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VD Attack Plan (1973)

I never thought I’d hear the phrase "pain during urination" in a Disney movie. That’s just one of several delights to be found in VD Attack Plan, an animated educational short starring a limbless but fierce commanding officer in charge of gonorrhea and syphilis germs. Sporting pockmarks, snaggleteeth, and a Kaiser helmet, the general rallies his troops against us humans, ordering them to "Maim ’em for life!" The soldiers, each of whom wears a beret marked with an S or a G, cackle as he shows them where to invade the Homo sapiens form and the nasty havoc they will wreak there–be ready to shield your eyes at the mention of the word chancre.

The Walt Disney Educational Media Company clearly did not have the same budget as Snow White or Bambi; nevertheless, the film features trademark Disney craftsmanship. Among the crowd of snickering germs, individual germs snicker in their own particular ways, and the score, with its oboes, bongos, and strings, is perfectly militaristic and sinister. I certainly learned (and retained) my lesson from VD Attack Plan–it is so much more compelling than the typical STD movies in which stern doctors try to scare the libido out of teenagers.

Disney’s decision to present the germs’ POV makes it truly radical for 1973, not to mention for Disney movies in 1973 (and today): No one has to feel guilty about sex, just prepared to ward off disease. Moreover, the germ sergeant mentions homosexual contact in the same breath as heterosexual contact in his list of attack methods for syphilis and gonorrhea. According to educational film archivist Skip Elsheimer, ten years passed before another VD film admitted that STDs can be transmitted through anything but male-female nookie. (Read Elsheimer’s essay about VD Attack Plan.) –Alexandra Ringe

Travel Naturally magazine
Issue #45

I was first drawn to Travel Naturally for the same reasons anyone would be: the promise of Mediterranean vistas, insight into the nudist lifestyle, and, of course, photos of naked people. But browsing its pages raises a lot of questions: If the goal is natural living, why are there so many shaved bikini lines? Why do the same six or so people reappear throughout the magazine? And if nudism is, as nudists often claim, not meant to be sexual, why are there so many voyeuristic videos for sale? I mean, how exactly is sitting in front of a television watching Naturalist Buddies ("The BEST male footage," featuring "Holiday Youth Party" and "Body Art Jamboree") or "1999 Junior Miss Pageant" supposed to get me in touch with nature?

These concerns aside, Travel Naturally is, as it turns out, a promotional vehicle for a California-based travel agency. Still, there’s more here than tour packages and child porn. My advice to the editors: fewer naked children, more nude middle-aged men with backpacks. And NEWS, more news, like the brief about a plot by teenage boys in Connecticut to run naked through a local convenience store. Then there are the TNT!MEN: Totally Naked Toronto Men Enjoying Nudity–they held a parade to protest public-nudity laws. Another story recounts a mishap during a hockey game, when a man wearing only his red socks ran out on the ice, fell, and had to be carried away on a stretcher.

Such stories, threaded with goofiness and carnivalesque politics, are something everyone can appreciate–even if you don’t get off by watching naked people play volleyball.

Carrie McLaren


365 Days of Something Extra in Your Life
(Wyeth Pharmaceuticals)

When our future Islamic overlords are sifting through the ruins of our civilization for clues to what made us tick, they could do worse than to start with 365 Days of Something Extra in Your Life, a promotional page-a-day calendar for Wyeth’s antidepressant/antianxiety drug Effexor. With a slogan in the imperative for every page, each designed to stimulate or simulate happiness, the calendar is a study in conventional contentment. The day-brightener for January 1 sets a high bar for your ambitions: "Resolve to work for peace on earth." Once that’s taken care of, by January 2, you’re ready to "Ski the best resorts this winter."

The calendar’s commentary ranges from the inexplicable ("Visit Texas and buy a 10-gallon hat"), to the quasi-threatening ("Always ride the roller coaster at an amusement park"). At times, the calendar lets slip an indication of a mind-set that is scary. "Don’t be afraid!" says one page. "Paint your living room your favorite color!" Okay!!!

