Help Hayden at The Pier – Fundraiser!

Help Hayden at The Pier is a LIVE music event put together by local musicians, DJs, promoters, business owners and people who care, to help raise funds for a little lad named Hayden!

“Hayden is a 3 year old local boy who has Cerebal Pulsy. He has just under gone an operation in America to help him walk and we’d like help pay for for the expensive after care that he now needs. Not only would this money help a little run around like every lil boy but also help ease some of the massive pressure his parents and family must be under.”

Tickets are just £6 so make sure you get involved and help in any way you can. For more information about Hayden please visit www.helphayden.co.uk and keep up to date on the fundraiser of at Facebook.

Social Media To Improve Your Business

Many of us use Social Media in an attempt to benefit our businesses, but do we really know how to use it effectively? Are we making effective use of our time spent on Social Media? Does our activity on Social Media actually help our business? How would we even know?

To help answer these questions and many more, Divine Aesthetic has teamed up with leading Social Media marketing company IG Media Marketing to bring you an informal one day seminar designed demystify the world of Social Media and begin to make you think about how you approach Social Media and how best you can apply it for results within your business.

To book yourself a place and find out more please head over to www.lovedadesign.co.uk

Love Mindanao <3

Tropical Storm Washi devastated the Philippines on December 16 and 17, 2011. The storm was not powerful in the traditional sense—it’s winds never surpassed 55 knots (100 kilometers per hour or 63 miles per hour) and it lacked the organization of an intense typhoon or hurricane. Nonetheless, Washi unleashed extremely heavy rain on northwest Mindanao and the resulting floods left hundreds dead or missing. The death toll from floods in the Philippines rose to 1,249 on Tuesday, more than a week after the disaster struck, with officials expecting more corpses to be found. Tropical storm Washi brought heavy rains, overflowing rivers and flash floods to the southern Philippines from December 16 to 18, sweeping away whole villages built on sandbars and riverbanks. More than 376,000 people were displaced by the storm and almost 55,000 are still huddled in crowded makeshift evacuation centres. The cities of Cagayan de Oro and Iligan received the most damage.

There is a large Filipino community in Portsmouth, many of whom work in the health services and at QA Hospital. Many have family and friends at the centre of the devastation.

To raise money for Filipino Hurricane Relief the event Love Mindanao has been set up by some Portsmouth creatives. Located at Groundlings Theatre on St Valentines Day the event will include an extraordinary range of arts and cultural contributions from around Portsmouth and Southsea’s arts communities. There will also be bands, singers, dance and theatre performances and workshop sessions, and an exhibition auction/sale of photography and art.

Entry will be £3 on the door and all proceeds will go to the fund.

The organisers are putting out a call for all artists, photographers, poets, or other creative individuals who would like to take part, please contact Los Dave or Diana Goss on Facebook via the Facebook event for more information.

New Years Eve in Southsea

If your stuck for somewhere to go this new years eve, here’s a few suggestions. Click the links below for more information.

Little Johnny Russells – Silent Disco
One Eyed Dog
The Wine Vaults
The Registry – Concrete Music Presents…
The Wedgewood Rooms
The Spinnaker Tower
The Eastney Cellars
The Jolly Sailor

20 Years of Chaos

For many, many people the word Chaos instantly brings back many, many years of amazing nights both at the pier and at The Wedgewood Rooms. As you’ll most likely be aware of Chaos went out with a huge bang back in November with it’s final night also being it’s 20th anniversary. Jon Jones has put together a great little documentary short film telling the story of Chaos, told by the people who were there from the very beginning.

Long live the carnage.

The Southsea Alternative Choir

This weekend, The Southsea Alternative Choir will be touring Southsea, holding alternative Christmas carol concerts in order to raise some cash for SamuelsFund (see below for details). There’ll be singing, dancing, drinking, mince pies, tinsel, snow (well, you never know!)…pretty much everything you’d associate with a good old fun-filled Christmas knees up. There’s only one difference that sets us apart from a traditional Christmas carol concert…we won’t be singing any Christmas carols. Instead, we’ll be playing a selection of feel-good anthems ranging from timeless bands such as The Beatles and The Beach Boys, right up to modern indie classics from the likes of Blur, Elbow & Mumford & Sons.

So why not join us this festive season? Everyone’s welcome and we don’t even care if you can’t sing…just as long as you want to have fun, like good music and can afford to chuck a few quid in a bucket to help someone who needs it this Christmas, the more the merrier! See you all soon, we look forward to singing with you!

About SamuelsFund…

Samuel Deakin-Mant is a brave young lad who was born with cerebral palsy. Cerebral palsy is a type of brain damage which, in Samuel’s case, affects his motor skills to the extent that he cannot walk. All cash raised from our events will go towards helping little Samuel. For more information on SamuelsFund, please visit www.samuelsfund.co.uk

Southsea Boutique Market at Little Johnny Russells

Saturday was an amazing day in Southsea with many other events going down across the city. As well as King Street Tavern we also made it down to the Southsea Boutique Market held at Little Johnny Russells which was also packed with great stalls.

