Marcie's Teeth

Marcie recuperating

So for the sake of completeness, here is a story about Marcie Carey and her dental adventures, which actually compare okay to those of her sisters.

Marcie had kind of unfortunate childhood and young adulthood in a puppy mill. Most of the dogs who were recovered with her — 11 of the 16 — died shortly after they were seized by animal services in Georgia. I can only imagine that her taciturn nature is both a result of the horrible experiences she had (three litters of puppies before she was 18 months old among other things) and part of her survival strategy. Marcie is very reserved and quiet — she had lived with me for three years before I ever heard her make a sound — and very loving with cats and people she knows well; I wonder sometimes if she is completely cheerful but she seems content most of the time.

Anyway, like a lot of puppy mill dogs, Marcie has always had terrible teeth. They’ve been extracted one by one over the years, but today, recognizing that all of her canine teeth were practically parrallel to the jawbone and that none of the molars met, the very nice dog dentist Dr. Michael Peak recommended that it was time for total toothlessness. (Also, the spaces around the teeth accumulate bacteria which affect dogs’ health in other ways.)

This is a challenging procedure not just because of the tiny bones of Italian Greyhounds but because their low body fat makes anesthesia tricky. Dr. Peak used only light sedation (isoflurane) with Marcie and some nerve blocking shots around the gumline. And of course Marcie had plenty of dog tranquilizers and painkillers plus subcutaneous and IV fluids.

Also, Marcie is simply much younger — Astra was 16 years old when she had her major extraction and bone graft! — than her sister was undergoing the same procedure.

Naturally I asked to keep the teeth, which you see here, and to have lots of photos.

However I do not think either Marcie nor myself was prepared for embarking on the new adventure of canine cuisine we are now faced with addressing. Marcie already was used to a lot of food — soup, stew, oatmeal, various kinds of cooked vegetables — she just sort of slurped up (not to mention the diet staples of ice cream and yogurt — what can I say?) but if people have ideas about what else a tooth-free IG might subsist on, that would be great.

The excision of Marcie’s tusks are certainly a loss to the world of Italian Greyhound glamour but I think you can see she is going to quickly make a good showing of the “tongue as accessory” thing.

A manifesto detailing the curator’s philosophy and the inspiration for this cultural insurgency will be forthcoming, but for now I welcome your vote. Please feel free to post your suggestions for alternative names in the comments section, and thank you for participating. — Jean Carey

Continuing the experiment, here is a video from YouTube of  Astra and Marcie napping Italian Greyhounds Sleeping filmed in 2007.

Astra Carey, 31 October 1992-9 January 2009

My darling girl and the love of my life Astra died at 6:30 p.m. 9 January 2009.

She spent her final day being extremely boisterous for her breakfast at 5:30 a.m., being variously sat beside and sat upon by her young sister, Marcie, and taking in as many B-movies as it is possible for a deaf, blind, elderly dog to absorb, all things she did most days for many years.

Astra was an amazing Italian Greyhound. During her long life she climbed the Bridal Veil falls trail and played in the falls’ freezing spray, ran on Miami Beach at sunrise, chased armadillos and wild boars, aspirated a sandspur, consumed an entire bag of dark chocolate, was stung by a bee, dove into an alligator-infested river, and walked thousands of miles with me in all sorts of environments. Astra survived all her adventures and misadventures with good cheer and a hearty appetite. Over the years I said many prayers to Saint Francis and Saint Mary imploring them to watch over and protect this loving, gentle soul and I believe she is receiving a warm welcome in paradise tonight and rejoining her sister, Queequeg, who went first as always a few years ago.

Until arthritis affected her range of motion these final years, the first sound I heard every morning after the alarm clock was Astra’s tail, thumping the bed, ready to greet another day in happiness and with love.

Astra was frequently infatuated with animals of other species, particularly rabbits and cats, and though her affections were often misunderstood she remained steadfast.

I have no other words to express my grief but also my ineffable gratitude at having had so many wonderful years with such a wonderful child.

[Green turtle, albino. By David Monniaux]

“To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.”

