Category: Uncategorised

Review: The December Brother

The Decem­ber Broth­er is the new­est pro­duc­tion from the SEEyD Theatre Com­pany. It com­prises of three mini plays, all linked with the com­mon form of fam­ily and the search for truth.

By the beach of Babylon, where we sat down. And waited. And waited.

Sunday would have been a lovely day to have brunch at Sweet Mother­’s Kit­chen, except pretty much every oth­er per­son in Wel­ling­ton had the same idea, and we were told it was going to be a 45 minute wait. We decided we’d ven­ture fur­ther afield, and made the mis­take of head­ing out to Ori­ent­al Parade, and Beach Babylon.

When we got there, it was really busy, but we thought surely it would be less than the 45 minutes wait at SMK, because there were free tables out­side. It was a bit breezy, so we were keen to sit inside – since there were no free tables they offered us one out­side and told us they’d give us the first free table inside. So we hopped up on stools crammed in the corner, and con­sul­ted the menu. Lots of things soun­ded tasty on the menu. K was happy that they had Fox­ton Fizz. I con­tem­plated order­ing a Pink Prin­cess, which was fizzy rasp­berry and vanilla ice cream, but I decided to pre­tend to be a grown up and order a latte bowl instead. So we waited for a wait­ress, and waited, and waited. Even­tu­ally one came up and told us that she could­n’t take our food order right now, because the kit­chen was slammed, but she’d be back to take our drinks order. Ser­i­ously? I appre­ci­ate the place was busy, but surely it is the job of the staff to man­age the work­flow. If the kit­chen was­n’t ready for our orders (which seems strange), the wait staff should still take them, and hold onto them, and let us know approx­im­ately how long a wait we could expect. 

Bye-bye, Wellywood sign

Wel­ling­ton Air­port has actu­ally listened to the massive pub­lic oppos­i­tion to the Wel­ly­wood sign (and poten­tial leg­al troubles from Hol­ly­wood) and have ditched the idea.

Thank God for that.

Stuff reports: 

Wel­ling­ton Air­port has backed down from a pro­pos­al to erect a “Wel­ly­wood” sign and is ask­ing the pub­lic for altern­at­ive ideas.

… [O]pposition from the pub­lic – and a pos­sible leg­al stoush after Hol­ly­wood law­yers said it would be a trade­mark viol­a­tion – led to a change of plans.

Wel­ling­ton Air­port chief exec­ut­ive Steve Fitzger­ald today invited altern­at­ive ideas for “a sign cel­eb­rat­ing the glob­al suc­cess of Wel­ling­ton’s film industry” to be sub­mit­ted via Face­book.

The ques­tion now is where­abouts on Face­book do we leave our ideas? There’s noth­ing for Wel­ling­ton Air­port, so we’re just left with the “Hey, let’s NOT have a “WELLYWOOD” sign in Wel­ling­ton” group, and the slightly strange “Sup­port Wel­ly­wood” page.

Let’s hope that whatever they come up with to grace the Miramar hills is some­thing we’ll love.

UPDATE: The Face­book page for Wel­ling­ton Inter­na­tion­al Air­port has appeared. Have at it!

Catching the fish

Last Tues­day, I was drawn like a fly to a pile of fish­heads to the Over­seas Ter­min­al for the launch of Fish­Head magazine.I had to sort out the Mol­lusc for try­ing to step into my ter­rit­ory. How many anonym­ous trouble­makers does this town need, after all?

The adven­ture star­ted with a boat ride from Queen’s Wharf, where enter­tain­ment came in the form of gir­affe-esque mod­els in ridicu­lous heels try­ing to clam­ber into the trawl­er. They still man­aged the task bet­ter than one Wel­ling­tonista whose flail­ing arm knocked the lens out of some unfor­tu­nate gen­tle­man’s glasses. Per­haps she was unsteady on her feet because of being unchar­ac­ter­ist­ic­ally sober? 

The sev­en minute voy­age across the har­bour seemed to have been planned entirely so the hip­sters could get their “on a boat” badge on Foursquare. Oh hip­sters and their ador­able need to col­lect things. Any­one would think that their lives were hol­low and empty or some­thing. Things got more lively on land, where we were wel­comed by Batu­cada, fish­heads firmly in place. 

The band soun­ded great out­side, march­ing back and for­ward and hit­ting their per­cus­siony bits. When they came inside later on, it was a little too loud though, so this Fly was­n’t suprised to see guests slip­ping out­side to get their Titan­ic on. 

Warmups, Webstock, Wrestling.

Holy crap, next week is going to be insane. It’s WEBSTOCK WEEK, baby! Expect a pro­lif­er­a­tion of smart sexy people with smart sexy satchels to be tak­ing over your favour­ite bars (espe­cially the ones we recom­men­ded to them) and dis­cuss­ing mind­blow­ingly awe­some con­cepts. You’re going, right? 

