A note about the cover: The image on the cover was taken in an effort to visually credit the ephemeral influences that have greatly informed the making of this issue of Tri-County Pie Eat. This gathering of objects reflects the chance encounters, beautiful eccentricities, and daily minutiae that have had a tremendous impact on the content and aesthetic, but which do not lend themselves well to being described with words. The two pieces featured that deserve explicit recognition, however, are the screen printed hand on the front cover and the postcard on the back which reads, “you are nothing without feminist art�. the screenprinted hand was made by Saturn Millner as part of a group show entitled, YIKES! Located at Through the Music Gallery and Studio in Battleboro, Vermont during the month of June, 2010. THe postcard is a piece by Portland artist sarah gottesdiener. it was distributed around town a few years ago and has been a permanent fixture on the walls of many houses since. it also had a cameo appearance during an episode of portlandia.
issue two This is the second issue of Tri-County Pie Eat; a quarterly publication which focuses on recognizing the efforts of conscientious artists, innovators, and malcontents who exist outside the realm of mainstream newsstand media. In this issue, we strove to create a more perfect union. While the success of such an effort is nebulous, we aimed to include more voices and outlooks, more friendships working together. We have gone back to our metaphorical roots and become excited again, sought out adventures once more, and remembered why we started Tri-County in the first place. This issue was born from a summer full of midnight rides, earnest phone calls, dog adoptions, trips to the river, and eating nothing but half vegan devilled eggs for weeks. Above all, as always, we sought to recognize individuals who excel at crafting self-satisfying lives. A little bit country, a little bit rock and roll, we hope that you enjoy the seconde issue even more than the first. Summer may be winding down, but fall is a season with its own set of inspirations and we can already feel the stories for issue three unfolding before us like an open roaD.
TRI-COUNTY PIE EAT IS CURRENTLY LOCATED IN PORTLAND, OREGON. Questions? Comments? Concerned? Write to us at: 5213 ne 21st ave, Portland ORegon 97211 / hello@tri-countyquarterly.com
C o n t r i b u t e r s : Abby Banks abbyrbanks.tumblr.com e ont LaP reve h sh ara : S clare igh f i Le r: che n’ edito istin sky ‘ Kr s lon on tor Edi ficti itor: y Jab bank y l d non ion e : sal : abb r r t es fic Edito edito jon n e e art ntur hel e t: p adv e d nt Pri
Ebin Lee ebinlee.weebly.com Eric Monrad newriverside.posterous.com Jes Rega Kristin Leigh kristinmleigh@gmail.com Lucas Foglia lucasfoglia.com
Mark Anthony Martinez sonoftherifleman.tumblr.com cubfluffer.com Melissa Joubert Michael Hernandez michaelahernandez.com Sarah Cloutier Sarah George sarah gottesdiener sarahgottesdiener.com Sarah LaPonte sarahlaponte.com Saturn Millner Tim Adam Maynard timadambags.com
issue two 6. Bootstrap homes: Sarah Cloutier 9. MIchael Hernandez: New images 16. Sea Legs, non fiction by Kristin Leigh 19. Collectives and Communes: Eric Monrad 26. Son of a Gun: Mark Anthony Martinez 30. Lucas Foglia, excerpt from a natural order 32. New adventures by Abby Banks 36. Catching up with Catching out 39. Muff tuff: photographs by sarah Laponte 49. Jes Rega, On becoming a woman 50. New work by Ebin Lee 53. Tim adam: bags for everyone 55. an ode to pork by melissa joubert
Bootstrap Homes text by Sarah Cloitier/ Images by Sarah LaPonte
Bootstrap Homes is an attempt to change attitudes towards homelessness through art, while supplying the basic needs of life to homeless people. What do people need? Food and clean water. Shelter from the weather. Sanitation. A secure place for their belongings. A safe place to sleep. Respect and pride. A place to exist. All of these are hard to get when you’re homeless. I can’t do anything about food, water, and sanitation right now, but I can provide legal space to exist: $300 camper-trailers known as Boots, which can be towed by hand, and legally parked on the street. They have locks and walls and roofs, and storage space, and ventilation. They’re easily cleaned, waterproof, fire resistant. They can be simply made from common materials. They can be made beautiful. I hope that working with communities to make these into quirky, whimsical, beautiful little homes will give everyone a sense of safety and even pride in these dwellings and their inhabitants.
