Tomor­row night at the St Cath­er­ine’s Col­lege Hall in Kil­birnie, the WCC is hold­ing a pub­lic meet­ing to gauge com­munity opin­ion on the fate of the Maranui Surf Lifesav­ing Club and the adja­cent three water­front build­ings, and to dis­cuss the options.

The Maranui club house is a lis­ted her­it­age build­ing, dam­aged by fire on 1 August. 

A call has been put out (see today’s Cap­it­al Times art­icle) for Wel­ling­ton’s cre­at­ive types to come and show their sup­port and with people being encour­aged to come along in their speedos it’s going to be an enter­tain­ing night! 

Who says pub­lic meet­ings can­’t be fun!? 

If you’re out of town, you can sign the online peti­tion here to restore the build­ing to its former glory. 

Among the open­ing exhib­i­tions at the brand spank­ing new City Gal­lery is Regan Gentry’s install­a­tion Make Way. Along with much of Gentry’s work, it pro­vokes ques­tions about the con­tem­por­ary city, and in this spir­it the Gal­lery is host­ing a pan­el dis­cus­sion on “Human­ising the City”. It’s on Wed­nes­day 4 Novem­ber at 12.30pm (which is one of the Gal­lery’s pop­u­lar free Wed­nes­days) in the Adam Aud­it­or­i­um.

I will chair the dis­cus­sion, which will be around ques­tions such as “How do plan­ning and urb­an design in Wel­ling­ton respond to human needs? What is the role of urb­an design in mak­ing our cit­ies live­able, lively, and com­munity-focused places? How do we cre­ate pub­lic space which bal­ances envir­on­ment­al sus­tain­ab­il­ity with infra­struc­ture sens­it­ive to the needs of its inhab­it­ants?” The oth­er par­ti­cipants are Asso­ci­ate Pro­fess­or Penny Allan (Pro­gramme Dir­ect­or, Land­scape Archi­tec­ture, Fac­ulty of Archi­tec­ture & Design, Vic­tor­ia Uni­ver­sity of Wel­ling­ton), Pro­fess­or Phil­ippa Howden-Chap­man (Dir­ect­or, NZ Centre for Sus­tain­able Cit­ies), Philip Belesky (Wel­ling­ton freel­ance design­er, Eye of the Fish blog­ger), and Mike Mel­lor (Vice Pres­id­ent, Liv­ing Streets Aotearoa).

As Robyn has rightly poin­ted out, tonight is Pecha Kucha at Down­stage at 7.30 (get there early if you are going).

Tonight is also the open­ing of Roger Mor­ris’s new show “See Noth­ing”.  Once again things are get­ting polit­ic­al, this time with a show based around “WHAT IF”? 9/11/2001.  Roger uses oil, print, graph­ite, mono­poly boards, jig­saw pieces and repur­posed gen­er­ic land­scapes to explore the theme.

Everything kicks off at 5.30 at Thistle Hall on Cuba Street.  Take a look at some of the works on the Face­book invite, if you are lucky you may be able to fit in Pecha Kucha after­wards.

It’s time for anoth­er Pecha Kucha Night, where cre­at­ive people of Wel­ling­ton will each give a short talk – with 20 slides each at 20 seconds per slide.

It’s TONIGHT – Monday 19 Octo­ber, at the lovely Down­stage Theatre. Doors open at 6.30pm, with the event start­ing at 7.30. It’s $9 admis­sion – cash only.

Tonight’s line-up:

Ral­ph Johns – land­scape archi­tect
Meena Kadri – design lecturer/communications strategist/researcher
Phil­ippe Cam­pays – architect/artist
Sarah Maxey – graph­ic designer/artist
Andy Irving – artist/designer
Hil­ary Beaton – Down­stage Theatre
Troy Donovan – facade design­er
James M. Mad­dock
Mar­garet Aus­tin
Craig Nich­olson – inter­cul­tur­al­ist
Sheba Wil­li­ams – artist
George Haji­an – graph­ic design­er
Meighan Ellis – artist
James Ever­ett – game design­er
Alis­on Wong – novelist/poet

Tomor­row eve, come to the Film Archive and wit­ness the unveil­ing of The Blue Room, a group show includ­ing (lucky num­ber) 13 artists who were asked to respond ‘in a psych­ic way’ to an idea, site or place. Some of the res­ults are quite start­ling.

