Arts & Entertainment >>

• Readers' Poll Winners (4 Comments)
  Best Comic Artist Steve Leialoha Best Comedian/Comedy Troupe BATS Improv Best Writer Broke-Ass Stuart, aka Stuart Schuffman Best Local Rock Band/Musician ArnoCorps Best Cover Band Zoo Station Best Music Radio Station KFOG, 104.5 Best Local Hip-Hop Act The Coup Best Radio DJ Dave... More >>
• Most Animated Museum
  Cartoon Art Museum
  To the uninitiated, the Cartoon Art Museum has a musty ring to it, pointing toward Hanna-Barbera cels and Krazy Kat. It does have that, but it far from ignores the new tribes of graphic novelists and young comics artists who continually reinvent the form for new generations. Like any great... More >>
• Best Comedian
  W. Kamau Bell
  Comedian W. Kamau Bell finds himself buffeted, even more than most of us, by those great fartlike gusts of technological wind, aka anonymous Internet comments. After he popped a short version of his great show, The W. Kamau Bell Curve, on YouTube, Bell found himself the target of some confused... More >>
• Best New Drag Show
  Cocktailgate
  While the drag mainstays in town are well established at this point, a few new festive freak shows have popped up in the last year with the ambition to provide San Francisco with even more fluidly gendered, three-minute onstage histrionics. While a handful fizzled out after a whirl or two,... More >>
• Best Flamenco Show
  Carola Zertuche and Theatre Flamenco, Thursdays at Peña Pachamama
  The magic (yes, magic) begins with the venue: Peña Pachamama, a Latin-American restaurant with small tables doused in low red-tinted lighting like a quaint Bolivian valentine. Order dinner and sangria early, because when the musicians step onto the tiny stage and the dancers take to the... More >>
• Best Dance Performance/Troupe
  Fresh Meat Productions
  Thank goodness for choreographers like Sean Dorsey, who make movement accessible without ever dumbing it down for audiences. Dorsey is the artistic director of Fresh Meat Productions, a company that does away with weird multimedia flourishes, showy couture, and the abstract headiness of modern... More >>
• Best Theater Company
  foolsFURY Theater
  The dramaturges, artists, and professional rabble-rousers of foolsFURY make supporting the arts feel like a truly commendable personal responsibility. The company, cobbled together in 1998 and helmed by artistic director Ben Yalom, specializes in pieces that break creative boundaries and get... More >>
• Best Bonus Theater Experience
  Shock Boxes at Hypnodrome
  Grand Guignol is French for "what people watched before horror movies existed." Before electricity brought us Evil Dead 2, obviously some folks had to figure out how to make that kind of thing happen onstage, and they did, and it was about as popular as slasher flicks are today. Described by one... More >>
• Best Local Filmmaker (1 Comment)
  Amanda Micheli
  From the very beginning, when Amanda Micheli's college doc about women's rodeo, Just for the Ride, scored a national PBS broadcast and a Student Academy Award, it was apparent she was a filmmaker to keep an eye on. It wasn't just her talent that set her apart, but also her resolve to spotlight... More >>
• Best Public Art
  Art on Market Street's Kiosk Poster Series
  Locals rarely use a city kiosk on a busy street, figuring that it contains all sort of information that they already know, like the path of the streetcar that they're waiting to catch. But starting last November, they could have gleamed some vital information about new projects: a zip line that... More >>
• Best Artist
  Michael Arcega
  Known — and collected — for punning relentlessly in the face of bigotry and despair, Michael Arcega is a very intelligent, very talented goofball. Among his works are a series of “drawings” he made by gluing hair onto white paper. Each meticulous, detailed image is titled for maximum wordplay:... More >>
• Best New Art Gallery (1 Comment)
  Fecal Face Dot Gallery
  If you're a fan of street art and its roots and offshoots, chances are you already know about Fecal Face. A more West Coast–oriented version of the Wooster Collective, Fecalface.com has long dished out the good stuff on artists, galleries, events, and art news. In February, its... More >>
• Best Nomadic Art Gallery
  Southern Exposure Gallery
  Every city needs a small gallery with a big brain. The ambitious Southern Exposure has long fostered S.F.'s geeky art scene, specializing in institutional critique and participatory projects. Last year, after a temporary layover at Mission and 25th streets, the artist-run gallery found itself... More >>
• Best Store as Art Project
  Frankenart Mart
  Open the door to Frankenart, and you walk into another dimension — one where commerce becomes conceptual, art is for everybody, and you may find yourself talking to a cat who has occupied your chair. Every four months or so, owner Leslie Henslee establishes a theme and then asks people to... More >>
• Best Rockin' Art Gallery (3 Comments)
  Queen's Nails Annex
  The four-year-old Queen's Nails Annex is a hurricane, a monsoon, a swarm of locusts. Hey, it just might be the second coming. It's also an edgy, funkadelic gallery in the Mission conveniently located next to Queen's Nails (hence the folks at this gallery simply add "annex" to their name and... More >>
