Laurie Anderson Has a Border Terrier

I turns out that Laurie Anderson not only has a Border Terrier named Willie, she and Lou Reed had a Rat Terrier before that, and she's made a film about the death of that first dog, Lolabelle.  From Salon:

There is a lot of loss in Laurie Anderson’s new film, “Heart of a Dog.” As the title suggests, there’s the death of her beloved rat terrier and longtime companion, Lolabelle, who learned to play the piano and paint after she became blind in her old age. There’s the death of her mother, who Anderson worries she never truly loved, and who hallucinated animals on the ceiling as her children gathered around her death bed. And of course, overshadowing it all is the death of her husband, Lou Reed, whose name is not uttered in the film, although it concludes with the strains of his love song “Turning Time Around” and a dedication "to the magnificent spirit of my husband, Lou Reed (1942-2013)."

But like the majority of work throughout the 68-year-old performance artist's impressive career, the film eludes simple description. Rather, it's an elliptical, almost hallucinatory voyage, exploring the interconnected themes of love, death, motherhood, Tibetan Buddhism, Wittgenstein's theories of language, 9/11, the surveillance state, and, of course, dogs (so, yeah, if you hadn’t already figured it out, it's an art film).