VIBE.com: You were on Degrassi for eight years. It must have taken a lot to leave that comfort zone. When did you know it was time to go?

Drake: I can’t really say I left that show. One day we came in and all the names were just changed on the dressing rooms. Everyone got cut. We go upstairs and it’s like, “Who are all these people auditioning in the front?” They owe us a lot of money. The amount of loyalty, the years we put in with these people…they did us foul. As far as the producers go, I don’t talk to anybody over there.

— VIBE: Drake Interview “Drake Day”

Broadcast, “Tears in the Typing Pool” [Warp; 2005]

At one point, this song meant a lot to me, and now it means something very different for obvious reasons. Probably in my Top 3 Songs list from a band that deserves a Top 20, easy.

Paavoharju: “Kevätrumpu” [Fonal; 2008]

Tell me this doesn’t sound like Grimes.

My interview with Judd Apatow is up on Pitchfork today. He’s someone I respect a lot as a writer and as someone who excels at making people laugh for a living, so I was sweating bullets during this one, but I am happy with how it turned out. The best part of speaking with him is when he mentioned this “Freaks and Geeks” scene of Bill (Martin Starr) watching Garry Shandling do stand-up. It’s moments like these in his works that I feel like Apatow connects not only with a specific portion of humanity, but also how laughter can be truly cathartic and can help you escape from anything oppressive that might be surrounding you. (This probably explains why I liked Funny People more than most, too.)

Anyway, it was great talking to Judd, and I have the feeling that This Is 40 is going to be very divisive, but I recommend seeing it anyway.

Super 8 [2011; J.J. Abrams]

About 3/4 into this, Abby asked me, “So, between this and Hugo, which movie do you think ‘likes movies’ more?” After talking about it we agreed that Super 8 is more a ‘movie about movies’ in a basic and positive sense, while Hugo is more a ‘movie about making a movie about making movies’. They are both very baldly sentimental and mostly sincere films, but Hugo’s emotional sincerity is somewhat tainted by the obvious genuflection towards filmmaking— the craft that made possible what is happening before your very eyes while watching the movie— that, by its own self-congratulatory ending (for a film about HUMANITY and ART, the whole thing ends up playing like Scorcese is being selfish, if anything) ends up feeling like a history lesson and not much more.

(Never mind the most hilarious aspect of Hugo— which, for the record, I actually like a lot!— is that a film so steeped in Remembering And Honoring The Past looked absolutely amazing in 3-D, to the point where I have to imagine seeing it on a TV somewhere would just feel like watching a feature-length “Thomas the Tank Engine” episode.)

Super 8 is a lot more about how movies affect our lives than The Importance Of Movies, and I really appreciated how, even though Abrams isn’t a hugely subtle storyteller, that theme was woven in with other really basic but probably good to remember themes— family, protection, friendship— in a way that wasn’t too showy. Not that I’m saying Super 8 isn’t showy! It is, in a very big and great way, and even though I thought the father/son dynamic was bizarrely underdeveloped for Abrams, who is totally obsessed with ‘guys and their dads’ melodrama, I do wish there were more movies regularly made that were like this. (Note that I still haven’t seen Real Steel, which I’ve heard is similarly ‘Hey It’s a Big Movie!’ great.)

Looks like I totally forgot to mention in that last post that “On Some Faraway Beach” was playing in the background during the dream. So now it makes more sense that I mentioned that song, haha.

M83: “Farewell/Goodbye” (Apologies for the porny cover art, for some reason Spotify doesn’t have Before the Dawn Heals Us available for streaming so this was the best I could do)

Love this song, but I only listen to it every so often because it sounds like what I imagine (hope, I guess) dying is like— floating up towards some bright light or maybe just slowly evaporating into the air, some sort of bombastic final act where you’re okay with everything ending because this is how it’s ending.

I have a similar association with the Tough Alliance’s “1982”, mostly because it just sounds like finality to me, and Brian Eno’s “On Some Faraway Beach”. The latter is particularly strong for me; I think I was a sophomore in high school when I first discovered how amazing Here Come the Warm Jets (still my favorite Eno album by far) is, I was listening to it constantly. Around that time I had a dream that my (still living) father had died, but thanks to some new amusement park attraction I had a chance to see him one last time in the form he’d taken in the afterlife. I rode some sort of strange elevator with a talking cartoon explaining the process inside, and the entire time I was crying.

I finally arrived to where my father (or my father’s soul I guess) was and I got to talk to him, he told me everything was going to be okay, and then I woke up and I couldn’t stop crying, it just felt very real and I might have actually gotten up to hear my father snoring to make sure that it was all a dream. I don’t think I listened to Here Come the Warm Jets for at least a year after having that dream, and even thinking about the dream now I’m getting sort of upset, so maybe it’s less a bad association with certain songs as it is a total fear of death and losing the people around me that I love, I don’t know really.

