Today, inspired by current events, I sat down and wrote a slightly — OK, somewhat — sarcastic letter to our 47th president, who could use a little advice about how to handle all the difficult, complex problems swirling around him, at home and abroad. Here it is! Go forth, Donny, and sin no more! Oh, BTW — your diaper needs changing! I can smell it from here.
Unloved King Shitzfurbranez,
Ye gods, you are an unholy fuckup! Even a little schmuck like me can still give you advice, so here’s a bulleted list:
Get rid of Elon! You need him, but does he need you? NO! His net income is bigger than some countries’ GDPs! He’s bought you, but how long will it be before he runs out of Special K and gets bored? My advice: Do him on a bridge, like Teddy Kennedy did it with that little bitch Mary Jo Kopechne! You can say you dove into the frigid, swirling water dozens of times trying to rescue Musky, and emerge for the news cameras a sopping wet HERO! Once again, you, Donnybrook, WIN!
Social Security, which I depend on for a meager $1,005 a month — pardon me, I had a checkered career — is headed for insolvency, and Medicare, which keeps me from dying of treatable illness and pays for my hospital stays and doctor care, appears to be on the chopping block. Oh, the government spent too much, we can’t afford to help the POOR any more! Besides, they must’ve somehow earned their poorness, because that’s where they are, right? POOR! BUT, I have come up with an amazing solution, completely unthought-of by anyone in your cabinet, Musk Ox or extended advisory council! Want to hear it? OK, and I won’t even charge you! HERE IT IS: TAX THE MOTHERFUCKING RICH! TAX THE MOTHERFUCKING RICH! TAX THE MOTHERFUCKING RICH! TAX THE MOTHERFUCKING RICH! There! Did you get that? And let me tell you why that’s GOOD economics, GOOD for America and GOOD for YOU: because if you tax the RICH, there aren’t enough of them to form a big mob, like you did on Jan. 6, 2021, pick up pitchforks and light torches, block the exits of the White House so you can’t get out, and burn it down AROUND YOU! That’s what happens, even to kings and queens, when they try to shift the tax burden from the nobles to the peasants. The peasants BURN you ALIVE!NOTE: This is not a threat, so don’t call whatever crook you have running the Secret Service. It’s merely a historical observation. But take my advice & AGAIN, YOU WIN!
Gazans have had at least 46,000 people, 2/3 of them (30,360) women and children, killed in the recent Israeli-committed genocide. I know you don’t give shit about them, but that was state-sponsored payback for the horrifying Oct. 7, 2023 HAMAS attacks where about 1,200 Israelis were killed. Now, you say you, or we, or somebody, is going to OWN GAZA and develop it into beautiful beachfront property, like Siesta Key, Sarasota, FL, where I used to live. But NOBODY ASKED THE PALESTINIANS! Because they’re poor, and poor people don’t vote, not for you, unless they’re white and dumb! I know the Navajo (Nation) pretty well, and they were relocated by the 7th Cavalry around 1862. They tried to scrape a living out of the sorry piece of sand they were forced to live on for 3 years, then gave up and WALKED 300 MILES back to their FORMER home! So I don’t think the Gazans, who have been living in PALESTINE for centuries, if not millennia, are going to leave that easily. My solution? Most Israelis are ASHKENAZI JEWS, which means their ancestry is European! WOULDN’T IT BE EASIER TO SEND THEM BACK TO EUROPE, GIVE GAZA BACK TO THE PALESTINIANS, and shake your buddy Netanyahu’s hand as he gets on the last train out of Jerusalem? Problem solved, and again, YOU WIN, DONNY! And don’t say I’m anti-Semitic, my dad was a Jew, served with the U.S. Army Signal Corps in WW2, and was a fine man. I loved him dearly. (My mother also served, as a nurse in the Royal Air Force, but with her, not so much.) Don’t worry, I’m approaching the end! •What I said about the Navajo loving their land also applies to Ukrainians. They like their own land just fine. And if that Jewish Fascist Zelenskyy started the war, did the Russian tank commanders have compasses? I ask, because all the Russian tanks I saw (you can tell, they had Russian flags on them) WERE HEADING WEST! I know that Putin is a fellow oligarch-cum-dictator, but just drop a small nuclear weapon, say 1 KT, on the Kremlin while he’s in it! Never mind the fallout, it’s just collateral damage, after all, you will have the heartfelt thanks and prayers of every Russian (I have friends there)! And the Ukrainians can go back to what they enjoy, being servile slaves of that horrible despot Zelenskyy! AGAIN YOU WIN!
The economy still sucks, worse than under Biden! That egg for your McMuffin cost $1! FORGET IT, YOU LOSE, KING SHITZFURBRANEZ! LOSER, LOSER, LOSER, LOSER, LOSER, LOSER, LOSER, you know who will inherit your throne? Not your children, but a man named ELON! LOSER, LOSER, LOSER, LOSER, LOSER, LOERLOSERLOSERLOSER!
Most sincerely yours, Malcolm J. Brenner
P.S. — Just one question, Donald (you never did like that name, did you? What a shit your father was, to name you that!): I had to fill out a long and rather complex form to be able to send this email to the White House, and answer some personal questions to do so. BUT WHY DO YOU NEED TO KNOW MY BLOOD TYPE? It is, for the record, B negative, which I am. Only towards you!
But what, Donnie, can I do? IT’S IN MY BLOOD! — MJB
(Image generated by AI. All you graphic artists out there, from the bottom of my flinty, cheap little heart, I apologize! This time, AI did what I asked, and I don’t have any money to pay you, anyway. And if I offered you my daughter’s hand in marriage, her husband might object, although that’s not a sure thing, they live in San Francisco, after all. So there!)
(Originally an email to about 40 of my friends and acquaintances on Feb. 20, 2025.)
