The Weekender: Summer's just around the corner, celebrate with this week's Weekender

Date
18 April 2014

Hey guys! For us Brits in the UK it’s actually a Bank Holiday weekend right now, which means we’re going to spend the next four days drinking shandies in the sun and being forced by children to hunt for eggs in damp, pansy-ridden back gardens – fun! The Bank Holiday gives everyone in the UK a feeling of magic, a tickle of fire in the belly, a feeling that anything and everything is possible. And maybe it is. Let The Weekender guide you into what could be the best weekend of your life.

Top Boy and Misfits director Jonathan van Tulleken told us about his top five books this week and also gave us an insight into the working life of a director.

– Camilla Mantovani told us why Jonathan Glazer’s video for Radiohead’s epic Street Spirit is the best video ever. Can’t really argue with that.

– And to celebrate the launch of the new Tom of Finland stamps, Maisie Skidmore ponders about the role of the stamp in design culture.

Liv Siddall -

Came across this poster on Facebook the other day and it blew my mind. I feel a lot of the time, usually when I’m on the Tube, that they just don’t make film posters like they used to. Imagine someone being this bold nowadays? Wouldn’t happen, the sponsors would go mental. For me, this is perfect. Obviously if you haven’t seen Leon then this won’t make any sense to you at all. Oops! Silly me, everyone’s seen it.

Above

Best film poster ever

Lisa Farrell -

In the early days of Errol Morris’ film-making career he experienced something of a mental block in completing his documentary Gates of Heaven. In a bid to motivate him, his then mentor Werner Herzog promised that he would cook and eat his own shoes if Errol finished the film.

Errol did finish it, and Werner kept his word.

Maisie Skidmore -

My contribution to The Weekender this week is a space mystery involving cherry trees, an astronaut and Buddhist monks from a temple in central Japan. It loosely revolves around the fact that pretend-sounding phenomena like “microgravity” and “cosmic rays” have caused a tree, which was grown from seeds which had previously travelled to space, to grow extraordinarily quickly. I’ll let that sink in for a moment.

Why am I sharing this with you? Because you might naively have supposed that you’d never read a news story about a “Space Cherry.” I, friends, am here to prove you wrong.

Above

Space Cherries!

Rob Alderson -

As first sentences go, “Everyone loves a good epithet” renders me powerless to resists an article’s charm. And this post on The Social Historian blog gets better from there, focusing on those historical figures who weren’t quite as lucky as Richard the Lionheart. From Crazy Otto of Bavaria to Ivaylo the Cabbage there’s some terrifically cruel nicknames, but all pale into insignificance next to the magnificently-derided “James The Sh*t.”

Above

John-George I of Saxony. Mine’s a Pint.

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