Rudy Panucci On Pop Culture

Month: December 2020 (Page 2 of 4)

Monday Morning Art: Noir Tree

This week’s art is my annual painting of the Panucci-Larch Christmas Tree. This year it’s a physical painting using acrylics with some other mixed media, on a small black canvas. I  painted it using a photo as my guide, but took it way, way dark. It sort of symbolizes this year, while remaining somewhat festive.

If you want to see it bigger, just click on the image.

Meanwhile, Monday at 9 AM on The AIR, the XMAS MESS once again takes over for the rest of this holiday week. We’ll have news on a brand-new special tossed into the mix tomorrow.

You can listen to The AIR at the website, or on the embedded radio player at the top of the right-hand column of this blog.

Sunday Evening Video: Unboxing Day

Above you see the first-ever PopCult Unboxing Video. We decided to jump on the bandwagon after everybody else already rode the wheels off it.

Mel Larch, AKA “Mrs. PopCulteer,” enthusiastically digs into the first SpongeBob Squarepants subscription “Bikini Bottom Box, showing off and raving over all its contents. This is actually all Mel.  She got her first Bikini Bottom Box and was so happy that she whipped out her phone and shot a video as she opened it. Your PopCulteer simply provided editing and dropped in the YouTube-supplied background music.

You’re going to see more unboxing videos from PopCult in the future. Probably as soon as Wednesday. Let us knw what you think.

The RFC Flashback: Christmas Part Two

PopCult wraps up out Flashback to Christmas Editions of Radio Free Charleston with three more holiday gems from the RFC video show. Enjoy and I hope this gets everyone in the mood for celebrating…alone…at your house…without going over the river and through the woods to kill grandmother.

Check out The AIR (at the website, or on the embeded player elsewhere on this page) for more holiday cheer, as we plunge headlong into Christmas for the next week.  PopCult’s going to be all Christmas-y, too. So if you’re a Grinch…well, you probably had a pretty good year so far, so just deal with it.

PopCult Is Leaving The Gazette-Mail (sort of)

The PopCulteer
December 18, 2020

After over fifteen years as The Charleston Gazette (-Mail) pop culture blogger, I will be taking this blog independent. Actually, I sort of already have. Hopefully, it’s not a big deal for my readers. Chances are you’re reading the new version now.

If you have PopCult bookmarked at The Gazette-Mail, there is no need to panic. I will continue to post the same content there that I do in the new blog. I just don’t know how much longer they will keep that PopCult blog up and running.

There is no acrimony or bitterness, it’s just that PopCult has never really been a priority at the newspaper, and I can’t really expect them to keep hosting what is really a personal blog that they could never figure out how to monetize. That they did so for fifteen years was pretty damned generous of them.

However, lately PopCult has been having a lot of technical issues. Direct links to posts don’t seem to work on Chrome-based browsers, and it’s not really worth the effort of the Gazette-Mail IT crew to spend time working on the problem.

I think the reason I’ve lasted so long is that I try not to be a problem. I don’t post profanity or nudity. The one time an insane Canadian threatened to sue, I removed the post, rather than potentially cost the Gazette any money fighting a nuisance lawsuit. At the moment, to fix the issues with PopCult, the folks at the Gazette-Mail and HD Media would have to spend a lot of time and energy on the problem that they can’t really justify.

Then there’s the matter of the redesign of The Charleston Gazette-Mail website a few weeks ago, where you can no longer link directly to any of the blogs. I’m lucky they didn’t just pull the plug then. Many times over the years I have thought that I would have to take PopCult independent.  That redesign was a wake-up call. This time my sense of urgency overtook my laziness, and I took action.

When that redesign happened, I started porting PopCult over to a new location. My plan was to write this post and make the big announcement two weeks from today, just to have a big New Year’s Day post, but over the last month the issues with my permalinks not working became too great, so I started sharing links to the beta version of PopCult on social media this week, instead of the Gazette-Mail version.

I intend to keep double-posting at the Gazette-Mail as long as they’ll have me. The Google rankings for PopCult at that site are pretty remarkable, and there are several dozen Wikipedia entries that link to PopCult.  So unless they need to pull the plug to free up server space, I’d sort of like to keep that one going for a while.

