If you pay mind to professional pundits you’re likely to hear one of them say something like, “America doesn’t make anything anymore.” It sounds goods on TV but it ain’t entirely true. My life is filled with people who make things like beer, clothes, furniture, toys, jewelry and soap; things that are made with the skill of a craftsman and the flair of an artist. I met a fair number of these people through the INDIEana Handicraft Exchange, the wildly popular event produced by my wife which, if you know me, you’ve heard me talk about ad naseum for the last three years.
What started as a single annual event in 2007 became a biannual event in 2009 with two additional “mini” fairs for good measure. Apparently that isn’t enough since we’re fielding offers to host even more events in even more locations in 2010. Indianapolis’ appetite for contemporary craft has exceeded Amanda’s ability to satisfy it while holding down her day job, so she is going to do what any right-thinking person would – she’s going to leave teaching to open a retail store devoted to contemporary handmade goods. Our goal is to open Homespun in Irvington some time between the IHE Summer Show in June and late Aug., when Amanda is due to deliver our first child.
The store’s mission is four-fold: to provide a brick-and-mortar retail outlet for contemporary artists, artisans and crafters, offer low-cost art and craft classes for people of all ages and skill levels, serve as a gathering place for the contemporary craft community, and inspire further development and renewal along the E. Washington St. corridor. We intend for income from the store to replace Amanda’s salary but this is private enterprise for the public good. We want to help people earn a living wage for meaningful work and spread the message that our lives are what we make of them.
I stepped away from freelancing and blogging for the last two months to work on the business plan, which is coming together nicely. Over the coming months I’ll be blogging about the process of starting the business and the people – like Karli Kujawa-Smith and Nikki Sutton – who are helping Homespun spring to life. If you’d like help us along, please visit our project profile on RefreshEverything.com – Pepsi is giving away $1.3 million per month all year long to for-profits, not-for-profits, and community groups with refreshing ideas. You can vote for up to 10 projects per day every day this month so set an iCal reminder for yourself! If we finish in the top ten this month we’ll be awarded a $5,000 grant. We’re currently #4 and your votes could help us make something – a difference.
It’s been a month since the last INDIEana Handicraft Exchange event and I’m sure that some’a ya’ll are in craft withdrawl. Lucky for you the Mass Ave Merchants Association invited the IHE to participate in its annual First Friday Holiday Hoopla. The IHE Holiday Mini will feature 46 vendors, live music, and raffles, and will be held from 5 to 9 p.m. on Fri., Dec. 4 in the newly constructed Chatham Center building at the corner of 9th and East Streets downtown. C’mon out, hang with me and the missus and pick up some handmade holiday gifts! If you ask politely, we’ll tell you about Homespun, the handmade boutique we’re opening in 2010. See you there!
(Certified eggheads: Chef JJ Boston and sou chef Jenna Gatchell.)
The wife and I knew JJ Boston was talking the spicy food-themed “Hell Night” seriously when we saw the firefighter standing inside Chef JJ’s Back Yard. But it turned out that Jim Campell, training supervisor for the Pike Township Fire Department, was there to start fires, not douse them.
JJ’s isn’t a restaurant, per se, it’s more of a kitchen-by-appointment. The chef hosts private functions, themed dinners, and cooking classes, and everything is prepared from fresh, local ingredients on Big Green Eggs. The night before Halloween JJ hosted “Hell Night,” a spicy foods dinner featuring a specially crafted beer from Sun King (exclusive beer supplier to JJ’s Back Yard) and hot sauces from Campbell’s Franklin, Ind.-based Mild to Wild Pepper & Herb Co.
Campbell is well known in the hot sauce scene and has been featured on the Food Network and Travel Channel. A chile lover since childhood, he started growing peppers commercially after butting heads with a superior at the station house.
“I had a revelation at the firehouse one day shortly after my supervisor told me, ‘you’ll never be promoted as long as I’m here,’” said Campbell, “I figured on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, I better look for fulfillment elsewhere. So I grabbed my seeds and threw ‘em in the ground.”