Hi, friends, fans and family, foes, fools, and frolickers, freedom-fighters and fellow-travelers,
I hope you’re doing well, or at least mostly adequate. Out of sheer, mortal desperation, I have started a fundraiser on GoFundMe, and it would mean so much if you could take a look at it! (See URL below.) How much?
The page has some pretty fair pictures of me on it, taken back when I was actually handsome, and AI didn’t write a word of it! Any help, like donating $$$ or sharing, gets me closer to my goal of not having to beg my reluctant and somewhat unpredictable relatives to save me from starvation, getting my lights or water turned off, or having to go straight for a while. Reality! What a major buzz kill, dudes! How do you cope?
I am hoping to raise $200-250 a month, which works out to $3K/year, to supplement my tiny Social Security check. (How tiny? Do you have an electron microscope?) Thanks in advance for your kindness, generosity and support! Just don’t expect the Universe to reward you for your goodwill, okay? It doesn’t work that way, and yes, it is disappointing.
The following is a slight revision of an email I sent to 34 individuals, some Pagan, a few Christian, and a handful of other religions just for luck. In short, just about everybody I know! I consider this dangerous announcement, from our seriously unhinged Commander-In-Chief (if Little Rocketman Musk hasn’t assumed that authority too) to be a warning anyone who is NOT a card-carrying Christian, to this effect:
Shut your damn pie hole about whatever weird rite it is you do, because talking about it is just as bad as doing it, and if Donald doesn’t send the IRS suits to question your religious tax exemption, maybe he’ll just send the Proud Boys to beat the snot out of you, smash whatever unholy heathen idols you think you’re worshipping, and burn your house of worship!
With that in mind, here it is:
Feb. 7, 2025
Shake the moths out of your asbestos undergarments, all you Witches, Pagans, occultists, Native Americans and followers of other obscure religions, because suddenly our notably-unreasonable sequel, TRUMP 2: MY REVENGE ON EVERYTHING!, is the only attraction at the local drive-in!
As proof I offer you this news report, filed today, Feb. 7, 2025, by Lauren Taylor of Straight Arrow News, bless her pointed little head!
Gee, I wonder who The Donald and the Reptilian who holds his leash, Emperor Elon, will appoint to decide what is “anti-Christian?” Why, that fuming, writhing cauldron of feminist sorcery, Her WitchynessPam Bondi, the U.S. Attorney General! I haven’t looked at her tack, err, TRACK record yet, but if Herr Drumpf’s other nominees are any indication, I bet she’s as highly polished as a frozen turd can get, to paraphrase the late, great Stanley Kubrick! Wonder Bread, all the way!
What, I wonder, are Pamela’s qualifications to sit in judgment on those who might be considered Anti-Christian? What a challenge! Does this mean we don’t get to enjoy the seasonal Baphomet display of the Satanic Church every Yuletide? Will the Isis-worshipping roots of the Easter Bunny be exposed? Is the Book of Revelations really a “how-to manual” for the Apocalypse, and can Ms. Bondi’s crayon connect the dots without melting?
Who can Pam enlist to help her in this noble crusade? Well, she could use a Quija board to raise the spirit of Torquemada, leader of the Spanish Inquisition, because you’re allowed to do Satanic things, as long as it’s in the Lord’s Name! You get it? There’s absolute absolution at the top, baby! And I’m sure Torquemada, or “Torky!” as he was known to close friends, could advise her.
So could the mad, unlamented pre-Revolutionary Russian monk Grigori Rasputin, who sinned mightily so he could be forgiven! (Notez-bien: Any similarity to the philosophy of Universalism, as espoused by people such as 19th-Century poet Walt Whitman, is co-incidental and unintentional!) I’m sure Cyril of Alexandria, who had Hypatia, the brilliant, Pagan woman mathematician of Alexandria, murdered horribly by a mob, then burned the great library of Alexandria, would be willing to add his two bits worth… you get my idea? The candidates will have to take a number! Their name is Legion!
As the Wiccan High Priestess Starhawk advises, “Never make your religious decisions out of fear.”
I, for one, will not go quietly, and I hope you feel the same way! Otherwise, go read an astrology column! Or a right-wing screed, or a complaint about passivity that is, itself, passive! I will continue to be what I am, a pro-dolphin evangelist (secular), an author, photographer and publisher, and do what I do. I don’t have time to be anti-Christian,
BECAUSE I’M TOO FUCKING BUSY RIGHT NOW FIGHTING FASCISM!
Thanks for being, and remaining, my friends and readers! — Malcolm J. Brenner, now and forever an iconoclast, and individualist, and a Foe of Bullies Everywhere!
(Image of Indiana Jones, or somebody who looks like him, generated on the third attempt by WordPress’s built-in AI, which is an oxymoron. Here’s what I was aiming for:)
“I came here to study the Humanities and punch Nazis, and they just cut funding for the Humanities!” — Dr. Indiana Jones, Archeologist & Tomb-Robber
Not all alligators are created equal. Nor advertising logos, either.
TO: Izod, Inc. Corporate HQ, a major sports clothing manufacturer headquartered in New York City, USA, with outlets throughout this spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy.
Dear Sir or Madam who reads this complaint,
I’ve been meaning to send back 3 pair of “boxer briefs,” as they are known in the industry, which I made the mistake of purchasing from a Beall’s Outlet store in Port Charlotte, FL. I did not realize my mistake until I got home, opened the package and removed the first pair.
To my shock, horror and astonishment, YOU HAVE MADE THIS INTIMATE ARTICLE OF MENS’ CLOTHING WITHOUT A FLY HOLE! What a stupid inconvenience to have to pull them down, and hold them there, every damn time you want to BLEED THE freaking TOAD! (Pardonnez ma Français, si vous plait!)
