Directed by Haskell Wexler

Criterion Collection DVD and Blu-ray

First of all, greatest title ever. “Medium cool” doesn’t derive from anything that happens in the film, per se, or a line of dialogue, but rather tweaks a Marshall McLuhan observation about the level of individual involvement in media. Yet not only does it beguile as a stand-alone phrase (not too cool, nor not cool enough, though maybe just middling), it also bullseyes the paradoxical passion and detachment of both Robert Forster’s TV-news cameraman and of legendary cinematographer Haskell Wexler’s best-known directorial effort. Intermittently out of circulation since its 1969 debut, Medium Cool returns in a typically luxe new Criterion edition and, despite some of its dated aspects, remains as provocative and pungent as a tear-gas waft.

We first meet Forster’s John Cassellis when he and his ever-present soundman (Peter Bonerz) happen across a traffic fatality, which they capture on film before calling the police. That distance from humanity, afforded by the camera’s lens and a reporter’s objectivity, contrasts with Casselis’ impetuous personal politics. He’s young and it’s 1968, after all. Mid-film he chases down a “human interest” story—a black cab driver who finds $10,000 is his taxi and turns it in—while clearly having only a certain level of interest in the human he’s trying to put on TV. This results in a straight-to-camera lecture by various background characters on mainstream media’s presumptions about parachuting into the black community for feature fodder, a talking-to many reporters could still stand to hear.

That permeable fourth wall is one of the many then-groundbreaking conceits that writer/director Wexler uses to animate what passes for a plot here—Cassellis runs afoul of his employers for political reasons, and he finds himself drawn away from his glamour-puss girlfriend (Marianna Hart) and toward a poor young mother (Verna Bloom) and her young son (Harold Blankenship). But Wexler, an angry young-ish man with a camera himself, arranged to film his story on the streets of Chicago with the 1968 Democratic National Convention looming. He captures National Guard troops training for riot duty—and captures Forster filming it in character. He shoots Forster debating journalistic ethics with real journalists, and walking the real convention floor, credentialed. And, ultimately, he films Bloom’s character mingling in the fractious throngs as Chicago police clear out protesters, cracking heads inches away. When a tear-gas shell goes off a few feet from the lens, someone off-camera shouts, “Watch out, Haskell, it’s real”—a warning the director left in the final sound mix, no doubt for its delicious layered irony.

Some of the boundary-pushing antics seem a bit pretentious now, and some of the politics a bit inchoate, but Wexler’s mix of docudrama and musings over media and society still retains a charge. And it helps that Wexler the director had Wexler the cinematographer (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Conversation) to lean on. An early POV shot from what seems to be the pillion position of a motorcycle zooming through the streets of Chicago still astonishes. And Wexler’s agitating documentary-film roots shine through too: Seeing actual urban poverty here reminds you of how little you see the real thing onscreen to this day. Of its time, perhaps, but with more than you might expect to offer to ours.

Pay attention, cultivate your negative capability, and subtle horror begins to dawn. The man (Thiago Martins) is a thief running the sweetest con ever—total mind control. The woman, Kris (Amy Seimetz), wakes up on the side of the road with no idea how her life was ruined. As she starts to put the pieces back together, she meets Jeff (Carruth), and suddenly Upstream Color is a love story. They are both damaged—he hints at a drug problem—but their woundedness seems to bring them closer together. And then she starts retelling his childhood memories as her own without realizing she’s doing it.

There is more, so much more. Thoreau’s Walden plays a key role. And then there’s an older man (Andrew Sensenig) who divides his time between manipulating field recordings into unearthly sounds and tending a herd of pigs implanted with the wriggling parasites he pulls out of hapless strangers. How the wide-swinging orbit of this character (dubbed “The Sampler” in the credits) intersects with the others’ is one of the areas where the complex tissue of connections holding Upstream Color together stretches thinnest.

After Primer, Carruth could have written his own ticket with a studio. Instead he spent private money to make a movie he wanted to make, his way—in addition to writing, directing, producing, shooting, editing, starring, and writing and performing the score, he’s distributing Upstream Color as well. And the result is polished, smart, and entertaining specifically because, unlike most movies, it pushes you to make connections yourself: some assembly required.

In a few of the handful of interviews Carruth has given about the film, he has stated that for him, it’s about identity and the loss of identity and how one copes with that. What the film gets at most for this viewer is connectivity, and the relations between man, woman, pig, worm, water, and earth—the awesome and terrible interrelation of the life cycle and the daily incorporation and casting out of the very atoms we all share in common. Whatever you get out of it, if you make it through once, you’re probably going to want to watch it again.

Through Friday, May 17, at the Charles Theatre. Also available on DVD.

Click here to view the embedded video.

John Dierker

At last night’s Mobtown Modern performance of Philip Glass’ Glassworks at the Windup Space, a first-ever official collaboration with musicians from the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, MM curator Brian Sacawa announced yet another trailblazing project: the Project 20 Remix. Jumping off from Project 20, the ambitious year-long 20th-anniversary arts rubric/celebration put forth by MM sponsoring institution the Contemporary Museum, the Remix aims to gather 20-second samples of playing by 20 local instrumentalists and then hand those 20 samples over to 12 local remixers.

