Part One Best After-Hours Club El Gato Negro ...

Part One

Best After-Hours Club El Gato Negro (closed) At Night All Cats Are Black. Too bad it had to end. While it was going, nothing could touch it. If you were a bartender, a bouncer, a promoter, DJ or night owl, there was really only one place to go. Sizzle was a played-out coke den that rarely got repeat customers except for the desperate; Mary Lou's had recently been shut down. So the market for a post-4 a.m. spot was wide open and El Gato Negro jumped in at the perfect time. For a few idyllic months, everyone in the club scene came to a basement space in the West Village for conversation, drinks and, dare we say it, blow. But it goes with the territory. Nothing ever got out of hand. In fact, one warm summer evening, the doorman carelessly left the door open for ventilation and a black cat sauntered in. It was as though it knew the club was its home, and it stayed the whole night, walking around, rubbing on assorted people and making itself comfy on banquette seats.

Note to the enterprising: If you open up an after-hours, tell your friends to be more discreet on the street. Women in Gucci dresses, guys in cowboy hats and loud, dizzy conversation don't belong on any quiet residential street at 4 a.m., and certainly not in numbers. By design, the after-hours is a limited offer, and everyone who goes holds a little piece of the party's life, or death as is often the case. El Gato Negro may resurface again, but if it does and you find out about it, keep it quiet.

Best Fucked-Up Movie-Journalism Synergy Shoot! Shoot! Darn that Columbine High School! Until those kids went and got offed in Colorado, the East Coast media elite were ready to once again help Hollywood peddle more sludge. Publicists?those watchdogs of junk?had arranged for both Brad Pitt and Edward Norton, lead actors of the upcoming (Oct. 15) ultraviolent The Fight Club, to star at newsstands everywhere. Here was a chance at more publicity. The stars would be saying nothing as usual, just Pitt showing all his cleavage and various pit-hairs in a sleaze-chic photo spread for W, and Norton, coyly goateed, smiling at you from the cover of Vanity Fair. Each feature was primed to sucker punch readers into another movie they ordinarily wouldn't want to see.

On Madison Ave. this debacle was even more resounding than the gunshots in Littleton. Disavowing their dependence on violence to sell tickets, the studios pushed back The Fight Club's release date. Tinsel Town panicked about its typical grossout fare, probably figuring that thanks to cable news outlets, the public was already sufficiently entertained by Columbine's guts and gore. The usual exploitation could wait?a moment of obnoxious silence like Oscar-winner James Cameron requested for the Titanic dead. But embarrassment hit at Vanity Fair and W, because those cover stories?no longer timed to a movie release?showed both publications to be even more nakedly insubstantial than usual. All that Hollywood-Journalism synergy wasted. Let's see more.

Best Significant Arts Scene Brooklyn They Come From as Far Away as Queens. Led by the gallery scene in Williamsburg, but radiating out to artist studios in DUMBO and Red Hook, the nascent Brooklyn arts scene is off and running hard. Like Soho in the prehistory of the art world and the East Village in the late 70s, several Brooklyn neighborhoods have been colonized by artists desperate for space to work in and inhabit. A few restaurants, bars and galleries later and a scene is born. Williamsburg, home to countless artists (throw a rock and you're bound to hit six; three good-sized stones and you might graze a good one) and a handful of good galleries (for the sake of transparency, we'll mention here and now that we're codirector of one space), is ground-zero for a growing wave of artist immigration from as far away as Argentina, Germany and Japan, as well as increasing attention from savvy collectors. Like new restaurants, new galleries appear every two months or so. Serious artists, gallerists and writers meet each other on the street; studios are visited; opinions exchanged; booze is quaffed in the local watering holes?all the while, the fancy high-waters and nose-ring set moon about, striking their best profiles. There is a plan in the works for a Brooklyn Art Fair in 2000 to be held at the Brooklyn Museum. Perhaps that will be the hinge upon which the Brooklyn scene's major financial fortunes will turn.

Best, and Sauciest, Yankee-Mariner Brawl Moment Safe Sex at Safeco. The early August fisticuffs between Seattle hurler Frankie Rodriguez and Yankee catcher Joltin' Joe Girardi were certainly well documented by the photographers. Rodriguez, a Brooklynite, should know better, or least know when to pull a punch.

We especially liked the shot that revealed Rodriguez delivering his last blow to Girardi's ass-neck, to borrow a phrase from the Jerky Boys. Odds are, obscene phone calls are legal but fisting is not in Washington state, and many baseball observers, including celebrity Mariners fan Peter Bagge, are wondering if Girardi will let Sicilian revenge tendencies prevail over his membership in the God Squad.

Best Lesson of Star Wars You're Not Seven Anymore Teeter Tots. We swear upon the unfilled grave of our mother that we started hearing the bitching about The Phantom Menace the same damn night that it opened. We were six when the first movie came out?our friends who were between five and 11 looked upon Star Wars as a watershed cinematic experience in their lives. So guess what? When they went to see the sequel, there was no magical heat ray that engulfed the audience and made them forget all the movies they'd seen and life experiences they'd had since 1977. So, gasp! It just wasn't the same as having one's mind blown as an impressionable child who'd never seen a huge projection of a planet blowing up before.

What we wonder is whether a bunch of 30-year-old men went out and bought all the action figures, brought them home and attempted to play with them, but tragically it occurred to them that they wanted to read books, discuss current events and touch girls' boobies.

That George Lucas, all not inventing a cure for adulthood and shit. Asshole.