And because we don’t want you to get injured from hav­ing your mind (and liv­er) blown without stretch­ing first, we here at the Wel­ling­tonista are super pleased to be host­ing an Offi­cial Wel­ling­tonista Unof­fi­cial Web­stock Warm-up on Wed­nes­day 17th at Hashigo Zake from 5pm. Expect lovely people, great prices on some beers thanks to Domin­ic and per­haps some oth­er spe­cial treats. Feel free to come along even if you’re not going to Web­stock, although we may point and laugh at you. 

If you can­’t afford to go to the whole con­fer­ence, there are still a couple of tick­ets left to the ONYAs party, which we are assured will be amaz­ing even if we’re not up for any awards. 

Or, if none of this floats your boat, you should go to the RASSLIN! 

The Wellingtonista & Twitter’s Lists

We’ve talked about Twit­ter before – we’re on it, of course, as over a thou­sand of you already know. Over time Twit­ter has evolved from a WTF? (back then at the same stage in its life as Google Wave is now) to an indis­pens­ible part of our social net­work­ing land­scape.

If you’ve logged on to Twit­ter recently you’ll have seen their new­est fea­ture, Twit­ter Lists. These are a way to group up oth­er Twit­ter users, both among the people you fol­low and the people you don’t. You might want to group up some of your friends; or make a list of your favour­ite bands; then you can con­veni­ently view just those tweets from those people.

Where this becomes inter­est­ing is that it’s pos­sible to fol­low oth­er people’s lists. A nice example of this is @webstock’s Speak­ers List – a List of speak­ers at past and future Web­stock events. Fol­low­ing this list allows you to immerse your­self in the whole Web­stock vibe, months in advance of the event itself! Very handy.

Of course The Wel­ling­tonista is not to be left out of this action. It can be quite hard to find the best people to fol­low on Twit­ter – so let us do it for you! We have com­piled some must-fol­low Wel­ling­ton-themed lists for you to fol­low, with more on the way.

• @wellingtonista/team – Us! Or at least, the large sub­set of us who are on Twit­ter. We are, of course, all well worth fol­low­ing indi­vidu­ally, but fol­low­ing the list is prob­ably easi­er.
• @wellingtonista/wgtn-music – Loc­ally based musi­cians, ven­ues and record shops. Why aren’t there more out there?
• @wellingtonista/wgtn-theatres – A mix of cinemas and play­houses. Good for find­ing out what’s on, and wheth­er there’s any com­pet­i­tions, spe­cials or oth­er pro­mo­tions run­ning.
• @wellingtonista/wgtn-food-and-drink – all the cafés, bars, ven­ues, res­taur­ants and bottlestores we could find. The inter­play between the vari­ous cafés in par­tic­u­lar is quite nice and col­legi­al and almost war­rants its own List, really.
• @wellingtonista/wgtn-events – Events. You know what they are: Fest­ivals; Mar­kets; Car­ni­vals. And the occa­sion­al, uh, sport­ing event.

Clearly these lists could do with a little fine tun­ing, as well as addi­tions. So let us know!

Smarten your Snapper – Voting starts

Finally here they are.

The top 14 final­ists in the Smarten your snap­per Com­pet­i­tion
as chosen by our pan­el of delight­ful judges, and you can now vote for the ulti­mate win­ner!  (click on the image to see large-wise, yo).

So what comes next?

Well it’s now down to you, the fine read­ers of the wel­ling­tonista to tell us which Snap­per cov­er you like best. All you have to do is head over to a very simple entry form, and vote for the snap­per cov­er you like the most.

Click here to vote.

Of course it might help to be able to check them out first
Vot­ing runs from today Septem­ber 14th till Monday Septem­ber 28th

Our final­ists in alpha­bet­ic­al order are:

1. Bite Me – cre­ated by Amie McCar­ron
2. Cas­setiquette Case – cre­ated by Matt Whit­wel
3. Jeans for your snap­per  – Cre­ated by Heike aka minu.
4. Kokako tie up cov­er – cre­ated by Deb from Boo­craft Designs
5. Lib­rary Card Cov­er – cre­ated by Matt Whit­wel
6. Patch­work Snap­per card – cre­ated by Mar­jor­ie from WHSKR
7. Pir­ate Patch – cre­ated by Amy from Bad Anim­als
8. Sequined Snap­per – by Emma from emma makes
9. Tahi Blue – cre­ated by Miss Mil­lie
10. The Big Snap­per – cre­ated by Miss Mil­lie
11. The Hoff – cre­ated by Paula from Madame Cake
12. Urb­an Vin­tage card hold­er – cre­ated by Shel­ley Gard­ner from “Sweet Wil­li­am”
13. wave- by Yana from chro­ma­to­phobic
14. Yum Yum Donuts – cre­ated by Paula from Madame Cake

Over the next week all the final­ists are being pro­filed over at Craft2.0 and we’ll also be shar­ing some of the judges thoughts on the final­ists.

There there is one vote per email address.

And you can vote right now!