The Phoenix - The Best 2005

Arts & Entertainment

City Life

Food & Drink

Shopping

Readers' Picks

Editors' Picks

READERS' PICKS - ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT
Page 1 Page 2

After-hours spot
Last year, the readers' choice for late-night partying was radically egalitarian: People's Republik, in Cambridge. This year, it's back to exclusivity with the return of Rise, a members-only dusk-till-dawn discothèque. The powers-that-be may demand that Boston evenings end no later than 2 am, but that's when things at Rise are just getting started. It's one of the few places where you can dance until the sun comes up. But to enjoy that privilege, you'll need a dues-paying member on your arm. And drink earlier in the night; bottled water's the only thing you can imbibe there.

Rise | 306 Stuart Street, Boston | 617.423.7473 | www.riseclub.us

Art gallery
Phoenix readers repeatedly select the Institute of Contemporary Art for this category, and we wager they'll keep doing so, particularly after the ICA moves into its tremendous new digs on Fan Pier in 2006. Leave dusty antiques and old masterpieces to other art spaces. Our readers recognize the ICA's commitment to the current, the up-and-coming, the challenging, and the cutting-edge.

The Zeitgeist Gallery - diminutive in size, gargantuan in weird - is another repeat favorite. At this Inman Square outpost, art on the wall isn't the half of it. Here you'll find poetry, politics, pianos, and performance art, not to mention jazz shows, slide shows, art shows, and rock shows. No matter what's spilling out onto the street on a given night, the Zeitgeist is ever-experimental, always iconoclastic.

Art museum
For its size (palatial), the breadth of its collections (ancient Egyptian to modern American), its scope (from cars and quilts to sailboats on the lawn), its future (a grand and expansive building project), and its mélange of programming (namely a concert series including the Mountain Goats, Dirty Three, and Fiery Furnaces), the Museum of Fine Arts is your pick.

Last year, Harvard's Fogg Museum took the under-appreciated category, and now readers give it the credit it's due. The Fogg's collections span Western civilization, and the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist collections will surely, ahem, impress. Its size allows for a manageable amount of art intake. And the admission price allows access to all three of Harvard's art museums.

Art-film house
Multi-year winner the Coolidge Corner Theatre screens all the best in camp, cult, and cool. It champions local filmmakers and international films, shows documentaries, hosts all manner of film fests from animation and Jewish to horror-movie marathons, and its "Midnite Movies" range from ninja flicks to '80s cheese.

The Brattle Theatre is in trouble. Despite getting the nod for the best place to watch movies that don't have gazillion-dollar budgets or star Jessica Simpson, the Harvard Square institution is struggling to stay afloat in the age of Netflix. For more than 50 years, the Brattle's been screening the kind of indie, classic, and foreign flicks you can't find anywhere else. Keep it that way by catching a movie or making a donation.

Bar
"Genius," said infamous barfly bard Charles Bukowski, "might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way." Bukowski's multi-page beer menu lists lagers and lambics, dunkelweizens, heiffeweizens, porters, pilsners, and Pabst. There's a brew for every mood, all served extra-cold.

While beer's the thing at Bukowski's, you also appreciate the mercurial quality of the Cambridgeside pick. In Central Square, the Phoenix Landing is a chameleon. Low-key Irish pub by day, bumping dance club by night, it's a place to linger over a Guinness and some shepherd's pie while watching English Premiership football, or to dance to the best in Boston's techno underground. Or do both on the same night.

Club for folk
The basement bastion of folkie flare, Harvard Square's Club Passim has been dominating Boston's singer-songwriter scene for more than 50 years. Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan have all graced the stage. More recent alums include Alastair Moock, Antje Duvekot, and Chris Trapper. Besides hosting music almost every night of the week, the subterranean club is a nonprofit devoted to preserving folk music in all its forms with a historical archive, children's programs, and a music school. And the adjoining Veggie Planet, run by Didi Emmons, is your pick for the best in meat-free fare.

Club Passim | 47 Palmer Street, Cambridge | 617.492.7679 | www.clubpassim.org

Club for hip-hop
You couldn't make up your mind for the hottest spot for hip-hop: Embassy or Aria. In Boston, Lansdowne Street is the club-goer's holy land. And at Embassy, hip-hop rules. Thursday nights bring "The Glamorous Life," billed as Boston's only gay and lesbian hip-hop party with DJs Esthera and Afrodite. Friday nights are "Avaland," where DJ Just Nice spins a blend of hip-hop and reggaeton. And "Sensation Saturdays" feature DJ Val Beats spinning hip-hop and dance. Over at Aria, you'll find DJ Hoff spinning hip-hop and R&B on "Jet Set Fridays." And "Lifestyle Saturdays" are a variation on the combination with DJ Thanos.

Club for jazz
The three pillars on which Wally's Café has stood since 1947 are thus: music every night of the year, never a cover, beer served cold. It's a consistent Phoenix-reader favorite for the best in jazz and blues, and we think that's got to be in part because it's entirely sans attitude. Hear swing, funk, fusion, blues, and Latin jazz, or sit in on the jam session on Sunday afternoons.

While it's mostly local musicians at Wally's, Ryles hosts more international acts, with a penchant for Brazilian jazz. The Inman Square spot has a renowned Sunday jazz brunch, a great pulled-pork sandwich, a second-floor dance hall for swing, salsa, and Zydeco dancing, and regardless of whether the rhythms are foreign or familiar, the room always carries the atmosphere.

