Okay, time to get things going around here.

First off, a few weeks ago I saw The Baxter, the new movie by Michael Showalter, at the free 'Drive-in Movies' event at Rockefeller Center. The setup was pretty neat, with seats in the Promenade area looking at a screen across the ice rink. The contrast on the picture wasn't great, but what can you expect. The sound was better than average for outdoors, with small speakers placed throughout the seating area.

Before the movie started, Showalter, David Wain, and Michael Ian Black came up on a stage to do a little performance. They also called up fellow The State alumni Joe Lo Truglio and Ken Marino, and Wet Hot American Summer guy A.D. Miles. The performance was basically banter about the movie and Stella, followed by a Q&A that just left me embarrassed for most of the questioners. Someone asked what we all really wanted to know, when The State DVD is coming out, and the answer: they just don't know.

As for the movie, I'd hate to be overly critical of the work of someone who really deserves all their success and more, but to me it was lacking in one thing that makes much of The State, Wet Hot, and Stella funny: mocking our banal, affected interactions by introducing the absurd into them. Before seeing it I'd read in a Gothamist interview about how it was very different from all the other stuff, an old-fashioned kind of movie with no profanity or gross-out humor. That seemed fine, and the premise, about the guy who is always the wrong guy for a girl and gets dumped for the more exciting guy who can sweep her off her feet, seemed very promising. But I think they needed to go further with the old-fashioned theme to get any comedic value out of it, for example by using Mr. Burns-esque antiquated phrases for modern things. And the premise was not quite what I thought it was: instead of being the nice guy who gets dumped for a dashing jerk, Showalter's character is just a truly boring guy who doesn't seem desirable, or very sympathetic, at all.

Despite its being an indie production, the movie seemed to suffer from some of the same faults as so many Hollywood romantic comedies. All the emotions and characters were pretty shallow. Plot points were whisked along with hardly any explanation. (Showalter's main girl decides to date him and then to marry him in the space of a scene in which they meet, and then a brief montage. She freaks out and leaves him because he doesn't take seriously a form about what kind of music and food they want at their wedding. When he next sees her at a hotel she has checked into, that conflict seems to have been instantly resolved.) There were bizarre and unnecessary holes in the script, as when an employee shows up for a stint of temp work in Showalter's office, and then after a three-minute conversation announces that she has to go because she's leaving town. I guess that's the nature of temp work.

The only thing I could think of to explain such deficiencies in a movie by someone who obviously isn't in a position to be tossing out a clearly crappy project just for money, is that perhaps the whole thing is a parody of all the bad things about generic romantic comedies. When I read the descriptions in the above paragraph it starts to sound that way. But the movie really didn't seem to be playing it that way--if it was the intention, it was done way too generally to produce any specific moments at which you could laugh at that. More likely it seems like a slightly desperate bid for wider success by dumbing down for the masses. I didn't really want to ask that question when walking by him afterward ("So...this was all a big joke right? You can't be serious...right?"). Then again while walking to the subway I did overhear someone say "Yeah, I liked that way more than Wet Hot American Summer," so maybe the strategy will work!

One final comment, there was a musical motif in the movie that I could swear was very very similar to one in another recent movie. It was a melancholy, repetitive little melody, with an organ-like instrument playing a three-note sequence at three different starting positions, and a more bell-like instrument doing a 4-note descending line at the end of each phrase. I think the movie I'm remembering it from was either Adaptation or Eternal Sunshine, but I'll have to rewatch them to see. If anyone else sees this movie and has a similar thought please let me know.

On a better note, I'm pleasantly surprised by the one episode I've seen so far of the Stella TV show. The transition from the incredibly vulgar shorts on the DVD I have to the relative cleanliness of Comedy Central, as well as the more cohesive plots within a half-hour episode, was made more gracefully than I would have thought possible, and it was very funny.

Now the Times says Stella is so bad "I watched that thing as if my face was palsied." Well, the Times didn't much care for Aqua Teens either. Considering the well-established fact that as soon as the Times writes about any trend, it's over, I think if they pan something (movies not included) there's a case to be made that it's not over. Granted, the Stella style of humor does take some getting used to, and I was already prepared for it having watched the DVD shorts. I hope the viewing public will still give it a chance.

I read about the Dreamachine in the Times several months ago, and it sounded quite appealing. You make a cylinder with some patterns cut out of it, put it on top of a rotating base, hang a light in the middle, and sit in front of it with your eyes closed, and you have dreams while you're awake! Some guy is selling them for $400--screw that. I wanted to make one myself, but there were two obstacles: I've never quite gotten comfortable with making stuff involving motors, and I knew it wouldn't look nearly as cool without the right patterns as pictured in the article, but figuring them out from one photo seemed a dicey proposition.

