Lurchers & Rescues: One Lunge at a Time

November 18, 2015 greydogtales 1 Comment

So I take the longdogs for a walk this morning. Ten minutes in, and I realise that I’ve forgotten my glasses. One of my shoes has no lace in and they’re the wrong shoes anyway because I’m standing in deep mud. It’s raining, Chilli stops every ten seconds to eat grass, and Django is pulling mightily in the other direction, having decided that it’s a five-poo day. Without my glasses I can’t tell if that’s another dog or a rubbish bin on the edge of the field. My recall whistle’s got tangled in my anorak, and Chilli goes off on one because she is suspicious of poodles. I laugh wildly at the worried poodle owner. Then I have to rush both dogs back the way we came because the old lady with the Jack Russell is approaching. The longdogs get tangled in my legs and each other’s leads, my feet are soaking wet, and I drag them home. I’m cold and my back hurts. Twiglet, annoyed at being left alone, has peed in the hallway and tried to eat a book. She always goes for the more expensive, hard-to-replace ones.

I make a cup of tea, and ten minutes later think, ooh, if only we had room for one more lurcher…

(And that all happened in the middle of writing this article.)

As part of greydogtales continuing mission to promote weird fiction, weird art and the weirdness that is the lurcher, we wanted to say something this week about rescues. We opted for two approaches, a) giving our opinion and b) highlighting an actual rescue centre.

This week we’re joined by Lurcher SOS, after we’ve mouthed off as usual. We selected Lurcher SOS Sighthound Rescue as our first centre (and possibly our only one after this article) by the exhaustive scientific method of looking at lurcher photos on-line and going oooh, they’ve got nice doggies. Our latest two longdogs happen to be Lurcher Link beauties. The previous three dogs were respectively a street abandonment, Battersea Dogs’ Home and Dogs Trust. We’re not fussy. If you want a name-drop for your own centre, just ask.

So this bit is purely us, and has no connection to Lurcher SOS. If you like them more than us, you can skip this ramble, we won’t mind.

As most listeners will already know, all our dogs are rescues, always have been. It’s a simple decision. Large and small centres are full of dogs in need. It might take time, but you’ll always find a lurcher you love (and who’ll love you) in one rescue or another. You don’t need to rush it. Don’t just try to grab a dog and hope for the best (and yes, we used to do that as well, once).

In our view, one of the worst things that can happen to a dog, a centre and you is for you to whisk a new dog away without preparation – and then find out a few days or a few weeks later that you can’t cope. The dog’s confused, the centre’s stressed out and you’ve lost confidence. If you’re in doubt, fostering and volunteering instead can be a good start. That way you learn your own strengths and abilities, and see a range of behaviours with which you may not be familiar. And this can lead to the famous ‘failed foster’, where you end up with the dog anyway even though you didn’t mean to.

Cand 8b — a ravening horde of longdogs we stole from lurcher link

Read up on the various types, and the worst they can do (greydogtales is good on that bit, at least) because you need to know first. Collie x lurchers can be different from bull x lurchers, for example. Some dogs at rescue centres have been abused, beaten, over-worked or starved. If that was you, then you might be scared and difficult to handle at first as well. Many in this group respond astonishingly to patience and security – they may never have known either before. Others are there because owners died, moved or couldn’t have a dog any more, and you might find some in this group who are home-ready from the day dot, as it were.

We’ve had the hyper-anxious and unsafe rescue (Jade was ready to bite anyone not in her ‘safe’ group, and threw herself through a closed window once) and the completely sorted rescue. You do get them – we overcompensated for Twiglet, worried that she might take time to adjust. The first thing she did was to take a scrubbing brush and happily eat it on the stairs. The second was to claim the entire double bed as her own. It turned out that we were the ones who were supposed to adjust. A less traumatised dog we’ve never met.

Once you’re prepared, you’ll find that most lurchers and longdogs are in fact superb family friendly, easy-going, devoted companions (apart from lurcher puppies, who are actually insane).

two longogs showing their wild, uncontrollable nature — two longdogs showing their wild, uncontrollable nature

Lurcher owners argue about what makes lurchers different from other types of dog, if anything. Our experience suggests a few common points which you might want to know:

they are genuinely faster than most dogs you’ll ever encounter
they don’t do well on some types of anaesthetic
their anatomy can make the traditional ‘sit’ uncomfortable
they have thin skins which get torn slightly more easily
with suitable bursts of activity, they sleep a lot, which surprises some new owners

Most dogs have a prey drive (it’s how they used to live). Lurchers can be sedate and disinterested in potential prey, but we always like to point out that a lurcher with a high prey drive needs more training and watching. You just can’t run as fast as they can! We’re not a veterinary or behavioural encyclopaedia, so we’re sure experienced lurcher people and centres will have their own points to add (if you want more of our views, some less serious, then click on longdogs in the little tag cloud on the left).

