Our Hotline party tomorrow got a very nice write-up in 48 Hills, so you should take their word for it and come out! The last one was really fun.

So it's a big, bright deal when representatives of 10 of our biggest indie dance parties -- Popscene, Club Leisure, Fringe, The Queen is Dead, Harder Better Faster Stronger, Last Nite, Club Gossip, Boy Division, Turbo Drive, and Indie Cent DJ -- come together for a huge quarterly blowout called Hotline.

The first installment, back in March, more than fulfilled the dreams of anyone wishing to wig out to Grimes and Morrissey back-to-back. But the ongoing impetus of the party is a deep, community-minded mission to help save a classic part of SF nightlife.

"The idea for Hotline has been years in the making, but was really kicked into action when news that one of San Francisco's most beloved alternative dance clubs, DNA Lounge, might be in jeopardy of closing," DJ Blondie K, aka Kristin Graff, of the lovely Fringe party at Madrone Art Bar told me.

"There is a cult-like following for the small, neighborhood indie dance parties, and as fans of the music, DJs in this space are often supporting each other's events. I think we were all curious if we could join forces, combine our individual communities, and give them a large-scale night club experience celebrating the music we all love," Blondie K continued. "At the same time, we wanted to bring some attention and financial support to DNA Lounge.

Hopefully deliveries will be up and running again late next week. Initially we will be using Grubhub for deliveries (it turns out that they now do deliveries as well as ordering, which we didn't realize.) We are looking in to ways to supplement that with other delivery mechanisms as well, though, because they stop delivering at 11pm. As one of the tiny minority of 24 hour restaurants in San Francisco, we did a big chunk of our delivery business between midnight and 3am, and we'd sure like to continue doing that.

Here's a sad moment. We go through a huge number of paper tickets in this business, so we order them in large quantities, and well in advance. Well, last week it was finally time to crack open the new box of drink tickets...

And they are the new design, which includes the Codeword logo.

Sigh.

So we're going to be staring at that and being sad for the next year or so.

As for Codeword, we're still going through the depressing process of working out how to shut things down in an orderly manner, working out what equipment we want to bring over to DNA, what is sellable, etc. One of the things we definitely want to do is bring the (newer, better) pizza oven from CW to DNA. This is very involved, because pizza stones are notoriously fragile; the oven won't fit around the bar so it either has to go over it, or through the front window; and I don't yet have a straight answer on who's going to be responsible for disconnecting and reconnecting the gas without blowing up the building. So, it's a work in progress.

The most valuable thing over there is the liquor license, which we are allegedly in the process of selling, though there hasn't been any visible motion on that yet. The damned things are worth in the neighborhood of a quarter million dollars, and demand is high, but it takes months to complete the sale. And we've sure got some stuff we could spend that money on right now, let me tell you.

Some photos from recent shows... You may notice that this is not many galleries for the past month. That's because we're again having trouble getting reliable photographers. If that's you, drop us a note.