The King Street Tavern’s Art Fair

We made it down to the popular annual Christmas art fair held at the King Street Tavern on Saturday, the turn out was really good including stalls by the Caravan Gallery, Mikey Ayling, Petting Zoo, the crew from Bonzo and loads more good art, photography, books, prints, jewellery, etc.

Depthcharge Exhibition at Gunwharf Quays

I popped over to Gunwharf Quays on Saturday morning to check out the one day Depthcharge event exhibition at the old police station by the main gate. Wet Picnic, who arranged the whole day’s activities (including theatre and children’s activities as well as the exhibition) had taken over the police station and turned it in to an amazing space where it felt like you had travelled back in time to the days of HMS Vernon. The attention to detail was incredible and it overall really gave you a sense of seeing a period of Portsmouth’s history in some way.

The exhibition included work by local Portsmouth schools such as photography, story writing, a banner and later in the day there was also a dance performance. You might remember our call for ex-service personnel a little while ago, the final photography work by St John’s primary was there with two photo books and two framed photos. The framed photos contained a vintage photo of the main gate from the early 1900s and a modern interpretation taken by a year 6 pupil, to contrast and compare how the place has changed over the years.

You can find out more here: www.wetpicnic.com

Depth Charge exhibition designed by Sarah-Jane Prentice for Wet Picnic Theatre Company.

Gunwharf: Depthcharge

The Depthcharge event, forming part of the 10th anniversary celebrations of Gunwharf Quays, happens tomorrow (Sunday 4th December) by Wet Picnic at Gunwharf Quays. There are different options for you to see the contributed work by four local primary schools, and the amazing work of Wet Picnic:

You can become a Time Engineer by booking tickets (£5 each from the New Theatre Royal) which will give you a guided tour of performances and installations from 5pm onwards.

You can become a Time Follower (for FREE) by downloading the map from HERE and take yourself on a tour from 4.30pm onwards.

You can visit the Log Room Exhibition (where the Creative Writing created by Corpus Christi Primary School and the photography created by St Johns Cathedral Primary School will be on display) and see the banner by St Pauls Primary School from 12 noon onwards (head for the Police Station)!

You can watch the 5 minute dance performed by pupils from St Swithuns Primary School at 4.30pm outside the Police Station.

So why not come along and see what the time detectives discovered! For more information and to download your map visit:

www.wetpicnic.com/depthcharge

Below are a selection of B&W film photos taken by the St John’s Primary year 6 pupils taken with vintage, manual control cameras.

PRIMARY – A Phoneography Exhibition by Strong Island – Call for entries

This coming new year we will be proud to announce our latest exhibition PRIMARY, a Phoneography exhibition by Strong Island and we are even happier to announce that it’s open to you, the readers.

With the continuing increase in impressive camera technology in mobile phones and the ability to alter, tweak, post process and upload the photos to social media networks and websites like Instagram, the popularity of Phoneography has never been greater.

The ‘of the moment’ ability to take a photo at almost any time and any place by most people has really driven the fact that the camera does not make the photographer. By which I mean, you don’t need an expensive camera to take outstanding photos.

Agreed, the quality of the physical image may not stand up to the big guns, but new learnings in composition, style and aesthetic by a new generation of camera users via online media has really driven this popularity, and encourage people to go beyond a ‘quick shot’.

PRIMARY invites you to get out and about around Portsea with your mobile phone camera and take photos of anything and everything based around the three primary colours red, yellow and blue. What you photograph is entirely up to you, but submissions will only be accepted if they stick to the theme.

The call for entires has now begun and the deadline is the 31st of January 2012 with the exhibition being held in March of 2012. Photos can be taken on any mobile phone model and we ask that a maximum of 3 photos per applicant are sent in to primary@strong-island.co.uk.

Please submit along with your photographs your name, photo title, phone model, location of photo on the island and any post process apps you used, if any, to achieve the final shot.

We look forward to seeing all the entries, and the final installation will be something special using every photo submitted in a slightly different fashion from your average photographic exhibition. CLICK HERE TO PRINT YOUR OWN POSTER

Poster by Tristan Savage & Photo by Paul Gonella

It’s going to be a Strong Movember – Closed at £725

Righto chaps, it’s time to clean shave your boat race and get that mighty moustache on the grow in support of Movember for The Prostate Cancer Charity and the Institute of Cancer Research. For 30 days of November you can help support and raise awareness through selflessly parading your top lip for charity.

You can sign up yourself, as I’m sure many of you already have, or you can join the Strong Island team and seek out sponsorship as a team. Through the Strong Island Movember page you can ask people to join the group, make donations, upload photos and post updates via the MoSpace page, Facebook and Twitter.

Head over to www.mobro.co/StrongIsland if you would like to get involved and grow a Strong Moustache to help raise awareness, or simply head over to www.uk.movember.com and sign up to personally raise money.

The funds raised in the UK support the number one and two male specific cancers – prostate and testicular cancer. The funds raised are directed to programmes run directly by Movember and our men’s health partners, The Prostate Cancer Charity and the Institute of Cancer Research. Together, these channels work together to ensure that Movember funds are supporting a broad range of innovative, world-class programmes in line with our strategic goals in the areas of awareness and education, survivorship and research.

Poster: Tristan Savage