Tobacco.org

Smoke ban stubs out Rab C star's creativity  

SCOTS actor and playwright Tony Roper has claimed the smoking ban has stopped him from writing.

Roper, 67, best known as Rab C Nesbitt's pal Jamesie Cotter, famously wrote classic comedy-drama The Steamie in 1988.

He said he wrote the play, novels and much of his other best work while smoking cigars in his favourite hotel, the Garfield House Hotel at Stepps, Glasgow. But since smoking was banned in public places in 2006, he says he no longer writes as much.

He said: "I used to go up to the Garfield and sit and meditate what I was going to write.

"The manager was great and used to come out and give me coffee and biscuits. I'd sit there with my coffee and biscuits and a cigar, and it was very relaxing.

"I wrote three novels and two plays up there. Now you can't smoke in the place I don't do it any longer – and I don't write as much as I used to."

Roper, speaking on BBC Alba's Cuide ri Cathy, to be broadcast later this month, said he had created "hundreds" of characters while smoking cigars in the hotel.

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Tobacco Talk and Smokers Gossip 

THE present collection of Notes and Anecdotes has been gleaned from the more generally interesting portion of a History of Tobacco, which for some few years has been in progress, and the materials for which were gathered from every available source.

Not only novels and plays, old newspapers, travels and memoirs, have been examined or perused; but the works of poets and satirists, histories, acts of parliament, technical treatises, the accounts of early voyages, collec- tions of tracts and tobacco journals, have been ransacked for contributions on the use and abuse, the praise and blame, of the "plant divine."

For the delectation of all devotees of Tobacco ; for those who take their Latakia from the seductive meerschaum, or Virginia from the clay; for those who taste the " naked beauties " of sweet Havana, as well as those who the " primrose path of dalliance tread " with a cigarette between their teeth ; we have brought together in this little volume droll stories of the pipe, the romantic history of the snuff-box, odds and ends of Tobacco lo^e, and pages of splendid panegyric by nico- tians such as Charles Lamb and Byron, Bulwer and Thackeray.

Here too will be found pleasant gossip about famous tobacco-takers from Raleigh to Tennyson ; not omit- ting the small sins of royalty, the backslidings of bishops (archbishops too) in this respect ; soldiers and doctors, lawyers and artists, poets and peers — every one in short who is an honour to nicotian society, among whom one living lady at least must be numbered — no less exalted a person- age than an Empress !

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Lyra nicotiana: poems and verses concerning tobacco: (1898) 

On a Broken Pipe— James Thomson 241

"And Life is like a Pipe" — Theo. Marzials .... 242

Edifying Reflections of a Smoker— German (Anon.), trans. by Eduard Breck 243

Ode to my Cigar— CAar^es Sprague 245

The Philosophy of Smoke— Pitncft 247

With Pipe and Book— iv/cAorcZ Le GaUienne . . . 249

The Happy Smoking Ground— ii/c7(ard Le GaUienne . . 250

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Six visual arts groups nominated for inaugural $75,000 Arts Achievement Award 

The Imperial Tobacco Canada Foundation today announced the six nominees for its inaugural Arts Achievement Award, an honour established by the Foundation in November 2008 to recognize sustained artistic excellence and innovative achievement. The winner of the award will receive a $75,000 prize.

"We are very impressed and extremely pleased with the high calibre of the nominations for our first Arts Achievement Award, as they provide an outstanding array of the vital organizations that play such an important role in the artistic fabric of our country," said Benjamin Kemball, president and CEO of Imperial Tobacco Canada and chair of the Foundation's Board of Directors. "These associations have already contributed significantly both in Canada and abroad, and are in the vanguard of the visual arts and media world. We salute our nominators who did an exemplary job on our behalf."

The 2009 nominated organizations in the areas of visual arts, new media arts and architecture are:

Le Mois de la Photo, Montreal . . .

Centre for Aboriginal Media and imagineNATIVE Annual Film +Media Arts Festival, Toronto . . .

Images Festival, Toronto . . .

Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art, Winnipeg . . .

Southern Alberta Art Gallery (SAAG), Lethbridge, Alberta . . .

Vancouver Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver

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'The Cigarette Century' by Allan M. Brandt 

Allan Brandt’s nuanced, intelligent, superbly researched history of the cigarette in the American 20th century tells you everything you need to know. The history of the cigarette is, in microcosm, the history of 20th- century capitalism itself, and Brandt follows it through culture, science, politics and the law.

Then he turns to the way in which big tobacco, partially thwarted at home, is now pushing its product into unregulated and lucrative Third World markets.

This is a work of scholarly history, rather than advocacy, but it makes a convincing case that the threat tobacco poses to global health is greater now than it ever has been.

That’s not to say this book is solemn. Brandt’s sense of the absurd makes it fascinating even as it appalls. Before the Marlboro Man, for example, there was Johnny Roventi, a 43-inch dwarf with the catchphrase: “Call For Philip Morris!” “He will go,” Fortune magazine reported admiringly, “wherever his dwarfhood, his voice, and his free cigarette will win him the eyes, ears and lungs of a crowd.”

Then there was the mechanical miracle of the Camel Man in Times Square . . .