In designing these, I had a number of self-imposed design specifcations to contend with. I wanted to keep them under $300: affordable within a year at a dollar a day. They had to be sturdy and long-lasting, to offset their initial cost. They needed to be light enough that people could pull them by hand or by bike, and narrow enough to go easily on the sidewalk, so that they would not be a nuisance to either homeless people or passersby. They needed to be waterproof and fireproof, of course, and easily washed between occupants or after vandalism. They needed to be easily constructed with few tools, and further, I required that any parts must be easily available locally. It had to be legal to park them somewhere, as one of their most pertinent benefits for homeless people would be legal space to exist. I was able to meet all of these specifcations, although there is plenty of room for improvement. The final Boots are approximately three and a half feet wide by six and a half feet long, nine if the roof and tow handle are included, and just under five feet tall. The interior space is almost four feet from floor to ceiling arch. They weigh around 150 pounds when empty, cost just under $300, meet building codes for fire safety, and require no specialized equipment
Michael Hernandez
Photographs
S e a
L e g s
images and text by kristin leigh I wake up with a jolt. My sleeping bag hugs the wall of my bunk and for a moment I don’t know where I am. The pungent smell of salmon, diesel exhaust and stale sweat overwhelms me. Then it hits me and the strangeness of it all washes over me again. I’m not used to living on an Alaskan fishing boat. I hear the sizzle of bacon hitting a hot pan in the galley kitchen not ten feet away. I rub my hands on my cold face, trying desperately to wake up. I could only hope there was coffee. “Hey, Kristin. It’s 4 A.M! Time to wake up and live the dream.” Ian says from the kitchen. I can hear him sifting through drawers. Thank God one of us is a morning person. “Yeah. I’m up.” I feel for my pants at the bottom of my sleeping bag and drag them on, along with my thermals and double layer socks. Even in August, these Alaskan mornings are an icy bitch. It takes all my resolve to will myself out of my warm cocoon. I hop down from my bunk, pull on my rubber XtraTuf boots, hoodie and survey the
scene around me. One of the deckhands, Jeremy sits at the kitchen table, thumbing through old, mangled crew logs from past seasons. I can’t tell how old he is but his face is worn and parched from years at sea. He hasn’t shaved for days and his hands are shaking. I suspect he’s detoxing from something nasty. Nick, an ex-firefighter, hums Bob Dylan in the kitchen, clearly in his element. “Want some coffee?” He asks, pointing to the nailed down Coffeemate. “Thought you’d never ask.” I say, walking past the table and over to the bar. I grab a cup, latched to the wall, and rub my hoodie over the edge. It still has traces of last night’s clam chowder in it, but it’s clean enough for me. Today I am wearing proper fishing boat attire but when I arrived with Ian last night, it was pretty obvious I had just stepped off a plane from Texas. I wore a navy blue cotton dress with hand sewn sparrows on the shoulders with black Mary Janes. Ian held my hand as we approached his boat, the Kendal. It was pretty obvious this was a booty call. The crew, in their flannel plaids and green rubber overalls watched me smirking, as I climbed
onto the boat, holding Ian for support as I steadied myself, lacking the sea legs and footwear to board a purse seiner gracefully. The testosterone in the air was palpable. Even nature, with its icy blue mountains dotting the horizon as far as I could see, was on steroids. I wasn’t in Austin any more. “You guys better get your asses in gear!” Monty shouts from the wheelhouse above us. He’s steering us in for this morning’s first set and is ready to get down to work. He doesn’t care that I’m visiting; he’s got more pressing things on his mind this morning. “How does pancakes and bacon sound? Hungry, skipper?” Nick shouts up at the ceiling, holding the box of Bisquick steady as the boat lurches and sways. “Just toss me up a peanut butter and jelly, will you?” I see Ian roll his eyes. I’m sure Monty’s demands get old. I’m happy to play the good natured, gowith-the-flow tourist. I lean over the bar and dump two heaping spoonfuls of non-dairy creamer into my coffee. Nick watches me over the griddle, “You know that stuff sparkles if you light it on fire.”
