Tales Of The City: Life's a drag

Can they really turn New York into a cigarette-free zone? Now that Mayor Bloomberg has passed his vicious, intrusive, goody-goody legislation, I'm dying to see what happens. Will the fag inspectors be able to check all the city's 25,000 bars and restaurants thoroughly, or will "smoke-easies" start to spring up in the basements around Park and Lexington? Because, try as I may, I simply cannot get my head round the idea of a smoke-free Manhattan.

Smoking is practically mandatory in the kind of New York bars you see in the movies. Was there ever a three-time loser, stool pigeon or thwarted lover who walked into a bar to drown his sorrows and didn't pull out a packet of Lucky Strikes to go with his 14 slugs of bourbon? No, there wasn't. Could JJ Hunsecker (played by Burt Lancaster) in Sweet Smell of Success have portrayed the monster gossip columnist half as well if he'd been banned by the 22 Hotel from sucking cigarettes (lit for him by his underling on the words, "Match me, Sidney")? Hardly. In Sebastian Faulks's terrific American novel On Green Dolphin Street, the heroine falls for the Sinatra-like journalist who romances her, partly because of his fancy fingerwork in the cigarette-tapping and match-flicking department in various Big Apple bars. And what of the restaurants and diners and dancehalls where a thousand seductions got underway with the exhalation of a few smoke rings, and gangsters indicated their level of disapproval with you by flicking a burning stub at your tuxedo? What are they going to do now – chuck a beer coaster at you?

The NY Mayor has even banned smoking in prison. Smokes have been exchangeable currency in porridge circles ever since Walter Raleigh brought tobacco back from the Americas – all prisoners build up a stash of negotiable riches by hoarding cigarettes. Not any more. What will theyuse for currency now? Hypodermic needles? Cockroaches?

I'm not certain if this draconian legislation extends to people smoking cigarettes out of doors – such as office workers, who huddle together in doorways in cold weather, and look like terribly unsuccessful prostitutes – but I suspect it's a matter of time. Mayor Bloomberg has decreed that "Fundamentally, people do not want the guy next to them smoking," and that's a generalisation that covers most of the population except for smokers – who are decent, libertarian people and would not mind at all. Even more fundamentally, people do not want the guy next to them telling them what to do and how to behave, but that's evidently a concept too subtle for Mr B to grasp. I just hope and pray that Ken Livingstone doesn't try these Stalinist tactics in London. They just wouldn't understand in the public bar of the Rat and Cockle in Shoreditch.

'It stimulates the half-crazed barbarian to the vilest deeds.' Well, lead me to it...

I was told that the art deco exhibition at the V&A museum was strictly for gay men, but trolled along anyway and was duly bowled over. Bowled over, that is, to find such slavish devotion displayed by so many to harsh, unlovely geometric rectangularity and to unfeasibly impractical, supposedly functional objects. (You know you'll never make an art critic when you look at a Vlastislav Hofman 1913 earthenware coffee set in squat monochrome, and your main thought is, "That'll never pour properly – it'll drip coffee all over the sideboard.")

But the exhibition brilliantly clarifies how it was that a dozen influences twined together to make art deco the European and American look of the early century (from flapper dresses and skyscrapers to cocktail glasses and ludicrously vertical bits of furniture) and how machine-age art and a fascination for primitive "exotica" could coincide.

The latter was a favourite section partly because it offered a chance to see the black dancer Josephine Baker shaking a tail feather at the Folies Bergère in 1926. Though I'd never before seen footage of the lady in action, I'd read about Ms Baker a hundred times, about her single-handed embodiment of "primitivism" and how her danse sauvage electrified sophisticated white audiences. It was dangerously erotic, they said, the passionate apotheosis of l'art nègre. Lots of people were scared of the potency of black girls frugging in their scanties. "Jazz originally was the accompaniment of the voodoo dancer," sniffed the Ladies' Home Journal, "stimulating the half-crazed barbarian to the vilest deeds. The weird chant has also been employed by other barbaric people to stimulate brutality and sensuality. That it has a demoralising effect upon the human brain has been demonstrated by many scientists." Well, lead me to it.

What you get on screen is slightly different. Ms Baker turns out to be a strapping lass in a not-very-humorous banana skirt (as pictured here in Paul Colin's painting of 1927), and she dances in an artlessly girly, clumping style, all knees and elbows and jumping about. No offence to Ms Baker, but it's about as erotic as the dancing hippo in Fantasia.

The main thing about Ms Baker is her huge and gleeful smile. She smiles fit to bust while dancing, as if showing off to the white folks is just the greatest fun in the world. But then, she clearly wanted to be accepted – and if that involved having to cross her eyes and gurn for the camera and wear bananas as if she were just down from the trees and dance like a jolly piccaninny fo' dem white folks, I guess that was the price she had to pay. But was her danse sauvage a "frenzied, erotically charged sequence"? Donnez-moi une fracture.

You've got spam

I'm relieved to hear the Government is planning to stem the flow of unsolicited "spam" advertisements that invade the nation's computer e-mail boxes every day. This morning I counted 123 spam slices as I consigned them, unopened, to cyberhell. I have absolutely no desire to check out candid shots of someone called Melissa's labia majora, nor to take advantage of a generous, if baffling, offer of "50lbs of lobster – big savings". I've got used to finding my mailbox filled with matey congratulations ("You did it! You've been given a certificate for a free vacation!"), of woefully unalluring romantic come-ons ("See photos of single women in your city" – oh, like, wow) and thick-as-a-brick invitations to take a bogus degree ("Earn your Bachelor of Science in paralegal studies today!"), complete with photographs of a moronic male model in a mortar board.

The main obsessions of spammers seem to be: a) treatments to make your penis bigger; b) cut-price printer-ink cartridges and c) debt-factoring services. It's a curious trio of interests, oddly reminiscent of Del Boy Trotter and the random collection of make-a-buck white goods and iffy gems he keeps in his Peckham eyrie. Like Del Boy, much of the spam activity isn't strictly illegal but flirts with the edge of what can be got away with – the "hot teens" stuff, for instance, which promises girl-on-girl action while hinting unpleasantly at violence and coercion. Or the hilarious financial scams ("Free money from the Government! – Claim now!") and the bizarre offers of just about anything the spammers have lying around in their Des Moines trailer: "Get Time magazine, a hand-held organiser and a Samsung DVD player FREE!".

Why I'm sick of this junk, though, is the quality of un-intelligence that's revealed behind the special offers. To be told I've been "approved" for unlimited credit on a platinum credit card suggests the work of someone of monumental stupidity trying to fool someone infinitesimally stupider than himself. Like the gormless youth with the mortar board, you'd sooner shoot such people than acknowledge you live in the same cyberworld as them.