And, so, farewell to Gidget, the Taco Bell Chihuahua

I’m sorry if this offends anyone, but I think I’ll miss Gidget, the Taco Bell Chihuahua, more than I’m going to miss Michael Jackson.

Gidget — who even knew she had a name? — died today, at 15. She gained favorable notice for a series of TV ads that ran from 1997 to 2000, promoting the fast-food chain, a unit of YUM Brands that offers particularly unpalatable tortilla-wrapped food items. It regularly occurs to people who have been out late drinking and forgot to eat dinner that it might not be an entirely bad idea to stop at Taco Bell and pick up a couple of bean burritos. Gidget, with her appealing manner, and her passionate cry of “Yo quiero Taco Bell!” made it possible to imagine that such thoughts could be something other than a radically self-destructive impulse. This is by no means a tiny accomplishment.

Unlike Michael Jackson, Gidget completed her assignment on behalf of Pepsi-Cola (the former owner of Taco Bell) without managing to set her head on fire, and developing addictions to prescription analgesics as a consequence.

Alas, poor Michael

We discover, after her passing, that Gidget was a female who was assumed to be male; her dubbed voice was that of Carlos Alazraqui, the dialect comedian. Jackson’s gender issues were, of course, much more complex.

Chihauhuas average a litter size of three. Jackson was one of 10 children, including Brandon, who was stillborn. Four pounds is a decent weight for a chihauhua, and Gidget seems to have maintained an acceptable body mass index, despite the documented high prevalence of obesity among Americans of Hispanic extraction, and her employment promoting the caloric, fat-laden products of the Taco Bell organization. Jackson reportedly weighed 112 pounds at his death, which indicates that his endorsement must have applied mainly to the fructose-free version of Pepsi-Cola.

A 40-ounce cup of Pepsi, which is what they’ll offer to serve you at Taco Bell,  contains 500 calories. A pair of those bean burritos is going to come in at 700 calories. The cola will perk you up, and the heavy lunch will put you to sleep, potentially creating a cycle of dependence. Watch out for that.

A coroner’s report said Jackson suffered from alopecia, and wore a wig. Chihauhuas, which typically live 10 to 17 years, are sometimes known as Mexican Hairless dogs.

As for Gidget, she seems today like a groundbreaking entertainment industry figure, who bridged previously offensive media stereotypes with today’s common depiction of Hispanic-Americans as a diverse and vital component of a multicultural society. Some have argued that Jackson’s popularity in the 1980s paved the way toward greater understanding between the races, leading to the presidency of Barack Obama. That could be, but I don’t think I want this discussion to go there. Obama is leading the world to a safer, saner place; Jackson died too young; “Beat It” is a great tune. We can agree on all that.

Sally Field was the original television Gidget. She’s still on TV, in a real stinker of a weekly drama, and promoting that osteoporosis drug in a series of commercials that is just painful to watch. Gidget the dog never stooped (pardon the disease-specific joke) to endorsing prescripton drugs. For his part, Jackson didn’t need to push pills; he allegedly had 19 doctors happily writing up enough scripts to get him through his final mid-life crisis.

The best you can say about Gidget, the Taco Bell Chihuahua, is that, though she appeared mainly in commercials, and though she was undeniably a canine, she brought two distinctive and seldom-seen  characteristics to the human-dominated modern entertainment industry.

Talent. And dignity.

Another newspaper bites the dust, and the autopsy once again says ‘death by stupidity’

Cuter than heck, but not worth a buck-fifty for a poorly printed picture

It has been more than a decade since the metropolitan daily in your community ended the pretense that they were fighting for you against the forces of inept government, indifferent big business, and other institutions that require a watchdog. The day of muckraking, crusading journalism ended when publishers determined that it took less effort and expense to simply provide biscuit recipes, reviews of rock-and-roll concerts, and wire-service photos of newborn baby puppies. This menu of lame trivia failed to win over audiences, but investors liked it just fine when profits improved.

Now, dumbed down well past the point of no return and abandoned by advertisers and audiences, these same newspapers are too disengaged and besotted to fight for their own survival. Small wonder that readers aren’t even bothering to say, “The hell with them.” They’ve simply walked away.

I was visiting the San Francisco area a couple of months ago, around the time Hearst was threatening to close The Chronicle, and now I’ve just returned from Boston, where the owners may be determined to shut down The Globe, and, as a trained reporter, I can offer this dispatch: No one in either community cares in the slightest about the threat of their newspaper disappearing.