On Photography, Susan Sontag’s exhaustive critique of photography, which excoriated photographers even as it elevated the art form, opens (in the 1977 book form of the collected essays) with the chapter “In Plato’s Cave.” Arranged and edited in this manner this chapter is meant to serve as the introduction to Sontag’s collection of ideas on the sociological implications of the medium of photography.
So much has been written by and about Sontag with respect to the construction and importance of these essays, and so much biographical detail about Sontag has come to light since her death a few years ago, that is it difficult to consider “In Plato’s Cave” unto itself, separate from that information, let alone separate from the other essays in the collection.
Basically, Sontag takes humankind to task, as did Plato, for sitting around accepting whatever images that happen to dance past as a perfect mirror (or projection) of reality and judges photographers equally harshly for approaching their subjects with acquisitiveness and predation. Sontag investigates the simile of the cave but more deeply the metaphor of the mirror.
I was interested to learn that Sontag had also written extensively about Persona, the 1966 Ingmar Bergman film, probably around the same time she began the series of essays that are collected in On Photography. Persona can also be construed as being about mirroring, and also about a kind of (seemingly) passive transmission and reception of knowledge, as well as a complicated examination about the relationship between the beholder and the beheld. Persona is open to interpretation as a horror movie rather than a psychological study, one in which a very modern sort of vampire sucks the being from a similar but not identical human.
I sort of think of On Photography in this way. The Greeks, after all (and probably including Plato), didn’t have a problem with copies and weren’t concerned with the original, in the sense that artists discuss the “aura” of the original. Nor was Plato concerned with the abjection of the person or thing being copied (in fact he gives the people holding the shadow-casting objects a higher physical place and degree of agenc). One of Sontag’s goals, beyond the moral judgments of photography, was to set herself up in comparison to Walter Benjamin. Like Elisabet in Persona, there is not much, at first that Benjamin can do about this being the mute party in the dialogue in which he is frequently mentioned.
Yet despite Sontag’s undeniable scholarly prowess, willingness to introduce (then) unfamiliar concepts of postmodernism, and access to substantial editorial resources, it is Benjamin who ultimately dominates the picture. Granted, Benjamin’s penchant for aphorisms makes him easily quoted, yet while his prose can be as dense as Sontag’s, his writing (conducted under more extreme and less leisurely circumstances) has a natural, nearly mathematical precision which makes his prose pleasing even when it is not comprehensible.
Sontag consumes Benjamin in the way photographers are accused of consuming subjects, and his (and Plato’s) intended meanings are perhaps manipulated as well. Benjamin did have great, sentimental, really, belief in the power of the original (which in another mirror/negative was not actually far out of line with what the Nazis he tried to escaped also believed) but was not entirely closed to the possibilities offered by the technologies of “mechanical reproduction.”
“In Plato’s Cave” does not nod to this faint approval. Photography is regarded as something akin to an infectious germ (a subject which would preoccupy Sontag in the years to come) the public at large is too dumb and inept to comprehend and control and the experts wield to detrimental effect. Sontag’s position is nonetheless intellectually legitimate (and validated by her participation in other forms of self-expression) but there is something in her contentions that make me think that she, too, is playing at being a projection.

Pere Ubu by Dora Maar, 1936

Authorship by Dora Maar gives this photograph authentic historic and even feminist credibility but I chose it because my main interest in art overall is the representation of animals. This is a very interesting view of a creature commonly seen in Florida (and all over), an armadillo (though this armadillo is of a different species than the nine-banded creatures who sadly cannot navigate traffic).
There is something primitive and otherwordly about armadillos and whatever Maar’s intent may have been in elevating such a seemingly lowly creature into this eerie portrait it is quite a lovely study. Since Maar was interested in primitivism, this seems apt.
With respect to technique, placing the pale, scaly armadillo against a grainy dark background removes it from a natural setting and allows for contemplation of the texture of its skin. The shadows on its chest accentuate its claws. There is no way to tell, framed in this manner, how big the armadillo is, whether he is, as Maar’s title suggests, “king” sized, or tiny like a fetus, which the armadillo also resembles.

An installtion by Adel Abdessemed exhibit entitled “Don’t Trust Me” consisting of six televisions displaying video images of six different animals — a doe, a goat, a horse, an ox, a pig, and a sheep — being bludgeoned to death with a largesledgehammer has been removed by the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), the installation’s sponsor. For once I think this redaction, which can and will be called censorship, was correct. What do you think?