About three weeks ago, our neighbor’s cat, Mavis, disappeared. They were pretty unhappy, as you might imagine, and put up flyers.

Mavis is a house kitty who’s very skittish around cars, and so no-one could figure where she’d gone.

Friday night as Dave, Viv and I walked back from a pho dinner at Thanh Bros on Broadway, we saw a black and white cat about half a block down the street. She was on 13th, off John in the direction of the reservoir. I called, “Mavis?”

Much to my surprise, the cat immediatley responded, and came trotting over, meowing, but still skittish, especially when a car would go by on John. She came to Dave and was purring loudly.

I told Dave to pick her up, which he did, but she would have none of it. Pushing out of his arms emphatically, I feared she was going to run away.

I told Viv to go get our neighbors so that if she did run off familiar voices could call her. Viv dashed up the street.

Dave picked her up again, and this time she allowed him to hold her. Eventually the jumped to the ground again and then I picked her up. I could see one of our neighbors across the intersectiion of 12th and John, by now; we had begun carrying the cat up the hill. She was purring and obviously very happy to be receiving affection.

The cat was still tryig to jump away each time a car passed, and by the time our neighbor had crossed the street, she’d gotten to the ground again. Mavis was still allowing me to gently restrain her and I was stroking her and talking to her.

Both our neighbors had caught up with us now, and Mavis’s ‘mom’ was crying for joy. He husband held her closely as she cradled Mavis. She was clearly overwhelmed by the unexpected gift of being reunited with her cat again after such a relatively long time. She kept remarking how much weight the cat had lost, tears running down her face.

I found I moving and difficult not to share her strong emotion.

I quickmarched to the bookstore today, against my wallet’s better judgment, in order to pick up a couple books for review at Cinescape.

It is a crisp, clear, sunny day; the afternoon sun shining brightly on autumn-scented air. The bright leaves of fall crumble beneath the feet of my neighborhood, and the trees – all of the trees, with the exception of our evergreens, naturally – are clad in full and brightly colored robes.

This is almost disturbingly anomalous. Fall in Puget Sound is overcast and drizzly, with rainstorms at predictable times of day.

Just before sunset, the sun breaks out from underneath the cloud deck to dazzingly illuminate the city with golden light so strong and yellow it defies belief. Increasing the contrast, this is uniformly preceded by a half-hour of rain.

Likewise, just before dawn, rains sweep through the city. It’s been this way every year here since I arrived for about three months, from October through December, and there are certain consequences.

The rain knocks the leaves from the trees. The overcast dampens people’s mood, somewhat. The light show in the half-hour before sunset is like a great shout of laughter. The air is perfectly clean, without a hint of pollution, also due to the twice-daily rain.

This year, the air smells of a city and of burning leaves. The trees and the sidewalks carry the leaves, and the leaves on the ground retain their brittleness long enough to crunch and crumble underfoot.

It’s pleasant, because the ambience is that of the falls of my youth in Southern Indiana. It’s disturbing because it certainly means that the drought will adversely affect everything from municipal water stores, to, yet again, my freakin’ electricity bill (I turn my head, mutter “fuckin’ Enron pigs,” and spit).

I lived here for six years before I realized that spring here smells like flowers, not chlorophyll. I know what the damp smell of autumn is here, and what I smell this year ain’t it.

So.

My job has taken a turn for the much more interesting, as you may have noted. I spent Monday afternoon on the set of X-Men 2 in Vancouver, watching a scene being shot, which I described for Cinescape here:

X-MEN 2 exclusive shooting notes.

The other story posted today from the visit can be found here:

X-MEN 2 spoof takes.

The second story recounts a few clips that we were shown by the director, Bryan Singer. Singer’s also directed “The Usual Suspects”, the first X-Men movie and more. He looks very, very young. He’s actually a mature, seasoned 35.

What’s interesting for me in the context of the writing I’ve been doing here is this: I write about what I observe, internally or externally, during the day. Suddenly, I’m also being paid to do this.

I mean, I theory, I’m being paid. Check’s in the mail. You know. You’ve all heard how that works, I’m sure.

So, back to the main topic. How can I write about what I see without using material which my editors feel they have an exclusive interest in? It’s a pickle, lemme tell ya.

Additionally, the process of writing professionally is much more time-consuming than writing here. Here, I can just make up what you have to say, although I certainly hope to accurately convey the meaning and flavor of a quote in this context. There, I have to roll the tape and check the notes, and even then I still get it wrong sometimes.

On the way back from Vancouver this time, we found the border crossing where the customs officials DON’T scowl and snap from under all-black paramilitary gear. But I can’t tell you where it is unless you’ll take a loyalty oath.

