Arts & Culture

Master of None: On Aziz Ansari’s Smart New Sitcom

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In Master of None, viewers meet a more thoughtful and mature Aziz Ansari. Ansari’s hyperactive rants about bed sheet thread counts and Kanye West are mostly absent, replaced by honest depictions of relationships, family and workplace strife. In the ten-episode Netflix original series (which Ansari co-created with Parks and Rec producer Alvin Yang), Ansari plays Dev Shah, an artistically struggling but financially stable actor in New York City. Dev and his cohort deal with the hyper modern — prowling review sites to find the best tacos, to the everyday — moving in with a significant other. Most often, however, Ansari and Leung’s storylines find a narrative sweet spot that is silly and poignant, such as when Dev seeks out the most polite, but strategic, way to offer a Father John Misty ticket to potential dates over text.

art

COLLINS| What Are We Fighting (Renoir) For?

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For readers who have not yet received their daily reminder of the intense strangeness of our modern world: a gang of protesters recently traveled to three museums to protest Renoir’s paintings. No, as Sebastian Smee notes in The Boston Globe, they’re not decrying Renoir’s anti-Semitism or any other related political issue. The “protests” focus purely on Renoir’s aesthetic, and the group’s name says it all: “Renoir Sucks At Painting.”

However, I struggle to call Renoir Sucks At Painting (R.S.A.P.) an activist group. It is, most simply, the material of an activist group, the elements of protesting deployed simply for the sake of deploying them. R.S.A.P.’s most impressive quality is the group’s ability to access every enraging, sophomoric, God-they’re-so-smug archetype that you would expect from aesthetic-focused protesters.

motion city soundtrack

TEST SPIN: Motion City Soundtrack — Panic Stations

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We only rip on the bands we love and, as such, I must take Motion City Soundtrack to task for 2015’s Panic Stations. The 11-song offering, a project with Dinosaur Jr. and Sonic Youth producer John Agnello, lacks the intricacy and vulnerability that endeared listeners to the band’s previous offerings. The album shimmers with a silver lining: Frontman Justin Pierre seems reenergized in recent interviews, and with good reason. This year marks 10 years since Motion City Soundtrack’s tour-de-force Commit This to Memory, an album that delivered pop-punk canon entries “Everything is Alright” and “L.G. FUAD.” Furthermore, Panic Stations resulted from fourteen days of furtive recording in Minnesota’s Pachyderm Studio, birthplace of Nirvana’s In Utero among others. By all indicators, Motion City Soundtrack should be enjoying a dignified position atop the pop-punk upper echelon.