2AWA: Best Shop nominations
Here are the nominees for the Best Shop category for the 2nd Annual Wellingtonista Awards (2AWA).
Goodbye pay-packet, hello merchandise:
Sometimes we like to pretend to be filthy hippies, and care about things like globalisation, and consumerism, debt and excessive consumption. But then we see all the shiny things for sale in these shops, and all those thoughts go right out the window as we rush towards the pretties with our arms wide open.
(nominees after the jump)
2AWA: Best Late-Night Venue nominations
Here are the nominees for the Best Late-Night Venue category for the 2nd Annual Wellingtonista Awards (2AWA).
When even Winston Peters has gone to bed, the best bar to go to is:
Sure, town is banging and humming around midnight. But what if the bar you’re in starts closing and you’re not ready to go home yet? Where do you head to then?
(nominees after the jump)
Art on the streets
Let’s say this for the record: the Wellingtonista hates tagging. It’s just an inane and territorial fury of poodle-pissings scrawled around the town signifying nothing but a terrifying lack of imagination on the part of the tagger.
That said, there’s more to the world of graffiti than tags. And at some point graffiti changes from mindless and wanton property damage into ART, somewhere across boundaries as ragged and ill-defined and debatable as any cultural warzone. Around central Wellington, it’s all there to be discovered and mapped, tucked away in the alleys and byways of Te Aro mainly, but also scattered around the wider inner city.
[We show you some great street-art, after the jump]
Ponoko at TechCrunch40
Ponoko is perhaps Wellington’s hardest to categorise tech startup. The general idea seems to be to around empowering ordinary people to design items that Ponoko will help them manufacture and distribute.
This admittedly sounds a bit vague until you’ve been immersed in the service, as several of the Wellingtonista (and many of our readers) have been. In fact, it’s now possible to buy fellow Wellingtonista Sue’s designed-by-Sue, built-by-Ponoko jewellery via the Ponoko site, with more to come.
So we are all very excited about what Ponoko has to offer, and that view is shared by the people at TechCrunch, who invited them and a handful of others out of a field of 700 start-up hopefuls world wide to present to today’s TechCrunch40 conference in San Francisco.
This is a fantastic achievement (the immediate evidence being the occasional 503 bandwidth errors on the Ponoko site after co-founder Dave ten Have’s presentation) and we hope this is the foundation for further and bigger success!
- Dave’s presentation is liveblogged here
- Noted by Engadget here.
- Zillions of mentions via Google Blogsearch
Ask Wellington: spring gardening?
Sometimes we at the Wellingtonista must admit that even we, strange though it may seem, do not know everything about our fine city (and in this case, its climatic peculiarities). So periodically we must call upon the mighty and erudite collective wisdom of our readers to fill in the gaps.
Many of you may have noticed the arrival of springtime, if only to observe the marginally warmer temperatures, a sustained breeziness, and an increased rate of sneezing experienced between your front doors and that of your air-conditioned workplaces. But not all of you fall into this category, and it is of you in particular we are enquiring today.
You see, some in the Wellingtonista (and again, this may be a little shocking) live in the suburbs. And some of us actually have areas of flat ground reserved for the growing of things that can be eaten (it is true that some apartment-dwellers have a couple of terracotta pots on their balconies for the same purpose – the following may apply to them too), called “vegetable gardens”.
And so the question we have for you today is: What should we be planting in our “vegetable gardens” right now?
We suspect that potatoes are good at the moment. But we wonder: what else is good, assuming that it’s both legal and tasty? If we were to get planting this coming week, what’s best?
Answers, please, dear readers.
Entertainment Book Review: One Red Dog
At the Wellingtonista we don’t often give props to less consciously hipster places like One Red Dog, even though their continued success shows they have a devoted following. Today we discovered one of the reasons why this devoted following might exist.
Review after the jump.
Ukes at lunch
We love the library. We do. And many of us are in there at least once a week, and not just to admire the architecture. (For some of us it has something to do with those kid’s pacifiers DVDs having just a seven day loan period. But we digress.)
Like the Wellingtonista, the library too is celebrating NZ Music month – they’re hosting a quiz that always ends with the chance to win a well known brand of MP3 player. Nice.
