Still from Michael Lucid's Dirty Girls

By Jennifer Swann

In high school, Michael Lucid was an artsy, friendly kid who floated around from one campus clique to the next. "I was more approachable and kids felt comfortable talking to me," he says of his time at Santa Monica's Crossroads School, where he graduated in 1996.

Because Lucid was likeable and trustworthy, his teenage peers granted him the kind of insider access into their lives that most filmmakers only dream about capturing on film. Filmmakers like Larry Clark (Kids, Wassup Rockers), Catherine Hardwicke (Lords of Dogtown, Thirteen) and Penelope Spheeris (Decline of Western Civilization, Suburbia) all launched their careers by making films that depicted the harsh realities of American teenagers' lives, but Lucid had an advantage over all of these filmmakers: he was himself a high schooler when he shot his gritty, painfully intimate documentary Dirty Girls, which has now become an instant cult sensation ever since it was uploaded to Youtube this month.

See also: Q&A: Amy Klein, a/k/a Amy Andronicus, On Her Many Side Projects, And Why "Feminism" Is A Dirty Word

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By Daniel Kohn

For music fans, there's nothing better than seeing your favorite band or checking out an up-and-coming act in person. While the records serve as a tangible finished product that fans can jam on until eternity, the live show experience explains more about a band than their recorded work. With concert prices soaring to astronomical prices, it's understandable if people are staying home. That's why the concert movie/DVD/Blu Ray has become so vital for a band's popularity.

For people who can't afford to see a show, the concert movie serves as a way to take in the action without all the strange smells that inhabit the floor section of the arena. With the number of concert films on the rise, we decided to take a look at our favorites from over the years. While the list is clearly subjective, the one common link is that the music and the cinematography both rock.

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After lugging rigs, cameras, a mandolin, a guitar, a snare, a cello, a violin and as many microphones as they could carry out to a spot in the middle of the woods, a handful of musicians and filmmakers found themselves standing in complete and total darkness. The generator they had also carried had run out of gas, which posed a bit of a problem: they needed it to run the lights they'd use to illuminate Josh Garrels, a Portland-based singer/songwriter, and seeing as they were stuck with all that gear in the remotest of locations for the acoustic set, heading out to the closest gas station wasn't exactly going to work. The production crew broke out their flashlights, glancing the curves of the instruments and the earnest faces of the musicians with an eerie glow, but not for long: in the middle of "Fire By Night," the bulbs strung between the branches above, lit up. Everybody cheered, those at the mics stood up and those with the flashlights sat down to enjoy the performance of one of the most aptly named songs of the shoot.
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Nick Murray: So we're here today to talk about Shut Up and Play the Hits, the new film (out tomorrow and tomorrow only) that captures LCD Soundsystem's final concert and follows the band's frontman, the inimitable James Murphy, as he embarks on what his British, kind of corny manager might have at one point described as the next chapter of his life. Turning to you, Luis, there's a lot we could potentially talk about here—the band's music, their legacy, what Murphy means by whimsical socks—but let's start with the basics: What did you think of the film? And were you at that Madison Square Garden show?

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In the most recent print issue of the Village Voice, we visit the Long Island City headquarters of Troma Entertainment, the "almost" 40-year-old Z-movie studio responsible for such unforgettable titles as Fat Guy Goes Nutzoid!! and Tales from the Crapper. But the company's best known creation is The Toxic Avenger, an early-'80s cult classic that spawned three sequels, the Saturday-morning cartoon Toxic Crusaders, an "actually kind of good" Off-Broadway musical scored by Bon Jovi keyboardist David Bryan, and a $100 million Hollywood remake that's in development. The Toxic Avenger is also the moniker assumed by Simon Delacroix, an electro-pop French DJ/producer whose sunny knob-squeaker "3,2,1"--the lead single from the 30-year-old's most recent full-length Angst--belongs on an afternoon wine-spritzer-party playlist, cued up for the moment the Passion Pit tolerance runs out.

Delacroix answered a few questions about his mutated anti-hero namesake over e-mail.

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Dylan Wilson

Next week, the CBGB Festival will take over a bunch of clubs around New York City in an effort to honor the legacy of the onetime Bowery staple, but right now in Savannah, Georgia, a movie about the club's history is being filmed. Starring Alan Rickman as CBGB impresario Hilly Krystal and his Harry Potter co-star Rupert Grint as Cheetah Chrome, as well as a bunch of other boldfaced names (Donal Logue!), the movie is slated to open next year. The bulk of the filming will apparently be done on a soundstage, but the movie's production people recreated the club's grimy exterior, awning and all, in the city's downtown. Can 2012 Georgia look as gritty as pre-Bowery-gentrification New York City? Find out below.

