Tag: dogs

Random reflections, wryly

~ Chris ~ 4 Comments

I have never done karaoke, and I never will.

I don’t understand runners. I don’t know what in the world they are doing.

Dancing — a faint memory from my roaring twenties that I hope goes away.

Reggae is the devil’s flatulence.

A good, mean rollercoaster mainlines an unparalleled high. 

There is nothing sexier than a comely woman reading a book. 

Cars. I will never get them. They are like refrigerators — necessary appliances.

‘Good dog’ is redundant.

People who purposely don’t travel are unevolved and sad. (And people who say Munich is better than Paris are the most unevolved and most sad.)

Going to the movies alone is the best.

Religion is so radically misunderstood, so repulsively knotted up, we should hit delete and start all over again.

I am constitutionally incapable of playing charades.

Giving money to your alma mater is strictly for suckers.

Unless you’re doing it to a tiny child, the high-five is socially questionable. Fist-bumps — criminal.

There are worse things than tongue piercings. Though I can’t think of anything.

When an adult says they’re “reading” Harry Potter, they’re not really reading at all.

Sushi is sublime. I’ll even eat the grocery store crap.

I‘m thinking of going back to Japan. The more I think about it, the crazier I get.

I have this thing that if someone tells me they don’t read, I want to go back in time to the moment where I hadn’t met them.

Carnivals are disgusting and revolting. I adore everything about them. Even those poor goldfish.

I can’t do the Great Outdoors. It’s the outdoors part that gets me.

I like sharks a lot. If one bit me, it would probably like me too.

Pet rats are like itty-bitty dogs — highly intelligent, funny, trainable, social, responsive. They drink beer and eat anything and, well, everything. Then at about 2-years-old they die and shatter your heart into 10,000 pieces. They’re the best.

If, in a post-apocalyptic world, all sports were wiped out, I wouldn’t care a whit. Take the fans first.

I was thinking of going to a local food festival and parade. Temporary insanity just creeps up on you.

roller-coaster-149508746-57ac7eb45f9b58974ace1b67.jpg
Good.
keep-calm-and-love-reggae-d001012131649.png
Evil.
_105702604_shark976.jpg
Cool.
Tongue-Piercing-Girl_620x349.jpg
Fool.

Want to know if the dog dies? Go here first

~ Chris ~ 2 Comments

In the bullet-peppered, body-slamming thriller “John Wick,” innumerable bad guys die stylishly gruesome deaths.

So, alas, does the dog.

The blameless Beagle puppy named Daisy is mercilessly killed before our hero’s eyes, which squint with vengeance instead of squinch with tears. John Wick (Keanu Reeves) isn’t taking this outrage sitting down — he’s not letting dead dogs lie — in the 2014 cult classic. He’s about to unleash a two-hour massacre.

john-wick-dog-e1533830984142-625x352.jpg
Play dead. For good.

Spoiler? You bet. That’s exactly what the fine, sometimes funny and oddly practical movie- and animal-lover site Does the Dog Die? is here for — to tell you ahead of time if the damn dog dies. You want to know. I definitely want to know.

Anytime a dog, or any animal for that matter, appears on screen I tense up and just hope the creature doesn’t get shot, run over by an SUV or mauled by a demon (or, if you’re the rabbit in “Fatal Attraction,” boiled alive). Animals in movies are too often sacrificial lambs, beelines to our heartstrings or, as in Wick’s case, catalysts for revenge. (Or just workaday roadkill. Shrug.)

The website covers all manner of movie, TV and book animal deaths. Fed by visitor input, it’s a spoiler sanctuary revealing what animals perish or get injured and how, in often graphic terms. (Sample: “A cat accidentally gets smashed by a book. A half-human, half-dog gets his arm chopped off and punched into the ground.”) Ha, ha.

