DNA Lounge: Wherein I talk about some 11th Street history.
There are two (or three, depending on how you count) decades-old nightclubs lying fallow on our block, and that's kind of sad.
I may have some of the dates and details slightly wrong here, so please let me know if you have corrections.
Part 1: The Oasis:
What was once known as The Oasis is on the Northwest corner of 11th and Folsom. This was a fairly large club with two rooms inside and a roof deck. One bizarre feature of the place is that it actually contained an indoor swimming pool under the dance floor. I never saw it actually open, though: every time I had been there, the pool cover was closed and functioning as a dance floor. It was kind of flexible, though, and I always wondered whether we were going to fall through some day. And whether there was still water in the pool to catch us if so. (I saw Nine Inch Nails play there in 1994, and the way that floor flexed and tilted was terrifying! DNA's own David King was pressed into service that night as a human carabiner: a speaker stack was sitting on the corner of the pool cover and was tilting in a rather deadly manner, so Dave's job was to sit on top of it and hold onto a sprinkler pipe all night!)
Oasis parties were largely outside, on the roof deck. It's hard to imagine that happening in in today's San Francisco, right? Well, when the condos moved in across the street, in the brick building on the Southeast corner, that was pretty much the beginning of the "lofts versus nightclubs" wars. The newly-arrived suburbanites complained about the noise, and the Oasis owners responded with, basically, "We were here first, go fuck yourselves."
That approach didn't work out so well, and The Oasis was forced out of business by SFPD in 1998.
In 1999, a woman named Anne bought The Oasis and divided it into two clubs, "VSF" and "Caliente". She was, of course, forced to agree to never again allow customers onto the roof deck, and the potted palm trees up there have been rotting ever since. She also lost the "late night" permit: The Oasis had been allowed to operate 24/7 like DNA Lounge, but VSF and Caliente had a 2 AM curfew forced on them.
VSF never did a lot of business, and as far as I can remember, hasn't been open since around 2006.
Caliente is a much sadder story: they were open for about nine years, catering mostly to an older Latino crowd, when SF's most notorious cop, Larry Bertrand, took it on himself to start paying them regular visits where he would ensure that the customers were all over 21 by lining them all up against the wall outside and demanding their papers. In other words, he did his best to make an ABC enforcement look as much like an INS raid as possible to the people he was harassing.
After the second time this happened, the customers just stopped coming back, and Maurice Salinas, the owner of the Caliente business, just said "Fuck it, this isn't worth it", and walked away from his business. Bertrand had won, and that space has been empty ever since.
I guess Anne still owns the building, and has decided that having two nightclubs sit vacant for years is the best use of that investment? Beats me.
Part 2: Paradise Lounge:
Paradise Lounge was the club on the Southwest corner of 11th and Folsom. It was huge space with multiple rooms, and a second floor with a separate entrance to the street, letting them run multiple unrelated events on the same night. It had a small but nice stage with good sight lines, a balcony, and in the 90s they did live music there almost every night. I saw Sharkbait there more times than I can count. At many of those shows, you could line up to get into a cage with a stack of televisions and beat them to death with a baseball bat. It was a simpler time.
In 2001, Paradise got some new owners (some dot-com guys with more money than sense who thought, "Hey, a nightclub sounds fun!" What kind of dummy does that, I ask you?) As they were Burning Man raver types, they had no interest in live music, so they ripped out the stage and ran the place as a dance club for a few years. I think the club changed hands a few times after that, and around 2006, someone put the stage back in (in roughly the same spot, but smaller). They rarely did live music there, however.
Then in 2008, a new potential owner came on the scene. The story goes that this was some young kid with no experience at running a club, but who had a rich dad. Dad agreed to fund the club, but only if the kid got himself some partners with actual experience running this kind of business. He hooked up with a few experienced folks including former Entertainment Commissioner Terrance Alan, and things seemed on track for the place to re-open. But then two things happened:
First, the group of them decided that Paradise Lounge had a "terrible reputation" (which is crazy) and what they should do was rename it and re-build the place from scratch. So they immediately started in on the demolition phase of their remodeling project. They knocked out all of the interior walls, pulled out the existing bars and plumbing, and basically stripped the place down to the studs.
