Best of Manhattan 2002: Best of Manhattan 2002

Best New York City
Sci-Fi Movie

Best Proof That Rock
Critics Are Idiots

Not one of these doofi bothered to add: Hurray for the White Stripes! Thank God they failed at Radio City Music Hall! What the hell was their management thinking booking them on this disastrous bill in the first place? The White Stripes had no business competing in a battle of the bands with the much more pop-star-ready Strokes. The brilliant duo is way too fucking smart and artistically inclined ever to become a global pop phenom. They belong in rock clubs, not the stadiums and arenas where the Strokes are headed. They’ve already won too many awards and gotten too much mainstream media attention over the past year, luring them (and their management) into stupid career moves like this one. A much higher level of "success" would very likely kill the Stripes at this stage. They should be thanking their lucky stars that the Radio City crowd and the idiot critics didn’t glom onto them. Let the Strokes become next year’s Oasis; the Stripes, a vastly superior band, would do well to settle back into something more like the obscurity in which they labored, ingeniously, only a year ago. Fuck pop stardom. The White Stripes rock.

Best Bowling Alley

If you just want to bowl, drop the pretensions and go to Leisure Time. This is no-frills bowling for real people, so you won’t have to stand on line with models and nobody has to show ID (unless you wanna go to the bar). It’s open ’til 11 most nights, 1 a.m. Friday and Saturday, has a full video arcade and the bar or snack stand won’t break you. It’s only $7 to bowl, and the Port Authority Bus Terminal/ Hell’s Kitchen location is still good for seedy kicks at any hour.

Best Brooklyn Underground
Venue For Live Music

That’s the thing about Happy Birthday Hideout: you cane go to socialize, drink, take in spectacular views from the roof, hear local music, all for around $5. They sell cheap cans of beer, and wine, and sometimes absinthe. We’ve seen everyone from the stripped-down country-garage group the Roger Sisters to Blood on the Wall and the arrogant Heroine Sheiks. Since it’s inconveniently located adjacent to the BQE between (very) south Williamsburg, Bed-Stuy and Clinton Hill, you won’t often find he outerborough yahoos you’d see at other nearby soirees. We’d pay $10 for that.

Best Embarrassing
Musical Trend

Best Punk Rock DJ

Best Stephin Merritt Protege

The main project is still Flare, the orchestral-pop outfit whose upcoming Hung CD finally allows their recorded output to catch up with the fine concerts of recent years–as can be heard at a showcase this Nov. 1 at Fez. Beghtol also records as the Moth Wranglers in collaboration with Chris Xefos. And then there’s his yearly appearance with Merritt and Dudley Klute as the Three Terrors. (You probably missed the Sept. 15 show dedicated to songs about intoxication.) Look for an upcoming solo album, too.

So what keeps Beghtol from being an indie star? It doesn’t help that he’s a bear of a gay guy who discusses his sexuality from the stage. (He doesn’t camp things up, outside of appearing with the Three Terrors.) Beghtol’s left falling between the cracks of every scene–which, of course, is why he’s built a scene of his own. How else can a talented musician survive in this town?

Best Underrated Movie That,
Had It Been Marketed
a Little Differently, Would Have Gotten
Raves from The Matthew Barney/Set

We’d never particularly been a fan of Tom Green; we went to the movie on opening night only in the hopes of seeing an American Pie knockoff. But we were in for greater things. Shocking images; familial hatred; identity politics: even A.O. Scott (the Times’ most talented thinker) called the father-son dynamic Ingmaresque. Scenes we can’t believe got past censors. But as a result of the movie, Tom Green’s career goes into the toilet, while someone like Matthew Barney makes Cremaster and gets the respect of Cinema Village and the love of Bjork?

Compare for example a scene in which a pregnant woman realizes too late that her baby’s being delivered by a stranger, Indian women begin to ululate and play the tambourine while blood is splattered on their faces and a man rends the umbilical cord with his teeth, to a scene in which a translucent corset is filled with bees and Norman Mailer plays Houdini. Tell us, which one of those two auteurs would you want to spend the evening with? Now also tell us: Why hasn’t Freddy Got Fingered become the sleeper hit of the year?

Best Night on Which To See
Trannies Dressed As Tank Girl
Atomic Dolls, Fridays at Webster Hall
125 E. 11th St. (betw. 3rd & 4th Aves.)
353-1600

So we just dress up, sit back and laugh at all the idiots who were too cool to dress up, yet not cool enough to reap the benefits of being fabulous–and a bit ridiculous, but isn’t that the fun of clubbing?

Best Indie-Rock Swan Song

It’s no fun being the scold at the wake, but it’s worse fun to watch breathless nostalgia transmute the passing of a very adequate rock club into something on the level of the closing of Max’s Kansas city or the Filmore East. The sticking point here, as far as we’re concerned, is that for all its bands-below-the-radar pretense, Brownies (and the scene it catered to) was never quite as humble as all that. To know this, all one had to do was play in a band or attend shows semiregularly around the time the indie-rock wave was cresting. Think back to all the coked-up A&R weasels posturing as homespun band advocates, all those would-be Lunchpail Petes with their music zines putting the thumbscrews to musicians to buy advertising in their pages in exchange for some crappily composed, semicoherent capsule review. Recall how the acquisition of a good slot on a medium-high profile bill was just that: a purchase, in the form of the ticket pre-buy courtesy of your label who, in the end, charged it all back to penniless you. And as for all those bands who actually were talented but also labelless, there was…well…always Monday night, midnight to 12:45.