Best Live Music Venue Bowery Ballroom 6 Delancey St. (Bowery) 533-2111 Take the J Train. Bowery Ballroom is the first local club designed specifically for the way the rock 'n' roll game is played in New York in '99. As things work out, here and now, at most big club shows only about half the people in the crowd came for the music. The others have some sort of corporate connection, either to the label or to some magazine, radio or apparel interest sponsoring the concert, or else they just asked the band's publicist to buy them a ticket because they're in media and want to schmooze. Bowery Ballroom has a schmoozing room?with its own bar?big enough to hold an entire Manhattan-in-'99 guest list's worth of synergy-crazed yahoos.

On top of that add top-notch sound, unobstructed sightlines, a bilevel auditorium resembling Irving Plaza's but with a cozier, more caringly detailed and overall classier feel than that 70s relic on E. 15th St., and you've got a much better place to catch nationally touring acts than New York's had in quite a while. Judging by recent bookings, it's looking like a lot of great bands see it that way, too.

Best Television Series The Sopranos Badda Bing Badda Boom Boom Boom. We weren't going to write this one after The Sopranos swept the Emmys, figuring it would be, no pun intended, overkill. Then we woke up: The Sopranos could not possibly sweep the Emmys. What were we thinking? The Sopranos was too smart and adult for the networks in the first place, so naturally it was too smart and adult to sweep the network-dominated Emmys. The Emmys are like the Oscars?an industry award, not an esthetic judgment.

Still, that the show got all those nominations, and won a few, is another crack in the networks' dike. Now we're wondering if a p.c. anti-Sopranos backlash is next. The Sopranos is anti-Italian. The Sopranos is anti-black, anti-Jewish, anti-finook. (All right, we're just guessing at the spelling there. Fock you.) The Sopranos is degrading to women. And Jerseyites. It glorifies violence and crime and vulgarity. It makes psychiatrists look bad, and senior centers. The Sopranos is okay, but Oz is really better, because it sends a better message about crime. And so on. So we just want to go on the record: The Sopranos is probably the best tv series made for adults in the last 20 years, with some of the best acting and writing ever, handsomely wearing the mantle of Goodfellas and the Godfather series, light-years ahead of the best the networks have to offer. The Sopranos makes NYPD Blue look about as "sophisticated" and "adult" as Blue's Clues?just as Sex and the City, which we don't think is very good really, does at least make Ally McBeal look about as "sexy" and reality-based as Sabrina.

Now a word to the finooks at HBO: Since you're not going to start the new series until January, why not run the first-season reruns yet again this fall? The fans are jonesing and will gladly watch those episodes a third time while they're waiting for the new shit. Meanwhile you'll capitalize on all the new viewers you'll get.

Best Reason to Join SAG Free Restrooms & Hot Tips on Waiter Jobs Not Ready for Our Closeup. Recently we were afforded the luxury of being asked by the New York Chapter of the Screen Actors Guild to join their exclusive AFL-CIO union. Not being ones to turn down a chance at a possible union gig, we gladly accepted the offer and forked over well above a grand. What we got in return was a card with our name on it, an enamel pin with their name on it and some useless literature about how to find an agent and get acting jobs. Oh, and biannual dues.

We went and had headshots done, then talked to some of the SAG-affiliated agents. We were surprised to find them even more full of shit than publishers, film publicists or the morons of the music business. To put it in three words, we were bummed.

Then, a few months back, while wandering around midtown, visiting the last of the local porno houses, we found ourselves in dire need of a restroom. After asking several restaurants if we could use their facilities and being turned down, we almost went in our pants. Then we remembered the SAG office at 1515 Broadway (corner of 45th). We rushed into the large building, which also houses MTV, Billboard and other corporate culture giants, and rushed up to the 44th floor. There we were met by a nice receptionist and smiling faces. We rushed to the restroom, did our business in an ultraclean stall and were able to wash up at our own pace without being rushed.

Exiting the lavatory with a smile on our face, we were greeted by others, who, like us, were unable to find work within our union. After just a few short minutes of meaningless babble about De Niro, Lee and Scorsese, the conversation turned to real employment, and we got some real hot tips on really cool waiting jobs.

So we thank SAG, not for our chance to be out-of-work actors, but just for a pot to piss in.

Best One-Person Museum Exhibition "David Reed Paintings: Motion Pictures" P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center Nouveau Traditional. Reed's work?bright-hued, Cibachrome-crisp, seductively unscrolling riffs on painting's fundamentally porous character?take the Great Tradition to new, up-to-date highs. Rarely have abstractions looked so relevant. Reed's canvases concern sex without depicting people, note our growing dependence on technology and the media, and turn out to be about painting as much as anything Caravaggio and de Kooning ever did. More than half a century after Ezra Pound coined his newsy definition of art, "news that stays news," David Reed has gotten the jump on everyone for the look of painting next century. Organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, "Motion Pictures" fits Long Island City's P.S. 1's hypercontemporary mission to a tee. Reed's late June through August exhibition, like last fall's "Inside Out," an impressive survey of Chinese art organized in conjunction with the Asia Society, serves as a high-water mark for the P.S. 1-MOMA megamuseum merger announced last February. One wishes, in fact, all P.S. 1 exhibitions were as significant as David Reed's. By contrast, surveys of solidly second-tier artists like Jack Smith and Ronald Bladen have rapidly sped down the off-ramp to Dullsville. Alex Katz's golden-oldie survey, for its part, screamed for more appropriate placement at a Manhattan museum or the artist's tony 57th St. gallery, Marlborough.

