Fight the potential extinction of the handwritten letter with this Mixed Messages noteset by New York stationary company, The Great Lakes Good. Having been an endangered species since the invention of social media, we couldn’t think of a better way to keep letter writing alive. This beautifully designed pack of six die cut shield cards will help to get the message across in its purest form, whether a simple ‘Hello, Hello, Hello’ or a ‘Thank U, Thank U’.

Buy the set at Couverture and The Garbstore for a healthy £13 and save the vanishing ‘Just a Note to Say’ today! 

Designer, chef and all-round innovator Jasleen Kaur has made something rather special. She's taken a well-loved cooking tool, the Tala Cook's Measure which first graced British kitchens in the 1920s, and transformed it into a curry measure.

Her Tahli Curry Measure gives you the right quantity of ingredients for nine different Indian dishes, from butter chicken to chapattis, and constitutes the only change to Tala's iconic tool since the addition of metric measurements.

We spoke to Jasleen about the story behind the measure, and how she got her mum to help tweak the recipes.

What was your experience of the Tala Cook's Measure before you redesigned it?

I know Tala from my Dad’s hardware shop. If a lady came into the shop asking for jam pot covers or muslin, I'd point them in the direction of "the blue gingham packet with Tala written in red". Later, whilst I was studying in London, I came across a really old Tala Cook's Measure at a stand in Spitalfields antique market. I became obsessed with how great a tool it was. And the choice of ingredients it measured was telling of the era it came from; lentils, rice, custard powder and what the hell was tapioca?

When did you develop the idea for the Thali Curry Measure?

After I bought the Cook's Measure my obsession grew as it sat on my desk. But as much as I loved how it worked, I didn't really use it. I don't bake and the combination of moving away from home and the lack of Mum’s home cooking meant the only thing I felt like eating for dinner was a tomato aubergine curry or yellow dahl.

What sparked the initial idea to redesign it was simply to tell the story of what we cooked at home. I pitched my very raw idea to Tala as, "I want to redesign your iconic 1920s Cook's Measure to make curry”. They loved it but told me to focus on finishing my MA first.

How did you go about designing the tool?

Before I could develop the recipes, I had to decide what it would cook. Along with some of my homemade favourites, like Mum’s simple dahl or Dad’s chicken curry, it also needed curry house classics such as jalfrezi and butter chicken. So I worked with my Mum to get the recipes right before product testing the measure on friends and family. 

How does the Thali measure fit with your design work more broadly?

My work has always been about finding ways to communicate with my family through visual language. With Tala, I wanted to take the values and importance of Indian home cooking, a language learned from my mother and nani ji, and work this into a product that speaks to a much wider audience. Most importantly for me, Tala’s existing distribution networks mean ultimately the product will end up selling in my dad’s hardware store, filtering back into the community the ideas originated from.

But the Thali Curry Measure here.

Renoir, the latest film directed by Gilles Bourdos, could really be called Les Renoirs as it tells the story of not only the famous Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste (a well cast Michel Bouquet) but also his son, the celebrated film maker, Jean (Vincent Rottiers).

However, it should perhaps more accurately be called Heuschling as not only is plot driven by the arrival of fiery, redhead artist's model Andrée Heuschling to the family estate bringing life to their but it is the on screen presence of Christa Theret who plays her, that brings life to the film.

We spoke to rising star Christa Theret ahead of Renoir's release on Friday 28th.

How did you get into acting?

I started by chance. In Paris films are often casted through wild castings and when I was twelve a casting director found me in a school. With Renoir, I met the director, Gilles, in a café and we started to speak about the film, he gave me the script and I loved it but I thought that I was too blonde and too skinny for the role but I passed four or five castings and I got it!

What was it about Andrée that really drew you to the role?

I loved her spontaneity. For me she is very modern. When she arrives at Renoir's estate she’s like 'Yes, I’m a model but I want to be a star of the cinema, I am not a servant!'. It touched me. The other girls in the film are much more resigned to their fate, to their condition, whereas Andrée might be from a very poor family but she still has big ambition. She is a strong woman and that appealed to me.

Playing an artist's model you spend a lot of the film nude, how did you feel about that?

