Covenger + Kester

A view of Nueva Esperanza cemetery during “Day of the Dead” celebrations on the outskirts of Lima, Peru on November 1, 2009. From The Big Picture.

African chair by Marcel Breuer (1921). On display at the Museum of Modern Art as part of “Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity,” through Jan. 25, 2010.

Disney is reimagining Mickey Mouse:

The first glimmer of this will be the introduction next year of a new video game, Epic Mickey, in which the formerly squeaky clean character can be cantankerous and cunning, as well as heroic, as he traverses a forbidding wasteland.

And at the same time, in a parallel but separate effort, Disney has quietly embarked on an even larger project to rethink the character’s personality, from the way Mickey walks and talks to the way he appears on the Disney Channel and how children interact with him on the Web — even what his house looks like at Disney World…

[New Mickey] still exhibits the hallmarks that younger generations know: he is adventurous, enthusiastic and curious. “Mickey is never going to be evil or go around killing people,” Mr. Spector said.

But Mickey won’t be bland anymore, either. “I wanted him to be able to be naughty — when you’re playing as Mickey you can misbehave and even be a little selfish,” Mr. Spector said.

In many ways, it is a return to Mickey at his creation. When the character made its debut in “Steamboat Willie” in 1928, he was the Bart Simpson of his time: an uninhibited rabble-rouser who got into fistfights, played tricks on his friends (pity Clarabelle Cow) and, later, was amorously aggressive with Minnie.

Score one for the Wilderness of Childhood. Maurice S. would be pleased.

Catalogue for London’s Partisan coffeehouse by Desmond Jeffrey (1959):

As a direct and elegant means of putting words on paper, letterpress remained vigorous until the end of its useful life about forty years ago. In 1950 the power of this unmediated route from original text to printed sheet caught the imagination of a young returning serviceman, Desmond Jeffery. He saw in the work of Anthony Froshaug what could be done with hand-set letterpress. Unlike Froshaug, for whom it was a matrix upon which to develop a design programme, for Desmond the practice was the programme. He equipped himself with an Adana, an Albion and a collection of foundry types, most of them imported, then in 1956 took over a jobbing letterpress workshop in Marylebone, where he installed a Heidelberg platen. Customers ranged from the Stevens Shanks foundry to Mayfair galleries, the Goldsmiths’ Company to the Partisan coffee house. This is the first public exhibition of his work.

More here.

Akira Kurosawa (c. 1960). The hat and sunglasses were apparently gifts from John Ford.

H/t Inventory.

Accidental Mysteries:

Alexander Crum Brown (1838-1922), mathematician and chemist, was professor of mathematics at Edinburgh University and a prolific maker of mathematical models. This surface represents the equation: z=3a(x squared - y squared) - (x cubed + y cubed). Every section made by a plane passing through the blue line and cutting the surface is an ellipse.

More at the London Science Museum.

Martz lamps (I think). In-house relative here.

Via Weird Friends, my new favorite Tumblr.

Apartamento #4

Whiskey on the rocks… literally.

Two-seater desk by Jean Prouvé (1952).

Available here.

“Nina and Simone, Piazza di Spagna, Rome,” William Klein (1962).

In 1956, a 28–year old William Klein arrived in Rome to assist Federico Fellini on his film Nights of Cabiria (1957). When the start of filming was delayed, Klein spent his time strolling about the city with Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alberto Moravia, and other avant-garde Italian writers and artists serving as his guides.

The resulting book, Rome, is out in a new edition next month from Aperture.

Angelica Huston on Wes Anderson in this week’s New Yorker:

“If I were to take one isolated vision of Wes, it’s in a boat, a rather small motorboat, opposite my motorboat, in choppy seas, foggy, cold, with a megaphone, telling me when to stand up and wave. He was like Captain Ahab on that movie, and it’s such a funny thing to me, because you think of Wes as being effete, toothpick-thin, a little bit languid and pale, and concave, but I have these incredibly bravura, muscular images of him out at sea. Wes, if he needed it for his movie, would hang upside down from a line over the Pyrenees.”

Three things:

1. This is difficult but entertaining to imagine.

2. Huston is clearly better with words than 99 percent of people who write for a living. She had me at “concave.”

3. I will no longer apologize for loving all (yes, all) of Wes Anderson’s movies (albeit not equally). I love them critically (there’s more to Darjeeling Limited than art direction). I love them uncritically (I want those suits. And that luggage). And yes, I realize they’re “twee.”