Walk a Crooked Line

I'm rather pleased with the title of this posting. In fact it's a pretty good title for my autobiography. Anyway I was at a party a few nights ago and my friend James was telling me how much he enjoys my blog. I apologised as there hasn't been a great deal going on here on the Wood of Kings. I did put that post up about the success of my play. I offered. Nah, fuck that, more of your drunken walks - that's what Jimmy wants and what Mr Lovebucket wants Mr Lovebucket gets. 


As luck would have it I've been attending a lot of stuff in town - thank you NZ comedy festival - so there have been a few drunken walks home of late. And a couple of them I have snapped off a few shots. As before I have little memory of taking these pictures or what interested me about them in the first place but come let's take a stroll down drunken memory lane together shall we?


This first selection come from a really foggy night a little while ago. The truth is you couldn't see more than a few feet in front of your nose. 

Ooh arty. 


My journey from town generally takes me down Williamson Ave. There's a great little takeaway at the end of this road that supplies egg burgers that my drunken tastebuds crave. 

Now in order to take this next shot I would've needed to be standing in the middle of the road. A drunk, dressed in black, standing in the middle of a road at two in the morning trying to take a photograph. I can see no danger in that; can you?

People familiar with Williamson will recognise this bit of street art. It's been there for a long time and in recent years the Queen has received a black face makeover I see. Something about the sentiment obviously appealed to my beer goggles. And since we have had a royal wedding not so long ago I think it's relevant. I guess. 

This one is a complete mystery to me. Somehow I found something of interest here in the back of a skip (or Brukes Bins as we called them when I was a kid). 

Again I have no idea about these next shots but something must've interested me about this window because I took literally hundreds of photos of it. 

This one here is a gem. What part of "No Circulars" didn't the poster understand. I also love the fact it's rolled up too. That's the icing on this particular cake for me.  Refer to my previous post for my thoughts on this issue. Check out my junk!

And - YES! - joy another abandoned couch to add to my collection.  

This next one puts me in mind of the Oscar Wilde quote:

"We're all in the gutter, 

but some of us are looking at the stars."

I was looking for stars in the gutter. Story of my life really. 

Now I do happen to know exactly what this one is about. These are that signs we have here in New Zealand to warn us about judder bars. But fore me it looks like there's an egg on toast up ahead. 

Am I right?

I bet, from now on, whenever you see one of these signs you'll think about fried eggs. Welcome to my world. 


Right Jimmy are you happy now? Now, I'm thirsty, is there anything to drink around here? 

The play's the thing...

Damn where have I been? Well I've been busy helping putting on a show. A show I co-wrote.

Yes all these years of writing feature films so I could finally break into theatre. It's been a wild ride. And in the process I'm sorry to say I've neglected my little blog and - horror of horrors - lost a follower in the process.

So what's the play about? A romantic comedy... about romantic comedy. Mike and Virginia. Both single. Both competitive. Both lecturers in film studies. Her specialty is romantic comedy, his is monster movies. She thinks he's an arrogant knuckle-dragger, he thinks she's a bitter cow. The very worst thing they could do is fall in love.

The idea for the play started when Kathryn Burnett (who I wrote the play with) and I were taking a car journey and we started having a conversation about whose students liked them better. We were both teaching screenwriting at the time. It turned into a hilarious argument and by the end of the journey we both looked at each other and said - there’s a story in this.

So were born Mike and Virginia two film studies lecturers who hate each other and then fall hopelessly in love. As I said it’s a romantic comedy about romantic comedies so it gave us the chance to explore and deconstruct the way romantic comedies work and have a fun time doing it. Honestly we were laughing until we cried some days working on this show. I know that will make its way onto the stage thanks to the team bringing it to life.

For the record my students like me better.

The plan was to write a play on get in onto stage quickly - movies tend to take years to come to fruition and when they do invariably they've been interfered with more than an attractive altar boy. Doing a play seemed like a fun idea. Write it quick, do some read throughs and get it on stage.

Four years later the play has finally made it to stage. Big houses and some great reviews.

You can read some of them here:

http://www.theatreview.org.nz/reviews/review.php?id=3924 

http://cheeseontoast.co.nz/wp/?p=6239

http://kissmyarts.posterous.com/wrap-mike-and-virginia

http://www.thecommoncritic.co.nz/?p=640

I had some fun helping building sets, sourcing props and music but in the end I was very much on the outside looking in. The play was brought to life by Te Radar our director, the crew, the awesome cast and of course the lovely Kathryn who produced the play. Hats off guys it was a pleasure and a joy to see this story finally brought to the stage and brought so effortlessly to life.


UPDATE:


For an unbiased report of the show (yeah right) check out my friend Sez's blog here.

The "acclaimed" Nick Ward

Sorry I haven't been posting much - it's been all go here at the Wood of Kings. So what's been happening? Well a lot. But I have something really exciting to share with you. I'm in line for an Oscar. It's  a very long line and I will be bumped to the back at any time but - to hell with it - I'm going to crow while the crowing's good.

The little short film I wrote - Das Tub - that was directed and produced by the very clever James Cunningham and his team at the Media Design School has won best short short at the Apsen Shortfest in Colorado. This is considered one of the world's top film festivals.

Winning this award means that we qualify to be considered for the Oscars. Yeah baby! You can read all about it here.

Okay yes I know this doesn't mean we're even in contention for an Oscar but blow me down if it isn't great to be breathing such rare air even for the briefest of fleeting moments. 

Nixie Cuckoo Clocks.

Today I had a series of exciting breakthroughs. And I have to share them with you. My cuckoo clocks took another step towards completion. It was a day of disappointments, a few electric shocks and finally a couple of giant leaps forward.

