For the last cou­ple of weeks, Welling­ton has been teased with the sight of grim reapers going about their busi­ness around the city. These hood­ed folk were pro­mot­ing the new play “Good Night — The End”, which has recent­ly opened at Down­stage.  Writ­ten by the mul­ti-tal­ent­ed Jo Ran­der­son, the play looks at a group of three grim reapers (and their zesty Ital­ian admin­is­tra­tor), just spend­ing time in their break room between reap­ing.

And like most peo­ple, the stuff that gets dis­cussed on breaks is often noth­ing to do with their work. So instead it’s argu­ments about doing the dish­es, using all the Milo, and Cheezels, pies, piz­zas and hash browns, com­ing across as an unruly mix of between The Office, passiveaggressivenotes.com, Big Broth­er and a bit of the Mighty Boosh thrown in for good mea­sure.

There must be some­thing about spring, and craft fairs as this sat­ur­day has 3 craft­ing events on in our fine city.

Make your first Craft des­ti­na­tion Berham­pore school from 9.30am, it’s home to welling­ton’s pop­u­lar sea­son­al fair, knack. Knack­’s been run­ning since 2007 and there are 3  things I tru­ly love about Knack:

• Knack is run as a fundrais­er for berham­pore school
• Knack is often where you will see some of Wellington’s emerg­ing Crafters show cas­ing their crafts for the first time
• There is a love­ly laid back vibe at every knack, which makes it a love­ly des­ti­na­tion for some crafty cul­ture.

Once you’ve checked out spring knack in Berham­pore head fur­ther down the road and you’ll hit Craft Vil­lage in Island Bay.

Home  to about 50 Crafters, Craft vil­lage is a month­ly mar­ket fea­tur­ing local crafters like Kate Burgess of Stitch Lips whose quirky cre­ations are fea­tured on the Craft Vil­lage Posters.

Rest up overnight and then head out to the long estab­lished Annu­al Pine­haven Arts and Crafts Fair  at Pine­haven School Hall, Pine­haven Road, Upper Hutt.

It is not a ‘sit at your stall’ type of fair more like a gallery where, every­thing is set out on walls, and dis­play tables. The school hall looks very unas­sum­ing from the out­side but once you get in it’s an eye open­er. The event is a fundrais­er for Pine­haven School, so just like spring knack you can do some shop­ping and feel like you are help­ing make the world a bet­ter place.

It is eDay again tomor­row, your oppor­tu­ni­ty to put your eJunk in your trunk take it to the drop off point to get it tak­en care of respon­si­bly.  Appar­ent­ly 95% of mate­ri­als in a com­put­er can be recy­cled and reused and putting your elec­tron­ic waste into land­fill just isn’t an option because haz­ardous mate­ri­als such as lead, mer­cury and cad­mi­um can leach into the earth and get into water­ways.

Where: West­pack Sta­di­um carpark (map here)

When: Sat­ur­day 12 Sep­tem­ber

Tips for dis­pos­ing of com­put­er equipt­ment all year round are on the eDay site here.

We will see you there.

It’s a few min­utes to 6pm on a Thurs­day night, a mot­ley group are mak­ing their way along the Ter­race to the St Andrew’s Church Hall. Inside, there are already a dozen or so peo­ple in casu­al attire. These are the “Advanced Class” who came at 5pm. Many of them stay on after their class to help and coach the “Begin­ners” who are arriv­ing for their ses­sion with teacher Michael Har­ris. The begin­ners don’t come too ear­ly, because watch­ing the advanced prac­tise is very dis­cour­ag­ing.

This is Thurs­day night danc­ing.

Every 8 weeks a new begin­ners class com­mences. Last night was the sec­ond ses­sion of the lat­est term, and already we’re old hands at the Clap Dance and fox­trot. We’re new hands at Rock ‘n Roll. Next week, God knows what fresh humi­la­tions await.

Old hands have expressed delight that this ter­m’s intake is almost equal num­bers of men & women. This means the more advanced women don’t have to dance as men so much. Men nev­er have to dance as women.

