Sinister: What is a 'Fog Gun'?

Dear Sinister, Halloween. I was walking back through the little shopping bit on Fulwood Road, just behind (my rule regarding walking, incidentally, if I’m on my own, is that unless there are exceptional circumstances I’m not allowed to pass anyone – people walk too fast, you miss things if you do) a young mother with a small child of indeterminate gender (the gender isn’t important to the story). Outside one of the little bakeries there she stops the pram and, pointing to a specially decorated Halloween style cake, asks the child if it would like one of those – cue ecstatic child. And, as I skip past the pram I feel the tiniest tinge of homesickness. When I get back to my room tiny bits of fallen leaves and twigs are stuck to the damp backs of my overlong jeans. Not the weather for them. In the lifts, through a tiny grate in the top left hand corner you can see yourself rising or falling, passing through physical space, sometimes the other lift will whiz past in the opposite direction, and as you step out, or in, if you look down at your feet there’s a tiny slit through which you can see the whole lift shaft – if you’re starting from the top, as I frequently am, then you can see all the blank space you’re about to fall into. I can’t decide if it makes me feel more or less claustrophobic – my eyes are drawn almost masochistically towards those gaps every time, especially if there are others in the lift with me. Imagine being stuck in a lift. It’s been done. Then, later that day, which was yesterday as I write this now, dancing to Pulp’s ‘Common People’ - happily the full album version, I look around to see if anyone knows the words to the ‘Like a dog lying in a corner…’ bit, but nobody seems to, so I sing it a bit louder, so that people might notice that I am au fait with the song. Loser. I think back to last year when during the manic encore rendition of said song I was slightly disturbed by the violent, almost celebratory way that the Birmingham Academy filled with what seemed like the whole crowd bellowing ‘Cus everybody hates a tourist!’ Later I try to muse on the nature of being a fan of a band, or even just a song, but am distracted by drunken chatter. The weather seems to have taken a turn for the worse now. Still. I’m wary of talking about weather now, though, since I read in quality free newspaper The Metro that following a pan-European survey, the British people were found to be the worst conversationalists in all Europe because all we talk about is the weather. Still. In Norwich they cut down horse chestnut trees because of the danger of people being hit by falling conkers, that is, horse chestuts falling and hitting people on the head. A church somewhere (I forget where) stops a weekly yoga group from using its hall because of yoga’s associations with the practises of Eastern religions. The Christian bookshop on the way into town here puts up anti-Halloween posters: “Trick or Treat? Just a bit of fun? No it isn’t.” The culture minister, on seeing the new Turner Prize exhibition claims that British art is ‘lost’. In my notebook I write that this is surely a good thing. I have not, however, seen the exhibition myself – I imagine the pictures I’ve seen don’t nearly do justice to the works themselves. Earlier that day, some students organise an anti-war protest. Someone stands on top of one of those round advertisement hoardings with a megaphone and the crowd chants along after him, HIM: WARFARE, THEM: WELFARE etc… on the ground a couple, one wearing a GW Bush mask and various witch paraphernalia and another ditto, but with a Tony Blair mask dance around, HIM: GEORGE BUSH, THEM: TERRORIST!, HIM: TONY BLAIR, THEM: TERRORIST! I lament easy student anarcho-socialism, and in doing so realise that my rebuttal of the validity of the protest is as much of a cliché as the protesters themselves. Still. The warfare/welfare chant reminded me sufficiently of Crass’ ‘Reality Asylum’ which I put on just loud enough for people in the corridor to hear, but there’s no one about. At my old primary school, a Catholic school, incidentally, and we used to have Halloween discos. But. A few years ago, so a good while after I left, there was a teacher who hung himself, from a tree in his back garden. He’d been married just two months previously, and, for the wedding he and his then fiancé had instructed the guests not to buy them gifts, but instead to give however much they were planning on spending to charity. How do people manage those really short posts by the way? Tell me everything, doesn’t matter how irrelevant it seems, we’re interested in what you have to say. I nearly always enjoy reading those big 3000 word monster posts – one of those a week and you’ll have a book by next Christmas. Still. I can’t rightly tell where I am in the day now, but during a lecture the lecturer mistakenly says that Tracey Emin won the Turner Prize for her unmade bed. Expecting similar, I go for the slow rushing intake of breath noise that customarily accompanies such faux-pas. But. Nothing. A few people turn and stare at me quizzically, the prof doesn’t falter on stage; the girl in front of me notes Emin’s false victory. Oh has the World changed or have I changed etc. “What the rest of the world calls a