Wr i t i n g Pl a c e sthings to each other with no clothes on theyl go home and�you knowet in the bathtub together instead of making war. F is very definitely a political statement. MANKOWITZ: Bravo, Mr. Plumb! Like I sometimes hear that people come to see me act in the nude because I just happen to have a beautiful pair of [BLIP]. What they don understand is that I am interposing my naked body against the violence of Vietnam and Chicago and the whole militaryindustrial complex. RUSKIN: Isn that the very point you are trying to make, Mr. Sjnqvist, in I Am Virgin SJNQVIST: Exactly! The girl in my film, Sigrid, symbol izes Truth; the stallion, Sven, represents the Establishment, and in the scene where she undresses and they [BLIP] in the meadow outside the summer palace of King Ulric, I am obviously making a deeply felt point about unilateral disarmament . . .Corporate America also reached new heights of selfjustification in that era of fat war contracts and huge cost over runs. To deal with its slippery language I invented a firm called the National Refractory & Brake Company. It made its debut in Life in the form of an annual report in which the chairman, Harley G. Waller, sums up with hearty pride a year that had in fact been a tissue of disasters. One was the development of a memory module to replace the crew of a passenger train:The module offered major savings in this age of mounting op erational costs and outrageous labor demands, and we were gratified by the decision of the New Haven Railroad to test it on a commuter run from Westport to New York on September 12. It is to be regretted that the memory module apparently lost its54