“Whatever.” I grin, “If this is my worst vice out here in the middle of ocean, I’ll manage just fine.” “At least the weather isn’t gonna be shitty today.” Jeremy says, his eyes scanning the reports. “It all comes down to luck, anyways.” Nick pulls strips of bacon out of the pan with a fork and shakes the grease off each one. “Don’t let Monty hear you say that,” Jeremy’s bloodshot eyes motion to the ceiling. “I think we will have some decent sets,” Ian says, sipping his coffee. I know enough to realize that whatever I say will sound naïve, so I drink my coffee in silence and watch Nick pour batter into elegant circles onto the griddle. “It’ll be just five more minutes before these pancakes are ready,” Nick eyes the bubbling mounds of batter, “In the meantime, I’ll make his royal pain in the ass’s sandwich a la carte.” I watch him spread a thick hunk of peanut butter on white bread. I can feel the coffee roiling around in my empty stomach, like the rolling wake off the stern of the boat. Everyone else knows what to expect, more or less, but I’m still clueless and unprepared. I can’t help but feel a little nervous. “Here ya’ go.” Nick pushes a plate across the particle
board bar towards Ian with two pieces of crisp bacon and a stack of pancakes bathed in syrup. If this didn’t help us get our day started, nothing would. “Thanks, Nick.” Ian grabs the plate and rolls his pancake into a cylinder. He pops it in his mouth and grins at me, syrup sticking to his beard. If ever I doubted Ian’s choice to spend his summers up here, I was wrong. His joy is contagious; it makes me so glad to see him like this, in his natural element. “Come on! Everyone on deck!” Monty yells, a booming voice above us, “Where’s my sandwich?” I cram a pancake in my mouth, and wash it down with the rest of my coffee. I run over to a makeshift closet, pull on thick neoprene overalls and climb up the stairs, slick with seawater. I walk out onto the deck, the air is frigid and my nose is already red. That’s when the beauty of it hits me like a truck. The open sea lies before me on four sides of this fifty foot boat. In the distance I can see a shoreline thick with trees, rocks and beach. The sky is pink and so wide it feels like we’re on the edge of the world, about to fall off. Even as a tourist I get why they do this. They leave their jobs and their families every year and I don’t think it’s just for the Alaskan wilderness, the endless days that stretch from twenty hours long or the ocean life that knocks you out with its beauty. Most of us spend the bulk of our days unconnected from our food and the products that make up our obsessively curated lifestyles. It’s an endless cycle of purchase and
consume. Everything is so far removed and disconnected from us that it’s hard to feel satisfied, to feel like our lives matter. Living with a crew of fishermen on a boat, pulling wild fish from the ocean is so visceral, so in your face real and straight forward, it’s a relief. The urge to escape society and to connect with something that is tangible is what brings these guys back every season. It jolts you awake in a culture that is distracted and half asleep. “Snap out of it, greenhorn!” Monty’s deep voice is directly behind me now. I turned around and see him smiling. “Do you see that?” He points to a spot in the ocean 200 yards away. At first I can’t tell what he’s referring to, then I see it. A whole school of fish, swimming and flopping in the water. They are packed in so thick that they looked like a giant pot of spaghetti on high heat. The sea is boiling with salmon. “I think today’s going to be a good day for us.” Monty says. I can’t agree more.
New Riverside Cafe Coillective, 1971. (that’s me on the far left) Photo Eve MacLeish.
