Photos are up of Thursday's last-minute Green Day show. Yeah, Green Day! How did that happen, you're probably wondering? Long story: They called us the night before and asked. Ok, it's not such a long story.

We had to cancel an event that we had scheduled for that night, and it's always a drag to have to do that, but the event we had was probably going to only get a hundred people, and Green Day sold out in 15 minutes on the day of the show. What are you gonna do?

It was a fantastic show. They played for almost three hours, including the entirety of their not-yet-released new album.

The sound quality was amazing. I don't think I've ever heard it sound so good in here.

My favorite part was when an 8-year-old kid climbed from his parent's shoulders onto the stage and Billie Joe said to him, "Go crowd surf, little man!" and he did. People were able to hold him up with one hand because he was so tiny.

My second favorite part was when Billie Joe forgot the lyrics to a song ("We've got a lot of songs!" he said) and pulled a girl up out of the audience to sing it for him. She wasn't a great singer, but she did know all the words!

We got some press on this one: New York Times, NME, and an Oakland Tribune article that was picked up in many other papers.

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Like I mentioned last week, the RealVideo webcast has been (mostly) down for the last week or so, because the machine that runs it lost a drive and I haven't been able to talk myself in to the level of Linux-based self-abuse that would be required to get it working again. I did try moving RealVideo on to another machine (making the kiosk server do double duty as the video encoder) but that machine just isn't fast enough to do both. And audio isn't working on it. And you remember how I love diagnosing Linux audio problems.

So, I see two options here, really:

1. One of you friendly people donate to me a modern, fast, Linux-capable PC to run this junk on; or
2. I just call it quits on RealVideo and assume that Justin.tv is good enough.

I don't have access to any logs that would tell me the relative popularity of either the Justin.tv or RealVideo streams, so I can't really tell whether anyone is watching either of them. If there is anyone out there who can think of a reason to keep the RealVideo stream going at all, please speak up now.

We're on the front page of the SF Chronicle today! It's a great article about how ABC is attacking all of the other all-ages clubs in San Francisco for other non-alcohol-related reasons, like food sales and hours of operation.

State goes after legendary all-ages music clubs

A teenager's first concert is a rite of passage of sorts, and in San Francisco, that rite often is undertaken at one of the city's inexpensive, small, all-ages music clubs - a type of business that owners warn might not survive much longer because of new enforcement efforts by state alcohol officials. [...]

Those venues could be forced to close, owners say, if the state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, better known as ABC, continues to impose rules that club attorneys argue are legally questionable and often unrelated to booze or safety issues.

Some of the clubs say they only recently learned about the new rules, which are not written into state law and haven't been enforced in the past.

For example, ABC has decreed that at least half of the clubs' revenue must come from food sales. The agency also is taking issue with minor operating changes, such as one club's decision to open an hour later.

In almost every case, the San Francisco clubs who have been battling ABC have the support of neighbors and local leaders.

The article doesn't mention DNA Lounge specifically, but this is absolutely the same fight that we're in. Though they're going after us with a ridiculous "lewdness" charge, they're going after all of the other clubs for whatever technicality they can find. There is a clear pattern of abuse of power here.

Also, we just filed our official appeal of our permit revocation to the ABC appeals board:

The grounds for this appeal are that (a) the department has proceeded without, or in excess of, its jurisdiction; (b) the department has not proceeded in the manner required by law; (c) the decision is not supported by the findings; (d) the findings are not supported by substantial evidence in the light of the whole record; (e) there is relevant evidence, which, in the exercise of reasonable diligence, could not have been produced or which was improperly excluded at the hearing before the department, and (f) ABC Rules 143.2 and 143.3 are unconstitutional.

Photos are up of the Hubba Hubba Revue St. Patricks Day show.

Also, someone sent me some scans of a few DNA Lounge flyers from the eighties, so I added a page for those (linked to from the 1985-1999 calendar page.)

The RealVideo and "slideshow" webcasts are down (though the Flash-based webcast is still up). The drive died on the RealVideo encoder machine, and I really can't motivate myself to screw around with it, so it might be down for a while. Presumably everybody is watching the Flash version these days anyway. It may be time to just give up on Real. Then there would be one less computer in here that I'd have to think about. That would be nice.