Wyeth’s 365 Days actively encourages you to deceive yourself and others about how happy you really are. At Christmas, you are supposed to "make everybody feel like they gave you the perfect gift." Escaping from the crushing agony of depression is not enough; things have to be perfect. The entry for September 11, which I imagine induced a crisis meeting of Wyeth’s copywriters, is particularly disingenuous: "Let’s fly our colors proudly as one nation united." It’s not just that it’s okay to be depressed on that day. Wouldn’t it be a little creepy not to be depressed? This kind of shrill optimism, in which bad things are simply papered over and everything is just great, all the time, actually sounds a little unhealthy.

Here’s the thing: Every shred of evidence from thousands of years of human history indicates that life mostly sucks. Sometimes, it really sucks, and sometimes it just kind of sucks, and sometimes, just sometimes, it doesn’t suck at all. In fact, sometimes life is as great as Wyeth wants you to think it can be. But Wyeth shouldn’t be in the happiness business; it should be in the antidepression business. There’s a lot of ground between wretched misery and ecstatic elation, those zones and tropics of humdrum okayness or not-so-goodness or ain’t-half-badness that most of us live in. –J. M. Tyree

 

Found Magazine

Because the following note was placed on the wrong windshield, it ended up in Found Magazine, a compilation of letters, to-do lists, journal entries, doodles, snapshots, report cards, and a million other objects happened upon by total strangers:

Mario,

I fucking hate you you said you had to work and then whys your car HERE at HER place? You’re a fucking LIAR. I hate you I fucking hate you.

Amber

P.S. Page me later

Thanks to people like Amber who misplace things and people like Davy Rothbart who pick them up, Found is my new favorite page-turner. Every item in Rothbart’s carefully curated magazine tells a great story that is refreshingly beyond the narrative-commercial complex. – Alexandra Ringe

 

Elaine S. Abelson, When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989

The middle- and upper-class white women discussed in Abelson’s book made for unlikely criminals–and that was the problem. Shoplifting from department stores was rampant among the "noble" classes in late 19th and early 20th century America, but the authorities didn’t know what to do with the lawbreakers. Ladies, by definition, could not be thieves, and so the only option was to consider shoplifting an illness. Doctors therefore created "kleptomania," allowing both culprits and stores to maintain an air of respectability.

Abelson’s evenhanded and accessible social history provides a glimpse into the golden age of the department store and some of the contradictions contained within. At the time, shoplifting was seen as yet another sign of the emotional instability of women, but Abelson carefully places the crimes in a social context in which women were responsible for doing all the household shopping yet were given no control over how money was spent. According to feminist tracts from the period, every expense down to the last spool of thread had to be explained and justified to the husband. Abelson quotes one woman who reminisced: "In my girlhood we spoke with awe of my contemporary, Louise de Loven, who had a bank account and could sign checks!"

Moreover, many stores had a deliberate policy of encouraging women to buy more than they could afford. In 1895, the Dry Goods Economist reported that successful retailing rested on the ability to "sell goods when a customer is supposed to be through with her purchasing; to sell a customer something she had not the remotest idea of buying." Clerks were taught to tempt customers, and in-store displays were designed to play on their impulses. Stores also used deceptive marketing tactics, such as hiring people to dress rich and stand transfixed before window displays, as if considering a purchase.

Though shoplifting led to huge losses in sales, the department stores resisted taking actions to curb theft. Some had learned the hard way that apprehending highly respected uppercrust community members wasn’t such a good idea. Other shoppers tended to believe the suspect’s denials and would accuse the store of thuglike police tactics. According to a newspaper account in 1899, "high class stores would rather lose hundreds of dollars than be associated in the public mind with police court trials and sensational arrests." Considering the brouhaha surrounding Winona Ryder’s escapades at Saks–and the "Free Winona" T-shirts made in her defense–I suspect that very little has changed. Carrie McLaren

 

Pootie Tang
VHS, 81 min.