I was helped by the fact that my father was a painter and my mother was a model and that is how they met. So from when I was little I was used to my father painting women and I learned to understand the relationship between them: That it was not sexual, there was no ambiguity. It is more subtle, more abstract.

My father and Renoir, I think, paint with the same desire, the same want, whether it is a landscape, a women, a still life, that it is their grace that they are trying to capture. That helped me to understand the position of Andrée as the model. An artist’s muse is a lot about the personality, not just the appearance. And it is very difficult to do, to stay still but at the same time to give something. The painter needs to be inspired. Like a director by an actress.

That is interesting because watching the film, in those scenes, it is not a sexual portrayal of the female body; it is just very beautiful.

That is exactly what Gilles wanted. There is no voyeurism. Even on the set I never felt myself to be uncomfortable.

It is important to see that on film. So often a naked woman is only seen in a sexualised way.

Exactly. Because of that, in France, we have some actresses who never show their bodies, they refuse. But for me it is important sometimes.

Have you ever felt uncomfortable on set?

Sometimes it is difficult but you have to speak to the director before you actually start shooting because otherwise you have the crew, maybe fifty persons, ready and waiting for you, and the lights, the cameras etc. A day of shooting is very, very expensive and you can’t just say no I don’t want to do that on the day. But at the same time, when you are filming it is all so quick.

When you make love, you have a little kiss and then the camera moves and then its ‘Ahh, ahh'! It’s so cut. It’s not a sequence or one big long shot. On film it looks long and drawn out but in real time it is so disturbed by different takes. I have never been disappointed by the direction or the end result because it was always justified for the situation or the story.

Renoir is out in cinemas on the 28th June. Watch the trailer here. 

It’s Tuesday and that means we’re once again diving into the musical brain waves of an upcoming band for Five Questions and a Song, the weekly column where we pester musicians with a quintette of questions and ask them to share one of their tracks for your listening pleasure.

Today we’re talking to Just Handshakes, a four piece indie band from Leeds whose debut album Say It came out earlier this year and has the bittersweet air of a dream at full moon. Called "officially one of the best indie bands around" by Rough Trade East, the four university friends are set to bring their Smiths-influenced melodies to the masses this summer. Have a listen to Just Handshakes’ nostalgic opening track 'London Bound' below.

Photo: Just Handshakes

Tell us about your band.

We are Clara, Mike, Jim and Sean. We met a few years ago in Leeds and we’ve been writing songs ever since.

What three bands would headline your dream concert? (And what dream food item would be served at the concession stand?)

We’d have Television, The Smiths and Happy Birthday and there would be a pre-gig selection of freshly baked foccacia bread with a nice cheese board for people to nibble.

Imagine that one day you decide to change musical direction and become a glam metal band instead. What would your new band name be? 

We were actually thinking of starting a glam metal side project called Space Face.

How often do you call your mum? [asked by previous interviewee Marnie Stern]

I’m close to my mum so we speak quite a bit, maybe two or three times a week. Sometimes she texts my house phone by accident and I get a weird automated voice that reads out her message.

What can you tell us about this song?

It’s partly about that limbo period when you finish uni and you’re not really sure what to do with yourself. There was a time when it felt like everyone we knew was disappearing to London. I guess it’s about “growing up” and feeling a bit lost.

www.justhandshakeswerebritish.tumblr.com

There is something special about hearing a poet read his or her own work aloud. Rhythms and cadence leap off the page and find life. New connections are made through pitch and tone, the hint of a smile or a frown revealing previously unrecognized irony or fervour.

In a recent article about Sylvia Plath for the New York Review of Books, writer April Bernard discusses how she first discovered Plath's dark humour after listening to Plath reading her poem Daddy "with a discernible wave of laughter in her voice". Bernard considers her assessment of Plath’s tendency to overstate in a new light, no longer seeing it as a mistake, but as an aesthetic choice to embarrass and cajole readers.

(Readers avoiding material involving suicide should skip to W. B. Yeats reading The Lake Isle of Innisfree.)

And there are the poets whose work is truly meant to sing. In a recording from 1932, W.B. Yeats prepares listeners for the rhythmic emphasis of his readings by paraphrasing William Morris, saying, “It gave me a devil of a lot of trouble to get into verse the poems that I am going to read, and that is why I WILL NOT read them as if they were prose.” Point taken.