butterfly, the caterpillar calls the end.” Lao Tzu said that, although scholars doubt his actual existence and so forth, but you can get that quote on a tshirt now, if I was as computer literate as I might like to be then I could even have that as my big end quote that I finish every post with, I could just write it on the end of each post I guess but that’s sort of cheating isn’t it? – there’s a whole range of tshirts encompassing choice phrases from such luminaries as James Joyce, Nietzsche, Foucault etc etc – I think it’d probably just look naff if I bought one though, and since it’s a bookshop that sells them chances are, as with so many of these things, the only size available will be adult XXL and obviously I wont be able to try it on. Dear. Back to later that day then. My indie cred hits a new low as I dance (halfheartedly!) to Nickleback. I was wearing, though, my b&s tshirt which glowed attractively in the UV light. Ok, change track. I wrote the above on Friday, which was yesterday, since today is Saturday. Since then a great deal has gone down, sort of, including me going to Offbeat last night which was excellent, despite them not playing anything I requested – I even bought a tshirt which says ‘indier than thou!’ on the back, which I’m probably not, not after that whole Nickleback fiasco anyway, but happily the super-ironique exclamation mark shows that I’m only jesting anyway and that I know that indie is not a contest of one-upmanship, and even, that by wearing the tshirt I am in fact critiquing the overly-serious ways of certain scenesters with their dogmatic self-righteousness etc. Speaking of exclamation marks, the following is an extract from the Sheffield University English Department Style Guide: “Exclamation marks are generally to be discouraged. Enthusiasm can be shown in other ways.” Brilliant. It also says ‘Boy’ on the front, no disputing that - this is the tshirt now, not the style guide. Ahem. Oh yeah, things being as they are, there isn’t another Offbeat until the 22nd of November. However, said date is the annual Belles special, which should be pretty top notch and and and on the 21st, which is the day before, zany American folksters The Moldy Peaches and zany American folkster Jeffrey Lewis are playing the typically pretty rubbish Sheffield SU indie night. It promises to be two whole days of fucking rock. You should all come. Oh actually, if anyone does actually want to come, in the interests of caring and sharing then I could put a couple of people up here. Yes, that’s right, in this very room where I compose these very posts. You can even see the computer that I use, the grubby little keyboard – it has a little burn mark on the spacebar after I dropped an incense stick on top of it which melted the poor plastic and spewed a load of smoke all over the place. Today then, Saturday, I went out for a walk in the rain. People don’t tend to do that anymore – I saw someone I vaguely know, “Where are you off to?” they asked, which is a perfectly fair question, “Er, nowhere really, I’m just sort of wandering…” I answer. This doesn’t seem acceptable as indicated by the look they give which combines something approaching horror and something approaching confusion. “Ok” they say and leave sharpish. Fair enough, I suppose. I make it into town about an hour later (someone in the lift the other day said that it takes half an hour to walk into town – this is evidence for my ‘people walk to fast’ proposition… i.e. this someone walks about twice as fast as I do) and, catching my pale reflection in a shop window I realise how wet I look – not wet as in the opposite to hard as in good at fighting, though that too, but that always, no, more actually physically wet from the rain. I don’t carry it well at all. Everyone seems to look less wet than I do, though perhaps I’m just vain, (I have become much more vain actually, recently that is, since getting here – something to do with trying to fertilise my ‘cool outsider schtick’ image – I am no longer too scared to try clothes on in shops and then not buy them). They do have umbrellas and hoods and things as well though – I should invest in an umbrella I imagine, though I haven’t the foggiest regarding where I’d get one from. This flat hair doesn’t suit. Though. I wave away a woman selling (perhaps that’s not quite the word, vending?) poppies who, ok, looks as bedraggled and wet as I do and then confused by my refusal, but I don’t want to get into why I don’t think wearing them is a good idea with her, not in this rain. I had all that at school last year. I am accosted by about twelve other people vending poppies whilst slouching round town. Jocularly, one of them offers to stick it on the lapel of my jacket for me “No fanks”. I suppose I’m as much of a hypocrite with my CND badge and all, but there you go. I should now probably say something about seeing a discarded poppy, stricken and alone, trampled into a puddle etc but I shan’t. Paragraphs. Just outside the window someone has gone to great expense (I guess) to put on a fairly spectacular fireworks display, as fireworks displays go. I’ve never been that impressed by fireworks to be honest, once you’ve seen one etc. Actually, the best bit of watching fireworks is seeing them going off far away and then