The class begins with a sim­ple warmup in the form of the “Clap Dance”. This is because after every few steps, a lusty clap is required, before tip­py-tap­ping back in towards your part­ner to bump hips. On the off chance you man­age to con­nect with­out dis­lo­cat­ing your part­ner’s hips, you get an encour­ag­ing com­ment from Michael. Me? After learn­ing the next stage of the tip­py-tap­ping, which involves a spin and a clap, I found myself about 10 metres away from my part­ner & hav­ing to sprint back in from across the room to attempt my “bump”.

090909 UpStage Fes­ti­val Pre­view from UpStage on Vimeo.

9 Sep­tem­ber (tomor­row) at 2pm get thee to a “real life” (RL) access node at the New­Dowse (or a com­put­er that does­n’t have all of the bells and whis­tles blocked) for the 3rd UpStage Fes­ti­val, 090909.  www.upstage.org.nz will play host to 13 live online per­for­mances, ‘cyber­for­mances’ no less, that span 9 time zones.

How does it work?

Well.…..

UpStage is a web-based plat­form that enables peo­ple any­where in the world to par­tic­i­pate in live online per­for­mances, cre­at­ed in real-time by geo­graph­i­cal­ly dis­persed per­form­ers.  Audi­ences inter­act through a text chat tool.  The play­ers use images, audio, video and text to cre­at the per­for­mances, oper­at­ing “avatars” — graph­i­cal char­ac­ters that move and speak aloud.  The per­for­mances are access­able to any­one with an inter­net brows­er.

Three mem­bers of the Welling­ton­ista are already glee­ful­ly plan­ning our out­fits for the open­ing of the Mon­tana World of Wear­ableArt Awards Show in on the 24th of Sep­tem­ber at TSB are­na.  The huge mar­ket­ing push has begun with ads pop­ping up near the air­port and the details of the WOW wan­der are being ham­mered out as I type.  The show is worth around 10 mil­lion dol­lars to the Welling­ton econ­o­my and we will no doubt see cre­ative lunges for our atten­tion on a par with ‘that ice­berg’ and ‘those reapers’.  Let’s hope they do Welling­ton proud with more cre­ativ­i­ty and less brand­ed bumpf. 

Last year the supreme award went to Welling­ton­ian Nadine Jag­gi and this year sees Welling­to­ni­ans dom­i­nat­ing the field again with 40 out of the 165 gar­ments from locals.  Last year Aun­ty Helen (or her COMMS peo­ple) did a mighty job of writ­ing a speech on the fly but although I am sure the awards will be “World Class”™ I am not sure that we need John on stage with giant paua encrust­ed key for the occa­sion this year (but if he wants to give the paua dress anoth­er out­ing.…)

What was that sound of cry­ing and wail­ing all over Welling­ton yes­ter­day? Why were sin­gle ladies pulling their hair and sob­bing onto one anoth­er’s shoul­ders? Did it have any­thing to do with a cer­tain DPF chang­ing his face­book sta­tus from “Sin­gle” to “In a rela­tion­ship”?

The Welling­ton­ista’s Font of all Film Knowl­edge Dan Slevin has been get­ting excit­ed about this one.

For the next fort­night the Film Archive is show­ing a ret­ro­spec­tive of the work of Welling­ton-based inde­pen­dent film mak­ing col­lec­tive Van­guard Films.

Screen­ing at the Archive’s cin­e­ma on the cor­ner of Tarana­ki and Ghuznee Sts, are a range of excep­tion­al doc­u­men­taries and dra­mas, with equip­ment and gear used by the film mak­ers over the years, also on dis­play. There’s even a Bolex cam­era saved from detec­tion by the French Mil­i­tary at Mururoa Atoll in 1973. Hid­den in a bar­rel of oranges (the film stock in a sack of flour) a decoy cam­era was con­fis­cat­ed, but one Bolex remained in Van­guard mem­ber Alis­ter Bar­ry’s pos­ses­sion which he used to shoot footage of the Mururoa test site.    

Don’t miss Rus­sell Camp­bell and Alis­ter Bar­ry on Sun­day with Chris Laid­law this week­end at 9:30am (appro­pri­ate­ly just after Medi­awatch). And come in to the Film Archive to find out more about the col­lec­tive’s cease­less polit­i­cal and social activism over the last 30 years.