Cur­ated by Pippa Sander­son the show fea­tures Wel­ling­to­ni­ans Bek Pilcher, Johanna Sanders and Pippa Sander­son, with Elle Loui August, Bekah Car­ran, Louise Clifton, Andrea du Chaten­i­er, Viol­et Faigan, Lon­nie Hutchin­son, Saskia Leek, Louise Men­zies, Dane Mitchell and Stu­art Shep­herd.

Some are believ­ers, some skep­tics, but all raise ques­tions about the fas­cin­a­tion with the psych­ic that haunts us now – the tele­vi­sion pro­grammes, the inter­net sites devoted to spells and spectres, the tour­ing psych­ics…

All wel­come at the open­ing, 5:30pm tomor­row, plus there’s an Artist Talk at the Archive 12:15pm, Tues­day 27 Octo­ber.

The exhib­i­tion runs until Sat­urday 21 Novem­ber 2009. 

This Sunday’s Sound­stage @ Down­stage is a goody – Rhi­an Shee­han plays his album Stand­ing in Silence from start to fin­ish with accom­pa­ny­ing filmic ele­ments by Gareth Moon (Nek­tar).

Guar­an­teed to be like noth­ing you have seen at Down­stage before, Rhi­an’s sound as described by him is “like float­ing through space in a warm bath”.

Described by review­ers as “spine tingling…a tsunami of sound” (Tom Cardy, Domin­ion Post), Stand­ing in Silence at Down­stage fea­tures a full com­ple­ment of live musi­cians play­ing along­side Rhi­an includ­ing key col­lab­or­at­or Jeff Boyle, two per­cus­sion­ists, a string sec­tion, Raashi Shee­han (Rhom­bus), Jerami­ah Ross (aka Mod­ule) and Woolshed Ses­sions mem­bers Jess Cham­bers, Andy Hum­mel and Peter Hill.

For those who like to join in, cus­tom made music boxes will be onsale before the show, which you can play in par­tic­u­lar tracks.

The lus­cious Rhi­an Shee­han: Stand­ing in Silence this Sunday 18 Oct @ Down­stage Theatre.  It starts promptly at the sens­ible hour of 7pm.

For more info check out Simon Sweet­man’s blog , and you can pur­chase tick­ets at Down­stage.

LATE UPDATE: Only 16 tick­ets left!

A lot of people don’t know that Wel­ling­ton has quite a siz­able Brazili­an expat­ri­ate com­munity. A bunch of them and their Kiwi friends have been work­ing hard to put togeth­er the Live Brazil 2009 Fest­iv­al this week­end.

The fest­iv­al will com­prise music, dance, capoeira, and cook­ing and drink work­shops. It starts on Fri­day night with a per­fo­mance fea­tur­ing Tam­bolelê (from Minas Gerais) at the Memori­al Theatre on the Vic cam­pus, with most oth­er events tak­ing place at the South­ern Cross.

Full details at this chaot­ic but inform­a­tion-rich site or in sum­mary form here.

This par­tic­u­lar Wel­ling­tonista will be lurk­ing in Car­men Mir­anda’s band on Sat­urday night – come and demon­strate your fruit-laden cos­tume and we can have a caipirinha.

Spot­ted near the Mt Vic lookout.

I dunno about the Great­er Wel­ling­ton guys, but I reck­on the Wel­ling­tonista could have put all this inform­a­tion on one sign – the only dif­fernce between the two is the name of the pois­on, and the col­our of the pel­let.  

Our “cov­er­age” of events here at Wel­ling­tonista can be a bit scat­ter­gun at times. Like the tagline says, “ran­dom stuff about New Zeal­and’s cap­it­al city since 2005”.

The gen­er­al premise is that we write about stuff we like, from whatever angle we like.  How­ever if it isn’t fea­tured, it don’t mean we don’t rate it, just means that we have been busy or some such.

Any-the-ho, last week­end was the Maori Art Mar­ket at Te Rauparaha Arena and Pataka Gal­lery in Pori­rua.  It would have been great to see ta moko artist Mark Kopua at work but you snooze, you lose in this town. 

Last Wed­nes­day also would have been a great chance to attend a talk on Mana When­ua Maori His­tory in Wel­ling­ton, giv­en by Mor­rie Love in the reopened City Gal­lery Wel­ling­ton.  It was free, dam­nit! 

Nev­er mind. It is good that Wel­ling­ton offers so much to the curi­ous and the brave; those who want to actu­ally par­ti­cip­ate in the cul­tur­al life of this city.  We will con­tin­ue to fos­sick for cul­tur­al gems in the twit­ter­stream and oth­er places to alert you to what is going on out there but please for­give us if we miss some of the good stuff.

After the jump some stuff you should­n’t miss this week (includ­ing tonight!):