DNA Lounge

There's someone on eBay trying to sell unused tickets to our 2013 Prince shows for $700 each. (I don't begrudge them the effort, but I'm still not linking to it -- and I realize that "asking for" is not the same as "receiving".) But what they don't know is, I have around 2,000 of those tickets left, and any time someone signs up for our Patreon and I mail them their membership card, I usually toss into the envelope a bunch of stickers and a Prince ticket or two. So, you know, if someone were…

38 years ago today, Zero Cool hacked all those banks across state lines. From his house. Crashed 1,507 systems in one day. Biggest crash in history. Front page New York Times, August 10, 1988. Naturally, that means it's time for our latest installment of CYBERDELIA. Yo, check it. DNA. Sun Aug 30. This is the THIRTY-FIRST Anniversary of HACKERS, yes really. Join me as I crumble to dust. So, as per tradition, we will have: A screening of Hackers at 8pm; Hackers costume contest at 11pm;…

I am currently incandescent with rage about something else entirely that I'm told I can't talk about yet, so let me sublimate that instinct with this unrelated story: The SFPD "Real-Time Investigation Center" is the surveillance nightmare funded by a $9.4 million "donation" from billionaire Chris Larsen and another $3 million "donation" from Salesforce and Trump quisling Marc Benioff. "We're going to be covering the entire city with drones," said RTIC representative Captain Thomas MacGuire.…

Today's VHS find: Pam Doré posted a video of the first night of Club Q at DNA Lounge, back in the distant year of Two Thousand and Two. Wait, we were still using VHS in 2002? Yes. Yes we were. 2002, in case you didn't know, was 24 years ago. How dare it. The nerve. ▶︎

I found another 36-year-old VHS tape on eBay! D.O.A.'s final concert, live at DNA Lounge, in 1990. ▶︎

Twenty-five years ago today, on July 13th 2001, was the first event at DNA Lounge under current management. I am very old and I have been leaning on this bar for a very long time. Typically we treat Nov 22 as our "real" anniversary (the club will be turning 41 this year) but 25 is kind of a shocking number, so I thought that was worth noting. Check out what used to pass for photo galleries two and a half decades ago. Traditionally this is where I do the usual "if you'd like us to be around for…

As our "Cyberdelia" series has seen a bit of success at branching out from being only the "Hackers" party, we've decided to try and screen roughly one cult movie a month! I hope you will join us. Our bill through the rest of the year: Conan the Barbarian (this Sunday!), Evil Dead 2 + Army of Darkness double bill, Hackers (the main event), The Crow, and Batman Returns (the greatest Christmas movie). And you can get a discounted seated "Season Pass" ticket that gets you a seat at all five events…

We replaced our network rack with a slightly larger one. Exciting news, I know, but I'm posting these photos because I know that there is a certain segment of my readership who will be upset by them, perhaps even scarred. Is this what peak performance looks like? Probably.

A few days ago Doris Fish posted this 90 minute video of the full show of Sluts a Go Go All Star Gang Bang, a drag and burlesque show which took place here at DNA Lounge back in the Twentieth Century, in the distant past of January 1990! ▶︎ As with the Spencer archives, I hope this trend of people unearthing their 36-year-old VHS tapes continues...

SF Gazetteer, Cydney Hayes: Why do these Castro gay bars have TSA-style face scanners? The machine Owen encountered is called a Patronscan Guard+, a biometric and personal data collection device made by Servall Data Systems, a surveillance tech company headquartered in Alberta, Canada. Mix is one of at least three bars in the Castro, including Badlands and Toad Hall on 18th Street, that wheel out the Patronscan kiosk each night to collect the personal data of every customer that comes through…

Ira Sandler, owner of 1015 Folsom for 40 years, has passed away. 48 Hills and DJ Dials have some nice words. RIP to one of the absolute legends of nightlife. He was a huge inspiration to so many.

When people sign their names on the point-of-sale tablet at the bar, at least half of those signatures are "wavy horizontal line". Most of the rest are an attempt at an actual signature, but probably only about 1 in 1000 of those have anything in them that you would perceive as letters, or in fact, writing. And about 1 time in 100, the customer draws a little picture for us instead. So I thought I should share some of those. If you're thinking, "they're all dicks, aren't they"... ...you are a…

Speaking of our neighbors... Hey, remember that hideous flashbulb of an office building they built across the street from us in 2019? How's that going? Still walled up with plywood and sitting 100% vacant after 7 years? Blank wall covered with graffiti and posters rather than that "ground-floor commercial" we were promised? Emergency lights still strobing all night long? Good, good... I guess the matryoshka doll of shell companies begins with 340-350 11th Street LLC. The realtor on that sign…

KQED says: Long Live The Pound: The Forgotten 2000s Venue That Changed the Bay Area: At The Pound, Carracci, Cardinal and Cipriano carved out a pivotal and mostly unsung revolution in San Francisco's legendary music scene. The Pound was born on Feb. 8, 2001 with Jerry Cantrell from Alice in Chains playing the venue's first show. Its short-but-influential run lasted just five years; the Port Authority pulled the plug on their lease in fall 2006. Along the way, The Pound hosted a blizzard of…

Welp, that's about enough of that. We're back to not doing deliveries again. At the end of January we started using Chow Now for deliveries. It was a $50/month flat fee, and they were to drop the orders directly into our Revel POS on the back end. Guess what, they ...

To recap... Back in 2021 we finally received some federal grant money to keep us alive and cover the enormous costs of having been completely closed for 18 months starting in early 2020... This was the COVID-19 Shuttered Venue Operations Grant (SVOG) which I think is the ...

There are a lot of things to be angry about in the world today, but Ticketmaster is always one of them. Spare them a little rage if you have any left to give. When, two years ago, we heard that DOJ was moving forward with their anti-trust suit against Live Nation we all knew