When his peppers came up he pitched them hot sauce producers, telling them he could get them high-quality chiles for less than they could get them from Central and South America. He started selling peppers commercially and before long was making his own sauces for retail and restaurant sale. “I finally suckered one of my customers into starting their own commercial kitchen and as soon as he did that I started having him make my sauces for me,” Campbell said.
The firefighter doesn’t have as much time to spend on Mild to Wild now that he’s out of the station house, and because food is a low profit margin business, he describes it more than a hobby and less than a second job. “It’s a labor of love,” he said.
That labor includes tending to a one-acre patch of peppers at an undisclosed location in central Indiana. “I grow the hobby patch for two reason. One, I’m always experimenting to see what the next big thing is in chile peppers, and two, to give ‘em away,” he said. The firefighter grows 40 to 60 varieties of chiles on his patch and each year Campbell hosts an event called “Open Field,” where chile aficionados come to pick pecks of un-pickled peppers. “People come from New Zealand, Australia, England, Denmark, the Netherlands, all over the United States,” Campbell said.
Campbell grows some of the hottest peppers on the planet, peppers with names like “The Ghost” and the “Trinidad Scorpion,” but he prefers much subtler flavors. “I love chipotle. I love the smoke,” the firefighter said. “I don’t know what it is, I’m just attracted to smoke.”
Before digging in to dinner Campbell advised us that the best way to avoid trouble with hot sauce is to start slow. “Build your way up so you can get off that train before it gets too far out of the station,” he said.
JJ followed that up with a warning that he would not be held responsible for anything the food did to his guests that night or the following morning, and with caveat JJ’s publicist / assistant / server / utility infielder Staraya McKinstry started delivering long plates of appetizers.
Round one featured bacon-wrapped, chorizo-stuffed jalapenos paired with Chile Sun Cream Ale. Brewer Clay Robinson explained that he filled a cheesecloth sack with jalapeno, Serrano and poblano peppers that JJ had smoked on the Big Green Egg and dropped it in a batch of Cream Ale. “So the beer basically sat on peppers for the last week,” Robinson said. The front end was all Cream Ale but as soon as you swallowed there was this wash of heat in the back of your mouth and throat.
Round two offered Caribbean jerk chicken and curried pork paired with Saison de Taffy, which is delicious if I do says so myself. I added “Rookie Orientation” to the chicken and pork and decided to get off the Campbell’s crazy train early. We had to get up early the next morning to produce the INDIEana Handicraft Exchange Halloween Mini and I couldn’t risk dealing with the Ring of Fire at 6 a.m.
Dessert was a Spiced Blueberry Bread Pudding paired with the El Gallo Negro Black IPA. The bread pudding may be spicier when served alone but after peppers, pepper beer, and hot sauce, I wasn’t picking up any spiciness. El Gallo Negro is rich, creamy, and smoky, a cross between an ale, a porter, and a stout. There is a bit of chocolate or coffee in it but not so much that it tastes infused. I am not a big stout fan but this was one of the best beer’s I’ve ever had. I’m considering going downtown today to get a growler of it.
I’ve eaten four or five Chef JJ meals now and every one of them has offered something interesting and unexpected, including the conversations we have with our tablemates. Chef JJ’s Back Yard is intimate but not cramped, which means you’ll probably end up talking to the strangers seated around you and having a lot more fun than you would if you spent a comparable amount for dinner at an upscale restaurant. The fact that JJ brings the food producers to the table is an added bonus.
If you live east of downtown you probably already know this but the Irvington Halloween Festival is this Saturday, Oct. 31, Halloween day. Our neighborhood does it up big around this holiday – the festival is in it’s 63rd year and a crowd in excess of 10,000 is expected. There is a crazy calendar of events related to the street festival, including a miniature version of the INDIEana Handicraft Exchange. The IHE Halloween ‘mini’ will take place between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m in a big white revival tent in a parking lot off Washington St. between Tiqueables and the scooter shop. There will be 20-some-odd vendors and live music by Shirtless Biddles, Pholly, and Julia Schafer & D. Mark Conway. If the weather holds it’ll be a damn fine day to stroll around our beautiful neighborhood. Hope to see you there.
