About not having a light

“Excuse me, mate, do you smoke?”

I’ll admit, I judged. She was painfully thin, with a sunken face, blotchy skin and all manner of nervous twitches. And we were just round the corner from a drop-in centre for people with substance abuse issues. But she’d done me no harm so I just assumed she wanted a light for the unlit cigarette hanging from her barely-there lips. So I said sorry, no, wondering whether she was then going to ask whether I had a couple of quid so she could get a bed for the night. Except...

“Oh, that’s a pity. It’s just I’ve got hold of a few hundred fags – don’t ask how – so I’m handing them out to people. Feeling generous. Maybe it’s a Christmas thing. Never mind, mate, you have a good day.”

How can I plot the downfall of civilisation on the back of a fag packet when there are no fag packets left?

From December, all cigarettes in Australia will have to be sold in uniform, olive-green packets. I’m not going to get into a fight over the rights and wrongs of tobacco laws, beyond mentioning what a doctor friend pointed out to me, that it costs rather less to treat a terminal case of lung cancer for 18 months than it does to manage a cocktail of dementia, osteoporosis and various other age-related conditions for 20 years. No, what really interests me is that the battleground on which the government and the tobacco companies have been slugging it out isn’t actually the thing that actually kills people – tobacco itself and its various noxious components – but something apparently peripheral, the pictures that surround the tobacco. First it was the advertising, now the boxes. They’re getting closer to the stuff itself, but they’re still not there. It’s as if someone had reframed that cliché in defence of the US Second Amendment: “It’s not guns that kill people, or even people that kill people – it’s the designer holsters that the guns come in.”

The reason Big Tobacco has resisted these encroachments so stoutly is that they know that they can’t hope to keep making profits based on the quality of their products alone. Branding and packaging are what keep their industry going but it’s a bigger fight even than that – without pretty pictures, huge chunks of capitalism would wither and die. Even supposedly sophisticated consumers can be gulled by a good label, as academics have shown with tweaked wine tastings (but let’s pass over the fact that that article was the work of pretty-boy auto-plagiariser Jonah Lehrer). BAT and Philip Morris aren’t just sticking up for your your right to kill yourself; it’s also about your sacred right to bullshit yourself as you do it. But which amendment covers that?

PS: In the Guardian, Alex Hoban predicts that the tobacco companies will make a virtue out of the enforced uniformity, as part of their strategy of co-opting anti-corporate adbusting techniques. Nice.

Still not sure about the big baby: a few more thoughts about the Olympic ceremony and that

Some stuff that should probably gone into the previous post.

1. Previous opening ceremonies either dutifully toed a political line (Berlin 1936, Moscow 1980, Beijing 2008) or expressed a prevailing zeigeist (Los Angeles 1984, Sydney 2000) that happened to tie in quite neatly with what the government wanted saying anyway. If Boyle’s efforts were truly subversive, was he just expressing a general mood that stands in opposition to what Cameron et al want Britain to be? Ai Weiwei liked it, which makes one wonder how many flavours of excrement would have hit the fan had he been in charge four years ago.

2. That said, I’m still slightly confused about the whole Industrial Revolution thing. Some right-wingers, claiming the whole thing was a leftie plot, have suggested that the event presented Brunel and co as evil, rapacious capitalists intent on tarmacking over Merrie Englande, whereas Boyle’s collaborator Frank Cottrell Boyce says that the huge technological upheaval was one of the “things we loved about Britain” and wanted to celebrate. I suppose it does expose the incoherence of English conservatism, yearning for an idealised, quasi-pastoral past while lauding the entrepreneurial spirit that wiped it out.

3. That Daily Mail article. Oh dear.

4. For some reason I keep thinking back to that poor man who died at Tate Modern last week and the rumour that some people initially thought it was a piece of performance art. If something hideous had happened during the ceremony, how soon would it have been before someone twigged? And would it be appropriate to quote Bill Shankly?

5. Not directly related to the ceremony, but anyway: the empty seats fiasco; and the problems in TV coverage of the cycling being blamed on excessive Twitter use. Do people still need to attend sports events in person? Do they still even need to see them on TV? I didn’t watch the opening ceremony live, but I followed it on Twitter. In 20 years’ time, will athletes be fencing and diving and underclad-volleyballing in near-empty stadia, accompanied only by the tap-tap-tap of a few accredited live tweeters?

6. David Hockney’s response to the whole thing:

Reals of film

American Gangster (dir: Ridley Scott, 2007) is a dramatisation of the true story of Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington), a Harlem heroin kingpin in the 1970s, a time when the NYPD narcotics department was riddled with corruption. Despite the fact this is territory that Hollywood has stomped over countless times before, it's very good, albeit maybe 20 minutes too long. But the familiarity of the milieu means that it ceases to be 'about' Lucas and his nemesis, clean cop Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe); it's about 101 other films instead. Police corruption gives us Serpico and The Departed (and, of course, Infernal Affairs); heroin suggests The French Connection (to the extent it's explicitly namechecked); Lucas's sojourn in South-East Asia summons the ghost of The Deer Hunter and any number of other Vietnam movies. The fact that the two protagonists don't actually meet until the closing stages of the film is a clear nod - intentional or otherwise - to Michael Mann's Heat; the formation of a skunkworks outside the normal workings of the police shares aspects of The Wire (and Roberts, with his chaotic private life, is a dead ringer for Jimmy McNulty). Walk-on parts from historical characters such as Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali echo the fusion of fact and fiction that novelists such as EL Doctorow deploy; until you remember that this is meant to be fact anyway.

It shouldn't be a surprise of course. Hollywood has become more real to us than reality itself; the characters played by Hackman and Pacino and Nicholson are more three-dimensional than flesh-and-blood humans such as Lucas and Roberts. We're so dazzled by the spectacle, we lose sight of our neighbours, and by implication, ourselves.

Although some people are quite capable of creating their own dazzle, if it serves a purpose. Bars in Minnesota are being redefined as theatres, in an effort to get around restrictions on smoking. As the owner of a heavy-metal bar in Maplewood says of his customers, "They're playing themselves before 1 October - you know, before there was a smoking ban."