#thelittlesthobo

[adorkablyinsane]

#canada #canadiana #ilovemycountry #ilovecanada #thelittlesthobo #canadianclassic #eh #canadaeh #ohcanada ❤️🤍🇨🇦🍁 https://www.instagram.com/p/Ci9EKTwLTGhSzpKLkRgEuLJupKejryxGd48DV80/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[cultfaction]

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#thelittlesthobo https://www.instagram.com/p/CdQInVBgewQ/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[allenafol]

Days Of The Year! Today is Lost Dog Awareness Day! This day reminded me of The Littlest Hobo! Anyone remember that show or am I showing my age? #daysoftheyear #lostdogawarenessday #thelittlesthobo #legopic #legophotography #legomoc #moc #lego #afol #allenafol #legolove #legolife #masterbuilder #legoart #legostagram #instalego (at Compstall) https://www.instagram.com/p/B_UZPDIJoNW/?igshid=1lovq3n1q910j

[panwalescymru]

🎼“Down the road/ That’s where I’ll always be / Find a friend...Maybe tomorrow I’ll try to settle down/ Until tomorrow I’ll just keep #movingon” #TheLittlestHobo ! : Rusty Rover 😃 Ci : #dog #Gaeilge : madra 🐶 #spaniel #Drumquin #Tyrone #Ireland 🍀 #cockerspaniel 🙀 Welon ni wiwer goch wedyn hefyd! 😊 (at Drumquin) https://www.instagram.com/p/B1V9JzXFXD0/?igshid=c5lob0wvnuif

[dylanjonferguson-blog]

S01E07: “Target For Terror”: Dichromatism

Our misty, videotaped dreams of the un-human Hobo as an actor of radical freedom may have been premature, if not delusional. The dog's narrow focus on interpersonal justice leaves no room for ideology, politics, or other forest-over-trees considerations. “Target For Terror,” the seventh episode of TLH, is a mix of menace, moral clarity, and naiveté that mimics a dog’s worldview, but draws uneasy parallels with our own.  

The fairly fantastic characters of “Target For Terror” literally leap from the headlines. The first thing we see is the bold, 72-point pronouncement at the top of a broadsheet, filling the screen: "TERRORISTS MAKE MORE DEMANDS." The unidentified newspaper reader then folds down the page, which, like an upside-down opera curtain, has the effect of revealing our human hero. Paul Hamilton – young man, snub-nose, Lego-hair, jacket-collar popped, flared pants swishing – is striding confidently into a train station. Following closely behind are two sketchy characters, who we immediately surmise are the terrorists. It is as if the dramatic headline conjured these players, or as if we have passed through the headline, into the world of ALL-CAPS anxiety, entering the fear-soaked deathscape of broadsheet news.

Briefly now, let’s jump ahead to an almost unaccountably strange moment that occurs halfway through the episode. One terrorist walks in on the other, who is perusing a thick paperback, and tells him to “Stop reading that junk!" Why were we invited to this moment? The title of the book, unfortunately can't be glimpsed. The only part of the cover we can see in an element in the lower left-hand corner: a swastika! Is it a book about Nazism? Are we being told that the terrorists are Nazis? Or that they're anti-fascists who consider Nazism "junk"? Perhaps it's a red herring to focus on that graphic detail. But surely there's a reason the one terrorist is chastised for reading a book.

I think it has to do with the newspaper headline at the start, which introduced our setting as a reductive and fearful world. Being in the world of a panicked newspaper means rejecting the world of books, which would include depths of context and greater stores of information, reasoning, empathy. Even the terrorists reject any intrusion from that world, which is foreign to the territory of the tale.

A dog must naturally see the world as tense and simple, but we are coached that way by broadsheet profiteers. And those who manipulate their message.

Paul Hamilton is a kind and rich fellow. The terrorists want to kill or capture him as part of an obscure plot to get at the boy's grandfather, Chief Justice Hamilton, played by John Carradine. Carradine, very old at this point, sometimes struggles with his delivery, but still has a large, theatrical presence, and beautifully gnarled, expressive hands that cling to fine lapels in his opulent office, which is replete with mahogany furnishings and a deep, patterned carpet that no doubt hides expensive Cuban ash. The camera films that office with a certain staid reverence: we’re not to scoff at this man, we’re to see his perspective as right and proper. The terrorists, in comparison, have weird, strained faces, natty clothes, and awkwardly-carved facial hair (one is played by the great Cronenberg regular Geva Kovacs).   The dog – named Nick, this time around – saves Paul in the train station, but Chief Justice Hamilton warns his grandson that the rugged schemers are still out there. Now that the terrorists have spooked their prey, they take another line of attack. By successfully kidnapping Paul’s fiancée, Pam, they force the groom-to-be to come out to a remote hotel in the country, where he too is kidnapped.  

“We have a cause,” the terrorist tells Paul, warning him not to try any funny stuff. “We live for it, and we’re willing to die for it.” But what this cause might be is, glaringly, never even hinted at.