Best Band Whose Name's Half-Derived From a Beatles Album Hank Williams' Lonesome Cheatin' Hearts Club Band Sergeant Peckerwood. It was a Sunday night at the East Village's 9C when we finally caught Hank Williams' Lonesome Cheatin' Hearts Club Band, four guys and a chick who pay homage to drunken old Hank Sr. We appreciate Hank as much as the next humans?maybe slightly more?but we weren't sure what to expect from these Williamsburg cats. They resembled a fey indie rock version of country music?three of them even wore matching suits along with their inevitable cowboy hats.

Still?all Hank, all night long, using acoustic guitar, percussion, stand-up bass, violin and sampler. And here's what's absolutely crucial: There was no infernal irony or hateful kitsch informing their performance. Rather, they delivered each song delicately, and with immense respect. A cover band that devotes itself to mastering Hank Williams' incredible song catalog, and pulls it off as well as does Hank Williams' Lonesome Cheatin' Hearts Club Band is?and let us be quite clear about this?worth our time. And no: as far as we know, they're never tempted to foul their sets with any twee, hateful Beatles crap.

Best Unexplored Woodstock '99 Riot Explanation The Acts on the Bill When In Rome, NY... Korn, Limp Bizkit and the Chili Peppers, but no cops inside? What the hell did they expect? That the name of the festival guaranteed peace? Because a name is all Woodstock '99 and Woodstock had in common, long before the bonfires. We'll make it simple: There was frat rock in 1969. There were tons of dumb, uncreative, Bermuda-shortsed bullies who drank too much and followed each other into Neanderthal behavior. But Woodstock was a bunch of hippies! If you want to make a fair comparison, match your Gaea-loving raver types to 60s flower people, and the kids who are feeling today's rap-metal to the ones who gleefully torched villages in 'Nam. Why no reporter could recognize the resemblance Woodstock '99 bore to the end of rush week at State U. is beyond us. To claim what happened demonstrates how rock has changed, or how Xers are different from boomers, is to insult the intelligence of anyone who understands white American youth.

Ten years ago, fratboys were into being latter-day hippies. They ate shrooms, wore tie-dyes and went to see the Dead?some dickhead pundit could have claimed nothing had changed. Now meatheads are dabbling in more outcast scenes they don't understand, screwing it up for people who do. What else is new? It's called a fucking trend. If it was teen rebellion, it wouldn't wear a baseball cap and chant, "Show! Your! Tits!"?that's mainstream USA. Woodstock '99 could have featured actual, establishment-challenging rap and metal acts, but the promoters didn't want a fringe party (less money in that, as it requires good security?black kids and working-class whiteboys mustn't ever be allowed to get too rowdy). They wanted a jarhead party. They got one.

Best Unreported Mets Item Joe McIlvaine Goes Skinnydipping Gee, M. With the exception of a throwaway mention in Bob Klapisch's subscription-only ESPN "Insider" online column back in April, the sunbathing habits of former Mets General Manager Joe McIlvaine have remained in the shade out in Flushing Meadow. And in lieu of current GM Steve Phillips' well-publicized girly problems and Bobby Valentine's backbiting, maybe it is for the better that no one knew about McIlvaine being busted in Jensen Beach, FL, this past April for indecent exposure.

The highly touted New York sports media pulled a Buckner on this one: The McIlvaine skinny is that the onetime dynasty-builder donned his birthday suit al fresco in public, thinking he was on a private beach. The locals didn't take much of a shine to this move, and in true Florida style, the authorities were summoned.

After calling it an honest mistake, Klapisch did tack on this line that invites an avalanche of lampooning in any media circus: "His decision to remove his clothes outdoors still raised eyebrows among baseball people, since he was such an image-conscious executive while at Shea." Let's hope it was only eyebrows that were being raised.

Best Black-Box Theater Soho Rep 46 Walker St. (betw. Church St. & B'way) 941-8632 Retrieving the Black Box. The young sort-of-working actor will find himself crammed into all sorts of miserable performance spaces in New York. There are the theaters you've got to climb five flights of steps to access, only to find that there's no wing space. There are also those 50-seat closets that violate all sorts of fire codes. There are even?occasionally?parking lots.

But Soho Rep (which is technically on the cusp of Tribeca) is an actor's dream?huge and deep, with significant wing space upstage, good acoustics and no blind spots in the lighting. Downstairs you'll find a lavish greenroom about the size of a Brooklyn one-bedroom and clean bathrooms. The theater's a quick block from the N train and...we could go on.

We performed at the Dog & Pony variety show at Soho Rep last month, under the auspices of one of the several groups that rent out the theater. Soho Rep themselves just finished their festival, and they're taking time off in the fall; that means other companies will get the chance to use this excellent space.

Best Disappointing Museum Exhibition "The American Century: Art & Culture 1900-1950" Whitney Museum of American Art Halftime. Full of state-of-the-art geegaws, courtesy of the Intel Corporation, Part I of this long-awaited and much hullabalooed show takes brilliant examples of American art and disrespectfully sets them next to tv monitors and video projections of, among other things, Busby Berkeley musicals and spinning covers of Vogue, Life and McClure's magazines. The message delivered by the exhibition's abundance of bells and whistles is simple: the art by itself is not enough, as it often gets in the way of the entertainment. New Whitney director Maxwell Anderson turns what could have been a brilliant debut into a losing version of Washington, DC's Air and Space Museum. If Anderson were a football or a basketball coach, bets would be on to see whether he'd make it past New Year's.