It’s humorous. It’s helpful. It’s horrific. Here’s a short screen grab to show you what entries looks like (note, it’s not the prettiest web design):

3fa53c75-9daf-41aa-b438-3b09f616fa24-screen-shot-2019-03-21-at-105648-am.png

Some more reader reports about dogs dying onscreen at Does the Dog Die:

  • “The Babadook” — “For anyone who DOESN’T WANT TO WATCH THE DEATH OF THE DOG, don’t watch from 1:09:20 to 1:11:20.”
  • “I Am Legend” — “Dog is infected by a zombie-esque virus and is killed by her owner.”
  • “The Witch” — “Dog disemboweled in the woods.”
  • “The Good Place” (TV) — “A dog is kicked into the sun.”
  • “The Thing” — “Many dogs die on and off camera. One looks like it got doused in acid and is still moving around.”
  • “John Wick” — “Yes, and it’s terrible, BUT John Wick spends the rest of the movie deliberately, gloriously, and violently avenging the dog, so it feels really pro-dog overall.”
  • “Old Yeller” — “Yes the dog dies. He’s shot by his owner after contracting rabies.”
Old Yeller. You bet your life the dog dies..jpg
“Old Yeller” — he’s either shaving or he has rabies. Yep: He dies.

Does the Dog Die goes well beyond dog deaths, featuring 50 queasy-making topics, things you might want to know before flipping on the TV or entering the multiplex. Some topics and contributor comments:

Does a kid die?

  • “Game of Thrones” (TV) — “Season 2, Episode 1: For goodness’ sake, don’t watch this episode if you can’t stand a child being hurt. A baby is murdered.”

Is someone burned alive?

  • “Thor Ragnarok” — “Someone is literally melted.”

Are there clowns?

  • “It” — “Shockingly, there are clowns.”

Does a head get squashed?

  • “Venom” — “Does a head getting eaten count as squashed? I’d say yeah, but some may disagree.”

Is Santa spoiled?

  • “Bojack Horseman” (TV) — “In the Christmas special, Bojack’s character admits that Santa is a lie in a way that is phrased to deny the existence of God.”

Are any teeth damaged?

  • “Room” — “Ma has a ‘bad tooth’ which hurts her when she eats. It eventually falls out and she gives it to her son.”

I can handle clowns, squashed heads and rotten teeth, but I hate it when the dog dies. Hate it. It’s one reason I call canine-killing movies like “Where the Red Fern Grows” and “Marley & Me” doggie-death porn. They all but fetishize the dog’s demise, milking the moment as they twist a knife in your heart, probably snickering as they do it. Sadists.

And so we have this neat site to tell us when to cover our eyes, leave the room, or skip a movie, show or book altogether. It’s not just a clever concept, it’s a public service.

Marley-and-Me-FTR.jpg
Sorry, Marley — you’re doomed.

Dog-doo afternoon

~ Chris ~ 8 Comments

Warning: This post discusses poop. Specifically dog poop.

The dog’s poop is marbled with blood. (I told you.) He relieved himself on the basement’s honey-hued carpet, which now bears permanent crimson splotches, some of them in the shape of small nations and rural flyover states. It’s a fecal atlas. 

Flippancy aside, recall: poo, blood, dog. This is eyebrow-raising on one hand, panic-time on the other. Bloody dookie is nothing to snicker, or snarl, at. It’s a call-the-vet-pronto affair, especially when said doggie, Cubby, is also behaving strangely and doing this regurgitation thing in which he chews and swallows whatever he’s just hacked up. It’s coming from both ends. It’s abnormal. We fear for the furball.

IMG_0832.jpg
Cubby in healthier days.

Should I worry if my dog’s stool has blood or mucus? That’s an actual question posted at Pet Health Network, a, well, pet health network that will either assuage your nerves or trigger the trots. 

If you, like me, are a hypochondriac, then you shouldn’t even be visiting sites like this or the human version, WebMD, where I often go to learn that my tennis elbow is likely an inoperable tumor and my heartburn is assuredly a minor stroke.

(Doctors hate sites like WebMD for spawning a nation of needlessly freaked out patients. I used to carry a sheaf of so-called diagnoses that I printed from the internet when I visited my doctor. He wanted to strangle me.)

The answer to the “my dog’s stool” query has several answers, making for something of a rollercoaster ride. Causes might be: an upset stomach from eating bad food (whew); inflammation of the colon (also, probably, whew); internal parasites (some antibiotics and we’re good, right?); cancer (Jesus!); allergies (we can deal); autoimmune disorders (egads). 

Cubby the über-hound is at the vet as I type. (No matter the diagnosis, I won’t let him read this.) The sun is dipping, kicking up skies of charcoal and embers. It’s 35-degrees out, just right, and somebody has to clean up the basement carpet. If Cubby’s OK, he can do it. 

