Hutcho

My poster is currently appearing on this screen at the Convention Centre!

The C.L.A.W. launch party was awesome. I invited my friend David and his sister Jess and her boyfriend Nick because I like them and because I hate parties but I go to them all the time anyway. The party started in an alleyway at Manuka at this hair salon. You could tell it was an art crowd coz everyone was dressed quite rich but there were beards, weird sideburns, large earrings and the occasional splash of fake hair colour. They had loads of cheese and bread too which I bet was some special crusty bread with probably olives in it. Plus they had some free wine which I managed to score two cups of before it ran out which was good. Red wine. We stood in the alleyway outside looking at this arty movie clip which was being shone up on the wall. The girls there were all attractive for some reason.

So, soon I got chatting to this quirky girl and this wacky woman who were both quirky but with slightly different styles of quirkiness. You can’t really use the word quirky because basically it means ‘not boring’ doesn’t it. So I actually hate the word quirky. Anyone with a half decent sense of humour gets that label, just like somebody with an interest or a hobby that isn’t football gets ‘eccentric’ or a girl who has a lesbian experience and gets loud and annoying when she’s drunk gets the label ‘wild’. Wild girls are the most boring of all. Outside of the time they kissed a girl or flashed their tits at a cop, what have they got to talk about? I think nearly all girls have snogged another girl at one point so that’s why that song ‘I Kissed a Girl’ shits me. It’s like me making a song called ‘I Am A Man, Yet I Have Long Hair Which Is Unusual These Days’.

Anyway, they weren’t quirky now that i think of it – they were just nice. I totally forget their names though. They ran some music festival in Corin Forest which even though music shits me, it sounded like it would be a gas. Imagine going up there for a music festival for three days. They wanted animation to project onto a screen and I said “I’m your man” even though when I look at all the animation i have ever done it is 90% game shit that you can’t really use, and the occasional extremely rude or inappropriate or one-joke animation clip such as Sniff My Penis. My latest animation project Fatal Rage of Conflict is so universally hated by Good Game viewers that I don’t really want to project it anywhere. What is weird is that I still quite enjoy working on it! I love making the pixel animation as good as possible. It just isn’t very funny and I don’t know why, and I don’t know what to do. If it was up to me I’d just make it really rude, and all about shit. But I don’t give a fuck – even though usually if someone dissed my drawing I’d be gutted. I think it’s because the audience are high school gamers and their hate is so intense it sort of deflects off my heart like a blunt, stupid spear made of gay high school rubber. One of the women was a science teacher and I asked her which creatures haven’t evolved very much over time (alligators and some crabs and some microscopic animal. They also used to have mini-horses), and when I asked her if any creatures have turned from herbivore to carnivore over time I think she said humans. Even though that was interesting it didn’t satiate my thirst for knowing if any like, proper non-person animals had. Such as what if sharks used to just graze on seaweed or whatever. Jay, my old workmate who actually got me my job at 2K in the first place turned up too. He’s learning ukulele and was inspired to do so by the game Guitar Hero. The chap who interviewed me on Art Sound FM gave me a quick interview again and I was trying to be honest and funny, but I think I came across as a smart-arse. Thanks, wine.

Everyone ‘migrated’ over to the gallery up where Starbucks used to be. Su who works for Canberra Arts Marketing told me they had free showbags so Nick and me grabbed one straight away. The art was really interesting because it varied so much in quality, skill and experience. Someone had made a giant spoon out of sugar cubes with a drip full of blood stuck to it which dripped blood into the pile of sugar at the bottom. This one girl with a bored manner had a really bad drawing on the wall done in cheap texta. I mean it looked like a year 7 drawing. I asked how old it was just to make conversation. She said she did it eight years ago. I imagined she probably wasn’t very prolific. David and me were giving amusing pun names to the art but you had to be there. It was a really good exhibition I thought.

Soon, a DJ began mixing some beats. DJs are interesting because they are treated like musicians. It’s like the term ‘graphic artist’ which nowadays means ‘Dude who can arrange clip-art in Adobe Illustrator but who’d shit his pants if you asked him to actually fucken draw something’. If you look at modern designs on ads and things, it’s all lazy digital rubbish that anyone could do.  Same with band posters, same with live music. How often do you look at a flyer for an event and have to try and figure out if the line-up is a line-up of actual musicians or DJs? This guy was pretty good though, mixing all kinds of tunes and sounds and was dancing around like he was loving it.   I asked David if he was better at DJ-ing and he said “yeah” like as if i even had to ask.

It was then that I noticed that Nick and me were the only ones there holding showbags. We’d been clutching them the whole time like total nerds.

We said goodbye to Jay and got some kebabs at Kismet, planning to now go to mine to try out this DVD series called The Wire which Jo Waite had lent me, telling me it was gritty and intelligent. Jay returned, asking us if we wanted to hang at his pad. He had The Wire on his PS3 you see. I was glad, saying that I didn’t want the responisibility of being a host. He assured us that he had tasty Snake lollies, as well as fruit loops which we could eat, but his lights were mostly out. I began to wonder aloud why we hadn’t tried to steal any of the free cheese from the salon. Cheese is really expensive. I don’t think I would have done that though. Jess and I marvelled about how tasty the kebabs were. Sometimes you are so busy stuffing your face you don’t realise how great your food is, and how it is actually producing endorphins because it is so good.

Nick and Jess went on this very mature shopping spree, buying wine and snacks for the night. I really needed to piss. At Jay’s I did. The name of the wine was ‘Cono Sur’. I am trying to lose weight but I ate three donuts, wine, snakes and loads of chips. I was actually sitting forward in my chair, eating them continuously and dipping them in salsa. I didn’t even realise what a guts I was being – I was enjoying them so much. When i realised this, I sat back in the chair, trying not to think about the chips. We watched The Wire which was shit, and played songs on Jay’s two ukuleles. Jay made up some chords and we played them, and David made up a song called ‘The Day I Kissed Ben’ which he apparently sung for about two days afterwards. He always gays me out in different ways. I soon forgot about the chips and thought about the donut but I didn’t want to have four. When I got home I had a cigarette and was pleased to realise I didn’t enjoy it one bit. I still had the whole bloody thing though.