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Archive for November, 2006November 2006 in Black LambVolume 4, Number 11 — November 2006November 1st, 2006 READ THIS ENTIRE ISSUE IN THE ENTRIES BELOW The All-Smoking & Drinking Issue In our cover story Terry Ross cautions against a too-Puritan view of our peccadilloes. In the page 2 feature, A Quick Buzz, Cate Garrison looks back on a life of smoking and drinking and finds pleasure in moderation. The title of Ed Goldberg’s piece describes his view: You Don’t Have to S&D to Have Fun (Ha-Ha). In As Good As It Gets? William Bogert casts an aye vote for S&D. Greg Roberts speaks eloquently in favor of alcohol in Unhand That Bottle!
Posted by: The Editors The All-Smoking & Drinking IssueIncluding a plea to remember the pleasure of our vicesNovember 1st, 2006 BY TERRY ROSS
By the same token, I am perhaps better qualified than some of the writers in this All-Smoking & Drinking Issue. Unlike, for example, Gillian Wilce (p. 4), I have smoked to excess, and although I gave up cigarettes some time ago, I still enjoy an occasional pipe or cigar. Unlike Cervine Kauffman (p. 11), I have in my time drunk to excess, and I look forward to occasionally doing so in the future.
Posted by: The Editors A quick buzz... and perhaps just a touch more occasionallyNovember 1st, 2006 BY CATE GARRISON My grandfather used to smoke one cigarette a year to round off his Christmas dinner. The whole event smacked of ritual, with a proper blend of anticipation, anxiety, and awe. From the moment the last bite of pudding had been put away, we waited tensely for my grandmother to fetch, with an air of long-suffering disapproval, a box of Lucifers from her kitchen. Who provided the lonely fag I cannot say, though in those days they could be purchased singly. My grandfather would strike the match with expert flair on the bottom of his shoe and light up. He smoked elegantly, without any of the coughing or puking one might associate with such an infrequent indulgence. At about the third puff, he would start to blow smoke rings of great concentricity and thick, blue intensity, through the middle of which we children would try to poke our fingers.
Posted by: The Editors You don’t have to S&D to have fun (ha-ha)November 1st, 2006 BY ED GOLDBERG I started smoking when I was twelve but waited another year to begin drinking.
Posted by: The Editors As good as it gets?November 1st, 2006 BY WILLIAM BOGERT My favorite line about drinking came from an episode of The Andy Williams Show, a variety program of forty or so years ago. One of Andy’s guest this particular week was Phil Harris, who was a renowned carouser, and in one sketch Andy proposed to Phil that they drop in for a visit with Pat Boone, who was a renowned straight arrow. They did, and Pat offered refreshment, and offer that Phil eagely accepted.
Posted by: The Editors Unhand that bottle!November 1st, 2006 BY GREG ROBERTS
True, drunks pull guns and drive cars that kill peope, but remember this: if it weren’t for alcohol, there wouldn’t be a country to pull a gun or drive a car in.
Posted by: The Editors An on-off affairNovember 1st, 2006 BY GILLIAN WILCE When I was a child I thought that smoking was very glamorous. It wasn’t just the lazy smoke drifting from the lips of the heroine in the black-and-white movies on TV. It was that our house smelled smoky only at Christmas, and only on those Christmases when our uncle and aunt and cousins came to visit. So the scent of tobacco loitering in a room meant something different from the humdrum, the everyday: festivity, more games (charades with four was, after all, a bit sad), more talk, more fun.
Posted by: The Editors NeverNovember 1st, 2006 BY DAN PETERSON Iam one of the least qualified guys on the planet to speak of smoking and drinking. I do neither and never have. I was cured of this early on by my father, who did both. He was a policeman, ending up as a lieutenant, in Evanston, Illinois. When I was about three or so, and we are talking 1939 here, he used to have some of the guys on his shift over to the house once a month for a session of poker: stud, draw and the rest.
Posted by: The Editors The hardest thingNovember 1st, 2006 BY ALAN ALBRIGHT The sun filters through those tall, coastal redwoods whose scale makes you feel as though you were a kid again, living amongst giants. Matilda and I pulled into Big Sur, found a campsite amidst the redwoods. Followed our rituals. The facilities were in good order, although out back there was a passle of young teenagers smoking up a storm. Didn’t need to hear them to know where they came from. But I asked anyway… in French.
Posted by: The Editors Can’t imagine whyNovember 1st, 2006 BY JIM PATTON Ah, smoking. “A custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black, stinking fume thereof nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless,” according to King James I of England. To which I could respond that nothing was ever less loathsome to my eye than beauteous Lisa Wilhelm smoking Gauloises cigarettes across a little table from me at a café in Brussels a few days before Christmas, many years ago; that plenty of people enjoy the smell of pipe tobacco and cigars, if not cigarettes (and a few enjoy even cigarettes); that Sir Winston Churchill lived to ninety-one despite smoking monster cigars (the type now known as Churchills) for decades.
Posted by: The Editors |
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