A few of us at the Wel­ling­tonista are fans of the TAWA-nom­in­ated Weird in Wel­ling­ton photo blog, a col­lec­tion of oddit­ies, curi­ous­it­ies and just real weird stuff out there in the city.

So, using a trail of car­pet offcuts, I lured the mys­ter­i­ous fel­low behind the blog in to Wel­ling­tonista Towers, strapped him to the Interrotoot2000 and asked him a few ques­tions.



Tell me a bit about your­self. How long have you lived in Wel­ling­ton?

I moved here with my fam­ily from Nel­son when I was two. I lived in Auck­land for a couple of years and Lev­in for six months (don’t ask), but have lived in vari­ous Wel­ling­ton sub­urbs for the remainder of my life to date. So a long time. I love the place. I travel over­seas a bit, but have no plans to go and live any­where else per­man­ently, ever. This is it.

What inspired you to start the Weird in Wel­ling­ton Tumblr blog?

There is kind of a story with it, actu­ally. Some­time in Septem­ber 2010 I was, well, for want of a less cringe-indu­cingly lame expres­sion, try­ing to woo a girl. This woo­ing involved writ­ing her a way-too-long email every day and attach­ing a photo I’d taken of some­thing odd, which I’d make some kind of cute or sar­cast­ic or absurdly obtuse com­ment about.

Yeah, you can stop laughing/crying any time you like.

Now the thing of it was (and this part may be hard to believe) my woo­ing attempts trans­lated in her mind more-or-less to “wow, this guy is a bab­bling needy loser to whom I can­’t believe I ever gave the time of day”. Even­tu­ally her almost total lack of response to the emails had its desired effect and I gave up my daily spam­ming of her inbox.

Any­way. As well as a broken heart I also found myself the own­er of a met­ric crap­ton of pho­to­graphs of the weird stuff I’d seen around Wel­ling­ton over the peri­od, with com­ment­ary. The oth­er thing I found was that tak­ing the pic­tures was some­thing I enjoyed doing, and I wanted to have a reas­on to keep doing it. As one of the best cures I’ve found for a broken heart is fever­ish industry I set up the blog/twitter/facebook page, chucked up the pho­tos and com­ment­ary I’d amassed to that point, and have been snap­ping and upload­ing pic­tures every day since, cir­cum­stances per­mit­ting.

The fun­ni­est aspect of the story to me is that the blog is, ulti­mately, tra­gic­ally, pathet­ic­ally, the product of a broken heart. And it’s on tumblr. Which I’ve since learned is the online hip­ster home of the broken-hearted and angst-rid­den. You could­n’t pay me to move it now, it’s too per­fect. And hon­estly, the hip­ster lov­in’ would be way, way too hard to give up.

How do you decide what is weird?

If some­thing catches my eye and I think it’s odd or inter­est­ing or curi­ous, or I can quickly think of some­thing pithy to write about it to frame it in order that it can be per­ceived to be, I take a pic­ture. I assume there must be enough of an inter­sec­tion between what I find weird/unusual and what oth­er people do that it’ll be of interest to at least some of the people fol­low­ing the blog. That said, I often find the stuff I think is hys­ter­ic­al or truly bizarre sloughs off the front page without com­ment while most of the pic­tures that’ve got­ten a lot of atten­tion I was pretty 50/50 about post­ing in the first place. So it goes.

Do you think there’s a par­tic­u­lar Wel­ling­ton style? How does Wel­ling­ton com­pare to your Auck­land vis­its?

Yeah, I guess in terms of street-level “weird­ness,” there is. I see a lot more delib­er­ate clev­erness and wit on Wel­ling­ton’s streets than Auck­land’s. Auck­land also seems to be a lot bet­ter at clean­ing up its graf (unless it’s with­in piss­ing dis­tance of a train track). Plus a lot more of what you see up there is tag­ging/gang-related stuff, which does­n’t interest me so much.

But y’know, man. The world’s full of weird­ness. It’s just a mat­ter of per­spect­ive and being motiv­ated enough to look for it. There’s no reas­on you could­n’t run some­thing sim­il­ar about any place so long as you have a cam­era, way too much free time on your hands, and an obsess­ive-com­puls­ive dis­order.

What kind of cam­era do you use for your pho­to­graphy?

You’re being obscenely kind to the point of sus­pec­ted fatu­ous­ness to call it “pho­to­graphy,” thanks. For most of the pho­tos I used an old iPhone 2G. How­ever, a drunk­en night at a rock gig put paid to that phone and I’m now using a Sam­sung GT-I5800, which has a bet­ter cam­era. I par­tic­u­larly like that it has a decent macro mode (for tak­ing pic­tures of stick­ers and such­like).

Has any­one ever taken excep­tion to being fea­tured in your blog, or even to you tak­ing a photo?