Collectives and Communes Hippies and Communists in Minneapolis circa 1971. Nixon was president, the Viet Nam war raged, and many of us thought the “Revolution” was just around the corner. As a 16 year old orphan I moved from California to Minneapolis to live with my brother, the 6th place I’d live in 4 years, in 5 different states. Our apartment in the hippie West Bank neighborhood was directly above a new coffee house with good food and live music 6 nights a week: it was my second family for many years. Clothes were free at the Free Store, healthcare was free at the People’s Cinic, and Food Co-ops fed the various neighborhoods. There were always posters to draw and photos to shoot with my 35mm Miranda: here are a few.
Photographs and Text by Eric Monrad
Betty Boop
“Watch Cat� poster we appropriated from theWobblies. Heller was our landlord who was tearing down our historic neighborhood to build high rise projects
Father Bill, hippie priest, one of the Cafe founders
Eve
Eric, 1970. Photo Eve MacLeish.
Onstage at the Cafe, 1970
Mark anthony Martinez
Chapter 1 Son of a Gun: The Origins of a Name
I want to start with a brief story about my mother, Cindy Olvera. She grew up on the
Southeast side of San Antonio, Texas, an area of town primarily populated by African American and Mexican‐American residents.1 Here, racism manifested through the color line, a line that divides White and non‐white populations within a city.2 In the 1960s, San Antonio consisted of eighteen square miles of poverty centered around the West and South sides of town.3 This poverty was the direct result of a concentration of wealth on the North, and predominately White, side of town.4 Subsequently, by the late 1960s, San Antonio had become the poorest major city in the United States, with more than half of its population living below the government poverty line.5
This demographic information, provided by David Montejano, in his book, Quixote's Soldiers,
in conjunction with my mother's age, is important to me because it informed my initial line of inquiry and the inspiration for this thesis project: How could my mother have been raised in an environment of poverty and racism and yet – I had never heard any of it – as a child or an adult?6 I knew my grandparents grew up poor – and I knew that my mother was the baby of the family, born in the late‐ fifties. By 1966, at the height of racial tension and opposition to the Vietnam war, my mother was
1 David Montejano, Quixote’s Soldiers: A Local History of the Chicano Movement, 19661981, 1st ed. (University of Texas Press, 2010). 2 In 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois wasn’t the first to use the phrase the “color line,” but when he posited this phrase as “the problem of the twentieth century,” however, I am sure he was well aware, that the color line would be a 21st‐century problem as well. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Bantam Classics, 1989), xxxi. 3 Fred H Schmidt, Spanish surnamed American employment in the Southwest ([Washington,: Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; for sale by the Supt. of Docs., U.S. Govt. Print. Off.,, 1970). 4 Montejano, Quixote’s Soldiers, 24. 5 Montejano, Quixote’s Soldiers, 24‐27.
6 Montejano, Quixote’s Soldiers.
only eight, which made her too young for any real political activity or participation in El Movimiento, or the Chicano Movement (Figure 1). A movement that represented (and in some contemporary cases still represents) marginalized communities of color that were regularly exposed to rampant discrimination and economic inequity.7 Chicanos repudiated Whiteness by acknowledging their indigenous and African heritage in the face of radical oppression.
Figure 1. San Antonio, “114 F‐street” (1968) Olvera Family
What's more, my mother loves to talk about her childhood, but not about the adversity of her
surroundings or politics in general. Instead, she most frequently talks about the comforts of having grown up with television, and frequently reminisces on the time her father brought home a newly acquired 15” black and white television set. She discovered shows like Tarzan, The Lone Ranger and most influential of all, The Rifleman, on this TV. This last program was very important personally because she would later name her first born son, Mark, after the son of the rifleman, Mark McCain, played by Johnny Crawford (Figure 2). Due to this key fact, I place myself within the larger context
7 Elizabeth Martinez, De colores means all of us: Latina veiws for a multicolored century. (Cambridge South End Press 1998., 1998).