I estimate that it will take me a year to go back and edit and clean up every post in the fifteen years of the archive. I’ll need to fix all the broken links and replace missing graphics and video where possible. I also find typos every single time I revisit my older posts, so I’ll fix those, too. It would be handy to have the original PopCult in place, just for reference.

“Porting,” by the way, is the process by which you move all the content from a blog over to a new virtual location. PopCult has actually been ported within the Charleston Gazette and later Charleston Gazette-Mail servers several times. It’s a long, tedious job, and often bits of the original blog get left behind.

The first time PopCult was ported was when we switched from using Blogger to using WordPress. That was about three years in, and we lost all our graphics from those first three years. There were a few other times since then, most recently a few months after the Gazette merged with The Daily Mail, and and they had to change the URL.

That was a bit more than four years ago. A few months after that happened they gave me admin privileges, which allowed me to see my reader counts for the first time. I agreed not to reveal my readership, but I will say that it’s been gratifying to know that my blog has had millions of views, just in the past four years. Apparently the counter reset every time the blog was ported, so I have no idea if my numbers have gone up or down since the beginning. I do know that I promote PopCult way more aggressively on social media now than I used to.

I’m pretty sure, now that I’m leaving the comfort zone of the Gazette-Mail, my readership numbers will plummet. It’s just the nature of SEO and Google rankings and the ways of internet voodoo. Luckily, it won’t affect my pay. The Gazette stopped paying their bloggers back in 2008, and I was having so much fun that I decided to keep doing it for free.

I wrote about this a few years ago, during another time that I thought I might have to move PopCult, when the paper was being sold out of bankruptcy and it looked like I may have been sacrificed on the altar of Odgen Newspapers.  Actually,the post at that link is a pretty good read that gives you an idea of my relationship with The Gazette-Mail over the years.

You will notice a few changes. The template (the layout of the blog) that they use at The Gazette-Mail is no longer available, so I had to pick one that was reasonably close to it.

The new template has some minor differences, some of which I love, and some of which are annoying.

I love that I can now embed the radio player for The AIR at the top of the right-hand column. I love that the RSS feed seems to work. I’m beginning to really like that the chosen feature image appears above the headline of each post. I love being able to have captions underneath my photos again. The last template change at the Gazette-Mail didn’t work with photo captions and made older posts look wonky.

I don’t like that the embedded radio player in all my archived posts throws off the layout of those posts. Those will all be edited out, eventually. I also wish I could make the header image a bit smaller. I may have lost the ability to embed Kickstarter widgets, but I can still do links, so it isn’t a big deal.

In general, I really like the new layout. I hope you do too.

I plan to do my best to restore the missing graphics and videos in the archives. A few posts that fell by the wayside over the years may come back, and I’m having an internal debate about preserving posts that plug events that happened long ago. I’m leaning toward preserving the historical record.

I also plan to become an Amazon affiliate. That means that if I review something and link to Amazon and you buy it, I get a tiny percentage. The only reason I didn’t do this earlier was that I didn’t want to have to figure out the revenue split with the newspaper. I may explore other affiliate programs. You’ll know about it when it happens. I won’t try to sneak anything like that under your noses without telling you.

I may also put in a “tip jar” link, to help cover the costs of blog hosting. I won’t mention it much, if I do, because I just hate to do stuff like that.

In the coming year, I plan to do more reviews, and I also will feel more comfortable writing about the challenges of print media in our digital times. I never wanted to come across as taking pot-shots at the Gazette-Mail while they were hosting the blog. Of course, you will still get the latest news on our programming on The AIR, plus our regular features like Monday Morning Art, The RFC Flashback, Sunday Evening Videos and The PopCulteer. PopCult will still have fresh content every day.

I want to thank The Charleston Gazette-Mail for letting me get away with writing this blog on their servers for so long. I still subscribe to the Gazette-Mail online and I encourage you to do the same. We need to support local journalism, even if some of their endorsements this year made me throw up in my mouth a little bit. I also want to thank Douglas Imbrogno for hiring me in the first place, and to  my colleagues over the years who supported me in print for the first ten years of PopCult.  I wrote about my fifteenth anniversary just a few months ago, and leaving the Gazette-Mail was sort of a looming concern then.  This move shouldn’t really be a surprise to anyone.