And so, on to someone else at last…

####

Lurcher SOS

Now in their 6th successful year, Lurcher SOS was started in 2010 by lifelong lurcher owners. Lurcher SOS is a Surrey based lurcher and greyhound rescue organisation. They have a network of supporters, fundraisers and fosterers in the South and Southeast, but they have homed dogs throughout England, Wales and Scotland.
They are all volunteers and their mission is to rescue, rehabilitate and home abused, abandoned and neglected lurchers and greyhounds from Ireland and the UK. They rescue whippets and all other sighthounds too and have helped Spanish, Cypriot and even Romanian and Egyptian sighthounds!

The organisation takes in lurchers and greyhounds of all ages, from puppies to oldies. Dogs come to them for various reasons – some are strays, some have been ill treated and some need to find a new home because their owners no longer want them. Some of these dogs are so emotionally and physically scarred that they will need long periods in foster homes, learning to trust humans again.

Rescue centres vary in their missions. It’s worth noting that Lurcher SOS has a particular mission which prioritises dogs due to be put to sleep, or dogs in danger both in Ireland and the UK. Because of this, rehoming from private individuals can rarely be considered.

Like so many such centres, they’re a non-profit organization and receive no statutory funding. They rely solely on donations from the public and are always in need of fundraising support to cover the cost of the care of their dogs. They are also actively seeking new foster parents and permanent homes for rescue dogs.

If you’re in their area, you can get more information on the organisation in general by clicking on the following link:

lurcher sos main site

Here’s a direct link to how you can help them, as well:

giving lurcher sos a hand

Thank you Lurcher SOS. As usual, next time – something else weird, with probably less added lurcher for a day or two…

Share this article with friends - or enemies...

Mansfield Dark & Hans Christian Andersen: The Shadow out of Denmark

November 15, 2015 greydogtales Leave a comment

or Who Cut up My Newspaper into Scary Things

It’s weird art time again, so the burning questions of the day are quite obvious: Who was Etienne de Silhouette? What has he to do with Hans Christian Andersen, and why are we interviewing those excellent scary film-makers Mansfield Dark at the same time?

I’d better start at the beginning. Old Etienne de Silhouette was an 18th century finance manager in France. Being a bit of a cheapskate, things done as inexpensively as possible became known as a la silhouette. And because cutting little profiles and shapes out of paper was also inexpensive, they became known as etiennettes. No, I’m lying again. Obviously they were called silhouettes.

Scherenschnitte, the German art of scissor cutting, was an accomplishment of the 19th century Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen. The 1952 film with Danny Kaye is – cough – not about the real Andersen. He was a rather odd fellow who had hopeless, interminably long love affairs with men and women, mostly unconsummated, and drove Dickens mad after overstaying his welcome in London. In between writing books, poems and fairy tales, Anderson hacked away producing cut-outs and… silhouettes (see?).

We can’t recommend de Silhouette book-keeping ledgers as a good read, but we did enjoy Tiina Nunnally‘s 2005 translation of the fairy tales. This collection also includes some of Andersen’s later and darker tales, plus a detailed biography and many examples of his paper-cutting.

fairy tales (trans. nunnally)

But this is greydogtales, obsessed with hounds, and so our favourite Andersen tale is The Tinderbox, with the three dogs who have eyes as big as tea cups, then mill wheels, then round towers. We have long meant to do a feature on the darkness of early fairy tales – as a quick example, we should point out that even in Andersen’s story, the soldier is about to be hanged when he summons the three dogs, who help him against the judge and council by “flinging them high into the air so they fell back down and were crushed to bits.” Not a happy ending for some.

Rather curiously, while picking out the illo for this bit, we found out that John Coulthart, an artist we’ll be featuring later in our weird art run, also wrote a piece on The Tinderbox some time ago, with some more classic illustrations:

feuilleton: the tinderbox

Which leads us to Mansfield Dark, with their silhouette animation and puppetry films. Richard and Daniel Mansfield are two guys who produce a wide range of short films, from out-and-out horror, through creepy fairytales and onwards into mad live-action spoofs.