of ethnic and racial assimilation, which is central to U.S. History. My name was not Jose, like my father or his father. Nor was it derived from a catholic saint. The language of my name is English, not that of my forebears, Nahuatl, the indigenous tongue of the Aztecs. Most importantly, for my mother, my name was not Mexican. With this conscious choice in mind, it becomes evident that through assimilation, one learns to ignore the Mexican experience in favor of a White American fantasy (provided via the television screen). A fantasy made all the more appealing through the uncomfortable alternative of recognizing a reality of racism that subjugated the lives of those who inhabited the West and South sides of 1960s San Antonio, Texas.
Figure 2. Four Star Sussex, “Cast of the Rifleman,” (1958) Johnny Crawford (left) and Chuck Connors (right)
What would later become clear to me through the stories my mother told, was that even
though San Antonio was very poor, my mother's family and the television insulated her from the chaos of the outside world. My grandfather gave my mother everything she wanted and thus gave her a childhood that even her older siblings did not have, much less her parents. Unfortunately, this
insulation came with a price and my mother was largely unaware of the socioeconomic conditions and bigotry of the world in which she was growing up. I attribute my mother's sheltered experience to a process of becoming American – a process I feel can be related to both a racial and ethnic experience – wherein individuals choose to buy into the “American Dream.”8 This dream promises a fair shot at economic opportunity and equality, specifically for my mother, through shedding Mexican values and Chicano ideologies. The editors of the book, Doing Race, Paula Moya and Hazel Markus, provide an insightful commentary as to what makes a topic like racism and oppression so difficult for Americans to face: Both possibilities that individuals might not be able to surmount the disadvantage of being nonwhite in U.S. Society and that they might not be able to free themselves from their group‐based associations – can be upsetting. The idea that a person might be associated with groups of people or histories of oppression with which she does not personally identify seems to undermine one of this country's most cherished narratives, the one known as the American Dream.9 In contrast to European ethnic groups, such as Polish, Irish or Italian immigrants who could, (to coin a phrase from David Roediger) “work toward whiteness” and buy into the unifying identification of Whiteness.10 Non‐White peoples – such as, in the case of my family, assimilation promised to make them psychologically American but never promised to treat them as such. As result and whether or not my family chooses to recognize this factor – the Chicano is perpetually foreign in their own land.
8 Hazel Rose Markus and Paula M. L. Moya, Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century (W. W. Norton & Company, 2010), 59‐62. 9 Ibid., 57.
10
David Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White (Basic Books, 2005).
new adventures
photographs by ABBY BANKS
Saturn in the music box, New Orleans
New Orleans Wolf
Bandelier National Park, New Mexico
Ezra on the hill, Los Angeles
Interveiw with Sarah George,
director of Catching Out; a documentary about hopping trains. images by jan cook.
TRI-COUNTY: How did you come about making this film? Was it an idea you have had for a long time or something that developed out of other projects?
Sarah George: I’m not sure if hopping freight trains was an excuse to make a film or if making a film was an excuse to hop trains but I always say I became a filmmaker and trainhopper at the same time. There was very little premeditation. What did you expect going into it and how was that different-or was that any different- that what you actually experience during the process of making it?
I expected it would take about a year to make the film. It took seven. Also, I thought the RR companies would be my biggest opposition, but it turned out to be the trainhoppers themselves! What was your process like in find-
ing subjects to interview and travel with?
I realized early on that the film needed strong characters, but the process of finding them was totally random. Northbank Fred introduced me to Switch and Baby Girl. Jessica wrote me a very convincing email. Lee and I became penpals before hopping trains together. There is a scene towards the end of the film where Jessica’s friends are talking about whether or not it is a good thing to make a film about riding freight because it will let too many people know about it. What was your impression of the new generation of train riders? And where you able to talk to any old timers about how they saw trainhopping changing as an activity that is increasingly documented.