Best Revival of Hee Haw on Fox 5 McCarver & Murcer Doin' Yankee Games Pickin' and Grinnin'. After a few innings of watching Tim McCarver and Bobby Murcer broadcast Yankee games on Fox, the question is, "Who's got the banjo?" Not one but two twanging Southerners settin' on the short porch watchin' a ballgame, fumbling pop culture references, using words like "gloaming." They feel like sinners when they have to read those impertinent Fox promos about real-life traumas and veiled buggery captured on home video.

We watched the launch of the new Southern Party on C-SPAN the other day, and know there is cause for alarm: Might the Yankees be subverted by these on-air Rebs? Oklahoma (Murcer) and Tennessee (McCarver) make for a mean combination. When Snuffy Smith replaces Bob Sheperd as the p.a. announcer at the Stadium, then we'll know this whole hillbilly-baseball thing has gone too far.

Best Local Underground Rappers Sir Menelik and Godfather Don Murderin' the Rhythm. The albums these two Kool Keith associates delivered this year each provide a megadose of the new-music, new-lyrics kinda hiphop that Keith talks about but hasn't delivered since Dr. Octagon. Sir Menelik, who as Scaramanga put out Seven Eyes, Seven Horns (Sun Large/Fat Beats) in late '98, had some cameos on that 1996 alterna-rap classic and is currently working on a Rawkus album; Godfather Don is known for the single "Properties of Steel" and an EP he did with Keith called "Cenobites" (Fondle 'Em)?his new album is called Diabolique (Sneak Tip/Hydra). Both of these guys revive the maverick spirit of Ultramagnetic MCs by ignoring current "urban" fashion to make hiphop music that will last. Seven Eyes, Seven Horns and Diabolique aren't for people who think Swizz Beats and Timbaland ride the vanguard?but we'll see who gets the "Platinum Edition" reissue in about 10 years. Their writing is so dense and abstract that Menelik's and Don's mic performances are halfway to bebop scat, and yet their words are delivered with so much stylized authority that their point comes through. The music is bugged-out, buzzing like a hive of hornets, chasing the beats over the horizon and into the hectic, alien land where these artists roll. They're perhaps just the latest to step through the door that Wu-Tang kicked open, but Sir Menelik and Godfather Don are so unique, independent-minded and skilled it's hard to imagine even the suffocating confines of the rap industry circa 1992 holding them back. Every sound they make comes across like it had to be.

Best Entertainment Lawyer Andrew Krents, Esq. Law Offices of Jonathan Schafrann 277 Park Ave. (betw. 47th & 48th Sts.) 702-9680 Or should we say "Entertaining"? We first met Andy some years ago at CBGB. At the time he was a high school student with big ambitions and an even bigger mouth. He told us of his plans to one day become a lawyer, and we hoped like hell that if he did, he would stay out of the street, as cars tend to speed up around his type.

Years later, when we ran into Andy again, he was now an up-and-coming legal eagle. He told us of the many entertainers he was working with, and all the different kinds of cases he was handling. We were impressed. We'd imagined he'd end up a sort of lowbrow Alan Grubman, but found him to be a high-class version of Broadway Danny Rose.

Krents handles a full spectrum of artists, ranging from major rock acts you'd see on television to those you'd find under a rock, like Furious George. Besides entertainment law, which is really just yelling at label bosses and getting your paralegal to mark up form contracts, Krents is very good at working with all types because of his adaptable personality and disarming charm. But don't be fooled. A reptile is a reptile, and Andy can slime his way around with the best of them.

Tell him we sent you, maybe he'll knock a grand or two off our bill.

Best Jukebox O'Connor's 39 5th Ave. (betw. Bergen & Dean Sts.) Brooklyn, 718-783-9721 Juke City King. In some ways, O'Connor's is pretty much the same place it was when we named it "Best Brooklyn Bar" in 1996. The room still has an appealing ramshackle air about it, the lighting is still admirably dim and a bottle of Bud still costs only two bucks. But the joint has quietly undergone a number of recent changes, and some of these have not been for the better. The clientele, which once leaned heavily toward the old-man demographic, is now dominated by the twentysomething tat-and-pierce crowd, which in turn has led to the most disheartening change of all: titular bartender Patrick O'Connor's self-imposed relegation to the daytime shift (as he put it at the time, "The customers are getting younger and I'm not").

One change, however, we can heartily applaud: the jukebox. While the tavern's old 45 juke was a doozy, it rarely seemed to work properly and its sound was tinny at best. But the new CD jukebox, tended and fussed over by primetime bartender Spike Priggen (who also installed a new sound system), now stands as the finest juke in the city, stocked with an eclectic and remarkably tasteful mix of r&b, punk, 60s garage pop, indie, blues and country. Not only isn't there a bad album on this machine?you'd be hard-pressed to find a bad song. While Spike's programming is often just a step sideways from what you'd expect (he refuses to stock the machine with discs by jukebox staples Johnny Cash and Patsy Cline, for example, "because too many people think those are the only country artists who ever recorded"), the musical mix nonetheless sounds classic, like a great free-form radio show with no commercials and no DJ chatter.

Best Metal Concert Iron Maiden at Hammerstein Ballroom July 17 Maiden Without Tears. We love putting the words "metal" and "concert" together. Does it seem oxymoronic? Outdated? (See: "rock opera.") It shouldn't?especially in the case of Iron Maiden.