In the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, US intelligence officials initially concluded that Syria was behind the attack, as retaliation for America’s downing of an Iranian passenger jet earlier that year. President Reagan, however, shifted the blame to Libya’s President Gaddafi, who was a more convenient villain (and happy to play along, to boost his anti-American cred). The U.S. president-cum-actor even participated in the creation of a neo-conservative conspiracy theory that had Gaddafi and Carlos the Jackal heading a deranged hit-squad hellbent on assassinating Reagan. A similar form of narrative alchemy happened in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks, when the Bush administration shifted the story to point blame at the unconnected Saddam Hussein, even though almost all the attackers were Saudis. The point is that American government ideologues seem to kind of like terrorists because, unlike a state army, their origins and motives often seem unclear, and so can be manipulated in the public mind. Obviously, anyone willing to kill and die for a cause has strong beliefs, but American governments would rather obscure the meaning, or even existence, of a cause. We can all remember George W. Bush nonsensically asserting that the terrorists simply “hate our freedoms.”  

This matters, because our films tend to reflect, intentionally or not, the false storylines being peddled. At the height of the Bush-era terrorism panic, The Dark Knight was released, starring a Bush/Blair-style Batman battling an anti-ideology lunatic who just wanted to “watch the world burn.” Why? Oh, no reason. Terrorists, we’ve been counterintuitively led to believe by state propaganda, don’t really need a reason. Apparently they just want to fuck shit up (or “maximize chaos” to use the ridiculous description of Nazi motives peddled by Jordan Peterson). It’s clear why we’re fed this lie. Obfuscating the position and ultimate aims of the terrorists makes their actions seem mad, and any opposing actions seem justified.

With both Pam and Paul captive to the villains, it’s up to the dog Nick to save them. And here we’re introduced to the episode’s most sympathetic character: Osborne, the meek, bespectacled man who runs the dilapidated country inn where the criminal action is happening. Unlike Paul, Osborne is not aligned with state ideology; he’s motivated by narrow, everyday concerns, like ensuring no dogs loiter on his property. We’re clearly meant to identify with Osborne: when Nick sprays the hotelier with a water hose, to get his attention, the water is first sprayed directly on the camera lens, at us.

Nick rouses the non-ideologic self-interested character to the defense of one political side. However, he does this not by appealing to ideology, but by threatening the comfort of the passive actor. This is reminiscent of how the newspaper is always declaring our comfort to be under threat. The sleight is possible, since the terrorists’ positions have been strategically re-written so that it appears that threatening stability is a goal unto itself, rather than a means to an end.

The Hobo is of course not actually acting in defense of state ideology, but his narrow focus on context-free morality (and waking up the non-ideological actor with his moral concerns) can be exploited to that end.  

The dog comes from a third world, not of power or of resistance, but the world of the woods. Among the trees, living as an animal, there are only immediate concerns, so of course he can’t see the greater context of his actions. But at times, this can also be an advantage, for him. When the terrorists chase Nick, he leads them off into the trees, and there they become hopelessly lost. In the woods, among individual trunks, their ideology can't follow, so they're easily duped.  

Osborne has a “No Dogs Allowed” sign on his property. By forbidding dogs, Osborne wishes to keep the wildness of apolitical moral action at bay (the forest, after all, is cut down a safe distance from his beloved lawn). And yet, even though he appears unaligned, Osborne’s cherished obsession with self-concern is policed by the channels and apparatuses of the state (which are nourished by a particular ideology, though he doesn't see it).

The wildness of the dog's morality runs outside of these channels. And yet, it is the dog, the apparently-radical actor, that draws Osborne's actions to a political side, for it is a roused Osborne who eventually unties and frees the kidnapped couple.  

Here we see the dangers of radical actions being co-opted to state ends, if the actions don't have their own, competing ideological compass.

This is why Osborne changes his sign at the end, crossing out the “No,” so it says simply “Dogs Allowed.” Since the moral-ideological motivation of the terrorists has been successfully hidden from him, and his own morality has been manipulated to be indistinguishable from self-interest, he is now able to see morality, state ideology, and his own comfort as compatible, and indeed mutually-reinforcing.  

The freed Paul Hamilton says he wants to make the dog his “best man.” Nick has been granted humanity because he is perceived to have collaborated with the correct (state) ideology.

The Hobo naturally flees this.

2 stars

[dylanjonferguson-blog]

S01E04: “The Defector”: Cynocephali

The fourth episode of The Littlest Hobo forces us to finally confront something that has been increasingly difficult to ignore over the thrilling course of the first three excellent episodes. Like a canine Prince Myshkin, there’s a distinct possibility that The Hobo is not just a very good boy, but The Very Good Boy. The dog might be Christ himself.

The plot of “The Defector” makes heavy symbolic use of a Saint Christopher’s medal belonging to the man whom the dog – here called “Sport” – befriends this time around. Saint Christopher is the patron saint of travellers (his most famous association, though Wikipedia mentions that he also has patronage for archers, bachelors, boatmen, soldiers, bookbinders, epilepsy, floods, fruit dealers, fullers, gardeners, market carriers, motorists, sailors, surfers, and toothache) and a medallion bearing Christopher’s image is historically worn by travellers seeking protection and good luck. It is worth remembering why.