The trainhopping community has tensions like any other community and there is friction
between different generations of riders. I like Luther the Jet’s take on it - embracing younger riders and not trying to impose a nostalgic definition of what is or isn’t true to the legacy. Trainhopping in the media is much more of a controversy among younger riders who depend on the trains for their lifestyle. But I feel that trainhopping has been a part of popular culture since we’ve had trains to ride. Can you talk a little about what it was like to shoot footage on and around the trains?
Trains are very photogenic so that made it easy! But honestly I invested a lot of time figuring how to shoot on moving trains and safety was a huge priority. We made sure to respect the trains. Have you train hopped since filming?
I took Catching Out on a self-styled distribution tour hopping trains between venues across the country. And my husband and I have taken a couple romantic adventures together. But somehow I can’t seem to make the time anymore which is an indictment of a reality that feels less and less sane. Has the experience of riding trains changed your outlook in regards to other aspects of your life?
Hopping freight trains changes your perspective completely. It is the opposite of the homogenous culture that seems to have consumed authentic experience, at least in capitalistic America.
Some of the narratives in Catching Out allude to the dangers involved in riding trains- both in terms of threatening fellow riders as well as the mechanical dangers involvedbut it seems the film as a whole focuses the beauty in the experience and the sense of community-can you speak a little to that?
I find there’s a lot less to fear on freight trains then at, say, a bank. Or more realistically, in a car. I do find the beauty intoxicating, and I value the sense of community tremendously. But the dangers are real. What kind of research did you do prior to filming? I
just tried to immerse myself in the culture and spend as much time listening as I could. It was important for me to get the story “right” and not sensationalize it - most of my research was just hanging out and talking. And drinking. What are you currently working on? I’m working on my house. Another project that I totally underestimated when I started. Fondest memories from your time filming? Sleeping in the trackside hobo
jungle in San Luis Obispo. Riding thru snow in the Sierras. Watching 4th of July fireworks in Flagstaff from the train. A worker who put me on train when I needed some help. Mesmerizing moonlight along the Missouri. Waking up along the Mississippi. Seeing endless waves of grain. The Canadian Rockies.
muff tuff portraits by Sarah LaPonte
AMANDA
ABBY
Kaija
Whitney
CAITLIN
CAYLEE
CLARE
Helen
ON BECOMING A WOMAN, BY JES REGA When I was 9 years old my parents bought a house. A little piece of the working class dream right smack dab in the middle of San Francisco’s Mission district. That summer we moved out of our creepy little basement flat in the Fillmore and into a run down Victorian that my mother spent the next 20 years restoring to its original glory. During the move, my paternal grandmother – Selma Beckelman – asked my mother if there was anything my mother needed that she could buy for her. My mother said “yeah, the kids are gonna have their own rooms for the first time and could really use new beds”. So my grandmother bought us a lifetime membership to the Jewish Community Center (what did my mother know about what the kids needed?!) For the next 5 years, I spent every minute that I wasn’t in school or asleep at the JCC. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I took gymnastics and the rest of the week I was a star swimmer for the JCC Swim Team. About 2 years into my swimming career, I started my period. I didn’t tell my mom because I kept hoping it would just go away. I sincerely believed that if I didn’t talk about it, it would just go away. At the time I couldn’t see the many flaws in my strategy. Since I hadn’t told my mom, I had to score my pads by stealing them from a woman I babysat for after school. I remember she had several boxes of varying absorbency, coverage, and thickness. In my panic at having to choose from so many options, I grabbed a fistful of winged overnights, which for those of you fortunate enough to have never encountered an overnight pad with wings, let me say this – hobo bed rolls are smaller than this thing. The following day, armed with my overnight with wings, I went to my swim meet. I put that giant fucking pad right in the crotch of
my swimsuit and swam my little ass off. That night my mom came into my room and said “I think it’s time I show you how to use a tampon”. I took this to mean that she would leave a little pamphlet on my desk and I could read it when I had the time. Instead, she returns with a box of OB non-applicator tampons. She sets those down on my desk, removes her pants and mom underwear. She unwraps the little missile shaped vagina plug, hikes her foot on my bed – the bed she had to buy ‘cause grandma decided we needed our Jewish community more than a place to sleep and if it wasn’t for that goddamn JCC swim team my mom wouldn’t have one foot on my bed and her hairy bush in my face right now. But, alas, here we are…… She takes the terrifyingly compact cotton bullet and shoves it right into the thick of her massive bush. With just her finger no less. And all I could think was, were the fuck did it go?! The second image that came into view after the smoke of my mothers vagina being seared into my retna had cleared was that of the OB tampon commercial that was on TV at the time. I young woman behind the frost of an 80’s camera filter leaps through a park (why is she leaping? I have no idea.) while this song plays: OB It’s the way it should be Keep it simple And set yourself free From the extras (ahhhhh) That you really don’t need Just try OB And you’ll see Thanks OB, but I’ve seen all I need to see.