This band is armed with three guitarists and a song list that's two decades long. The Maiden formula hasn't changed: staggeringly intricate harmonies, a wailing tenor lead vocalist, virtuosic bass, concept albums and idiotic stage sets that have over the course of the years included Egyptian tombs, medieval battlefields and the captain's quarters of a scarred old galleon. Sometimes, just for the hell of it, Maiden uses all of these motifs, one after the other, in a two-hour period, and makes up its own gargantuan myth: The Metal Concert. Iron Maiden "stripped down" at the Mercury Lounge? Never. Maiden at the Museum of Natural History? Maybe.

We took our seats in the balcony at the Hammerstein, fully expecting a walk down memory lane and a couple of laughs. The show had been sold out for months. We were with Jeff, an old, old friend of our late brother Joshua. Maybe we expected a good cry.

Jump to midway through the set. The band segues into "Phantom of the Opera," a deep, deep cut. The concert reaches critical mass. The floor is a seething phalanx of obese young men, and everyone in the balcony, the older crowd, is kneeling. Just completely blown away. We're breathing through our mouth. We look over our shoulder and notice, without surprise, that Flipper is slouched in the row right behind ours. He is, as usual, sporting cutoffs, tennies and a head full of split ends. The joint between his lips has fizzled out. He looks at us mournfully. We hadn't seen him since 1985, when Maiden was on the Powerslave tour.

From this far away, the guys in the band look the same as they always have. Scraggly hair, ill-fitting jeans, puffy white sneakers. Maybe a little thicker around the middle, who knows? The singer still behaves like the Samsonite simian, loping all over the stage, vibrato-ing and bellowing like he's the alpha male, back in season, and we all know it. Every note, every perfectly timed unison bass, guitar and vocal run says: Take that. Even the new songs, the ones that the crowd can't sing along to, sound like someone dancing on a grave. Even Jeff, whose metal bullshit meter has a hair trigger, thinks Maiden, ca. 1999, is awesome.

One more thing: Iron Maiden never changed its logo. Never softened its razory edges or streamlined it in any way. We notice this when some helpful soul furls a bedsheet banner off the balcony. Unfortunately, it's hung upside down and backwards.

Best Film Book of the Summer Seven, by Richard Dyer Auteur! Auteur! After writing White, an important, monumental (and ignored) study of the predominance and invisibility of racial power in modern culture, British film critic Richard Dyer returns with Seven. As part of the BFI Modern Classics series, this is virtually a postscript to White; Dyer uses David Fincher's 1995 killer thriller to extend his critique of social position?the "highest point of aspiration"?relentlessly perpetrated in Western art. Applying his usual trenchant perception and scholarly interpretation, Dyer makes more of Seven than it deserves yet that only makes it the summer's most readable film book.

Will Dyer prove that Fincher, screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker and photographer Darius Khondji have made a great art work or just a resonant piece of pop exploitation? That's the book's moral and esthetic suspense plot?abstract, detailed and about as good as non-auteurist film criticism can be. Superb descriptive chapters on the movie's sound design and photography are vivid, almost convincing artistic defenses. Dyer's rational taste kicks in with the summary: "Religion and culture provide the grandeur of a perception of sin and despair, and there is a funny kind of consolation in this, but neither provides hope, salvation or cure. We are left with the more modest possibilities of human goodness." Accepting Seven's modest (at best) achievement comes from Dyer's structuralist, sociological frame of mind. Like Morgan Freeman in Seven, Dyer becomes the detective with a conscience, turning forensics into literature.

Best Party Bang the Party 726-1322 Bang-Shang-a-Lang. Promoters Lorie Caval and longtime NYPress stalwart E-Man started Bang the Party (BTP) at Chrystie St.'s 205 Club, and when it began, the only other real competition was Sunday's "Body & Soul." But we liked Bang better. It was smaller, sweatier and definitely funky. We'd get there at 11 and stay until four, dancing all night long until our tank top was transparent with sweat. After 205, the party moved to the yuppie-laden Bar 13. The rhythmless nonbelievers didn't stop the dancers from crowding out the two-steppers and bringing more soul to that tired strip of University Pl. than it had ever seen.

For many months since, Bang the Party has held court the first Friday of each month at Baktun on W. 14th St. Here, E-Man and his guests spin the deepest, funkiest house music around. Lately, new initiates have been inducted into the Bang tribe, an ever-growing nomadic family of dancers, musicians, house heads and just plain freaks. Everyone smiles and acts courteously, which is an anomaly in this city.

But the funkiest of the funk gets laid down at Frank's Lounge in Brooklyn. Every Friday of the month (except the first, of course), E-Man and a revolving cast of guest DJs crowd into Frank's tiny booth to spin the stuff they won't understand in Manhattan. The dancers dance harder, the sweat is stanker and the vibes are the deepest at about 3 in the morning when E-Man and friends have whipped the crowd into an ecstatic trance. For lots of dancers, it's therapy, and a weekly trip to Bang is far more effective than a 50-minute hour on anyone's couch.

Best Victim of Rock-Critics' Misunderstanding Elliott Smith Mr. Misery. He's not much of victim. His major-label debut, XO, sold well and made all the critics' year-end lists. But damn near every article on Elliott Smith missed the story, and it's one that, if reported, would have earned him a lot more listeners. Here it is: Elliott Smith is that one-per-decade guy. He can write, sing, play and perform as well as anybody out there, and nobody out there his age brings the whole package like he does. Seeing Smith, last fall, get that just-another-troubadour treatment made us sad. Only the Times' Ben Ratliff focused on the music, naming George Harrison and Elvis Costello as Smith's singer-songwriter peers. Everyone else wrote about how Smith's lyrics seem melancholy, his demeanor depressed. Elliott is morose. Elliott is a drinker. Elliott is a recovering addict. Elliott didn't win the Oscar he was nominated for. Elliott wears black. Hey, interviewers?ever consider that maybe the reason he didn't seem all that cheery is that he spends most of his life making beautiful, life-affirming music, but at the moment he was forced to hang out with you?