The Gazette-Mail web redesign happened when I was about three days into The 2020 PopCult Gift Guide, and it took me about sixteen hours over two days to get the new site set up while cranking out gift guide posts at the same time. It’ll take me longer to get the archives fully restored, but for now, I think we’ve got things up and running pretty well. I’m pretty excited to see what the future holds.

Welcome to the new PopCult. Tell all your friends.

Hustling Around The Christmas Tree

Meanwhile, Friday at 2 PM on The AIR (listen at the website, or just click on the embedded player in the right column), one week out from Christmas, Mel Larch has graced us with a brand-new MIRRORBALL Christmas Special.

You can boogie down and celebrate the birth of Baby Jesus with The Village People, KC and the Sunshine Band, Hot Chocolate Band, The Salsoul Orchestra and more.

It’s one full hour of disco-fied holiday music. That will be followed at 3 PM by a Christmas Edition of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat. Then Saturday The AIR goes full-tilt into the holidays with special programming in large blocks all week long.

The 2020 PopCult Christmas Tree

It’s become an annual tradition. Sometime, a week or so before Christmas, your PopCulteer posts a whole bunch of photos of his Christmas Tree, rather than actually write anything substantial.

Of course, nobody seems to mind because Mrs. PopCulteer, Mel Larch, does such a wonderful job decorating the tree. With 2020 being the year from hell, we didn’t get to travel much, and therefore don’t have much in the way of new ornaments with cool stories behind them this year. I think our only new ornamets were the glass-blown junkfood ornaments I found cheap at Kroger, and the Pusheen in a stocking that I got for Mel, not realizing that I gave her an identical one last year.

Normally Mel agonizes over how to group our ornaments together, so that all the Batman ornaments are in one place, and all the Walking Dead and SpongeBob ornaments are in their place. This year I asked her not to do this. I thought it was better to have the cool stuff spread all over the tree, plus it greatly reduced Mel’s self-induced stress level.

I’d say the end result is pretty spectacular. It’s fun to stare at the tree (I’ve been known to do that) and it’s like a a giant puzzle, finding all the ornaments from Chicago, New York, The Yellow Submarine, GI Joe, Pusheen, Senoia Georgia, Coca Cola, and all the fun things we’ve accumulated over the years. You see the whole tree up above this text. Below, with sparse commentary, you’ll see close ups.

We had to start with the topper. In the background you’ll see art by Jeff Pierson, a Svengoolie puzzle and some Wrigley Field stuff.

 

With Ringo, Squidward, Batman & Robin & Batgirl, Hot Wheels and more, this part of the tree is dripping with pop culture goodness!

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Even More Holiday Spirit Invades The AIR

Wednesday looks great on The AIR.  We are running even more full speed ahead toward Christmas, with our thousands of loyal listeners worldwide who are tuning in and you can hear why at the website, or on the nifty  radio machine doohickey in the right-hand column of this blog.

At 8 AM, 11 AM and 6 PM, you can hear the Christmas Edition of The Swing Shift. 9 AM sees a replay of the Radio Free Charleston Christmas Special, which combines local holiday music recorded for the RFC video show with music that I featured on RFC on broadcast radio waaaay back in 1989.

After our regularly-scheduled Noon replay of last week’s Aussie-centric episode of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat, Beatles Blast presents an hour of the Beatles Christmas Fan Club records and more holiday goodness at 2 PM. These were officially released just last week, and we bring them to you with no interruptions from your humble host. We also toss in some holiday tunes from John, Paul and Ringo.

At 3PM you can hear a holiday edition of Curtain Call as Mel Larch brings you Christmas-themed songs from shows like Irving Berlin’s White Christmas, Elf: The Musical, A Christmas Carol: The Musical and more, plus some Christmas songs performed by cast members from shows like The Producers, The Bardy Bunch and Something Rotten.

We are edging gingerly into Christmas on The AIR. The plan is debut a new Christmas Disco episode of MIRRORBALL on Friday, and a new Radio Free Charleston Shut-in Christmas Show next Tuesday. By then, we’ll have tons of other holiday goodies conveniently scheduled far ahead of time for your amusement and our relaxation.

