Arts & Entertainment >>

• Best Big Fat Hardcover Book About St. Louis Culture
  Seeking St. Louis: Voices From a River City, 1670-2000
  For those of you who're new to the Lou and need to catch up on the Arch City vibe right quick, the most effective place for the bookworm to turn is this 1,200-page collection of essays and previously published works from a megawatt roster of authors and artists. It reads like the Delmar Loop's... More >>
• Best Place to Find Dirty French Novels
  Dada/Surrealist/Counterculture Corner, Subterranean Books
  "Pornography" is a funny word. It literally means "one-handed writing," which implies that your other hand is doing ... well, you know. Before photography and Internet porn, it took the degenerate French novelists and their nondescriptly packaged tomes to give hardworking Americans manual... More >>
• Best Radio Station for Music
  The one you program yourself
  If you've been a reader for any length of time, you know our predilections and our biases (full disclosure: three full-time RFTers have staked claims on KDHX time slots). The simple truth, though, is that for all its glory, the FM band has its limitations: mainly, those who own the stations,... More >>
• Best Display of Impromptu Public Art
  Demo Man
  For decades, Don Bellon, head demo man for Bellon Wrecking and Salvage, had a desktop statue of a man swinging a sledgehammer, called "The Wrecker." His wife had given him the statue when he started his business back in '73. The statue was made of metal toothpicks, nuts and bolts. "I always had... More >>
• Best Local Artist
  Leslie Laskey
  In the hit-or-miss world of contemporary art, longevity in itself is a virtue. A longtime professor of art and architecture at Washington University, Leslie Laskey has possessed emeritus status for many years. His demeanor in the classroom is still the stuff of legend -- suffice it to say he... More >>
• Best Populist Top-Ten Chart
  Trash cans in front of Vintage Vinyl
  Blame David Letterman if you must, but the supremacy of the Top Ten-style list is now complete. By breaking down every form of entertainment into subcategories and microcategories and allowing every wonk with a word processor and a modem to disseminate his opinions, it is now common knowledge... More >>
• Best Museum Exhibit
  Andy Warhol's "Silver Clouds," Museum of Contemporary Religious Art
  We say heaven is a place on earth. At least it was during the bleak days of winter, when Andy Warhol's "Silver Clouds" was first housed at the Museum of Contemporary Religious Art on the campus of St. Louis University. Even though he produced some giant silkscreen re-creations of "The Last... More >>
• Best Poet
  Mary Jo Bang
  "We're having a party./There's dancing; there's petting/in the bedroom to the right. Inevitable light/in the morning. Who will refuse enthrallment?//To be free, Louise says, is to be undecided." Now, isn't that fun? Mary Jo Bang's first collection, the impeccably titled Apology for Want, was... More >>
• Best Belly Dancing
  Aalim Dance Academy at the Venice Café
  It's the first Monday of the month, and something strange is happening on the corner of Lemp and Pestalozzi. The bar is packed with models and dancers, all clapping and swiveling to Middle Eastern rhythms. Men and women slip dollar bills into bell-adorned bikinis, but the dancing isn't just a... More >>
• Best Drinking Fountain (1 Comment)
  Mad Art's Halsey Taylor pedestal fountain
  It kinda goes without saying that the best drinking fountain in the region is a Halsey Taylor; everyone knows the company makes the Cadillacs of fountains, just as everyone knows that HT holds the patent on the heavenly Double Bubbler spigot system, which, in the verbiage of the company... More >>
• Best Gallery Exhibition
  Terra Incognita: Contemporary Artists' Maps and Other Visual Organizing Systems
  "How can you be two places at once when you're not anywhere at all?" is the old Firesign Theater line that is more profound than most of us are comfortable with. How do we know where we are in an age of space and cyberspace? If maps change as knowledge changes, if maps are remade as demarcations... More >>
• Best Shakespeare
  Twelfth Night, St. Louis Shakespeare
  Choosing the play is easy. Twelfth Night, Shakespeare's bright winter comedy, received two productions during the past year; both were satisfying, for quite different reasons. The tricky part comes in choosing which production was best. The student version at Washington University's Edison... More >>
• Best Measured Response to an Irrational Crackdown
  Intimate Warehouse Parties
  The Man can pass laws and can enforce them; he can chase and cite and hassle and intimidate, but he can't keep the kids from dancing, even though for some reason this egregious act scares the bejesus out of him. The recent crackdown on rave culture and that evil electronic dance music -- passing... More >>
