"Like a bat out of hell, I'll be gone when the Weekender comes" – Meatloaf

Date
19 June 2015

If the Weekender were to contribute to the “lonely hearts” column in a crumpled, thoroughly thumbed tabloid, it would probably read “fun-loving, outgoing, heavily bearded older guy, WLTM likeminded pals for weird GIF exchanges, bad jokes, all-you-can-drink Bloody Mary brunches and all that accompanies them.” If that doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, you’re in the wrong place. Enjoy!

– Oh M.I.A., audio-visual queen of our hearts, is there no wrong you can do? For the latest release from her new album Matangi, Maya teamed up with Gener8ion to film no fewer than 36,000 kids at China’s biggest fighting school performing a routine in staggering, faultless unison. Just try to look away.

– If you hadn’t already realised (we might have mentioned it once or twice) last week saw the arrival of our annual creative symposium Here, where a bunch of brilliant speakers share their wisdom at London’s Royal Geographic Society. If you didn’t make the event and perhaps even if you did, here are some things we learned on the day.

– While we were out scraping our knees and playing Kiss-Chase in the playground, these two were recreating the iconic original version of Jurassic Park in their bedrooms with toys, a handheld camcorder, and a shitload of invisible string. Laters Jurassic World, we’ll take this any day of the week.

– Graphic designer Côme de Bouchony’s bookshelf taught us about magazine design, pop-up books, and one seriously big sausage, with this week’s let’s-have-a-snoop-around-your-collection feature.

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Jocelyn Allen: 22nd February 2016. Courtesy of the artist

– From Francesca Jane Allen’s candid look at girlhood to the unseen world of adult baptism, our very own Maisie Skidmore picks five up-and-coming photographers from this year’s Freshfaced and Wildeyed at the The Photographers’ Gallery.

– Last week at Here, comedy writer and Father Ted creator Graham Lineman talked us through walking that fine line between working and wasting time. Find out why he thinks boredom is essential to the creative’s toolkit here.

– Few artists spark as much controversy as Richard Prince and if any proof is needed, one look at his his much-discussed Instagram portraits now showing at London Gagosian will have you loving or hating him.

– Ever wondered what freelancers really get up to? We spoke to a host of creatives about the highs and lows of going it alone and created this illustrated guide to freelance life with Working Not Working’s Jay Wright.

– We city-dwellers have all thought about packing it in and leaving for the countryside but few of us do it. Photographer Spencer Murphy traded London for the woods and turned his lens on Runnymede’s off-grid community of freegans.

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St Ives, Cornwall, England, May 1957, English sculptor Barbara Hepworth is pictured with some of her completed works. Photograph: Paul Popper

– In a British design match made in heaven, fashion designer Margaret Howell designed a workwear collection in homage to the great sculptor Barbara Hepworth.

– From Ai Weiwei to Frank Gehry, The Guardian looks at the afterlives of the showstopping pavilions designed each year for the Serpentine in London.

– Wikipedia is one of the biggest, most-used online resources we have, but most of us know by now that print is most definitely not dead, and as testament to that, artist Michael Mandiberg is printing the online encylopaedia in 7,600 volumes!

– Derek Jarman is bloody great, and after a monologue from one of his radical films soundtracked the Alexander McQueen SS16 show earlier this week, Dazed Digital took the liberty of outlining the must-sees from the British director’s repetoire

– With its cheap rents and buzzing culture Berlin has long offered refuge to bright young things from around the world. Now, off the back of last month’s British election results, i-D looks at the spate of creatives relocating to the German capital.

Alex Hawkins

We all know someone who insists on filling our news feed with a stream of cryptic, essentially meaningless updates. There’s oversharing, and then there’s that weird mix of over and undersharing, and I’m not sure which is the lesser evil. As usual The New Yorker have nailed this one. (“Vibes, por favor!!!”)

Beccy Fulleylove

So this week Gap announced it was closing 175 stores in North America and with it came an onslaught of nostalgic internet talk about people’s first Gap experience. Mine was in the 90s when my mum very generously bought me a white long-sleeved crew neck top with the Gap logo emblazoned in a cool aqua. I felt like the bomb. To recapture that feeling of bliss I’ve been looking at old Gap adverts on Youtube and I forgot how amazing they were. There was a series in the late 90s where great looking people sat or stood in a crowd, looking fresh in Gap’s finest khaki and beige and singing and dancing along to old records. This Mellow Yellow one is the one that sticks in my mind most and really shows Gap in its glorious heyday.

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Jack Godfrey Baxter: Sandwicheata

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Jack Godfrey Baxter: Sandwicheata

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Jack Godfrey Baxter: Sandwicheata

Maisie Skidmore

I’ve spent a disproportionate amount of time in the world’s worst Tesco contemplating its comparatively limited range of sandwiches this week, which makes Jack Godfrey Baxter’s ham sandwich GIF, in all three variations, my new favourite image of the day.

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