Don LaFontaine, voiceover master, is dead at 68. I’m wondering how the sound of movie previews will change without the heavy-duty drama of “In a world…”

Maybe Pablo Francisco will take over, since his beloved but tired spoof of the man would be kinda tacky now. But I’m guessing that the character of movie trailer voiceovers is going to change. Anyone who tries to mimic that gravitas will pale by comparison, so I think they’ll have to use a completely different approach. I also think the days of one dominant voice used for a bazillion trailers is over.

This illuminated shrine is dedicated to Steve Irwin. Goofball delivery and ironic death aside, he was a great conservationist and used his popularity and his money well.

The shrine was created in Jane Wynn’s Illuminated Shrine class at Art Unraveled 2008. It features a fetal ray, a stingray spine, a chipboard gear and alcohol inks that came from Hannah Grey. The frame was a gaudy thing from Ross or somewhere like that and the shadow box is made from an Altoid-style mint tin (treated with alcohol inks and a blowtorch), and the rice lights were procured from the wedding aisle of a hobby store– these were all provided to the class by the instructor for the project.

I ended up using the back of the frame since the rhinestone-studded front didn’t suit the imagery. (Besides, the back took alcohol inks wonderfully.) The stage (the chipboard gear) is fastened to a little bezel cut from a copper pipe and soldered directly to the mint tin as a standoff. I believe I might have had to add a couple washers in there to clear the tips of the tiny lights poking through from the back.

For the health of my marriage, we are instituting a mandatory weekly art night, wherein we ignore all the stuff we SHOULD be doing and just work on art stuff.

Here’s a mask I built from paper clay that will be used for a piece I’m working on. It’s heaped on there pretty good, it’ll be drying for days. At the last minute I added a light dusting of dry paper clay for texture, but when the heat gun hit it it blasted the stuff all over the kitchen. Our cat Torque Smackey was supervising nearby and subsequently had to have a lengthy tongue bath.

I also experimented with my new coiling gizmo and whatever wire I had laying around. The coils with the super-fine transformer wire feel really neat.

(I also put a few finishing touches on the piece I made in Jane Wynn’s class at Art Unraveled, but it’s a real challenge to shoot and it will take me a while to post that.)

This is my first time with paper clay. I have to say that it’s probably a lot cheaper to use the crap they blew into our walls as insulation. Seems like it was the same stuff. If I start doing a lot of this I might try it.

Last night I went to see a band at the Blank Club called 187CALM. This was a band that my beloved old roommate Luz Longa adored and when she moved out she took the only CD of theirs I had ever seen before or since. I saw them once or twice, I think both times with Mute Angst Envy, like 14 years ago, and then the band stopped doing shows ten years ago. So when I saw a poster advertising a reunion show it brought a whirlwind of memories back for me. (It took them a while to surface though, I’m afraid. “Was that Luz’ band? No wait, was that her friends? I remember having some files for one of their show posters on my Mac back then — did I design that one? Or just help?” Well, eventually I put the pieces together, remembered the band and even my fruitless search for their CD’s, and resolved to go. While it was nice to think that I was finally getting out to shows again — kinda makes me feel more alive — I was really just going there to see the band and buy those elusive CD’s.

I showed up early and listened to the blisteringly loud band DESA (”Hmm, they’re too loud. Does that mean I’m too old? KISS might have been right.”). The band was OK; they played one song they claimed was new that I quite liked. I didn’t care for the singer all that much but I really liked the song structures and the performance from the other musicians. I realized I don’t have the vocabulary any more to describe bands (”I guess you’d say… progcore?”) Lacking anything better to do I hit the merch table and stocked up on those hard-to-find 187CALM CDs. I got a free poster which I foolishly accepted — now I had to keep it safe all night. Then I sat at the bar and had a couple of pints of Guinness, thinking about the futility of trying to meet people at a show when the band is this loud and the lighting is this dim and you don’t know anyone there. Thinking about how I actually might know someone there but even if either could recognize the other in the light and after all those years — would either of us remember the other’s name?