• Best Gallery
  Des Lee Gallery
  Washington University art professor Pat Schuchard coaxed his institution into renovating one of its vacant downtown buildings for artist housing back in 1999. Besides providing low-income housing to a working class that got pushed out of Washington Avenue after the urban zone they pioneered... More >>
• Best Rock Critic
  Paul Friswold
  It may be unseemly to toot your own horn, but Riverfront Times writer Paul Friswold is the best rock journalist in this town. Let's review the reviews. Friswold on Motörhead: "Motörhead fans are a special breed. If you've ever punched a stranger in the face, puked out the door of a... More >>
• Best Movie Theater
  Tivoli Theatre
  Three things make the Tivoli the best movie theater in St. Louis. First, the stunning architecture: Ornate ceilings, a terrazzo floor, recessed domes, beautiful arches, a deep-burgundy curtain and old movie memorabilia set the Tivoli apart from the run-of-the-mill, uninspired mall boxes. Second,... More >>
• Best Theater Surprise
  God of Vengeance
  Theater magic can strike in the unlikeliest places. Last January, it struck in a synagogue on Kingshighway, at a staged reading of an obscure Yiddish play, jointly sponsored by City Players and the New Jewish Theatre. When Sholem Asch's God of Vengeance was produced on Broadway in 1923, this... More >>
• Best Local-Theater Play
  Seven Guitars
  August Wilson's 1996 elegy about dreams deferred is an epic drama, but it's also long and verbose, and anyone who has seen it before could be forgiven for approaching yet another production with foreboding. So the shock here was the amazing pace of last January's St. Louis Black Repertory... More >>
• Best Change at KWMU-FM
  Mike Sampson hosts CityScape
  The mic passed from the don of St. Louis critics, Joe Pollack, to the inquisitive Mike Sampson on the cultural program CityScape, which plays live on Friday mornings and is rebroadcast on Sunday mornings. A grateful KWMU audience gives praise. Pollack knows his stuff but never stopped reminding... More >>
• Best Place to Go for a Spin and Watch a Play
  Carousel House at Faust Park
  Truth be told, St. Louis is not blessed with an abundance of great theater spaces. The Fabulous Fox is more fabulous in décor than in intimacy, and the Edison must have been designed by a contortionist. How else to account for a section of seats that barely even faces the stage? St. Louis... More >>
• Best Television PSAs
  "This is St. Louis" media campaign
  To thrive, civic-marketing wonks argue, a city must attract and retain creative young people -- not just yuppies and dot-commers and advertising jerks but their less affluent boho counterparts, the feckless, glamorous artist-types who tend the cool bars and form the cool bands and otherwise... More >>
• Best Place and Time to Get Schatzied
  Saturday mornings, WEW (770 AM)
  There are at least three kinds of Germans: Bad Germans, who are stinkers; good Germans, who also are very, very bad (but can take orders); and St. Louis Germans, who like to trink bier, tanz around in der lederhosen und schtufft der bellies full o' de big fat wursts. Most years, when the... More >>
• Best Funky Children's-Theater Group
  DramaRama Theatre Company
  Here is a truism that never goes away: The arts are an acquired taste. If we are not exposed to theater, music and dance as children, there is no reason to expect that we will value theater, music and dance as adults. You can't have too many children's theater groups: Characters & Company, for... More >>
• Best Theater Company
  St. Louis Black Repertory Company
  The St. Louis Black Repertory Company attained this accolade the old-fashioned way: They earned it. For its 25th-anniversary season, the Black Rep assembled a solid core acting company -- which in itself is a rarity these days. That versatile company then succeeded in staging four absorbing... More >>
• Best Down-and-Dirty Crime Rag
  St. Louis Metro Evening Whirl
  We all say we're sick of the media's penchant for broadcasting crime and violence -- murder, homicide, robberies and so on -- on TV, and, of course, we are. In public we scream about it. But -- 'fess up! -- in private a whole bunch of us love reading about it in the newspaper that best covers... More >>
• Best Long-Running Production
  Late Nite Catechism, Grandel Theatre
  For the past ten months, St. Louis has been blessed by the presence of Colleen O'Neill, whose remarkably gentle yet fully-realized performance as Sister in Late Nite Catechism has made the city a more benevolent place. Out on the street, newspaper headlines proclaimed the trying times of the... More >>
• Best Casino
  Ameristar
  There's nothing wrong with local casinos that a little competition wouldn't solve. What sets casinos apart is the ambience, given that games everywhere are essentially the same, as are the odds of winning. Is the floor clean? Are you asked whether you'd like a drink more often than once an... More >>