The Tucson Citizen died a few weekends past. My bet is that no one cares, in Tucson, or Pima County, or anywhere else. Wherever you may be, around your office water-cooler this morning, everyone probably knows what happened to poor Susan Boyle, and how much the Star Trek movie earned at the box office, and what the overnight ratings were for the concluding episode of some lame TV drama, but no one will have ever heard of the Tucson Citizen. When the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s print version croaked recently I had intended to scribble down some thoughts — worthwhile and revealing thoughts, I might stress — about an internship I once had there, back in grad school. Never quite got around to it. Had a lot more important things to attend to, potatoes requiring mashing, several bicycle tires to inflate, and all.

I’ve spent my entire life reading, employed by, studying and caring about newspapers (in which case, you’re probably right to make that sarcastic aside about it not being much of a life) and I still can’t manage to get worked up about the industry’s decline.

I’ve been corresponding recently via e-mail with a fellow who used to own some big newspapers, and a much larger number of small ones, and he tells me that there are great challenges in the business, such as distribution logistics, and high fixed labor costs. I wanted to keep the conversation pleasant, but, come on now. Talk about missing the point. The biggest problem newspapers face is plainly that they are just plain irrelevant to anyone without a financial stake in their well-being.

There just isn’t much left to newspapers for anyone to care about. All the sensory aspects that used to be an integral part of the experience of reading a newspaper have been stripped out, such as the foul-smelling ink that would leave stains on your fingers and clothing, and the paper residue that would cling to your lap. If you happened to be walking past a newspaper printing plant late at night, say the old Globe and Mail offices in downtown Toronto, when the presses were running, you’d feel the rumble of the machinery, and when, at 9 p.m., you paid the vendor for the next morning’s paper, it could still be warm to the touch: literally, hot off the press.

Disappearing before your eyes

It didn’t matter that the paper you’d just bought wasn’t worthy of any prize from the New York Art Directors’ Club. It wasn’t meant to appear sleek, functional and friendly, like an I-phone. You were supposed to adjust to it, folding the broadsheet pages in halves or quarters to accommodate the output of the printing apparatus, or else lying on the floor on your stomach to scan the pages. Who does that now? The pages have been trimmed to manageable size, the typefaces plumped up with collagen, the designs cleansed and sanitized.

As noted a few blog posts back, the Marriott hotel chain plans to discontinue dropping newspapers in front of guestrooms this season. This decision has not caused Marriott stock to plummet, and I doubt that Bill Marriott’s days have been taken up with fending off complaints from deprived hotel guests. It’s not as if he was out removing TV sets from the fiberboard armoires in each of his properties, or emptying the vending machines of Pringles or OnYums. I’d like to see him dare to try that stunt.

Whoa, Nellie. Where have the reporters gone?

No, Bill Marriott’s safe to kick newspapers while they’re down, because newspaper publishers are far too stupid to fight back. In the heyday of the press, promotion managers would try to boost circulation by creating appealing gimmicks, such as cash giveaways, and bingo games, and other tactics to appeal to casual readers. Editors would send reporters out to create news, a la Nellie Bly. Editors, again — because you didn’t really have art directors until fairly recently — would concoct eye-grabbing headlines, or select striking photographs, or determine a way to stand out from other publications: hence, the salmon-colored Financial Times, or the late “Pink” Toronto Telegram.

That was then. Now, the publishers are too whipped to fight, and too weak to even recycle the old bad ideas. Readers have understandably deduced that if all dailies are offering is an ever-decreasing portion of ever-more uninteresting content, it’s time to try something else for your information fix: a commuter rag, an entertainment-listings tabloid, YouTube, or a blog. It’s not that any of those things are inherently less boring than your morning paper, or, lord knows, that they have a better-executed business plan. As regards the newspaper, it’s simply that, as someone once observed of the rule of the modern Iranian monarchy, in the end, they just didn’t matter any more.

You are now entering/You are now leaving Canada. Welcome/Come back soon, Mr. President

Like so many others, I was impressed-as-heck with the U.S. President’s visit this week to the Canadian capital. It was a far less uncomfortable spectacle than when their predecessors last convened in Ottawa, where it was discovered that neither the U.S. leader, Mr. Bush, nor the Canadian leader, M. Chretien, spoke a solitary word of English between them. On that previous occasion, their exchanged grunting and gibbering at a televised state dinner seemed intensified after local organizers arranged for someone’s brother-in-law to look after the AV arrangements, in a contract valued at nearly twelve dollars. The ornate scene was outfitted with a single 40-watt overhead light and a lone microphone declared surplus by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, back around the age of Norman DePoe. The impression I had, watching on television as Bush and Chretien slurped soup, was that the world was scheduled to end in around 10 minutes, and these esteemed leaders were being televised from their refuge in an undersea cavern off the New Zealand coast.

