Blue Mouse Monkey Blog

I just saw WALL-E. Several months late, I know, but it is what it is.

Stunningly beautiful: check.
Cute Mac in-joke: check.
Typical Disney ’simple-hearted ragamuffin’ male, ‘beautiful sophisticated’ female romance. (I went straight to Lady and the Tramp): check.
Take-away “liberal” message linking consumerism and despoiling the world: check. 

Wait, uncheck that one.

Did anyone watch the end? Or the credits? The take-away message of WALL-E is that even if we wreck the world and become infantile slobs who live in space and drink liquid cupcakes, it’s okay! We’ll be able to come back! We’ll be able to start over! And civilization will progress (rather quickly) through a few key phases represented via western Art History, and all will be well! 

The take away message of WALL-E is that we will be rescued from our own bad decisions. And technology will do most of the rescuing. Sure, the ship’s captain had to stand up to the autopilot in order to get the humans home to earth, but the captain is as simple-minded as the rest of them. Other than a spark of rebellion (which seems to come from nowhere) and enough brute strength to switch the autopilot’s button to ‘manual’, he does nothing. Compare this to the relationship between Dave and HAL in 2001: A Space Oddessy. In WALL-E, the humans have no smarts, no ingenuity, and little will. The robots (the ‘rogue’ robots, that is) are the ones with those qualities.

In the credits of WALL-E, the obese humans on earth are shown planting crops (in soil of dubious cleanliness) and building structures with the help of the stalwart robots that were designed and built not by them but at some earlier stage of human existence. There is no human capable in the film of designing and building such things: the humans are sheep-like beings, for whom the mere act of standing up is revolutionary. Lucky for them they are surrounded by intelligent, tireless technology that does the heavy lifting.

Literally: the robots make fire, drill wells, till the soil, help lift nets of fish (which come from where?), supply bricks for buildings. And by the end of the credits we see towns, Renaissance domes, and Van Gogh-like flowers and birds (did he ever paint a bird?). Plus fields of some green plant that may be spinach. And somehow these humans who used to live in hoverchairs and watch TV and drink liquid cupcakes are happy to be doing all this. A return to simple pleasures and all that, I guess. A return made easy by robots that do all the work!

So don’t worry about a thing, it will all turn out okay. In the meantime, another cupcake in a cup won’t hurt.

Julie Perini takes on the world!

Julie Perini recently relocated to Portland, whereupon I had the pleasure of meeting her…and pretty soon I was designing her a fab new website! Her short videos investigate her immediate surroundings as well as larger social structures with humor. Julie is cooking, with a recent show at PCC Cascade, and one up right now at PSU. Check it out!

Blue Mouse Monkey is happy to announce the launch of a new website for Seattle artist Roger Shurtleff. Working primarily as a painter, Roger takes on abstraction and the figure with a bold and gestural vocabulary.

This article by Lev Grossman in Time Magazine (Feb 2 2009) is exciting. It’s always bothered me that publishing industry seems to push writers into colonial and defensive positions, which seems so…last century. On top of that, the industry itself is in distress, laying off staff in large numbers. Grossman looks at how attitudes towards self-publication have changed in the last two years, and paints an interesting picture of Old Publishing and New Publishing. Excerpts from the article below. Read the full article here.

[Publishing] is evolving, and so radically that we may hardly recognize it when it’s done. Literature interprets the world, but it’s also shaped by that world, and we’re living through one of the greatest economic and technological transformations since–well, since the early 18th century. The novel won’t stay the same: it has always been exquisitely sensitive to newness, hence the name. It’s about to renew itself again, into something cheaper, wilder, trashier, more democratic and more deliriously fertile than ever.

[and] People are still reading. According to a National Endowment for the Arts study released on Jan. 12, literary reading by adults has actually increased 3.5% since 2002, the first such increase in 26 years.

[but] shipping physical books back and forth across the country is starting to seem pretty 20th century. Novels are getting restless, shrugging off their expensive papery husks and transmigrating digitally into other forms. Devices like the Sony Reader and Amazon’s Kindle have gained devoted followings. Google has scanned more than 7 million books into its online database; the plan is to scan them all, every single one, within 10 years. Writers podcast their books and post them, chapter by chapter, on blogs. Four of the five best-selling novels in Japan in 2007 belonged to an entirely new literary form called keitai shosetsu: novels written, and read, on cell phones.

For the first time in modern history, novels are becoming detached from dollars. They’re circulating outside the economy that spawned them.

Self-publishing has gone from being the last resort of the desperate and talentless to something more like out-of-town tryouts for theater or the farm system in baseball. It’s the last ripple of the Web 2.0 vibe finally washing up on publishing’s remote shores. After YouTube and Wikipedia, the idea of user-generated content just isn’t that freaky anymore.

…there are cultural sectors that conventional publishing isn’t serving. We can read in the rise of self-publishing not only a technological revolution but also a quiet cultural one–an audience rising up to claim its right to act as a tastemaker too.

…more books, written and read by more people, often for little or no money, circulating in a wild diversity of forms, both physical and electronic, far outside the charmed circle of New York City’s entrenched publishing culture. Old Publishing is stately, quality-controlled and relatively expensive. New Publishing is cheap, promiscuous and unconstrained by paper, money or institutional taste. If Old Publishing is, say, a tidy, well-maintained orchard, New Publishing is a riotous jungle: vast and trackless and chaotic, full of exquisite orchids and undiscovered treasures and a hell of a lot of noxious weeds.

…if that sounds alarming or tragic, go back and sample the righteous zeal with which people despised novels when they first arose. They thought novels were vulgar and immoral. And in a way they were, and that was what was great about them: they shocked and seduced people into new ways of thinking. These books will too.