As you know with my clocks I've been embracing outdated technologies. It's one thing to build a cuckoo clock - there are kits out there - but I really want my clocks to be something whimsical, out of the ordinary. Cuckoo clocks are inherently playful - they're silly old things - so it's only right that I let my imagination get the better of me.

Today I worked hard to bring the nixie cuckoo clocks to life. As you know I'm a real fan of the nixie clocks. They're a fantastic throwback to a by-gone era. A time before LCD screens and digital readouts. There are of course lots of people out there building nixie clocks and putting their projects on line.

However no one - as far as I can tell - has built a nixie cuckoo clock. I'm pretty good at putting stuff together but when it came to the nixies I was a bit out of my depth so I turned to an expert.

Dr Peter Jensen - over at tubeclock.com builds and sells nixie clocks and kits online. I've always admired his clocks for their simple elegance and their clever construction. So I got in contact with him and asked if he could help me. Instead of laughing in face he went to great lengths to assist me and even agreed to modify some of his kits to work with my designs. Each for them now pumps out a short pulse every hour on the hour.

Using a transistor as a trigger I wired the nixie output to my cuckoo clock. Then I set it going. With the flip clock I wired it up and fully expected it not to work. Amazingly the flip clock worked first time. I couldn't believe it.

This time no such luck. I was getting a charge out of the nixie clock. The cuckoo mechanism was working but something was wrong with my transistor trigger. It wasn't working. And it was my fault. In trying to find out what was going wrong I gave myself an electric shock off the first clock. For the record nixie clocks work on pretty big voltages. The nixie clocks don't work on batteries - wall socket all the way with these puppies. Dr Jensen did warn me about the voltages and thankfully it was only a small shock.

This is the first time I've used a "breadboard" to design a circuit and guess what? I wasn't doing it right (as the actress said to the bishop). It was like reading a map upside down once I'd turned it right side up - voila - it worked!

So here, for your viewing pleasure, are nixie clock one and two.

First up is  the version I call the "flatface" version which is based on Jensen's IN12 4 Tube kit. One of the buttons on this kit got broken so I used these little steel beauties I had lying around.

They're just mounted in a shoebox temporarily eventually they'll be on the side of the clock.

That's setting it. Now let's see it in action...

And this one is based on Jensen's IN14 6 Tube kit. I have some very interesting plans for what I'm going to do this one. Stay tuned.

I'm learning a lot as I work my walk through this project and rediscovering the joy of electronics and mechanics. It's a challenge and - yes - completely cuckoo but I'm loving it. Now I can't wait to see these through to the next stage.

  

Come take a walk with me...

Last night I hand a skinful of booze with my friend Bob. While we were in the bar he told me that the bat above the toilet was the only one in the room that wasn't smiling. You know he was right. See how happy the lower bat is and how very unhappy the upper bat is?

The toilets at the IVY bar in Kingsland are covered in pictures of animals taken out of an old botanical book. It's a cool look. Here especially for my interweb heroes - Kal - is a picture of his mortal enemy.

Now for reasons best known to my drunken brain I decided to walk home. Along the way I decided to take a few photographs. On the way home I decided to snap off a few shots of my journey. So armed only with my phone camera and the pretty cool hipstamatic I proceeded to take some shots of my journey home. Now I have very little memory of doing this but in the morning I found them on my phone. Come with me now and experience Nick's drunken walk across the cycle track...

Feeling drunk yet?

I reckon these are pretty cool. Drunken photography is something I should explore more.

Old coin eyes is watching you.

In the day time is where I buy pies. Sometimes.

And here waiting in the driveway, at the end of my journey, is my trusty steed, my Kingswood. Home safe. In the Wood of Kings. 

Sweet Thursday. Black Friday.

Now I've been following with much amusement the latest internet "sensation" Rebecca Black and her "song" Friday. Yes we're all enjoying it in an ironic way but I'd just like to add my twenty cents to this youtube "event." The song wasn't actually written by Rebecca it was written by two grown adults at the ARK music factory. That's right, two adult human beings wrote this tune. Rebecca's mother paid $2000 dollars for her daughter to record the song and have the video made. Not a bad investment considering that guessimates are saying the ditty has already made in excess of a million dollars.

Now I'm not here to attack young Rebecca - all power to her. However I'd just like to send a few small thoughts out into the ether. While we're all laughing about the lyrics of this song let's not forget this was put out not as a joke but the creators saw it as a serious song. A song that had something to say.

Now as chance who have it I am currently reading a book by master wordsmith John Steinbeck. The genius behind such classics as Cannery Row, Of Mice and Men and, of course, The Grapes of Wrath. The book is called Sweet Thursday and it's a cracking read full of characters, humor and a fair amount of Hooptedoodle. This book was written in 1954 but you'd swear in many cases he was talking about what's happening to us right now. The details are so truthful and universal.

Chapter 24 - "Waiting Friday" opens with a simple paragraph in which he sums up the day that ends our working week:

Not Everyone believes that Friday is unlucky, but nearly everyone agrees it is a waiting day. In business, the week is really over. In school, Friday is the half-open gate to freedom. Friday is neither holiday nor workday, but a time of wondering what Saturday will bring. Trade and amusement fall off. Women look through their closets to see what they have to wear. Supper is leftovers from the week. 

Beautiful isn 't? What 's more it's as true today as is was in 1954. Now here's how Rebecca Black sums up the same day.

Yesterday was Thursday, Thursday
Today i-is Friday, Friday (Partyin’)
We-we-we so excited
We so excited
We gonna have a ball today

So what am I saying? Are we watching - and listening to - the slow death of culture? Well maybe. No I'm just saying that maybe we could benefit from watching a little less youtube and reading a few more books. If anything it will make your conversations more interesting.