Did it ever occur to your overpaid designers that, if I want to pull my underpants down, I can do so even if they have a fly hole in them? Did it ever occur to your porridge-brained bean counters that the $.005 they save by leaving out what must be an extra, minor operation, would invoke the wrath of so many men, all of them inconvenienced, like me, by what is either a colossal oversight or a very perverse design feature, possibly the displaced wrath of some woman designer who is pissed-off at men, for some reason, and wishes they would keep their bratwurst in their pants?
Like I said, I wanted to send the boxer briefs back to you, but I lost the receipt, I’m short of cash for postage right now (the Social Security check never buys as much weed as you hope it will) and I’m cheap, but thrifty too. So I think I will donate the washed boxer briefs to some local charity that collects clothing for the poor and homeless, and suffice it be to express my annoyance at the corporate You, Izod, for marketing such a thoughtfully inferior and poorly-designed garment to an unsuspecting world! Dockers are better-made and more stylish than your clothes anyway, so please rest assured this soured consumer will make it a point to avoid all your products in the future, if possible. Forever and ever, aaaaahh-mennnn!
Sincerely yours, Malcolm J. Brenner /Eyes Open Media/ malcolmbrenner.com
I woke from a nap last Saturday, just in time to witness on live TV the attempted assassination of ex-President Trump. It was quite a surreal situation, I assure you; I’d laid my head on a pillow on the couch for just a moment, and it seemed like no time had passed. I sort of lap-dissolved from the national evening news into coverage of The Donald’s election rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and became, as they say, another witness to the latest chapter in America’s dark, violent and bloody modern politics, the politics of hate, of polarization, the politics of the AR-15 and the bump stock.
Do you know what the wonderful thing about hate is? It is utterly indiscriminate! As an emotion, a state of self-perpetuating rage and battle-response stress, hate doesn’t care about any reasons who or what is hated, it’s much too primal for such refined cogitation. Any reasons it could come up with would only be thin masks, barely concealing the need to inflict hurt on others. Because hate only acknowledges its own existence, its own pain, its own wounds, and uses them to justify lashing out at the perceived person or object hated, or, as psychologists call it, the other.
Hence, we get news stories of rednecks attacking Sikhs, not because Sikhs are evil or have done the rednecks any harm, but since adult male Sikhs all wear turbans, grow full, luxurious beards and appear prosperous (the ones I’ve seen, anyhow), they fit the rednecks’ preconceived image of “your stereotypical A-rab oil sheik” and as such become the target for discrimination, harassment, assault and worse. Mind you, the rednecks wouldn’t know a real sheik if they tripped over him; many sheiks wear Western business suits when visiting our side of the world. Besides, I hear relations between the Muslims and Sikhs aren’t exactly what one would call amorous, and haven’t been much that way for the past, oh, I don’t know, 525 years?
Would-be Trump assassin Thomas Mattew Crooks, it now turns out, had images of both Trump and Biden on his cell phone, along with schedules of the Republican and Democratic Conventions. Crooks targeted both, but Trump’s convention came first, and was thus the earliest opportunity to do something totally random, totally chaotic, and thoroughly evil. It’s obvious Crooks didn’t care who he killed, finding one victim as good as another! He therefore had no impetus, no narrative, and no motive, except the brooding rage of one incessantly bullied, access to his father’s semiautomatic people-hunting rifle, enough cash to buy 50 rounds of ammo, and the immanent, irresistible presence in his world of an important, accessible target, like the smell of bacon attracting a hungry dog.
The FBI and other law enforcement agencies are having a hard time assigning a motive to Crooks’ murderous actions, and no wonder! His only motive was the opportunity to kill someone famous, it didn’t matter who! This kind of randomness, where the flip of a coin may decide whether you live or die, doesn’t care which side you’re on, what uniform you’re wearing, what color your skin is or what language you speak. Like the Xenomorph in the Alien movie franchise, Crooks killed because he could. His attempt to murder Trump made about as much sense as nobody John Hinkley trying to kill President Ronald Reagan to impress actress Jodie Foster: NONE WHATSOEVER!
Is this assassination attempt, such a meaningless gesture, a signal that the era of extremism in politics is over? If it no longer makes any difference to a would-be assassin what you as a victim believe, or do, or plan, why bother holding extremist viewpoints? Now, both sides of the Congressional aisle can feel equally threatened!
When it no longer matters who you kill, liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat, you have truly become a psychopath.
***
NO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (A.I.) WAS USED IN THE COMPOSITION OF THIS ESSAY. AS A WRITER, I REJECT A.I. IT’S MORE PRONE TO HALLUCINATIONS THAN I AM! I MUCH PREFER THE APP NATURAL STUPIDITY. YOU CAN DOWNLOAD IT AT… OH HELL, JUST GO FIND IT YOURSELF!
— Paraphrasing the racist, murderous Gen. George Armstrong Custer, U.S. Cavalry, butcher of Native Americans. The Lakota would not scalp him after the Battle of the Little Bighorn, because you don’t scalp a dog. Sorry if the Custer family takes offense at this, but your ancestor was a PIECE OF WORK.
The difference between me and Gen. Custer is, I’m RIGHT! Ask anyone who lived through WW2, like my parents. They weren’t great people, but they knew a Fascist when they saw one, and they fought them with their brains and their hands. And if you can’t find anyone, read the books they left, like “The Diary of Anne Frank” or the cartoons of Bill Mauldin, the U.S. Army’s greatest cartoonist! And while you’re at it… FUCK TRUMP! FUCK TRUMP! FUCK TRUMP!FUCK TRUMP! FUCK TRUMP!
There… now I feel better. VOTE, AND VOTE FOR YOUR CHILDREN’S FUTURES!
This is the only photo I could find of Robbie Robertson that depicts any trace of his Native American ancestry. For a musician who was half-First Nations, and proud of it, that strikes me as odd.
Photo from Wikimedia Commons, Nicholas Jennings.
She broke down / on the highway / miles from nowhere / it had no number. / She was lost / a long way from home.
