If, like many of us, you’re furious about the way many media outlets treat women, you need to start reading the American magazine Bust. It’s fiercely feminist, but also riffs on craft, culture and fashion – in a good way (they use ‘real’ people for models, of all shapes, sizes and sexualities etc) In fact, their new issue is the perfect place to start, because it features our Wellingtonians of the Year, the all-conquering Flight of the Conchords on one side of its flip cover, along with the Wellington landmark-defiling Elijah Wood.
I recommend subscribing, because this magazine is really so very very awesome, but if you just want to give it a go, you can buy it at Vic Books, Magazzino, and probably Unity Books.
About half the Wellingtonista now call Newtown home, so we thought it was about time we did some exploring of the area. Therefore, on this coming Saturday, we’re going to be doing a Newtownista Pub Crawl, and you should come with us!
We’re going to start on Riddiford St down near the zoo around 7.30pm, and work our way back towards town, aiming to end up at Amigo’s for tapas. Most of us haven’t been to most of the bars, so we’ll be intending to give them all a go-to, even the dodgy ones – but we may change our minds on the night when we look in their doors.
To come along, either show up in that area at that time, get in contact with a cellphone number so we can text you our progress, or follow my twitter account as hopefully I’ll remember to update it as we go along. We’re going to boldly go where some people have gone before, and it should be a jolly good time.
Gorgeous photo by Dead Possum, yanked from flickr
To celebrate getting over Hump Day (Wednesday), here’s the first in a series of things that the Wellingtonista is loving right now. Please feel free to add in your own current loves in the comments section.
Got half an hour or more to spare? Jump in the fabric queue at Spotlight at the bottom of the Ngaio Gorge, home to possibly the slowest shop assistants in all of New Zealand.
Seriously, where the hell do they find these people? They’re a really good encouragement to forsake the easy parking and take a bus in to the fabric shop on Willis Street instead. But then you’d miss out on all the fabulous “oh my god they are so slow!” queue conversations you get to have with the other irate shoppers…
I know we talked about this last year, when we made fun of John McGrath (you know, just for a change) but I feel the need to remind y’all that the Wairarapa Wine Harvest Festival is coming up again.
And now I can say for certain that it really is the most kickass day ever. Just $25 gets your ticket into the shindig, and you can get a shuttle from the train for $15. Taste wines from all kinds of boutique winemakers around the Wairarapa, many of whom don’t have a cellar door. Laugh as the man from Maebus describes his favourite Pinot Noir as tasting “like angels fornicating in your mouth” – and try and get in his good books in case he really is in with Google. Watch my parents try and win half a case of wine with their awesome dancing skills again. But one suggestion: don’t try and walk on rolling barrels. You will just fall off, hit your head and cry.
There was a while in 2005 when you knew that on Friday and Saturday nights you could go to Indigo, and they’d be open, and there’d be Nixx-Til-Sixx spinning everything from Bloc Party to Motley Crue and you could drink until 6am. And then that stopped and it sucked. Fast foward to now though, and in 2008, Indigo is now San Francisco Bathhouse, and Nixx-Til-Sixx has been replaced by the fabulous DJ Doofus, but the same thing is happening.
All night long, baby. Just like Lionel promised. 1 a.m til 6 a.m. All weekend. Every weekend. Cheap beverages. Rotating djs. Open when others bars close. Hosted by djdooofus and the nice staff at San Fran. It’s a celebration, bitches!
Welcome to your new favourite place to go when everything else has already shut. We’ll see you there.
1. Right now you should go and buy your ticket to the Wellington Girl Geek dinner, because according to their site, there are only three tickets left. And you know you want to go, because a) Brenda is awesome at all things interweb b) I’m speaking and there must be a reason why I’m so hubristical and c) we already mentioned the hopeful swag.
2. On Saturday, you should go to the Gay and Lesbian Fair in Civic Square, because, to quote Sue, it’s “fully licensed with rumours of whitebait fritters”.
3. As if that wasn’t enough of a fair, on Sunday there’s the Newtown Festival!
4. Also on Sunday, the Costume Cave is having a sale of its old costumes, so you should go along and get some new outfits to spice up your life. As a side note, I was going to do a post at one stage recommending that you rent any wigs you may need from the Costume Cave instead of since Creative Showoff in Thorndon they’re $10 instead of $20, but then I was a month late in returning a wig to Creative and they didn’t charge me anything, so that’s nice.
And the half point: Since we know there’s plenty of Aucklanders who read this site as well, on Saturday at 5pm the Aucklandista is having its first meet-up in an extremely untrendy bar near the Viaduct, and so if you’re interested in contributing to the site, you should get in contact to find out where they’ll be and come along.
Often with the Wellingtonista we tell you things. Today, however, we’re asking for things. Specifically:
1. Swag: Wellington is going to be having its first Girl Geek dinner, and I’m putting together Swag Bags – if you have something you’d like to put in around 50 bags for 50 technologically-minded and intelligent women, please get in touch – johubris @ gmail.com.
2. Contra: Last night lots of us attended a Bloggers’ Meet-Up, and the awesome Epic Beer came up with some lubrication to get us started. The Wellingtonista absolutely would be very very keen on doing this sort of thing more often. We’re working on our guidelines, and templates to allow space for brand exposure, but this is just a heads up: if you offer good products or services, and want to reach our smart readers who like disposing of their incomes, we would like to work with you, so get in touch.
Okay, you know how the Wellingtonista have a twitter account that you can sign up to in order to receive updates to your phone about what’s going on in the city? Yeah, I suppose I should be the first person to admit that doesn’t go so well. You see, despite the fact that all Wellingtonistas know the login and password for it, there are only a small handful of us who use Twitter, and all of us therefore have our phones configured with our personal accounts, which means any updates to the Wellingtonista Twitter have to come from online, which means we’re tied down to a computer.
Well, clever people have come up with solutions to let everyone use their own personal accounts to update one main twitter. I first experienced this at Webstock, with the Webstock Twitter bot which ran hot during the conference. Now there’s the Free Wellington account, which will send you updates on things to do for free or under $10 in Wellington. But here’s the trick: you can update it too. Just follow FreeWellington on twitter, and preface your updates with an FW, and everyone will be able to know what the water’s like at the beach, or why they should be staying the hell away from Waitangi Park…
It’s a genius scheme. Now we’re just hoping that the Wellingtonista will get a bot of its very own for Xmas!