• Best Karaoke
  Jack's Club
  The best karaoke joints are the ones where almost nobody is good. They're places where not only do mediocre singers sparkle, but also where everybody feels comfortable getting involved. That's pretty much the M.O. at Jack's Club, a divey bar near the border of the Mission and Potrero Hill, on... More >>
• Best Jukebox
  Lucky 13
  Jukeboxes, like everything music-related, are in flux. Some of us prefer the old-fashioned kind, with 45 rpm vinyl records visible through the curved plate glass, but most working boxes these days are digitized, sanitized, and smeared with tech-macho graphics that might have been cool for a... More >>
• Best Place to See Live Music
  Great American Music Hall
  The mother lode of all San Francisco music venues is none other than the Great American Music Hall, which was a bordello in a previous life. You can tell bands truly love to play here — it has a reputation for treating musicians well and actually feeding them. With its gilded mirrors,... More >>
• Best MC/Rapper (1 Comment)
  San Quinn
  Quincy Brooks looked to the notorious San Quentin prison for his clever, locally influenced rap moniker. At 30, he isn't quite as old-school as that penitentiary, but he has been an instrumental part of the Bay Area rap scene for so long that his young son Lil Quinn is now on his way to... More >>
• Best Local Lil' Indie Band That Could
  Dodos
  If you're looking for San Francisco's next Rogue Wave or Two Gallants, or at least the next-likely band to make an impact outside the 580-split, no need to look farther than our own Dodos. A duo comprising guitarist Meric Long and drummer Logan Kroeber, their sound is infectious enough to keep... More >>
• Best Internet DJ
  Ted Leibowitz, Bagel Radio
  These days, music fans have way too many people clamoring for their attention. MP3 blogs, Pandora, and weekly newspapers (oops!) all tug at listeners' elbows, insisting their opinions are the most reliable. That's why it's nice to have someone you can trust, like Ted Leibowitz of local Internet... More >>
• Best Commercial Radio DJ
  Chuy Gomez, KMEL
  Jesus "Chuy" Gomez began his career in Bay Area radio in the early '90s as a morning sidekick for Mancow. But Chuy (aka "Chu-Dog") was never meant to stay in the background, as longtime listeners of KMEL will attest; he has been a solo personality there for more than a decade. Chuy in the... More >>
• Best Classical Music Jam
  Papa Toby's Revolution Cafe
  Every Sunday night around 9, this laid-back Mission hangout transforms into a haven for classical music, as professional and amateur Bay Area musicians come together and play whatever strikes their fancy. Sometimes it'll be a piece a string quartet has worked on together before, but it's just as... More >>
• Best Crazed Gypsy Brass Band Dance Party
  Kafana Balkan
  Yes, this occasional Kafana Balkan party is pretty much the only crazed Gypsy brass band dance party in town, but that doesn't make it any less special. Where else can you find hundreds of swarthy men with dangling moustaches and pork-pie hats dancing with slinky ladies in diaphanous dresses and... More >>
• Best New Dance Club Genre
  Electro-Cumbia
  Over the last few years, San Francisco's club scene has been infiltrated by styles from around the globe, with DJs going nuts for Brazilian baile funk, Indian bhangra, and British grime. The latest club craze is electro-cumbia, an adaptation of a centuries-old traditional form of music prevalent... More >>
• Best New Gay Club Night
  Booty Call
  Hard-working drag den mother Juanita More has thrown her fair share of parties in recent years, but none quite so reliably photographed as "Booty Call," which began happening every Wednesday last fall. The rollicking club night includes a backroom photo studio where attendees can pose in a new... More >>
• Best Dance Club
  Mezzanine
  Many of San Francisco's nightclubs have a gimmick; something that a venue is known for. That can be a good thing, but all too often it makes a place predictable. Mezzanine is a spot that is thankfully hard to pigeonhole, and the crowd varies widely depending on the night, giving it a chameleonic... More >>
• Best Flash Mob (7 Comments)
  FlashDance, put on by Amandeep Jawa
  Step one: E-mail flashdance-join@deeptrouble.com to get on the list. Step two: Await message with the 411 for the next roving street dance party. Step three: Show up and boogie while onlookers wonder what the heck is going on, or just stop asking questions and join in themselves. Started around... More >>
• Best DJ Web Site (1 Comment)
  Dr. Toast's Amazing World of Toast
  If Web sites were cars, some DJs would own tricked-out street racers, loud and flashy machines with zooming custom graphics and embedded Shockwave music blasters. Others seem content to ride public transportation, i.e., MySpace. But for sheer personal expression, Dr. Toast's Amazing World of... More >>
• Best New Pickup Scene
  Eye-Gazing Parties