waiting those few inert seconds to hear the bang. That silence is pure science. It’s a bit like the space between seeing where a piece of puzzle goes and actually putting it into place. There are other examples. The ones here did enough to drown out the slightly disturbing sounds of this Dymaxion record. Dymaxion, as it goes (though this is admittedly just conjecture on my part) are probably so named after the ill-fated dymaxion car designed by the R. Buckminster-Fuller who also happened to discover that magic third isotope of carbon, buckminsterfullerene. Small world. Anyway this leads me neatly on to talking about music which disturbs you – this probably, but not definitely, lies somewhat outside the realms of b&s, and bits of music that disturb me tend to be instrumental anyway, stuff with vocals doesn’t work so well. It’s usually pretty sparse stuff too, which is why this Dymaxion record fits well – other examples? There’s a bit on the longest song from the most recent Shalabi Effect album where all the percussion falls away which is quite spooky, and despite having vocals, much of Daniel Johnston’s stuff unsettles me, though maybe that’s as much contextual as anything else. But, the more interesting question is: How is it that music can produce unsettling or disturbing emotions? Incidentally, when I started my tape for the tape tree the idea (which slowly became obscured as I found songs which I wanted on that didn’t quite fit the criteria) was that side one would consist of songs which didn’t seem that threatening on the surface, but were insidious and scary in their cores – so side one has Dymaxion (if you haven’t heard Dymaxion by the way, then download something or buy something, I’m sure you’ll like them) and Akira Ifukube and stuff and side two would have songs that sounded threatening on the surface but were really a lot of fun once you got to know them – stuff like Merzbow and Naked City and The Locust. As I say, it didn’t quite come off like that, but it’s an interesting idea anyway. Swish. Ok. Having all but avoided the wrath of the camera for the best part of the summer people have suddenly started taking pictures of me at a rate that can be best described as alarming. What was it that Brian Eno said about photographs and videos of himself? He really summed it up anyway, whatever it was – I’ll have to paraphrase since I can’t recall the exact words, if you’re interested they’ll be on the net somewhere, I believe the interview where he said it was with Mark Sinker, but something about your thoughts turning to yourself in the future looking back at this picture as the camera turns on you - you’re split into being in two places at once, which isn’t a comfortable feeling. Or perhaps Eno and I are just not very photogenic. So somewhere, probably in the grubby, but thankfully gloved (they do have their standards) hands of some employee at Boots, there now exist photos of me wearing poorly applied eye makeup (actually, and this’ll be a long parenthetic preamble so sit back, one of the scariest things I’ve ever done is buy said makeup – I never used to bother with the stuff really, and if I wanted to I borrowed it from someone, but after I returned here wearing some after a night out a couple of weeks ago I met with the horror and revulsion of other’s here, including one guy who quizzed me at some length regarding my reasons and justifications for being male and wearing makeup – am I gay? Am I trying to look stupid? So, being the contrary cunt that I am after that I decided I had to buy some and wear it at every opportunity. Easier than it sounds. I’ve stuffed this up actually, too much build up and the build up is much more fun than the actual story which involves me feeling awkward in Boots and embarrassedly buying a can of coke as well and avoiding the joint ‘if you say it’s for your girlfriend or sister’ gazes of checkout attendant and security guard. Away I ran. Pretty fucking scary, huh?) and grinning sheepishly (notice there how the sentence ran on seamlessly despite the two hundred odd words in the brackets, brilliant) or idiotically (those are the only two I can manage). And, well, I don’t know, I’m not a fan of photos of myself. Again I’m probably deprecating to try and pick up compliments here, though from who I have no idea since I don’t think anyone on Sinister has ever seen a photograph of me – if I can get hold of a copy and I work out how to magic it onto the computer then maybe I’ll send the above mentioned photo for inclusion on the photos page on the Sinister site. Is that still going? Dangler there - the photo page I mean, of course, I haven’t looked in ages, actually. I’m sort of running out of things to say, there were others which might come back to me in a minute but I’m being tempted into stupid “‘The Beggar’s Opera’ – what’s that all about?” type comments. Not a good road to go down. Et bien. I’m going to leave it there, then. More during the week, I imagine. I bet you can hardly wait. - Kieran. _________________________________________________________________ Protect your PC - get McAfee.com VirusScan Online http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963 +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. 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