Blue Mouse Monkey Blog

Well, I imagine there must have been a battle, because major brands don’t usually acquiesce to this kind of thing.

Leavenworth, WA, the “Bavarian” town is remarkable (if for no other reason) in that the Leavenworth brand is apparently strong enough to dominate major national brands. Corporations must forgo their brand logos and fonts for something that “blends” with the rest of the town, in this case Wells Fargo bank.

Another instance of brand subservience: Bank of America.

The Starbucks brand relinquishing its visual identity in Leavenworth, WA.

Even Subway has to use a fancy “old fashioned” font, although they are allowed to keep the two-color aspect to their name. 

We’re pleased the announce the launch of the website for Minnesota photographer Anders Bjorling. Anders travels the world to take beautiful shots in his native Sweden, as well as Iceland, Africa, the Galapagos, Ecuador, and elsewhere. The site was built with scalable portfolio pages, so with the CMS (content management system) in place, there is no limit to the number of images Anders can add.

After a hectic spring and summer at Blue Mouse Monkey, projects are wrapping up and my workload is decreasing. And I’m loving it. All of a sudden I have time for family and friends. I have time to just poke around the web, or stroll around outside. And time to get working on my second novel.

Okay, there I said it. Yes, I am working on a second novel. The first one, which took me 10+ years to write, is in the process of being queried to agents. Many readers tell me it’s an important story that needs to get out there, and I do hope it finds its way in the wider world. Learn more about Parts Per Million here. This second novel won’t take me 10 years. This time I’m starting with plot and moving towards crafting sentences, instead of the other way around. And its going to be more of a literary thriller. Parts Per Million has some thrillerish aspects of uncovering secrets and facing dangerous repercussions, but I wouldn’t call it a bumper-to-bumper thriller.

The new novel is going to be about a rogue biohacker. I’ve started research (which means amassing folders of related articles Thank you New Scientist) and am sketching out plot. I’m also working on making my rogue protagonist sympathetic. You’re going to be on her side, even while she wreaks havoc, because, well… I don’t want to give it all away!

And as the summer closes there’s time for pickling cucumbers and steaming home-grown edamame, and drawing on rocks with a 15 lb yellow-orange crayon. We were at Crescent Beach last weekend, and at the patch of basalt scree at the far end of the beach I discovered a rock, a piece of sandstone perhaps, that had oxidized (or something – I have no idea what I’m talking about, really) and was coated in a 1/2 inch layer of soft, crayony bright yellow…stuff.

Basalt, which Oregon is full of due to the massive basalt floods of 17–14 million years ago, is dark gray. Rather a somber stone, and not particularly inviting. But when columnar basalt breaks off it does so with smooth, slightly curved planes. Nice to draw on. I had fun brightening up the jumble of gray at the end of the beach.

And now that the anniversary of my breast cancer diagnosis has passed, I’m ready to put that difficult year behind me. When my GP broke the news to me last July, she said, “This will dominate your life for a year.” And she was right. And now I’m better, stronger, healthier, and so happy to find a soft yellow rock to draw with.

Last weekend I had the opportunity to play outside. I guess I don’t get to do that much anymore, because it felt like an incredible treat. At home I can be outside in the garden in two modes: gardening, or relaxing. The relaxing thing happens rarely, and only for a half hour, tops, then I’m off doing something else. The gardening thing is good, but purposeful. There isn’t much pure play involved in weeding beds and harvesting vegetables.

But last weekend I stayed in a log house in the Hood Canal (which is really a fjord) with three other women. We were there to share creative solitude during the day, and friendship over dinner in the evenings. The others worked on writing projects, and I made art. I expected to write, too, but earlier, while cleaning out our basement, I found a bunch of leftover bits and pieces from grad school. Plaster casts of hands, rolls of colored string and cellophane, paper cut-out shapes. On impulse I decided to take this flotsam and jetsam of a period of intense art-making up to the Hood Canal to play around with it and see what happened.

At my friend’s place I chose to work in a small meadow next to an old shed. It was more like a clearing in the forest, and filled with buttercups and light slanting through the trees. I didn’t have any particular plans other than I’d make site-specific sculptures and leave them there. (Or dismantle and discard them in my host didn’t like them, but it turned out she did :-)

The first piece I made was inspired by sun hitting tendrils of tall grass in front of the shed. They made bright vertical lines of light against the dark background. I created a set of horizontal lines to complement, using embroidery thread. Keeping the tension in the thread was the hard part, since I couldn’t pull too hard on the grass stalks or they would snap.

Then I hung from a tree pieces from an installation I did years ago called The Myriad Things. Now the very cool thing I discovered, which I had never seen when this work hung in a gallery, was how it moved in the wind. Each strand has three collaged paper or glass vesica piscis shapes strung together with fine monofilament. Instead of flapping around like a wind chime, the shapes acted like paddles, and they spun in place. It created a beautiful floating, flickering effect, especially, when seen across the clearing. (Please excuse the crappy iphone video.)

Other pieces I made included burying gold foil under the duff so it glinted through, making the earth look golden. That one was hard to photograph. I also wrapped a sapling trunk in bands of gold foil, and placed plaster hands among the buttercups.

The other more visible piece I did was a large “cellophane fin”, made by wrapping colored cellophane across the delta-shaped spaces made by low, nearly horizontal maple limbs. The cellophane was left over from some 4-color printing process, with alternating magenta, cyan, yellow and black frames. The effect was like stained glass, but delicate and fragile, and in a tree.

I got to make a sculpture garden! It was the most satisfying thing I have done in a long time. I need to get out and play more often.*

* Bucket list:
1. Experience the Calabi-Yau in all ten dimensions
2. Play outside regualrly

Click for high-rez version to see the ripple texture in the dunes.