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Still from Koyaanisqatsi

Every day this month, in conjunction with our Feb. 1 cover story "Philip Glass, An East Village Voice," Sound of the City will post excepts of interviews with Glass and his collaborators, as well as reviews of several concerts celebrating his 75th birthday.

Earlier this week, we published our interview with Koyaanisqatsi director Godfrey Reggio, who dragged Glass kicking and screaming into film scoring. Today, we're publishing Glass's side of the story of their initial meeting, along with his thoughts on working with Errol Morris, Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, Woody Allen, Robert Wilson, Allen Ginsburg, Kronos Quartet, and Lucinda Childs. We also asked Glass about the claim that he writes music so that his friends can chill together, and find out why he appreciates when working relationships aren't "just one-night stands."

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Every day this month, in conjunction with our Feb. 1 cover story "Philip Glass, An East Village Voice," Sound of the City will post excepts of interviews with Glass and his collaborators, as well as reviews of several concerts celebrating his 75th birthday.

Today we are publishing the first of several interviews with Godfrey Reggio, the director of Koyaanisqatsi (the entire film is embedded above, courtesy of Hulu) and its sequels Powaqqatsi and Naqoyqatsi. Reggio "bothered the hell out of" Glass to drag him, kicking and screaming, into scoring his first film in the late 1970s (though Glass had previously composed music for a couple of TV projects like Sesame Street). Thirty-five years later, the two are still collaborating together, now on their fourth film the holy see, which is in post-production.

In this installment, we talk to Reggio about how he initially chose Glass as his composer, and how his team started making a film without dialogue, spoken narration, or a traditional screenplay.

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In the last 20-plus years, filmmaker Kevin Kerslake has amassed a mind-boggling list of music-industry credits, not only shooting videos for Sonic Youth, Prince, Green Day, R.E.M., the Rolling Stones, but also directing the visual treatment of Nirvana's "Come As You Are" and the MTV VMA-winning Ed-Sullivan-homage "In Bloom." So it's something of a genre departure that Kerslake--who will begin working on the film adaptation of J.G. Ballard's Running Wild starring Samuel L. Jackson this spring--is the man behind Electric Daisy Carnival Experience, a feature-length electronic-music concert doc released on DVD this month and produced by EDC founder Insomniac Productions.

"I did a film back in 2000, with [Insomniac CEO] Pasquale [Rotella] on Electric Daisy Carnival, but this was all conceived as a three-part series," explains Kerslake. "This is the first attempt to really put it out to a wider audience, and to turn people onto what the scene is all about."

Many people think the scene is all about is drugs--at the 2010 EDC in Los Angeles, which drew more than 180,000 people and where this film is primarily set, a 15-year-old died from injuries related to a drug overdose and more than 100 people were sent to the hospital. Compounding EDC's negative publicity woes, there was a mini-riot at last summer's Hollywood premiere of Kerslake's film Electric Daisy Carnival Experience, which caused Regal and AMC Cinemas to cancel their upcoming national screenings. But Kerslake insists that's hullabaloo is only one part of the story, and a tiny one at that. "There are negative aspects of anything that I might endeavor to do," he says. "But I don't choose to focus on those." We spoke with him recently from the West Coast.

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American Juggalo: The scene with the smoking Juggalette

Commercial director Sean Dunne brought a six-man camera crew to this year's Gathering of the Juggalos, Insane Clown Posse's annual psycho-porn amusement park, and returned with footage of predictably lowbrow hedonism: Juggalos drinking, inhaling, whoop-whooping, hallucinogenic tripping, shooting fireworks, sucking on nitrous balloons; a green-haired Juggalette too messed up on Ecstasy and vodka to get out of a car; a pregnant Juggalette smoking. Naturally, the 23-minute web doc went viral--the biggest surprise about American Juggalo was that it took someone this long to make it.

Dunne admits that he was hesitant to be so late. "When I thought of this idea it was before the Gathering last year," the Greenpoint resident insists. "The shit hit the fan last year with Tila Tequila. And it made me be like, 'God, do I want to be this guy who goes in there and does this still?'" Since he decided to be that guy, we spoke with him about getting pulled over the cops outside the Gathering, why there may be an Illinois arrest warrant out there bearing his name, and why people should give Juggalos a break.

Tomorrow night, Insane Clown Posse headlines Hammerstein Ballroom. Tickets are still available here.

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