We spent Sunday afternoon perusing the recently re-stocked calendar aisle at Barnes & Noble, our favorite fall activity besides eating mass quantities of fun-size Butterfingers. All those clean, shiny pages on the 2010 High School Musical calendars have got us narrowing in on dates for next year’s Northside Festival. We’ll be back here with an announcement, and you’ll have a few dates to circle with a red felt-tip marker on your calendars very soon.

It happened. What began as a harebrained idea turned into a four-day whirlwind of music and art, giving way to Heineken-hazed memories and life-altering moments, if you count Craig Finn making grown men cry during “Constructive Summer” as life altering, which we do. You’ll want to head to The L Magazine’s web site for all sorts of wrap-up coverage, including John Norris’ interviews with Kurt Vile and Real Estate, video of a gleefully inebriated Drink Up Buttercup mistaking a mannequin’s head as a drumstick on N 6th Street, and commentary on how Spencer Krug handled his mic repeatedly going out at Studio B. These are the images that will reel through our minds in the fleeting moments before we die, to hell with childhood memories and our wedding day. For that, we have a lot of people to thank.

To our showcase partners: We can’t stress enough how much we owe you for getting on board, organizing shows, promoting shows, re-organizing shows, and rolling with the punches of a first-year undertaking. To the bands, all 350 of them: Northside couldn’t have happened without you, to state the obvious. The idea of you devoting your time and talent to our festival is something we can’t quite wrap our heads around. To the Williamsburg Gallery Association: Nothing but eternal gratitude for highlighting another reason why New York is at the center of the art world. And of course there was an army of volunteers, interns, venue employees, gallery workers, badge holders, show-goers, and whoever’s idea it was to put a taco truck on Bedford Avenue to which we credit pretty much everything. We owe you all fruit baskets.

So, let’s talk 2010. We certainly learned a lot this past year and are pretty excited to start thinking bigger and better. We already have calls out to Thom Yorke to see if Radiohead is down for a show at Public Assembly, but if you have any other feedback to offer, we’re all ears. Shoot an e-mail to feedback@thelmagazine.com. Really, we’d love to hear from you. Now get out there and enjoy CMJ… but then come right back here and sit and stare and hit “refresh” on your computer screen everyday until next spring. That’s when we’ll start rolling out some announcements, and it’ll all start again.