What else? It’s not news to CINESCAPE readers, I guess, that there are hundreds of people, well, a good hundred, anyway, who hang around for hours and hours while a film is being made. It wasn’t really news to me, either, but there sure were a lot of people on the set.

I shook hands with Ian McKellen, the film’s Magneto, which, really, was very cool. Also with Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, who plays Mystique, and, yes, it was much like shaking hands with a blue-paint-covered naked supermodel. One does not know what the appropriate social behavior is. Smile, look into her eyes, nice to meet you.

Really, too much, too hard to separate the news from the personal right now. Tomorrow, I must write everything in a rough draft form so I have it as raw material for here, and there, and elsewhere. As an exercise, it will be a good thing, I think, to be thinking about personal versus news while I work on this tomorrow.

I do have a concrete assignment or two for the material from Cinescape as well, and that will undoubtedly shape it.

So, what just happened here? Did I just wake up and find out that I’m a writer? I am so confused. No. Bemused.

Time for a nice glass of scotch.

The explosion blinded me, and I started back in shock as I waited for feeling to return to my face, just ahead of the rumbling wall of debris carried on the shockwave. I began to realize that I had heard a loud sound just as I looked up, out of the window. I should not have long to wait.

I may have dropped the x-acto blade and ruler I was using in paste-up, or I may have carefully placed them on the surface of the layout table, groping in my blindness. Which direction was I facing? Northwest. That’s where I saw the flash. There was a three-story building in that direction. Had I seen the flash through the upper stories of the building?

It must have been an airburst. That should scramble radio; all I would hear would be static. Did an EMP weapon also knock out power? I could still hear my Lou Reed tape crooning “ooooo, new sensations.” It must not have been an EMP burst, then. What was to the northwest?

Crane Naval Weapons Storage Depot was north of the city, I thought. Wasn’t it a county north? That’d be what, fifteen miles?

I had been taught to count seconds from the lightning stroke ripping the spring skies of the Midwest until I heard the thunder roll. One second of silence meant one mile of distance. Count and compare two strikes to determine if the storm is headed toward you or away.

Had it been fifteen seconds since the flash? I had been jolted with terror as my field of vision whited out, and been deep in concentration on the task at hand. Now I became more aware of my body as I began to guess how long had passed. I had received a full dose of adrenaline, and my heart roared and thumped in my ears, my neck.

I was seated, bolt upright, on my draftsman’s stool. My body was rigid, alert, tensed for immediate flight or more information regarding the imminent threat.

I was working in an office on the second floor of one of the oldest buildings on Bloomington’s downtown square, a two-story brick building that dated, as I recall, to the 1850s and which may have had a name that reflected its’ original builders. A cannon ball was lodged in the side of the building, just under the window out of which I was at that moment looking. I had been told that the ball was the result of a Civil War skirmish. It’s not clear how factual that information is.

It is known that during the Civil War, a garrison of union troops was stationed in Bloomington specifically to minimize the impact of any secessionist counties in the southern half of the state, Indiana. The unit was used to quell a rebellion in Brown County, but from Bill Weaver’s accounts of the rebellion for a Brown County newspaper, the rebellion consisted of some meetings that were broken up. No heavy artillery appeared in the retellings.

Since the building dated back so far, I had no great faith in the seismic integrity of the building. In fact, I recalled the spectacular collapse of another elderly brick building down the street when I was a child. The Towne Cinema’s grand slump had been accompanied by a fire which destroyed a print of Ralph Bakshi’s ambitious “American Pop”. I recall this because I was hoping to see the film the next day.

I had just reached the conclusion that it was a good idea to get the hell out of the building before the scientific tsunami reduced it to rubble and trapped me within, blind, burned, and bleeding. I began to grope for my jacket.

I had remained facing the window, and as my hand brushed my jacket, draped on the backrest of my chair, I noticed a slight pinkishness to the undifferentiated field of black that had replaced the unbearable white.

Then, quickly, the pink flushed through the spectrum, resolving, as the darkness cleared, into the view out the window I had expected to see moments before, as I looked up.

Out the window, cars rolled, people walked, and small birds flitted; the streetlights changed, and fall leaves fluttered to the sidewalk. A telephone pole just outside the window rocked violently back and forth, the only object in such motion. Just below a large cylindrical capacitor, an eight-inch bar of metal whipped in the trail of the pole’s oscillations.

Occasionally, the bar would graze a set of clamps, obviously designed to hold one end of the bar in place, and a rosy-white shower of sparks would burst forth for a moment.

I gaped.