Rather than a long-winded greydogtales commentary, we are delighted to have an exclusive interview with Richard Mansfield.

greydog: Welcome! We were particularly keen to have your participation in our weird art series because of your unusual range of films, which may not be familiar to many of our listeners.

richard: Thank you for having me, it’s a pleasure!

greydog: The obvious connection to our abiding interest in classic horror is your recent adaptation of Count Magnus. Tell us something about the reason for choosing that particular M R James story.

richard: I had adapted two classic ghost stories into shadow films and I always had my eye on an M R James adaptation. I got in touch with the M R James Appreciation Society on Facebook and asked what story they would like to see adapted and Count Magnus was top of the list. It wasn’t a story I was familiar with so it was great to get to know it better and see the potential for an engaging film. All of the Count’s backstory is fantastic and lends itself perfectly to shadows and the phantasmagorical effects that are possible with silhouettes.

greydog: We would have to describe your range as eclectic, given your use of live-action madness, romance, puppetry and animation. Was this deliberately planned to produce a diverse portfolio, or do you just wake up and go for whatever springs to mind?

richard: I’ve had no great plan in mind other than to be free to make whatever I feel like. A lot of my early work was about teaching myself how to make films. I’ve never wanted to limit myself to one particular thing but I can see themes that have been present in my work since the beginning. I saw Daniel making his live-action films and I wanted to do it myself and I made ‘The Mothman Curse’. I’ve recently started making shadow films again and an E F Benson cartoon ghost story animated on an iPad. It’s been lovely to return to making shorts after a few years of features.

greydog: We know that Mansfield Dark is primarily a two-man show. Is the work divided equally between you as it comes, or does each of you have a specific creative or production role?

richard: Daniel and I both share a love of film and TV. We’ve both made numerous short and feature films but we rarely collaborate. We work better that way. Ultimately one of us is in charge on our own films and the other will help out. Daniel has filmed all his features as have I with mine. Daniel has done voiceover work on my shadow films as well as puppeteering. I’ve filled in a couple of minor live-action roles in a few of his films too and we’ve both made the sandwiches and been each other’s runners! Daniel is currently working on a photography project.

greydog: Silhouette animation seems to have started around the start of the last century, but it’s not common nowadays. We’d love to know what inspired you to revive this unusual approach.

richard: I had a small shadow theatre with a couple of friends and we did cabaret shows, we then ended up collaborating with band Little Sparta on a music and shadows project that we managed to get some development funding for. I really realised the scope that the shadows had. In the past I had had to build all the 3D scenery and props which was very time consuming and took up a lot of space. With shadows you can create whole worlds and sets and it’s all cut out of card. The effort goes a lot further with silhouettes and I’ve had a lot of great feedback from audiences. There’s something very interesting about the use of light and dark. We all have a shadow and I think we’re hard-wired to see the hidden detail in the shadows.

greydog: Oddly enough, Mansfield Brewery produces a Mansfield Dark Ale. It’s described as slightly sweet, but with a touch of bitterness at the finish. What sort of flavour and finish would you say your work has?

richard: I’ll have to try it. There is a sweetness to some of my work but always with a touch of darkness or a splash of blood. I love ghost stories and the mystery of other worlds that we could come across at any point. All my live-action films have been about hauntings and strange figures glimpsed or dreamt about. Oh and death.

greydog: Which is where we came in, but whilst you’re here, we also wanted to ask you if your LGBT work is political, personal or just for fun.

richard: 2013 was the year Daniel and I both decided to make our LGBT films. I made period-drama romance horror ‘The Secret Path’ and Daniel made erotic vampire thriller ‘Drink Me’. I think we were both feeling frustrated with gay cinema. There seemed to be very few releases with something different to say. Personally I wanted to make a film where the couple were secure and happy with themselves. I wanted to show a snap-shot in the lives of two men that had found a place to be themselves. It almost feels like found footage and both actors were fearless and passionate about bringing the characters to life. Lots of gay cinema deals with self-loathing or homophobia but I wanted any negative influence to be external and I love genre films. With ‘Drink Me’ Daniel looked at an affluent middle-class couple torn apart by a desire for the dangerous. There can be expectations to aspire to be heteronormative and ‘Drink Me’ is satirising that. It questions whether we really want to follow society’s norms or forge our own path. I’d love to see more gay horror, sci-fi and thrillers but there is virtually no support to filmmakers. You pretty much have to self/crowd fund and make it off your own back and hope a distributor will take it on. This is why we’ve never spent more than we could afford to lose. Things are changing rapidly and we’re experimenting with different forms of self-distribution. We both had a lot of fun making both films and The Secret Path was our first film to get a commercial release with a distributor so it’s been a real eye opener from start to finish.

greydog: And finally, we have to ask about the Jane Austen connection. We’re great fans of hers here. Is the name of your company just a rather neat pun, or does it reflect an actual interest in Austen?