Best Showbiz Up-And-Comer Jesus Oh Baby Baby Jesus. Our redneck relatives were totally baffled by all the how-dee-do over the sexual escapades of Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart. Because anybody familiar with Baptist and Pentecostal and Holiness churches?not prissy liberal pricks who've never stepped into a service?knows that preachers are like musicians; they dog around. They drink. And, when they get on a mic in a church and the whole house opens up their hearts, some sort of strange magic happens and the room gets open like it would if an extraordinary musical experience were going down. People really do react to it physically. The Holy Ghost?at least what it feels like to be filled with the Holy Ghost?is very, very real.

We saw a great Christian rapper get shafted by KRS-ONE on MTV's The Cut. The man clearly had skills?the melody and the metaphors, and a real nice way of jump-cutting between English and Spanish. The song was 100 percent Jesus?unapologetic. He was testifying. And he was rocking the fucking house. KRS-ONE gave him a low number, and subsequently he lost to some chumpy folksinger.

Now, check it out: Christian rappers, Christian rock bands, even pastors whose tone and sensibility lay a little closer to Chuck D than to Benny Hinn?they're proliferating like a motherfucker. The basis of soul music was gospel music?listen to a Sam Cooke record and you can pick out the parts where the word "Jesus" was replaced by "Baby." Something big is brewing out there. Think about it: 2000 years of Christianity. That's a lot of momentum right there. And basically it's a pretty simple religion. It says: You're human. You fuck up. You do things that end up making you unhappy. Now, all you have to do is believe in this one guy, and God will forgive you. Dig: "For God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten son, so that whosoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life." We could get into a big boring argument about what everlasting life means, we could give a fuck about the pie-in-the-sky scenario. When we hear music that gets into us and opens us up?the Beatles, Duke Ellington, hell, the fucking new Britney Spears single?that feeling, that rush of an invincible feeling, that's everlasting life to us.

Now, Christ is anathema to y'all New York hipsters (Jah Ras Tafari and the Buddha are curiously exempt from religious prejudice), but that's okay. One day you might realize that Christianity does not equal Puritanism, and that letting a bunch of assbackwards conservatives have sole possession over the interpretation of one of the most beautiful pieces of literature in history (read the Psalms of David, the Book of Revelations and the Song of Solomon and then we dare you to disagree with us) is dumber than, say, handing Shakespeare over to the Idaho militiamen and letting them interpret what they will out of it. We think that in the next century, music and Jesus are going to combine forces and something beautiful, undeniable and absolutely huge will come out of it. You just wait. You'll see.

Best Bore Radiohead ZZZ-Rock. We don't believe anybody actually likes this band, but boy oh boy does everybody and their mom pretend to or what? Maybe it's because the Radiohead guy's got that weird lazy eye, and it's cool to like bands with ugly people in them. Maybe it's because people feel like they should like classical music, or big ol' pompous smart guy music in general, but they don't, and Radiohead is like the same thing?you know, all long and epic-like and nonrepetitive and stuff?but with guitars instead of like bassoons and stuff. Maybe it's because they have three guitar players, and the memory of Skynyrd strikes a chord deep in the deep deep of anybody's sentimental core. Plus, Skynyrd's drummer was named "Artimus." But we digress. Maybe people like Radiohead 'cause of that GUNK-GUNK! GUNKGUNK! sound that the guy with all the hair in his face makes on his guitar just before the chorus of "Creep." Anyway, we're not the people who know the answers?we're the people that ask the questions. But this much we can tell you: There's no stupider band name ever than "Radiohead." It's like, a guy, but his head?it's a radio!

And the lyrical content is dumber than a mime on a yoga retreat. Like, fake plastic trees are bogus, dude! Call the karma police!

Best Subway Singer James Johnson Underground Music. The first time we ever heard James Johnson sing, he transformed a corner of Penn Station into a smoky blues bar. Dripping sweat while playing acoustic guitar and singing music made famous by Sam Cooke and Otis Redding, or r&b versions of folk songs like "If I Had a Hammer," Johnson took us back to our childhood.

A conscientious objector to the hiphop revolution, the Louisiana-born, New York-bred Johnson once told us, "Music should be beautiful. Music should never be about destruction and hate, and that's what rap music is." We saw Johnson working the 7th Ave. line last month.

Best New Sitcom Futurama Future Tents. Because, among other things, it only seems lowbrow. Like in this scene: Former pizza delivery boy Fry, transported cryogenically to the 31st century, tries out the professor's new smelloscope (which allows you to smell distant planets) as spaceship captain Leela looks on. Fry: "As long as you don't make me smell Uranus." Leela: "I don't get it." Professor: "I'm sorry, Fry, but astronomers renamed that planet in 2020 to stop that stupid joke once and for all." Fry: "Oh. What's it called now?" Professor: "Urectum."

Not for nothing, showrunner David X. ("the X stands for Xamuel") Cohen's a Harvard grad with a masters in computer science.