  Back in 2005, Michael Ellsberg grew tired of having the same old conversations when meeting people in bars. So he invented the Eye-Gazing Party — a singles event much like speed dating, only without the talking. At the shindigs, men and women take turns gazing into each other's eyes for... More >>
• Best Feminist Peep Show
  The Lusty Lady Theatre
  In this category, there's just no competition. Literally. The Lusty Lady, a unionized North Beach strip joint, remains the only gig in town that allows you to walk into a dark booth, cough up a dollar, and watch live, Suicide Girls-style dancers fuck themselves with dildos. You don't even have... More >>
• Best Occasion to Pretend You're on Vacation
  Aloha Festival
  If you're chary of time-honored local events like the Folsom Street Fair, the Pacific Islanders' Cultural Association's annual event might seem pretty desirable compared to San Francisco's more outlandish revelry-making. Now in its 14th year, the Aloha Festival is all about clean,... More >>
• Best Public TV Show
  Check, Please! Bay Area
  Check, Please! Bay Area takes a page from blogs and offers restaurant reviews by regular diners, poorly trained palates and all. Each episode finds three locals sampling one another's favorite restaurants, and part of the fun is watching them dismantle these favorites. Not everyone gets along,... More >>
• Best New Reading Series
  The Rebel Reading Series
  What's better than sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll? How about readings devoted to those topics? Since its inception in June 2007, the quarterly Rebel Reading Series has attempted to be "a nonserious reading series for serious writers," as co-founder Whitney Phaneuf puts it. For the events, Phaneuf... More >>
• Best Intellectual Use of a Soapbox
  Bernal Bubbles
  The Laundromat is not typically a highly intellectual environment. The thrum of the washers and the hum of the dryers could lull even Einstein into a snooze. On the first Saturday of every month, however, Bernal Bubbles transforms into a mini lecture hall, full of listeners eager to learn about... More >>
• Best Place to Virtually Meet a Famous Author
  Red Room
  Why do so many wannabe writers sign up for MFA programs? Because they want to schmooze with authors. Instead, they could just sign up for a new social network dedicated to hooking up lovers of literature. Founder Ivory Madison became known for her writing workshops, held in the "red room" of the... More >>
• Best S&M/Political Lit Guy
  Stephen Elliott
  Stephen Elliott may be a man whose girlfriend comes to the city and beats him up, but the confessional author has another, less sweaty side: He's a fierce political animal, presiding over the Progressive Reading Series to benefit progressive candidates. In 2006 it raised more than $50,000 for... More >>
• Best Small Press (1 Comment)
  Manic D Press
  Indie-lit may well be the only publishing culture in San Francisco, but Manic D Press has a distinctly DIY approach to bookmaking that would make even the most cynical, caffeine-soaked experimental writer hum with approval. Manic D is the brainchild of Jennifer Joseph, a publisher who since 1984... More >>
• Best New Book by a Zinester
  Erick Lyle's On the Lower Frequencies
  Once upon a time, there was a punk hero who made a zine. He called himself Iggy Scam. He called the zine Scam. Both Scams became famous in the homeless train-hopper artist world. Time went by, and, weathering the dot-com boom, the dot-com bust, and the Care Not Cash billboards of the... More >>
• Best Free Print Music Magazine
  West Coast Performer
  Three words: Good scene reports. If you're like us, they're mostly what you look for in a rock music magazine. Although West Coast Performer is only semilocal, and it's technically a musician's trade publication, it has good scene reports from Seattle, Los Angeles, San Diego, and here. Unlike... More >>
• Best Neighborhood Rag
  The Loin's Mouth
  Most people have probably never set eyes on one of those banal, district-specific newspapers that supposedly provide indifferent city dwellers with a bird's-eye view of their hood, but The Loin's Mouth is the kind of rag you just want to devour. Next time you're schlepping unsuspecting tourists... More >>
• Four Great Music Fests
  Coachella gets all the hype when it comes to California music festivals, but there are plenty of excellent offerings much closer to home. The best of these is, of course, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, because it's free and filled with big names. But since we've noted that one elsewhere in our... More >>
• Four Great Film Festivals
  San Francisco hosts an eye-popping, jaw-dropping 40 film festivals every year, plus another dozen or so touring series. The homegrown bashes serve every slice of the ethnic, sexual, political, and film genre spectrum. Here are the four that plug most directly into the city's fragmented... More >>
• Best Party Bands
  Dance parties are great, there's no doubt. But sometimes a DJ just doesn't emit enough energy all by himself. Sometimes you need the boost that only a live group can deliver. Luckily, a bunch of fun party bands has sprung up in town over the past few years — groups who know how to rock out... More >>