richard: I’ve probably enjoyed film adaptations of her work more than I’ve read it but her influence is there in the period dramas. It’s a pun really, rolls off the tongue easily and sounds familiar. Plus it’s a perfect name for our output of films and art.

greydog: Thank you, Richard Mansfield. Coming out next from Mansfield Dark is Daniel’s spoof-comedy ‘Showgirls: London Calling’ Daniel’s love letter to the camp classic ‘Showgirls‘ and Richard’s horror feature ‘Video Killer’ about a demon stalking his victims through a series of haunted VHS tapes. In production is an animated adaptation of E F Benson’s ‘The Room in the Tower’ and a new M R James shadow film ‘The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance’. To find out more about Richard and Daniel’s work, click here:

mansfield dark

And if you fancy grabbing a copy of their Count Magnus film, click here:

count magnus

Do remember, dear listeners, that greydogtales does not recommend running with scissors, especially if you’re cutting out silhouettes at the same time…

Share this article with friends - or enemies...

Three Wyrd Hounds

November 9, 2015 greydogtales Leave a comment

Still playing around with hounds, horror and art. Further to last week’s post, the greatest horror at the moment is looking at the back garden and seeing what a combination of three dogs and four days of rain have produced.

A waterlogged medieval cart-track wanders down the centre of the ex-lawn, leading to a wet pit which was the pond. Despite having tied the pond marginals in with stakes and wire, Django has managed to drown most of them. After that, the autumn fall of sweet chestnuts still too small to eat has produced the effect of hundreds of little mines floating on top of the drowned plants. I keep expecting to see tiny submarine periscopes popping up.

And Django’s mound, the earth he dug up to sleep on in the summer, is a mudslide waiting to happen. Soon a TV network reporter will be found strolling through the garden, camera crew behind her. “This once proud land, now reduced to…”

Now, proper stuff. In Carnacki news today, greydogtales celebrated William Hope Hodgson for a month and forgot to mention Carnacki’s appearance in Alan Moore‘s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. So we rectify that with an illo from the graphic novel Century: 1910.

Another snippet: we hear that Big Finish productions are adding Carnacki to their large audio range, with anticipated release of six of the original stories in one bumper audiobook, early next year. With a little luck, we hope to have a full feature on greydogtales before release date.

####

Our theme picture for today comes courtesy of Andy Paciorek, a graphic artist who draws much of his inspiration from folklore and myths. Andy is a major source of folklore and folk-horror information and is a leading light in the Folk Horror Revival group on facebook, a lively group well worth a visit. He’s illustrated many books as well as his own, and does some terrific artwork. Here’s a sample:

Andy also did the interior art for Cumbrian Cthulhu:

You can find out more about Andy Paciorek’s latest book, Strange Lands, through the link below the cover.

strangelands strange lands

####

Because we like to be inspirational grasshoppers when we’re not being longdogs, we’ve picked three examples of hounds from weird/fantasy fiction to have a brief play in the wasteland.

The most weird and horrific are, of course, not dogs at all – they’re the Hounds of Tindalos. See, we cheated. They first appeared in 1929 in Frank Belknap Long‘s story (guess), The Hounds of Tindalos.

“They are lean and athirst!” he shrieked… “All the evil in the universe was concentrated in their lean, hungry bodies. Or had they bodies? I saw them only for a moment, I cannot be certain.”

Hounds_of_tindalosHannesBok — hannes bok

To some extent these beasts are an artist’s dream, because no-one has really worked out what they look like. As extra-dimensional creatures of Lovecraftian nature, they inhabit different geometries, and no humans who meet them survive long enough to give a proper description. Some suggest that they are more insectoid, but to be honest if you drew a flower-pot with a long tongue, you couldn’t be told that you were wrong. Still, the general impression is of something thin and twisting and very hungry.

August Derleth, a great chap for trying to take anything vaguely Cthulhoid and nail it to a single plank, incorporated the Hounds of Tindalos into his Cthulhu Mythos. Though, if you want to be fair to Derleth, H P Lovecraft himself did mention them in his The Whisperer in Darkness two years later:

“…and I was told the essence (though not the source) of the Hounds of Tindalos.”

They were also resurrected by Brian Lumley in order they could hunt down Titus Crow and Henri-Laurent de Marigny. The first hunt is in his book The Transition of Titus Crow, the second in Elysia. We have to admit that we can’t get over-excited about Elysia, because it drags our occult detective into HPL’s Dreamscape (or Dream Cycle), which is less involving than Crow solving earth-based occult mysteries. Neither books are frankly as much fun as The Burrowers Beneath, which we read whenever we hear of an earthquake somewhere…

(The Hounds of Tindalos is also the title of Long’s 1946 collection of weird stories, originally published by Arkham House.)

