Plankton crumbs are polluting the driveways of seventeen clowns in Liverpool England. Ridge Campbell, popular scouse clown, has thrown a hammer at one of these plankton crumbs. He reports that nothing whatsoever happened at all. He wasn’t overly happy about it.
Brisbane is a train of towns running five minutes late, with three drunks in the third carriage talking about pantries and another in the last carriage reading Angela Carter. The ticket offices are always closed for those wanting to climb aboard Brisbane. It doesn’t always stop at the tumbling down wooden stations. Ticket inspectors rove from car to car with lanterns, smoking herbs, trying to wear their regulation coats with whatever accuracy they can approach. The train of towns, old Brisbane town, old fish and chip shops strung together by big men tall as bears rattles collapsing in great leaps through pockets of coral and mulberry trees steaming hot in late afternoons.
Some days the great train of old churches, new townhouses, leaning facades with 19th century date stamps embossed high above plate glass restuarants specialising in bowls of cheese and chips, of creeper and lemon fruit and frangipani perfumes stops still. At the oldest blindest regional station it stops and it steams and settles into its silent throb of insects arguing with an ancient station master with wooden buttons and plenty of cigarettes closeted all over his coat, his sleeves, pockets and boots. Some days that old train stops long enough for the older people to climb aboard, find a seat between piles of second third and eighth hand street directores dating back to 1974, rhododendrons boiling over old chinese antique lamps, and grandchildren with subscriptions to defunct Bristol teapot societies gone over ripe and stringy after too many wet Saturdays.
Then that train of church towers, renovated high rise apartment lofts, windmills and terrace flats grinds back into life and moves on through the labyrinths of its stranger stops and rows and blocks.
Maps can’t trace Brisbane’s tracks through the jumble sale canyons of overgrown grass any longer. The map makers got lost on their way to work last weekend and have all started families down back alleys in the bigger fibro carriages somewhere near the outer suburbs of the rollicking train, famous for dirt and grit and printing shops. They have all given up going back, finding their old offices, emptying their old desks. They are too busy mapping the next ten years of their lives. Mapping the paths their wives and husbands and children must take through the overgrown towns of sporting ovals and bus stops passing all the pretty stations of satin and musk they can no longer afford to catalogue.
The Mayor of Brisbane’s long train of broken down cars, of vases of vegetable flowers and fruit shops hops from carriage to carriage as it moves around long loops, up and down hills, in long careless loops of iron and glass and louvre windows framing ferns and acres of moss. He leaps carefully, his clothes old, made from shoes and sheets of metal rusted black as outdoor bathtubs.
The Mayor of the town climbs a chimney of the train and sees Brisbane town’s engine in the far distance shrouded in ponds of moss and trunks of custard apples, its end tangled and jangled in lattice and arbours in long forgotten family gardens unheralded, lost and hidden behind real estate for sale signs ten years rotten and faded.
The train of Brisbane’s past and future stumbles on deep into its present of mushrooms and cobwebbed historical societies. The clouds rain on it all, and the sun deals with it in its own sweating skin wet ways.
Somewhere timetables are nailed to hoop pines and left to go green into the last of the late afternoons. They will be examined by antique men in blue black hats one hundred years away, and they will be ignored. There is no keeping time in Brisbane. There is only collecting it and selling it on. The train is running late.
Pilots in the area have been complaining for seven days about these vast unidentified bath tubs flying through the indian oceans of sky over hanging the east coast of Australia like solar curtains of translucent flesh. The pilots know what they are talking about. Four of them are Danish.
Nobody is sure what the bathtubs are doing flying about the east coast of Australia. Whoever is piloting these baths knows something about cosmic soap floating and the problems of fertilising clouds with filthy luke warm water full of ash and town grit. Whoever is doing this is no stranger to dampening brain moods among those who choose not to clean their armpit dirts.
Rainbow Clown News is on the lookout for new footage so we can buy it off you for a tiny sum and flog it off to the West Europeans for a song of some type. Possibly a reel. We’ll see.
Meanwhile, eye trumpets to the clotted dairy sky reader. There may be quite a lot of money in it for us if you strike a vision and let us know the time and place.