Ebin Lee: New Work
Tie
Earring
Shoe
Tim Adam:
BAGS FOR EVERYONE PHOTOGRAPHS BY SARAH LAPONTE
TRI-COUNTY: How did you get started making backpacks? TIM ADAM MAYNARD: I worked for a company called Seagull Bags out of Ohio for two years, from 2007-2009. Then I moved out here, brought my sewing machine with me. When I moved here I, and got a job sewing for an awning/tent maker on Alberta. I started making backpacks on the side just at home, usually just for friends, through word of mouth, but then I created a website which got more people looking at my bags. I’ve been doing it full time now for a year and a half.
How did you first get hired at Seagull?
I had a friend who worked there, and when I moved back to Columbus, Ohio, they needed someone to cut fabric so I got a part time job doing that. After a couple months I started jumping on the sewing machine, my friend would teach me after hours how to put together a bag, and then I started doing it on the clock.
Awesome! that is really great. What is new business wise? Actually, the whole time I’ve been making bags, I’ve had no brand really, just a name
but it hasn’t been on any bags. Except these bags are all going to japan as part of a whole sale order and my distributer there created this because they wanted a label and I didn’t have one, but I finally got my own branding and am launching a new website next week.
which is why they take so long to do. I’m trying to get away from that. I don’t like doing that because I do all the bags myself and its too much production style. I’d rather do smaller orders. I’m not trying to be like Chrome. I’m just trying to make a living doing what I do.
How did you get found in Japan?
It’s exciting that instead of just designing the bags, you also do every aspect of making them yourself. Do you think it’s easier to do what you do here, in Portland?
I’m not sure, actually. Somewhere on Tumblr probably. I have an inkling on who it was though, this kid in new york who’s nineteen and bought a bag from me and then started a fashion blog that is somehow really popular now, so I think through
that blog that a lot business started to come my way. I haven’t been really pushing business at all because I’ve been doing these wholesale orders that have been taking up so much time that I haven’t been able to do any websites or branding stuff, everything was super simple, basically pictures and an email address, but that’s about to change and I’m excited to see what happens.
How big are the wholesale orders? It depends, but probably the largest was 260 bags,
Definitely. I think now that I’ve done it, I could take it somewhere else, but I feel like people are
very receptive here to small businesses.
And how has Portland been treating you so far? I’ve been here two years, almost three. It’s great.
What’s it like when you seen people with your backpacks? Do you talk to them? (Laughs) No, not usually. I got on the bus one day though and sat by a lady who had a bag and I had mine, and she complemented it. That was pretty funny.