After a moment, I realized what had happened. I had glanced directly at the capacitor on the pole just at the moment a power surge, or something, had overloaded the gear. The simple, exposed metal breaker had been thrown as a result, accompanied by a blinding arc.

The crisis passed, I immediately began laughing and shaking uncontrollably. I turned to my half finished layout and was not able to hold the x-acto as my body burned the adrenaline off. I scrawled a half-legible note, and took the afternoon off.

As I recall it, the note read, “Survived nuclear explosion – gone to drink heavily. Will make up time tomorrow.”

It’s a long drive up and back in a day – 3 hours each way, with a slow border cross both ways. We got waved into Canadian emigration for a short bit of closer scrutiny on the way up it was shorter on the way back.

I had left my birth certificate in the trunk when we hit the border on the way back, and the black clad border inspector, who looks just like a swat cop without armor, instructed up to pop the trunk.

He negelcted to tell me to get out of the car to get the certificate, though. Rule number one with cops and cars is do nothing unless specifically instructed, so when he expressed irritation that I had not exited the car to et the certificate I was puzzled.

Anyway, we got through with no difficulty.

I do not know how much of the material from my visit needs to be reserved for Cinescape, so I can’t write about what I saw in great detail here yet. But it was cool, and very interesting.

We were attending a press conference and set walkthrough for the X-MEN 2 movie currently in production in Vancouver. Nearly the entire cast was at the press conference, and I asked a question during the conference of Patrick Stewart. Then I got shy and clammed up, much to my disappointment.

The set walkthough was also remarkable. For now, all I’ll note concerning the sets is that what we were shown was very large.

pix.whybark.com :: Rainier with Spence (8-26) :: 9 is an image of the other mountain, which Eric and Anne did not see except when they flew out.

There’s some neat shots of the high trails around Paradise in the fog starting here. I believe I like this one the best.

These are pix from late August, on a jaunt taken in company with dear pal Spence. Unfortunately, that picture I link to at the top of the post was the best view of the moon-tang we had all weekend.

Apologies for my weakened discipline – Eric and Anne are in town and I haven’t had time to plant butt in chair long enough to discourse upon aught. There will be makeups and fictional dates attributed.

But I have been practicing my conjugations of “tump”, in honor of Eric’s degree from Texas A&M and his paternal status as horse-wranglin’ Texan.

He’s awful quiet though. I just can’t seem to get him into the lie-telling and shoutin’ mode one expects. Since we both actually grew up in Indiana maybe there’s a reason for this.

Aargh, sorry this entry isn’t up til now. Guess I got too involved on Friday and Saturday. So: howzabout some mixed notes?

First off a big YEESH to Mr. Baruz for hooking me up to mainline a dang wordgame: Bookworm will keep me from my household chores for days. Weeks, even. I got NOZZLES with some bonus or something.

Next, I went overboard on the research for what’s gonna be an 800-word piece on the IMAX re-releases of “Attack of the Clones” and “Apollo 13,” and went and saw “Space Station 3D” and “Apollo 13” back to back last week. Or maybe the week before. I forget. Go see ’em both.

“Space Station 3D” was in un-headachy, polarized-lens-headset 3D and boy was it neat. It was very interesting to compare and contrast the static, information filled framing of the 3D movie to the artful, you-only-get-to-see-what-we-show-you approach of what is an excellent Hollywood flick, A13.

I’m working on another oversized project to spring on y’all soon. It’s neat, If I do say so myself. It’s not as convoluted as the KGP.

Hey-HEY RAM is cheap again. $50 for half a gig. Get it now before the port closings start messing things up good.

We have two successive waves of guests arriving shortly; Hotel Perez-Whybark will be booked until November.

So… Billy Childish played a song once that had that refrain, above, and it’s a great song.

When Steve Jobs sings it, it’s not so good, to me.

Ever since the very earliest installs of OS X I have had recurrent, highy irritating timeouts in the console which essentially amount to “I can’t see any name servers, so you can’t have the internet.”

The messages are spurious and do not reflect actual status of the name servers addressed. Rather than trying again, and so on, the default behavior of the OS has been to stop attempting DNS enquiries until the process which performs the queries is stopped and restarted in one of several ways.

In lay terms, the computer decides that the pipe to the net is plugged and stops trying to get data from it. But the pipe’s fine.

There’s no meaningful documentation of this bug at Apple’s website.

I’d learned workarounds.

Guess what? in OS X 10.2 (Jagwyre), my workarounds have been DISABLED! The lookupd messages in console are even gone…. but the problem is still there, and infact, it appears that all Apple’s done is make it harder to diagnose the problem when it occurs.