Keep checking PopCult and stay tuned to The AIR so we can have a wonderful Christmas to cap off an atrocious year.

The Holiday Spirit Creeps Onto The AIR

Ten days out from The Big Day, The AIR will take baby steps to achieving Christmas Spirit Tuesday with two classic AIR Holiday Specials that we dug out of the vaults. You can tune in at the Website or on the neato-keen little embedded player over on at the top right column of this blog.

It’s Radio Free Charleston and The Swing Shift bringing you all the holiday joy with special episodes recorded in 2016. Next week we’re going to bring you a new RFC Holiday Special, where yours truly will be joined by Mrs. PopCulteer Mel Larch. But this week we bring you some classics.

Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM we have a two-hour Radio Free Charleston Xmas Special, loaded with tons of local artists singing the songs and having the fun of the holidays.

The second hour of this show is largely comprised of the 1989 Radio Free Charleston Christmas show, complete with holiday wishes and live, in-studio, interviews and performances.

RFC XMAS

Melanie Larch/Diablo Blues Band “Please Come Home For Christmas”
Marium Bria Naughty Christmas”
Frenchy and The Punk “All I Want For Christmas Is A Time Machine”
The Laser Beams “Up On The Rooftop”
The Bob Thompson Unit “Festival”
Charleston Gay Men’s Chorale “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas”
The Renfields “Merry Christmas To All”
Clownhole “Deck The Halls”
Prank Monkey “The Chipmunk Song”
Joseph Hale “Let’s Put The X in Xmas”
2012 Cast of “Mary” “Lord of Mercy”
Rowan Maher “Child, My Child”
Pepper Fandango and Lee Harrah “Baby It’s Cold Outside”
Todd Burge with Joseph Hale “Merry Methmas”

hour two
“Jam theme”-a special rendition of the Radio Free Charleston theme song, recorded at The Charleston Playhouse and featuring most of the Charleston Playhouse Quartet, with the addition of Stephen Beckner, who provides a wintery spoken interlude.
A 1989 commercial for Budget Tapes & Records where your PopCulteer provides all three voices, including the ghost of Bing Crosby.
Go Van Gogh “Santa Claus Is Back In Town”
Stephen Beckner and John and Tim Rock from Go van Gogh, live interview in the studio.
Go Van Gogh attempts at Christmas carols
Three Bodies (Kris Cormany, Brian Young, Brian Lucas) live interview in the studio
Three Bodies “Three Bodies”
“Why Do We Have To Work Skit”
Clownhole (Sham Voodoo, Flair) Christmas message with the accapella punk “Deck The Halls”
Charleston Playhouse Jam Session “Jingle Bells”
Plugs for “The Last Ride,” the final concert by Brian Diller and the Ride, which happened one week after this show first aired.
Mad Scientist Club “I Saw Santa Claus”
Gary Price Christmas wishes from The Swivels
Charleston Playhouse Jam Session interview with John McIntyre leading into “Heaven and Mud/Train Wreck The Halls/Will The Circle Be Unbroken”
Gary Price from The Swivels, pre-taped interview in the production studio
Clownhole in the studio, rambling semi-interview
Go Van Gogh in the studio, going off the rails a bit.
Go Van Gogh “Big Bottom (accapella)”–this was considered appropriate for the holiday for some reason
Melanie Larch   “Ave Maria”
Melanie Larch and Mark Scarpelli  “Christmas Time Is Here”

Since we’re cramming two hours of radio into a three-hour slot, the third hour will be filled with a mystery holiday treat!