Well, I did get bus­ted tak­ing this photo. The guy came out of his house while I was walk­ing down his path and kind of aggress­ively asked me what I thought I was doing. I smiled and explained that I was just tak­ing a photo of the sign in his win­dow because I thought it was won­der­ful. That mol­li­fied him and I escaped unmo­les­ted. I also got hassled by a few of the friends of this guy, but I guess that just comes with the ter­rit­ory when you make mean-spir­ited and sar­cast­ic pub­lic com­ments about people’s fash­ion sens­ib­il­it­ies from behind the cowl of an +5 Inter­cloak of Pseudoan­onym­ity.

Uhm, oh and this pic­ture? The guy you can just see through the door crack saw me tak­ing the photo and was head­ing out to con­front me. But I’d turned and walked off before he got out, and he must have decided it was­n’t worth it.

Gen­er­ally though, when I take pic­tures of people I either have their per­mis­sion or I’m really sneaky and under­han­ded about it (related note: lov­in’ the zoom on the new cam­era). Does tak­ing sneaky pic­tures of people and put­ting them on the Inter­net with pithy com­ment­ary make me a bad per­son? Prob­ably. I guess it’s some­thing I’m just going to have to find a way to live with. teh_lulz are a harsh mis­tress.

Do you go out spe­cific­ally look­ing for weird stuff, or is it just things you notice as you oth­er­wise go about your busi­ness?

I do both. I walk to work and it’s long way, so I get a lot of pho­tos from those par­tic­u­lar “jus’ trol­lin’ ’bout mah bid­nez” trips. Because I’m using my phone to take the pho­tos and I usu­ally have it on me a lot of the pho­tos are also taken as I’m just doing my thing, for whatever value “thing” may have at the time.

But I do also do planned trips. Some­times I rock into town at 4am to check out graf with a torch and cam­era. Or, to pre-empt your next ques­tion, rock out on twit­ter-dir­ec­ted mis­sions to sub­urbs I’m less famil­i­ar with. Like, well. Woodridge. And if I get a tip-off about some­thing in par­tic­u­lar and can get to it before it’s gone, I will.

Wel­ling­ton’s inner neigh­bour­hoods, like Te Aro, Mt Cook and New­town, seem to be a rich source of weird­ness, though recently you’ve trav­elled a little fur­ther afield to deep­est, darkest Woodridge. Are you going to explore all of Wel­ling­ton’s sub­urbs? Weird in Churton Park?

Yeah, that’s the plan. I’m going to col­lect them all. So far I’ve made spe­cial trips to Woodridge, Karori, and Brook­lyn. And I guess the sub­urbs I trav­elled through to get to them. I will def­in­itely get to Churton Park even­tu­ally. Maybe even soon, see­ing as you keep bring­ing it up.

Do you think any­one’s ever done some­thing delib­er­ately to get into your blog?

I know people have. I’m cool with it. I don’t have any kind of grand plan or agenda, but if the blog inspires a few people to do a few odd things to make city life more inter­est­ing and fun for every­one else I say go nuts. And let me know. I’ll totes go and take a pic­ture of your shit.

What’s your favour­ite weird thing so far?

Oh man. There’s well over a thou­sand pho­tos on there right now, I don’t think I could pos­sibly choose one I liked best. If I tried I’d end up with a lot of first-equals.

I guess in terms of my own sense of humour and appre­ci­ation for weird­ness, I prefer things that are extreme. For which I blame way too many years of hanging out with com­plete no-fil­ter freaks on IRC/ED/4chan. It’s safe to assume that the more puerile, offens­ive, and harsh an image is the more likely it is to be coun­ted amongst my favour­ites. I also really like the “witty” text stuff when it has an edge to it. For example, this:

What do you do when you not doing Weird in Wel­ling­ton?

Work some job in town. Write. Read. Eat, sleep, exer­cise. See bands. Go to D&B/Jungle/Dubstep things. Col­lect ran­dom junk from the foot­path and stick it on my wall. Unsuc­cess­fully attempt to woo girls via email.

Just kid­ding about the “read­ing” thing.

HAY DUDE THERE’S A REALLY COOL ONE OF DARTH VADER DOING A RUBIK’S CUBE BY THE BYPASS. YOU SHOULD TOTALLY DO THAT ONE!!!!!1

O SWET BRO IL HEAD RIGHT OUT THEIR NOW AND TAEK A PIC AEWSOMA LOL RUBIX CUB DARTH VAEDR SOUNDS 2TALY AEWSOMA IL MAEK IT LIK A FEATUR3D POST OR DA BAKGROUND OR SOMETHNG THX AGANE U ROK!1!!1!

Thank you kindly. I am sure the read­ers of Gen­tle­wo­man’s Quarterly will find your com­ments most insight­ful.

You are very wel­come. Thank you, and I’d like to take this oppor­tun­ity to quote my man Albert Camus when he states that vir­tue can­not sep­ar­ate itself from real­ity without becom­ing a prin­ciple of evil. Why? Because it does­n’t have any rel­ev­ance or rela­tion­ship to any­thing I’ve just said.

And that’s weird.

Wait, what? Ok, you can go now.