If we had our Strothers, we`d be getting along better with Mr. Martin

Failure to communicate, Strother Martin-style, is far from the problem concerning the facile Mr. Obama, and the earnestly articulate Mr. Harper. Both could talk the scales and bones right off the Arctic Char, as they might say up north. Where the previous two North American leaders were, let’s say, somewhat provincial and cloistered in their outlook and bearing, the current pair seemed perfectly at ease with their respective roles, and with each other. Mr. Obama seems not to be the sort of American visitor to Canada who grows tetchy the first time he notices gasoline being dispensed by the litre, and later becomes unhinged upon determining the scarcity of Pabst Blue Ribbon or that local brand of pork rinds they sell in Tulsa. Similarly, because Mr. Obama was spared the horror of having to converse with minor Canadian political figures such as Jack Layton and Gilles Duceppe, he was presumably able to skip the lecture concerning the superiority of Canadian healthcare and the unfair level of transfer payments to Quebec. I’m certain I wasn’t the only one who was reminded, as Mr. Obama boarded his plane back to civilization, of Humphrey Bogart and Claude Raines at the conclusion of Casablanca, chirping about how this was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Or not. As effusive as Mr. Obama was in his praise of the neighbor-nation, there are many of his countrymen who still struggle with the difficult concept of a land that looks, sounds and smells like the United States — but isn’t. It’s comparable to the disorientation our English cousins seem to experience after they’ve inadvertently stumbled over the footbridge into Chepstow, Wales, except that the English know instinctively how to handle such a situation, which is to shrug and continue their binge-drinking. An American, separated from his or her homeland, seems to lack that sort of easy adaptability, and feels compelled to begin explaining things, first to themselves and to then anyone unfortunate enough to be in proximity.

Chepstow, a town in Wales, which is another country that isn`t the USA

So it was in Ottawa with the saddest Americans of all, those representing the national media.

Noting the presense at Mr. Obama’s arrival of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, replete with ceremonial scarlet tunics, CNN newscaster Fredrika Whitfield, normally no imbicile, was flummoxed. She admitted her confusion to the viewing public: ”They appear to be some sort of troops.” Other stateside journos, made knowledgable of RCMP protocol by watching Dudley Doright cartoons in childhood, wondered aloud how the Mounties had arrived at the airport without their horses. One bears this foolishness with neighborly good humor; you should hear the nutty things they say about their own country.

Of course, there’s never any shortage of stupidity in the Canadian media, either. The gold standard of local idiocy, the Toronto Star, continues to stick to the plot of its serially published fantasy, which involves an imaginary Canadian political leader named Iggy, who is standing by and about to grab the tiller that steers the federal government. The Star was offering its readers an alternate-reality account of the presidential visit, wherein the American president acknowledged and took a real liking to this fictitious Iggy character, and has him sized up as a better candidate for the role of sidekick than the elected leader of Canada, Mr. Harper.

Indeed, when Mr. Obama finally quits screwing around with the economy and short-hop foreign visits, and gets around to the serious business of buying a dog for his daughters, he could surely find a worse name for the pooch than Iggy. Other than which, it’s fair to assume that the Star’s Iggy must have struck Mr. Obama as a certain type of figure he’d seen in his prior career in Chicago politics, the grinning one-name supplicant — Ziggy the ethnic fellow, or Wiggy the high-strung man, or Piggy the overweight boy with the snout-like nose — who presents himself as qualified for employment as a city library worker, or night custodian at Midway airport, or as a toll-taker on one of Chicagoland’s many fine bridges and thoroughfares.

That is, if he made any impression at all.

Puppies who paint: Roll over, Picasso, and tell Mark Rothko the news

The talented Ms. Chanda-Leah

I’ll admit to being fascinated by the art of Miss Chanda-Leah, a Canadian expressionist working in watercolors. While her execution and technique may seem unexceptional — if I may be allowed my keen critical judgment — allowances can and must be made, since the artist is a dog. This is not intended as a slight on the individual’s deportment or appearance. She really is a dog.

“Chanda Loves to Paint!,” it says on the web site devoted to her work. When applied to four-legged artistes, who would quibble that use of the exclamation point is ever unwarranted?