At 3 PM  check out The Swing Shift XMAS, again, hosted by your PopCulteer, and with the following tracks…

The Swing Shift XMAS

Royal Crown Revue   “Cool Yule”
Big Bad Voodoo Daddy  “Christmas in Tinsletown”
Brian Setzer Orchestra  “Santa Claus Is Back In Town”
Lavay Smith and her Red Hot Skillet Lickers  “Winter Wonderland”
Dean Martin  “Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow”
Ed Ivory  “Oogie Boogie’s Song”
Wynton Marselis  “Santa Claus is Coming to Town”
Sammy Davis Jr. “Christmas Time All Over The World”
Vic Damone  “Deck The Halls”
Royal Crown Revue with Vicki Tafoya  “Boogie Woogie Santa Claus”
Frank Sinatra  “Santa Claus is Coming to Town”
Buster Poindexter  “‘Zat You, Santa Claus?”
Brian Setzer  “Santa Drives A Hot Rod”
Bing Crosby  “White Christmas”
Vince Guaraldi  “Linus and Lucy”
Wynton Marselis  “Jingle Bells”
Royal Crown Revue  “Hey Santa”
Frank Sinatra  “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas”

This is part of our special holiday programming on The AIR, which we will be replaying the heck out of for the next couple of weeks, so learn to like it, folks. Seriously, next week we’re going to be lousy with this stuff, 24/7.

Monday Morning Art: Escheresque

 

This week’s art is a digital geometric abstract, inspired in no small part by the subject of yesterday’s Sunday Evening Video, the artist M.C. Escher. Basically, I created a monochrome design, fed it through a feedback filter, multiplied it twenty-five times, and then sphereized it. And that’s it up there.

If you want to see it bigger, just click on the image.

Meanwhile, Monday at 9 AM on The AIR, the Monday Marathon once again brings you six hours of Mel Larch’s Disco showcase,  MIRRORBALL, which follows the regularly-scheduled repeat of last weeks Big Electric Cat at 7 AM.

At 3 PM on Prognosis, Herman Linte launches The AIR’s 2020 Christmas campaign with an edition of Prognosis devoted to prog-rock holiday jams. Check out the playlist…

Greg Lake  “I Believe In Father Christmas”
Jethro Tull  “A Christmas Song”
Jon Anderson “How It Hits You”
Chris Squire and Alan White  “Run With The Fox”
Rick Wakeman  “O Little Town Of Bethlehem”
The December People  “Carol of the Bells”
Queen  “Thank God It’s Christmas”
The December People  “I Heard The Bells On Christmas Day”
Keith Emerson  “I Saw Three Ships”
The December People  “Little Drummer Boy”
The December People  “Silent Night”
The California Guitar Trio  “Oh Christmas Tree”
Jethro Tull  “Another Christmas Song”
Kate Bush  “December Will Be Magic Again”
Genesis  “A Winter’s Tale”
Queen  “A Winter’s Tale”
Renaissance  “The Winter Tree”
Steve Howe  “Beyond Winter”
The December People  “The First Noel”
ELP  “Nutrocker”Kansas  “The Light”
The December People “Up On The Rooftop”
Jon Anderson  “Day of Days”
The December People  “Deck The Halls”
The December People  “Angels We Have Heard On High”
ELP  “Humbug”
Jethro Tull  “Fire at Midnight”
Rabbit  “Auld Lang Syne”

That’s followed by a classic Prognosis and an evening of NOISE BRIGADE and Radio Free Charleston. You can hear replays of Prognosis Tuesdays at 7 AM, Wednesdays at 8 PM, Thursday at Noon, and Saturday at 9 AM.  Christmas shows will start popping up all over The AIR this week, before taking over completely next week. 

You can listen to The AIR at the website, or on the embedded radio player at the top of the right-hand column of this blog.

Sunday Evening Videos: Escher, Animated

This week we are going to bring you a few short videos that attempt to animate the art of the visionary M.C. Escher. Maurits Cornelis Escher passed away almost fifty years ago, but his work, which combined art and mathematics with surreal and lovely results, lives on, and is a major influence on much of the graphic design we see today. His work has become more relevant now that we have computer animation programs that can more easily bring motion to his static drawings.

These short videos are a mix of CGI and traditional animation, and are just incredible to look at.

The RFC Flashback: Christmas Part One

2020 has been such a bizarre year. Sometimes it feels like this year has lasted a decade, while other times it feels like it’s lasted a week. It’s difficult to comprehend that we are less than two weeks away from Christmas, but this week and next we will bring you some of the best Radio Free Charleston Christmas specials, to help you try to get in the mood. Above you see our first, from 2006. Below, you’ll find a few from later years. We’ll have more next week.

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