As a tobacco company’s internal memo—with hilarious candor –put it: “Public suicide and voluntary spreading of diseases to innocent victims are never going to be socially acceptable or regarded as a characteristic of first-class citizenship.” Another one? No thanks, I’m trying to give up.

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Cigarettes 

Daily Routines: Smokers 

The little cigarette girl  

Outside the grandest of the restaurants - a place beloved by Hollywood princesses and European countesses and men who were rich beyond the dreams of avarice - stood a little cigarette girl. She was shivering alone in the cold, but the only way for her to earn a few pounds was to wait for the diners who sometimes sauntered onto the pavement to smoke. . . .

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• Días de humo 

Focused mainly in the development of the design of objects and the graph around the tobacco during century XX in Mexico, Days of smoke in addition it will show to historical antecedents as far as the consolidation and the social assent of a culture of the tobacco. A trip towards the past, towards which today already it is history and that allows us to generate stories and memories in nostalgia, around those days of smoke…

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Dias de Humo, The Days of Smoking  

For Mexico City’s smokers, who were recently deprived the pleasure of enjoying their habit in restaurants, bars, offices and other public places, an exhibition celebrating the pleasure and history of tobacco might feel like someone’s blowing smoke in their faces.

But organizers of “Dias de Humo” (Days of Smoke), which opened last week at the Museo Soumaya, say that the intention behind the show is to celebrate smoking’s place in history, art and culture, not to encourage the habit.

12 photos * 28 views

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• Mexico City smokers enjoy a bit of nostalgia 

For Mexico City’s smokers, who were recently deprived of the pleasure of enjoying their habit in restaurants, bars, offices and other public places, an exhibition celebrating the pleasure and history of tobacco might feel like someone’s blowing smoke in their faces.

But organizers of “Dias de Humo” (The Days of Smoking), which opened last week at the Museo Soumaya, say the intention is to celebrate smoking’s place in history, art and culture, not to encourage the habit.

Pre-Hispanic pipes, personalized cigarette holders and snuffboxes, newspaper articles, old television ads and publicity posters tell what is more than just the history of tobacco.

Some of Mexico’s most famed artists and public figures, such as José Guadalupe Posada, Frida Kahlo and José Clemente Orozco, are included in an exhibit that is really a kind of history of Mexico, using the tobacco industry and smoking culture as the organizing thread.

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• DAVIS: All I want for Christmas: cleaner air  

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the House (of Representatives), not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. House Bill 4163 had been through both chambers with great fanfare, and there was a great yell of triumph from the Campaign for Smokefree Air.

Children with asthma were wishing for the best, of visits to restaurants with clean air in their chests. And Mama in her apron could work for a living, without the worry of cancer the secondhand smoke was giving.

When out in the Capitol lobby, there arose such a clatter, the people all wondered just what was the matter? Ohio has done it, and Illinois, too, so many states were smoke free, why is it so hard for Michigan to do? . . .

So write to your lawmakers and tell them to compromise and vote; tell them you're watching and you're taking note. It's good for me and for you, good for health and business too; Be you naughty or nice, a smokefree Michigan is the right thing to do!

-- Dr. Ronald M. Davis, M.D, of East Lansing, who wrote this verse a year ago, died last month of pancreatic cancer.

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The Digital Ramble | Le Smoking  

LIFE magazine made millions of photos available this week — most never before published — through Google image search, and I got digging. Cigarettes turn up everywhere: with Sophia Loren between takes, with Eisenhower after a parade. But it’s tough to enjoy that world-war-era cool when there’s this two-year-old smoking in your face. “Le smoking,” as a phrase, has a bit more of the glamour and sex I sought, even if it only means “tuxedo.” These 1954 backstage fashion-show pictures capture the mood, as does the photo blog “Le Smoking,” which stockpiles photos of people smoking — it’s edgy living meets tobacco, one clichéd plate at a time. . . .

Lots of my friends, though, were addicted to only one thing in 2008: Mad Men, a show starring cigarettes in supporting roles.

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Breakfast with the FT: Art Spiegelman 

Art Spiegelman doesn’t go to restaurants. In fact, since the smoking ban came in he doesn’t go out much at all. So, rather than lunch with the FT, the 60-year-old graphic artist proposes we meet for breakfast at his SoHo studio . . .

“Comics seem to be cooking these days,” he observes; rising young artists are proud to say they’re cartoonists: “It’s like being a rock star.” Perhaps that’s why Spiegelman clings on to his smoking habit – it gives him a last excuse to be a rebel, a “fugitive”, as he repeatedly labels himself.

It’s nearly lunchtime and the haze in the fugitive’s retreat is dense. Spiegelman sees me out and into the lift; just before he disappears from view I watch him light his eighth cigarette of the morning.

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She Fine-Tuned the Forks of the Richan Vulgars  

“She must not swing her arms as though they were dangling ropes,” Emily Post wrote about a young bride in one of the ubiquitous editions of her etiquette books. “She must not shout; and she must not, while wearing her bridal veil, smoke a cigarette.” . . .

In 1927 the 1922 chapter on “The Chaperone and Other Conventions” was replaced with “The Vanishing Chaperone and Other Lost Conventions,” which gave way eventually to “The Vanished Chaperone.” Men no longer had to pay the check; unmarried girls over 18 could go out with men unchaperoned and have dinner in their apartments. They could also smoke.

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