I headed to the restroom and was forced to gaze at the Nostalgia Wall above the urinal, plastered in vintage show posters for Cactus Club, Marsugi’s, Club X events, it was all there — these were SHOWS I HAD BEEN TO.

Mercifully the headliner finally hit the stage and I got into position. I found myself feeling incredibly and uncharacteristically self-conscious, clutching my merchandise, feeling very bald, wondering why I put on a Skinny Puppy shirt before the show (”Is this just silly? *I* know I wear it often, but does it just look like I’m trying to prove I belong in a nightclub?”). It was almost as though losing all the weight made me MORE self-conscious. I guess I expected that to somehow make me younger or something.

I found myself wishing I had invited Lisa Dewey — she put out the most recent Mute Angst Envy record on her label, maybe she likes these guys too! And being there with someone else would have taken the edge off of all the silly shit I was feeling in a heartbeat. But it was far too late for that. I tried to remind myself I was just there for the music and concentrate on the band.

For their part the band was great. More varied in style than I remember and it was indeed music I can still enjoy now. Even when things went wrong the band was charming and entertaining. And their celebrated atmosphere did create an agreeable mood which is nice at a show. I’d certainly go see them every chance I had, even now. But next time I’ll make sure to bring somebody with.

I thought about staying after to talk to the bandmembers as I often do, knowing that at least we could talk about Luz, but I just wanted to disconnect from the whole depressing scene. I left that night, never having uttered a word to anyone.

Before we had finished describing all of the dog’s various symptoms the vet brought up the dreaded “quality of life” phrase.  We thought it would be easy.  We thought we were prepared.

We were not.

Even though she drove us crazy it was really hard, when it came down to it.  What’s worse, we had been putting this off because we didn’t want to seem too hasty, and the vet said something along the lines of “when you see these symptoms… it’s just cruel to make them live that way.”  So great — our self-consciousness turned to cruelty.

And, as we were absorbing that little nugget, Grey asked “Why is he going to kill our dog?” Now, we had talked to him about this possibility at length in the preceding weeks.  But how do you get that to sink in with a six-year old?  It’s pretty abstract.

Shoshanah dissolved in tears and took Greyson to the waiting room. The doc had me pin down a confused and struggling Coco.  I desperately wanted to tell her that it would be okay, that the pain and misery and confusion would be over.  I talked to her as best I could in those few seconds, hoping the lower tones in my voice would pierce that deafness that had started making everything so much worse.  And as the anaesthetic rushed in, she did relax and seemed happy, happier I imagine than she had been in months, and soon she lay quietly in my arms.

The guilt was piercing and multilayered.  The guilt for keeping her alive, the guilt for putting her down. The guilt over how we honestly felt about her when she was alive.  The guilt from the uncertainty about whether it was wise to have Grey involved in this final process.  The conflict about my support for voluntary human euthanasia and the difficulty of participating in pet euthanasia. (I know, those are very different but it didn’t feel like it just then.)

As for Grey, there was method to our madness.  We have a beloved relative in poor health, and I think that Greyson will be confronting death imminently.  I felt it was a disservice to try to shelter him from it at this time.  Thoughts?

This left me aghast. To me, jealousy is a worthless and destructive emotion, something to be gotten under control, like the desire to cause violence or revenge.

Here are the pros the way I understand them:

1) It shows you care.

This is a popular interpretation I’ve heard before, exclusively from women. There are much more worthwhile and positive ways to show you care, like changing some disagreeable aspect of your lifestyle to make her happy. I know — it’s easier to get angry about things. But relationships require effort and commitment.

2) You can defend your wife against would-be seducers or other threats to your relationship.

This one is just silly. Seduction is the art of getting ill-advised consent. If you feel that your wife is in danger of giving consent to an outside party, your beef needs to be with your wife, not the seducer. Similarly, if there are external threats to your relationship, your relationship needs to be fortified from within.

I actually think that’s it for the pros. Now the cons:

1) Interferes with judgment.