Club for rock
At one point or another, everyone ends up at the Paradise, a rock-house legend and a repeat pick. U2 played its first US show here and the list of other acts - Pixies, Pretenders, Blondie, Coldplay, Stereolab, Bosstones, Black Crowes - is a history lesson in the last 25 years of rock and roll. The Lounge also features up-and-coming bands and rotating art exhibits.

You just couldn't make up your mind for best rock club in Cambridge. The Middle East is now four clubs in one. On any given night, you can see a national touring artist like Jonathan Richman downstairs, a great local band like Lock and Key upstairs, belly dancing in the corner, and Latin DJs in ZuZu. Cheap beer and rock and roll rule the Abbey Lounge, and what more could you want? Loud and local bands like the Brett Rosenberg Problem, Rock City Crimewave, and Hilken Mancini grace the no-frills Slumerville space. Closed for some fire code problems, the Abbey hopes to back up and running in a week.

Club for techno
DANCE HERE blares the giant billboard outside Avalon, and the Lansdowne Street club is indeed Boston's pounding techno nucleus. When the world's biggest DJs come to Boston, they spin here. And all you merrymakers - be you TriDelt from BU, Eurotrasher wearing shades, or just a kid looking to lose yourself in the music - bump and grind on the dance floor. If capacity crowds and too many halter tops rattle your mojo and push you toward the wall, then the Cambridgeside choice for techno spot may be more your speed. As the cozy Phoenix Landing morphs into a seething dance scene, you can take comfort that it's just an Irish pub that happens to host some of Boston's best underground DJs.

Club for comedy
Chinese restaurants have long been hotbeds for up-and-coming comedy. The Comedy Studio on the third floor of the Hong Kong in Harvard Square features the best in local newbies and laugh-lab vets. There's a weekly magic show, Tony V on Tuesdays, Dan Sally on Thursdays, and a gaggle of stand-up and sketch artists five nights a week. Thursday nights at the Cantab Lounge, the grassroots group The Tribe Presents . . . rule the night. The Tribe, which also took best theater company, are devoted to getting artists seen and heard, and they've succeeded. Thursdays consist of four half-hour slots filled with improv ensembles, stand-up comics, sketch, and occasionally film shorts or music.

Dance club/night
For the decadent and debauched, the dance-fevered and fervent, there is Avalon. DJs like Tiesto, Carl Cox, and Armin Van Burren swing in to spin for Friday night's "Avaland." There's DJ Adilson on Saturdays, "Fling," a college night of hip-hop and Top 40 on Thursdays, and Sunday is Boston's largest and longest-running gay night. Over in Union Square, Toast Lounge takes this category for the first time for its hugely popular Dyke Night with DJ Susan Esthera. Activist Kristen Porter came up with Dyke Night, which spent years in Jamaica Plain at the Midway as a party promoting lesbian activism and events. Now, women from all over make tracks to Toast on Friday nights.

Dance company
Sugar-plum fairies dance in the heads of more than 120,000 people every year during Boston Ballet's annual production of The Nutcracker, making it the most widely attended ballet production in the world. But there's more than The Nutcracker run. Under the artistic direction of Mikko Nissinen, Boston Ballet blurs the boundary between classic and contemporary, which means that the dance doesn't get stale and the movements feel vital and new. In the 2005-'06 season, the classic La Fille Mal Gardée is balanced by the cutting-edge Grand Slam with works by four contemporary choreographers. And it's just a few weeks until the curtain rises on the giant Christmas tree, dancing mice, and sugar plums.

Boston Ballet | 19 Clarendon Street, Boston | 617.695.6950 | www.bostonballet.org

Dive bar
The Midway Café has open arms. As our readers' choice for gold-medal dive, the Jamaica Plain café offers a range of live music that reflects the diversity of its patrons. In a given week, you could hear punk, surf, metal, electro, or blues. Also on the bill are "Musk," Wednesday dance nights, and "Queeraoke" on Thursdays.

The varied comics and crooners at the Cantab Lounge in Central Square pull an equally varied crowd of grizzled barflies and Cambridge regulars, plus slam poets, comedians, and dudes plunking Appalachia on their banjos. It's the premier saloon for bluegrass in the city, and Little Joe Cook and the Thrillers continue to hold court every weekend.

DIY promoter
Stacie Slotnick founded the music series "The Critique of Pure Reason" in 2002, and she's since brought a slew of mostly all-ages bills to Cambridge and Somerville, including Devendra Banhart, the Moldy Peaches' Kimya Dawson, Joanna Newsom, Deerhoof, Choo Choo La Rouge, Xiu Xiu, and all sorts of other lo-fi, alt-country, psych-folk underdogs. "I only book music I like," she writes on her Web site, and that's a good thing, because our readers seem to have the same taste. CPR events have taken place at the Zeitgeist, the Cambridge Family YMCA, and most recently, PA's Lounge in Somerville. Look for upcoming shows from the Jim Yoshii Pile-Up, Calvin Johnson, the Impossible Shapes, and Night Rally.

Stacie Slotnick and the Critique of Pure Reason | www.thecritique.org

DJ
Twenty-nine-year-old Justin Carr founded the Collective, a group of Boston DJs who ran the decks every Thursday night at Club Europa. The DJ collaborative wants to bring high-quality club experiences to everyone and "liberate Boston from its prevailing image-obsessed club scene." More power to him, you say. All the DJs in the Collective are encouraged to play their passions for better parties. Progressive, techno, and trance are this turntablist's delight, and currently he and the Collective are looking for a new venue for their weekly events.

DJ Justin Carr | www.djjustincarr.com | www.myspace.com/collectiveboston

Page 1 Page 2

thephoenix.com

stuffatnight.com