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:
Something rotten —
A winter publication
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.
Patience (After Sebald)
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.
Maersk aims high but shoots itself in the foot
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.
Edward Gorey
A recent post on the excellent Covenger and Kester has made me aware of the work of Edward Gorey, an American writer and illustrator who almost never left his Cape Cod home, was an avid consumer of pop culture (he was a big fan of Cheers), and rarely missed a performance of the New York City Ballet.
A choice quote from his Wikipedia entry:
“Because of the settings and style of Gorey’s work, many people have assumed he was British; in fact, he only left the U.S. once, for a visit to the Scottish Hebrides.”
