Grey paint and padlocks
There was a photo in last Tuesday’s Dom Post of a paintbrush-toting chap in bright orange. Council employees wearing high-vis vests in the paper almost never means something good, and on reading the associated story* this was no exception: Wellington City Council workers yesterday started removing graffiti in a lane that links Ghuznee St with […]
Notional Significance: Underground
[See all Notional Significance posts] As I approach the tunnel mouth, I can’t help but notice the looming cliff to my right. I try to imagine the promised/threatened second tunnel, and the impact that its eastern portal will have on the landscape. I envision a giant tunnel-boring mole bursting from the mountainside, like one of […]
Wellington Killah Beez on the Swarm
We like our blue cheese served with honey at Pollux, and we like our cocktails honey-rimmed at S&M. It’s fair to say that we here at the Wellingtonista are fans of bees, no matter what their political affiliations may be. That said, everyone knows we’re a bunch of pinko lefties, so it’s only fitting that […]
Notional Significance: Isthmus
It’s a given: New Zealand is a young land. But this infant isthmus, earthquake-raised, has already suffered abuses and transformations that have left it far from tender. If psychogeography is, as Iain Sinclair says, “a way of psychoanalysing the psychosis of the place in which I happen to live”, then this place will be on […]
Craft Beer for Japan
To raise funds in the wake of the diaster in Japan, Hashigo Zake is holding a tasting of Japanese craft beer on Thursday 24th March at 6:30pm. All proceeds will be donated to the Japanese Red Cross. The tasting will feature Tokyo beer writer Rei Murakami, who will be bringing beer from breweries Baeren and […]
We be jammin’
Have you planned your Craft2.0 experience around Jam off? Because you should,as the Great Wellington Jamoff is happening during Craft2.0 on the 23rd of April and judging kicks off at 2pm. I promise it’s going to be beyond special. Last time, it pretty much shut down the old Bank Arcade during judging, not only because […]
Notional Significance: Takeoff
National significance begins with a roundabout: from the air it looks like a navel, the axis of the world, the green Omphalos where one begins. But what is beginning here? There’s a distinct impression that more traffic comes from the eastern suburbs via Broadway than from the airport itself, which would make this a somewhat […]
TEMPORARY
TEMPORARY is a pop-up shop that appeared a few weeks ago in the ground-floor café space at the Garden Club on Dixon Street. We spoke to Blink, the one, perhaps insane, man behind A Low Hum. He set up the space with Matthew Davis from Flying Nun, and they’re selling “CDs, records, tapes, tees, posters, zines, books, art […]
Notional Significance: Flyer
Before reaching the starting point of the journey, I need to take a preliminary journey, from something resembling the heart of the city to the start of the highway: the airport. That in itself tells us something about just where cities fit into the whole “National Significance” agenda. A city is never an end in […]
Notional Significance
Allow me to introduce, not myself exactly, but the little series of posts that the Wellingtonista people have kindly allowed me to publish here. “Notional Significance” will be somewhere between travel writing, history, psychogeography and personal reflection, based upon walking the length of Wellington’s stretch of State Highway 1. The concept may sound familiar. I […]