photos by stefan simchowitz

There are many ways to approach this subject. There has always been a feud between Sopranos viewers. Some people opt for the more artful incarnations of the Sopranos—the dream episodes, the metaphysical What the Bleep Do We Know rip off episode that occurs after Tony recovers when he meets a quantum physicist—as opposed to the first episode a classic example of Mob politics, the transition to Soprano dominance after the past greatness of the Aprile’s. The real conundrum is that David Chase wrote both incarnations of the show, the first and last episode, two episodes that are arguably unrecognizable as the same show. Sure a decade had passed and by the second season the Sopranos had enough money to use real music as opposed to the cheesy mob-jazz synth score that pervaded the first season, but the content of the show has largely shifted. The only similarity is the emphasis on the familial structure. My assessment is that David Chase’s two directorial episodes are antithetical to the Sopranos as a whole, a show that is inarguably one of the finest achievements in the history of television. The Sopranos does not work as a straight mob show about ultra-violence and power structures or an artsy fartsy surrealist journey into Tony Soprano’s mind. The show is a show about mafia stereotypes. It has an ironic sensibility that is more subtle than Goodfellas, but less serious than the Godfather, about regular people with regular problems, whose actions are motivated by things that only happen in the mafia. The failure of the final show is not that there is an inconclusive ending, but rather that the artful, beautifully shot and emotionally visceral scenes were in no way related to Tony’s business.
We were so close to achieving a sense of closure, but in the end Tony’s character is in the same place, suspicious of every character, and in business alone, but at home is fulfilled to a point, just like everybody else. The concept of closure in a show that was always open ended is a good place to start the argument. The final episode did not need closure, but David Chase was fucking with the audience purposely. At every moment when we thought an action plot-moving action would occur it didn’t (AJ’s car burning, Sil on the bed, and finally the last seconds). The end although quite compelling was a bit cliché, hadn’t Monster used the same music, and didn’t Boogie Nights have a similar moment of silence with blasting eighties music, as Dirk Diggler made a cocaine deal. However, way the episode did finally stopped in the last moments was extremely original, but felt like the bright idea of some third rate film school editor. Everyone in the country thought his or her cable cut out. The show is structured so everything has remained the same, despite the absence of all Tony’s essential and peripheral business figures AKA Capos. Through it all and through all the seasons Tony has always had incredible luck, and the fact that since Christopher’s death this has been continuously outlined makes me happy, but also in a similar sense feels like a cop out. What is so special about Tony Soprano? I don’t care if the critical consensus of intellectuals prefers the ending, after a ninety-hour investment in a single series the majority of the viewers and I wanted a little more.

Film: It’s a constant struggle between adoring aged classics and trying to figure out the minds of contemporary geniuses. To make things more difficult there are those obscure old masterpieces that are rediscovered, making old tropes fresh and exciting again. MOMA’s To Save and To Project, has been one such attempt to befuddle our expectations.

The double feature on this past Saturday began with the short “Isabelle aux dombes,” a daringly shot set of montages evoking emotion and drama without the use of linear narrative. The visual feast is reminiscent of, or rather prefigures, the tranquility of Abbas Kiarostriami and the intensity of Christopher Doyle. In only 9 minutes, this 1950 short by Maurice Pialat is a concentrated nugget of powerful visual storytelling.

Following the appetizer came Jean Renoir’s “Whirlpool of Fate,” a simple, idyllic, fairy tale like story about a misfortunate girl named Gudule. Though perhaps indulgently childish, the film still evokes a powerful response through its beautiful scenes, sets, and acting. What made the experience even more special was the fact that this film, once thought to be lost, was rediscovered in the form of a English backup print. Since its rediscovery, the subtitles were retranslated back into French. Then in the MOMA theater, along with a piano accompaniment by Stuart Oderman, we get a live reading of the subtitles translated back into English. Good thing the story was simple enough that nothing could really have been lost in transation. It was like story time. Most of the lines were read with a straight face but once in awhile, when Gudule thew her rare tantrum, the reader too threw in a bit of her sass giving the film some extra flavor and contrast.

Music: Everyone knows ToddP by now. His DIY all ages show range from revolutionary to totally f’ed up (not sure if I should get into details). The No Age show I went to this past Thursday was somewhere in between. It was fun and pretty mellow (not the bands but the atmosphere). The line up went Thank You (formerly More Dogs) from Baltimore; No Age, that somtimes pop, sometimes ambient, sometimes noise skate punk band from LA; and Meneguar. My heart went out to Thank You. They had the cutest drummer with pig tails and a blue dress drumming with more force than Zach Hill (of The Advantage). During one of the songs her mouth opened wide like she was screaming. But she was still smiling. Somehow. Then afterwards she giggled and panted and drank some water. Profoudly sexy… sorry if this is getting creepy. Speaking of creepy, their music sounded like a black and white sci-fi horror flick, like old Doctor Who or The Thing, very cool very different and definitely well executed. Hey if some member of the band sees this please make a Selfpotrait account cuz we love you, all three of you!