When Pootie Tang came, and went, in July of 2001, it was received with less fanfare than Chris Rock’s previous movie, the ill-conceived Heaven Can Wait remake Down to Earth. The few who did see it were treated to a fast and funny script, stellar casting, and some great subversion of the mainstream. The film effectively pokes fun at corporate greed, portrayals of black sexuality, and marketing hype without coming off as dogmatic or shrill.

Lance Crouther plays the titular Tang, a man too cool for words–literally, he speaks in a dialect unlike any known language–who fights crime when he’s not running his successful Chicago nightclub, recording number-one hits, or filming public service announcements encouraging children to eat vegetables and say no to cigarettes and malt liquor. When Dick Lechter, the head of Corporate America (played by Robert Vaughn) takes notice of plummeting sales, he attempts to buy Tang off.

Ultimately, Pootie Tang is a hero not so much for kicking ass and loving ladies, as for respecting women (mostly), resisting the financial lure of marketing black coolness and…okay, he is a hero for kicking ass, but he does it in a cartoonish way. His temporary downfall comes not from a beating at the hands of his nemesis but from the public’s perception that he has sold out and turned his back on his values.

Pootie Tang doesn’t leave you hanging on the edge of your seat until the conclusion, but it propels you from scene to scene so you can enjoy the charismatic Crouther interact with Rock–who plays two roles, Pootie’s friend and his father–as well as a talented cast of comedians, including David Cross, Todd Barry (as seen on the cover of Stay Free!), and Andy Richter. If nothing else, Pootie Tang is worth seeing for a hilarious performance by Wanda Sykes and the best pie-related love scene ever filmed. –Joe Garden

 

FeralChildren.com

After watching his dad murder his mom, John Ssebunya–then a toddler living in Uganda–fled into the woods, where he was adopted by vervet monkeys. A few years later, adults spotted him, pried him away from his adopted family, and reintroduced him to the human world. Now 15 years old, John still exhibits a few monkey mannerisms, but he has proven himself adept at the activities his human friends admire. He sings in the Pearl of Africa Children’s Choir and played soccer in this summer’s Special Olympics.

You can read about John’s case and others on FeralChildren.com, a site devoted to children who grew up without the support of other humans. Some were victims of child abuse. "Wild Child" Genie, for instance, spent her childhood locked in a bedroom; Anna was kept in an attic. But the most interesting cases are the kids raised by animals. Traian Caldarar ran away from home in Romania and was found last year eating a wild dog. When discovered in 1996, the "Nigerian Chimp Boy" dragged his arms on the ground, made chimpanzee-like noises and clapped his hands over his head in the way that apes do. Shamdeo was raised by wolves, bore sharpened teeth, ate his meat raw, and preferred darkness to daylight; found in May 1972, he eventually learned sign language.

The details on FeralChildren.com are sometimes sparse, and you have to take it all with a bit of skepticism (though Ssebunya makes for a damn convincing monkey boy). Nevertheless, the articles and interviews linked from the site provide fascinating insights into the human condition. As these stories indicate, many of the habits that we consider natural or innately human are in fact cultural or socially taught. Though their circumstances differ widely, feral children tend to have a hard time not only speaking, reading, and writing, but also walking, sitting, standing, smiling, and crying. (Genie, for example, expressed very little emotion and exhibited a curious "bunny walk.") They tend to move as animals do, and their bodies adapt accordingly, developing muscles and joints accustomed to walking on all fours. Many children also seemed impervious to rain or changes in temperature–one boy delighted in playing in the snow while nude–suggesting that our sensitivity to temperature is culturally influenced.

These findings have limited scientific value, as many of the abandoned children were probably retarded or otherwise disabled in the first place. Still, the site reminds me of primatologist Frans de Waal’s work. De Waal has spent years documenting the habits that animals teach one another. In certain parts of the world, monkeys wash potatoes, fish for ants, and rub stones together–practices they learned from their mothers and peers. By prodding us to acknowledge that we are animals ourselves, FeralChildren.com slyly suggests that howling may be no more natural to wolves than singing show tunes is to humans. Carrie McLaren