Robbie Robertson, musician and activist, died Friday, August 11. Maybe to some of you, he’s best remembered as the leader of the The Band, the nameless but very talented group that fronted for Bob Dylan on his last couple of tours. If that’s all, okay. You remember hits like “Up On Cripple Creek,” “The Weight,” and their cover of Joan Baez’ odd tearjerker for the Lost Cause, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” Their performance on Dylan’s last tour even inspired Taxi Driver director Martin Scorsese to shoot a documentary, The Last Waltz, which was, coincidentally, the name of the tour. So Robbie was kind of a famous rocker, for a while.
She was fed-up / with the routine / when you got trouble / with a man. / She blew town / with a vengeance!
But I bet you’ve never heard Robbie’s “lost album,” by far his most complex, subtle and sophisticated work, and one which deserves much wider recognition and play than it has historically received. I am referring to his masterpiece with the Red Road Ensemble, Music for ‘The Native Americans.’
Painted Desert, peyote rain / Lord don’t let me go insane! / Skinwalker, skinwalker / Who am I? Who are you? / I was only passing through / Skinwalker, skinwalker!
I worked on the Navajo Nation for almost 8 years as a reporter, winning some awards. I lost most of them in Hurricane Charley, 2004 for those who don’t/can’t remember, and only a very durable plaque, awarded by the Associated Press in 1995 for “Best of Show, Investigative Reporting,” remains. Fortunately, the vivid memories I have of driving through miles of emptiness near towns like Crown Point, Mexican Hat and Shiprock, a full moon rising huge and gibbous in the rear-view mirror, have proven more durable. All I had for accompaniment was Robbie’s beautiful, soulful, inspiring and sometimes eerie music. And that was all I needed!
A strange encounter / to be sure / He was wicked / He was pure / Hear him calling? / He’s calling for you!
Robertson was Canadian, which makes him officially “First Nations,” the name the aboriginal people use in our northern neighbor, rather than “Native Americans,” which is what you call an American Indian if you don’t know their tribe! They much prefer to identify themselves as Navajo, or Cherokee, or Sioux, thinking that somehow White Culture will notice those unsubtle distinctions as much as they do. For instance, you can officially join the Cherokee Nation (which has its own unique alphabet, invented by a Cherokee) if you are only 1/128 Cherokee blood — which means if one great-great-great-great-great grandparent was Cherokee! The blood quotient for the Navajo Nation is far stricter: 50% Navajo, meaning one of your parents is Navajo, and the other better learn to speak at least a little Navajo, or they’re in danger of being thought of forever as a bi’laga’anah — a white person, an outsider.
Come with me / into the mystic/ Come with me / into the night / We couldlive / Live forever!
Robertson’s mother, who was Cayuga and Mohawk, had him out of wedlock with a Jewish gambler. Like my mother, she fell for a Jew; only Mom, a tough RAF nurse who was enduring the Blitz in London, placed her bet on a dashing young Jewish lieutenant in the U.S. Army Signal Corps. (Us Jews really get around! It’s a dirty job, subverting the Aryan gene pool, but somebody’s got to do it! Just look at the mess they made of the 20th Century!) Robertson was raised in a Victorian neighborhood in suburban Toronto, and assisted for a short while in a freak show! This later lead to him producing and co-starring in the 1980 feature film Carny, alongside a young Gary Busey and Jodie Foster! So once again, Robbie was famous, sort of. I mean, those co-stars are bankable! (I confess I was nowhere near the film when it was playing, but Music for ‘The Native Americans’ wasn’t composed until 1994, which seems like 10,000,000 B.C., now.)
Painted Desert, peyote rain / Lord don’t let me go insane! / Skinwalker, skinwalker / Through your eyes / I can see / You have left your mark on me / Skinwalker, skinwalker!
I started writing this post on August 12, 2023, the day after Robbie died. Two months later, I am still trying to finish it! This is the nature of the non-fatal, but chronic illnesses I am enduring: chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), and undiagnosed vertigo. Just for laughs, the gods threw in some Latin, Perugia nodularis, which means “itchy bumps” in English. This condition is more annoying, time-consuming and painful than anything else, as these bumps frequently result from ingrown hairs, or ingrown hairs surrounded by a sheath of solidified dead bacteria, or pulpy overgrown blood vessels, or small, odd-shaped pieces of cartilage or keratin poking their way from my inside through my epidermis, on their way to being pried out of my skin and disposed of. If I don’t take the initiative, the wound just doesn’t heal. It hangs around for months, but if I remove the infectious agent cleanly, it heals in days, and with little pain.
Painted Desert, peyote rain / Lord don’t let me go insane! / Skinwalker, skinwalker / Takes you to / a sacred place / Drinks a tear from your face / Skinwalker, skinwalker!
This problem is annoying, but the vertigo and CFS eat up time that I know must be rapidly running out at my age, time when I could be creating somethinguseful, beautiful, or informative, and all I can do is wedge myself into a corner of the couch, watch Roku or YouTube, hope I don’t fall asleep and wish the room would stop spinning! So I am going to finish this blog post today, October 14, 2023, come Hell or high water, and publish it, even if I leave it incomplete! I tried a month ago, but my repeated SAVEs to the desktop didn’t capture the whole article, and I lost about half of what I wrote because I couldn’t pay sufficient attention to what I was doing! So, if this post ends in the middle, know that I reached my limit and was not able to type, or write, or think, any more. Yeah, type, not even write cursive, with a fountain pen, like I learned to do in Mrs. Notose’s 1st grade class! (She was Filipino, short-tempered, and whenever even SHE pronounced her name it sounded to our young, innocent ears like “Mrs. No-Toes!”) And YES, it is really a BITCH!
Later — I didn’t finish this, so here it is. Do yourself a favor and buy, or at least listen to, Robbie Robertson’s Music from “The Native Americans.” If this album doesn’t haunt you, make you smile and thrill you, you’re dead on the inside.
