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.

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.”

She’ll be here soon and I feel like I’ve been waiting for her all my life.

My loveliest memory of December was the flight back to England (first shot above). We left in early morning darkness and climbed above the clouds into daylight - an interzone of cerise stillness between here and there, everywhere and nowhere.

The title of this post is pilfered - it’s the name of the opening track of the Pure X album ‘Pleasure’. But it seemed apt for this selection of shots from my first roll of black and white film. There’s not enough light in any of them but I’ve deliberately avoided doing any post-processing - I like the opacity. I think part of what I love about film is, even when you nail an exposure, there can still feel like a lack of definition. The information of film is just different to digital. It leaves room for mystery.

There’s more on Flickr if you’re interested.

Tres Bien Shop is one of the world’s foremost independent menswear shops. Their brand list is one of the most select in the industry, from cult Japanese labels like Beams, Post O’Alls and Neighborhood to some of the leading lights of the American workwear revival, including Engineered Garments, Woolrich and Gitman.

The guys do a great job with social media. They’ve got good followings on both Twitter and Facebook and use both channels to keep their customers in the loop about when new collections arrive, occasional promotions, and to push out new blog content. For a while, they’ve also been running a video series called In Motion on their Vimeo channel. The idea is to showcase handpicked outfits in a more dynamic way - to give people a chance to see what certain garments look like ‘in motion’ - a smart, simple idea for a company that does most of its business online.

The videos themselves do a solid job in showing off the clothes but Chris and I felt that we could help them lift the aesthetic to a higher level. We sent them our CPH Meal videos and they agreed. The one-minute film below is the result. We wanted to inject a little narrative intrigue while still keeping the clothes central. Hope you like it.

(Incidentally, this is our first ‘official’ project as First XI. More details on that soon.)

Danish winters are often to be endured rather then enjoyed but I’ve been having a good one so far. Sofie’s getting bigger by the day - we’re expecting a girl at the end of February and we can’t wait. We went down to Langeland for a long weekend and were lucky with some gorgeous autumn sun. Otherwise work took me to Nuremberg and Karlskrona, I had a lovely lunch at Radio and I hung out with my friends.

iPhone snaps finished in ShakeItphoto from last month’s trip to the West coast.

After landing in San Francisco, we drove north on Highway 1 to Gualala for a friend’s wedding. We spent a couple of days there (we stayed in one of the houses at St Orres) and then drove inland to Anderson Valley and a two-day stay at The Madrones, just outside Philo. This was a lovely interlude. We explored the Hendy Woods State Park, sadly slated for closure next year, and the nearby Apple Farm, which was one of the most quietly beautiful places I’ve visited. If you’re ever in the area, stay there. Both nights we ate at Table 128 at the Boonville Hotel. This was a real treat - charming, unassuming service, excellent local wines and deliciously fresh and mostly locally grown food.

We headed back to San Francisco where we holed up in an old B&B in the Mission district. Highlights for me were visiting Unionmade in Castro and eating a stupendously good meal at Bar Tartine. Unionmade must represent a new pinnacle in retail - great brand mix, loving attention to detail and unobtrusive, friendly staff. I also got to hang out with my old friend Russell Quinn, now digital director of McSweeney’s. Russell took us to Mission Street Food and we also spent a nice afternoon drinking Guinness with Lucky Peach editor Chris Ying - good inspiration for CPH Meal.

And that was that.

Nike’s collaborations with underground designers have always left me cold. My cynical brain just perceived a monolithic global corporation that saw a way to ingratiate itself among subcultural movers and shakers and remained aloof. Unfortunately for my wallet, however, the moral high ground was never mine to occupy. It turns out I was never impervious to Nike’s branding efforts - they just hadn’t found my sweet spot.

The company’s collaboration with Jun Takahashi’s Undercover Lab passed me by for the first few seasons but earlier this month I read about the latest Gyakusou line on Inventory and immediately felt a pang of desire for one of the pictured items (the short-sleeve tee in a lovely subdued orange).

Some rapid linkhopping led me to the exquisite ‘Running Monks’ video above. This was the clincher. I fell hook, line and sinker for the execution - three impassive Japanese dudes about my age running through forests and temples to a glacially minimal ambient soundtrack.

The video is a beautiful way to present the products and, when coupled with the launch strategy, you can see how the line ticks a lot of boxes for style-conscious runners who want to separate themselves from the flock:

• Strictly limited edition
• Obscure Japanese credentials
• Not mass marketed (quietly spread on A-list men’s style blogs)
• Only available at select retailers

It’s insidious this. Nike are saying that it doesn’t matter how outside the status quo you consider yourself, they can identify that space, colonise it and get your money. As we speak, they are ‘doing the metrics’ on how to get more ’share of wallet’ from a group of Belgian nudists whose only form of transport  is pogo sticks.