• Best Dance Club
  Lo
  Think back to your most heavenly dancing experience. No doubt the place was packed and you were rubbing up against equally blissful, equally lovable friends, playmates and strangers. That's dancing, and it involves sweat, people, most of which is ain't yours. The goal is intimacy, and to achieve... More >>
• Best Fanzine
  Tohmet
  Painful as it is to admit, the St. Louis metal scene is weak. Metal is undersupported, underloved, underwanted and underappreciated. So it was surprising to discover Tohmet, a digest-sized fanzine dedicated to informing St. Louis metal heads about upcoming releases and tours from underground... More >>
• Best Use for a Bookmobile
  Gina and Dan Gibbons' Wedding
  In the '70s suburbs, bookmobiles were the place -- should the librarian be filing in the back -- where you could get your thirteen-year-old mitts on a thick, smutty paperback copy of Judy Blume's Wifey before one of your friends' moms checked it out. The bookmobile evokes tales of singularly... More >>
• Best Songwriter Under 30
  Matt Ahearn
  His guitar, when he has one, is a rinky-dink Takamine. No pickup, and the strings haven't been changed since he bought it. He's a solid rhythm guitarist who once fronted the quasi-jam band Jitney Ride and, briefly, the Sharky Farmers, but he drops his pick when he plays and forgets the words to... More >>
• Best Weekly DJ Spin
  The Science
  There's nothing like a good weekend ritual, a special place to head with the headz, to groove alongside the dude you were eyeing last week, to finally work up the nerve to chat with the girl who always stands in that corner. Weekly DJ spins are taking place all over St. Louis these days: at the... More >>
• Best Dance Craze
  "The Monastery"
  We're not about to instigate a shitstorm by citing the source of this dance, which, for all we know, has been around in some incarnation or another for decades. Nor are we going to credit anyone in particular with inventing it, although we've heard countless theories about its origins. All we... More >>
• Best Indoor Graffiti
  Hi-Pointe Café Bathrooms
  The moment you hit the top floor of the Hi-Pointe Café, a sight appears that's so loud you have to squint. Inside the bathrooms is a caterwaul of rock & roll, the visual version: graffiti. A gusty deliverance of subcultural scribble jacksonpollocks every surface like a demented office... More >>
• Best Arts Administrator
  Brent Benjamin, St. Louis Art Museum
  This is a surprise selection -- even to us. St. Louis Art Museum director Brent Benjamin drives media types crazy. Handsome, charming, eminently knowledgeable -- you walk out of an interview with Benjamin and figure you've got really good stuff. But, back in your office, you read your notes over... More >>
• Best Rock & Roll Club
  Lemmons Basement Bar
  A satellite of the popular Black Thorn pizza parlor, Lemmons Basement Bar is often eerily reminiscent of the late, great Cicero's Basement Bar, back when it was on the other side of the street and not so redolent of patchouli. Like its legendary predecessor, Lemmons is thick with smoke and... More >>
• Best Soulard Blues Guitarist (1 Comment)
  Steve Pecaro
  As fine a genre as it can be when handled by the right set of fingers and pipes, blues remains a relatively somber musical genre, the stump from which the phrase "crying in your beer" grows. Not so with Steve Pecaro, whose typical house of blues is the 1860's Hard Shell in the 'Lard most Friday... More >>
• Best In-Store Concerts
  Vintage Vinyl
  Truth be told, Vintage Vinyl doesn't have much competition in this area: Border's has brought in some decent talent, including Neil Halstead and Julia Fordham, but it's primarily a bookstore, with a penchant for NPR-friendly strummers who won't freak out the grandmas. Euclid Records hosts the... More >>
• Best Outdoor Graffiti
  Mary Miss' Abandoned Pool Installation
  Tucked away in the trees of Laumeier Park is the city's greatest repository of vapid lyrics and painful doggerel. Mary Miss' installation is an empty pool, encircled by a walkway and with a bare-timber structure close by. Thousands of snippets of Hendrix, Grateful Dead, Red Hot Chili Peppers and... More >>
• Best Load-In
  Black Thorn at Lemmons
  In addition to the fame, the chicks and the mountains of coke, one of the best things about being in a rock band is getting to carry heavy musical equipment through glass-strewn alleys and up and down narrow back staircases slick with beer, urine and GG Allin knows what else. Leave it to those... More >>
• Best Self-Promotion
  CORE Project
  Say what you will about the CORE Project's melding of hip-hop and hippie jams, but you cannot deny this band's fervor when it comes to promoting themselves. Their graffiti-style fliers are ubiquitous, and their "Hello, My Name Is CORE Project" stickers are found on street signs in Bridgeton,... More >>
