…its members are falling away; background sounds once familiar have been silenced. The jangle of the pay phone on the wall, the click of the lighter, the snap and hiss of a match being lighted.

To those retired players in New York City bars, add the hulking workhorse in the back of the pit. It played all night: thunk, thunk, thunk, as the coins dropped into the slot, followed by the grinding crank of unseen gears as the rod was yanked out. The short solo ended modestly, like a tap on a high hat, with the whisper of a pack of smokes wrapped in plastic film sliding into the tray below.

The cigarette machine.

–Michael Wilson, bringing the poetry in an elegiac piece in the NYT about the passing of the old-school mechanical cigarette machine.

I always liked the Art-O-Mat idea: cigarette pack sized art projects you could buy out of re-purposed machines. Gumballs for adults.