Remem­ber the good time y’all had last year at the TAWAs? Sure, a lot of that was us up on stage, but also, it was the Klezmer Rebs, play­ing rol­lick­ingly good tunes. So we ima­gine you’d like to see them again, yes?

Good news, friends! They’re play­ing a gig next Fri­day July 30th at the Bath House, with Rodrigo Bros, The Char­coal White, Sam Man­zanza Africa Rhythm Band, Rose’, Rus­sell Self, Han­nah Howes, oSka and more yet to con­firm. The gig is to raise money for the Sea Shep­pard and Pete Beth­une. 

Come out and show your sup­port for oppos­i­tion to whal­ing.  All bands are donat­ing their ser­vices and all pro­ceeds go to the Sea Shep­herd Soci­ety to help them con­tin­ue their dir­ect action against whalers in our oceans.

Yes, there are divided opin­ions on the Sea Shep­par­d’s tech­niques and Pete Beth­une in par­tic­u­lar. What’s not up for debate? How much fun it is to have a jolly good dance. 

Cross­pos­ted from Pretty Pretty Pretty, because I can.

It’s been a while since our last Pretty Pretty Party cloth­ing swap, and giv­en my cur­rent home­less­ness, it’ll prob­ably be ages until the next one, but nev­er fear! If you need to freshen up your ward­robe, you can still get your swap on, next Sunday:

The Big Shwop

• Sunday July 25
• Ven­ue: The St James Theatre, Cour­tenay Place, Wel­ling­ton
• Time: 10 am – 2.30 pm
• Tick­ets: $20 from our web­site or just turn up on the day
• R 18 event as alco­hol is being served
• Bring up to 20 items of cloth­ing

Tick­ets are $20, but because there are strict rules for what people can bring in, you know that the clothes will be good. Also, there’s all kinds of added good­ies on the day.

In 1895, an eld­erly, ill Mark Twain embarked on a world lec­ture tour, in order to earn enough money to pay back the $100,000 debt he held. The tour took him down under, includ­ing a vis­it to Whan­ganui. And it’s this event that Mark Twain and Me in Maor­i­land takes its inspir­a­tion from.

After its premiere at the New Zea­l­and Fest­iv­al of the Arts earli­er this year, the play returns for a short run at Down­stage.

The play sup­poses that Mr Twain took a rather more act­ive role in loc­al polit­ics, inflam­ming the Pakeha, and both pro-European and anti-European Maori alike.

But this is no staid his­tor­ic drama. The play has lash­ings of te reo Maori – some­times trans­lated, oth­er times not, but you’re clev­er so you can fig­ure it out from the con­text. And there’s a pleas­ing amount of song and music, with Mr Twain strap­ping on an elec­tric gui­tar at one point, to join in on a blues num­ber.

Play­wright Dav­id Geary’s innov­at­ive script has moments of high com­edy, yet with the power to get right down into some really gritty emo­tion­al moments. But what I really enjoyed the most was how New Zea­l­and this play is. I’m sure all the places Twain vis­ited on his 1895 tour have their own stor­ies to tell (or make up), but it’s just really sat­is­fy­ing to see an invent­ive, enter­tain­ing play like this that’s come out of New Zea­l­and.

• Mark Twain and Me in Maor­i­land
  Down­stage Theatre until 24 July

 I am not going to see a single film at the Film Fest­iv­al. I’m not much of a movie-goer at the best of times, and the idea of hav­ing to decide where I’m going to be weeks in advance in order to avoid hav­ing to sit with my knees around my ears in the back row some­where just does­n’t appeal to me at all. But I know that there are people amongst us who love the fest­iv­al. One Wel­ling­tonista has taken two weeks off work to attend as many films as pos­sible. Another­’s going to see The Room in Christ­ch­urch and Wel­ling­ton. You crazy kids and your hula hoops and your mov­ing pic­tures! 

But appar­ently not all is run­ning smoothly. We got a copy of an angry let­ter an acquaint­ance is send­ing to the fest­iv­al, and I thought I’d post it here to see if any of y’all are hav­ing sim­il­ar exper­i­ences.

To whom it may con­cern,

I write to you in response to the chaos I wit­nessed this after­noon whilst lin­ing up to buy a tick­et for a pop­u­lar film at the Embassy theatre. I know it was silly of me to expect to get a tick­et on a busy Sat­urday half an hour before the film starts, but some people choose to make these choices. What shocked me was the level of com­pet­ence involved at the box office. The whole thing seems very inef­fi­cient. I have an idea that you may find use­ful or not. Why not have three sep­ar­ate lines lead­ing to the three sep­ar­ate con­soles using dividers? I used to work at the Embassy and I know they have these dividers in the base­ment. If the lines are organ­ized you can then make things a lot smooth­er dur­ing peak times. Make one line for advance book­ings, one line for tick­et col­lec­tion from pre-orders, and one line for the imme­di­ate screen­ing. You can even go a step fur­ther by using a sign stat­ing the title of the film about to screen and wheth­er or not it is sold out

There are craft mar­kets that hap­pen occa­sion­ally like Craft 2.0 and the Knack, which we get suit­ably excited about at the time, but anoth­er mar­ket that hap­pens every week­end takes place on Sat­urdays in the under­ground car­park at Frank Kitts.