According to the story, the very tall and sturdy Christopher, recently converted to Christianity, had devoted himself to helping people cross a dangerous river (this is perhaps at some point between the years 249 and 313 CE, if he was indeed a real person). Christopher was carrying a child across, when the boy became as heavy as lead, yet good Chris made it to the other bank all the same. The child then said (by way of apology, I suppose): “You had on your shoulders not only the whole world but Him who made it. I am Christ your king, whom you are serving by this work.” Then vanished.  

So in “The Defector,” the man with the Saint Christopher medal is a wanderer named Paul, dragging his tight jeans down a baked highway, and as our attention is drawn to this icon around his neck, it’s impossible not to speculate about the German Shepherd who trots by his side.

I’m not saying that The Hobo is necessarily literally The Christ. But the ecstasy and tragedy presented by the ownerless dog’s boundless love for humans may have only one familiar analog in the Western tradition. This actually gives us an interesting inversion of the usual human-dog relationship, since the man is here cast as the unthinking, faithful servant, and the dog is the complicated and burdened one in need of a companion.

In fact, in Eastern Orthodox iconography, Saint Christopher was often depicted as having the head of a dog. There appears to have been the belief, at times, that he came from a tribe of dog-headed people. This might have been a case of mistranslation: confusing the Latin “Cananeus” (meaning “Canaanite”) with “canineus” (meaning “canine”). However, Christopher is believed to have come from Libya, and Libya is indeed one region where the cynocephali, the dog-headed people, were apparently believed to reside in antiquity. India was also a frequently reputed homeland for man-dogs, and Jason and his Argonauts managed to battle them in what was probably Southern Hungary. The list of accounts of men with the heads of dogs is surprisingly extensive, with stories appearing among the Egyptians, Greeks, Ancient Chinese, and Mediaeval French and English, though with little consistency on the question of geographic location. All regions probably share a border with The Land of Xenophobia, though not all accounts of dog-headed men are negative.

Some great Christian thinkers, including Augustine of Hippo and the Frankish theologian Ratramnus, felt compelled to address the question of whether or not the dog-headed men were truly men, and sons of Adam. Both concluded that they were.

I like to think that it’s appropriate that Christopher would be dog-headed, because his uncomplaining servility towards a master, in the river story, shows the kind of character we often admire in dogs. Of course, a normal dog is only slavishly servile to a single person, or a small group of people. And the owners who benefit from this servility are pretty randomly determined. You could argue both that this makes dogs less moral (since they don’t choose to serve only “good” people) or actually more moral (since they don’t divide people into “good” and “bad” in the first place) than us. Of the many admirable attributes of dogs, their in-bred servility is one I struggle to see as a net positive.  

So the plot of the episode is basically that Paul and Sport stumble upon a couple of shady characters who are trying to kidnap a famous foreign ballerina. They try to enlist the help of a beat cop, but he laughs at the St. Christopher’s medal, and points out that the house to which the kidnappers and kidnappee apparently absconded is the house of a police lieutenant. Paul and Sport try to settle things themselves by sneaking into the premises, but are apprehended in the house of the lieutenant, who is in the pocket of a dirty foreign government. Sport escapes with the Saint Christopher’s medal in his mouth. By showing the talisman to the police officer, Sport makes the cop understand that its owner is in danger, and the now-good cop returns to the scene in time to foil the kidnapping and halt the execution of Paul.  

Compared to the first three episodes of TLH, this fourth is actually pretty shit. The story is thin and silly pulp, and the foreign villains (the ballerina is a defector being punished by her native country) are slimy and cheap, without any backstory. What makes it especially disagreeable is the vague and xenophobic othering of the presumably communist villains, who come from a country the episode refuses to name. It relies on familiar, nasty Cold War short-hand for scheming foreigners.

Marco Polo, by the way, also located the home of the dog-headed people. He said he encountered them on the Andaman Islands. These famously isolated islands have been in the news lately, after the Sentinelese fatally punctured some very stupid American missionary who risked all the natives’ lives by attempting contact. Polo would have been aghast, for unlike Augustine and Ratramnus, he believed that the hound-heads of the Andamans were beasts, and not human at all.

I was relieved, at this episode’s end, to see the emotionless Hobo trot away from a disquieting mess of religion and xenophobia.  

1 star

[docuvixen]

My life is really and truly #TheLittlestHobo funny how my life is only close illustration is that of a Fictionalized Dog. (at Downtown, Toronto) https://www.instagram.com/p/Bq-cVSjglf_/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1d7532c30v54s

[zombiebunnyink]

May I present to you ** @ewanwhosearmy ** who will be guesting at ZBI Tue 31st Jan - Sat 11th Feb 2017. @ewanwhosearmy specialises in pinup, traditional and horror portraits. Get in touch with @ewanwhosearmy directly to make appointments during his guest spot at ZBI #guestartist #tattoo #ink #pinup #traditional #traditionaltattoo #thelittlesthobo #ontheroad #tattooist (at Zombie Bunny Ink Tattooing by Karen Hogg)