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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​Early this year, Never Say Never took us backstage as teenpop heartthrob Justin Bieber worked his way to a sold-out Madison Square Garden tour finale, juxtaposing current success with clips of baby Bieber playing drums, doing cute things, and wowing crowds at Ontario open mics. Journey to Fearless (out this Tuesday) is, more or less, Taylor Swift's straight-to-DVD response, and while Swift never flips her hair at the camera, moving in slow motion and across all three dimensions, both the songs and the graphics improve upon those in the Bieber original. (Note, for instance, the shot of her hugging bff and "Fifteen" inspiration Abigail in an Avatar-style forest while digital rain falls and the song plays). Below are the top five most joyous, inspiring, or heartwarming moments from the DVD's two hours and 20 minutes of interviews, live performances, and archive footage. (If for some reason you're worried about spoilers, there might be a few.)

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NB: This is not how bloggers generally dress.

​Yesterday, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Duplass brothers—the siblings behind last year's cutesy indie Cyrus—were shopping a script for a thriller in which the mother of a recently deceased indie rocker seeks vengeance on a blogger who had snarked in her kid's general direction. The brothers are hoping to get Susan Sarandon for the mom role and Cyrus Jonah Hill to play the blogger, but the really important name is the one of the site where the mean mau-mauing appeared: Pitchfork. Since the brothers have already stolen my idea, I might as well show you some of the "indie thriller" treatments I'd been working on:

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​God Bless Ozzy Osbourne
Directed by Mike Fleiss and Mike Piscitelli
Starring Ozzy Osburne, Sharon Osbourne, Sir Paul McCartney, Tommy Lee, Kelly Osbourne, Bill Ward

The most overexposed of rock stars receives yet more attention thanks to this standard-issue biopic, which premiered Sunday night at the Tribeca Film Festival. Much like a feature-length Behind the Music episode, God Bless Ozzy Osbourne chronologically retells what we've long known about the man, the myth, the legend, the lout. Sprung from a modest, working-class English family, he got out of Dodge by hustling his way into Black Sabbath, then parlayed near-instant success into an ambitious career of self-abuse. After being fired from the band, he joined up with wunderkind guitar god Randy Rhoads to produce a few good rock records, then resumed his downward spiral before starring in a 21st-century reality-TV freakshow alongside his second wife and manager, Sharon, and their two teenaged children.

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DVD cover

We are on the cusp of a riot-grrrl resurgence, or so we hope. Early last year, NYU's Fales Library announced that the institution had acquired Kathleen Hanna's 1989-1996 papers. Then in the fall, news of a Hanna documentary spread, with activist/poet/Sister Spit staple Sini Anderson at the helm, blessed with her subject's collaborative approval. The Kathleen Hanna Project, the film's working title, also inspired a tribute concert at the Knitting Factory last December that staged the Bikini Kill firebrand's past-and-present peers (Kim Gordon, Team Dresch's Kaia Wilson, Toshi Reagon) and descendents (Coco Moore, Care Bears on Fire) covering the third-wave feminist's work for footage. That night, Hanna exhumed her pre-Le-Tigre alter-ego Julie Ruin, performing four songs and announcing that she was working on new Julie Ruin material.

Now, we have another testimony to Hanna's influence and post-riot-grrrl evolution, Who Took The Bomp? Le Tigre On Tour. Comprised of travel footage from the band's This Island tour, Who Took The Bomp? is an endearing portrait of a seminal-feminist trio who, more than six years later, are phasing into roles as public intellectuals. We recently spoke with director Kerthy Fix, who is also responsible for the Stephin Merritt non-fiction film Strange Powers.

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photo by Nate "Igor" Smith

The Gregory Brothers at the Village Voice Web Awards in December 2010

Among the rusty Web 2.0 jokes, Anne Hathaway's cornball hooting, and all the precious air Oprah breathed, there were a few redeeming aspects to last night's Oscars. Coincidentally (or not?), they tended to have local ties. Staten Island's PS22 Chorus, "the only remotely competent performers at the Oscars." Pom-pom-headed Luke Matheny, who gave a resolutely human acceptance speech and shouted out NYU. And "The Year's Unintentional Musicals," a minute-and-a-half digital montage of AutoTuned scenes from Harry Potter, Toy Story 3, The Social Network, and Twilight--the latter, a deeply amusing riff on Taylor Lautner's perpetual toplessness called "He Doesn't Own a Shirt." Behind this spot were Brooklyn's very own Auto-Tune the News Guys, the Gregory Brothers (Andrew, Michael, Evan, and Sarah), who all watched the show last night at home, drinking champagne, and snapping pictures of the TV screen with their phones--you would too.

We caught up with three of them this afternoon, amid the telephonic chaos of moving offices, to talk about working with the Oscar producers, Ron Weasley as a booty-jam balladeer, and what should have won Best Picture of the Year.

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​Now here's a fuckin' movie. The Lenny Kilmster documentary, wonderfully titled Lemmy: 49% Motherf**ker, 51% Son Of A Bitch and apparently a big hit on the international festival circuit ("Best Documentary" in Chile!), is finally hitting the U.S.A. in early 2011, including an engagement at Cinema Village starting January 28. The DVD will be out in February, affording you the opportunity to gush over Jarvis Cocker (!) gushing over Lemmy in the privacy of your own home. Hopefully someone from Apple is in this thing, to explain the "if you type 'Motörhead' in an iPhone notepad, it auto-corrects to add the umlaut" thing, which is totally real. Trailer below:

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