Our friend Mark Growden is a storyteller and professional musician from my hometown. Several years ago, he asked us to make him a bag to use during his songwriting workshops that could hold his Sruti Box, a tambourine, and a notepad.
I have been watching 'Ax Men' with my 2 year old, and it conjures layers of memory from childhood in a logging town.
Our childhood hero was Mangin, the bachelor timberfaller across the street. He was home from the woods at about the same time that we were free of school - logger childcare. As kids with the whole afternoon to kill before our folks got home, we would sit in his yard in the shade of a big fir tree and watch Mangin and Kent take off tall boots, sharpen saw chains, drink Mickey's bigmouths, and spin yarns.
Mangin was also a Volkswagen mechanic. He wore the same pair of black Key Jeans every day in the woods, and they could stand up by themselves. His house smelled like fir pitch, sweat, and peanuts. He was half deaf from logging, and spent a lot of money on stereo equipment, on which he played very loud ZZ Top and rock radio. He welded a secret compartment in some bozo's gas tank, and when that guy got popped smuggling a whole bunch of cocaine in from Central America, Mangin had to spend some time in the Federal Pen in the Mojave. My dad the homebrewer put a six pack of beer into root beer bottles that - delivered to Mangin - proved a great hit with the boys down there in Barstow. I was about ten, but I still remember Mangin's going-away party before he went to prison. August in Goodrich Meadows, with kegs of Budweiser cooling in the back of Mangin's Willys pickup under a load of snow from Swain Mountain. Dave Foat roasting a pig over a pit fire.
Kent was killed falling a tree about 10 years ago, and there were a lot of broke-down burly woodsmen in his yard for the wake. A section of the street was flagged off for the overflow crowd using 'KILLER TREE' flagging. The preacher was from the church that Mark's dad helped to start about 30 years ago. When he said that Kent was going to heaven not because of his good deeds but because he the preacher had saved him not 2 months before, a surge of anger flushed through me, and a good part of the crowd too. Kent's good friends from the bar stirred angrily out in the street, and Kenny Bruns grumbled 'Bullshit! He is going there for his good deeds too'.
I have come to realize that we had a lot of male role models, and that we are of a storytelling culture.
My (Zeke) bagmaking has been slowed up by two young boys and starting another business - I've made three bags in the last 10 months.
I took measurements for this bag 16 months ago, and Mark has been very patient. Finally he called a month ago and said gently 'the bag I have been using has completely disintegrated, how's that bag coming?' I needed a prod.
Two or three years later, this one is finally done. Making it brought up a lot of these stories.
Fire hose, cordura scrap, necktie, a classroom map, a jacket lining, surplus webbing, treebark camo pantleg, and some aluminum tubing from the ReStore.
Under the flap is more necktie and map. Mark is a few years older than me and his dad was my track coach/crafts teacher in high school. Mark has been studying music for most of his life with influences all over the world ranging from Ravi Shankar to old slave songs. He came back to town when I was still in high school to regale us with tales of traveling around the West Coast juggling, making music, falling in love, and being offered a blowjob by a strange traveling salesman while hitchhiking across Eastern Washington. He knew how to make weird Vietnamese-shaped hats out of felt, and spent a few weeks telling us stories and teaching us to juggle, playing music, and generally blowing our smalltown minds. Then he was off again.
Old camo as a nod to shared millpond roots. This project brought up memories of growing up in Westwood, and the interweaving of lives there. Of track practice in the gym with 6 feet of snow outside, or running on melting slush through streams of icy runoff; of shooting guns at the sewer ponds with Dean Growden - Mark's brother who is now Lassen County Sheriff.
Or of the 1970s Cutlass that Mark's younger brother - my best friend Jeremy, filled up with gas one day during our senior year and just drove away.
And Mark has always been flamboyant, of course, so I had an excuse to go big with the bag. People in Westwood are still probably talking about the time that they turned on 'Real Sex' on HBO and saw Mark there in some sort of men's tantra workshop circle thingy. My crew boss marking timber for the US Forest Service told me that he had the episode on videotape.
Mark's sister Janay makes amazing clothing, window displays, and anything else. We painted flowers and peace signs on her VW bus before we knew that we weren't really hippies, or that hippies weren't really very cool, and drove it down Highway 32 to Chico to shop for school clothes at Pegasus, wondering why the guys in the big trucks were flipping us off or screaming at us. Janay is a master textile artist who gives me courage to sew in a stream of consciousness way - we share a love of the zigzag.
