The Wellingtonista Bowling League Draw

It gives us tremendous pleasure to announce the draw of our Bowling League. Brave (but foolish for thinking they could possibly beat us) teams from Xero, Silverstripe, Click Suite, Clemenger BBDO and the fantastically named Bowltron will be taking part and therefore get massive karma points.

SEE THE FULL DRAW HERE.

Round 1 will be Tuesday 24th at 8pm at The Lanes on Wakefield St.

The rules on the night are as follows:

  • If at the end of the game your team’s sum total (total of all four players) is higher than your opposition’s then you get four competition points.
  • If your team consumes more than four alcoholic beverages (or averages more than one per player) you get a bonus competition point
  • The team with the highest sum total on the night gets an extra bonus point.

So if you booze up and roll like a god your team could come away with 6 points.

Expect to see many people at Clemenger crying on Wednesday morning after the Bowlingtonista give them the thrashing of their lives. Hurrah!

3rd Annual NZ Comics Weekend

For the third year in a row, the New Zealand Comics Weekend is up and running from at Graphic Comic Shop (106 Cuba Street), and the Southern Cross Garden Bar (39 Abel Smith Street, Wellington.)

This annual festival of independent comics runs alongside the Armageddon Pulp Culture Expo in order to showcase and highlight the underground talents in New Zealand Comics.

More info here at Feeling Great.

Alt.country at the Bathhouse

American alt.country legends Richard Buckner and Edith Frost are playing together at the San Francisco Bathhouse on Wednesday night.

There are three kinds of American folk artist: those who sit, contented, on a back porch contemplating America’s landscape and ways; those for whom its landscape and ways are something to stand against or move boldly through; and those whose America is a shadowy, impressionistic place that moves inside of them. This [latter] is the area that the sombre-voiced Richard Buckner has been exploring since 1984 –(Sylvie Simmons; The Guardian, 2004)

What up, weekend?

Wanting to stalk us this weekend, and/or find something for yourself to do? Here are our suggestions:

theNewDowse goes ape sh*t

The spiders are coming!Taken straight from the Weta Holics website:

As if you needed another reason to live in New Zealand! The wonderful Dowse Museum in Lower Hutt has just re-launched and is now calling itself TheNewDowse . . . AND they’re hosting a King Kong exhibition from June to November this year!

They’re calling it Becoming King Kong. I feel excited just thinking about it!

It’s opening on 23 June and runs until 11 November 2007. A wee bird tells me that it’s packed with insights into the ground-breaking film-making technologies used to make the movie, as well as the creative processes used in the conception of the character of Kong. That’s right – the grumpy ape that keeps on turning up in the film he he…

The exhibition will take you behind the scenes to experience the Weta way of working, the expansive collection of the sculptured creatures, the beauty of the sketches, the innovative techniques and the secrets of how these were achieved: it took thousands of drawings, hundreds of design maquettes and Weta Digital’s visual effects team years of work to create the character of Kong.

To celebrate the exhibition, we’ll be revealing previously never seen before online images from the making of the film in the new Weta Gallery

Coming soon

Extravaganza of Progressive Post-Rock

Post-rock is a done-to-death description but as a semaphore of intent it still serves a certain purpose. First coined by music-journo Simon Reynolds as a term to describe progressive music “using rock instrumentation for non-rock purposes, using guitars as facilitators of timbre and textures rather than riffs and power chords”, its use was rapidly spread during the 90s by breathless writers suddenly overwhelmed by seemingly-infinite possible music-futures. Reynolds further expounded:

perhaps the really provocative area for future development lies… in cyborg rock; not the wholehearted embrace of Techno’s methodology, but some kind of interface between real time, hands-on playing and the use of digital effects and enhancement.


… which in itself has turned out to be suitably ambitious, as in general attempts at an amalgam of real-time instrumentation and digital frippery have turned out to be a big horrible mess (with notable exceptions, of course).

Rusticity

rusticity

Following the success of the recent Wellington Flickr Group‘s exhibition at the Paramount, cames yet more photographic goodness from a Wellington flickr-ite legend A Different Perspective (aka Jim Henderson).

He’s putting on an exhibition of his work down at Island Bay’s The Bach café, from the 1st to the 30th of April.

To get a feel for what you might be seeing, check out his awesome flickr photostream here.

Where we’ll be

If you’re trying to stalk the Wellingtonista, and/or find something to do this weekend, here are our hot tips:

  • The City Art Gallery tonight because Luke Buda is adorable and Aspen has a good track record
  • The Aro Valley Fair. Perhaps you can find out for me why it seems that everyone in Aro owns a dog and/or a baby.
  • Trying to find the Wellingtonista on our big night out on Saturday – it would be cheating to tell you where we’ll be, but there may be clues in these posts here.
  • If the poster’s this good the Voom and The Sneaks gig should be good as well. Voom used to be the laziest band in NZ – their songs are so effortlessly pop perfection – but it seems they’ve finally got their act together after many line-up scandals.
  • The Festival Italia on Sunday. Perhaps you could adopt a bad accent and try the “Do you have any Italian in you? Do you want some?” line you neglected to use on St. Patrick’s Day.

A Friday night and a Saturday morning

Down at the City Gallery on Friday night they are running another one of their Late Night Sessions, where you get to cruise around the big exhibition (this time it’s the biennial Prospect show) in relative peace and listen to lovely live music while you do so. And all for free.

City Gallery’s popular late night Friday returns. Wander through Telecom Prospect 2007: New Art New Zealand to a backdrop of independent and electronic sounds by local performers. Featuring Peneloping, Tc Wedde with Luke Buda, and Aspen.

The lovely Luke Buda is of course in The Phoenix Foundation, as is (the equally lovely) Tc Wedde. Aspen is also lovely and also known as Signer, and is one half of Over the Atlantic and one half of Skallander. And the "medium-core girl-boy plinkpop!" Peneloping also have a very good reputation as a live act. Having experienced Late Night Sessions many times before – from the point of view both of a performer and a patron – I can heartily recommend this event.

Cuba Street Carnival Feedback

Cuba St Carnival - Photo by Chillu, stolen from flickrDid you know that the Council supported the carnival?

Do you think they should support the carnival?

Got 2 minutes to answer those & a few other questions right here?

Supplementary question:

Are you offended by nudity at carnivals? If no, were you not outside Floriditas with half the Wellingtonista?

Then go here… and if that’s your wife/girlfriend/mother/daughter wrapped around that pole….

Well, way to go.