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Recently in Salon Health & Body

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You don't even need to light up!
Smoking rooms at airports are pretty ugly, but soon they'll be attractive and filled with food.
By Mary Roach
[02/11/00]

Marlboro Man lives
Big Tobacco money is being spent differently than before, but it's still targeting our youth.
By Alex Salkever
[02/10/00]

Urge: Naked World
The truth about vaginas
After playing God in the film "Dogma," rock's goddess of angst will star in an off-Broadway play about female genitalia.
By Hank Hyena
[02/10/00]

Urge: Naked World
Albanian gangsters kidnapping women and girls to service troops
Kosovo has not been part of the Eastern European sex trade that has flourished since the collapse of communism, but the lure of a 45,000-strong army has made it a new business.
By Hank Hyena
[02/09/00]

The Gitane affair
Forget McDonald's and Coca-Cola; the French see American-style anti-tobacco lawsuits as one of the greatest threats to French culture.
By Debra Ollivier
[02/09/00]

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Smoking in bed. Sharing a cigarette. Watching David Bowie in "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence." This is heaven: the convergence of bed, you, smoking and David Bowie. Bowie, a prisoner of war, is in his cell awaiting execution. The guards come to fetch him, but he makes them wait while he prepares for the end. He picks up his hat, holding it upside down in the palm of his hand like a bowl, and turns to the wall. Peering into the wall as though into a mirror, he rubs his chin, dips an imaginary shaving brush into the bowl, picks up an imaginary razor and begins to shave. Slowly, ritualistically, he mimes the act of shaving and then of drinking a cup of tea, and then he reaches out and takes an imaginary cigarette between his fingers. My hand reaches out for the pack and starts shaking a cigarette loose, but your fingers close around my wrist, and you whisper, "Wait."

"The Smoking Book" By Lesley Stern University of Chicago Press, 238 pages What is your level of nicotine addiction? Calculate it here. Also, find out all you need to know about smoking at the Tackling Tobacco Center.

He inhales deeply, luxuriously; you can feel the nicotine spreading through his being. And then he exhales, running his tongue over his lips, tasting, catching a stray strand of tobacco. He savors that cigarette. When it is almost finished he throws it to the ground -- cut to a high-angle medium shot of his boot stepping on the imaginary stub. Then he moves off, out of frame.

After the movie is over we make love, smoke a cigarette together, inhaling before the altar of the television, giving thanks that we are not in prison. Lulled by the fumes we doze, the pack of Camels on the bedside table, within reach, like a precious gem.
salon.com | Feb. 11, 2000

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