Stix’s life story has a plot twist in it, and Seth Bogart is not the only one who could have ended up as the last chapter.
Bogart, the front man of the gleefully filthy punk band Hunx and His Punx, an artist who makes oversize ceramic sculptures of feminist books and bondage gear, and the man behind the cult Los Angeles store Wacky Wacko, says he learned after the fact that the terrier mix asleep on his sofa had been earmarked for somebody else entirely.
As Bogart tells it, he only learned later that the terrier had first been lined up for the actor Elliot Page, until the woman handling her decided a pair of gay guys would dote on her more and steered the dog their way instead.
The chain that got her there is almost too convoluted to be true. Bogart had mentioned to Kirsten Smith, the screenwriter behind Legally Blonde and The House Bunny, at Tavi Gevinson’s 18th birthday party, that he was thinking about a dog. Three days later Smith emailed: a friend of hers volunteered at a kill shelter and was obsessed with a particular terrier. A few days after that, Bogart walked into a stranger’s house in the Hollywood Hills and the dog jumped into his arms and started kissing him.
The way Bogart sums it up, the dog took a strange route from a shelter cage through a Hollywood detour and into his living room.
Her shelter name was Shakira
She arrived very thin, with long legs that made Bogart think of sticks. Hence Stix. Her name at the shelter had been Shakira. Her other name, in the house, is Shi, spelled with an i because it looked more chic.
That is roughly the level of seriousness with which the whole household operates, and it is also the point. Nothing about Stix’s origin was planned, and she has been the least chaotic thing in Bogart’s life ever since.
The studio dog who actually likes the studio
Plenty of dogs are bored senseless by an artist’s work. Painting is, from a dog’s perspective, a person staring at a wall and refusing to throw anything.
Stix is not one of them, according to Bogart. She hangs out. She sleeps. He describes her as “a teen-grandma,” which is exactly right for a dog who wants to be in the room and also wants to be unconscious in the room.
She is more assertive about music. Bogart records at home, and she insists on his lap while he does it, which becomes a problem when he tracks vocals and she decides that is the moment to lick his face. Her barking has ended up on the tape more than once, usually aimed at the mailman.
Her real party trick is social. She works a room like a candidate, giving each person about two minutes of undivided attention before moving on to the next, on a rotation nobody taught her. The exception is men she has decided she does not like, particularly, as Bogart tells it, contractors and repairmen who show up to do work. Those men get barked at. He calls it a superpower.
The treat cabinet situation
Stix has a cabinet. Inside the cabinet are roughly 20 bags of treats, because the household buys a new one nearly every grocery run, mostly to watch her shove her whole head into the bag.
She has become so spoiled by the arrangement that she now declines treats she considers beneath her, on the theory that something better exists elsewhere in the kitchen. She has eaten lobster. She responds to the spoken word “cheese,” and can identify the sound of packaging opening through multiple walls with fans running.
It is a very funny bit, and it is also the one place where a vet would gently clear their throat. The working rule is that treats and table food should stay under about 10 percent of a dog’s daily calories, with the other 90 percent coming from complete, balanced food. For a small terrier mix burning maybe 350 to 400 calories a day, 10 percent is a startlingly small number, roughly one modest biscuit’s worth. Rich, fatty, human foods are the ones that most reliably turn a fun evening into a pancreatitis appointment, and cheese and shellfish both qualify.
None of which means the cabinet has to go. It means the cabinet is a portion problem, not a love problem.
Why she has never gone on tour
Bogart has thought about bringing her out on the road. She sleeps constantly and she likes traveling, so on paper it works. What stops him is the venue.
“A punk show is not a loud room to a dog, it’s a physically unsafe one,” says Dr. Priya Nair. “Sound levels at a small club routinely sit above 100 decibels, and dogs hear well past the range we do. The right instinct is exactly the one people have when they hesitate: if the dog cannot leave the room, the dog should not be in it.”
His compromise, if it ever happened, would be a hotel near the venue, with Stix nowhere near the stage. Which is the correct answer.
What happened next
When Bogart gave this interview, he had just come off the road opening for Bikini Kill, a band he first got to know as a teenager by mailing them fan letters and getting zines back in return. Hunx and His Punx had just finished recording their first new songs since 2013, and the first two were about to come out on Sub Pop. He said the album would probably follow the next year.
It took five.
The single, “White Lipstick,” arrived on August 16, 2022. The same day, the fiancé of the band’s Shannon Shaw, Joe Haener, was killed in a car accident. The band stopped. The record sat untouched for more than a year while Shaw grieved.
Then, on January 7, 2025, the Eaton Fire tore through the Altadena area, and roughly half of the new record, written in Bogart’s basement, burned with it.
The album, Walk Out on This World, finally came out on August 22, 2025, on Get Better Records rather than Sub Pop. Its lead single is called “Alone in Hollywood on Acid.” It is the band’s fourth record and their first in twelve years.
Through all of it, one thing in Bogart’s house did not change, which is the dog on his lap while he tries to sing.
Back in 2022, talking about the ugliness he was writing his way through, Bogart made the point that none of it registers with the dog. She has no idea what the songs are about. Whatever is falling apart on any given day, she is still delighted he walked in the door, still nothing but affection.
What’s new since this was written
The album Bogart was teasing exists now, and it cost more to make than anyone planned. If you want the version of this story with a soundtrack, Walk Out on This World is it.
The other thing worth updating is the part that started it all. Stix came out of a kill shelter with a different name and a foster who happened to know somebody, and she got a life. That is not a fairy tale, it is just what an adoption looks like when it works. Terrier mixes and small scruffy dogs of no fixed breed are still the animals sitting longest in shelters in most US cities.
If the takeaway you want from a punk frontman’s dog is a practical one: the dog nobody has a category for is very often the good one.
References
- Hunx and His Punx. Sub Pop Records artist page. subpop.com
- “Permanent Vacation: Hunx and His Punx’s Seth Bogart on Daydreams, Death Trips, and the Urge to ‘Walk Out On This World.’” WUSSY Magazine, September 2025. wussymag.com
- Get Better Records. Hunx and His Punx. getbetterrecords.com
- Association of American Feed Control Officials / WSAVA Global Nutrition Committee. “Treats and table food should not exceed 10% of daily caloric intake.” WSAVA Nutrition Toolkit. wsava.org