Image: Nothing Lasts For Ever is the motto of the notorious graffiti collective Faile. Check out their open gallery at 201 Christie St. Ponder the importance of Mao. And anime girls. The themes of media, resistance, and sexiness seem consistent. Other than that Faile is definitely unoffensive in a good way; after all graffiti is public statement.

Spider Man 2, released first on the Playstation 2 and XBOX consoles, and later on the Gamecube, is not a new game. It’s not a spectacular, monumental game either. Why am I writing a review of it two years after its release, and moreover, after the far more recent release of a newer installment? Well, one, because I haven’t moved on to the next-gen consoles (for reasons I’ll blog about later), and two (and this is more of a grounds than a reason), many of the plays that George Bernard Shaw, for instance, reviewed, were neither new nor memorable. I feel I have enough to say about the game that pertains not only to the Spider Man series, and treating games like scholarly documents seems to be all the rage these days (see my paper on the phenomenology of games like SecondLife on my selfportrait profile). I’m secondarily hoping that IGN.com will read this and hire me.

After finishing the main game in just under 15 hours last week, I puzzled for a while over a variety of feelings I had towards it. Generally, when rating a game I consider, first, whether it is overall a good game, an excellent game, an abysmal game, etc. and second, whether it is an important game. I concluded that Spider Man 2 is a good, not great game, which suffers from completely unbalanced design, and that it is an unimportant addition to the gaming canon, except for one single feature or moment, which is the ability to jump from the top of every building (the highest of which in post 9/11 rendered New York is the Empire State Building), and experience a vertiginous freefall which I imagine must be much like suicide, imparting an an excellent element of realism to the game. The freefall, though incomparable to jumping from a harrier jet at 30,000 feet in GTA San Andreas and rocketing downwards for two minutes, is a beautiful, if inadvertant, moment for meditation.

Controls: Spider Man 2′s controls do not port well to the Gamecube. It is very difficult when web-slinging to execute sharp corners, which must be done by holding down A in advance, releasing R, pushing hard in one direction on the analog stick, and then pressing R again, and supplementing it with L, if you wish to get any speed. The problem is that the Gamecube’s R button is so shoddily built. Perhaps it’s from so many hours of Super Smash Bros. Melee, but my R trigger tends not to react anymore to delicate taps, or rapid sequences of taps. Also, the Gamecube’s R trigger, rather than being wholly pressure-sensitive like that of the Playstation 2, uses a two-tier system, where you have to make sure the button ‘clicks’ to execute the corresponding move. Furthermore, directional movement when swinging is not sensitive enough. There is a learning-curve to swinging, and it’s enjoyable to upgrade your swing speed and learn the most efficient technique, but the problem is that by the time you can swing well the main game is over, and you’ve spent the past 15 hours bumping into the sides of buildings because you can’t shift direction quickly enough.
The fighting engine also suffers because of the controls – Because the B, Y and X, buttons center around the A (main action) button, and are consequently spaced far apart, the numerous combos available in the game are difficult to pull off, and one must resort to button-mashing. This could have been rectified somewhat by a Customize Controls option, BUT THERE ISN’T ONE.
Finally, too much weight is put on the Gamecube’s miniscule d-pad. The d-pad facilitates both lock-on and Spider-Reflexes. Lock-on is mildly helpful during the game, but really only to keep track of where the enemy of your immediate concern is (since most battles are fought in open arenas) and not to use strategically. On the other hand, I went through basically the entire game without needing to use Spider-Reflexes once. I would call it gimmicky if it weren’t so unnoticable. I used it on occassion for my own enjoyment, but it’s an entirely superfluous and un-integrated feature. I think part of that is due to its marginalized location on the d-pad.

Camera: In a game where you spend 90% of your time web-slinging through concrete and steel canyons at high speeds, a responsive and intelligent camera is important. For the most part, I think the developers did a good job with the non-battle camera. One gripe is that I wish the camera would shift from a bottom-up vertical perspective to a horizontal one when reaching the tops of buildings. Many times (especially in the myriad extra races you can complete), you’ll scale a building by using the spring-jump, where you pounce up the wall and land at intervals. On the final jump however, it’s often difficult to gauge how much farther the top is, and you’ll often overshoot it. This happens a lot on tripartite buildings, or buildings with wedding cake setbacks. If the camera switched to horizontal more quickly, you could push in and land, but instead you have to wait out the height of your jump, wasting precious seconds on the way to a marker. Similarly, when scaling buildings sideways or upsidedown, the camera has a hard time paralleling your movements, and you often have to pause and orient yourself. This makes navigating more complex structures like the Brooklyn Bridge or the spire atop the Chrysler Building difficult. Adam Sessler would have a field day with this! The battle-camera on the other hand is horrible. Granted that slaying hordes of thugs in this game is pretty easy, you hardly ever know who you’re about to attack, or who’s about to attack you (despite that your Spidey-Sense alerts you to impending attacks). In tight or low-ceiling spaces, this is especially harrying. Overall though, the camera is not as bad as in many action-adventure games.