A few months later, after spotting one belonging to the Brian Jonestown Massacre in DiG! I was inspired to look into it again, and both of those obstacles were quickly cleared. As for the first, the base can, even should, be a record player that rotates at 78rpm. And as for the second, several sites had versions of the exact pattern layout that looked good and probably authentic to me. Here are a few of those: noah.org, 10111.org, brainwashed.com. Warning: extremely pretentious prose ahead: ...it is a method of balancing and effecting a communication with the three bases of life itself, each then becoming more strongly connected. This allows a much more pure form of energy to pass through them, feeding and being fed by themselves.

The Dreamachine was invented by Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville, friends of William S. Burroughs, blah blah. Yes, they were on psychotropic drugs. But as far as I can tell the Dreamachine was sincerely meant to be used without them. It immediately made sense to me that it would work because of experiences I've had watching a low sun through trees while in a car on a highway, or while standing in front of a strobe light in a thick smoke machine-generated fog at a Flaming Lips show. The device works by the patterns cut out of the cylinder causing the light to flash against your eyelids at between 7 and 13 Hz (6 holes in each row * 1.2 rotations per second = 9.6Hz), the same frequency as so-called Alpha brain waves. Supposedly having to process the light at that frequency will cause those waves to appear, in turn causing certain effects associated with the appearance of those waves. I've been telling people without looking into it too thoroughly that Alpha waves are "the ones that happen when you're dreaming." The Skeptic's Dictionary says they are usually associated with lack of visual processing and lack of focus, but can also appear when one is not relaxed. Other sites say that Alpha waves do also appear during REM sleep.

Anyway, for my Dreamachine I glued together two pieces of oak tag--the plans specified a height of 36", but for me 28" with the top row of holes left off seemed more than adequate. I drew a 2" grid onto the oak tag and then drew on the patterns for the holes. The web sites wanted me to print out templates of the shapes, but that seemed unnecessary when they had been so nicely designed to consist entirely of straight lines and and circular arcs:

My only advice for the cutting is to start with a new blade for your X-acto knife. I switched part of the way through and it made the difference between making the cut three times and getting a slightly jagged edge, and making it once with a perfect edge.

Record players seem so ubiquitous at yard sales and the like that I was slightly embarrassed to have to seek one out. But it just wasn't happening the easy way, and I realized it was a rather narrowing requirement to want one that just spins and doesn't play records (and therefore is very cheap), so I selected one from eBay that had no discernable brand name and was estimated to be from the 1930s or 40s, for $5 + $13 shipping. When I got it I had to solder on a new AC plug for it, but after doing so I was quite relieved when it spun nicely. It even has the mechanism for stacking up multiple records on the spindle and playing them in succession, but the chances of that working seemed remote, and it was not relevant anyway.

A few days after a brief initial trial, my roommate tripped over the Dreamachine and left it slightly torn and rather warped. I repaired it several days later with some electrical tape and stabilizing barbecue skewers, and have used it happily a few times since.

My experience so far is that the Dreamachine quickly produces surprisingly complex visual patterns that also change very quickly. My brain creatively fills in some details, causing me to imagine (but not really to believe) that these patterns are some object or event I am watching, or a landscape I am moving through. I haven't experienced the sensation of 360 degree view that some talk about. Usually I would not say that what I am experiencing is much like a dream. I'm watching these cool patterns go by, but I still know where I am and what's really happening. A few times though, that has changed. During one session, for a while I felt like my whole body was rotating on a horizontal axis, as if I were sitting on a giant record player (though I didn't think that was happening--it was like those virtual rides where they tip your seat around). Ian Sommerville seems to have described something similar as an early, unpleasant stage of his first Dreamachine session, but I didn't mind it. One other time I was made slightly anxious by a momentary feeling that I was hearing burbling sounds, and that I might be underwater in a large aquarium. Other times I've had dreamlike sensations that were more abstract, less memorable thoughts, like dreams I would have during a microsleep.

In general the Dreamachine is, for me, a very relaxing time. Often if I try to lie perfectly still in the dark and quiet, I am inevitably overcome within a few minutes by an itch or simply an urge to move a limb, and after that I will start fidgeting without even realizing it. The machine seems to provide enough of a stimulus that I'm distracted from those urges and have no trouble lying still at all. I seem to feel pretty serene after a session, though perhaps that will diminish with time. And the thing just looks so damn cool! Highly recommended for all non-epileptics.