And now a text arrives from Cubby’s mom at the vet: The doc can’t tell what the problem is but the bill, counting all manner of exams, including a stomach X-ray, is a soul-shriveling $901. Almost a thousand dollars in less than an hour. I’m gobsmacked until I remember how I once spent roughly $500 on an ailing pet rat. Animals will do that — break your heart while breaking the bank.

So it appears to be wait and see for schlubby Cubby, despite the red-streaked poop, which is actually the least of the vet’s concerns. The dog has a fever of 103, says the vet, who gave Cubs an antibiotic, anti-nausea meds and fluids for dehydration. The tummy X-ray was sent to a specialist, even though the vet saw nothing unusual in it like, say, a toothbrush or an iPhone.

This non-vet will tell you the animal has been unusually lethargic, and has picked up some odd habits over the days (he’s suddenly fond of karaoke and mojitos) and has dramatically altered his cravings (he wants nachos and Popeye’s). He isn’t chewing his beloved bully stick, which is, literally, a dried bull penis. He canceled his subscription to People and has gone to watching the dreadful third season of “True Detective.”

He’s one sick pup.

When the pup popped pills

~ Chris ~ 2 Comments

We OD’d the dog. 

Cubby the magic mutt was supposed to get one sedative pill before his visit to the vet yesterday. He’s a nervous guy, especially around the ominous sterility of the doctor’s office and creepy paper-sheathed exam table. So he pops a chill pill. (We should all be so lucky.) 

An hour before his appointment, I dipped a tablet in peanut butter, tricking him into swallowing the large pill. It’s an anti-anxiety med made for, get this, humans over age 25. It’s called Trazodone and it’s prescribed for any “stressful event.” I am seriously considering stealing a couple. 

Then this: Minutes later, my sister-in-law, unaware her dog was already medicated, gave him another Trazodone. Within a half hour, it was clear: Cubby was cooked. 

A smallish dog covered in gray curls, Cubby suddenly looked heartbreakingly lost, a Who-what-where am I? expression on his Ewok face. Dazed and confused, he started lurching and stumbling in slow-motion, like a wagon with a wobbly wheel, or Dean Martin.

His eyes little pinwheels, he looked like Joe Cocker on his first acid trip. He furrowed his brows and those eyes filled with vacant perplexity. 

He tottered up the stairs and onto the low bed, where he looked around wondering what was going on. His wet-noodle limbs did him no favors. He was a fuzzy stumblebum. He followed me into the bathroom and tried to leap atop the closed toilet but slipped and fell on his butt onto the floor, where he remained, shrugging, Whateva.

It was an unnerving spectacle. I felt at once bad for and envious of the doped dog. This was some drug. Trazodone is also an anti-depressant and off-label is used as “a hypnotic to initiate sleep.” (Seriously. I’m taking some. Shhh.)

And why did Cubby need this mega-med? He was going to the vet to get his nails clipped (really?) and to have his anal glands “expressed,” or emptied (really!). You know it’s time for that undignified procedure when your animal starts scooting across the floor, sphincter in the carpet, sliding like he’s on wheels.

Cubby survived the vet visit. Of course, he was baked, so maybe he even enjoyed it. The doctor said it would take 12 hours for the pills to wear off and for his expression to stop resembling Cheech and Chong’s.

dolly.470pxwidthmaximum.gif
Not actually Cubby, but this is exactly how he wound up that night.

By night, the dog wore a look of blissed bewilderment. He passed out. There he was, zonked on his back, legs sticking straight in the air like an overturned table. Gone. 

A few of my year-end enthusiasms

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

People, places and culture — little consolations — that are turning me on (saving me?) in the waning days of a sometimes unbearably tumultuous year …

  • Courtney Barnett — Guitar rock lives. Or so we can dream, a reverie persuasively advanced by grungy guitar-slinger Barnett, a pop-punk pixie who’s making some of the crunchiest, catchiest, folky-fuzzy rock around, music that sounds improbably lasting. A devout DIYer with a Grammy nod and fervent following, Barnett traces the raw, minimalist contours of Nirvana and the Pixies, with squalling distortion and a voice so uninflected that her Australian accent claws right through. That voice echoes the talk-singing and slightly nasal tones of Liz Phair, Patti Smith and The Hold Steady. Wincingly intimate, her jagged, jangly songs are shot through with personal drama and cutting irony. Often they’re downright hilarious. Choice cuts: “Pedestrian at Best,” “Debbie Downer,” “Avant Gardener,” “City Looks Pretty.” Watch her in concert HERE. And visit her squiggly world HERE.