Shiprock pinnacle with autumn foliage, Navajo Nation, Four Corners region.
Hey Gang — a recent Google search for Marco Pereyma, a very advanced fine-arts photography student I encountered my freshman year at New College of Florida (1969-1970), led me, like Indiana Jones finding the buried ruins of Lucasfilm, to this story in the NC newspaper Captain Jack, vol. 1, #8, Jan. 12, 1970. For you arithmetically challenged, that’s more than 53 years ago!
The King of the Blues made quite an impression on me; I think the only concert I’d ever been to before that was some kind of charity benefit featuring a very down-home Eric Von Schmidt and his acoustic guitar, and if you know who HE was, aside from a local Sarasota talent, you’re the new nominee for Hipster Supreme! (Hint: He painted the only authentic painting of Custer’s Last Stand, based on the actual battlefield terrain and the testimony of survivors. [Sioux survivors, that is!] It made the cover of Smithsonian Magazine, and Eric told me that I have the only photos of him creating it! Woo-hoo!)
This concert was long before B. B. was being celebrated as an all-American musical icon in the Mainstream (read “white”) Press. I’ve wracked my brains trying to remember when I first heard about heard about him, and I can’t. That title — “The King of the Blues” — seemed mighty ambitious, maybe even a trifle presumptuous, but at the end of the show I was ready to bow down and acknowledge His Majesty, and his queen, Lucille (which if you’re not up on your B. B. King mythology was the guitar he always played, because it saved his life of several occasions! He wasn’t into trashing his instruments, like, say, The Who did, every performance. Generally speaking, Black musicians in that period couldn’t afford to, and weren’t inclined to!)
Why do I refer to Marco Pereyma as “a very advanced fine-arts photography student”? Well, several reasons:
He shot with a Nikon F 35mm SLR. It was Stanley Kubrick’s favorite still camera, it was very hip, it was indestructible and the lenses were so sharp the camera came with spare Band-Aids in the box.
Marco never consulted a light meter, he just set whatever lens opening and shutter speed he needed for the light conditions and adjusted the film development accordingly. This resulted in some very weird negatives!
These he then printed on Agfa Brovira #5, a type of B&W enlarging paper so contrasty it made everything look like a visit from Mormon missionaries. There was black, and there was white. Shades of gray? What are you, a Communist?
Professor Herb Stoddard, who was apparently the ONLY faculty member at NC qualified to judge photography, LOVED Marco’s photos and praised him extensively! Except for the few who failed his classes, Stoddard gave the rest of us one-word evaluations: SATISFACTORY. No more, no less. Satisfactory! That was what my father paid $10,000 tuition a year for, and YES, THAT WAS SOME BIG MONEY BACK THEN! If I’d gotten smart advice from my mother, I’d have accepted the FULL SCHOLARSHIP I was offered from Cornell and asked my dad to spend some of the difference on a good 16mm. movie camera, maybe a Bolex R5 or a Beaulieu RPZ-16, and a tripod. But my mother didn’t give me good advice, she was more interested in hurting my father than my getting an education.
Marco was one of the most striking persons, physically, I ever met. He made an indelible impression on you: tall and toothpick-thin, with a shock of almost-albino hair and the coldest, hardest, bluest eyes I’d ever seen to that time. And I felt that way until I met Philadelphia futurist and murderer Ira Einhorn, and saw his eyes, like two oysters on the half shell, on ice, in a bar.
Finally, although I cannot remember her name, Marco had a small, cute and incredibly attractive girlfriend who’d pose in the nude for him! I’m sure Professor Stoddard loved his photos for that reason, too! And you knew they were getting it on, because she smiled at everyone, and Marco moved with the grace and stealth of a big cat. Which I suspect he was.
Marco was so talented, I wonder whatever became of him? Why didn’t he enter the ranks of great American photographers, beside Richard Avedon, Margaret Bourke-White and Gordon Parks? Did he get sucked into the meat-grinder known as Vietnam, or did he simply lose interest in his grainy Tri-X film, his fisheye lenses and his sexy girlfriend model?
Does it matter, now, after more than half a century has passed? Yeah, it still does. You have to hang on to people, to grab them as the current swirls them by and rope them to you somehow, so you don’t lose them downstream, over the falls. That was unlikely to happen with Marco, as both his manner and his methods left me cold. I was always looking for the shades of gray between the black and the white. But my search did yield a great review I forgot I’d written, and a couple of pictures of the immeasurably talented Mr. King himself, so I guess it was worth it, huh?
An early Bolex 16mm camera with a reflex 17-70 Som Berthiot lens. My film mentor, Hack Swain, said the lens was a Coke bottle, and only 1 in 3 were any good! This is the same camera I dragged to May Day 1971, in Washington, D.C. I was one of very few student filmmakers at that event to return with my camera and film intact!
In an effort to log some history, and also to chronicle my own exploits, I present this article from an old, old issue of the slick, slightly left-of-center magazine NEWSWEEK, which is still hanging around in digital format! This was the first article I’d ever seen, at the tender age of 11.5, that mentioned dolphins in connection with extraterrestrial aliens — which, in essence, is what the dolphins are, living in our own oceans instead of those of Jupiter, Uranus or Xagramorfagel (if you haven’t heard of the last one, don’t worry, it’s going viral any day now!). My favorite novel at the time being Robert A. Heinlein’s Star Beast, about a pet alien and his boy, I was, of course, extremely eager to make a dolphin’s acquaintance, as I was sure they had nothing better to do than hang around, waiting for me to show up! Here, then, although I do not know the author’s name, I present the first article I encountered to mention dolphins in connection with ET aliens!