Time passes, and the meaning of songs change. Mark wrote a song about Westwood years ago that means something to any person who is from there. Trying to reconcile his love of the land with the hardship of the place and its baggage. I used to think that he whined too much about his life, that he was being a drama queen. Later I realized that he was just a few years ahead of me in trying to come to terms with, or express how you identify with (or don't) the important places in your life. As time goes by, I am glad that we have a place that we know is home, and stories to share about it.
April is a wild month in Chico. A budding, blooming, creative explosion of lengthening light and lusty life. We were lucky/taxed to have two deadlines fall at the end of it - RayRay's 'Bike=art' show and Chikoko's 'Bizarre Bazaar'. We overextended and are glad that they are over! But we got to make a lot of new art - a spectrum from Bumblebee habitat boxes, psychedelic micro messenger bags, and rice harvester steel sunflowers to 'Opium Den' leather collage purses and fire hose totes. Here are some photos from the two shows.
Hillbilly yard art, firehose snakeskin samba belts, tough-mama firehose totes, and rake+ski pole garden diggers - our uncategorizable booth at Chikoko's Bizarre Bazaar.
Pulled together some new and old bags with a bike theme and decided to use my old chopper 'Pinkie' as a rack at the last minute. Welded a stand, loaded up the goods into the hemp panniers and rode it to the show. The bags on the handlebars are a new design that I am calling the MicroMessenger - they are big enough for a mini Kryptonite lock, cell phone and wallet; they have a loop to go on your belt, or we can add a traditional messenger strap and stabilizer.
Our hemp panniers and large and mini messenger bags - I added a new stabilizer strap to the messenger bags.
Stopped at the newspaper recycling shed at 6th and Flume to get some paper to stuff the bags with and found a paper bag full of old maps! Score! RayRay decided to put us in the window - I like what they did with the maps - they are prolific and amazing.
My folks were in town and pops took these photos - you can see him in the reflection, below.
We are starting to get back on the pony. We are going to be vending at the Bicycle Harvest Party at the end of October, and need to make some goods before then! Also starting to think about the Bizarre Bazaar - Chikoko's annual holiday fair, and our favorite event. Here are some new things.
Erika scored 231 of these tough zippers at the Salvation Army, look for them all over our stuff until they are gone.
Erika just whipped this messenger out from one of her old paintings.
Details - I love my wife.
I am making pockets - this is what I do when I don't feel up to actually putting bags together - lots of bag parts.
Pocket full o' texture. Sorry, Pearson (friend with texture-phobia)!
More pockets fronts - these will go into the outside of the bulgy pockets below.
Detail - I have decided to own the fact that many of our materials are old and frayed. If you want a bag that looks like it was made in China by a crew of terrified teenagers working under an anal Nazi line-director (meaning clean, all edges trimmed, no raw fiber visible) I will make you one, but I am going to charge you quadruple!
In the spirit of reuse, I present my 15 year old bike seat - coming soon, to a pocket near you.
Who doesn't like camo? This is vintage, not to be associated with our current militarism. Camo from old wars - we promise not to use any pixelated desert camo for at least 30 years.
Bulgy pocket variation on the hip-slinger Kanteen pouches I have been making.
New bulgy pocket design.
Bulgy pocket detail. We saw some festival belts at the International Festival at Chico State last week, and I am knocking off some of their details. I love knocking off details from mass-produced imports for some reason. If you are designing any hipster festival belts and having them made in India, know that I am going to plagiarize them and sell them to people that will pay three times as much because I made them here, myself. HA! You can't have third-world slave labor and your first-world intellectual property rights too, I love it! Fire hose trim and hemp-cotton canvas from German Army bags.
Zeeko Salvage is a collective. We are a married couple living, scrounging and sewing together. Many of our items are co-created; we like making lots of different things - that's why we have a variety of products to offer.
Zeke Lunder started out making farmer's market bags out of chicken feed sacks in 2004. Erika Dietrich Lunder learned to sew and make clothes from her grandmother, and worked as a clothing designer from 2005 to 2007.
Zeeko Salvage formed when we met and began collaborating on a line of purses and totes from feed sacks and mylar-printed Hindu comics. Lately we have been working with fire hose, firefighting surplus, inner tube, and leather, but we'll work with just about anything that can fit thru an industrial sewing machine.
We are a micro-scale DIY industry. The two of us do the sewing, repair our own machines and make as many tools and parts as we can. We sell online, at Chikoko sponsored events in Chico, California, and at the August 'Prepare for the Playa' Street Fair in San Francisco. Feel free to contact us if you have an idea for a custom bag. {Email Us}
