Dance

Diary Turns Two This Saturday with Hella 90s Screamo, Cheap Beer, & Free Shit

Saturday is shaping up to be pretty fucking nuts: Phono del Sol kicks off at noon, Alkaline Trio plays at Slim's, and if you haven't had your fill of music for the day, why not crowd-surf to The Casket Lottery while downing two dollar beers in the Mission's “hub of consequences”?

Here're the relevant details from Kris and Patric:

Diary is turning two years old, HOLY SHIT. We're super pumped to be celebrating with you guys! Who knew it would have lasted this long and we'd still be seeing crowd-surfing awesomeness?! To celebrate, we're loading up on gifts to give away. But there's a catch!

Dig through your archives and find the funniest old-school photo of you looking your punk or emo best and bring it in for us. We'll post it up on a wall of fame for the night and judge winners to receive prizes (records, DVDs, fun stuff).

If you're like me and left all your old photos in state which you were raised, you're shit outta luck, but you can always bring some old, decaying tshirt that hasn't fit you in 6 years and nail it up to the wall.

CONTEST: Win Tickets to The Roxie's Screening of "Skatetown, U.S.A."

This Friday, our favorite neighborhood theater, The Roxie, 21st Amendment and CellSpace are hosting “the best roller disco movie party of the summer.”  The Roxie will be showing the Scott Baio (just ask anyone born before the Cobain assassination who he is) feature, “Skatetown, U.S.A.,” pouring cheap 21st Amendment beer for the crowd, and then sending everyone over to CellSpace for their infamous roller disco party.

If you're unfamiliar with the film, the trailer says it all: terrible music, a bad haircut on wheels discharging a firearm, a man wearing a top hat with beard covered in cocaine, tits, and Patrick Swayze.  From the trailer's YouTube description:

The third installment in the devil's unholy trilogy of godawful Eighties roller disco flicks meant to destroy mankind's collective sense of good taste once and for all. Naturally, I could not possibly recommend this movie any more highly.

The Roxie adds:

Patrick Swayze’s big screen debut! Two hunks are pitted against one another in a skate competition at a roller disco. At stake? A thousand bucks and a moped. Ninety-eight minutes of non-stop music, roller skating and comedy. According to her autobiography, former Brady Bunch starlet Maureen McCormick fell into severe cocaine addiction on the set of this movie. FREE TUBE SOCKS! BEER!

If you want to take part of this drunken, cocaine-fueled evening for free, tell us your best 4-wheeled, tube sock, or cocaine story in the comments, and if we like it, we'll hook you up with a pair of tickets.  Otherwise, you can go score yourself some tickets for $10 over at the Roxie's website.

A Saturday Afternoon in the Upper Haight

I found myself at a friend's Upper Haight birthday party last weekend.  He's a fairly normal dude: he drinks liquor by the bottle, is totally broke, has a few tattoos, is an aspiring filmmaker, rides a motorcycle at excessive speeds with a suspended license, and has no fear when it comes to igniting various explosives in urban areas.  A true San Franciscan.

He also happens to live in the Upper Haight. How he got there is not important, but we can all agree that moving into a room in an Upper Haight home is some cheap San Francisco living that doesn't have you riding the N Judah to work from the Outer Sunset.

It had always been my opinion that he and others represent modern Haight residents.  Sure, they have to walk over migratory gutter punks on their way to buy Captain Crunch, but the people who actually live in the 'hood could fit in anywhere around town, they just happen to live in the Haight.

So I roll up in the early afternoon to “Haight House,” which is about as cleverly named as Columbus Crib, Polk Pad, Fell Flophouse, Steiner Shack, Valencia Villa, or Turk Terrordome, and I quickly realized that all my notions on “the new Upper Haight” were complete and utter bullshit:

The first thing I see a trio tie-dying clothing on the kitchen table while dubstep being played on the roof rattles the house.

“Whoa, is that a bottle of Jameson?!,” one of the girls covered in blue dye excitingly asks.

I nod in her direction as my eyes slowly examine the walls around me and extend the bottle to her.

She takes a giant swig and puts the bottle down on the table and goes back to tie-dying a victimized shirt. “Just giving you a heads up, those are molly mimosas over there.”

The spectacle is almost indescribable.  Everyone around me is drinking PBR, Tecate, and Jameson, predominately wearing skinny jeans and torn leggings, into acceptable music (dubstep aside), yet live in the middle of a 1960's time capsule.  If this were a zoo, a pride of mature lions were dumped into the monkey cage with an ample supply mescaline and finger paints.

At this point, I realize if I am to truly appreciate the phenomenon which I just walked into, I'm going to have to “do as the Upper Haighters do” and go drink for drink with these kids.  So after putting back a Thursday evening's worth of beer and booze while admiring the hanging underwear and finger paintings on the back deck, I haphazardly stumble into the living room during my directionless trek to the bathroom.

The living room basically speaks for itself.  A strange and frightening old man with clothes I've never seen any human being wear on any day that wasn't Halloween bobbed back in forth in the middle of the room while two bros chilled out smoking weed.  A tie-die painted ukulele rests against a bongo, begging for protection.

On the roof, figuring that's as good a place to pee as any, I encounter an unreserved girl showing off a fresh Grateful Dead tattoo.  “I got this done in the living room last night!” Much like a Mission kid showing off his new sleeve, she goes on to talk, at length, of its meaning and the “street cred” it affords her now around the Haight.  She is speaking words at me, but all I can bother to think about is whether or not Jameson is now being made with wormwood.

After hanging out on the roof for an hour or so, a penniless vagabond made his way into the house after a long day holding up a meaningless sign and begging for change.  Within moments, the “sick bassline” overtook his body like a poltergeist and he's swinging around his didgeridoo with a wanton disregard for the safety and emotional well-being of those around him.