Newsweek: Space & The Atom Oct. 22, 1962, pg. 51
FIVE PEEPS AND A TWEET
Man’s first contact with extraterrestrials may never come — or it may be only a beat in history away; his giant radio telescopes could pick up a message from space tomorrow (July 22, 1960). But when it comes to working out a system of interspecies communication with a species that may not even exist, man is still in kindergarten. This lack has long worried space scientists, who think that the parties at each end of the “telephone” might have everything to say to each other and no common way to say it.
One suggested way of surmounting this embarrassment is to practice communications with other species on man’s own planet, but which species? In answer, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has made its choice, and not surprisingly it is the bottlenose dolphin. Under an $80,700, one-year grant from NASA, communication with the brainy mammal will be explored by the dolphins’ old friend, Florida neurophysiologist Dr. John Lilly, who has been studying them since 1955.
Dr. Lilly, who is convinced that “man will communicate with another species in a decade or two,” has long considered the dolphin the most likely possibility. His reasons: Dolphins’ brains are larger and more complex than man’s; they talk to each other in a high-speed language of whistles, click, squawks and blats; and they can produce an eerie mimicry of the human voice, even copying subtle inflections (one recently mimicked the Southern drawl of Lilly’s assistant). Dr. Lilly is now feeding tapes of dolphin sounds to a computer, which will sift them for a meaningful pattern. “It is possible that their intelligence is comparable with ours, though in a very strange fashion,” he has said. “They may be a group with whom we can learn basic techniques of communicating with really alien intelligent life forms.”
Say It With Shapes: Such technologies would obviously be of vast assistance to space scientists. Although few expect that man will ever drop in on the residents of another solar system (the trip could take centuries), they haven’t given up on earthbound communication. Before the advent of radio, all suggestions for signaling extraterrestrials were optical in nature: Flashing messages with large mirrors and searchlights, or cutting vast geometric patterns out of forests and farmlands. [Italics added for emphasis, this seemingly suggests “crop circles” a full decade before they were first reported by UFO investigators!]
Far more practical schemes accompanied the development of powerful radio transmitters. The problem is what to translate. One of the most elaborate schemes is that of Hans Freudenthal, a Dutch mathematics professor writing in English. Called Lincos (for Cosmic Language), it depends upon the supposedly universal concepts of mathematics. First Freudenthal would teach the extraterrestrials the idea of “greater than” by sending five peeps, followed by a different signal—perhaps a tweet—and then three peeps. This would be repeated, using several combinations of peeps, until the listeners had equated “greater than” with the peep signal. Similarly, the concepts of “less than,” “equals,” “plus,” and “minus” could be taught. Eventually, Freudenthal hopes to transmit an elaborate mathematics language, then go on to the tasks of sending lessons in physics, physiology, and even ethics.
TV Images: A simpler sounding plan—the transmission of TV images—has been suggested by Dr. Frank Drake of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Greenbank, W. Wa. It is based on the principle that television pictures can be broken down into tiny dots of light. The different intensities if the dots can be translated into correspondingly differentiated such as dots and dashes, frequencies, or numbers, and sent as radio signals. Drake hopes the aliens would understand this principle and reconstruct our television pictures from the signals.
Yet both these ingenious plans, and many like them, rest on the fragile assumption that the extraterrestrials think as we do. Perhaps they do: then again it is conceivable that mathematics and inductive reasoning may be as foreign to them as their worlds and bodies might appear to us. Here lies the potential value of the dolphin—a creature operating in an environment perhaps as alien to humans as that of Mars. Even the slightest clue to how such a creature thinks could eventually lead to radically different approach to placing interstellar “telephone calls”—or a new method of analyzing space static to discover is someone is trying to call us.
But this is a long way off. “Right now we don’t expect any dolphins to teach us how to talk to Martian ants,” a NASA official cracked last week. “We’re simply trying to decode their own talk.” What happens after that, of course, depends on what they have to say.
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Analysis: This article, and several others like it in LIFE, Look and other popular publications opened my eyes (and ears, don’t forget the ears) to the possibility of communicating with dolphins! As an avid science fiction reader, I was delighted with the idea that our seas might contain a comparable form of non-human intelligence. I eventually got much more than I expected, by about 2 or 3 orders of magnitude, with Dolly!
The last paragraph of the article is particularly telling, and sad. The famous anthropologists Dr. Gregory Bateson & his wife Lois Cammack had joined Lilly in the Virgin Islands to see what was going on, and, a year later, “See if you’re smart enough to decode their talk before you try to teach them ours” was Bateson’s parting shot. He later wrote “Steps to an Ecology of Mind,” a book which I tried three times to read, and failed miserably each time.
And this is what Lilly’s most vociferous critics complained about his research, quite properly: HE NEVER PROVED THAT DOLPHINS EITHER USE OR COMPREHEND LANGUAGE BEFORE HIRING MARGARET HOWE (LOVATT) TO TEACH THEM ENGLISH! In scientific terms, this is serious cart-before the horse-putting, and it is an obvious no-no! Why, then, did Lilly pursue it so devotedly?
It strikes me, from both reading his writings and my personal experiences with him, that Lilly had to some degree an obsessive-compulsive disorder. This is common in scientists who strive under pressure for a high degree of accuracy, often to several decimal points. It’s also indicated in Lilly’s own autobiographical novel, “The Scientist,” in his descriptions of his lonely, rather isolated upbringing and childhood.
I can’t really say how Lilly handled major disappointments, because I never observed him doing so. But one of the privileges of whiteness, wealth (which Lilly had in relative degree) and education is that you’re insulated, to some degree, from failure. It may be that, as the evidence that he was on the wrong path accumulated, Lilly stuck more and more strongly to his abortive theories because he had to, to support his rather expansive ego. To admit he was wrong would be uncharacteristic of him, until much later in life.