courtney-barnett-elizabeth-weinberg-054.jpg

  • “Night Train”: New and Selected Stories by Thom Jones — I didn’t even know Jones died two years ago. He’s one of my favorite short fiction writers and I kept wondering where in the hell he went, when he would publish again. I was alerted to his fate by this posthumous assemblage, plucked from Jones’ classic ’90s collections “The Pugilist at Rest,” “Cold Snap” and “Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine,” each worth owning, and cherishing. But with this chubby tome, featuring seven new stories, including the typically mordant title tale and spanning the biting, semi-autobiographical Vietnam War epic “The Pugilist at Rest” to the absurdist vermin mayhem of “Mouses,” Jones’ spare, sinewy, mean and bust-up funny realism comes into exhilarating focus. Fueled by grit, violence and the tough tenets of his hero Arthur Schopenhauer, this is essential contemporary fiction.

38496743._UY400_SS400_.jpg

  • Gin and tonic at Angel’s Share — Last month I drank a gin and tonic with a Japanese gin I criminally did not get the name of at Angel’s Share, the dark, elbow-jabbing speakeasy in New York’s East Village. It was the smoothest, lightest, tastiest G&T I’ve ever sipped, spritzed with a gorgeously un-cloying tonic that was gently fizzy, not nose-tickingly fizzy. The drink was a perfect alchemical mingling of alcohol and mixer, a frosty masterpiece. (If only I could afford the $17 elixir more than once a year.) 

gin-and-tonic-1

  • “I Am Dynamite!” by Sue Prideaux — Penetrating and punchy, with an attractively light touch for the weighty subject, Prideaux’s new biography of Friedrich Nietzsche, one of my dearest great dead thinkers — atheism! nihilism! iconoclasm! self-invention! and more furrowed-brow brilliance — is like literary windshield wipers, a slashing text of clarification and demystification. Despite the luxuriously daunting walrus mustache and monumental scowl worthy of a grumpus Mount Rushmore, the German polymath — yes: a prickly, willful malcontent — wasn’t the poisonous philosophical force we’ve been warned of. (For one, he abhorred antisemitism.) Reason reigned, until it crumbled amidst the famous crack-up that would kill him at age 56. Dead: first God, then him. 

31bookprideaux2-articleLarge

  • Istanbul — First come the post-vacation blues: the immediate despondency felt when you return home from a great trip. Crap, it’s over. And then there’s the afterglow: the crazy satisfaction and rapture you feel when the depression burns off. Damn, that was the best trip ever! I got back from Turkey last month and I’m basking in the afterglow. I was mostly in Istanbul, one of few cities that can hurl me into a dream state that’s as wondrous as it is ineffable, an otherworldly stupor of sights, sounds and flavors, pocked by the lovable multitude of stray dogs and cats and the unfailingly caring and splendid people. I still savor my Istanbul lodgings, the über-charming boutique Hotel Ibrahim Pasha and, in Cappadocia in Central Turkey, the Pumpkin Göreme Restaurant and Art Gallery, where the cheap and divine fixed menu delivers the allure of Turkey on many plates. If I sound a little intoxicated by it all, I am. 
turkey.jpg
Hagia Sophia, Istanbul
  • “Skate Kitchen” — The young women of this scruffy 2018 skateboard drama are hell on wheels — or is that Chanel on wheels? No way. The tribe of shredding female street teens are all about the clacking and scraping of boards on New York concrete, smoking spliffs and coupling with the opposite (or same) sex. The star here is bespectacled Camille (Rachelle Vinberg), a taciturn 18-year-old from Long Island who defies her mother for the skate parks and subways of Manhattan, where she’s promptly absorbed into a rowdy posse of all-girl skaters. The film is predictably sincere about teen rebellion equating to freedom and addressing, softly, teen politics and gender politics. Yet it works; it has kick. Crystal Moselle (2015’s hit documentary “The Wolfpack”) shoots with a meandering vérité camera, the city captured with gritty love and bloodied-knee realism, and music to match. The movie is on DVD and streaming. The trailer’s HERE.

