At Target today I noticed big gaps on the shelves. I’m used to the pasta aisle being completely cleared out, but today most of the canned tomatoes were gone. If you’re wondering why the devil I would use canned tomatoes, well, I use the small cans of “tomato sauce” as a basis for my pasta sauce. The freezers were also empty, and that usually means they had a power outage. The salad department was half-arsed. At one point I almost decided to put my few choices back and leave the store.

As I approached the registers, I saw a new construction: four banks of freezers, by the door where you get the carts. There were signs, pre-made, with the usual slogan - Pardon our construction, we are making a better tomorrow or something like that. In retrospect I think they may hav been swapping them out for the freezers in the back, but it didn’t look like it. They were arranged in rows, perfectly aligned with the store grid.

If they are putting freezers by the entrance, they are insane. We’ll see. Anyway. I went to self-checkout, and the customer relations lady who is always there and has been there forever says HOW ARE YOU

I give her two thumbs up, but I note “They’re out of everything. Pasta, gone. Tomatoes, gone. Salad gone.”

“I DON’T SELL WINE,” She said. What? Oh. “NO WHINING.”

“I’m not whining,” I said. “I’m providing valued guest input.”

What I did not buy: stain sticks. I used to buy those all the time - or rather, a domestic request would be put in for stain-stick procurement. Perhaps I was thinking "I won't be staining much," so I didn't get them.

Remember this, for it will be important.

I went to the gym, returned home to an unhappy dog who was not whining when I went down the hall but no doubt had been issuing pathetic moans for the last hour. Then I decided to consolidate all the travel bags and items, since the Boston trip had revealed how scattered and redundant things were. While going through the box marked TRAVEL I saw a bag of Shout Wipe & Go packets, and I wondered if they were still wet. Could be completely dry. Should probably buy more. They're useful for spills on the plane.

After dinner - a remarkably good pepper steak with my signature cayenne potatoes - I put Birch in the car and headed to Zork Storage to return the suitcase. When I got in the car and looked down to buckle, I noticed a bit of signature cayenne potatoes on my shirt. Something had dropped or dribbled. And I thought:

Should've bought a stain stick.

Waved my phone, access code connects, door opens. While I'm up in the unit I get some cords I need, and looked through the big suitcase to see if there's anything that needs to go in the Consolidated Travel box.

Security camera footage would've shown something odd: a guy opens a suitcase, gets out a small white packet and rubs it between his fingers, making a face; it appears dry. Then he opens another, opens it, and vigorously rubs the front his white shirt. Did he come here just to do that?

No, but I found a couple of packets in the blue suitcase, and one was dry. The other did the job! I didn't have to kick myself for not buying a stain stick!

We're putting this day in the win column

Listening to the Weather Channel now. Not the current weather, but the weather from 1996 or so. It’s a YouTube video that lasts 45 minutes, and all the music is from the current era, made by Vaporware composers.

Google AI summary of the genre:

Vaporwave is an internet-born music microgenre and visual art movement that emerged in the early 2010s. It functions as a surreal, melancholic, and satirical commentary on consumer capitalism, tech-utopianism, and globalized popular culture.

Just what you want from your music, right? Nice tune but where’s the satirical commentary

It’s more than that. It has the same function for people under 35 as the orchestral Mantovani - Easy Listening did for people of my generation, I think. Aural security blanket.

Vaporwave is widely interpreted as an ambiguous critique and parody of consumer capitalism and technological utopianism, using the "dead" aesthetics of a recent past to evoke a sense of nostalgia for a future that never materialized.

Sort of. But also no. It did materialize:

The aesthetic's visual style is a distinct collage that blends certain elements of the 1980s and 1990s, such as the interior design of malls and lobbies (classical Greco-Roman statues and columns, palm plants, pink and cyan pastel colors, tiled floors, Memphis Lite patterns), Japan's 1980s economic boom, retro commercials, retro computers, 1990s web design, early CGI, and logos of obsolete brands.

We did have those things. The Windows 95 aesthetic, the typefaces, the obligatory Classical bust floating on a checkerboard pattern - if those things hadn’t existed they wouldn’t be a signifier of the era.

It's a rather broad concept, though. Listen to the opening bars, and name that decade!

I recognized this right away. It's from a suite of music that gets increasingly harrowing as it progresses, until the music is indistuguishable from a form of inert insanity. You can probably guess the inspiration:

Yes, it’s an Al Bowlly tune, run through the same sensibility as the end of “The Shining.” It doesn’t really match the visuals. But the visuals somehow mesh, finding a common place devoid of motion or life, but not dead, just a limnal disused world . It’s the same idea behind the Backrooms guy’s other video project, The Oldest Guest, and suggests there’s this powerful and mournful longing for a world that ceased to be at the turn of the century.

So? Eras always have nostalgia for other times, and drench it with saccharine sentiment. True. In the 70s were were nostalgic for Happy Days times, I guess - but there was so much of a difference between 1975 and 1955, and there just isn’t that much difference between 2025 and 2005. You can blame the end of the monoculture - everyone could go live in their own subgenres, disconnected to the others, with little overlap. A world of soap bubbles, not Venn diagrams but that splot long ago. No, there's the sense that the development of the physical world has stalled, because every visual and stylistic innovation takes place on the phone. The canvas is tiny and the demands of the medium push everything into a brighter, simpler, stupider place. On TV, commercials all seem to be drug ads with the same tone and plot. Or insurance. Everything is blue or The Color. Everything is ironic and wants you to know it’s an ad.

No surprise why there are all these channels devoted to old ads. It’s a different world. It’s happier, more honest, sexier, more confidence. Of course they’re ads and hence, you know, fictions. But they’re more interesting.

To tell you the truth, I miss it too.

It’s 1960.

These are from Vogue. I do not have a great stack of Vogues. These have been taken from archive.org, where they were scanned with a potato in 1994.

I’m not sure this look caught on.

But a great deal of fashion, or at least a good deal of fashion ads, aren’y meant to make you buy that particular product, but get an idea about the brand.

In this case, “the brand can be quite stupid, when it comes to headgear.”

“A magic channel of protection.”

Interesting idea: everything’s floral. She’s reading a flower newspaper through flower spectacles. Hence that time of the month will be a wonderful scented bloom, I guess. Agreeable euphemisms and implications.

One of the best slogans of the era.

Oh, it’s about hair color! It’s only about hair color.

The look of beauty even on “Drizmal Days.” A perfectly cromulent word, and we should use it more.

The guy’s expression as he bears in does not seem to be something that would entice or intrigue many women.

You can almost feel the brittle, shellacked finish, can’t you?

They’re still around, and the company’s history site noted that the 1960s era was ruled nay Roux. They also made “‘Tween Time, a non-flaking retouch color stick.” So many things to keep track of.

Oh, I think most of them would dare. I don’t think they’d have any trouble being hated at all.

My mom used this stuff. A fixture in the bathroom. I had no idea what it was. Seemed more astringent than lotion; was there another formulation?

Still around, and here’s the surprise: there was a Bonne Bell. (Not Bonnie.) She was the daughter of the cosmetic salesman, Jesse Bell, who made the stuff in his basement and sold it door to door. And the company is now run by two sisters . . . named Bell.

Yes, they're related.

Helene Curtis, on the other hand, “ was founded in Chicago in 1927 as the National Mineral Company by partners Gerald Gidwitz and Louis Stein.

They’d go on to make Stopette - (altogether now, What’s My Line enthusiasts: poof!) and Suave. Bought by Unilever in 1996.