Romance & Sex

Love in the Time of Tinder

The Mission’s Got a Live Dating Game Show

— By Raymond Hobbs (@drhobbs) |

Of course the city that recently ranked #1 on Rent.com’s list of best cities for singles (39% single adults?!? Are you fucking kidding me?!!) has a live dating game show. The updated take on the saccharine, hetero-normative classic has been playing at Z Space for the better part of a year now. The creatively named ‘Z Dating Game’ is set up like the old show: 1 single person interviews 3 others in front of a crowd of strangers. Features that make this version particularly San Francisco:

  • Gay and Lesbian Rounds
  • Interpretive dance of people’s embarrassing sex stories
  • The venue is an old warehouse, repurposed as a theater/art gallery, because of course it is
  • From what I can tell, everyone is drunk
  • The press release is ironic: “Remember, the path to true love is always easier with hundreds of strangers vocally questioning your every step.”

This shameless exploitation of horny singles happens every couple of months. Z Dating Game is this Saturday, 8pm at Z Space (450 Florida St.). Advanced tickets can be purchased for $10 here, and are $20 at the door.

Previously on Uptown Almanac: 
Politicians Gone Wild

The Wild Tale of a Political Consultant's Blood and Piss-Soaked 50th Birthday Party

— By Kevin Montgomery (@kevinmonty) |

There’s been much ado about Jack Davis lately.  The political consultant with ties to big developers and mayors Gavin Newsom, Willie Brown, and Frank Jordan is being linked to the incredibly shady “Clean Up the Plaza” astroturf campaign, all while “working as a paid political consultant for the condo project at 16th and Mission.”

So the timing couldn’t have been better for Last Gasp, the Mission District publisher that recently released a colorful account of Jack Davis’s notorious 1997 50th birthday party.  The details of which include everything that makes San Francisco the best fucked city in the United States: heavy metal satanist musicians, drinking blood and piss, politicians eating blood-soaked cake, someone getting fucked by a bottle of Jack Daniels, and pigs running amok.  A prized party so brilliant and offensive, the Chronicle described it as “like the Folsom Street Fair with free booze.”

And for some bonus fun, the NY Times interviewed our disgraced gun-running state senator Leland Yee about the party, then just a lowly city supervisor who spent evenings cruising Capp Street for prostitutes and stuffing stolen suntan lotion in his underoos:

“When I walked in, everyone had their clothes on,” said a city Supervisor, Leland Y. Yee, one of many public officials who have been protesting their innocence.

Mr. Yee, a new member of the board, said he had concluded that there were indeed limits, even to the tolerance of this famously tolerant city. “Bloodletting and public urination are lines you just don’t cross,” he said.

Words to live by.

Previously on Uptown Almanac: 

Burner Celebrates Hippie Return Day By Littering SoMa Streets With Dildos

— By Kevin Montgomery (@kevinmonty) |

It's the first Tuesday of September, so San Francisco's loathed drug goons are amidst caravanning back from the desert and car wash employees are contemplating career changes.  Normally, it's a day filled with unpacking, testing the limits of REI's return policy, and boring your Facebook friends with mystical praise about going off the grid.  But for one, it meant dumping desert dongs in the streets of SoMa.

Namaste.

[via BuffBro]

Babysitting Startup Advertises Outside of Local Sex Shop

— By Kevin Montgomery (@kevinmonty) |

Excuse the grainy picture, but right there is a Mini Cooper parked outside of Good Vibes Dong Shop, slathered in stickers reading “No Baby On Board” and propping an app that is effectively Task Rabbit for people you entrust not to throw your crying monster down the stairs.

Not sure if this is targeted advertising or pure coincidence, but I love it either way.

(Side note: has anyone else been noticing the drastic uptick in startups parking billboards in the Mission's bike racks, parking spots, and in front of fire hydrants? I'm guessing it's only a matter of time before the city looks to ban those too.)

A Breakup Letter With The Mission

— By Kevin Montgomery (@kevinmonty) |

Chris Tacy, a 20-year Mission resident and self-described gentrifier, has decided he's had it with the Mission.  Not because he hates—err, hated it—but because of greed.  As he puts it:

During the dot-com boom, the city started to lose some of its soul. Greed started to rule, and the city started to become more and more expensive. The weird craziness started to slip away. Experimentation and reinvention began to vanish as the cost of living in the city became prohibitive for artists and dreamers and anyone who didn’t work in tech. […]

But now… Now it’s worse than it was in 2000. Now it’s only about the money. Now the only diversity we have left is ethnic diversity. Everyone is rich and privileged and entitled or hustling as hard as they can to become rich and privileged and entitled. A city once defined by people wanting to change the world is now defined by people who just want to be among the world’s richest. A culture that once understood history and tried to create it now has a memory that’s about 2 fiscal quarters long - and a vision that goes as far out as their funding allows.

San Francisco used to be weird. And we were proud of that. Now it's shockingly vanilla and suburban and conformist. It once felt like a city. Now it feels like a suburb.
And that's sad.

He goes on to say that weirdness has been replaced with “the exact same frat boys and sorority girls and mommy bloggers and snobbish rich kids that I moved here to avoid.”  And now that it's cheaper to rent in Cole Valley than the Mission, he's out of here.

Agree with him or not, the entire letter—aptly titled “Don't Be a Fucking Douchebag”—is worth a read.

[via Mat Honan]

Pages