Nice luck!
Rainbow Clown News last week conducted our survey of modern Melbourne book shops, and god willing we rambled in and out of some of the strangest alley ways, arcades, lofts and stairwells around that strange big city stretch just now filling its own shoes.
Renford the Clown led the way early on down Swanston Street, shaking his fist at the errant tram drivers for so long Victorian spiders began arching down in big looping arcs, setting up shop in his novelty clown gloves, and generally causing many sturdy helpings of top shelf clown guffaws as Renford expressed his anger in various jugglings and general clown frolicking about. Finally Renford put aside his hate and suggested we ignore the tramings for the rest of the afternoon and ascend a series of stairs up to the best clown shop around.
Melbourne clowns know the shop I mean; Visiting clowns will spot it. Hidden between clothes stores and interesting cooking stops, bird faced shop workers frowning with their clogs set to stun, encasing fine never walked a day in their lives feet smelling of ambrosia, this shop, this music and film and book shop flashed with surprise finds, flickered with good luck discoveries, and had us all feeling awfully proud to be clown scribes in this dandy year of 2008.
Lance Armstrong the Clown went gaga nuts at some of the fine woven book cases and mesh glued CD cases, the LP sleeves smelling of wild tobacco leaf, new mexico harvests of old Syd Barrett vinyl smelling like a million dollar marijuana farmer after a St Matthews day cook out gone wrong. Lance was happy as a hatful of thieves, and I photographed his smile seven or eight times just to be sure it was smiling. Well it was. It was smiling like a prize of cats, polar cold and full of ice.
Later, after we had drained the Rainbow Clown News bank accounts and lumbered free of this dream clown store with our bags of paperbacks, vinyl and acid jazz cigarette addictions, we wandered further down along Swanston Street, stopped, drank milk, moved further along to our next location.
Lucky our milk was fresh…
(To be continued)
Rainbow Clown News staff have just returned from three nights in the new Green Coral Hotel currently hovering over Greece, and known to all good clowns as the ‘Elvis in the Clouds’. Shaped like a giant golden Elvis head, this grand hotel of restless floating travellers drifts between Turkey and Greece from month to month, and guests tend to have weird dreams about the King every night while on board.
Rainbow Clown News would like to recommend viewers visit The Elvis of the Clouds as soon as possible. One of our IT staff, HeeHaw Supreme, had a dream about Elvis brandishing a golf club while playing a match with three of the four living Mongolian Kaisers. He reports that it was the best dream he had had that week.
Have you noticed how the lobsters are having less fun in public nowadays? There isn’t anywhere near as much lobster joking about as there used to be. Once you could snorkle off Miami and bump into forty lobsters an hour all having lots of fun times, talking about parties and enjoying the coral, but this has become rare, at least along the reefs I have been frequenting. What changed? Where did the happy lobsters go?
There is a suggestion that they have all migrated to trees on the Norway coast. Reports are coming in of loud lobster parties in elms all around that coast. No proof yet of course, but it makes a lot of sense. I have always thought lobsters and the coast of norway made the perfect collection of amusing things bundled together, and this would make it all mean a lot more wouldn’t it.
Time will tell.
More evidence Roof Tennis is gaining a foothold in our glorious rainbow clown society. Regi Manifold the Happy Balloon Clown reports Roof Tennis sightings during a recent mad theatrical helicopter jaunt over New York City, and three days later, Chicago.
Clowns are advised to avoid any rooftop tennis enthusiasts in the coming months, late April being a particularly dangerous period. Highrise tennis buffs are likely to be eating pickled onion sandwiches and smelling of different fruity mosses.
Remember, if these jokers lob one of their green furry balls over the edge of the buildings they are playing on…well, just lets keep our eyes open for high velocity rooftop borne tennis balls in built up areas, eh?
The latest news is Pumpkin Lamps have been banned by Rainbow authorities in Germany. No more telling time by the light of the best Pumpkin Lamps in town, not in Bavaria at any rate.
This will have a marked effect on the rainbow writing in the region, and people will have to start eating more yoghurt to compensate.