RAINBOW CLOWN NEWS

Its takes guts to wear a wrist watch now, he said. He had more to say. The crumbs were bothering him. He put up his hands. No more of this, he said. He had had enough of this modern world and its sincere clock aversions, its odd cakes of ash. He wanted to go down below. He left a note. It spent a lot of its paper referring to cold snaps. It told of old infections. The Police could not understand it. They sold it to NASA, who left it on a park bench and forgot about it. It is still out there, and he is still down there. Nobody minds too much.

A night of trick crumpets, Cackling black cloud heaps raining down jokes like whales, Glock Fontwhistle, Clown Detective, has had four coffees and knows it. A fumbling raincoat of cream pie japes swaddling his body of hard luck scars and candy fat dimples, Fontwhistle has had a hard night of dead end alleyways and hasn’t got a jack of diamonds to show for it. The rain drops apple pies of sugared fruit and crazy food colourings of hot water on rat throated roads, cobble stone laneways rain cratered and sewer fog shrouded with ruined heavy water, and Fontwhistle is thick with smoke, choked with meat tobacco, sick with sleuthing and wet mysteries his raincoat won’t solve. As always Fontwhistle writes on his cigar to get things started. Novels, if the writing is bleak enough, can cover leaping hectares of smoking device, can forage and crimple and wound and tinker with all the primary colours a good tube of tobacco will contain. A fox of tough thoughts, a blooming mouth fire of lateral thinking always gets Fontwhistle underway. Mysteries revealed by gusts of the crumbling firework his hands conjure and clap, he watches as leads shimmer before him, appear and disappear, petty thefts, bicycle heists, bread nabbings, rabbit catchings, cabinet nickings.

The rain came down in parrots. Fontwhistle is on the case.

Rainbow Clown News would like to announce the forthcoming takeover of the southern hemisphere and selected spurs of Holland. General Regis Coates, Horrifying Clown Dictator, promises to mow down anybody who won’t support personal hand trumpets and private amusing nosewear once his new regime bullies its way to the top of the clown country tree machine in May. ‘We clowns hate anyone who is different in the way they spend money’ Coates told Rainbow Clown News in his usual completely odd way, and it was pretty clear he meant it too. He was running around chopping up cattle with hammers and plastic antlers when I last saw him. He is quite insane these days. His hair is now naturally green after a very confusing mind warping last Easter, and he hates pets. If you see Coates in your area over the next few weeks throw him a Mango, he is mad as a bucket of slops and won’t be told otherwise!

Life can be like this you know.

Smaller morning walks prepare you for later theoretical evening walks down unfamiliar roads. Bypass coffee, twist your ankle, see friends from a distance but miss them, watch them walk away. You can already predict mid morning coffee stops to the north of the city. You approach the CBD and the kitchen steam rising from old treasury houses converted into riverside casino stations. Overtaking five to ten businessmen over Victoria Bridge. The river is just below but you don’t look down on it, don’t look south to the reach of half glimpsed imaginary bridges of workers crossing them in black and white, day glo coloured bags hung around their necks like war stripes and medals. The clouds cover you, hide you. The buildings throw down block wedge shaped stagehands of shade. Huddling in the cool you start to think of food, mumbling about it, looking for it.

Chewing gum is always a possibility. Shuttered shopfronts zip ripping open present gum pack browsing possibilities. Passing sleep jaw grinding smokers consider extra mild fag packet purchaes. Where will you buy your gum? Kitchens of confectionary churn out banana green packets under the pavements. Secret chefs slip down industrial alleyways off Adelaide street with gum vat recipe guidebooks, white coats, laboratory frock suit smocks sugar creamed and coke smeared. You don’t ever see any of this, except when you are on a bus, half reading a magazine about tennis, thinking about melons and building blocks, and you catch the outer segment of cloth cap hem fluttering around a corner behind an eighty something Hungarian fellow talking about piano accordions. Sometimes it is better to keep reading your magazine.

Catching a train from Central Station, buying a fruit juice at the platform three news power agency neon stall. The train heading north. Already your south side night time unknown all new eight o’clock ramble approaches stocky, apple crumble bits dropping in upper lip avalanche shambles of pastry. Slipping through magazine handheld boxes of coloured light and gossip materials the fortitude valley op shop Dresden tank stands break into your reading. Men and women MP3 bopping about here and there stationed all through the carriage. They are all aiming to sell thirty five flowers of vegetable resemblance by their favourite weekend of the year. Some of them might make it.

