This Week in the Voice: The Tilda Swinton Moment

How time flies, right? Eighteen years ago, Sally Potter had her breakout as the writer-director of Orlando, which also starred then-breakout Tilda Swinton. Now, for this week's Village Voice cover story, Melissa Anderson talks with Potter and Swinton about Orlando about their continuing careers as the film is re-released in theaters later this week.

Elsewhere in the Voice, time might be flying, but we're living in the now, and it's hot as hell.

For example, this week in News:

• Voice columnist Tom Robbins reports on a battle heating up between a Brooklyn-born developer named Sharif El-Gamal, his dream of having a mosque downtown, and the people who want to stop him, because they're zealots, is why. Robbins reports: The Downtown Mosque Plan Riles the Loons.
• Where else is New York heating up? In the thin undergarment of some local go-go dancer our own Michael Musto has declared The Hottest Guy in New York (Who Is Semi-Available). Granted, I haven't read this yet, but that probably means you can pay to have sex with him. No? Is that not how these things work?

This week in Music, the sun has yet to set on:

• The preeminent sage of the genre previously known as "college radio" (among other things) Flaming Lips lead singer Wayne Coyne, as he dishes wisdom to writer Rob Trucks on (among other things) the Lips' latest release The Flaming Lips and Stardeath and White Dwarfs With Henry Rollins and Peaches Doing the Dark Side of the Moon.
• The guy who was once Jay-Z's Roc-A-Fella Records business partner and personal impresario, Damon Dash, who's since risen again in New York with the survival of his gallery DD172 as a cultural force in New York, as documented by our own Ben Detrick.
• Indie rock power couple Wavves and Best Coast, who -- having both just released two of the summer's hottest albums, both of California Surf-fuzz dreams -- get the once-over by Sean Fennessey.
• Former corrections-officer-turned-rapper Rick Ross, who is somehow still commercially viable, and now, critically acclaimed, as Jayson Greene is both fascinated by and trying to understand how Rick Ross' Alternate Reality works, exactly.

Meanwhile, it's still hot as ever in Food:

Voice food critic and certified deep outer-borough navigator Robert Sietsema this week dives down to Chinatown, where the back of a restaurant called A-Wah yields some unexpected surprises for him, some Japanese-ish cuisine among them, but most importantly, a Chinese rice casserole called a "bo zai fan," which, no joke, you're going to crave shortly after reading about it.

In Film, we are more than beating the sun in theaters around the city:

• Legendary Voice film critic J. Hoberman gets in the trenches with Todd Solondz's latest, Life During Wartime.
• Meanwhile, Karina Longworth sees just how many grains she should take Angelina Jolie's latest action role with in her review of Salt, Nick Pinkerton gets buried under Farewell's Cold War bureaucracy, Nick Schager suffers through a movie none of you will probably ever see unless you have children (and stupid children with shitty taste in movies, at that), and Melissa Anderson lets Tamra Davis's newest documentary on Jean-Michel Basquiat paint a pretty picture for her.

Finally, in Arts, we're not letting the heat slow us down:

• Dance critic Deborah Jowitt checks in with Pilobolus Dance Theater's latest, a collaboration with cartoonist Art Spiegelman entitled Hapless Hooligan in "Still Moving."
• Art critic Robert Shuster gives exhibitions by installation artist Tim Hawkinson, performance-painter Michael Alan, and, well, a show about Asian artists who don't make art about being Asian, except they kinda do. And it's called 'Irrelevant: Local Emerging Asian Artists Who Don't Make Work About Being Asian.' Don't ask me, I just work here. Read it.
• Theater makes a strong showing this week, too, as legendary Voice theater critic Michael Feingold checks out British theater group Complicite's entry to the Lincoln Center Festival, A Disappearing Number.
• Meanwhile, Tom Sellar visits the Lincoln Center Festival's far reaches both figuratively and literally as Dutch theater company Toneelgroep Amsterdam performs acclaimed international theater director Ivo Van Hov's stage adaptation of Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1968 film Teorema out on Governor's Island.
• Lastly, Alexis Soloski ventures a little further inland from the others, checking out an angry, rejected play about science called Sweet, Sweet Motherhood at the HERE Arts Center, and a slightly-less rejected play about science (and artificial intellegence) called Lovesong of the Electric Bear on Atlantic Theater Company's second stage.

All that, plus more Music, Art, Theater, Film, Books, Dance, Restaurants, Michael Musto, Free Will Astrology, and Dan Savage. And then some.

Here at The Village Voice, we're surviving the test of time, whatever season it is. But right now, it's summer and it feels like we're fucking melting. So you should just grab our paper, read it, and then find some of the things in it and go do them. And you should do it in a place that's air-conditioned.

Here at The Village Voice, we're also not afraid to be servicey. Ever.

[fkamer@villagevoice.com]