Culture Laid Thick

One of the things I’ve rediscovered is just how thick on the ground our culture is in Wellington. It’s everywhere. There’s

• great theatre going on all over the place
• The New Local Music being heard at many venues throughout town every night of the week and available in abundance at local music shops
• wicked local flavours in clothing available all up and down Cuba Street
• the big table of NZ books in Unity and around and about
• local magazines and local indie zines
• the rack of Kiwi comics inside the door of the comic shop
• dance and orchestra and jazz and other performance in their little hideouts
• a steady stream of NZ films on the big screen
• galleries of local artists all over the place, not to mention the cafe-gallery phenomenon
• there’s cultural events both centre (ethnic food festivals) and edge (goth balls and suchlike)
• And, of course, there’s the indie-est of indie art, roleplaying at the cutting edge. (Indie-er than thou, per MC Frontalot? But that’s another post.)

It’s wonderful. It’s also quite unlike anywhere else I’ve been. The networking in Wellington is what sets it apart – other places might have as much or more going on, but the Welly creative scene works with a lot of intense interconnections that you don’t get elsewhere.
It’s an observation I’ve made a few times about this city – it’s a great size, because it’s large enough to support all these fascinating subcultures, but small enough that interconnectedness isn’t just encouraged, it’s necessary.
Tonight, I went with Cal to see ‘Golden Boys’ at Circa, which I went to see because of its director being a friend of mine. It was good – might write about it soon – and it was cool getting to say hi to David afterwards and offer some congratulations for his successes in the past year.
Then we wandered up to Fidel’s Cafe, and there ran into Billy and Darryl. I’ve just finished reading Billy’s newly-finished novel manuscript. His band Idle Faction play on Thursday. And Cal had just advised me that she had an impossible-to-get first-pressing copy of the Dukes of Leisure EP for me, this band including Darryl as a member.
All this cool culture, happening all around me. Plus, some classic Wellington bumping-into-people. (It was a good night for that – prior to this I’d run into the elusive Lena, and also Rachael who I know from Edinburgh.) Good people doing good things = precisely why this is the greatest place to live in the whole damn world.
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Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, they did Warpcon. I wish I coulda been there too.