This is a little late, but not really. Flux Factory finally started its first Kickstarter campaign with a drive to purchase and install a new heating system (unit, ducting, labor) for our remodeled facility in Long Island City’s Dutch Kills neighborhood.
We’re only two weeks shy of the arrival of Spring, so we’re definitely through the thick of Winter, but this campaign is still as valid as ever. Oddly enough on the day we made this film it was also warm outside, but there were definitely days where everybody was wearing 3, 4, 5 layers in order to stay toasty. Plenty of times my sock-layer scene was lived out. Or hot water became super-chilled in minutes. It wasn’t always very pleasant. We survived – clearly – but the building still needs work, adjustments and improvements. So help us raise the money we need by pledging. With Kickstarter, your money is only pledged if we meet our target goal of $5000 – and our thinking is that if everybody we know gave us $1 we should be good (yes, we know mad numbers of peoples!).
scroll down to watch the incredibly awesome and hilarious video made by Gregg Conde and Jaime Iglehart – big ups to them for their hard work on this project.
The mugshot is a pretty interesting phenomenon of photography. Most-interesting to me is that the notion of the modern mugshot we know today was conceived by Allan Pinkerton, founder of the Pinkerton’s National Defense Agency – during the latter part of the 19th century they were two-faced, on the one face they were the first organized detective agency in the United States, and on the other face they doubled as thugs-for-hire to suppress workers’ unions or other semi-organized groups, through use of overwhelming force. They were interested in criminal justice, yes, but they were also very intimidating motherfuckers at heart, and the mugshot was merely a means to an end.
Anyhow! I was called up about 5 hours before the Thunder Gumbo III and asked if I had my camera available to take mugshots. A little ill-prepared but the results are wonderful. The lighting is a little off-mark, but works. I’m actually fond of the blue background but next time I plan on using this faux cinder block pattern I have, and some lettering or numbering to sequence the CRIMINALS!
If you recognize any of the faces, be sure to tag them on the Facebook album.
I posted this back in April over on my Flickr, but it deserves some additional coverage today.
How far ahead do you plan? I remember seeing a Brownline brand day planner once that spanned two years. Yeah, 365 x 2 = 730 pages, minimum. Throw in those extra pages for currency conversions (that become outdated by the minute), distances between cities matrixes, and the accompanying non-adequate “black book” and the thing was well around 800 pages. A brick of a planner. Not the kind of thing I’d want to be carrying our when the End of the World is nigh.
We started with a smorgasbord of available veggies. These included red onions, carrots, garlic, ginger, radishes, red cabbage, green cabbage and some peppers and spices. Oh yeah and some apples!
Before the students arrived we laid out all the food and necessary kitchen tools. As it would turn out this wasn’t the wisest idea. We wound up inadvertently using the cuttings boards as plates and then had to wash everything again before the cutting boards could be used for their intended purposes: chopping veggies on! Anyways, I learned my mistakes when leading a FOOD workshop.
After 20+ minutes of talking about the history of kimchi, the differences between kimchi and sauerkraut, and the health benefits of “good bacteria” as told by ex-Fluxer and ceramic artists and food guru Ellen, we had a tasting session:
YUMS!
We talked about what went into each different kimchi, and it was generally regarded that the dill kimchi (either bottom-middle or bottom-left) was the bees knees. Then each student took into account how they wanted to flavor their own kimchi, and we proceeded to cut, dice, chop, mince and then pack our jars:
Here’s a kimchi student hard at work packing their jar:
We made a total (good) mess. We used every single vegetable! We packed 10 jars in total!
48 hours later, and this is what some of the jars are starting to look like:
Of course the real way to judge a kimchi is by its smell, so believe me when I say these stink! The short squatty jar on the right has apples in it, so it has a sweet and spicy smell to it. The one on the far left contains an equal volume of onion and cabbage! It also has a fair amount of garlic and ginger in it. And the middle one was basically all the leftovers packed into another jar (along with some unknown spices to produce a surprise meal).
It’ll take another 7-10 days for these to totally ferment. And then Colonic Justice!