event-9932572.jpg

  • Cubby the Wonder Dog — The perennially pampered pup, huge heart, small bladder, gives as good as he gets — hugs and snuggles, mutual adoration, tricks and treats, ribald chit-chat over Scotch and cigars. We love the mutt with our lives, no matter if he begs, bedevils the cats or poops and pees on occasion and off the Wee-Wee Pad. Spiritual creatures, dogs are fuzzy founts of friendship, besting humans, I’m afraid. I’m rotten when I wake up, until I see that damn dog wagging his curled tail and things fall into place. Mused author Thom Jones (see above): “Dogs have a way of finding the people who need them, filling an emptiness we don’t even know we have.”
IMG_0001
Cubby

A transcendent dogumentary

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

They scramble and scrabble, bark and bound, nap and nuzzle, making an indelible imprint on their human pack leaders whose love for canines is crazily uncontainable.

Photos: Netflix

“Dogs,” a terrific six-part anthology series on Netflix, lushly shot by a squad of bravura documentarians (Glen Zipper, Oscar-nominated Amy Berg, et al.) , is a frank and unadorned look at the relationship between man and mutt. Heartrending and heartwarming, little is forced or pushily sentimental. Episodes provide spectacularly detailed snapshots of person, place and pup, and you strangely come away with a broader comprehension of life itself. Which makes the series certified art. 

Emotions organically erupt from an array of situations, be it a Labradoodle service dog that detects seizures in its epileptic owner with whooping barks; an imperiled Syrian war refugee that happens to be a yowling Siberian Husky; an aging golden Lab in a quaint Italian fishing village that dutifully follows his master onto Lake Como where they drift together; the fabulously groomed pooches of Japan and the uncharted culture of competitive grooming; a sanctuary in Costa Rica that’s home to 1,200 free-range strays; or New York City’s exploding rescue-dog phenomenon.

Each textured 50-minute portrait is framed within the big picture of the humans’ lives, from political to familial, together with the dogs’ often precarious realities. Funny, galvanizing, sad, uplifting and even spiritual, “Dogs” shows how beautifully symbiotic the two entities, hound and human, truly are.

Watch the “Dogs” trailer HERE.

The ecstasy of the unleashed dog

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

Roxie! Roxie! Come on!

It’s dark out and the human couple are going crazy trying to corral their unleashed dog in the street near the park. Come on! they take turns beseeching the heedless hound.

The dog keeps circling them in wide arcs, mouth open, tongue wagging. He’s laughing at them. He’s having a ball. Catch me if you can! 

Exasperation streaks the air. This little game is growing old. The dog doesn’t know this. It’s cold, it’s getting late, dinner beckons. Ha! says the dog. He is free, free at last. And he isn’t wasting this hard-won opportunity of open-range rambling.

Roxie! (breathless) Roxie! (impatient) Come on! (aggravated) COME. ON. (hair being pulled)

The empty leash rattles, human feet stomp and scamper, doggie nails tappy-tap against pavement. The animal runs, feints, twists around, runs in the other direction. The humans are hopeless. 

There is no grand ending to this tableau. Eventually the drama fades, as it will. The dog is captured, the leash reattached. Feet shuffle away. If one listens closely, a dog pants and pants and says under his breath: Yes!

Hounding the dogs of Istanbul

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

She ambled into the cafe smiling, her rump gently shaking this way and that, tail shyly wagging. The cafe owner, a radiant globe-trotter named Nazan who’s lived in Istanbul for years, joyfully greeted the large brown mutt, patting her head and cooing her name. The dog then plopped onto the wood floor and rolled on her back, legs skyward. She remained in this posture for a good half hour. She looked ridiculous. And adorable.

1.jpg

The pup, whose name is Garip, is one in a gaggle of dogs and cats Nazan feeds and takes care of. Garip is a stray, part of thousands that live in the by turns picturesque and grungy streets of Istanbul, a massive, hilly metropolis bulging with 16 million people — the world’s fourth largest city and the biggest city in Europe. 

That means a lot of stray dogs, whose numbers rival the city’s seething stray cat population (lovingly profiled in the documentary “Kedi,” which I wrote about HERE). It’s a zoo out there, an amicable, well-behaved cosmos of bewhiskered street urchins that are mostly pampered by locals or, at worst, casually ignored. 

Animus towards the animals isn’t evident. I was in Istanbul for nine days this month and kept a close eye on the roving dogs and cats. The critters are almost universally plump and well-fed by caring, compassionate locals attuned to the spiritual sustenance of communing with intelligent four-legged creatures that reciprocate the love. 