There was also the practical aspect that Lilly had, with the establishment of the Dolphin Communications Laboratory, taken on the care and feeding of three, 400-lb. (180-kg.) adolescents who could smack you through a concrete wall, if they wanted to. It’s a big responsibility, and I don’t think people are going to give you much money just to study dolphins to see if they maybe, possibly, HAVE a language!
Finally… finally, sometimes a scientist, like everyone else, has a strong hunch that things are heading the right way, that they can disregard everybody else, that they can break the rules and still win! Such feelings are hard for a logical, rational mind to resist, precisely because they are not rational nor logical. But neither having a strong hunch, nor following it to the bitter end, makes one automatically right! Appearances can be deceiving, and as often as not, it is ourselves we deceive.
What matters to me is, I found something I wanted to pursue, and I have pursued it all my life. Maybe not as a scientist, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t made remarkable discoveries, such as this: WE HAVE HAD LIVING BESIDE US, UNNOTICED, FOR MILLIONS OF YEARS, ANOTHER SPECIES OF LIFE THAT ROUTINELY ENGAGES IN MANY OF THE SAME HIGHER-ORDER FUNCTIONS THAT WE HUMANS DO: COMPLEX PROBLEM-SOLVING, SOCIAL AWARENESS, INDIVIDUAL AND GROUP IDENTITIES, ETHICS, THEORY OF MIND, and has enough imagination to realize that in some ways this odd, upright ape with the clever fingers IS RATHER LIKE ITSELF, in that our minds have strange and significant similarities!
We humans, as the dominant species on Planet Earth, need to acknowledge that a non-technological species, which cannot even open a can of beans or unfold a Swiss Army knife, is Number 2, and in the ocean, they are, and always will be, Number 1! Due to their 12-million year head start on us in the Large Brains Department, and their incredible record of sheer SURVIVAL over that time, we should be approaching them as older and wiser beings, with the respect and deliberation they deserve. Let what nature writer Loren Eisley called “our long human loneliness” finally be over, as we are re-admitted to the order of Natureby our old friends, the dolphins!
The author as he appeared in the 1970’s, eavesdropping on a chat between a dolphin and a Martian ant, whose appearance is thanks to NASA. Biden’s going to announce it next week, no, REALLY!
In Part I, I discussed the Caldwells, a married couple of scientists who authoritatively declared, in their 1967 book The World of the Bottlenose Dolphin,“Dolphins are not little humans in wet suits.”
They said this in an attempt to lay to rest what they felt was rampant, emergent pseudo-science about the “intelligence” and “spirituality” of dolphins coming from the John C. Lilly/Paul Spong camp of non-marine-biologist dolphin researchers, who experimented with then-rampant psychedelics, played jackhammers (Lilly) or wine glasses (Spong) to their subjects, and communed with them — psychically! (Or so they claimed.)
This series discusses some of the many striking similarities we DO share with dolphins, in this essay, self-recognition and self-awareness.
If David and Melba were alive today, I wonder how they would dismiss these similarities? Like debunking astronomers who claim, without actually researching, “No astronomer has ever seen a UFO,” (Jacques Vallee, J. Allen Hynek and Carl Sagan come to mind, among others), marine mammalogists come up with all kinds of fantastic explanations for the advanced reasoning capabilities displayed by dolphins, and their insights into situations, especially power-structures, even human power-structures, which must be very similar to their own to be recognized as such!
About 25 years before the two scientists who ran the mirror experiment arrived on the dolphin scene, a former atomic physicist named Horace Dobbs took to SCUBA diving with Donald, a “lone wolf” dolphin who hung out in the cold waters off Cornwall, in southwest England. He wrote a book about his experience, Follow a Wild Dolphin, and in it he described what happened when he introduced Donald to his mirror image. The following film shows the results better than I can describe them!
In the film, Donald seems perplexed, and rightfully so: his eyes are showing him something threatening (another male dolphin) that his echolocation cannot get a lock on! What appears deep to his vision is merely a thin, flat panel when he plexes it (a term I have come to use as convenient shorthand for a dolphin using echolocation to locate or identify an object or person). So, in frustration, he gives it a good whack with his snout, sending the shattered fragments to the sea floor, where they now glint back at him malevolently from many sides. He has, in his frustration, only made the problem worse!
Score: Mirror 27, Dolphin 0! Round Two…
Self-awareness, or sapience — being able to think about your own thoughts — is rare in the animal kingdom. It was assumed, for the longest while, that no animal other than Homo sapiens possessed this characteristic, which is most eloquently expressed by recognizing that the face we see in the mirror is our own!
The dolphin-in-the-mirror experiment was definitively conducted in 2001 at the Baltimore Aquarium by two perceptive scientists, Lori Marino and Diana Reiss, for their joint PhD. project on animal cognition. By covering the mirror and marking the animal subject in an out-of-the-way place with a harmless grease marker, the two scientists were able to watch to see if the subject examined itself when the mirror’s cover was removed, a sure sign it knew the reflection was of itself, and not another threat or rival! (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.101086398) Their experiment is rightly famous!
As an example of the lack of this ability to recognize one’s reflection, I will relate the plight of a male cardinal, whose nest was perilously close to a parking lot at Babcock Ranch, where I worked as a tour guide. The bird wasn’t in any danger from the cars; however, their outside rear view mirrors were filled with a dreaded competitor, who was somehow always there whenever the cardinal stopped to take a look! I don’t know how many hours it spent fruitlessly battling this intruder, but it was pretty obvious that the instinct to attack things that resembled itself did not evolve in the presence of the looking-glass. Talk about a fruitless task! The cardinal never realized he was fighting his own reflection! He was trapped by instinct, a process that not only operates below cognitive thought, but long before it can get its shorts on!
