It’s been over a month (hi) since the last newsletter. I call mulligan. But if you’re here, thanks again for reading. Thanks again for being here. Black lives matter.
As promised, here is a high-res photo of a Grade-A, sure to hit you in the eyes like a big petqa nat fizz, pop, bang Zev Rovine Selections (ZRS) tote. My brother took the photo. I threw the bag in the air. Someone else stacked the hay bales.
Anyone ever tell you that global warming looks good on you? Anyway…
What you cover is who you are Andre Gee noted.
That, then, would make me an unspecified but perhaps familiar tote bag.
On the other hand: “Too many totes. Who is out there touting this as the default brand merch?? Whoever it is, they are doing a great job,” asked Jess Henderson on “The Tote Issue” of Outsider Now. In the way that Saturn Returns are sometimes described, her query sounds particularly salient since it feels like a condemnation as well as an appreciated observation. Revisiting the issue of this very-much-so undefeated Mailchimp missive felt like cracking open a fortune cookie. If they could print diatribes on fortune cookie paper it’d go like:
The odd part is that one is meant to see this as a gift more often than a practicality. When you’re leaving an event they give you an empty bag (!?). I know we talk about altruism a lot—but this is not generosity.
Jess knows Baggage (as an ethos, not at all as a tardy tote bag review newsletter). She knows the immediately put upon, the sideswiped-by-a-Revel (rip) feeling of seeing too many totes. That sense, pre-pandemic, of being in those neighborhoods and enclaves were affectations of cool tended to cluster and, like some wet AC drip to the dome, becoming instantly self-conscious and grumpy, hair product leaking down your forehead. Or something similar.
As a cultural confection, there’s a chance that every encounter with a tote can be dispiriting. Or the opposite. It can break your heart to know your interests can be parlayed as more merch. It’s not just totes, really. Puppies, politicians, potted plants: Each, you figure, has a similar correlative of fans and haters although the stakes are considerably different.
There is so much cultural production that it becomes just that—confection. It becomes the ornaments and adornments in the public plazas we occupy the most nowadays: Instagram and, much less so, urban/indoor public-private spaces. We’re all in the waiting room or the training facility and have been, every day since mid-March. It’s been months and we’re still waiting for the next round of the game to begin. An empty bag, whether as a gift or a purchase, is a metonym for preparedness and patience as much as it is a symbol of a lack of possessions.
The next fortune cookie—assuming you purchased enough food to score a free wonton soup OR soda/bottle of water—would say:
Turns out there are also levels of in-the-know in the choice of tote too. How complex the decision of who you want the world to read you as through your bag!
What then makes this a subcategory in the first place considering that, when looking at the samples in my possession, most of the bags are near identical aside from color and screenprint? (Tl;dr most totes are the same, etc.) Still, the differentiators include a zipper closure, three or four holsters (industry term: bottle pockets) for your 750 ml of unfiltered Loire Valley nectar, and, sometimes, a smaller interior pocket for keeping a wine key, sunglasses, a spare face mask—you know, the I can’t see the haters at the park—6 feet away and their vibe is a corny 400 Degreez and rising—starter park.
Hypothetically, say you’ve enjoyed ~$40 bottle of good glou glou (not Glou Glou but not not anything that you and a loved one would want to hunker down with either). There’s a chance that enjoying that bottle of markedly natty natty wine made you feel like someone turned the pilot life of your soul back on. Still, then, there’s a further chance that seeing ZRS’ May 29th post pushed the exact right combination of dopamine and guilt to produce the easiest of armchair activist compunctions: A $50 donation to the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund and DM’d proof of receipt in exchange for a tote.
You pray that the circumstances for such a post won’t present themselves again but America does not lack for moral merch (construed as you will) in this immoral time.
Which, you suppose, only adds to why the ZRS tote is a remarkable number among the wine tote subcategory. Prior to the social media reiki therapy magic of imbuing political purpose, it used to be that it was just such a rare sighting; it was the bag for folks who work in the industry. That industry being the natural (natty) wine space which has gatecrashed the millennial lexicon and refuses to give their seat back to craft beer or hard seltzer or tequila-somebody-soda.
Expressly, the individual who’d be able to countenance a ZRS tote were formerly the type who knew better than to walk around town with a similar bag from say, Four Horseman. No longer. The jawn is out of the bag, er, bottle, er, bottle bag(!), as it were. Having both totes but only a nice photo of the former, I can attest to the higher quality of the ZRS jawn, but where the latter’s concerned, it was an impulse tack-on to the bill after Jackie and I had finished up a sweet if slightly claustrophobic dinner (lifetimes ago, it seems).
I’ve referred to it, cartoonishly so, as the “Goodbye Horsies” tote; though that’s a mental gimmick, I suppose: A way to remember the nice dinner and not that the eponymous horsemen are harbingers of terrible things somehow only slightly more terrifying than what we have to contend with on the regular. It comes in a black, 10oz. cotton wash that, should you be in a pinch, works incredibly well as a cat hair lint brush. It’s also available in the, however much an industry standard, awkwardly-termed “natural” color.
Already though, Jackie’s already seen another ZRS tote (the blue not the green) out around our block, not-discreetly swangin from the shoulder of a fellow justice-and-carbonic-reds enthusiast, despite knowing that these parts are for brandishing your cute Forêt mini tote. (Briefly: an automatic upgrade to any dinner party or curbside/parkside/beachside picnic.) But it’s a sort of signaling that’s all interconnected anyway.
The root of the matter, I’ve learned from drunken conversations with friends who know their wine (always know your history, etc.) is that it’s the distributor who matters. And, as one of the few distributors of record, the ZRS tote—an empty bag that you fill as you see fit—is to acknowledge or, as Outsider Now would uncarefully put it, to advertise for free, your favorite place’s favorite place.
booga ooga,
fc