Sound/Graphics: I put these two together because I’m usually not hugely concerned with either; I think that considering the state of game production these days, gameplay, pacing, camera, and immersion are paramount. So, unless either is especially good or poor, I consider them both secondary. The graphics are decent, even on the Gamecube. Though there is a lot of draw, that’s expected and acceptable considering the vastness of the rendered city. Spider Man himself looks a little . . . fragile . . . (though better than the rest of the character models) and his default ready-for-action pose is cheesy, but most of his animations are good; he moves with an elasticity that juxtaposes the rigidity of the buildings. Also well done are the highly-reflective glass and steel surfaces which I’ve seen criticized elsewhere, but which glimmer gorgeously at night. I didn’t watch any of the cut-scenes, so I can’t tell you if they were well rendered. I did very much like the blur effect, both visual and aural, that occurs when you’re swinging or falling fast, and frankly I wish it happened more often!
The sound is okay. There’s some beautiful Philip Glass-esque (forgive my lack of research, but I’m not sure if it is in fact Philip Glass) mood music which cues in all too infrequently (randomly, it seems, once you’ve completed the main game), and the butt-rock that complements races and fights is above par butt-rock. The voice overs, as usual, are stilted.

Gameplay: I won’t cover over all the facets of gameplay, since you can find them elsewhere, but the most concerning flaw is this games unbelievably unbalanced design. Treyarch have rendered one of the largest playable environments in any game yet, second only to the GTA series, and perhaps True Crime, though I’d hardly call the latter’s environments ‘playable’. Nearly every major Manhattan landmark is present. Swinging from Inwood Park all the way down to the Financial District takes nearly 10 minutes. But here’s the caveat – IT’S ALL FUCKING USELESS! The main game is divided into 16 chapters, buffered by repetitive hero missions where you have to stop armored car holdups, bank robberies, carry wounded civilians to the hospital, deliver pizzas, etc. You do these missions to gain upgrades like faster swinging, combat moves (my favorite is The Lamp Post, where you can tie up baddies and hang them from street lights), and fun acrobatics moves. The main missions though, are mostly brief episodes, hardly related to one another. In other words, this game is more like ‘several months in the life of a superhero’, than a cohesive game. You blunder and then reconcile a relationship with Mary Jane, you fight the Rhino, Shocker, and Mysterio (the first and by far most fun battle), and meanwhile there is the Doc Oc strand which is like a condensed adaptation of Spider Man 2, the film. Then, after a final showdown with Doc Oc, a mission that is ten times harder than anything else you’ve previously done in the game, it’s over. You’re left with a 50% completion, a la GTA, and a wealth of mini-games to accomplish, like races, collecting skyscraper coins, and the like. You begin chapter 16, poetically titled “The First Day of The Rest of Your Life,” and realize something horrifying: Treyarch, probably funded by the film studio, got an army of programmer monkeys to render a way-too-big New York, and about 1 fucking percent of it is utilized in the main game. Sure you can complete every outstanding challenge, but other than that, everything is just scenery; what a waste! GTA San Andreas, though vast, offered some sense of purpose, of accomplishment and territory, in cruising around it’s cities once the main game was complete. Spider Man 2, on the other hand, leaves one with a terrific void of solitude to aimlessly swing around in. You turn off the console and feel as if Spider Man is trapped in that purposeless, lonely metropolis eternally. I’d feel worse if I gave a shit about Spider Man.

I chose not to rant about movies-turned-videogames, because we all know the often ugly results (Dukes of Hazzard, Pirates of the Carribean, etc. are all perfect specimens). I also think comics, and comic games, suck. There’s something so unappealing to me about comic book superheros – Spider Man is a bumbling goody-two-shoes who got bit by a radioactive spider for fuck’s sake; how sexy or romantic is that? Bugs are disgusting. But, this game obviously had some real effort put into it, more than that which is put into most games, and swinging around New York is fun. Plus, it was only $14.99, at GameStop. IGN gave it an 8.8, which I think is a little high. I give it an 8.0, because game developers really need to step things up.

