The Arts of Smoking
"Because," she says, "I'm a writer and the words are in the cigarettes." I'm not here to try to justify the duplicitous greed of the tobacco companies. Nor do I wish to get into wrangling with the puritanical, hypocritical anti-smoking behavior of the alcohol-swigging Boomers. What I'd like to suggest is a tobacco marketing stance to put the drug in a more positive light. (If your knee is jerking already, then clearly you ought to be out reviving the Christian Women's Temperance Union or something instead of reading this). Drugs and creativity have gone together as long as we have historical records. Creative types have always tended toward the "bent", never averse to inventive consciousness-alteration. Now that the air in American restaurants is clean (and, don't forget: America today; tomorrow, the world), the only public places left for smokers in many cities are bars. And of course some city councils have already put a stop to THAT too. Suggestion: Why not start a franchise of "smoker's bars," places modeled on the classic European coffee house, with advertising playing up the connection between intellectual and artistic ferment and smoking and coffee and free reading materials in public houses? A chain of establishments, clean, well-lighted, comfortable, lots of newspapers and magazines on racks, maybe even a few internet terminals, a reasonable array of coffees and teas, places where smoke is the norm. Whatever leg-up this might give to the tobacco companies, it has the more important potential to provide a fertile environment for, well, for intellectual and artistic ferment--something which neither America nor the world has had in much quantity of late. Possible advertising copy: "How different would the world be if Picasso hadn't had a place in Paris to sit, drink, talk, and smoke?" "Da-da was born in a smoke-filled coffee bar in Basel. What earth-shaking art movement are the smoke-free bars of <your city> giving birth to tonight?" "Beethoven may've been deaf. But at least he had a place to go where he could sit for hours, drinking fine Viennese coffee, writing, smoking. Is there a place for today's Beethovens in <your city>. Are you listening, Big Tobacco?
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Fran Leibowitz, when people ask her why she smokes, has a ready
answer (Ms. Leibowitz has a ready answer for everything).