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.