Gotham Diary:
Toys
22 May 2013
Last night, Kathleen and I had dinner on the balcony for the first time this year — for the first time since regaining possession. The day had been warm and unpleasantly muggy, but the evening breeze was a delight. We enjoyed every minute. The food didn’t matter, although I’d put a bit of effort into chopping a few mushrooms and green onions, cooking them for a minute, and then stirring them into a bowl of steamed arborio rice — that came out well. Interesting but probably not to be repeated: chicken legs marinated for several days in Jack Daniel’s steak sauce, and then baked in a hot oven. This was a frugal offering, in that it cleared the freezer of the chicken legs and the condiment tray of the steak sauce. Kathleen asked for ice cream for dessert.
Earlier in the day, Ray Soleil and I got together for lunch, after which we walked up to Feldman’s Housewares in Carnegie Hill. All I really needed was an extension cord, but of course there were a few other things that I found I had to have, and I left with two very large shopping bags. As if my weakness for housewares weren’t bad enough, there’s Feldman’s counter of death to contend with. While waiting for your purchases to be totted up and wrapped and bagged, a lovingly leisurely process, you have all the time in the world to play with the novelty toys on display by the register. Talk about guilty pleasures! This is where I discovered the Yodeling Pickle, which, as I saw immediately, would fascinate Will inordinately. (It’s not even a nuisance to listen to anymore.) On offer yesterday was something called the Spiro-Light. An unprepossessing handheld object, the Spiro-Light recreates something of the thrill of nighttime at an amusement park when you press the button. Two soft-bladed fans whir into action. One of each fan’s blades spotted with diodes that spark on and off at staggered intervals, creating bright blinking circles of primary colors. After dinner, I showed the Spiro-Light to Kathleen, and she was so thrilled that she spent a long time trying to hunt one down on the Internet — in vain!
That’s the interesting part. This morning, I tracked down the outfit that sells the toy, Play Visions. If you visit the firm’s home page, and wait for the panel in the center to cycle through a series of promotions, you’ll see one for “Light Up Tops From Play Visions.” This suggests, without actually illustrating, a toy like the Spiro-Light. To find out more, you have to be a retailer. (Or expose yourself to Feldman’s counter of death.) Many of Play Vision’s toys are featured on the Web site, but not the Spiro-Light — not yet. It makes sense that retailers would be attracted by almost anything that isn’t available online, and a novelty impulse item that nobody has ever seen before because even the picture is not online is going to promise some old-fashioned business. (Remember when things “flew off the shelves” and “out of the stores”? No?)
I could try to take a picture myself, but that would violate all the principles of novelty impulse buying.
***
In the street, Ray asked, “Do you think the city is being taken over by black SUVs?” I replied that I didn’t think that any other kind of vehicle was still being made. At that very instant, a sleek, smallish Rolls Royce glided by. You don’t see Rolls Royces in Yorkville every day, not even every year. It seems contrary to nature, somehow. Why on earth would the driver of such an automobile — and this one, we could see, wore a cap — take 86th Street to go anywhere? Especially with the subway station construction. So much bustle and commotion and ordinariness. I thought to myself, Thank God I do not own a car. I think that every day, just as Orthodox Jewish men are said to Thank God for their XY chromosome. Then, remembering something I’d read recently about the moral opprobrium visited on the scientists who developed the atomic bomb (because they put such terrible powers in the hands of benighted mankind), I thought, what about the automobile? The automobile has done untold orders of magnitude more damage to humanity than the bomb, and the damage goes on piling up, day after day.
Albert Hirschman says something on point here. As a way of apologizing for “the danger that the dynamics I celebrated could be overdone, to the point of setting up a highly inefficient industrial structure,” Hirschman writes,
Is it not unreasonable to ask the inventor of the internal combustion engine to come up immediately with a design for pollution control and air bags?
There are people who would insist that it is not unreasonable to make such demands, and there always will be, and although (happily) they are never effective, it would be better if they saved their breath. They are the same people who expect scientists warning about climate change to develop immediate solutions. Some people, I believe, are constitutionally incapable of dealing with the fact that things develop over time, that circumstances change in unforeseen ways. Their violent alarms make it harder for patient meliorists to exercise steady vigilance. They must reduce everything to simple terms and bold initiatives.
The atomic bomb was so obviously awful (in every sense of that term) that it was immediately surrounded by sanctions (many of them paranoid, but we must hope effective). The automobile was just the opposite. Early cars were toys for grownups — rich grownups. Then, along came Henry Ford. Was he the Oppenheimer of the auto? Or was it Eisenhower, who endorsed a massive national highway project to enable defensive maneuvers that have become increasingly difficult to imagine? I can never decide whether the automobile ruined American civilization or made it. But I can rephrase the puzzle: the automobile seriously damaged the possibilities of civilization in America.
Who could have foretold this?