Animations made by hand

Blue Mouse Monkey is proud to announce the launch a new website for Stacey Steers’s animated films. Stacey Steers is an animator living in Colorado. Her films are created, by hand, from thousands of collages or hand-painted drawings. They’ve been screened at The Sundance Film Festival, and numerous other festivals worldwide.

From the 2008 batch. chili ginger, dill, tarragon, basil garlic

Who doesn’t have truckloads of zucchinis in the summer? Bread and butter pickles traditionally use cucumbers, but zucchinis work just as well. The following will fill 3 quart jars. This is a non water-bath method.

Ingredients:

• 6 lb of vegetables, e.g. 5 1/2 lb of zucchini and 1/2 lb of onion. Or all zucchini and no onion.

• 3 1/4 c vinegar (I like plain old white, to let the other flavors shine through) 
• 2 c sugar (this is less than most other recipes, and the pickles still turn out sweet)
About 1/4 c of salt
• 1 tray of ice cubes
• 1 T mustard seeds
• 1 T fennel seeds
• For herb/spice variations, scroll down

Directions:

1. Slice the veges. Small enough they will fit easily through the mouths of the jars, large enough they aren’t a pain to get out when you want to eat them.
2. Mix the veges up in a large bowl with the salt. Distribute the ice cubes on top. Alternatively, if your bowl fits in the fridge, put it there.
3. Allow the veges to sit for about 3 hours or more. Overnight is okay. This step of soaking in salt is what makes the final pickles crisp instead of mushy.
4. In the meantime, set everything else up. You will need:

• A large pot. A 6 quart pot is a good size for this amount of food.
• 3 quart jars (or the equivalent in smaller wide-mouth jars) plus their good metal lids. Do not use lids that have any signs of rust, or dings, or are bent.
• A pair of metal tongs.
• A large serving spoon, plus another spoon (regular size okay).
• A smaller pot for boiling water.
• An oven.
• An area where you can ladle the hot pickle mixture into the jars without lifting it too high. I use the kitchen sink.
   

Prepare the tools

About ½ an hour before you are ready to drain the salt-soaking veges, prepare the tools:

• Wash the jars and their lids. Rinse and drain them, then put them upright in the oven. Set the oven to 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Put the jar-lids in there also, spread out and not touching. This sterilizes the jars, and dries them, too.
• Put your tongs, serving spoon, and the other spoon in a pot of water, enough to cover the round part of the spoons. Boil these on high for at least 3 minutes of rolling boil. This sterilizes these instruments so that you can use them to touch the pickle mixture, and the sterile jars.
   

Now you can start cooking.

1. In the large pot put the vinegar and sugar. Heat on medium till sugar is dissolved. Add the spices (but not the herbs - see below).
2. Now drain all the salty water from the chopped veges. Even if you didn’t start with ice cubes, there will be a lot of water, and the veges will have shrunk. I also give them a single rinse in cold water, just to reduce a little of the salt. But don’t let them sit in fresh water, or they will re-absorb it all again.
3. Bring the vinegar mixture to the boil. When at a rolling boil, pour in the drained veges. At first it might look like there is not enough vinegar, but they will shrink down some more.
4. Now remove the sterilized tools from the boiling water, and place them upright in something like a tall glass or a dishrack. The point is to have a place to put them where their sterilized parts don’t touch any surfaces.
5. Now bring the vinegar plus veges back to the boil. Because of the volume of veges, this actually takes a few minutes. During this time, set up your jars.
6. Using the tongs, take the hot, sterile jars out of the oven. Place each jar in the sink. Don’t do this too early, because you don’t want too many airborne bacteria floating into them.
7. Stir the veges often. As soon as they come back to a boil, they are ready to put into the jars.
8. Bring the pot over to the sink. Using the large serving spoon, spoon the pickle mixture into the jars. The other sterile spoon is for those occasions when a piece of vege gets stuck on the large spoon, or threatens to fall down the outside of a jar. You may not need an extra spoon at all, but it’s sad to see good pickle mixture go to waste because you can’t nudge it in the right direction with your unsterile fingers, and it falls into the sink.
9. When the jars are full, pour in extra liquid. Fill to within a half inch of the top.
10. If necessary, wipe the outside threads with a paper towel. Don’t let it touch the inside anywhere. 

Finishing up.

1. Now get the lids out of the oven using the tongs. Seal each jar. You may need to hold them with a dish towel because of the heat. After about 5 minutes, try turning the lids again, and there may be some more tightening to do.
2. Let the jars cool. Over the next few hours you will hear the popping sound of the lids contracting as the seals set.
3. Put the jars away for at least 3 weeks. Something happens to the chemical balance that matures the flavor over this time.

And that’s it. If you’ve been careful about how clean everything is, you won’t need to water-bath them. They keep for months in a dark cupboard. I have not kept any longer than a year, so I don’t know their long-term shelf-life, but I have never had a problem. Needless to say, if there’s a lid that doesn’t contract (i.e. ‘button’ is still up), it’s not sealed. You can keep it in the fridge and treat it like an open bottle of salad dressing. But the pickles won’t have matured, so won’t be as delicious.

And needless to say, if any go a funky color, or have mold on top when you open them, or the lid bulges outwards, then throw them away. But like I said, I have never had that happen.

Herb/spice variations

Add in any combination of sliced chili peppers, garlic, dill, cilantro, tarragon, cayenne, paprika, basil, sliced ginger. The flavors that seems to add the most are tarragon and ginger.

I treat whole fresh herbs separately. They are washed, and then right after I put the sterile jars in the sink, and take the spoons etc out of their boiling water, I dunk the herbs in for about 30 seconds to 1 minute into the same boiling water. Then I spoon the herbs into the clean jars. This is before I put the pickle mixture in. So put the blanched herbs into the jars before ladling in the pickle mixture.