SMOKY SOUNDS

Amazon kindly wrote to me the other day, saying: "As someone who has purchased or rated Winter Lullabies by Howard Goodall, you might like to know that Yanomami: Music for Choir and Guitar is now available. You can order yours for just £13.69 by following the link below."

I did and was faced with the following - rather disturbing CD cover...


Well if ever there was proof that smoking can damage your health, that is it!

Apart from which, I remain unconvinced that Amazon's similar-product-identifying machine got it quite right on this occasion. The link between Howard Goodall (that nice English composer who wrote the theme music for The Vicar of Dibley) and the Hispanic/Latin American choir, Coro Cevantes, elludes me.

Still, it's intriguing! And might just possibly provide David with a musical accompaniment for a multiple cigarette production routine!

And to inspire him, here's a superb performance which only needs the addition of another four fags to achieve something similar to the illusion demonstrated above.

STONE AGE ETHICS

Following on from my recent post about the animated TV series of Hanna-Barbera, I recently stumbled on an aspect of one of my favourite H&B shows, The Flintstones, that those of us who watched the programme in Britain never saw --- the sponsorship commercials advertising Winston cigarettes...

Times have certainly changed since the neolithic 'sixties!

How would one describe such a commercial liaison in this more politically correct age of ours? Yabba-Dabba-Doo? I think not! 

Today (as SharonM suggests in the comments below) it would be a more a case of Yabba-Dabba-DON'T! 

TO BE IS TO DO

Through the kindness of a friend who gave me a copy of Jack Tracy's The Ultimate Sherlock Holmes Encyclopedia, I have been taking a few highly enjoyable return visits to 221b Baker Street where I overheard the great detective make what seems a pretty timeless observation:

What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence. The question is, what can you make people believe that you have done?  

(As recorded by Dr John H Watson and reported

by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in A Study in Scarlet)

However true that may be, many other things have changed in the 121 years since Holmes and Watson set out to unravel the "scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life".

For example, Holmes' official portraitist, Sidney Paget (late of The Strand Magazine) may have shown his subject smoking one of his many pipes (above) or, here, occupying a SMOKING compartment when travelling with Watson by train...


But, today, pipes are definitely not permitted on the London Underground --- even, as you can see, at Baker Street station!

GRAVE PERSPECTIVE

Being just back from Greece, where smoking is NOT an issue, it is very curious to see so many ugly NOSMOKING notices slapped up everywhere and the harried huddles of smokers trying to find doorways that are not now designated NOSMOKING doorways...

Anyway, whoever thought it was witty to decorate a "Smoking Room" with this ceiling painting must now be kicking themselves for having wasted their dosh on commissioning the contemporary Michelangelo responsible for the work...


Since being legally defined as "an enclosed space", this Smoking Room must actually now be a Nosmoking Smoking Room!

SMOKE SCREENS

Years ago, cinemas were full of smoke and smokers - you could to see it shifting and swirling in the beam of light from the projector - and so, too, were the movies we went to see.



At the end of Now Voyager, Paul Henreid lit two cigarettes at once for Bette Davis and himself as they agreed not to ask for the moon when they had the stars; and the smoking of ciggies provided similar emotional punctuation in Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, All About Eve and hundreds of other movies of the 'forties and 'fifties.

Nowadays, of course, smoking is social leprosy and one of Moviedom's leading dream factories has announced that they are giving up and taking the pledge...

Walt Disney Productions (the studio founded by a chain-smoker who died of lung cancer) announced that it had decided to stub out the fag habit:

BURBANK, Calif, July 25, 2007 -- The Walt Disney Company today made a commitment to US Representative Edward J Markey, Chairman of the House Telecommunications and the Internet Subcommittee, that it will discourage depictions of cigarette smoking in its films...

In a letter sent to Representative Markey today, Disney President and CEO Robert A Iger said, “The Walt Disney Company shares your concern regarding deaths due to cigarette smoking. We discourage depictions of cigarette smoking in Disney, Touchstone and Miramax films. In particular, we expect that depictions of cigarette smoking in future Disney branded films will be non-existent. In response to your suggestion, our Company will place an anti-smoking Public Service Announcements on DVD's of any future film that does depict cigarette smoking.”

“Disney’s decision to take a stand against smoking is groundbreaking and I commend CEO Bob Iger for this important commitment. Now it’s time for other media companies to similarly kick the habit and follow Disney’s lead,” said Representative Markey.

Among the 'casualties' of this decision are various characters in Disney's on-going The Chronicles of Narnia franchise based on the books written by the pipe-smoking C S Lewis (right), who will not now be allowed to live in peace with their pipes...

Most significantly - and to the utter outrage of Narnia fans on the net - this will include Puddleglum the Marshwiggle (in the penultimate Chronicle, The Silver Chair) whose pipe was as much a feature of his personality as it was of his creator...

Mind you, it so happens that, for some time now, Disney have been retrospectively - and covertly - de-smoking some of their earlier films as part of a questionable revisionist practice to eliminates awkward and uncomfortable non-pc aspects of films from the past...

For example, Pecos Bill, the animated mythical hero of a tall tale of the West included in the 1948 film Melody Time, appeared throughout the piece (much as many flesh and blood Western actors did) with a cigarette dangling from his lower lip...


But now, thanks to the wonders of digital technology, Pecos Bill has been cured of his pernicious addiction to tobacco - though not his allegiance to the gun lobby...

And who's next for aversion therapy? Well, here's one obvious candidate...


...along with those other Wonderland reprobates: the cigar-chomping Walrus and the pipe-puffing Dodo!