Terminal, a new and different app apparently LACKING font smoothing, now has user-tied scrollback disabled as well.

Oh, I’m steamed. From my perspective and a couple of hours of scowling at the screen, this is a downgrade.

Keep working on the record!

WFHB Bloomington Community Radio is the successor station to a “cable free-form radio station”, known as WQAX. QAX (pronounced “quacks”) thrived or limped from the early ’70s into the mid 90’s, when its place in the community was taken by WFHB, a low-power station that had obtained a broadcast license due to diligence on the part of community radio activists and arrogance and corruption on the part of the local media establishment.

No, really! The radio corporation that dominated Bloomington’s airwaves did something that PO’d an adjudicator during a frequency-granting application process: the multiply applying, and multiply denied til then, community radio folks were granted the frequency.

I began deejaying at QAX in 1980 when I was 14. I was kicked out when I was 16 in an incident involving many smashed duplicate copies of commercial vinyl which had been stored in a hallway. I rejoined at some point (I believe I was 18) , and shortly got the boot once more, I think this time for profanity. Or maybe it was booze in the studio.

I don’t know. To shorten this up a bit, I’m reasonably sure I was kicked out of the station membership at least three times, maybe four, for clear, unambiguous violation of the membership guidelines. It’s even possible that was ejected once when I was not a member; since I was deeply conversant with the station’s gear it was easy for me to sub for someone that needed a shift covered.

The fact that I was booted so frequently meant that I, and others, were quite vague about my membership status at any given time. I lived with two successive station managers, Bill and Chet. Eric Sinclair, with whom I joined the station and took my first training in the company of (a few days prior to a Halloween concert by one Frank Zappa in my hometown), later became the station’s last GM, and possibly the one who held that position the longest. More than two years, I believe: it was a thankless job, and certainly did not pay even one dime. All volunteer, you know!

Anyway, it seems likely I held the record for getting kicked out of the place. Not that I bear it any ill will: it rocked, and I loved it. It’s where I learned about music, and gay people, and punk rock, and the counterculture, and how seventies hippies hated punks. But, I assure you, not about pot. I learned about that on my own.

WFHB inherited the role of WQAX in the early nineties, with a bit more structure and a broadcast license, and somehow found a home in Bloomington’s turn-of the-century city hall. When I was a teenager, it was where my parents came to pick me up after I was arrested for, um, well, since I hadn’t yet had a drink, I won’t call it underage drinking. Call it “underage pouring out the MD 20/20 onto the floor of the car and sitting in the stench until the cops actually walk up to the car”. Yes, it was a police station.

Later, I attened what may have been the world’s only puppet wedding in the building.

“Where the hell are you going wth this, Whybark?”, shouts Ken Goldstein, of Jersey City, New Jersey (I can make his home address available to interested parties for a nominal fee, and can accompany that with a detailed description if required. Oh, and I have been reliably informed that he needs a freaking break*).

Well, check it out: I upgraded iTunes (Apple’s integrated audio player application) after a long delay, and noticed a “radio” option.

Hmm, sez I. Click the pic to make it big.

Clicking into a channel listing (I think it was “public”, but things appear to have changed in the last day or so) I saw: WFHB, KEXP (Seattle), KAOS (Olumpia), KCRW (Santa Monica), and KPIG. These stations represent pretty much the best of the wast coast stations and to see my beloved ‘FHB there (no university-affiliated WFIU, which made me happy for my cohort at FHB but sad as a consumer).

Anyway, I immediately accessed the WFHB stream. chudda-chudda-chudda-chudda-aiiiiii i i i – Black Metal, harder than hard, blacker than black, eviler than evil, enveloped me.

Now, I may have been a record-smashing, booze-swilling menace to a community asset back in the day, but these days I entertain myself by chaing bums out of my yard and anxiously awaiting the world premiere of Naqoyaqatsi while bending an ear to the sweet strains of field recordings of ten thousand Nepali monks beating the still-warm bodies of deceased yaks while singing “You Are My Sunshine” in the distinctive Himalayan multi-octave drone.

So I changed the channel, pleased that any damn kinda music can still get on the air at what I can only think of as MY radio station. Next time I’m in town maybe the Old Perfesser will let me get drunk, cuss, and bust up some crappy top 40 for old times’ sake.

*I think, but am not certain, that this really means Ken has not been havin’ any luck with the ladies. Ken! Go buy a bunch of comics at St. Mark’s. The ladies luuuv the middle-aged comics fan, all hot and puffy and like, with money and shit, in from Jersey for the day. Go on now. Go!