And then... wait for it... the kid with the money disappeared off the face of the Earth, leaving his partners holding the bag.
So they took a completely functional nightclub, that needed at best a coat of paint and some re-upholstery, and they destroyed it. It's been empty ever since, and at this point, if someone gave you that business for free, I'll bet you'd be half a million dollars away from selling your first beer.
It's the tragedy of the decade.
DNA Lounge: Wherein five weeks vanish and nobody's overly concerned.
And when I freak out about this, everyone acts like I'm crazy.
Some amount of construction has started upstairs. I was out of town for a bit more than a week and expected to come back to see framed-out bathrooms upstairs by now. But no, instead I see some stacks of cut plywood and not a lot else.
At this point, there's basically no chance we'll get our second building permit, the one that lets us cut doors in the wall and build the upstairs bar, before July. Even assuming the bathrooms are finished by then, which is far from a foregone conclusion. So if the rest of the construction takes four months -- which, given the small amount of work it is, sounds more than reasonable, right? But, ha ha, I've done this before, I know "reasonable" has nothing to do with it -- well, that would put us in November. So then it only takes another one-plus of these inexplicable, useless, passive-voice, responsibility-dodged delays like this latest random five weeks of hurry-up-and-wait to cause the new space to not be open for New Years Eve.
That's, you know, kind of a big fucking deal.
Yeah, it's only March and I can already see NYE slipping away because I live in a city so hostile to local businesses that that's actually a thing.
And we've been at this since FEBRUARY 2011.
What the fucking fuck.
Anyway. Here's some photos:
iPhone + TSA security-fail combo
The airlines will now email you your boarding pass, which is a nice time-saver. And if you're like everyone else I know, you have a passcode on your phone but with at least a 5 minute timeout on it, so that you don't have to type your code repeatedly while you're actively using the phone. (It's a tradeoff, and one that almost everyone chooses.)
So you get to the front of the security line, wave your phone in front of the barcode scanner, and then you are forced to toss your phone in the basket for the x-ray machine.
So now you're guaranteed that your phone is both unlocked and out of your possession. What would Michael Westen say!
Not to mention, if you are lucky enough to get some kind of "special treatment" from TSA, there's nothing technical that stops them from browsing through your email, as long as they do it quickly enough, or just tap the power button every few minutes to keep it from ever hitting the lock timeout.
There's no "lock immediately" command on the iPhone. Changing that setting is buried half a dozen levels deep in preferences and hard to find. Siri doesn't understand "lock my phone now" either. (And even if Siri did work, Siri doesn't work -- like you're gonna have functional data service in an airport!)
If you don't remember to change that setting before you get to the airport, I guess you could just power the phone fully off after waving it at the barcode scanner in the security line, but you'll need to power it on again to scan it at the boarding gate, and that burns battery like crazy during the 5 minutes it takes to boot up.
Jumping through those hoops is a level of paranoia that will make most people just say, "eh, fuck it, probably nothing will go wrong", and almost all the time they'll be right -- except when they're not, which is why security issues like this should fail safe.
Transhuman intelligences have deployed icebreakers to accelerate your enslavement, part 2.
Kevin Slavin: How algorithms shape our world.
"Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us."
St. Cyber-Falls
So, an unfortunate coincidence of timing is that SXSW occurs across St. Patrick's Day, the Spring Amateur Night. As a result, there are a lot of showcases of Irish bands, which is a mixed bag because you get a bunch of shitty acoustic crooners, but good stuff too -- I'd presumably never have discovered Dirty Epics were it not for the thematic needs of the green beer bros, for example.
Anyway. To my point. This year, the green paper mini-top-hats and fake beards were far, far outnumbered by the girls wearing springy green "cyber-falls" straight out of 1999. Only the green ones, of course, not the pink ones. They also tended to have blinky green LEDs on rings, necklaces, and deely-bobbers.
To a Certain Someone: I hate to break it to you, but your retro look now reads to the general public as "Rock Out With Your Shamrock Out".
"The street finds its own use for things," indeed.