Stephen Erikson deserves a mention because of his Hounds of Shadow, from the Malazan Book of the Fallen series. Despite being an increasingly complicated set of door-stops, this massive series does have some wonderful elements. We actually like Erikson’s work a lot, but haven’t the energy to keep up with it, so it’s our fault really.

The Hounds of Shadow are actual hounds this time, the servants of High House Shadow. They are large, more the size of a small horse than a dog, with mottled grey/black fur and gleaming eyes. They are also better muscled than Charles Atlas (get grandma to explain that one).

“There was around each beast an aura of dreadful competence, wrought with vast antiquity like threads of iron.”

They sound much like many interpretations of our beloved Yorkshire black hound, the barghest – see earlier post game of groans & clanking chains . This observation is only confused by Erikson’s use of the term barghast to describe a race of pre- or neanderthalian humans with rather sharp teeth themselves.

And finally, very briefly, to our favourites, the Hounds of the Morrigan. Featuring in that wonderful 1985 novel of the same name by the late Pat O’Shea, they serve, unsurprisingly, the Morrigan. We love the simplicity of that. The hounds themselves are actually quite likeable, considering that they serve the Witch-Queen, and in the end we felt rather sorry for them. An infinitely re-readable book supposedly aimed at children or young adults, it takes fantasy further than many adult books in the genre. With likeable characters and a fabulous re-writing of Celtic legends, we give this five paws (sorry, stars).

Next time: Heaven knows. I’m busy collating art and interviews…

Share this article with friends - or enemies...

Weird Art and More

November 5, 2015 greydogtales Leave a comment

As you know, dear listeners, greydogtales is all about the strange, from the mysterious world of longdogs and lurchers to the often less surprising world of weird art and fiction. In the run up to the Winter Solstice, we will have something for everyone (except extremely timid cat owners, perhaps).

Weird art will feature heavily in the next month or two, though fear not, lurchers and writers will not be forgotten. Descending to the “I” that is J Linseed Grant for a moment, I am delighted to open today with this highly appropriate illustration by Robyn Molyneaux. Robyn is a talented young Australian artist, and I hope to have more of her work to display in due course:

Having a planned programme is always a disastrous move, but over the next six or seven weeks we (that’s the entire greydogtales staff, including Django) hope to have illustrated main features on the following artists/creators, in a rather random order:

John Coulthart. John has been producing the most amazingly detailed illustrative work for some years, including Lovecraftian pieces such as those in his book, the redesigned The Haunter of the Dark. He tells us that he will soon be working on an illustrated edition of The House on the Borderland.

Raphael Ordonez. Raphael is both a writer and an artist with whom we came into contact over his interest in William Hope Hodgson. He says that some of his fiction is influenced by Hodgson, and his artistic work includes both unsettling paintings and naturalistic images.

M Wayne Miller. Wayne is well known in weird fiction circles for the striking illustrations which adorn many novels and collections, including his cover art for Willie Meikle, interviewed by greydogtales a couple of weeks ago.

Mansfield Dark, also known as Richard and Daniel Mansfield, is a UK team which produces disturbing short films and images, including some fascinating shadow puppetry and silhouette animation. Recent work includes a version of the M R James story Count Magnus.

Sebastian Cabrol. This talented Argentinian artist and illustrator is already familiar to greydogtales followers for his work illustrating editions of The Night Land and The House on the Borderland. We also have a commentary from Diego Arandojo, comic writer, film-maker and editor, on working with Sebastian.

We will be keeping it varied with more longdog posts, such as a feature on Lurcher SOS Sighthound Rescue, a centre in the South (we can’t all be perfect) of England, to show the sort of work which is needed. If you didn’t know, every one of our own dogs has been a rescue dog since 1982. See, we were young once!

And amongst other goodies, we hope to have an interview with the author James Stoddard, mentioned in the Hodgson tribute month as the author of The Night Land: A Story Retold, but also the author of fantasy books such as The High House and The False House.

Finally, a snippet which is too good to miss, given its title. You might remember a post a month or so ago, Game of Groans and Clanking Chains, which introduced some ghostly Yorkshire dogs.

Game of Groans & Clanking Chains

This August Nick Stone, a photographer from Norfolk, started a Public Archaeology Project called Black Dog Tales: Mapping the Grim and Other Stories. His website includes a wealth of information about the various incarnations of demon and spirit dogs, and is highly recommended. Nick and others write about many aspects of the grim, and new material is still being added – and welcomed, we understand. His site can be found here:

Mapping the Grim