DJ Spooky spinning at Work in Progress last night.

When DJ Spooky invited the Occupy Wall Street Library to hold a book-party / dance-party at the chichi Vandam club Work in Progress, it was an open question how the revolutionary politics of the occupation and the glitz of the downtown nightclub scene would mesh.

The answer is: Not at all. The collaboration ended early with harsh words between the librarians and the club's management, as the occupiers packed up their books and left just as DJ Spooky was beginning his set for the club's well-dressed patrons.

"For me, the idea is to use the movie to highlight some issues that resonate with today's culture of cut-and-paste, collaged-out-the-ass, wildly fragmented post-YouTube nation."

Spooky, performing Rebirth of a Nation in San Francisco

Paul Miller, a/k/a DJ Spooky, takes a lot of flack (sometimes from this publication). Nothing, though, will stop this man from getting busy: he is responsible for a slew of experimental films and records, scholarly essays on the likes of Kehinde Wiley and Harry Smith, and production on the new Yoko Ono album, among lots and lots of other projects. Spooky's most famous creation, 2004's Rebirth of a Nation, will be showing at the MOMA this week. The film mashes disparate sounds and images with clips from D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, remixing the original into a commentary on the contemporary political and racial landscape of the US. To find out how his attitudes toward the work have changed since the film's debut in 2004, how he feels about the rapid decline of the media world, and what he's up to these days, we spoke with Spooky over email.