Author: Paris Ionescu

Rafael Nadal won Roland Garros for the third consecutive year today, and I cried. My tears were brought on by an overwhelming triad of emotions: the disappointment at the defeat of my great hero, Roger Federer, who squandered 11 break-point chances during the match; the notion that Nadal, older than me by only a few months, is a true artist, and a brilliant young soul; and above all, the sheer awe of watching any single person triumph in front of a crowd of 15,000, and millions more watching remotely. The singularity of tennis is one of the reasons I love it so much; as opposed to basketball, futbol, or other team sports, at the end of a tournament there is only one man or woman to whom all the glory is ascribed. Doubles tennis, though there are two players, is essentially the same since duos are often equally lonesome (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, for example).

Maybe it’s because I’m an only child, but I’ve never been much of a team player, and similarly I’ve always enjoyed seeing a single person succeed more than a team – I share the same sentiment for an entire nation winning at, say, the Olympics, but in those cases a nation, though composed of many people, returns to being a singular thing in itself. This is why seeing Roger Federer, who is otherwise so far removed from the pack, and so close to becoming something extraterrestrial, defeated, brought back to earth, is heartbreaking; suddenly he is one of many, and not one of a kind.

Another source of anguish in the equation is that Rafa Nadal, who I have only in the past two weeks of play begun to see the genius in, really impressed himself upon me today. In fact, in his Herculean build, wild mane, unyielding filial piety, foreign tongue and exotic homeland, he arguably possesses more of the archetypal qualities of a hero than Federer (I just though of the nick-name Fedex, though I doubt I’m the first). There is an apparent simplicity to Nadal, which I am not ashamed to equate with a primality, even animality. Before, I saw his ravenous strokes and lupine gaze as brutish, but now I see that they stand for some determined, beautiful notion of singularity commensurate with my ability to wonder.

Author: Paris Ionescu

Almost every evening since school let out two weeks ago I’ve been going to Jesse’s house for some post-work sessions of Guitar Hero II (and to be fed by Jesse’s stepmom, Ali (thanks, Ali!)). Though I’m a naturally musical person, and do play the guitar, Guitar Hero is probably the closest I’ll ever come to real shredding. But, it’s not a bad substitute – knocking out Wolfmother’s ‘Woman’ on Expert is a pretty satisfying experience. Charlie, of Hysterics, who really CAN shred, joined us one night and cut his teeth on the mini-ax; he was a natural. I asked him afterwards how similar he found Guitar Hero to real guitar playing. Hardly at all, he said, but it definitely strengthens the wrist muscles and tendons. That may be, but after several marathons I’m beginning to suspect the onset of mild arthritis.

I have a reputation in my group of close friends for being a quick learner, particularly when it comes to games (ping-pong, foosball, Icy Tower), and I think I’ve followed suit with Guitar Hero, so much so that Jonny suspects me of secretly owning an XBOX 360 (which I do not!) and practicing at home. It may be that I have good hands – I have long, tendrily fingers, and practiced classical piano for the better part of my youth – though, to be honest, I’m a bit clumsy when it comes to hand-eye coordination (I’ve never been good at magic, for instance). There’s pressure though, in being expected to excel at things. When Theo came over and I couldn’t find my rhythm on ‘Killing in the Name of’, by Rage Against the Machine, I was a little embarrassed. In fact, it made me resentful that there was any expectation of my prowess. But then on another evening our intern, Yann, a Guitar Hero newbie, came over, and I was proud, even a little bit cock-sure, to show him how it was done. Don’t read this the wrong way, but if there’s any videogame whose mastery has some sex appeal, it’s Guitar Hero (see love-to-hate-him Kevin Pereira’s Attack of the Show! Guitar Hero tutorial here – “you’ll get to the point where the notes are just a vague suggestion of how to rock out.” <-- tard.) In fact, we know that Ray Chandler and Harley Viera Newton are avid players. Here's a booth-girl at E3 (post-no-bikinis policy) posing with her ax:

So, I’m conflicted about my new-found talent. While I do find improving pleasurable, and do enjoy the kudos that come along with it, I don’t like being expected to perform, as if it were part of my identity. I guess you could call me the Guitar Anti-Hero.

Here’s a video of some guy nailing the solo of ‘Arterial Black’, by Drist, a band I’m glad to say I’ve never heard of.

Author: Paris Ionescu

The commencement of this blog will be my opportunity to give you a vague sense of what it is going to be. We want this blog to be a hodgepodge of selfportrait related news, news in general, and a general cultural forum, where artists can discuss anything vaguely related to art. We will be inviting several members from the site to write on the blog, and hopefully the utopian idea that user generated content will make some indiscernibly beautiful labyrinth will work to our advantage and yours. You will be free to post words, pictures, videos (jesus Christ how can that even be possible) and give us an impression of your life, the life of an artist at the apex of the technological boom in the history of man. So inundated with more information than anyone could ever hope to grasp, maybe your blog posts and mine will offer some sense of distraction, or even some affirmation of life. Maybe the few words we send into the world of cyberspace will have some purpose unintended to the writer, but of some value to someone. That’s all we could ever hope for.