One of my favourite recordings is of Dylan Thomas, reading Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night. The structure of the poem, with its repeating refrains, tugs and lulls the listener, but Thomas’s rich, resonant voice fights against this ceaseless march of time. As YouTube commenter mhendrickson26 says: “a bit more emotional impact than “YOLO”, I would think”. I would think so, too.

It’s unsurprising that Before Midnight hasn’t been marketed on the basis of its mysteries. Anyone who has seen the first two entries in the series understands what to expect: like 1995’s Before Sunrise and 2004’s Before Sunset, the bulk of the film centres around a discursive conversation between Céline (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke) as they wander through a location in Europe – in this case, Messenia, Greece. Before Midnight is a little less mobile than its forebears, staging lengthy scenes in a car, at a dinner with friends and in a hotel room, but its emphasis on freeform debates about life and relationships will be familiar to anyone acquainted with the series.

Most films are best viewed knowing almost nothing about them in advance, but this applies especially to Before Midnight. While plot has always taken a back seat to character in director Richard Linklater’s much-loved series, it’s important to remember that Before Sunset ended with one of cinema’s greatest cliff-hangers – a tantalisingly inviting statement from one of the protagonists that has remained unanswered for nearly a decade. Sadly, as even the most basic synopsis of the film would disclose the outcome of its predecessor’s final moments, it’s likely that most of the audience will be deprived of the unique rush of emotion that arrives minutes in when Jesse exits an airport and everything becomes clear.

Thankfully, even without that heady moment Before Midnight is still a marvellous film. The reality of a well-worn love between people in their forties – depicted here as something both wonderful and exhausting – is a subject that is rarely explored in cinema, but Before Midnight manages to do so in a tremendously moving fashion. While the conversational, naturalistic format of the films produces a level of detail and intimacy absent from most cinematic romances, what gives the series its power is the palpable history that has increased with each entry and has added depth to the ones that have gone before.

In Before Sunset, Jesse and Céline's struggle to accept the compromises and disappointments of adulthood resonated because the audience had seen the characters at their most youthful and impossibly optimistic. Similarly, Before Midnight finds the pair a decade later as they attempt to find continued meaning in a long-living love. Because the audience has seen how that love has defined their lives ever since they were two curious, joyful young people who randomly met on a train, their shared past provides enormous stakes. Jesse and Céline are as fictional as any other characters in any other film and yet their sporadic, recurring appearances have created an ongoing emotional investment in what happens to them. Most films have to fake the history between their characters: Before Midnight succeeds because the audience shares it too. With the benefit of its two lived-in, imperfect, beautifully-written-and-performed characters, Linklater and his co-writers Delpy and Hawke have contributed another terrific instalment in what has perhaps become one of the defining love stories of a generation.

Scrolling through Best Made Company's online shop is a delight in itself – you’ll find everything you need for your inner lumber jack; from compasses, pocket knives and hand-crafted axes (the tool that launched the site thanks to Peter Buchanan-Smith’s ‘need for a better axe’ in life) to motivational felt badges and woolly warm camp blankets.

But it is the Seamless & Steadfast Enamel Steel crockery ($35 for a set of two plates) that we’re after this week. Made using World War Two era machinery, the renowned ‘Famous X’ and compass rose is baked directly to the plate and the rim is double dipped with enamel. Not your average plate ey? We say, swap your paper plates for a set of these at your next picnic so you can be ready for anything.

Find them here, and if you’re stuck for ideas as to what to serve on them try: ‘Cee Dub’s Dutch Oven and Other Camp Cookin’: A Back Country Guide to Outdoor Cooking Spiced with Tall Tales’ for belt-busting recipes with lashings of dry wit.

On Sunday, the moon passes the closest to the earth that it'll be all year. It'll hang larger in the sky than any other time, a phenomenon prosaically known as a supermoon.

We'd like you to capture the supermoon, wherever you are. We'll print a spread of photos in our next issue. Send them to [email protected] by July 10th, with a little about your location.

Now go listen to the Magnetic Fields, Save A Secret For The Moon.

Photo: Robin Ohia.