Usu­ally they have a mix of stalls, food and music, but tomor­row they have a par­tic­u­lar focus: 

“Won­ders of Wool” Mar­ket

Show­ing off the region’s fibre artists, spin­ners, fel­ters, knit­ters & weavers.

Includ­ing demon­stra­tions on spin­ning, weav­ing, crochet­ing as well as some spe­cific­ally for the kids.

Over 60 stalls, includ­ing:

• Fel­ted hats, scarves & throws
• Alpaca cloth­ing
• Hand­woven nov­elty yarns
• Hand-dyed spin­ning and felt­ing fibres
• Cro­cheted items
• Merino cloth­ing
• Balls of wool, knit­ting needles, felt­ing needles etc

 The mar­ket runs from 10am-4pm, it’s under cov­er, and the organ­isers prom­ise it’ll be warm, so if you’re up for some yarn, you should def­in­itely go along and check it out, not least because my aunt will be selling off her huge stash of weav­ing wool (we’re all about the nepot­ism here, of course).

It’s nev­er been a tough­er time to be run­ning a film fest­iv­al. In addi­tion to the usu­al com­mer­cial con­sid­er­a­tions of just selling enough tick­ets to stay afloat, each year brings with it fresh wrinkles to be accom­mod­ated. The win­dow of avail­ab­il­ity of titles shrinks every year because dis­trib­ut­ors don’t want to sit on their invest­ment. There’s increas­ing pres­sure to get films into cinemas before down­load­ing des­troys the mar­ket and less time for films to build a deserving inter­na­tion­al buzz.

In pre­vi­ous years films like the Argen­tini­an Best For­eign Lan­guage Oscar win­ner The Secrets in their Eyes might have been tent-pole fea­tures for a Wel­ling­ton Film Fest­iv­al but have already been and gone from loc­al cinemas so it’s incum­bent on dir­ect­or and chief pro­gram­mer Bill Gos­den (and his cohorts) to dig deep­er to find more gems for our annu­al mid-winter fix.

People keep ask­ing me, Dan, they say, what sort of Fest­iv­al is it, this year, and I have to answer that I really don’t know. I’ve only seen 19 out of the 160+ movies in the book. That’s not enough to know any­thing, really, about the Fest­iv­al as a whole. It’s less than 15% of an enorm­ously rich and diverse smor­gas­bord of poten­tial good­ies.

As usu­al, I asked the Fest­iv­al people to feed me the unher­al­ded and unknown, the films that might miss out on atten­tion from the big media, and they did. As might be expec­ted, not all of them worked for me but I have some sug­ges­tions for films that I am assured will not be com­ing back on gen­er­al release later this year.

In the drama sec­tion I was very affected by Honey, a beau­ti­ful Turk­ish film about a young boy with some kind of learn­ing dis­order, des­per­ate for the approv­al of his teach­ers, class­mates and his tacit­urn bee­keep­er fath­er. A fine example of slow cinema, I feel cer­tain that you will be absorbed by its beauty and the mira­cu­lous cent­ral per­form­ance.

The rest of the Wel­ling­tonista pre­view, after the jump.

We already told you how excited we are about the upcom­ing Wel­ling­ton on a Plate fest­iv­al, and now we’re even more excited to announce that we’re work­ing with Pos­it­ively Wel­ling­ton Tour­ism to help you get the most out of the event. Yes, that’s right, you! Over the next five weeks, we’re going to be giv­ing away one $100 vouch­er each week to one of five dif­fer­ent res­taur­ants par­ti­cip­at­ing in Wel­ling­ton on a Plate. That’s some ser­i­ous deli­cious­ness to be had right there!

First up, we have a vouch­er for Ele­ments Cafe. Ele­ments is a fre­quent nom­in­ee in our TAWAs  for Best Sur­burb­an Ven­ue, and with menu items like char­grilled lamb loin, lamb & por­cini pie served with truffle mash on the din­ner menu, it’s not hard to see why. The ser­vice is warm and friendly, the set­ting in an old butcher­’s shop is lovely and the food is extremely tasty. It’s well worth a trip out to Lyall Bay either for brunch, din­ner or their cook­ing classes.  As part of Wel­ling­ton on a Plate, Ele­ments are offer­ing a $35 two-course lunch, or a $40 three-course din­ner, includ­ing a glass of wine. Yum!

It’s time to eat eat eat! The pro­gramme for Wel­ling­ton on a Plate has been launched, and it is mak­ing us mighty hungry. At the same time though, it makes us a little frus­trated, because we’re not sure how to book events, or how much they’ll cost, and the descrip­tions are often quite vague. Still, there’s a lot of events that sounds fun, from Steam­punk tours to murder mys­ter­ies, and there’s a range of spe­cial deals on at res­taur­ants (finally eat­ing at Mar­tin Bos­ley’s is in fin­an­cial reach!). Also new this year is a bur­ger con­test. We dare you to try each and every one, and report back to us with your find­ings. So, you’re tak­ing us out for din­ner then, yes?