We be clubbin'
By Vivian Host

CLUBBING IN WINTER makes me sick. No, literally. After a long night of going in and out of clubs (from sweaty heat to flash freeze) and having germ-harboring friends share my beer bottle, I'm cruising for the flu. Couple that with Mr. Thang turning the heater up to 90 under the cloak of night, and I have woken up four times this week feeling like a giant piece of beef jerky. Apparently I'm not the only one worried. My friend Rab got a missed connection on Craigslist last week addressed: "To the Girl Puking at Bottom of the Hill Last Night." I thought it was a potential booty call, but it read something like "Please tell me you were just drunk, because there's an airborne virus going around, and I don't want to catch it." Romance is so, like, dead and stuff.

So it's pissing rain. So we're all going to get sick. So what? There are still lots of places to go. More places than ever before, if you can scrape up the money to get there. There's Chi Chi and Cherry, Soluna and Sublounge, Dragon Bar and EZ5, and on and on. In an effort to break the Milk-the Top-Club Six cycle, I visited a few.

First stop was Loft 11, which looks like that nightclub Michael Douglas went to in Basic Instinct. S.D. and I were there at 8:30 at night, so the only thing crackin' was a delicious Chop Chop Chicken Salad and wontons filled with Kailua wild boar, which tasted not unlike Jimmy Dean breakfast sausage. It was weird eating dinner in a quiet nightclub and tough to picture what crowd would be flooding in there later (one assumes well-dressed thirtysomethings). The best part of the two-tiered space was a rectangular side room where everything was floor-to-ceiling white – good for ambiance, but a bad place to lose your cocaine.

Forty dollars later, we clocked in across the street at eight-month-old Public, this time more of a restaurant than a bar. The food is American comfort, the scene is chilled, and the owners – Tad, Anthony, and Kathryn – are saucy, but the best thing about this place is the maraschinos they put in your cocktail. Unlike those cancer-causing cherries you get in other bars, these are syrup-drenched and imported from Italy in a decidedly nonglamorous "giant aluminum can." I'm tempted to start carrying them around in my purse – they're that good.

We screeched off to Mighty, the new venture from Peter Glikshtern, who originally opened Liquid and Club Six. It's a high-ceilinged brick space, like a darker, more ambient 111 Minna Gallery, and some banji-boy house was pumping on the nice, loud sound system: gay New York City-style stuff – the crowd of drum 'n' bass scenesters, industry types, and foreign exchange students didn't know what to do with themselves. Graf writer Buter pointed out the speaker stacks, multiple DJ booths, and moving video screens, as a windswept Glikshtern rushed past, looking more like he was running a regatta than a club. I finally met Will Linn from Blasthaus, who gave me a bone-crushing handshake and chipped off before I could thank him for promoting the dope Kompakt records show, which convinced me that techno is going to make a massive comeback in 2004. Repetitive beats have never sounded so good.

Getting drunker, I finally became a crazed camp counselor and dragged all my friends to the fancy Fluid Bar and Lounge. I figured it was the one night I was actually dressed up enough to get in, but when we got there, it was closing. Manager Sam was good to us, turning on the special lighting system, called GrandMA, so we could see the floor light up like the "Thriller" video. After some obligatory moonwalking, we had to jet. I'd like to go back – its minimal white and mirrored look would be great for a trashy party – but since it's only hosting high-end house things and private functions for Gavin Newsom, I just don't know.

After all this new, new, new, we ended up at Arrow, where Alexis Georgopoulous from Tussle and his friend Cliff Hengst were playing sad, sad songs designed to make 45-year-old suburban housewives wet. It was both fun and excruciating. How ... familiar.

Loft 11. 316 11th St., S.F. (415) 701-8111.

Public. 1489 Folsom, S.F. (415) 552-3065.

Mighty. 119 Utah, S.F. (415) 626-7001.

Fluid Bar and Lounge. 662 Mission, S.F. (415) 615-6888.

E-mail Vivian Host