Jealousy invariably obscures the truth of any given situation.

2) It can put a premature end to what could be a rewarding friendship.

Stop wasting time giving me the stinkeye; I’m no threat and maybe we have some rewarding commonalities.

3) Jealousy is a euphemism for insecurity.

Jealousy is a threat response and consists of a combination of insecurity and anger, two emotions that many people pay good money to manage, for good reason.

4) Jealousy is always pointed in the wrong direction.

Merely a variation on these other axioms is the assertion that jealousy always points to an external threat when the actual problem or potential problem lies within the relationship. This applies to all kinds of threats — people as well as other attention-suckers like work or hobbies. If the relationship is so rewarding that your significant other is willing to risk reprisals at work or slow progress in some other activity in order to be with you, then it’s pretty much like when you were first dating! So don’t get upset at the work, the hobby or the pretty secretary who spends too much time with your S.O. — work to figure out what would make your S.O. more interested in being with you.

5) It is a tremendous waste of energy.

All that fear, anger, suspicion — all the conflicts it causes, and stupid fights: “What are you so upset about, he’s just a friend!” — these are an exhausting burden to live under, and poisonous to the people around you. The damage it can cause when you get it wrong — good relationships get torn up by groundless suspicion all the time.

Here’s the bottom line: If you’re secure in your relationship there is no need for jealousy. If you’re insecure in your relationship you need to work to fortify it. In either of these cases any jealousy is always misdirected and needs to be controlled like any other ugly, base instinct.

OK, comment away.

Like most photo sites do (or will do), Flickr encourages geotagging, adding fun features if the site knows where in the world the photo was taken. Now, imagine a 14-year-old girl adding a self-portrait featuring a provocative pose to their new Flickr account. Now, imagine her biggest fan, knowing where she took it, how to find the house, even what bedroom it was in. For example, take this lady here. She’s not underage, she knew what she was doing, and she looks like she can take care of herself. But imagine a younger girl, unaware that her camera was telling people her address.

Any site that shares photos must make geotagging an opt-in process, by default hiding the data from public view. Otherwise, we’re going to see another steady stream of news stories blaming the sharing site for the behavior of criminals and their victims.

All this accessibility brings about the illusion of constant availability.  Just because one is accessible doesn’t mean one is available to communicate.

Let’s take, for example, my dear mother.  Where to begin?  The phone calls are bad enough.  There’s never just one.  It’s like skipping a stone.  First one big one, then a followup with something she forgot, and then a few more short followups.  Add email into the equation and it gets worse.  She still occasionally will call multiple different phone numbers to advise me that she sent me an email.  And recently she called my house and cel phone for a combined total of ten times in less than four hours regarding travel plans I was trying to make.  Granted, one of those calls was to apologize to my wife for browbeating her for my failure to return her calls.  This failure was simply this: I was busy.  I couldn’t talk on the phone.

Chat and SMS text messaging tighten this illusory loop even further. How many times have you come back from brief distraction to see, in a chat window, “Hello?  Did I lose you?”  Now granted the channel is pretty narrow.  There’s no way to know if the person on the other end is too steamed or bored to respond, or if they’re simply distracted.  In a medium where the time interval between responses is an important indicator of meaning (go ahead, read back over a heavy chat transcript.  It loses a lot without the punctuating pregnant pauses, doesn’t it?), ny delays are easy to misinterpret, like in those cel phone ads where the call is dropped at a very inopportune time, causing hilarious misinterpretations.

This illusion of availability, a side effect of society’s obsessive drive to improve communication, has resulted in no small aggravation on the part of either correspondent, albeit for different reasons.  Radio silence is not a reliable indicator of meaning or respect.  And just because I am accessible doesn’t mean I can talk!

Torque is Back!

Originally uploaded by Tymcode

He showed up today, skinnier and thirsty as hell but happy to see everybody. Shosh had been calling through a vent under the house in case he was in there and he came trotting around the corner.

I think I caused him to come home; I had just flyered the neighborhood in 94-degree weather…