Justus Köhncke: “It’s Gonna Be Alright” [Kompakt; 2008]

Over at Pitchfork today, we posted Benoit & Sergio’s “New Ships”, a single from a production duo that I’ve been excited about for a few years now and who just seem to get better and better at conveying a wide range of emotions while making dance music that is both really erudite but also simply pleasing and open-hearted. Listening to Justus Köhncke’sSafe and Soundtonight made me think of that song again because it sounds vaguely Daft Punk-y— like, maybe Daft Funk as smoke blown through a cardboard tube with a sheet of fabric softener tied at the end of the tube, all soft and complicated perfume.

What an album cover, too— reminds me of the one for Gas’Pop.

Heading South [2005; Laurent Cantet]

This is the second film I’ve seen by Cantet,The Class being the first. I think I like this a little more than The Class, but they’re incomparable, really— both films, in my view (correct me if I’m wrong re: The Class) do deal with white privilege and how it affects the resulting interactions between people who differ in both race and class, but narratively they’re quite different, to me. The Class feels more like a free-form discussion from which a narrative emerges, while Heading South almost rigidly adheres to a set structure, using the characters’ actions and past experiences to build to an abrupt— although not entirely unforeseen— climax that creates both devastation and casual indifference in its wake.

Three of the film’s protagonists are middle-aged white women who stay at a Haitian resort (with varying annual regularity) and engage in almost exclusively sexual relationships with the young boys that live in the area. (All three claim to be in love with their paramours at one point or another, but the distance that Cantet creates between the audience and the actual relationships suggests that is not the case.) Undoubtedly, all three are engaging in sexual tourism, but their motivations differ.

Sue (Louise Portal) is a somewhat well-meaning Canadian factory worker who simply seeks companionship of any sort at the resort because she can’t find it back at home. She possesses an element of “they know not what they do” and is subsequently the most sympathetic character, made more sympathetic by the fact that she seems to be the one who possesses the kindest heart of the three.

Somewhat tangentially, she is subjected to cruel comments about her weight and build in absentia by Ellen (played masterfully, as is her typicality, by Charlotte Rampling), a French professor at Wellesley who seems most aware of the games being played. She scornfully talks about her female students who seem perpetually heartbroken and, when seeing Legba, a young man who sleeps with her and several other women at the resort, wearing expensive-looking clothing, comments with disgust about how he looks like “a black guy from Harlem”.

Ellen pretty much spells out her own sense of colonialism (a word I, admittedly, probably wouldn’t use were it not for her British accent) when she states, upon gazing at Legba dancing with another unnamed woman at the resort, “Legba belongs to everyone.” Later in the film, she orders the kitchen staff out of their work area to have a conversation with him, and you get the sense that Legba is not the only person of color that Ellen feels she can assert a sense of command— if not ownership— over.

The film’s catalyst and most fascinating character is Brenda (played by Karen Young, who I was just reminded was the FBI agent who befriended and attempted to flip Adriana in The Sopranos) is a dissatisfied, emotionally distraught wife returning to the resort after engaging in a highly inappropriate sexual encounter with a 15-year-old boy there years before, an encounter that resulted in her experiencing her first true orgasm in her entire life. Suffice to say, it takes a certain type of personal confusion to engage in and subsequently cherish a relationship with a minor, and Brenda spends the majority of the film looking as if in a trance, especially in her scenes with Legba, who spends enough time with several women in the resort that when we finally meet his family near the end of the film, it’s clear he doesn’t drop by much at home. Of the three, she’s the most susceptible in confusing lust with love, becoming fiercely protective of Legba and eventually sharing responsibility in his death.

Of the three women, Brenda most explicitly is a tourist, sexual and otherwise (even if they all are in the end— as an investigator says in the film’s closing minutes, “Tourists never die”). Early on in the film, she expresses a desire to leave the resort visit the nearby city; Ellen balks and claims to rarely visit the city at all, while Sue comments how she goes to the market occasionally to take advantage of the currency rate and fill her home with cheap statues and paintings. In the film’s third act, Legba takes her into the city, where she takes pictures of locals and buys bundled tobacco for little practical reason. Through a series of events owing to the stark realities that connect Legba and his other, more real life in Haitian culture and the city at large, he is found consorting with Brenda and eventually murdered along with a young female acquaintance, their naked bodies dumped on the beach at the resort.

Perhaps the most telling scene takes place after Legba is chased by gunpoint through the streets, temporarily splitting up with Brenda in the process. For a few moments, we’re left to wonder what’s happened to Legba, who has been put in serious danger partially due to his relationship with Brenda— a relationship that seems emotionally unequal at best.

Brenda, meanwhile, sits at the resort bar and takes some Valium to calm herself down. She’s in love, but as the film’s ending drives home, she can also travel anywhere else, engage in whatever “adventures” she’d like to, and leave whatever devastation her actions have created in the hands of the locals whose lives she’s temporarily disrupted. You get the feeling that, to her, the consequences are of a less lasting nature than a stamp in someone’s passport.