Standing Room Only for Sunday 14 February 2016

12.39  People Like Us - Transgender drama

Transgender stories are hot right now. Eddie Redmayne is making his bid for a second Oscar in biopic The Danish Girl while Jeffrey Tambor stops being Mort and instead becomes Maura in TV series Transparent. But none of these roles are played by Trans-people.  A new show in Auckland rides this wave but also bucks that trend. People Like Us is a love story between two trans people, played by trans people and written by a trans woman.  Joanna Jayne St John wrote the musical and she tells Justin Gregory it’s a love story just like all the others.

12.50  Christchurch's CoCA Gallery reopens

The fifth anniversary of the most devastating of the Christchurch earthquakes is just days away...and this weekend one of the city's best loved arts venues reopens its doors to the public.  $4m later, the Centre of Contemporary Art's Brutalist exterior is restored.  CoCA also has a revamped interior and a new curator with big ideas about its exhibitions.  The Gloucester Street gallery re-opened yesterday with a free exhibition, aptly named 'Precarious Balance', featuring local and international contemporary artists.  We talk to Director and Principal Curator Paula Orrell and Chair of CoCA's Trust Board Kristina Pickford.

1.10  At The Movies

This week - Steve Jobs, Anomalisa and an interview with the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Carol, Phyllis Nagy.

1.35  Owen Dippie - Street Art On A Massive Scale

Grand-scale street artist Owen Dippie has left a very large mark on Tauranga, New York and now Sydney.  The Tauranga work was his "Larger than Life" project.  And they are enormous!   His giant spray painting of a Goldie started a craze for others in the Bay of Plenty town.  You can't miss the Girl with the Pearl Earring or a couple of homages to Michelangelo adorning the walls of a multi storey car park here...or a three storey building there.   Owen's latest work is very timely.  He'd been commisioned to spray paint the hoardings of a building renovation in central Wollongong.  The result: a David Bowie 'Aladdin Sane' mural.

1.46 Culture jamming coke GIFs, celebrity, and artistic expression

Culture jamming is the practice of subverting an established icon or brand for artistic, political, or comedic reasons.  But is this a tool of expression that is being increasing co-opted by the very people and institutions that are being made fun of?

Recently Coca Cola launched an online advertising campaign allowing people to make GIFs to advertise this massive corporation's product. They've made around three and an half thousand words unusable in in their user generated ads. But even so, surely these images are just asking for people to customise unenticing slogans that go against the image the brand so wants to project?

Ian Bogost from the Georgia Institute of Technology, who has written about this campaign for The Atlantic magazine, spoke to Standing Room Only's Shaun D Wilson about culture jamming; which extends to the celebrity mashup art of Brandon Bird.

2.04  The Laugh Track - Comedienne Lana Schwarcz

Melbourne comedienne Lana Schwarcz has turned bad news - being told she had breast cancer - into, first a hilarious blog, and now into a hit stage show Lovely Lady Lumps, which she's about to perform at the Hamilton Gardens Art Festival.   Lana's Laugh Track picks include Denise Scott, Tig Notaro, Louisa Omielan and Steven Wright.

2.26 Edinburgh Tattoo Guests The Wellington City Pipe Band

The City of Wellington Pipe Band is practising hard out before taking part in one of the biggest events in its long history.....the Edinburgh Military Tattoo.  They don't have far to travel, because the Tattoo's coming back to New Zealand as part of the upcoming Arts Festival in the Capital.  The City of Wellington Pipe Band's oldest member Vern Andrews is 80-something.   He joins Lynn live with the band's youngest player, 15 year old St Pats student Martin McFee.

2.38  Photographer Ilan Wittenberg

Israeli-born Ilan Wittenberg abandoned a family tradition of Industrial Engineering to become an award-winning photographer.   Ilan makes a living out of family portraiture from his converted garage.  He's about to open an exhibition of portraits taken within the old city walls of his old haunt: 'Faces of Jerusalem: An Interfaith Journey'.  And at the same time another - quite different - project of his is gaining ground - are you man enough to expose your bare chest to Ilan's camera?

2.49  Publisher Murdoch Stephens Anthology:  Still Got All Our Fingers And Toes

What gets published and what doesn't?   How is it presented and illustrated?   What gets heavily-edited and what sticks close to the original?  These are all decisions made behind the closed doors of the world's publishing houses.   A new anthology promises to show readers what really goes on behind the scenes.  It's called Still Got All Our Fingers and Toes and it marks the first ten years of the Lawrence & Gibson publishing collective in Wellington.  The editor of Lawrence and Gibson, Murdoch Stephens, says it includes notes on books that were rejected and photographs of how books are bound.

3.04  Drama At Three:  The Mercy Clause by Phillip Braithwaite