The contributing musicians read like a who’s who of local players from the avant/improvising/jazz/classical end of the spectrum: Susan Alcorn, Dave Ballou, Nathan Ellman-Bell, Karin Brown, Lara Bruckmann, Sam Burt, Audrey Chen, John Dierker, Neil Feather, Ian Hesford, Adam Hopkins, Lura Johnson, Marcia Kämper, Liz Meredith, Will Redman, Sacawa himself, Shodekeh, David Smooke, Eric Trudel, and Igor Yuzefovich. The remixers are Cex (aka erstwhile City Paper contributor Rjyan Kidwell), Dennis DeSantis, DJ Dubble8 (aka MM co-founder Erik Spangler), Michael Lowenstern, Ecstatic Sunshine’s Matt Papich, Wendel Patrick, Gabriel Prokofiev, Quincy of Uncle Jesse, Ricky Rabbit, Todd Reynolds, Schwarz, and Cullen Stalin. The Cex track will feature rhymes from the Get ‘Em Mamis.

Plans call for a CD featuring the remixes to be released in September, at the beginning of the next MM season, and this being 2011, there’s a Kickstarter campaign underway to help fund the project.

This week’s Detroit Metro Times, a CP sister publication, features a fairly exhaustive feature on Negative Approach/Laughing Hyenas frontman and aggro rock legend John Brannon. (His current outfit, Easy Action, recorded a couple of albums for Baltimore’s own Reptilian Records.) If you paid any attention to ’80s hardcore or post-hardcore underground rock (i.e. the Touch & Go universe), you probably owe it to yourself to read it.

As organizer of the annual High Zero Festival and the experimental hive the Red Room, the High Zero Foundation (HZF) has been an integral part of the city’s arts community for more than a decade now, and a forerunner/sparkplug of Baltimore’s current arts explosion. But the HZ folks also understand that there are plenty of Baltimoreans who are perhaps unfamiliar with or even intimidated by the very idea of free improvisation and experimental music. So tonight, beginning at 8 p.m. sharp, HZF hosts Taster!, a free event at 2640 Space featuring a stellar line-up of local avant types playing brief sets in a casual setting with wine and nibbles in hopes of reaching new listeners.

“This event is designed to be a thumbnail introduction to the music and the people who make it,” HZF President John Berndt writes in an e-mail, “with an emphasis on fun and novelty.”

If you aren’t familiar with Baltimore’s experimental scene or its players, the following litany of names might not mean much to you. If you are familiar, feel free to be amazed to see this kind of all-star line-up on a local stage outside the annual High Zero blowout itself. For newcomers or veterans, it’s not a night to be missed. The sets include:

Neil Feather: inventions
Eric Franklin: inventions
Dan Breen: inventions

John Dierker: bass clarinet
Samuel Burt: bass clarinet
Britton Powell: bass
Will Redman: drums

Susan Alcorn: pedal steel guitar
Paul Neidhardt: drums
Chris Pumphrey: alto saxophone

Andy Hayleck: inventions
Ayako Katoaka: inventions
Peter Blasser: inventions

Audrey Chen: cello, voice
Shodekeh: human beat-boxing
Brian Sacawa: saxophones

Allaboutjazz.com reports that reedsman and educator Joe Maneri died Aug. 24. He was 82.

Maneri was best known for his interest in and dedicated use of microtones (simplistically put, the notes between the usual do-re-mi notes of the standard scale) in his playing and composing, though his music also included beguiling strains of free jazz, Mediterranean Basin ethnic sounds, and 20th-century European composition. A relatively obscure figure, even at the peak of his renown, he spent most of his career away from the bandstand and recording studio as he schooled, a couple of generations of jazz musicians at the New England Conservatory, where he was on the faculty for decades. In 1990s, he was suddenly (re)discovered and embraced by avant-jazz heads and went on to record a number of fine albums for esteemed labels such as ECM, Hat Hut, and Leo, often in collaboration with his violinist son Mat.

Despite the modest vogue for his music in recent years, Joe Maneri remained mostly heard of, rather than heard. Perhaps the imminent slew of small obituaries like this will inspire people to track down a copy of, say, Three Men Walking and give him a listen.

Jazz composer/bandleader/theorist George Russell passed away Monday after a long illness. His was far from a household name even in many jazz-loving households, but cognoscenti will mourn him for a career that encompassed an influential theoretical treatment of modal playing in jazz (The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization) to shrewd experiments within the vanguard mid-20th-century jazz (including vital collaborations with seminal figures such as pianist Bill Evans and reedsman Eric Dolphy) to the ambitious genre-bending suites such as Electronic Sonata for Souls Loved by Nature and The African Game that defined his later career. Posthumous appreciations for this under-appreciated figure will surely follow, but Patrick Jarenwattananon has already posted an appealing remembrance over at NPR.org.

Not only did local Top 40 R&B quartet Dru Hill get back together yesterday, but it broke up again live on the radio about 10 minutes later. And you can watch the whole thing happen on video.

This is not news to dedicated fans of 92Q‘s Big Phat Morning Show, where original members Woody, Siquó, Jazz, and Nokio were back together on the air for the first time in almost a decade. Whatever new project they had in the works probably isn’t in the works anymore, though, after James “Woody Rock” Green basically backed out of the reteaming into an open microphone, citing his commitments to doing God’s work. (He left the group originally in 1999 for similar reasons.) You can imagine how upset the other members were, but you don’t have to: As tipped to us by City Paper contributing writer/blogger Al Shipley, somebody shot footage of the whole thing.

As gawk-worthy as this fiasco is, it’s more than a little sad, too. Quiet as it’s kept these days, Dru Hill was a bigger pop success than any other Baltimore act of the past 15 years. These days its legacy tends to be defined by Sisqó’s 1999 solo hit “Thong Song,” but the first two Dru Hill albums featured plenty of compelling smooth R&B buoyed by the quartet’s luxurious vocals. And if this means we’re never gonna hear “Never Make a Promise” (talk about drama) live again, well, that just sucks.