There they are, zonked out, on their sides or curled in balls, in the middle of plazas amid the bustle and noise of swarming tour groups that step over them. They loiter outside of restaurants, reliable fonts of food, and snarf up the dog kibble people put out for them on schedule. Nimbly dodging cars, some move in small packs but most ramble their neighborhoods as lone wolves, occasionally pausing to sniff one of their hairy cohorts’ rear-ends before tramping off down cobblestone paths.

The dogs calmly stroll around for snacks and strokes, but are rarely beggy. They don’t cadge, they don’t hector. They scarcely bark. Rather they befriend and endear. If you approach them, they nuzzle up to you, tail fanning, like any dog worth its canine credentials, yet leave you alone when you pull away (unless you call them to follow you, as I often did). Their independence is admirable, even noble.  

As the homeless can attest, street life’s a bitch. Hunger remains an imperative and untended wounds agonizingly fester. I met a dog with a ghastly slash around its throat and another with an oozing cut on its back leg that left a bright streak of blood down its fluffy cream tail, looking like a giant paint brush dipped in red paint. Many stray dogs are registered by the city, signaled by a tag on their ear that means they’ve been fixed and vaccinated. I think that’s swell.

At the cafe, the marvelous Mitara Cafe & Gallery, Nazan visibly adores her furry charges, her courteous quadruped pals. She speaks to them, strokes them, invites them in for a bite and respite from the heat or cold. When I handed her a tip for my lunch, Nazan assured me it would go to food and medical care for the animals. That was all right by me.

A motley gallery of some new Istanbul friends:

2

3.jpg

4.jpg

5.jpg

P1030568_1.jpg

6.jpg

7.jpg

P1030243_1.jpg

8.jpg

The dog’s search for meaning

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

It’s hot outside and the dog gallops up the stairs to the very warm attic, panting with a slashing smile, tongue flapping, teeth bared, eyes wide and wild, tail wagging. He looks “on,” like he’s just hit the stage to burst into a blazing showtune, or just won the lottery. He’s so very jazzed to be here. 

Realizing he’s just exerted that much energy only to run into me at the top, me, ordinary me, who has no food for him, just pets and pats for the good doggie, he quickly calms and collapses on the floor, seals his salivating maw, exhales one huffy breath through his nostrils and resigns himself to the humdruminess of life. Rip-off, he’s certainly thinking.

The dog is not alone in his deflation. The heat rises to the cozy attic and no fan, no matter its wattage, can disperse the vapors. But it’s an existential heat, too, one we all know at some point, here and there. The dog is in the throes of it, stretched out in languid dismay.

IMG_0829
The dog, gazing at me, pondering his existential predicament.

And so am I, to an extent, though I am not physically sprawled out, that would be ridiculous. Still, the dog and I are in moody concert, encased in ennui, a kind of life weariness, if just for this time. Trying to write, I turned to reading my book, “NW” by Zadie Smith, when the dog jogged up to say hello and discovered the groin-punch of nothingness.

Right now, his glass — or his water bowl — is half-empty, to borrow the old metaphorical measure of the optimist vs. the pessimist. He is slowly realizing that life isn’t a continuous (tennis) ball, that letdowns lurk, that existence precedes essence, that not all chew toys are created equal. These are things I learned years ago, that we make our own happiness, shape our own lives, that free will, not divine intervention, reigns, and that disappointments and satisfactions are divvied up about 65/35. The dog doesn’t know all this yet. He is a troubled soul.

In anthropomorphic terms, he’s displaying a glint of neuroses. Somewhere Freud and Jean-Paul Sartre are high-fiving over the notion that psychological and existential angst can be traced in a furry quadruped.

The dog seeks the meaning of life, this is plain from his searching brown eyes, furrowed brows and the alarming way he drags his butt across the carpet. Freud’s pleasure principle manifests itself in his frequent calls for belly rubs. Sartre’s theory, which states that our individual responsibility in defining our own lives is almost debilitating in its enormity, has the dog a little down. Knowledge of his own mortality is something of a buzz kill.

