knew Tennessee Williams. I’ll miss Taylor.

One of my big, pressing projects right now is to create an EAD-compliant finding aid for the papers of the man who was chancellor at UNCG when I was an undergraduate there. I’m not sure if I’m more disturbed by the fact that my undergraduate years are now officially part of university history or by the fact that my undergraduate years are now officially part of university history and that I’m the one documenting them. Either way, it’s nothing but a really big XML file anyway, I guess.

One of my other big, pressing projects is my exciting annotated bibliography on the history of the America shopping center. No, I’m not really sure what it has to do with what I’m studying, either, but at least it was more fun than most of the stuff I’ve been doing the past month or so. I’ll post it here when it’s done. There are pretty pictures and a nice history essay as well.

This may be the last you hear from me for the next couple of weeks.