The wife and I were at the Irving Theater tonight for an evening of (long winded) stories from schlock movie maker Charles Band when Amanda received an e-mail telling her that our proposal was one of ten accepted for Pecha Kucha 7. Entrants were told that the final ten would be notified on Fri., Oct 23 – we didn’t hear anything and she’d been in a funk ever since. That’s because this edition of PK features a $10,000 grant awarded to the winner.
Rather than paraphrase, I’ll lift this from the official PK Indy site:
On Thurs., Nov. 12, at 9 p.m., Pecha Kucha Indianapolis will hold its seventh volume in what is its most collaborative and meaningful event yet. Hosted at The Toby by the Indianapolis Museum of Art as an official Spirit & Place Festival event, the judges of “Pecha Kucha Vol. 7: The Next Indianapolis” will grant an award of $10,000 from the Central Indiana Community Foundation to one of ten presenters for use towards a project that turns an Indianapolis location into a more inspiring place.
For those of you who are unfamiliar, Pecha Kucha is a competition to see who can make the most compelling/entertaining presentation using the most despised communication tool on the planet: PowerPoint. Presenters are restricted to 20 slides and 20 seconds per slide. I don’t want to spill the beans on our proposal but I can say our project involves using the INDIEana Handicraft Exchange to improve the lives of working artists around the city, state, region, and beyond while helping to make our neighborhood a more inspiring place. We’d love to see our friends and friendly acquaintances on Nov. 12, and support from Craft Exchange vendors and visitors would mean the world to us. Tickets are free but you need to request them online or in person at the IMA.
As promised, my Q&A with local murderabilia collector Matthew Aaron was published today in Metromix Indy. It’s a really interesting conversation, if I do say so myself. Pick up the print edition and then go here to read the bonus material. Together they form like Voltron to make one mega awesome interview.
Some weeks back the wife and I were dropping books off after hours at the Irvington Branch of the Indianapolis Marion County Public Library. As we drove up we saw a battered brown sedan with white spray-painted Juggalo declarations all over the quarter panels, doors, hood, and trunk. It was amusing but not out of the ordinary – as some of you surely know, Washington St. is a natural habitat for the wild Juggalo and it’s not uncommon to see signs of the Dark Carnival in every day life. When we got to the front of the library we notice that the likely owners of the car were sitting in the entryway typing on a laptop, stealing wireless internet access. Pretty clever for a juggalo, who are known to use simple tools but aren’t the most intelligent subset of homo sapiens sapiens.
Last week we received troubling news from a friend who works at the library. It seems that the Irvington Branch now turns it’s Wi-Fi off when it closes because there was a police run a few weeks back involving a battery and attempted theft of a laptop computer in front of the building. It appears the young juggalo (and likely his juggalette) was accosted while working in his “office” and escaped largely unharmed. Sucks for them ‘cos Starbucks got they shit on lock.
“I hope that none of us ever does anything so bad that no one can ever forgive us.” Matthew Aaron
Last February The Last Dime Museum requested to be my friend on Myspace. After a quick look around I knew I’d be writing a story about it, I just didn’t realize it would be another eight months before I got around to it. Yesterday I called Matthew Aaron to talk about his museum, which is actually more a photographic display of his murderabilia collection than an actual museum, and we killed more than an hour talking about art, crime, and punishment. It’s a thought-provoking Q&A, which you’ll be able to find in Metromix and on indy.metromix.com on Thurs., Oct. 22 (the first of five or six solid weeks of Taffy contributions to the publication I used to call home).
During our conversation, Aaron hit on something timely that I wanted to share. Far from being an apologist for the people he interacts with, the murderabilia collector thinks that the attention given to capital cases allows criminals to be turned into outlaw celebrities, a problem exacerbated by years or decades spent on death row. He noted that the trial of Desmond Turner, one of two suspects in the Hamilton Street Murders, began this week, and that he didn’t want Turner to receive undue attention.
