"In New York City on a street in the East Forties there is an ordinary tailor shop. Or is it ordinary? We enter through the agents' entrance, and we are now in U.N.C.L.E. headquarters. U.N.C.L.E. is an international organization consisting of agents of all nationalities. It's involved in maintaining political and legal order anywhere in the world."

Say Uncle. That’s U.N.C.L.E., otherwise known as the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement. Starting in 1964, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. was one of a flurry of shows to take advantage of the new James Bond craze. It featured many of the same elements as the super-spy films. You had sophisticated spies in tuxedos. There were plenty of gadgets. And there were constant threats of world domination, mostly from the evil counter organization, THRUSH. The two top spies for the good guys were Napoleon Solo (Vaughn) and Illya Kuryakin (McCallum). The Bond references were never subtle and always intentional. Ian Fleming himself consulted on the show and named Napoleon Solo after a Bond character. Together Solo and Kuryakin would travel around the globe, saving the world from almost certain doom. The series ran for four years. In 1983 there was talk of bringing the show back. Apparently the two stars were still up to the task, and both could have used the work. Thus was born the television film and potential pilot: The Return Of The Man From U.N.C.L.E.: The Fifteen Year Affair. The pilot didn't take off, and the project appeared dead until it was revived once again as a feature film reboot of the franchise ala Mission: Impossible. There was also a short-lived spinoff called The Girl From U.N.C.L.E. that starred Stephanie Powers as the first female field agent for the organization.

Loosely based on Melissa de la Cruz’s book, Witches of East End was renewed for a second season in July 2014, opening with over 1 million viewers scrambling to the TV set to see what would happen now that the portal of Asgard was opened and Joanna was struggling to overcome Argentium poisoning. Featuring Julia Ormond as the matriarch Joanna Beauchamp, she is parked in the middle of lofty tales of the supernatural ,which are commonplace to this unusual family. If you’ve been following the trials and tribulations of the Beauchamp brood, you already know these aren’t the wart-nosed witches of your childhood storybooks. When you watch this, understand you are not watching for superiorly crafted writing; it is fluff, pure and simple – a soap opera with supernaturally gifted women and men. It features  modern-day witches who’ve lived multiple lives that always cross, of course just happen to be sexy as h*ll AND have very cool names based on Norse mythology.  An example of this is Freya, played by actress Jenna Dewan Tatum (yes, married to Channing “XXL”), who even pregnant while filming looked like Photoshopped perfection in this production. Much like what Vampire Diaries was for vampires, we now have the ideal setup for a WB Lifetime program - a supernatural show about lots of picture-perfect beautiful people doing magic.

Episode one “A Moveable Beast” bursts open with Freya’s long lost twin brother arriving in the nick of time to save his mother, Joanna. Poor Dash is still fretting over his brother. When he used magic against his brother over Killian’s love for his fiancée ex-fiancée, Freya, sent him soaring skyward, crash landing in a boat and adrift in the sea – did he kill him, or didn’t he? Apparently not, as Killian is shacked up with a brand-spanking-new bewitchingly lovely wife, Ava. No, of course, she’s not dosing him with mind-control drugs to make him forget his soulmate and one true love, Freya, hoping to get him to knock her up so she can get what’s coming to her per her agreement with a warlock many decades before.

The DVD release of In The Dream Machine makes a number of promises. It promises to show rare footage of William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Leonardo DiCaprio. It does, but only in the broadest interpretation of that concept. It has a blurb from famed avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger which says, “More interesting than most documentaries in that it is presented in the way Burroughs writes”. I flat out disagree with that. It does show Burroughs extensively, but mostly in incoherent or unflattering segments. The film is incompetently edited and put together with a slapdash of offbeat and unintelligible segments. This sort of thing was fairly common back in the hazy, lazy days of the 1960's, but this has been compiled from 1996 through 2014.

Woodard makes numerous appearances in the DVD by himself and with Burroughs. At one point he makes a brief attempt to show how to make the dream machine. If you want to know how to build the dream machine, I suggest googling how to build a dream machine, and you should find detailed instructions under ultraculture.org. You'll need a 32” x 32” piece of aluminum or heavy cardboard. You cut out the prescribed patterns with an X-acto knife. You will need to glue it together so it will fit over a 78 RPM turntable with a light bulb suspended inside. Turn it on, close your eyes, and dream away. It is supposed to induce a hypnagogic (altered state of consciousness) state. There is an interminable DVD extra at the Freud Museum of Dreams in Saint Petersburg, Russia with Dr. David Woodard.