Experiments with jungle-dwelling mammals show similar results. Leopards, gorillas, baboons, even most chimpanzees, all either attacked their own image in a stainless-steel mirror, or tried to avoid it. In short, we may say that the mirror aroused anxiety in them — I think that is anti-anthropomorphic enough to qualify as a valid assertion, don’t you? Only a few species of non-human animals showed consistent awareness of their mirror image, the ability to use the mirror to locate a mark on their bodies that they could not otherwise see, and examine it! Indian elephants and bottlenose dolphins were two of them. No surprise there, huh? Both have brains up to several times larger than human, with more folds on the substantial neocortex!
But among the NON-MAMMALS put before the mirror, several AVIANS — the last surviving category of DINOSAURIA! — showed critical mirror awareness, with brains roughly the size of shelled walnuts! How the ding-dang-doodle do they manage that with such tiny little brains? I refer to the Corvids, including magpies, crows and ravens, and the Psittacines, that is, the parrots and macaws, whose intellectual achievements have been shown to be closer to an 8-year-old child than to what we used to mockingly call a “bird brain!” Turns out we were unwittingly complimenting birds, much the way Motorola complimented Sony when a Motorola employee bought the first transistorized shirt-pocket radio!
One factor shared by all, save one, of these creatures (the pachyderms), is the desensitization, and even total loss, of the brain regions devoted to smell. Most birds have no sense of smell, nor do any of the cetaceans; they don’t have the brains for it! Smell to them is like echolocation to us, a theoretical concept.
The olfactory sense must have been the last, and most recent, to evolve in the Permian period, when insects and amphibians were first colonizing dry land. While life remained immersed in water, the sense of smell was subsumed under the sense of taste. It’s pretty much a moot point to me whether sharks, for instance, taste blood with their tongues or “smell” it with some kind of olfactory apparatus associated with the nostrils, they can reportedly detect blood in the water at 1:1,000,000 dilution!
That’s one part in one million, sucker. Keep swimming, that shark needs exercise!
(NOTE TO SELF: Check to see whether sharks do, indeed, have nostrils, or whether they smell with their gills.We wouldn’t want to lead people astray, would we? Oh, no, no, NO! Inaccuracy! Dishonesty! Guilt!)
This specific change in the cetacean and human brains will the the subject of Part III of this article, Can’t You Smell That Smell? It should be published in the next month, if I keep feeling as forward-moving as I do now… of course, my progress is only measured by how many steps backward I must take for each one forward!
Another interesting feature of these self-aware creature’s brains is that they feature a special type of nerve cell, or neuron, that doesn’t appear in the brains of un-self-aware creatures. It’s called a von Economo neuron, after the 1926 discoverer, or more casually, a spindle cell, based on its shape.
Left, normal neurom showing multiple axons and dendrites; right, a von Economo neuron, having just one of each. Photos from Smithsonian Magazine.Whaddya think, I sliced up somebody’s brain? Sheesh! “It’s okay, he wasn’t using it anyway!“
Neurologist Constantin von Economo, trying to look badass in 1920’s road gear. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
Von Economo neurons aren’t found in the brains of monkeys. They are found sparsely in the brains of primates, somewhat more densely in the brains of elephants, more densely in cetacean brains and MOST densely in human brains! “Aha,” you exclaim, “human exceptionalism shows itself once again!” But I must demur! More than the basic fact of density/cm3, it’s how often these neurons get used that determines their degree of functionality! You can own a Cray supercomputer, but if you never turn it on, you’re going to do better math with the Calculator app on your iPhone!*
( * DISCLAIMER: The author does not own any stock in Apple, nor does anyone in his family work for Apple or have an interest in Apple. He is simply the humble owner of an iPhone, and appreciates the fact that it was so damn easy to figure out! Even for an all-thumbs 1950’s child like himself, yes!)
What exactly these von Economo neurons do is something of a mystery, but it is thought that they help transmit signals quickly across uninvolved regions of the brain, the idea being that since they only have one dendrite, they are able to respond more quickly than typical neurons, with multiple dendrites. They seem to have some effect on one’s sense of self, self-image and relations with others, but what shows most clearly is their lack. John Allman, a brain researcher at CalTech Pasadena, says “It is very clear that the original target of the disease (frontotemporal dementia) is these cells, and when you destroy these cells you get the whole breakdown of social functioning. That’s a really astounding result that speaks to the function of the cells about as clearly as anything can.”
In other words, what the von Economo neurons do, and how this affects the behavior of their owner, is not clear, and the brain-boffins are whistling past the graveyard! I mean, I read several Inter-Web articles on the damn things, and neurologists can barely agree on where these cells are found (between your ears, duh, but in only ONE LAYER of the brain), and whether they are REALLY different brains cells, or just look different.
(I DIDN’T KNOW BRAIN CELLS DISCRIMINATED BASED ON APPEARANCE, BUT I GUESS THAT’S THEIR JOB, EH?)
So what does this all boil down to?
Simply this: there are valid, biological reasons why dolphins appear to show such unusual animal behaviors as mutual aid-giving, social learning, and collective, cooperative behavior — like when the dolphins of Manaus, Brazil, help the local fishermen net fish, and eat what spills out! Parsimonious scientists suggest that these are just “spillover” behaviors, that the dolphins are reacting more-or-less instinctively toward us, without any real consideration of who or what we are.
But the fact is, most dolphins, even wild ones, show an intense, personal interest in us, when they get the chance. They don’t flee, like most wild animals do in the presence of humans; instead, they interact with us in a curious, often playful way, and sometimes even challenge us to play their games, make their noises, share their food, or even move utterly beyond the bounds of being human! And frankly, the idea that they are doing all those things INSTINCTIVELY…
…well, and purely confidentially, I think it stinks! But we’ll deal with that in Part III.
Image: “The Consciousness Connection,” by Jonathan Burton, New Scientist, 2012
COMING NEXT: PART III, Can’t You Smell That Smell? How dolphins lost their noses and part of their brains but gained blowholes! STAY TUNED, FELLOW DOLPHIN LOVERS!
Malcolm J. Brenner 