Best Metal Band Starr Red Starr. Adorned head to toe in red leather, these 90s youth are a throwback to our favorite era of metal, the Crüe years. Not since Tommy Lee, his penis and company has a band been so sincere about a genre so silly. Sure there was Ratt, Twisted Sister, even Poison, but none of them had the flair, style and honesty of Crüe until Starr.

Led on vocals by Zane Fix, Starr plays the kind of heavy metal that even your mother would enjoy. Poppy, energetic, melodic and just plain fun. Zane and the rest of his band (Luke Luv, Kenny Max and Niki Shea) stumble across the stage in platforms that are too high for them to crawl in, which just makes them all the more charming. And the songs. We love their songs. "L-U-V in NYC," "Sexy Child," "Little Superstar" and our personal favorite, "Homework."

And they have Kaz. Not Kaz the NYPress cartoonist, but Kaz, Fix's girlfriend, the band's costume designer. Not only does she design their red leather outfits, which look 10 times better than the Romantics' sissy outfits ever did, she sews them together herself. And for the icing on the cake, she's made red leather armbands with a star on them that look as fashionable as any Third Reich accessory ever did.

While we would like to keep Starr our secret, seeing them at CBGB and other local dives, we are aware they belong onstage at the Garden and at the next Ozzfest. They're sincere in what they do, preferring us to call them "bubblegum" or "pop-metal." But we know what they really are: Two fingers in the air heavy fucking metal! Viva Starr!

Best Movie Perk An Iron Giant View-Master See It Tank in 3-D! One day?maybe soon?you'll find these at Sotheby's or a lucky flea market. Warner Bros. sent them out to media friends to advertise their summer animated feature The Iron Giant, but the souvenir is a delight in itself. The redesign improves on the original View-Master, that sharp-edged brown thing with box-like lenses similar to the clunky tv screens of the 50s and 60s. A timelessly cool toy, the View-Master gives three-dimensional peeks at the images included on a disc of doubled slides (one for each eye). You pull down a lever on the right as if voting for the next vision (subjects ranged from the Seven Wonders of the World to the 1964 New York World's Fair).

An instant collector's item, the Iron Giant View-Master boasts altogether new, faux-50s lines, circular lenses and a nose bridge with eyepieces shaped to resemble catlike eyeglass frames. Its body is made of light plastic, cinnamon-candy colored, with a bright orange lever sticking out from the right like a psychedelic stop signal. When you click it, the slide-wheel offers 3-D images of The Iron Giant's poster and pages from its website. Old-time gimmickry meets newfangled technology. Forget the usual t-shirt and baseball cap inducements; this is ingenious?as all toys should be.

Best Downtown Dance Performance Dream Analysis Wet Dream. Unlike some artsy, talent-free choreographers (Hi, John Jasperse), Mark Dendy possesses the wit and craft to back up his high-concept ideas. Dream Analysis?which ran last season at Dance Theater Workshop?is the type of work that reaffirms that the dance world isn't really being run by bristly, bunioned feminist crones. The piece focuses on a young man who's torn between dreams: He wants to be both Judy Garland and Nijinksy. By the end of the performance, the hall's full of wet seats from the audience's laughing, crying and generally ecstatic excreting. Dendy's reportedly trying to get the show produced off-Broadway, and we wish him success in doing so.

Best Eminem Ambush Dennis the Phantom Menace. Tax Day, 1999. The front row of the stage-left section of Hammerstein Ballroom's mezzanine is taped off and empty during the opening acts' sets. Every other spot in the place is occupied by a modern-day beastie boy or girl, enthralled by Eminem's brainy decadence, his "scrawny and ornery" wigger style.

The VIPs show up halfway through the white rapper's show. They don't fit in. All five are significantly older, classier and blacker than the bulk of the audience. It's three guys?freshly shaved heads, silk shirts draped over football-player shoulders, diamond stud earrings?and two fine-boned beauties who look like they'd sooner wipe their noses on their top-shelf designer wear than let some man call them a bitch. They're vibing and flexing African-American aristocratic power, sipping champagne and red cocktails and raising eyebrows at each other over the suburban-brat scene around them.

Then, during Eminem's a cappella freestyle, something happens. The first couplet has something about spraying Puffy with mace, and surprised giggles escape the cool cats. Then there's some shit dissing Master P?it's all piling up in rapid-fire, obnoxious rhyme. Eminem is rapping about fucking with every powerbrokering playa in the industry?even his mentor, Dr. Dre?and the specifics are so colorfully outlandish (imagine a Calvin and Hobbes fantasy about whupping Batman) that it's impossible for anyone familiar with the self-serious rap game to not picture them and laugh. Soon the VIPs aren't even trying to hold back?they're guffawing at Eminem as much as with him, but they're doing it hard enough that it'd be difficult to argue he hasn't won them over. It's not respect he's eliciting?Eminem will never get that?more like a grownup view of the jealous awe strictly-brought-up, middle-class black kids experience when they first witness the kind of antics their white peers get away with at home. Plus maybe a pang of residual awe underneath.

During the very next number, someone in the balcony above spills an entire cup of suds on the jiggy five. The men, furious, with bald domes dripping Budweiser, try to head upstairs for a confrontation, but a security guard who looks like a Steppenwolf roadie blocks their path. A minute later the front row of the mezzanine is empty again.

Best Overrated Art Gallery Gavin Brown's Enterprise Corp. 436 W. 15th St. (betw. 9th & 10th Aves.) 627-5258 Drink Too Much, Puke on Painting, Call It Art. This year it's, hands down, Gavin Brown; the only gallery with a built-in bar and a noxious bar scene. Get ready to overhear conversations like this: Um, doesn't that guy look like Jamiroquai? Or: I heard Bowie was here last week. Being there is like hearing a symphony of nails grate across a blackboard. And what about that pretentious name?