At times like this, a good, jaunty walk won’t cut it. Scooby snacks — nope. A ride in the car? He snickers. But the dog is resilient, and getting his tail wagging is not a demanding task. As with me, these moods of brooding despair and overthinking are intermittent. He’d rather eat a good meal or harass the cats than dwell on the insane, undeniable meaninglessness of his puny little life.

And the next time he does, I plan to start reading to him from Sartre’s daunting opus “Being and Nothingness” or Freud’s “The Future of an Illusion.” And when I myself plummet to pondering the philosophical conundrums, the dog can read to me from — this is an actual book — “Chicken Soup for the Soul: What I Learned from the Dog.”

Life’s too short for sulking. I know this. However, the dog, whose years are on the seven-year scale, meaning he’s about 21 to 28 in human years, resides on a shorter leash. But this canine savant is swiftly learning one of the essentials, no matter how fur-raising:

Self-realization — it’s a bitch.

Retro movie review: ‘Wendy and Lucy’

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

“Wendy and Lucy,” from 2009, is an unsung pearl of stripped-down indie filmmaking. Directed by Kelly Reichardt, it warrants a revisit by dint of its thematic relevance, stirring lead performance, and the soulful presence of an utterly endearing dog named Lucy. My review:

In the minimalist heartbreaker “Wendy and Lucy,” Michelle Williams plays Wendy with a premature perma-frown and a youthful spirit that’s been crumpled like a recycled can. Lucy is her faithful pup, a golden mutt with dark, serious eyes and the cool composure of Robert Mitchum.

She’s a good dog. Wendy’s striving to be good, too, but fate and circumstance have thrown up a gauntlet of bad luck with no room in which to budge. With impressive calm and fierce nonjudgment, the movie puts you in Wendy’s shabby sneakers and taps into our morbid economic moment when it can seem that a dog is all you have.

wendy-and-lucy-watching-recommendation-master768-v2.jpg

Kelly Reichardt’s follow-up to her scruffily lo-fi “Old Joy” is a desolate story told in miniature with almost forbidding quietude. It crackles on life’s lowest, most natural frequencies, banishing slash-cuts and musical cues, except for the singsongy, slightly eerie tune Wendy sometimes hums, and courts the rustle and flow of its woodsy Oregon setting. Such a threadbare aesthetic speaks of self-conscious formalism, yet form and function here are gracefully and expressively wed.

The story, what little there is, starts in mid-sentence, with Wendy and her steady companion stopping in a small Oregon town on their way to Alaska, where Wendy plans to get work in a cannery. “I hear they need people,” she tells an old parking lot security guard (an extremely un-actorly Walter Dalton) who becomes her angel in hard times.

Wendy has an exhausted voice for her age. It’s breathy and weary and assumes a pitch of exasperated despair as her troubles mount. Her car breaks down, she gets caught shoplifting dog food and, topping things off and setting the nonplot in motion, Lucy disappears.

Wendy searches for Lucy and, with no money, tries to get her car fixed. That’s it. But of course that’s not it. The movie’s a symposium in American poverty, about how people living on the brink of destitution can land there with a shift in the wind. It’s about how people respond to a woman whose only problem seems to be chronic bad breaks. It’s about how you and I respond to that dude and his dog with a cardboard sign at the intersection — our fellow citizens and brethren. Wendy becomes different things to different people: parasite, criminal, an everywoman in need. It’s about our state of affairs, right now.

th.jpeg

Reichardt and co-writer Jon Raymond, who displayed a similar fascination with the dispossessed and marginalized in “Old Joy,” purposely strip Wendy of backstory and even much personality, and this could challenge viewer empathy. Williams, sporting cut-offs, a tomboy shag and vacant eyes, recedes into the role, making Wendy a wraith in society, all but invisible. It’s an entrancing anti-performance.

You could say nothing happens in “Wendy and Lucy,” but if it were your life, everything happens. The movie doesn’t make it easy on pleasure-seeking viewers. It proudly basks in the quotidian now and lives in its exquisite details, be it Wendy washing and changing in a dingy gas station bathroom or walking past graffiti that simply says “Goner.”

In its stubborn airiness “Wendy and Lucy” grants you gaping spaces in which to wander with the protagonist and feel her metastasizing despair. Without melodrama or the clanking machinery of by-committee plotting, the movie engenders a sense of effortlessness that snares you in its lyrical spell.

It’s tempting to call this frowzy story a tone poem, but it’s not. It’s cold, naked prose, scratched in gravel with a stick.