Tobacco.org

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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32. Etiquette in Business and Politics. Post, Emily. 1922. Etiquette 

ETIQUETTE IN SMOKING

The above does not mean that a gentleman may never smoke in the presence of ladies—especially in the presence of those who smoke themselves—but a gentleman should not smoke under the following circumstances: When walking on the street with a lady. When lifting his hat or bowing. In a room, an office, or an elevator, when a lady enters. In any short conversation where he is standing near, or talking with a lady. 4 If he is seated himself for a conversation with a lady on a veranda, in an hotel, in a private house, anywhere where “smoking is permitted,” he first asks, “Do you mind if I smoke?” And if she replies, “Not at all” or “Do, by all means,” it is then proper for him to do so. He should, however, take his cigar, pipe, or cigarette, out of his mouth while he is speaking. One who is very adroit can say a word or two without an unpleasant grimace, but one should not talk with one’s mouth either full of food or barricaded with tobacco. 5

In the country, a gentleman may walk with a lady and smoke at the same time—especially a pipe or cigarette. Why a cigar is less admissible is hard to determine, unless a pipe somehow belongs to the country. A gentleman in golf or country clothes with a pipe in his mouth and a dog at his heels suggests a picture fitting to the scene; while a cigar seems as out of place as a cutaway coat. A pipe on the street in a city, on the other hand, is less appropriate than a cigar in the country. In any event he will, of course, ask his companion’s permission to smoke.

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37. Traveling at Home and Abroad.  

ON A CONTINENTAL TRAIN

Europeans usually prefer to ride backwards, and as an American prefers to face the engine, it works out beautifully. It is not etiquette to talk with fellow passengers, in fact it is very middle-class. If you are in a smoking carriage (all European carriages are smoking unless marked “Ladies alone” or “No smoking”) and ladies are present, it is polite to ask if you may smoke. Language is not necessary, as you need merely to look at your cigar and bow with an interrogatory expression, whereupon your fellow passengers bow assent and you smoke.

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More doctors smoke Camels? Exhibit on heyday of cigarette advertising opens at NYC library  

A phalanx of white-coated doctors endorses Camel cigarettes in an exhibit that opened this week at the New York Public Library.

Movie stars and baseball greats are there, too, in tobacco ads dating from the 1920s to the 1950s. Even Santa Claus is there, puffing on a Pall Mall.

The exhibit, titled "Not a Cough in a Carload: Images Used by Tobacco Companies to Hide the Hazards of Smoking," opened Tuesday and will be at the library's Science, Industry and Business branch on Madison Avenue through Dec. 26.

It was curated by Dr. Robert Jackler, an associate dean of continuing medical education at Stanford University.

Jackler said he and his wife, Laurie, chose the images from about 5,000 tobacco ads he began collecting when his mother, a longtime smoker, was diagnosed with lung cancer. She died last year.

"For us, this was a memorial to her," Jackler said in a telephone interview.

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• Can Hollywood quit smoking?  

What, then, are we going to do about the century of screen smoking that sits enmeshed in the very best - as well as the worst - output of cinema over the last 100 years, and television over the last 60 or so? And how can we convincingly omit a practice that was almost universal at a period in time that new historical drama - such as Life On Mars US - might be attempting to depict?

Since 'retro' became so magnetic and profitable - from the sale of old US TV shows in large and affordable DVD box-sets, to actually setting a show like Life On Mars in one of the smokiest and grittiest periods of New York's 20th century history - this is about as thorny a problem for the anti-smoking contingent in Hollywood as it could possibly be.

In the Life On Mars pilot show, as our review noted, people are seen with lit cigarettes, but hold them as if they were incense sticks. Clinton-like, there's no obvious inhaling going on. You can almost see the elaborate storyboarding and political wrangling behind the depiction of smoking in Life On Mars US - the compromises, the arbitrators, the wrangling, and the legally-required presence of the New York Fire Department as soon as one of the shabby tecs lights up a herbal fake in an enclosed set.

