I moved to Copenhagen in January 2006 with enough money to last a few months. I had no job prospects, no contacts, and knew nothing about the city. I can’t quite remember how I heard about the bar. Maybe it was mentioned in some article in the local English-speaking newspaper, or listed in a guidebook. The description was appealing either way.

I seem to recall not being able to find it the first few times I tried. Eventually I achieved the feat. I wandered in early one weekday afternoon and found a dark and scruffy cellar bar with one other patron - both had seen better days. Crucially, the other chap was watching cricket on the TV. I stayed for a few hours, had a couple of beers, made some small talk about the cricket. I returned often. Began to recognise faces and was recognised in turn. The best bars exert a particular force. You see something in them others don’t. But that’s fine because then they’re your own. Bloomsday was my own.

A couple of the pics above I shot while filming in Bloomsday - the bar I’ve drunk in since moving here six and a half years ago and which is closing in less than a week. I’m looking forward to sharing the film with you but I’m not looking forward to life without my favourite bar.

The Long Goodbye is an excellent read. The story hums along nicely enough but it’s Chandler’s melancholic observations, voiced by various of his characters, that were most affecting:

“When I got home I mixed a stiff one and stood by the open window in the living room and sipped it and listened to the groundswell of traffic on Laurel Canyon Boulevard and looked at the glare of the big angry city hanging over the shoulder of the hills through which the boulevard had been cut. Far off the banshee wail of police or fire sirens rose and fell, never for very long completely silent. Twenty four hours a day somebody is running, somebody else is trying to catch him. Out there in the night of a thousand crimes, people were dying, being maimed, cut by flying glass, crushed against steering wheels or under heavy tires. People were being beaten, robbed, strangled, raped, and murdered. People were hungry, sick; bored, desperate with loneliness or remorse or fear, angry, cruel, feverish, shaken by sobs. A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness. It all depends on where you sit and what your own private score is. I didn’t have one. I didn’t care. I finished the drink and went to bed.”

“I own newspapers but I don’t like them. I regard them as a constant menace to whatever privacy we have left. Their constant yelping about a free press means, with a few honourable exceptions, freedom to peddle scandle, crime, sex, sensationalism, hate, innuendo, and the political and financial uses of propaganda. A newspaper is a business out to make money through advertising revenue. That is predicated on its circulation and you know what that depends on.”

“He turned and walked across the floor and out. I watched the door close. I listened to his steps going away down the imitation marble corridor. After a while they got faint, then they got silent. I kept on listening anyway.”

Got my third roll of film back from the printers last week. Still a lot of issues with under exposure but enough worked out well enough to justify the extortionate price to get them transferred to CD.

More on Flickr.

Idly surfing a while back I came across a blog post detailing a stunt that seemed gloriously irreverent:

“…it would have all the trappings of a conference, just without the conference.”

I forgot all about it for a while but something jogged my memory and I decided to get to the bottom of it. The actual story features the noted art curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, and while still a lovely tale, it’s less of a stunt and more of a considered approach to an intricate problem, namely the best way of bringing together thinkers from two wildly differing fields. The below is taken from this interview with Edge:

We thought we’d do a conference there, but then talking to Ernst, we actually realized that that was again wrong, because to some extent why would we do a conference with artists and scientists who had never met, and who would feel put on the spot. Instead, we decided that the most important thing would be to create a contact zone, which wouldn’t put people on the spot, where something could happen, but nothing had to happen.

I feel very often with my projects that we cannot force things. One cannot engineer human relations. One can set the conditions under which things then happen. For that reason, we decided, a few hours before the event was supposed to take place, to cancel the conference and to just do a “non-conference.” It had all the ingredients of a conference — badges, tee shirts, bags with all the speakers’ CVs, a hotel where all the people would stay, a bus to pick them up in the morning and bring them to the science center, people at the airport picking the guests up, all of the logistics — but the conference no longer was there. It was just a coffee break.

Gerda was born on February 20 at 6.34am. I love being a dad.

I’m happy to report that ‘Winter’ is now available via PayPal over at CPH Meal. Our friends at Tres Bien in Malmo have also agreed to stock it in the store, which we’re really chuffed about. Here’s some more pics:

We made a publication. It folds out into a lovely poster and includes a veal heart recipe from a Noma chef, a terrific cocktail from one of the city’s best bartenders, and a personal essay from Relæ’s Christian Puglisi detailing the challenges of his restaurant’s first winter.

It also features several exquisite illustrations from Sine Jensen. Sine works from photographic source material and has a delicate, almost ethereal line. She’s picking up regular commissions now and she deserves all the success that is sure to come her way.

I should also mention that we were hugely inspired by Simon Roche’s publication The Radio Post. So inspired in fact that when it came to layout and folding technique, there was only one man we wanted to work with. Thankfully he agreed and we’re so happy he did.

We printed 500 of these. I doubt we’ll sell more than a few dozen but that doesn’t worry us unduly. It’s a social object, I guess. We’ll sell some, give some away, and see where it leads us next.

If you’d like a copy and you’re in Copenhagen, you can pick it up at Ved Stranden 10. If you’re outside Denmark, we’ll be setting up PayPal over the weekend so please check in over at cphmeal.com over the next few days.

The above is a trailer for a documentary by Grant Gee in which he retraces W.G Sebald’s route along the Suffolk coast - the setting for his novel The Rings of Saturn. I’ve tried and failed to express the depth of my admiration for Sebald on this blog before so I won’t try again. I’m very much looking forward to tracking this down and watching it.

Details of the film’s release dates can be found here while The Guardian has several excellent articles and reviews - here, here and here.

Pitchfork has details of the soundtrack, composed by The Caretaker, whose An Empty Bliss Beyond This World is one of the most unearthly records I’ve ever purchased.

This is a bold, beautiful, but ultimately inept production from Maersk. At times during the film’s somewhat grandiose 12-minute running time, we find the company teetering on the brink of relevance beyond operational excellence but it constantly withdraws to the safety of platitudinous soundbites about its way of doing business.

The problem is Maersk’s scale. As the script notes at the outset, the company is almost ubiquitous: ’Pick a point on the globe, any point, and Maersk won’t be far away.’ What an amazingly priviliged position for a company to be in. Few if any businesses can match Maersk in terms of scope of operations. They are at the core of global trade, powering, transporting, enabling the capitalistic exchange.

All of which gives it plenty of scope to play a really meaningful role in forging more innovative and sustainable business practices. Instead we’re treated to languorous scenes of its gargantuan ships and mid-ocean drilling rigs in operation while company talking heads regale us with vague stories detailing the achievements of some of Maersk’s different business units.

The disappointment hits just after the 1.10 mark following John Hurt’s stirring announcement that the company is ‘preparing for new times, new challenges’. Prepped for inspiring stories of how Maersk is pioneering new forms of sustainable energy, seeking ways to reduce its carbon footprint, maybe even announcing that it will henceforth refuse to transport weapons, I fell into a deep funk at the lack of vision that followed: cleverer ways of drilling to extract what remains of the earth’s oil, bigger ships, smarter logistics. Business as usual, in other words.

Maersk is clearly excellent at doing what it is currently doing - micromanaging macro processes, optimizing, scaling… all the things you expect a corporate behemoth to be good at. But on the evidence of this film, it is less adept at judging what it is to be a company in 2012. It has spectacularly misjudged the zeitgeist.