ode to pork
by melissa joubert
Joubert’s prosciutto leg hanging in the basement, above a drumset. Photo by Sarah LaPonte
I love meat. It can be gently coaxed into such a variety of mouthwatering flavors and toothsome textures. Meat is an important ingredient in the culinary traditions of the majority of cultures in the world. Human beings have been raising animals for their meat for thousands of years, and hunting them for far longer. But, meat is complicated, it is complex, and it is controversial. The reasons for and against eating meat are as varied and unique as the world’s sausages. Whether we choose to eat meat or not, we all still consume factory-farm raised animals through the use of slaughterhouse by-products that are processed into fertilizers to enrich the soils of organic fruit and vegetable farms across America. But, I digress. This is neither a stringent essay on food politics in the United States, nor an analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of consuming an animal protein based diet; This is an ode to pork. This project was spawned from my true love of dry-cured ham legs paired with my good fortune of meeting a couple of local hog farmers. While interning at an organic farm in Yamhill, OR during the summer of 2008, my boss took my co-workers and I to his friend’s farm for a tour and a cold pint. (Both farmers happened to have refrigerated kegs of local brews in their barns!) The farm, Square Peg Farm of Forest Grove, owned and operated by Chris Rhoem and Amy Benson, was 40 acres of rolling green pasture, where their organic hogs and laying hens roamed. Chris and Amy also had a small orchard, a sizeable u-pick strawberry patch, and a handful of acres in vegetable production. To a young farm intern, this place was a veritable agrarian dream come true. I vowed then and there that one day I would either: a) purchase a half-hog from them or b) convince them to adopt me so that I could live and work at their farm forever. In the spring of 2011, my boyfriend Mark and I finally took the plunge and put a down payment on an organic, pastured-raised half-hog from Square Peg.
As giddy as school girls at a Hello Kitty convention, we drove out to Forest Grove to give Chris and Amy our deposit. After taking a stroll around the farm, we gladly handed over our down payment, and Chris gave us a superfluous pig’s head as a parting gift, knowing that Mark, a cook by trade, would know what to do with it. I’d be lying if I said that driving back into the city with a 20-pound hog’s head in a black trash bag in the backseat of the car didn’t make me feel at least a little unnerved. Our half-hog was delivered three months later, and the rest is history. Described below is our 9-step process for curing and drying a ham leg at home. (Thankfully, we had use of a restaurant kitchen for the delivery, temporary storage, and butchering of our half-hog.)
Images courtesy Melissa Joubert
1. Find a pig farmer near you. 2. Buy a half-hog (or whole hog, if you dare) from said farmer, and have it delivered to a location that can accommodate a half-carcass the size of a small man. 3. Cut the half-hog into manageable pieces and vacuum-seal each piece (to be frozen) keeping the leg aside for immediate curing. 4. Pack the leg in coarse kosher salt, paying special attention to the cut end. Cover with a lid, and weigh down with river rocks. 5. Keep salt-packed leg in refrigerator for one day per pound. Pour off accumulated liquid as needed. 6. Remove from salt. Rinse. Pat dry with paper towels. 7. Cover cut end of leg in lard (rendered pork fat) and whole black pepper corns. Wrap leg in cheese cloth and truss with cooking twine. 8. Hang leg in a cool, dry place (ie. a basement, a closet, etc.) for 12-24 months. Check periodically for bad odors and visible mold or rot. 9. Unwrap leg and enjoy. Keep leg hung in cool, dry place until fully consumed. * Special thanks to Mark for introducing me to both prosciutto (Italian dry-cured ham) and jamon serrano ( Spanish dry-cured ham.) ** Sadly, as of this year, Chris and Amy are no longer raising hogs.
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tri-county pie eat was proudly printed by pine island press, a small press located in portland, oregon. It was printed using non-toxic solid ink technology that reduces waste, uses less energy, and smells like a crayon while printing! the outer covers were screenprinted through the help of the always wonderful bt livermoore at magnetic north, a beautiful printmaking studio in north east portland. TRI-County PIE was bound by hand at the irreplaceable IPRC. a Huge thanks to all the contributors of this issue for all of your patience and enthusiasm. Endless thanks also to lucas foglia for your continued inspiration, sarah george for taking the time, and abby banks for being alive. thank you kindly to everyone who is on the cover. you know who you are.
Š Tri-County Pie Eat