What's this? A Modelo-toting bro follows the human-didgeridoo hazard to the roof while carrying a random American Flag-clad cylindrical object.

Suddenly both of these men are dancing and screaming on the ledge of the house.  This can't possibly end well for them, but will probably end alright for us.

Then in a moment a better judgment, the cliff dancers step back from the precipice and the second guy abruptly reveals he was holding an extendable American Flag didgeridoo.  I'm now listening to a freestyle didgeridoo battle and contemplating throwing myself off the building.

When I begin to think things cannot and stranger, hours of alcohol and marijuana consumption begin to form a category 5 hurricane of drunk that is going to make landfall before FEMA can protect the citizenry.  Conscious of the fact my brain would eventually cease writing to disk, I begin taking notes on yellowing BevMo! and Jamba Juice receipts crumbled at the bottom of my bag.

The majority of these notes are the unintelligible scrawls of a man grasping to the last legs of sobriety. Deciphering them with the futility of reading hieroglyphs before the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, the last remaining primary documents from a Saturday afternoon in the Upper Haight describes a grisly crime scene of music and fashion abuse:

  • A tribe of girls are frolicking on the roof in Indian headdresses.
  • People are still tie-dying shirts while drinking PBR.
  • Some white dude with dreadlocks recognized my friend's pipe and knew who made it.
  • DJ playing a dubstep remix of “Hip Hop” by Dead Prez. This song totally needed a dubstep remix.
  • Girl with new tattoo having two didgeridoos simultaneously blown into her ears.
  • Just introduced to a man wearing a top hat and monocle.  Terrified.
  • Man sitting next to me wearing an Indian headdress and Ray-Bans.  He's rolling loose-leaf American Spirit cigarettes.  Can't be real.  I must have drank a molly mimosa.

Reviewing photographs taken from the party the following day, I learned that molly mimosas or various hallucinogens were not responsible for my tribal visions; all this really happened:

A Revolution Without Dancing is Not a Revolution Worth Having.

What I Saw in Berkeley Today spotted the latest work from Get Up pasted up on Berkeley's equivalent of Valencia Street.  Well, I guess it's hard to call Telegraph an equivalent to Valencia, considering it's thoroughly inferior.  Then again, Berkeley is an inferior version of San Francisco, so I supposed it works.  But I digress.  Dancing, right?  Yes, dancing.

In San Francisco, Even Death Metal Concerts Are Exactly Like Burning Man

I made my way to the epic Blood, Bath & Beyond Day at Potrero del Sol on Saturday.  For those of you unfamiliar with Potrero del Sol, it's the park at the corner of Potrero and 25th in which you can drink beer and listen to metal just a few yards away from a playground and a child's birthday party without any neighbors calling the cops.  Coexistence in its purest form.

Well this particular weekend, the park was not only host to bands such as “Zombie Death Stench” and “Feral Depravity,” but also some Burning Man pregame picnic.  As the video shows, the two groups got along just fine…

Bonus shot at 1:50 of children rolling down the hill while some dude from Modesto screamed about society falling apart or some shit.

[video shot by Steve Rude]

Still Need Something To Do Tonight?

As you might have heard, a few Bay Area cool kids decided they wanted to bring back Clueless and all its horrible slang for a four-act musicial.  So As If! put their idea up on Kickstarter and enough people thought it was a solid idea and donated them three-and-a-half grand to make the magic happen.  So, to celebrate, they're taking a page out of the dot-com handbook and throwing a launch party.

Yeah yeah, I know what you're saying.  “Bro, launch parties are fucking lame.”  No doubt, but this launch party features Ocean Spray (The Cranberries cover band), Boyz IV Men, a Jock Jams dance party, and fuzzy pens.  The Jock Jams dance party alone makes me depressed I'm going to miss this one, but Big Sur is calling me.

Tonight at 9pm.  $10.  251 Rhode Island.  Ticket info.

Rowdy Bash Featuring Metal Music, Jack Daniels Cupcakes, Beer, Aerobics & Aqua Net THIS FRIDAY

This photo is a tame representation of what will go down on Friday.

For the past year, Kelly over at WorkshopSF has been throwing a regular metal dance party/group exercise session/excuse to drink more cheap beer dubbed “Heavy Metal Aerobics.”  Basically, instead of going to a gym and listening to some upbeat techno music and following the moves of someone way more fit than you, some regular-ass aerobics instructor helps you get fit and blasts Slayer.  Even Lydia of Hater Tuesday digs HMA, and that trick hates everything.

Anyway, to celebrate the one-year anniversary of HMA and its move from the Wester Addition to the Mission, Kelly's throwing one epic party at Engine Works this Friday:

The infernal gates of Hades (aka the doors at Engine Works [190 Capp St.]) open at 8pm with DJ's Sarah Doppler (Pop, Be Excellent to Each Other), Mike Gerardo, and Donnelle Malnik (THE Heavy Metal Aerobics Instructor) each spinning the heavy/hair metal tracks. At 9pm, the eardrum annihilation begins in the Engine Works basement with metal overlords Hightower, followed by the wicked guitar wizardry of Hot Lunch.

But if you are thinking of catching a breather between sets…. think again. Instructor Donnelle Malnik will lead a Heavy Metal Aerobics workout medley during the break, complete with HMA girls clad in leopard print body suits and legwarmers, teased out hair that could eclipse the sun, and of course our own Workshop beer can weights! Aqua Net hair teasing and groupie makeup stations will be offered for the ladies and the glam rock boys. Prizes (including custom heavy metal vests) will be awarded for most heavy metal aerobics inspired costume. And don’t forget to lineup a few of our Jack Daniels cupcakes.

Sweet!  Tickets are $10 and you can get them over at WorkshotSF.

(photo via SF Weekly)

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