• Best New Building
  Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts
  First, an honorable mention goes to the Schmidt Art Center on the campus of Southwestern Illinois College in Belleville. A small jewel of a space out near the cornfields, the Schmidt is well worth the trip out to the end of the MetroLink line. But let's face it: As much as we like to award... More >>
• Best Topless Club
  P.T.'s of Centreville
  It's too soon to tell whether Larry Flynt's Hustler Club entry into the local "topless" club scene will boost the revamped Déjà Vu to the top of the line of East Side strip joints. In the buffet of buck-nakedness that is the circuit, titillation is where you find it, not just where... More >>
• Best Music Venue
  Off Broadway
  When Off Broadway changed ownership last year, the rumor mill went into overdrive, and all the speculation was bad. As it turns out, Off Broadway hasn't just kept everything that made the club the best place to hear live music in St. Louis; new owners Connie Garcia and Joe Telle have made the... More >>
• Best Twentysomething Drunken Stumble Down Memory Lane
  "Dollar Bin" at Lo
  Sake and nostalgia are a dangerous combination, and even more so when the nostalgic can't handle their sake, a big sound system is involved and DJ Kenny Kingston is kicking the cream cheese: the hair metal, the teeny-funk, the new jack swing, the Prince ("they always ask for the Prince,"... More >>
• Best Reason Not to Appear in the "Best of St. Louis"
  You might go out of business
  Like the curse of the Best New Artist Grammy ("Milli Vanilli's revenge," if you will), not all awards and recognition work out in the long run for the recipients. Take some of those featured in last year's best-of issue. Days after the paper hit the streets, the folks running the... More >>
• Best Window Display
  Michael Tomlinson's place
  Michael Tomlinson, fashion designer, lives in Benton Park, on Sidney Street. It's a nice residential neighborhood, and his place sits directly across from the ultraswank, Lexus-lovin' Sidney Street Café. Talk about location. The clever ones turn this fact into an opportunity, and... More >>
• Best Honky-Tonk Band
  Rockhouse Ramblers
  When it comes to that slippery music genre called alt-country, it's often easy to find the "alt" but all too often difficult to find the "country." Throwing a pedal steel over a morphine-paced slacker whine just doesn't cut it, son. Nor does a pale imitation of the country-rock hybrid best... More >>
• Best Local Radio DJ/Personality (1 Comment)
  Jay Nicks, WFUN (95.5 FM)
  Radio personalities aren't supposed to be good-looking; they're supposed to sound good-looking. After all, if they had the face to match the voice, they'd be on TV, right? Well, we've never actually seen Jay Nicks, the early-evening 95.5 jock who refers to himself as "the youngest in charge,"... More >>
• Best Public Art
  "Wild Rose Run" by Linda Horsley and Bob Rocca
  Linda Horsley and Bob Rocca have done their part to replenish the de-natured city. From a chain-link fence that borders Forest Park Parkway, roses have bloomed. Glimpsed, as they are, whipping by at car-window level, "Wild Rose Run" makes for sunny impressions on the commute. Horsley and Rocca... More >>
• Best Minimalist Chandelier
  I Fratellini Caffe and Rosticceria
  When you think "chandelier," the first mind-image is probably of a fancy one made of cut crystal. But sometimes, of course, the simpler the better. Check out the lights designed by artists, such as the beauties dangling above tables at SqWires, Lafayette Square's newest hangout, housed in an old... More >>
• Best New Radio Show
  Memphis to Manchester
  John Wendland's Memphis to Manchester show, which airs every Friday from 8-10 a.m., epitomizes all the qualities that make KDHX the best radio station in St. Louis and quite possibly the world: wide-ranging but impeccable programming, a minimum of chitchat and a genuine passion for sharing great... More >>
• Best Place to See the Sky
  Richard Serra's "Joe," Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts
  From the outside, Richard Serra's Cor-Ten-steel masterpiece "Joe" appears to list a bit to one side, like a stylish woman's hat or the prow of a ship. The sculpture is the vibrant stroke of burnished orange that glows next to the concrete Ando building and the gray-graveled ground. Step inside,... More >>
• Best Comedy Show
  St. Louis University Art Museum
  Forget driving out to the suburban comedy clubs and turn off the damn TV, already. Turns out that the Jesuits have the most amusing show in town: the new St. Louis University Art Museum. The St. Louis Convention and Visitors Commission should really think about promoting this as a must-see... More >>