Sour grapes? Hardly. The business runs on money. Always has, always will. And we certainly don’t begrudge Mike Stuto–easily one of the most dedicated, hardest-working guys in the business–his success. No, in the end, all we take issue with is the gap between the spin and the reality. Measure our sorrow by a venue lost and it’s huge. Measure it by the sincerity in the promise and we say, Alas! Here was an era that begged for an end.

Best Original Music Venue
West of the Hudson

With the interior design of a biker bar and the ambience of a Loisaida lounge, the Underpass has a unique setting for being surrounded by the suburban sprawl of Bergen County. Make sure you check out their open mic night, every Wednesday, which showcases some of the finest improvised sets, from funk to jazz to drum ’n’ bass. After one trip over to the Underpass, you’ll find yourself becoming the bridge and tunnel crowd on a regular basis.

Best Public Sculpture

The Gandhi Man Can. Who doesn’t like Mahatma Gandhi? Everyone seems to love this bronze statue too, newly reinstalled on a reconstructed patch of Union Square Park. It’s a lifesize take of the frail little dude, striding purposely forward toward the farmer’s market, maybe ready to break his most recent fast. A lot of the time he’s wearing fresh bouquets of flowers.

Mahatma disappeared for a bit while his immediate neighborhood was spruced up. His new digs now allow better and more dignified access to the old boy. We’re glad to see him back, looking ready as ever for some very civil civil disobedience.

Best Monday-Night Institution

Best Self-Esteem
Therapy For NYC Guys

Best Interactive
Souvenir Experience

One small one is the souvenir you can get at one of the two penny machines at Deno’s in Wheel Park. One is right near the Wonder Wheel and the other is by the concession stand, near the rides by the boardwalk in the upper part of the park. They are the kind of machine where you put in two quarters and a penny, and it stamps out a miniature scene on your (now elongated) coin. On the first one, you only have one choice, an imprint of the Wonder Wheel, but on the other machine, you can choose from four different scenes of amusement park attractions. The fun part of the second machine is that you get to spin the dial to choose which scene you want, and you have to crank the handle four times (the magic number) before it spits out your penny. Just for something different, bring some wheat pennies along with your newer coins and you’ll get a different look each time.

Here’s another secret: If you know someone whose birthday is coming up, find a coin from the year they were born. If you put it in the machine with Lincoln facing out, most of the time you can read the date on the back, which makes for not only a perfect souvenir, but a perfect birthday gift, too.

Best Club at Which
to See Free T&A

The lower level of Albion Saturdays at Downtime is like a strip show in a graveyard, decaying bodies with electrical-taped nipples (oh my God, that’s like so five years ago) trying to find the beat. But you don’t need talent or rhythm to shake those jugs, as the Man Show taught us. For $15 we can stand in an audience full of thugs that other clubs rejected and old guys in poet shirts with goth porn fetishes and witness all the T&A we want with no need to provide tips for the dancers. In fact, we’ve become accustomed to bringing pennies to throw at the stage, because those girls go through a lot of electrical tape. We’ll even spare you the trouble of feeling bitter like we did when we discovered that we wasted half of our evening looking at the boobies. We got a secret: the good party is on the second floor.

Best Warehouse Fire Waiting to Happen

When we first went there to hear DJ Spooky spin, it wasn’t like they had flame dancers on a midlevel platform, while below a portly gentleman with a very large fire extinguisher was hardly obscured by sozzled loungers twirling in dangling cloth chairs. It wasn’t the sort of venue that would install large plastic tubeways to explore, its art exhibits providing the interactivity and danger of a playground, back when playgrounds weren’t miniature, multicolored, Martha Stewart lawn decorations. And would said venue, also, leave you dancing home, the rising sun meeting you halfway to the F train?

We mean, come on. Would anyone do that? Nooo. Who would do any of that? It would be silly. Or maybe, just some good hot fun.

Best Local Rock Promoter

"Isn’t that an oxymoron?" he replied.

Indeed. But he’d never dealt with Weiss. We have, and we repeat: Weiss is the very rare rock promoter who’s a genuinely nice guy. We’re sure we’ll get letters from a band or two who’ve had unhappy encounters with him and think he’s a dick, but that comes with the job. We’ve booked several gigs and had other related dealings with him over a few years now, and we love the guy. Weiss books shows at Warsaw and the Village Underground, as well as honchoing the dinosaur/garage rock Cavestomp! series and record label. He was into garage rock well before it became a fad, long before that raghead from Springsteen’s band glommed onto it, years before Time Out tumbled onto the White Stripes and the Go.