At Bowen Hills you can smell the paddocks of five suburbs, how natural ten minute walks in every direction are exploded into muddled half hour baffled strolls so odd you can never really know what the land is like you’re tracing with the pencil you wish you had in your hand drawing you further out of your way. Your West End start, your Moorooka end, the nine hour Newstead day you’re preparing to dig down deep inside. Albion castle lookout of stone, bright blue lit spired Greek Church on the cloudland crag a kilometre south. The line of tweed trousers and strange shirts linking the two. A whole day trying to reach the best rambling jacket in the town. You get a good view of your day from the Bowen Hills station platform bridge. All the little old houses the antique clothes pegs you’d drive to Caloundra to collect. Your whole day is a fifteen minute walk along the soccer field and down the ghost of the radio station office blocks that won’t ever be broadcast. The walk to work where for eight hours you’ll be thinking about returning home to the lost lanes you’ve never been down, going home to roads you don’t know and tree hung avenues of Moorooka you haven’t learnt to get lost in yet. Home is five houses you don’t know all that well in five suburbs you don’t yet understand.

Smaller walks, interval rides that prepare you for the evening run south of the river, getting lost under possum wires of wrong laneways, frangipani letterbox dotted street names that conjour up early eighties Australian sitcoms. Walks that worry you as the day goes on. All of them suggesting how the big one, the real one, the one you can’t predict or guess at will turn out. As it gets closer it gets bigger and blacker. The light gets darker, the walk gets nearer, and you start to smell it, the mulberry stink coming in on a sea breeze.

Rainbow dreams for everbody!!! What are your rainbow dreams all about eh listener? Eh? (Special thanks to Rainbow Clown Art Director Lee May)

Old Genius Jars, I’ll tell you a think or two about that old so n so, was the thing Munz was telling his daughter Lindsay, and meanwhile the cable car was falling from the wire, falling down into the ravines of the alps, the green and pleasant ravines of dying often, and the moon dangling its trans fat moon glum beams of light upon the falling cable car dropping like stones was an uptight point of view. Lindsay wasn’t paying attention to any of this, was reading the novel by Edward V, was thinking that it was a good sort of novel, was enjoying the type of thing that it was. It was certainly a novel type of thing, she was thinking. And while all of this was going on, that cable car, it was really falling faster now, down to those ravines of extreme bad endings with blood covering the white cauldrons of snowscape plantations, high altitude death wishes so cold you can barely take photographs afterwards, during the whole dreary aftermath of the thing, when they check the teeth to see who it was who was in the cable car in its glorious pre death period.

The daughter of Genius Jars was thousands of miles away and would not have cared what any old man had said about her magnificent father if she had known. She was on a beach. It was an enjoyable time.

He coughs all over the new seats, the camomile sleeve hems dragged back along his arms up to the kink in his better elbows, and the whle time he tells me about the Martian invasion he witnessed upon the Albion football field in late 2006. I don’t know where to look. I notice a gaunt faced fellow eating a bowl of spaghetti and green flowers three seats back, eyes giant spiders in the jars of his spectacles darting about the train, anywhere but the bowl he holds like three melons, fresh, fat and old as dough. Then the train guard appears in the carriage after a downpour of steel levers shunting two doors shut, smoke billowing like salad dishes from the tiny chickens of his ugly pornography face. Eye gleams of early winters trying to out psych you know who, whose story is becoming ‘difficult’, is starting to harbour essayists and unusual planets and left over pasta breads.

I am two stations away from getting up and leaving through the doors and folding my body into christmas evenings of drinks cabinet conversations looking out over golf clubs of overweight accountancy firm get togethers. I can already smell the platforms, their weird chalets selling tickets to rain coat row your boat going men with moustaches of mould and soup.

Rumours flying around at the minute suggesting Sony are about to launch pocket rainbow bookmarks! Hank Coyne refuses to comment.

In dark houses over the river, black timber feet perched over the streams of plum fish and tiger sharks, you read your books and play your trumpets and think carefully about your next ten years. Your next ten years could see you lost in old woods in strange continents, strange towns, strange alps. Snow on your shoulders, windows fogged with rice, you could be on the highest mountains looking over the darkest valleys smoking strange cigarettes and talking about instruments. The next ten years could see you in container ships hitchhiking to Norway, eating bad crab, bad chocolate, cold fish, wrong oats and rotting cabbage.

You cannot leave the dark houses easily. They can be warm at times, but in the early morning they grow so cold the ceilings sweat with cold sleet and rain. Once you leave them you cannot return. You can walk inland over dew speckled mountains, east to the sea and the long strands of icy beach, or you can follow the river, to its mouth or its root, to wherever it goes. The houses are still standing. They go on haunting whoever they hold.

You can wait for those houses to walk you downriver. You can sit in dark rooms listening to old records, listening to old books of dust,  jars of dust black and grey and blue with strange silts.