But even better, there’s a performance by local Super Group The Wellington International Ukelele Orchestra this Thursday 12:30pm at the library.
If you are feeling brave enough to visit MySpace, check out some videos here. And should your immersion in the Wellington music scene be as pitifully shallow as this sad individual’s, then you should consider your attendance on Thursday to be compulsory.
Wellington Music Month 6: a shameful secret.
So alone among the Wellingtonista, I have a terrible secret: apart from an early album from the Black Seeds, I have no current Wellington Music in my collection.
None.
Not even Fat Freddy’s Drop.
In my major period of buying music, Wellington music for me was a bit fringe and wacky, and worst of all, not on Flying Nun. There were occasional songs that caught my attention: Bill Direen & the Bilders’ Do the Alligator; that amusing Elephunk song; one or two songs from the Six Volts… and that’s about it. Wellington was full of arty jazzy stuff that frankly I despised.
Time has moved on – about 20 years in fact – and somehow Wellington’s musical renaissance has passed me by. This is not good.
So I need help!
What are the top five albums by Wellington bands in the last five years? Answers please: I must remove the shameful stain of my musical ignorance!
When you come back home
Sometimes there comes a time when you must leave this town, your town for a break – it could be a holiday; it could be your OE; it could be that career move; it could be to do a geographical and just get away.
What’s that? Your favourite barista moved to Westport, and you had to follow? (Yeah, OK. There’s always an excuse.) But sooner or later, you must come back. And when you do there is always a moment when you know you are home.
Here’s one such:
Coming down the Ngauranga Gorge there’s that long sweeping curve where the Hutt and Porirua motorways meet. Look up from the road and you’ll see Wellington arrayed in full panoply before you. There are our small cluster of tall buildings standing proud, feet in the sea and backs to the hills. There are the hills themselves, steeply carpeted with houses in defiance of tectonics and plain good sense, looking on to and out to the sea. There is the bowl of the harbour, rimmed with bush and filled with reflected sky. There is the sky, mostly blue, sometimes grey, often set with clouds scudding.
There it is. Our town. Where you live. Where I live.
Where is this moment for you?
Is it, as the Front Lawn once had it, flying overhead?
over Wellington Harbour
Oriental Bay is standing there in the sunlight
Is it that first sip of Mojo or Fuel?
Is it Courtenay Place at the weekend?
Where? What? With whom? Comment, zoomin, or blog away!
Borders: opening Thursday
As Tom noted back in October, the northern portion of Capital on the Quay is to become a Borders’. Imagine a bookstore with a giant footprint, a café inside, and possibly the largest range of stock in town. That might well be what we’re getting.
Several months later it seems the the work is just about complete, and earlier this week a sign appeared in the window: opening is to be 8:00am this Thursday 15th.
At the Wellingtonista we’ve been keenly awaiting the opening: probably more because we are hoping for some great opening bargains than anything else (not that we actually know anything – please comment if you do).
Around the watercooler though, there’s been a bit of discussion about Borders’ entry into the Wellington book retail market: will it be good, or bad for the book-loving public?
Experience of the Auckland store varied: one of us felt that although the initial stock on opening was broad enough to have people hyperventilating (three different editions of “Finnegan’s Wake” – a benchmark by which any book-store, ‑chain, or even society can be measured he said, misty-eyed with remembrance), over time it seemed to become less diverse.
But a couple of the others have found the Auckland store to be pretty good actually, beating out even Unity in some areas (post-modern American poetry, anyone?), and that the range available is huge.
At this point, the concept of The Long Tail made its way into the increasingly thick soup of the conversation. The idea applied in this case being that Borders’ can generate volume and make money by selling one or two copies of many many different titles rather than flogging large numbers of just a few very popular titles. Which may bode ill for for our favourite small-but-more-specialised bookshops elsewhere in town: Unity, Vic Books, Parsons, and even Dymocks all have their adherents up here in Wellingtonista towers. It’s hard to say how it’s going to pan out: maybe Borders’ won’t, or can’t compete against the independents, crimping the Quay’s other book megastore pretender Whitcoulls instead… or maybe not.