Lately he’s been indulging his 60s rock jones at Automatic Slims on Sunday and Monday nights, where the soundtrack is all vintage songs chosen with exquisite taste, and the muted tv over the bar runs classic, and often little-seen, Shindig-era footage. You kids want to see what a real rock band is supposed to look like? Check it out. More recently, Weiss has revealed himself as a well-versed aficionado of country music as well; Billboard just ran a piece about his rock-to-country crossover. If he does for classic country what he’s done for vintage and revivalist rock, NYC could become the Nashville of the North. We can think of far worse fates.

Best Sorely Missed PBS News Anchor

Daljit Dhaliwal, ITN

The British-born daughter of Indian parents, her popularity in the U.S. irked the hell out of the media poobahs back home. It only took a pic in People’s "50 Most Beautiful People" issue and a profile in The New York Times to prompt her white British masters to begin serving up big steaming helpings of schadenfreude. In one embarrassing piece full of damning faint praise, outright calumny and dodo logic, the London Guardian’s Matt Wells chafed at the "Cult of Daljit," claiming that her appearance on David Letterman denigrated her journalistic pride.

At first, we were willing to grant that British newsies do not work the celebrity circuit to the degree that their U.S. counterparts do and so okay, a point scored for the high-minded. But it was in the article’s crescendo that Wells let his true mind slip: "Dhaliwal does not remotely live up to the hype. She is striking, but not unfeasibly pretty; yes, she has great bone structure, but she also has bags under her eyes. And some of the pictures on the website have clearly undergone the Photoshop treatment."

Ahem. Yes, well, we once made similar remarks about a woman, though not in an appraisal of her journalistic integrity. With enemies like that it’s no wonder Daljit Dhaliwal’s been banished to the murky outposts of airport-feed cable news.

Lest she think we’ve forgotten her we’d like to take this opportunity to say: Daljit, Na maskar. Aap se mil ke khu-shi hui. Kya haal hayen? Chunari chunari. Krip ya dhan ya vad. Mujhe minu dikha. Haram zadah, David Wells, haram zadah! Ach ha.

P.S. If some or other ill fortune should befall that lucky SOB husband of yours, our door’s always open.

Best Odd Public Sculpture

On an explanatory sign next to the sculpture, a quote from the artist reads: "The dog is you, the dog is me." Make of it what you will.

As you get closer still, however, you notice that the dog’s eyes are downcast, and that what at first appeared to be drool is, in reality, a continuous stream of spilling tears.

Nara is a world-renowned Japanese artist famous for regularly mixing the cute and the melancholy. In fact, he’s done crying dogs before. We’re not exactly sure how one of his dogs ended up here in Tompkins, or if it’s supposed to be permanent. We do wonder, however sadly, how long it will take before some of the more easily entertained park regulars destroy it. While it’s there, though, we think it’s pretty keen.

Best Use of Nudity To
Serve the Narrative

Their ranks are quotidian, omni-corporeal–from the classically sculpted to the outright flabby. And so what one member will try and not quite achieve–an arabesque, say, or a high kick–an adjacent member will pull off sans souci. In the disconnect lay the funny. But there’s revelation here too. (They reminded us just how much time we once wasted at the behest of an ex modern-dancer friend. Us failing, though in earnest, to decipher plot and meaning from all her insufferable Sprocketry.) It took one Dazzle Dancers performance to finally come away with a real appreciation for what professional dancers can do and the rest of us can’t. It took a second performance to realize that dance captain Cherry Dazzle (nee Cary Curran) is possessed of a killer singing voice and formal stage presence and will likely be snatched up by the first film director with his head screwed on crooked.

The Dazzles are a coed group. They tend to perform mostly at the gayer venues, which is a shame since hetero audiences could probably dig their act, too. As to their habit of concluding their routines smack-ass naked? Well, that does not bother us even a little.

Best Punk Rock Band

That’s why we love the Kick. Based on the Lower East Side, these kids play the punk like our pappies used to. Loud, fast and snotty. Fronted by a singer named Sammy and a bass player named Scott, these guys look sweet enough to bring home to your mothers, but punk rock enough to have your dad search them when they leave. Their music is played very Dead Boysish, with a little Damned/ Clash/Jam thrown in there to make it spicy. They write really fun tunes, and truthfully, the chicks love ’em. Jealous? You bet we are. Little punks…

Best Free Pool Table
Least Likely to Incite a Riot

Best New York Rock Venue
In New Jersey

Friday and Saturday nights feature live rock ’n’ roll. Maxwell’s may book "brand name" acts, but Uncle Joe’s is something more important: a launch pad for local talent and small bands who are still developing the pull to make the harsh City circuit. Don’t let the low profile fool you, savvy bookers help ensure the bands are good enough to justify the 15-minute PATH ride out, plus cover’s never over $5 and nobody’s suggested any indoor smoking bans in Jersey. According to management, the bar’s not just the only game in town for live rock, but also one of the most successful local joints as well, solely on the DIY basis of word-of-mouth and strategically dropped fliers. The only drawback is the 2:30 a.m. last call (1:30 on weekights).

Best Orgy to Avoid