This Week in the Voice: Philip Glass, an East Village Voice

This week in the Voice, out today: Steven Thrasher profiles Philip Glass, tracing the 75-year-old composer’s career and love for New York, “Regardless of success, neither Glass’s life nor his music have ever abandoned their East Village sensibilities. He worked as a cab driver and furniture mover until he was in his early forties, and his identification (politically and artistically) has never left the idea of downtown.”

Lauren Shockey reviews Family Recipe, and finds that the Japanese restaurant is carnivore and vegetarian friendly, though the archipelago’s take on the pancake is one of her faves, “Family Recipe’s do-or-die dish is the okonomiyaki, served as a nightly special. The first evening we sampled it, the cast-iron skillet held a molten pancake chock a block with shrimp and kimchi and drizzled with mayo. Smoky bonito shavings writhed like go-go dancers under wisps of steam.”

Maura Johnston writes on Lana Del Rey’s Born to Die, and says that the songstress’ anticlimax debut album, “ushers itself in with a flourish of strings and sampled moans. It’s a curiously unconfident first step for any singer, but especially so for this one, whose every move has been chronicled by every website worth its Google PageRank since the release of her first single last August.”

Karina Longworth describes the Sundance Film Festival as anxious, like the rest of the nation, “It’s dangerous to look at the lineup of the Sundance Film Festival, which ended Sunday, as a reflection of the character of contemporary indie film, the collective American consciousness, or, well, anything. But there’s no question that the 2012 edition of the festival was stuffed with films in some way touched by the psychological and practical fallout of economic crisis. “

Michael Feingold checks out one of George Bernard Shaw’s rarely produced plays, The Philanderer, and finds it kinda sexy, “Conventional minds view Shaw as ‘sexless’ or, at best, ‘cold.’ The Philanderer shows clearly that his temperature could sizzle as well as chill…Manifestly, the script reveals, he knew all about the differences, physical and psychological, between men and women; he demonstrates just how tangled at moments of high emotion the two genders can get.”

Christian Viveros-Faune talks about death and destruction in his predictions for the future of the city’s art scene, “The aesthetics of decline–a gathering movement that features artists and other creators shedding the mode of bling for blight–has yet to take over New York, but it’s on fire around the globe.”

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