“I hope something turns around for Carl Brizzi and Hoosiers don’t end up paying for these people to sit on death row for ever and it turns into something like Charlie Manson where he gets fans and people think he’s Jesse James. There’s something real wrong with that and if we don’t change that we’re doomed to be stuck in a situation where John Wayne Gacy’s artwork is worth more than Nancy Noel’s. Boy, Nancy would hate me if she read that. An Ed Gein autograph sells for $10,000. Charlie Manson makes little spiders out of his socks. Something like that is worth $500 in this market and it’s his old, dirty sock.”
Maybe if Slayer wrote a song about Nancy Noel she’d experience an increase in sales.
A long-time acquaintance of mine, Austin Considine, is covering the trial for True/Slant and hopes to produce a documentary about the crime. I’ll be following his coverage as well as that of the Indianapolis Star.
As you (hopefully) already know, my super special lady friend Amanda Mauer Taflinger is the brains behind the INDIEana Handicraft Exchange. She’s been working her pretty, birdlike fingers to the bone since July on the fall show which is set to pop off on Fri., Oct. 2. The event will take place during IDADA First Friday at the Harrison Center for the Arts and will continue from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Sat., Oct. 3. More than 70 vendors will fill three rooms (the gymnasium, Gallery No. 2, and the Underground) and we’ll have live entertainment from a whole mess ‘a folks, not the least of which are Mandy Marie and our favorite tighty-whitey-wearin’ bassist Mo, the Shirtless Biddles, and Annie & Andy Skinner.
Like I said, it’s Amanda’s baby but she’s worked with a lot of great people to make the Fall Show happen. In no particular order, thanks to…
A friend of sent me a link last week that reminded me of a story from my days in Bloomington. After high school I got a job in a retail mailing shop – the kind of place you can make copies, pack and ship things, and rent a personal mail box. For years part of my morning duties included picking up and sorting mail for our boxholders.
The boxholders were a motley crew of legitimate business owners, RV-dwelling retirees, aspiring scam artists, and people with something to hide (porn, off-shore gambling accounts) from friends and family, but they shared a near-universal disdain for junk mail. Fourth-class mail was a hefty portion of the daily haul, sometimes making up a quarter or more of the total volume.
Many of our boxholders explicitly told us to toss the AOL promotional discs, the NetZero offers, the letters pleading with them to invest in gold BECAUSE GOLD WILL NEVER LOSE ITS VALUE! Other boxholders never saw their junk mail because they came by so infrequently that we had to sift through the overflowing pile of crap just to make sure we could fit the important stuff, like child support overdue notices, in their box.
At any rate, after several years I left that job on good terms and moved to Bloomington to finish the degree I’d been slowly working towards at Ivy Tech and IUPUI. The following summer I needed to come up with some extra cash in addition to my bouncing gig so I headed out to the mall and picked some low-hanging fruit. The next week I started working at the Bloomington franchise of said mailing shop and found myself learning a new lot of boxes and their corresponding weirdos.
That summer I started sorting red paper envelopes that seemed to contain CDs. Mixed in with AOL trial offers and NetZero teases, I figured these red envelopes were part of another irritating ISP’s marketing campaign. I sorted them into boxes when there was room but as more and more arrived I started tossing them in the trash can. But when I started throwing them out they began multiplying like Mogwai in a swimming pool. I couldn’t make sense of it but ultimately I didn’t care – it was junk mail as far as I could tell. I threw hundreds upon hundreds of those red paper envelopes out over the course of the summer and never gave them a second thought when I quit to start fall term.
That autumn I was sitting in a friends’ house when I noticed one of those same envelopes on her coffee table. I told her that I’d been throwing them out all summer and asked her why she had one. She told me that the envelope was from Netflix, which I knew, but it’s some stupid internet service company, right? No, she said, they are the new web-based DVD rental service.
I held up the envelope, thought of those piles of discs sitting atop unwanted solicitations and catalogs in a 32-gallon Rubbermaid trash can and the curious faces of boxholders who never received their movies no matter how many times they complained to Netflix and I laughed, and laughed, and laughed.