From the HiRISE site.

Makara Beach, outside of Wellington, NZ

…when you’re busy, then you go on vacation. We were in Hawaii and New Zealand for a couple of weeks, visiting relatives. It was lovely. We really should get back there more often. What was also lovely was that Blue Moue Monkey carried on in my absence. Now that we have a project manager (John Redder) and a studio manager (Sheliese Gieseke), stuff gets done even when I’m not there! I am so thrilled to have them both on board. And of course Jimmy Thomas, who strictly speaking isn’t part of Blue Mouse Monkey, but he does so much work for us he may as well be. Jimmy built the new Blue Mouse Monkey website while I was away. We’re putting the finishing touches on it and hope to launch it this week!

Austin Granger is a photographer and writer who has produced three books, and wanted us to create online versions of each of them. The challenge was to reproduce the books in web form in a way that preserved as much of the flavor of “book”, with its concomitant hierarchies of information, while maintaining good digital user interface and information design. The resulting triple-website presents nearly 400 photographs, along with Austin’s 9-chapter essay on Point Reyes. Check out the three books: Elegy from the Edge of a Continent: Photographing Point Reyes, Lights and Keepsakes, and Astoria.

Decisions Decisions, a consulting group in Portland, needed a stand-alone website for their growing environmental consulting division. Solid Ground Consulting works with non-profits, foundations, and alliances that deal with land stewardship, conservation, affordable housing, historic protection, and environmental advocacy. The site’s content management system enables Solid Ground to respond quickly to changes in their team of advisors and consultants.

Port Orford from Humbug Mountain

Back from a week in SW Oregon. The first two nights were in Port Orford (eponym of the Port Orford cedar). The weather sucked, and the seascape, which looked so pretty one sunny day we passed through some time ago, was now bleak.

However, we did climb nearby Humbug mountain (1700 foot elevation gain, 5.5 mi round trip), where the flora and fauna were impressively coastal and wild.

We then moved inland, dipping briefly into California and back up along the dam-free Smith River. The weather got warmer with each mile and soon we broke out into sunshine and the Indian summer that is blessing Oregon this year.

Darlingtonia Californica

New Thing Learned: Darlingtonia Californica likes nutrient-poor bogs, and is often in the same location as Port Orford cedars, which, by the way, are suffering from an attack of an incurable fungus and are on the decline. (Another factoid: the straight-grained wood is used for coffins, shrines, arrows, and aircraft.) The darlingtonia is also known as the cobra lily, and is a carnivorous pitcher plant. First time I’ve ever seen a field full of carnivorous plants. The tallest were about 18″ high, and they were beautiful greens and reds.

Cantrell Buckley

Then we camped at the Cantrell-Buckley Park at the start of the Applegate Valley. Beautiful. And we practically had the madrone-forest campground to ourselves. Saw deer, a very cute feral cat (kitten, really) native snails, lizards, and Tom saw a fox and a skunk, in silhouette. (Their shadows cast on our tent.) But it still counts.

I didn’t take my laptop with me, nor any other electronic device except my phone. Tom had his laptop, but I refrained from getting online when we were at coffee shops in Ashland. It’s the longest I’ve gone without an Internet connection in years. And it was great.

Our camp in the madrone forest

 

Arches National Park

From the Salt Lake Tribune

Excepts from the article by Patty Henetz:

He didn’t pour sugar into a bulldozer’s gas tank. He didn’t spike a tree or set a billboard on fire. But wielding only a bidder’s paddle, a University of Utah student just as surely monkey-wrenched a federal oil- and gas-lease sale Friday, ensuring that thousands of acres near two southern Utah national parks won’t be opened to drilling anytime soon.

Tim DeChristopher, 27, faces possible federal charges after winning bids totaling about $1.8 million on more than 10 lease parcels that he admits he has neither the intention nor the money to buy — and he’s not sorry.

“I decided I could be much more effective by an act of civil disobedience.”

Book Cliffs, Utah

…he came to the BLM’s state office in Salt Lake City to join about 200 other activists in a peaceful protest outside the building Friday morning. But then he registered with the BLM as representing himself and went to the auction room.
There, he thought about the times he has marched, fired off letters to his congressmen, signed petitions and supported environmental organizations — all to no avail.

“What the environmental movement has been doing for the past 20 years hasn’t worked,” DeChristopher said.

…The auction had been under way for a couple of hours when energy company representatives became suspicious of a man wearing an old red down parka after he won bids on more than 10 parcels numbered consecutively, all around Arches and Canyonlands…the man, brandishing bidding paddle No. 70 and unknown to the regular buyers, also seemed to be bidding up on parcels, raising prices on leases that others eventually won.

DeChristopher, who acknowledged upping other bids by about $500,000, said he would be willing to go to jail to defend his generation’s prospects in light of global climate disruption and other environmental threats.

Since the Election Day announcement of the lease sale, preservationists, conservationists, archaeologists, business owners, river runners, anglers and hunters have registered objections to the BLM’s plans to allow drilling in some of Utah’s most scenic redrock desert.

Desolation Canyon, Utah

They challenged proposed leases near Arches National Park, the White River, the greater Desolation Canyon region, Labyrinth Canyon, the benches east of Canyonlands National Park, Nine Mile Canyon, the Book Cliffs and the Deep Creek Mountains.

Objections also have come from the National Park Service, members of Congress and John Podesta, the head of President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team, who said the lease sale should be halted or altered to accommodate environmental concerns.

…BLM official Terry Catlin said the agency didn’t want to reopen the bidding on the parcels DeChristopher snagged unless all interested parties were able to compete for the leases. That means the parcels won’t be available again until at least February — after Obama takes office — during the next scheduled auction.

Read the full article