By the most conservative estimates, 40% of male adults were smokers in the US in 1973. You can probably add a few percentage points for stress-driven jobs like police work, and loads of points for the criminal fraternity, so any cop drama set in that period is going to have to look smokey or it's going to have to look 'wrong'. . . .

The solutions for historical drama are not clear, but obviously you can't continue to have historical characters nursing cigarettes that they never smoke. Nor can you claim that all your characters fall within the non-smoking bracket in whatever period of history you're trying to depict - even the most rudimentary understanding of demographics won't support it. . . .

In the meantime the tobacco industry rubs its hands at the cultural loophole that lets historical drama fill the silver screen with a miasma of tobacco; for it, Hollywood's future is definitely in the past. . . .

But while 20-25% of the Western population still smokes, the tobacco paradox will continue to contribute to the problem in the form of legacy content; in what's already 'in the can', on our screens, our re-runs and in our DVD players. The struggle to get that 20% of smokers in the population down to 0% will still prove to be the (continuing) work of decades rather than years if we're to do it without another Volstead act. In the current depressed mood, bringing with it a wistful atavism for times and styles past, it's not the easiest moment for Hollywood to detox.

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Comics 

This was issue No. 133 of "Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen" -- the first to be written and drawn by the comics legend Jack Kirby. . . .

In the biography Kirby: King of Comics (Abrams, $40), the King's longtime confidant and assistant Mark Evanier writes of Kirby that "when a new idea came to him, he jotted it down on a scrap of paper and, usually, lost it. Once, he got careless with a cigar, started a small fire in his workplace and lost over 50 concepts" -- or, as his wife, Roz, put it, "'a whole day's work for Kirby.'"

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• Big Tobacco’s Spin on Women’s Liberation  

Why do nearly one-fifth of women in America smoke? The answer goes back to an event almost 80 years ago on Fifth Avenue, which is often regarded as one of the most successful P.R. stunts in American history.

This sometimes overlooked piece of history has surfaced again because of an exhibit of historic cigarette ads at the New York Public Library's Science, Industry and Business branch at 34th Street and Madison Avenue.

The show, "Not a Cough in a Carload: Images Used by Tobacco Companies to Hide the Hazards of Smoking," which opened this week, was curated by a doctor, Robert J. Jackler, whose mother, a smoker, died of lung cancer. . . .

Recognizing that women were still riding high on the suffrage movement, Mr. Bernays used the equality angle as the basis for his new campaign. He convinced a number of genteel women, including his own secretary, to march in the 1929 Easter Day parade down Fifth Avenue and light up cigarettes in a defiant show of their liberation.

One woman who lit a Lucky Strike told the reporter from the New York Evening World that she “first got the idea for this campaign when a man on the street asked her to extinguish her cigarette because it embarrassed him. ‘I talked it over with my friends, and we decided it was high time something was done about the situation.’” . . .

The Times published an article the next day on the Easter Parade, with headline saying in part, "Group of Girls Puff at Cigarettes as a Gesture of 'Freedom'"

“Within a year, it became acceptable for woman to smoke outside," Dr. Jackler said. . . .

Marketing cigarettes for women continued with the introduction of Virginia Slims in 1968, which for decades used the theme “You’ve come a long way, baby” as an allusion to the feminist movement.

“There is a bump in women’s smoking in the 1970s," Dr. Jackler said.

That increase has shown up now, he added, as more cases of "lung cancer and emphysema, because they started smoking in the '70s because of the Virginia Slim ads." . . .

But last year, R. J. Reynolds introduced Camel No. 9s

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The Brian Lehrer Show: Arts Orgs Fuming at Philip Morris 

Karen Brooks Hopkins, president of the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Andrew Martin, business reporter for the New York Times talk about why the tobacco company is pulling its money from New York arts groups.

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