Best Summer Film Festival Newport International Film Festival Green Screen. In Newport, RI, of all places, kinda off the beaten path (no direct flights from Cannes or to Telluride), but the June 5 weekend brought excellent weather to a spot quiet and cozy enough for you to actually think about the movies rather than the biz. Among the fare was George Hickenlooper's film version of the Orson Welles script The Big Brass Ring (starring William Hurt, who won the Festival Jury's lone acting prize) and Rory Kennedy's documentary American Hollow. An assortment of panels offered heated (yet air-conditioned) debate on the state of cinema. In between movies you could tour Newport itself?a place of special interest to filmgoers who remember how the credit sequence for Reversal of Fortune featured aerial shots of the area's grand estates. Hourly tours take you there, visiting robber baron haunts as well as the backgrounds to that Jeremy Irons-Glenn Close melodrama. And in the evenings, the festival's parties mixed local enthusiasts and filmmakers at several of Newport's historic summer cottages (mansions to you outsiders)?including a big clambake on closing night.

This film festival is the only one in the country featuring greenery as a respite. It's a breezy place to take in choice indies and grand remnants of American social history?just a couple of hours away by a New York train.

Best New Animal Attraction in the Bronx Congo Gorilla Forest at the Bronx Zoo Fordham Rd. (Bronx River Pkwy.), the Bronx 718-367-1010 No, Not Fordham's Freshmen. There's more to the Bronx than the Yankees and inner-city despair. The Bronx Zoo's come up with a winner of a exhibit: the Congo Gorilla Forest opened in June to rave reviews from simian lovers all around New York.

What's it all about? The new exhibit's a 6.5-acre habitat that contains the largest breeding group of lowland gorillas in North America. If you want to visit on the cheap, stop by on Wednesdays when admission to the zoo is free. Otherwise the freight's $7.75 for adults, $4 for seniors and children between two and 12. And the new gorilla exhibit's so popular that it costs an extra three bucks to get in.

But it's worth the coin. First you watch a short film about the African low-mountain ecosystem. Then the film ends, the screen rises and?whoa!?gorillas behind glass, staring their human cousins down! (If you have toddlers, by the way, be prepared?this gambit always stimulates a mad rush toward the window. Sometimes the animals are on the wrong side of the glass.) After the screening room business, you walk down a long corridor and check out the gorillas hanging out in their big, happy families.

The exhibit gets crowded, and the wait to get in can be more than an hour. But if you come early, around 10 a.m., or after 4 p.m., you'll usually wait no longer than 15 minutes.

Best DIY Record Label Vital Music DIY Still Rules. In an era when even "independent" labels are attached to the tentacles of some multinational corporation somewhere along the way, it is ultra-refreshing to see the local Vital Music Records still cranking out releases after a decade now. Formed in 1989 by Tom Cassar, bass player of the Sea Monkeys, the label got its first boost with the awesome collection of 7-inch 45s they released to combat the crap Sub Pop was pushing from Seattle at the time. Vital released singles from locals like Karen Black, the Lunachicks, Ween, Alice Donut, Iron Prostate (pre-Furious George Tabb), Mr. T. Experience and many more. The records sold like crazy, and this gave Tom and company the money they needed to continue to do bigger and better things.

One of these was a version of Tommy condensed to seven minutes?the whole rock opera in seven minutes, a blazing medley of all the songs performed by more than 12 bands in less time than it takes to listen to "Baba O'Riley." And things didn't slow down after that. Vital went on to release more than 50 records, and they now distribute independent releases from all over the world. With 5000-plus releases in their catalog (which can be yours for free by calling 777-5021 or writing to P.O. Box 210, NYC 10276-0210) there is quite literally something for everyone there.

For remaining truly independent and not sucking the ass of any corporations, no way no how, we salute this Do It Yourself record label. We also enjoy the monthly rock shows at Vital's offices, with performances by acts they either record or distribute. Call them for info on that, too. Or just call them to tell them they rule.

Best Gallery Exhibitions Christian Schumann at Postmasters Inka Essenhigh at Jeffrey Deitch Alex Ross at Mary Boone Bright Lights. All exhibitions of newly rejuvenated, tack-smart, art world-reforming painting, the work of these three accomplished young artists puts the final lie to the inane, retrograde desire of certain conceptual and/or multiculti-minded folks to consign painting to the trashbin of history (imagine!). Willing to take previously politicized postmodernism at face value, this troika of artists spearheads what is today a fearless new movement in painting. Ready for anything, Schumann, Essenhigh and Ross pump style and painterliness for all they're worth, eschewing grand narratives and mincing ironies in the same breath, while shamelessly getting at projects that engage meaning. Each in his or her inimitable way?Schumann via wacky victims and perps, Essenhigh through disporting, acid-colored mugwumps and Ross through the endless suggestion served up by his green biomorphic figures?at once take on figuration and abstraction, pop culture and the canon, the painterly concerns of Duccio and the conceptual strategies of Duchamp. Together with other painters like Karen Davie, Lisa Yuskavage, John Currin, Lisa Ruyter and Michael Bevilacqua, Schumann, Essenhigh and Ross represent at least the beginning of a new beginning (if not a dawning in their own right). In a word, the work of these three painters deserves the art world's ultimate compliment: Their efforts might easily turn out to be the most "radical" development of the decade.