Best one-stop avant-garde hang

In the newspaper biz you like to spread it around, but what could we do when, week after week, the Zeitgeist Gallery in Inman Square kept showing up featured in our "8 Days" pages? Week in and week out, it offered one provocative visual-art or musical event after another. It might be an "artists who rock" show with works by the likes of Asa Brebner, Charlie Chesterman, and Cynthia von Buhler. Or experimental films by Guy Maddin and Chelsea Spear. The music has run the gamut, from rock guys mixing it up on the experimental edge, to visits from New York jazz heavycats like Tony Malaby and Drew Gress, to a night of progressive Latin jazz from Pablo Ablanedo, to shows by the Either/Orchestra and Joe Maneri. On the bill as we went to press were a show by mainstream-blues-piano great David Maxwell with his experimental outfit Sleeper Cell, and a tango-oriented show that promised to mix the influences of Astor Piazzolla and Jorge Luis Borges. A photo exhibit promised "righteous and radical revolutionary figures" from Betty Friedan, Noam Chomsky, and Howard Zinn to Chuck Berry, Public Enemy, and the Stooges by Cambridge shutterbug John Nikolai. If that weren't validation enough, Boston's longest-running avant-garde trio, the Fringe, have set up their longstanding Monday residency at the Zeitgeist. What's more, it's a non-alcohol, all-ages venue. "We are a venue for that which has no other venue," says the Zeitgeist's mission statement. And by recruiting community volunteers and a diverse crew of curators, owner Alan Nidle has made the Zeitgeist the venue. Operating outside the mainstream marketplace, the Zeitgeist is the kind of place where new art gets its start.

Zeitgeist Gallery, 1353 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, (617) 876-6060.