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!
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.
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!
Flight of the Conchords: Jenni
Nearly forgot! Flight of the Conchords Wednesday!
“What a hilarious misunderstanding!”
Carnage on the corner
Fancy a little accident spotting while you enjoy a nice pizza? Word on the street is that the best seat in town is at Scopa.
Michael Gregg comments:
Someone will be injured on the Ghuznee/Cuba Corner soon. Spend ten minutes in Scopa and watch the intersection to see for yourself.
Pedestrians crossing Ghuznee Street are struggling with the new two-way traffic flowing through Ghuznee. There is no reminder to look both ways and regulars are falling back into old habits, glancing and running. Even worse, the new traffic lights bring traffic out of Cuba at the same time as the pedestrian signals engage, meaning the intersection brings impatient drivers and bustling, rushing walkers together. As the weather deteriorates, I’m worried that someone might get hit.
The solution:
- Remove the chains and allow pedestrians to cross diagonally and on both sides of Cuba Street halting all vehicle traffic for this period. This will quickly clear the backlog of walkers by allowing more room to cross, plus take them off the street when the cars get their right of way.
- Install clear signage at eye height and on the curb.
- Mark the Ghuznee east intersection clearly with a no-left turn arrow.
- Mark the Cuba intersection with left and right lanes to direct turning traffic.
- Put two way arrows on the Ghuznee roadway (like we do for tourists on SH1) for both entry/exits into this intersection
How are you enjoying the two way traffic on Ghuznee?
I love it, but then my favourite memories are of cars going the wrong way down Molesworth St. Such a blissful spectator sport.
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.
A Mighty Mighty Mighty Weekend
Not only is The Mighty Mighty one of our favourite bars, what with its endearingly gauché fit out and entertainingly gauché barstaff and wot-not, but this weekend they host two very exciting (and very different!) gigs.
Mëstar are touring their recent album Shut The Squizwot Factories Down and on Friday night (the 20th) they play at Mighty Mighty with Hot Swiss Mistress:
(Sorry for the stink photo of the gig poster but it was the best I could do with my phone-camera on the way to work this morning.)
And then, on Saturday night (the 21st), at the starting time of 9pm is the avant-punk theatrics of Mr. Sterile Assembly, with Xenu and Thee Strapons:
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)
Beautiful Mash
We all know that in Wellington, everyone and their dogs are already busy making films of some description already, but for any aspiring film-makers not currently up to their eyeballs in digital video, here’s your chance. LOOP Recordings want you to make a video for Adi Dick’s song “Beautiful View”.
They’re providing you with nearly a Gigabyte of green-screen footage of the singer, then handing it over to you to mash it up with your own footage or animation to create your interpretation of the song. You have until the 20th of May.
What up, weekend?
Wanting to stalk us this weekend, and/or find something for yourself to do? Here are our suggestions:
- Since Hadyn likes the poster, it’s probably well worth checking out Wellingtonista’s favourite man-bear, Sam Flynn Scott with Lawrence Arabia at the San Francisco Bathhouse tonight. I know that’s what I’ll be doing anyway.
- If you’re looking to head out for drinks tonight, why not try some amari?
- See if we’re capable of being drunk and articulate at the same time at on Public Address Radio broadcast on Radio Live at 2pm on Saturday.
- It’s the last days of the A Human Touch: Design by Droog exhibition at the New Dowse, so why not see if it really does “trigger questions, spark discussion and elicit giggles”?
- The Country Club will be doing Brazil tomorrow night. Expect caipirinhas, samba, soccer, feijoada and no doubt Brazillian porn.
- We went to the last opening and had a (drunken) blast, so we can recommend pretty clothing & accessories shop Modern Love‘s opening for its new premises in Left Bank at 2pm on Sunday. If you need an added incentive, there will be cup cakes and the Real Hot Bitches!
- Of course, if you’re not heading out of town to wrestle pigs, or bask in your well-deserved fame, and you feel like something a little more family-friendly, you could always do some home etomology, go see Bad Jelly the Witch, work on your screen-printing or catch up on some Vonnegut.
Martha on the Front Page of the DomPost
Hard on the heels of one of their worst front pages ever, the DomPost goes some way to redeeming itself by putting one the of Wellingtonista above the fold in today’s issue…
Nice work Martha. Way to fly the flag undies.