09.09.11. Cruising the SkyMall

I recently had the audacity to undertake a four-flight journey from Portland to Paris, across two days. There are more direct routes from Oregon to France, but these cost money, and I had only airline miles and time. Lots and lots of time.

There was an age when such an itinerary would have meant two days of luxury. But flying, as an activity, has shifted categories across recent years from "pleasurable pursuit" to "self-flagellation," and as such is little more than an obstacle to overcome in order to reach wonderful places and progress in our lives. For me, flying has become a means to build a bridge between my two homes on either side of the Atlantic. I move through the lines and doff and don my personal effects as needed so that I may return to those who await me. To have homes in different places is reassuring, but it is also a burden, as one's heartstrings are pulled taut across the stretches of the earth.

But not all, in flying, is anguish and despair. There is one bright spot in air travel that has been a constant across the years, one holdover from the era of the honey-roasted peanut that is still happily filling out that seat-back pocket in front of you. I speak, of course, of that curious and beguiling vortex of hedonism that goes by the name of SkyMall.

All who have flown the skies of America will be familiar with this catalog of niche products. These are products that both attract and repulse you, two opposing phenomena that occur for the exact same reason. And this reason is that the items that populate SkyMall are characteristically, and paradoxically, both quite handy and completely useless.

You, like me, may have made a habit of picking up and perusing the catalog during each flight, and, like me, you have probably found a few products that have spoken to you. Products that you were itching to buy.

Did you? Because someone must be buying these things. Today, in 2011, SkyMall's catalog is just as fat and its products are just as audacious and outlandish as ever. And they continue to inspire (Ed's note: a teensy bit, at least, on some shallow level!). After much thought, I believe I understand this draw of SkyMall. It pulls me in, and you in, and everyone else in, and the only difference between those who purchase and those who don't is a good dose of rationality and foresight—that is, the ability to envision life as a SkyMall customer, what it means to move forward with the products of this catalog in your life.

This is a future I don't like. So I don't buy.

But the fact remains that SkyMall is a talented seductress. And it is my belief that SkyMall gets under your skin so well because it has zeroed in on cool. You could argue that SkyMall's offerings are obscure, pointless, weird, and expensive. And you'd generally be right. But so many of these same items are also undeniably cool, in a way so self-conscious that it is disarming. And that precisely is SkyMall's business plan: to forget about the dichotomy of usefulness and uselessness, and nail down cool; to make cool the sole criterion for its products.

A personalized branding iron. Cool. The Ballpark Classic Baseball Game, a so-called "foosball of baseball" that is perfect for your "man cave." Cool. Premium Road Mice, a series of Lamborghinis and Jaguars that serve as wireless, LED-equipped computer mice; the "always-cool pillow," which never requires turning over; and, above all, the stainless steel wallet, constructed of thousands of tiny stainless steel threads. Cool. I wouldn't buy these things, but I would put them on my Christmas list. 

Partially, these archetypical objects of cool are dependent upon environmental factors for their success. SkyMall has some inherent advantages in this, its battle to make "cool" king: You, wedged into seat 37E, are less a potential customer than you are prey. You can't move for hours at a time, nor can you actually see or touch the items you are looking at. Were you able to—were these items to take on tangibility and appear before you in their true form—you might very well turn away in horror. But you can't see them, not beyond their thumbnail-sized image in the catalog. And it is this detention and this detachment that SkyMall depends upon, allowing it to chip away at your reason until you break down and buy an 8-foot-tall garden statue of the Egyptian falcon god Horus, son of Osiris. Surely that will be a shock when you return home from your three-week European vacation to find that sitting on your porch!

Yet the cards are not all in SkyMall's favor. Working against it is the fleeting quality of "cool"; selling on cool alone is risky business because it shifts constantly and is abstract, ethereal. You can see this process playing itself out with certain of SkyMall's products, for example the Beats by Dr. Dre headphones, which are debatably cool at this stage. Probably, they are on their way out, and will have to be replaced with another artist's product (Bieber ears?).

Other borderline items: the SunCap, a baseball cap with always-ready sunglass lenses that you can push down through the bill to cover your eyes; the double-sided clock, of whose usefulness or social cachet I couldn't be sure; and what you might call hobo socks, the pedal equivalent to the popular fingerless gloves.

In some cases, however, the verdict is clear. Lame products pepper the middle pages of the catalog, coming in a cascade after you get past page twenty-five: Passing the Bar, a board game for lawyers and aspiring lawyers; the BikeGlow safety light, a wraparound illumination system which does announce your presence to every car around, yes, but also your being a complete hoser; skin-tag removal products, which, though effective, can never be cool; and a shameful-looking shoe sanitizer stand.

In the case of these items, it appears that SkyMall has either lost its bearing on cool, or hasn't the courage to accept that some of its most cherished products have lost their pulse. One final, ringing example is their wedge pillow, a massive inflatable device to be propped on your tray table during flight. The pillow is purported to have been featured on the Today Show; probably, this was to make fun of it.

Despite subjecting you to items like the wedge pillow, SkyMall does serve a purpose. It releases you from the sterile airplane cabin and catapults you into another reality where things don't have to be useful or practical. Just hip. A world where it's no biggie to throw away a week's wages on a giraffe toilet paper holder, because it is so elegant with a full roll draped about its neck. I might like to live in such a world.

I do not, however, and so I will never buy anything from SkyMall. But if you're wondering what to get me for Christmas, a stainless steel wallet might be nice.◊