Her biographer elaborates: “By holding a brush in her mouth, Chanda is able to paint some very unusual abstracts. She uses different size brushes to achieve these ‘creative’ pictures.”

The site includes a portrait of the artist as a rather stout toy poodle. She’s photographed with a brush clamped within her jaws, poised before an easel; Georgia O’Keeffe, eat your heart out. Here’s Chanda pursuing her muse, rather than the usual things her species might chase, such as a cat, a mailman, or a speeding Buick.

Opus 64 demonstrates the evolution of Chanda's style

The Chanda collection numbers some 64 works, executed in 2005 and 2006. That may not be so impressive, adjusted for the usual measure of one dog year equaling seven human years. But, even so, go ahead and call that a prolific output. Most dogs never get around to painting a single opus, much as they might hang around outside Starbucks, trying to impress the opposite sex by yapping about their creative intentions. Let these art-school poseurs talk; Chandra’s a doer.

Audacious and vivid are two fitting adjectives for Miss Chandra’s canvases, which demonstrate a capricious abandon in the use of shape and color. That’s a puzzle, since dogs reportedly don’t see colors, or at least not the same colors as us humans. However, when the subject is canine art projects, mysteries abound. That’s something to remember while struggling to understand Chanda’s ability to sign her name to her works, both in a big looping human-like script, and with a tiny black paw-print. We may assume that Chanda’s owner, trainer, and intellectual-property manager, Mrs. Sharon Robinson of Hamilton, Ont., may have assisted in this regard.

Handy though she appears with a set of brushes, I couldn’t help but observe that Chadra’s thick, lustrous coat of fur might have offered an alternative means of applying paint to canvas. Given this advantage, along with the unrestrained enthusiasm typical to the poodle breed, we might ask what impulse held the artist back from using her very body to passionately slam pigment to board, a la Jackson Pollock. I’ve witnessed my own toy poodle engrossed in using her flipside to grind a potato into the carpet of my parents’ living room, and regarded it as an inspired form of performance art. Alas, Chanda is no longer in a position to offer career guidance to up-and-coming dog aesthetes.

The Canadian art scene was dealt a staggering loss on June 20, 2006, when Chanda-Leah died at age 12, “due to complications that led to heart failure.” Her unnamed 64th and final artistic creation was completed only four days before her death, imbuing that work, and her entire gallery, with a special poignancy.

It’s a sad occasion when any dog has her day — or any artist. There’s a scene in a novel I just finished reading wherein a dog is struck by a car and killed on a rain-slicked street-corner, and the guilt-stricken driver hands the dog’s owner a large stack of cash before driving off. The inconsolable owner sits on the curb, beside the lifeless form of his pet, and in his despair arranges the bills on the wet sidewalk to trace the outline of a dog’s body. This vignette, which occurs in a not-especially-good piece of fiction by a man named Connolly, seemed to me astonishingly moving and poetic. Likely Chanda has never attempted the art-form of creative writing, but I have, with unsatisfactory results, and I’ll tell you that one eye-popping passage surrounded by three hundred pages of forgettable prose is always going to be something to strive for.

When swingers swung: painter Bill 'n' politico Pierre

As much as I’m fond of dogs, I can’t manage the conclusion that it’s easier to lose an artist than a pet. For example, I was unexpectedly saddened to hear of the death of the Canadian painter William Ronald a decade back, although I never met the fellow, was put off by his television program, and didn’t think his art was up to much. I don’t know why I cared about the end of Bill Ronald. Life short; art long — something like that? Could be.

Upping the ante by a pawful of kibble: a famous vision by Cassius Coolidge (1844-1934)

If you love dogs, and art, and art that depicts dogs, and if you can put up with the company of human artists who will paint portraits of dogs playing poker, you still may not know what to make of art ostensibly created by a dog. I’m reminded of a stunt undertaken by another toy poodle once housed by my in-laws. A crafts-minded member of the household was hooking a rug, and the dog took the occasion of being left alone to deconstruct the effort, somehow undoing each stitch. Then the dog arranged each strand of wool into a separate pile, accurately sorted according to color. When the rug-hooker returned home, the dog could not have been more proud, glancing at the ruined handiwork, catching the eye of the artisan, and grinning the way nihilist poodles do. This strikes me as a more natural undertaking for the canine bent on creative expression. Anti-art is fringe, but art nonetheless, and in the right hands, or paws, it can be pure, strong and beautiful.