This week’s Village Voice features a piece by Barry Michael Cooper on Busy Bee, one of the participants in the seminal 1982 film Wild Style (which will be re-released on DVD next week). Earlier this year, in our Hip-Hop Nuggets issue, Michael A. Gonzales interviewed Barry Michael Cooper, pictured here, about everything from the rise of crack in the Eighties to Oliver Stone to his screenplay for the 1991 gangster classic New Jack City. (Click here to read the Q&A with BMC, titled “Baltimore Orator.”)

It comes as no surprise that the media has fallen in lockstep with the promotional campaign for Alan Greenspan‘s latest memoir, The Age of Turbulence. Of course, the former Federal Reserve chairman has done his fair share to give the story wings, beginning with a bombshell appearance on 60 Minutes, an interview about Saddam’s oil fields with Bob Woodward and a cover story interview with Newsweek (pictured here) where Greenspan strikes a somewhat schoolgirlish pose. But two items in the New York Times might be the most compelling stories to take flight: David Leonhart’s book review focuses on Greenspan’s early days as a jazz player, and a piece in last week’s Business section, “The Literature of Capitalism,” examines the work of Greenspan’s friend and mentor, Ayn Rand, specifically the novel Atlas Shrugged, Rand’s “glorification of the right of individuals to live entirely for their own interest.”

Timing with our review of David Cronenberg‘s latest film Eastern Promises, which opened strongly in limited release this weekend, we’re taking a look back at our 2006 interview with Cronenberg, featured in The Documentary Issue (click here to read the interview). Cronenberg will also appear in the 2007 installment of our annual 20 Interviews issue, due out in December. (Excerpts from last year’s installment of 20 Interviews are also available online, including Q&As with Tom Waits and The RZA.)

We’re big fans of Boogie. The Serbian-born photographer has been cranking out dramatic black and white snapshots of urban life all over the world at an impressive clip. We wrote about his most recent book in our Photography Issue. On Wednesday the 19th, he has an opening in NYC at Higher Pictures. This guy has been shooting and showing all over the world, so grab some of these shots while you can.

This week’s New York magazine spotlights the completion of “a posthumous construction from the twentieth century’s most famous architect,” Frank Lloyd Wright. The house, located on a private island 50 miles north of New York City, was financed by a sheet-metal magnate determined to complete the project, which had been shelved for over 50 years. Wright (who died in 1959) had originally intended the home to surpass Fallingwater, his masterpiece. “There are those who will celebrate its realization,” writes David Colman. “And there are its haters: architects, scholars and amateurs who say it’s not Wright’s real vision.” A slideshow of the house at NYmag.com lets the reader decide.

Internationally acclaimed artist Barry McGee (who goes by Twist in the graffiti world) has a show opening in Los Angeles this Friday at Redcat, titled “Barry McGee: Advanced Mature Work”. The transition from graffiti artist to gallery artist has taken interesting turns in McGee’s work: from painting his classic forlorn characters on the street, to painting them on bottles, to overturning vans and using animatronic graffiti writers in his installations, he has consistently flipped every notion of what graffiti and graffiti-influenced art could be on its head. For a clip about Barry from the upcoming Beautiful Losers movie, go here.

With a few months left on the calendar — let alone a matter of hours before the sixth anniversary of 9/11 — it’s unlikely a stranger headline will emerge than the one splashed on the front page of today’s New York Sun: “GOP Struggles Over What to Make of Bin Laden.” The article details the public relations hot potato over the recent Webcast issued by the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist. A “virtually impotent” Bin Laden (Homeland Security adviser Frances Townsend) is also “a reminder about the dangerous world in which live” (Bush). The man who “continues to lead” (McCain) is also “deluded” (Romney). Guiliani feels catching Bin Laden is “important to do,” while Fred Thompson claims his existence is “more symbolism than anything else.” Perhaps a more apt bumper sticker to test-market on the campaign trail would read: “Wanted: Deluded or Symbolically Alive.”

In this week’s Village Voice, Nathan Lee takes a second look at Cruising, the controversial 1980 film by director William Friedkin (The French Connection, The Exorcist), which begins a limited release this weekend (with a restored DVD due out on 9/18). Friedkin, a Chicago native, spoke to Stop Smiling in 2005 for our Chicago Issue: Excerpts of the interview are available here and here.

It should come as no surprise to anyone paying attention to the endless war in Iraq that the surge ordered by General Petraeus is nothing more than a political stalling tactic, ordered by the this president by proxy through his military leaders. It now seems clear that the Bush administration’s real intention is to keep this generation’s Vietnam going long enough to dump it on the lap of the next president to fix. According to documents released last night to time with Petraeus’ testimony today before congress, his recommendation is to hold off on withdrawing any major American forces for another six months; by next summer, the US will only be able to withdraw enough troops to equal the levels on the ground (roughly 130,000) before the surge. Now, the battle rages on in Washington. But a NYT/CBS poll out today suggests that only 5% of Americans trust the current administration to resolve the war.

This past April, legendary journalist David Halberstam died in a car accident in California at the age of 73. The 700-plus page book he was working on when he died, The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War, will be released by Hyperion Books on September 24th. To commemorate Halberstam’s life and work, some of his closest friends (including Joan Didion, Bob Woodward, Seymour Hersh, Gay Talese and Anna Quindlen) will embark on a national publicity tour to promote the book in his honor, recounting personal reminiscences and reading from his most-cherished works. A full schedule of appearances is posted on the Hyperion web site.