So mysterious R&B outfit the Weeknd announced its first S.F. show ever yesterday. Tickets for the May 8 set at the Fillmore went onsale at 10 a.m. this morning, and sold out in less than 10 minutes, according to eager seekers on Twitter.

When shows sell out that fast, weird things start to happen. Weird things like people promising to pay multiple times the face value of the tickets and/or give their bodies in exchange for going to the show: "I willing to trade sex (1 hr) to go see the weeknd.....5'5...140 pds....nice ass and titts. Im really serious," reads one offer placed earlier this afternoon on Craigslist, along with this very NSFW picture:

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David Lewinsky

Producer and DJ Monty Luke is the inspiration for a new song and video.

Recording together as AM/TM, S.F. house producers Anthony Mansfield and Tal M. Klein reference a funky bunch that includes Bob Villa, Ecstasy, Maury Povich, Lower Haight staples like Rosamunde Sausage Grill's Tuesday burgers, and the man specifically named in their new falsetto-peppered track "Who's Afraid of Monty Luke?"

Luke, a producer and DJ who runs his own label, Black Catalogue, called the Bay Area and its music scene home before moving to Detroit a few years ago. He doesn't quite get why his old buddies would make a song for him.

"Yeah, when they told me about it, I didn't know what to think," he says from his perch in the Midwest. "And I still don't. However, I did agree to doing a remix for it, so there's that. But it's definitely some insanely inside joke that I'm not even in on. Kinda awkward."

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We here at SF Weekly know that every up-and-coming band's ultimate aspiration is to play a huge festival -- while getting blasted in the face with overripe, crushed tomatoes.

Well, every group in the Bay Area has a shot to have its dreams come true -- the Tomato Battle is coming to the Alameda Fairgrounds on Oct. 1, complete with a beer garden, a battle of the bands, and, oh yeah, a 10,000-person tomato fight.

Technically, bands won't be performing during the actual ketchup craziness, but if you're talented, ambitious, and a big fan of getting your daily dose of fruits and vegetables, hit the jump for details on how to enter for a chance to play in the battle.

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​Long ago in the year 2010, on a faraway place known as this blog, we told you about "Record Store in Space (A True Story)" -- the amateur video comedy project of a few rather hilarious S.F. record store employees. The first installment of the series (whose draft script was first written, of course, on a bar napkin) was a silly look at the absurdity of record store employees and the dying retail boxes that employ them... plus an added space-opera subplot for dramatic effect. We enjoyed it tremendously. And now there's another chapter in the series coming online next Saturday, April 16, in honor of Record Store Day. We don't know what will happen to our grouchy characters and their crumbling record-store-as-space-ship, but we do have a preview for you. Hint: It looks painful.
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Darrow Montgomery/ Washington City Paper

​Last year, we told you about the latest wacky festival phenomenon to strike the world of indie-ness: a three-day cruise ship ride to the Bahamas featuring some of the wildest bands in garage-rock, among them, San Francisco's own Thee Oh Sees and Ty Segall.

The cruise went down late last month, and reports from the dozen or so media outlets that covered it are still streaming in. The latest is a cover story in the Washington, D.C., City Paper by Jonathan L. Fischer that manages to capture both the good (music; antics like throwing a bass into the ocean) and the bad (the pervasive shitty cruise ship-ness) of this rather odd happening.

Most importantly, Fischer writes that our locals did us proud. Thee Oh Sees, he says, played the best set of the event:

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Thomas Levinson

Is this the future of raves in California?

​Following several drug-related deaths, arrests, and hospitalizations at raves in the Bay Area and Los Angeles this year, S.F. Assemblywoman Fiona Ma says the state should ban raves altogether.

Ma's bill, the Anti-Raves Act of 2011, would outlaw any "public event at night that includes prerecorded music and lasts more than three and one-half hours." Events held at bars, clubs, and other licensed entertainment venues are excepted, and Ma says the law isn't intended to affect "traditional music concerts."

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