This Week in the Voice: Subprime Candidate – Inside Rick Lazio’s Biggest Wall Street Deals

In 2007, current New York gubernatorial candidate Rick Lazio was a JPMorgan Chase executive, one who sent emails like all the other JPMorgan executives. The difference, though? Some of Lazio’s emails — which the Village Voice has now obtained and published — show the details of just how involved the potential governor was in a deal that could’ve resulted in over $1B in retiree benefits being invested in doomed JPMorgan Chase subprime mortgages were it not stopped, a deal that Lazio made over a $1M bonus regardless. Voice staff writer and columnist Wayne Barrett reports: Inside Rick Lazio’s Biggest Wall Street Deal–The Chummy E-Mails.

Elsewhere this week in News, we’re stripping away at some figurative (or literal) “new clothes”:

• Voice columnist Tom Robbins this week doesn’t even need to give some people a dressing-down: double-crossing party-switching Bronx state senator Pedro Espada stiffing his tailor (but paying for $20,000 of sushi with someone else’s cash near the home that’s also being investigated) speaks pretty loudly for itself.
• And Voice gossip columnist Michael Musto styles himself a rampage looking for a paycheck, but not from us: gay powerhouse media brand and publisher Regent Media stiffed him. For money.

This week in Music, we’re bringing up the new life out of the previously presumed otherwise:

• Late rapper Camu Tao of Definitive Jux’s haunting final effort has finally seen the light of day, three years after the critically acclaimed rapper died of lung cancer. The album’s been released in its raw, unfinished state. Phillip Mlynar explains the difficulty (and necessity) of hearing it.
• Can you recognize a Justin Bieber when you see one? Do you feel the need to understand what kind of threat this Justin Bieber thing is to Western Civilization? Or at the very least, how or why he’s playing Madison Square Garden? Well, either way, Rachel Devitt will try to explain.
• Keith Jarrett’s keeping the great spirit of jazz pianists alive in his new collaboration with his old 70s bassist Charlie Haden in what’s, well, a pretty spirited effort, Francis Davis argues.
• There are singer-songerwriters, and nowadays, R&B-rappers. Epic track-guest Bruno Mars isn’t one of them. Yet coming up on his solo debut, as Mikael Wood finds by talking with him, he’s not “soft” either.

In Food, we’re bringing the old-school to the front:

• Cantonese was the go-to Chinese province for “Chinese food” in New York up until the past two decades, when regional cuisine from Shanghai, Fujian, Xi’an, Chaozhou, Taiwan, Dongbei, and Sichuan came in to crowd the field. Voice food critic Robert Sietsema argues, though, that New York’s experiencing a bit of a Hong Kong Riot in visiting two new Cantonese restaurants, one in Brooklyn and one in Queens.
• Meanwhile, Voice food critic Sarah DiGregorio is thinking ’bout the South again, as she gets down with the Dixie cuisine in Williamsburg’s Honeychiles inside The Charleston, a punk bar now serving up hardcore southern food. DixieCore?

In Film, we’re covering all the required watching:

• Pat Tillman’s never not going to be a symbol of the worst parts of the American War Machine, or those who’d label it as such, either. The Arizona Cardinals safety who went to fight as a U.S. Marine in Afghanistan became a propaganda symbol for the war cause, even though he was killed by friendly fire. Melissa Anderson sees more than just a documentary in The Tillman Story, she sees the record set straight.
• Legendary Voice film critic J. Hoberman looks back on complexities in the career of director Eric Rohmer, whose films are getting a retrospective at Walter Reade this week.
• The Virgin Suicides writer Jeffrey Eugenides is seeing another one of his stories make its way to the silver screen in The Switch. Except, only kinda. Not really. Karina Longworth explains.
• Also this week in Film, a Nazi propaganda tape turned into an Israeli filmmaker’s documentary, Dan Kois saw a movie with Bow Wow in it, Karina Longworth watches Christophe Honoré’s new “structurally ambitious” French psychodrama Making Plans for Lena and lives to tell the tale, Michael Atkinson heads to Williamsburg’s Dumbo’s new ReRun Gastropub Theater for “micro-indie” black comedy Modern Love Is Automatic, here’s a movie about dance and Chinese dissidents, and apparently, then some. .

Finally, in Arts, there are no more movies to review, which is relieving:

• National Lampoon put out a $40 book of the best visual artists the brand had before all the movies of the last ten or fifteen years came along and completely screwed the legacy of a once respectable publication and comedy brand. It probably has more laughs in it than all of those years combined. In the first two pages. R.C. Baker reviews Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Writers and Artists Who Made the National Lampoon Insanely Great as well as some transport posters from London spanning the 1920s to the 1940s, which are no doubt better than the MTAs last…however many years since they’ve been around….’s posters.
• It’s terrifying, it’s new, it’s Andrea Miller’s Wonderland, which Voice dance critic Deborah Jowitt is glad to be put through.
• Voice theater critic Michael Feingold saw Zach Braff in a play by one of the guys who are responsible for teen sex romp American Pie (sorry Paul Weitz, you’re never outliving that) off-Broadway at Second Stage, who for some reason, keeps mounting his stuff with decent marquee names (maybe the whole American Pie thing has something to do with it?). Anyway, here’s what he saw.
• And last but certainly not least, Voice theater critic Alexis Soloski not only manages to survive another year of New York’s indie theater calamity The Fringe Festival, but she manages to find the good stuff, too.

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 close deals the honest way: We avoid work at banks or in government. It doesn’t pay nearly as well, but at least we get to throw down on assholes. That’s pretty nice.

[fkamer@villagevoice.com]