Sinister: What is a 'Fog Gun'?

[Kieran Devaney]

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.





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