Druid persecution must end

Last night, I attended an unusual and memorable gig staged within one of the brick arches of a tram-line bridge to raise funds for a local hockey club. Kings Of The Day III was the amped-up uke of Superintendent Of Electric Light (aka my buddy CM); honed classic rock of The Faults; keyboard-driven, new wave-ish, Brazilian pop of Rocky Acoustica; high-energy punk of Constant Project and Run! Hide!; infectious enthusiasm of hip-hop posse Glebe Bay Dynamite Crew (feat. Lizzee Rascal); and sheer awesomeness of Raise The Crazy, who reminded me of Rose Tattoo and Acca Dacca and The Screaming Jets and had a lunatic frontman with a penchant for climbing onto the bar or speakers...then somersaulting off. Before we made like Elvis and left the building, the raffle was drawn and I won third prize - a bottle of silver-label Bundy Rum that Dad will enjoy adding to his coffee.

This arvo, my poor earses still ringing, I paid a months-overdue visit the Art Gallery Of NSW. There were more temporary exhibitions than I had time to properly appreciate, so I focused my attention on "Printmaking In The Age Of Romanticism" - 150 works, on all manner of topics, by Blake, Delacroix, Turner, etc. I also checked out the micro-exhibit about Goulburn-born painter Sydney Long's "Pan" and his related scenes of Antipodean Arcadia. These were wonderful. Browsing the gift shop, I contemplated purchasing a mounted print of a Jeffrey Smart landscape. Although he's among my favourite contemporary artists, none of the images on offer begged to be hung on my walls.

Miscellanea I'm too lazy to shoehorn into the preceding pars... This weekend, I also devoured my first Scottish pie (yummy spiced mutton in a distinctive open-topped pastry). The sound'n'lighting guy at the concert was wearing a cool belt buckle he'd fashioned from an NES controller. While we're on the subject of attire, some bloke was marching through the gallery in a pith helmet! And in Hyde Park, I saw a young Japanese fellow scoring spare change from passers-by with his arrangement of intricately carved fruit. Having seen such carvings done on Jap game show "TV Champions", I recognised him for the supreme blade master that he was.


L: "Australian FourFourTwo Insider" podcast (but skipping the adverts!), the neo-prawg rawk of "Frequency" (2009) by IQ.

P: "Alara Reborn" solo magickal cards :-)

R: Deepening manga mystery "20th Century Boys #4" (2001, translated 2009) by Naoki Urasawa, coffee-table photobook "Tokyo - A Certain Style" (1999) by Kyoichi Tsuzuki, unputdownable autobiography "The Two Of Me" (2007, revised 2008) by Andrew Johns with Neil Cadigan.