The Brian Jonestown Massacre

He's talking about Kevin Rudd, obscure bands, the tambourine, John Safran, the Black Ryder gig last night, Aimee Nash's breasts, Steve Kilbey, and the need to not throw cigarettes around inside. The crowd is restless and yelling at them to just play. I want to slap him and the people who constantly barge past on the stairs.

The percussionist has sunglasses, double denim and is all chunky, clunky side-burns. I say percussionist but he plays only one instrument, a tambourine.

At the house above the sea I come across this: "The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange." But sometimes it seems like it takes no imagination at all to make settled things strange. Perhaps settled things are mostly strange.

It's a yellow morning and no accident that during that week I've found myself in the department store wondering what fashion feels like now.

At the Brian Jonestown Massacre fashion feels sometimes like checked lumberjack coats and greasy hair. Boys barely out of their teens are inexplicably championing natty hats and then sitting on the stairs with their head between their legs for a drunken breather. Behind us one says that it's moments like these that change your life. I mostly feel irritation at the lost momentum and beauty wasted in endless cigarettes between songs. I wonder if irritation can be life changing.

We leave before they finish. He's said they'll play all day, and we don't doubt his word. It means that the toilets are empty as we leave.

I've been peripatetic and it's unsettling in many ways.

Always thought I was someone, turned out I was wrong.

I remember hearing that line for the first time driving in a combi across the Czech border into a German forest (please let them share a border - geography eludes me) - and it resonates still on a cold Sunday spent pottering. I draw a mental line from the Jayhawks to Band of Horses.

There was Melbourne. A Hamlet at once fey and yet Brendan. I do understand now the need for actors to be remote. My first Hamlet, though, so perhaps I need to study and compare. I will always remember the scene where they watch the players, there at his behest, and he sits on his haunches on a chair unable to be still, and she is repelled and attracted.

And there was Heide. Do you know at the time that you want to live your life as an informal patron of the arts, or are you too busy hanging out with artists? Does it help if you're born a Ballieu? In any case the garden is lovely. We listen to the contemporary painters talk before we wet our shoes in the dew of the sculpture garden. One of them - Australian but born in Egypt - has applied to immigrate to every country he could think of then represented all of the responses as pastel paintings. They are in a line above head height on the wall. Only New Zealand said yes, please come.

Splendour.

I buy the Band of Horses CD to go in seach of the words that I've sung by instinct, swaying, days before. Inside the case there are no words. There are eight images, CD-sized with white borders. I divide them into those that speak to me and those that don't as if participating in my own personal research group. The chosen images all remind me of something else: the river at Braidwood with trees sweeping over the bank in which I've swum once, the elk on the front of the Interpol CD, a jetty from my childhood that I walked down obsessed with the sea moving beneath, and a fir tree in front of a winter sky.

But what of Splendour? Freedom to not fit in. Friday night: Armani v's Versace; Hobbit v's elf; intense v's full on. It's enough to have to decide just what to capitalise. Hobbit?

Lightspeed Champion is wearing a woolly hat and shorts. Polite intervals between engagements. Understanding The Drones. Understanding it's all in the listening. And then it seems like the night belongs to Devo although the images and sounds that are with me now are those of the Polyphonic Spree choreography and Band of Horses sliding into major guitar on Is There a Ghost.

Actually, what stays with me is walking Noonan-fast to escape inane conversations about Frenzal Rhomb on the way home, and room-mates snoring. These are the things of a festival. Thinking that one has to pull one's fashion socks up to keep pace with the kids, and then not caring on realising that they're all singing to The Wombats.

Patience. I want to talk about the fact that she was wearing a Batman suit but I feel like it will do her a disservice. She looked great and is an unparalleled performer. She brings joy regardless of most things, and that is not to be underestimated.

This weekend, a kookaburra is heard several times from Church Street (and never before). I wake up to the sound and it comforts me.