PopCult

Tuesday is always a great day to tune into The AIR  and today we prove it with a new episode of Radio Free Charleston , but I gotta be honest with you, while Tuesday is a great day to tune in to The AIR, it seems that Monday is a lousy day to try to record a radio show. To listen to The AIR, you simply have to point your cursor over and tune in at the website, or you could just stay here, and  listen to the cool embedded player found elsewhere on this page.  

You can hear Radio Free Charleston Tuesdays at 10 AM and 10 PM, with boatloads of replays throughout the week.

 This week we open with a full hour of brand-new local, independent and cult-following music, and that is followed by a rare episode of Radio Free Charleston International that hasn’t been heard since the late spring of 2018. I’d planned to do three full hours of great local, independent and cult music, but as I began, the power started flickering out.  It didn’t leave me in the dark with no air conditioning for long periods. However, it did cause me to lose work and have to spend almost half an hour rebooting everything every time it happened.

I am reminded of the myth of Sisyphus.  In particular, I was reminded of the part where he gets one-fourth of the way up the giant mountain and says, “Y’know…this rock looks pretty good right here!” and then he goes off to watch cartoons and eat pizza.

Rather than schedule another whole rerun, I decided to just do one hour of new RFC, and then launch into a classic episode of Radio Free Charleston International that I hadn’t recycled into RFC Volume Five yet, because…there was no playlist.

Yeah, I had to Shazam about half the songs in the show.

But back to that first hour…we open with brand-new music from Sasha  Colette & The Magnolias, who will be hosting a CD release party June 19 at the Foundry Theater, in Huntington. You can find more details on the show HERE, and I’ll run a graphic in STUFF TO DO next week. Our opening song is the title track from Back In Business.

The rest of our first hour includes new tunes from Jim Lange, Jeff Ellis, Death Cab For Cutie, Cricketman, The Holler Hounds and more.

Option 22  are the folks who created CultureFest and the Riff Raff Artist’s Collective in Princeton, West Virginia, making that area a hotbed of creativity in the state. I first recorded them for the video incarnation of RFC back during FestivALL in 2009, and it’s wonderful to have new music from these elcectic artists. The song you hear this week is the third of a trilogy of new releases from the band.  Next week, in our second hour, we will play all three tracks, so you can get the full effect of this awesome musical statement.

Our second and third hours bring you an episode of RFC International that hasn’t been available in any form since early 2018.  This show is remarkable because, for one thing, I didn’t have a playlist, and had to reconstruct it, and also, the playlist makes no sense at all, jumping from genre to genre with no regard for human safety.

Yet, somehow it works.

Check out this playlist, with links to the artist’s page, in the first hour…

RFC V5 272

hour one
Sasha Colette and The Magnoilias “Back In Business”
Tunesmiths “Ballet Dancer”
Decomposing In Paris “Fireworks”
Jeff Ellis “Code Blue”
Modest Mouse “Life’s A Dream”
Jim Lange “AFI Clip 6 Rockin’ Ouit”
Option 22 “What Do We Do”
Amazing Heeby Jeebies “White Light, White Heat”
Cricketman “Normal Guy”
GRPPLNG “Held Out”
Vinto Van Go “Prayer for Summer”
The Jasons “It’s Still Crystal Lake To Me”
The Holler Hounds “The Judgment/I am The Man”
Death Cab For Cutie “Envy The Birds”
The Claypool Lennon Delirium “Clipton Scuttle”

hour two
Madness “Soul Denying”
Orange Constant “Red Rider”
White Manna “Freak”
Plastic Shrines “King Size Death Bed”
Black Swan Lake “The Pain You Suffer Is Gone”
Andy Grammer “Grown Ass Man Child”
Welcome Inside The Brain “Welcome Inside The Brain”
Ian Dury & The Blockheads “If I Was With A Woman”
Difford & Tilbrook “You Can’t Hurt The Girl”
Quatro, Scott & Powell “Fever”
The Sorrows “Take A Heart”

hour three
The Stranglers “Bless You”
Carl Douglas “Kung Fu Fighting”
Alice Glass “Blood Oath”
DEVO “Jerkin’ Back And Forth”
B. Bumble & The Stingers “Nut Rocker”
Kate Bush “The Dreaming”
Julian Cope “Out of My Mind on Dope & Speed”
Frank Zappa “Bamboozled By Love”
Snakefinger “The Picture Makers Vs. The Children of the Sea”
Blue Oyster Cult “Sole Survivor”
Big Big Train “Grimspound”

You can hear this episode of Radio Free Charleston Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM on The AIR, with replays Wednesday at 9 AM,  Thursday at 2 PM, Friday at 9 AM, Saturday at Noon and Midnight, Sunday at 8 PM and  Monday at 11 AM, exclusively on The AIR. Now you can also hear a different classic episode of RFC every weekday at 5 PM, and we bring you a marathon all night long Saturday night/Sunday morning.

I’m also going to  embed a low-fi, mono version of this show right in this post, right here so you can listen on demand.

After RFC, stick around for encores of last week’s episodes of  MIRRORBALL at 1 PM and Curtain Call at 2 PM.

At 3 PM get ready for two classic episodes of The Swing Shift, featuring the best Swing Music from the last century!

 You can hear The Swing Shift Tuesday at 3 PM, with replays Wednesday at 8 AM, Thursday at 9 AM,  Friday at 10 AM and 8 PM and Saturday afternoon, only on The AIR . You can also hear all-night marathons, seven hours each, starting at Midnight Thursdays and Sundays.

This week we have another pastel color rough of a road scene, this time based on a photo taken with a Kodak Charmera, as Mel and I were leaving to head to Louisville ten days ago to attend WonderFest.

This time it’s based on a lower-res image  and I basically knocked this out while listening to a few long videos about the Bricks & Minifigs case Sunday afternoon.

I guess we’ve found ourselves in an unscheduled series of road images, done in a couple of different mediums. Who knows what might be here next week.

If you want to see this image larger, click HERE.

Meanwhile, over in radioland, Monday beginning at 2 PM on The AIR,  we bring you a classic episode of Psychedelic Shack, and then at 3 PM we do the same with Herman Linte’s weekly showcase of the Progressive Rock of the past half-century, Prognosis.  You can listen to The AIR at the website, or on the embedded radio player elsewhere on this page. Psychedelic Shack can be heard every Monday at 2 PM, with replays Tuesday at 9 AM, Wednesday at 10 PM, Friday at 1 PM,  and Saturday at 9 AM. You can hear Prognosis on The AIR Monday at 3 PM, with replays Tuesday at 7 AM, Wednesday at 8 PM, Thursday at Noon, and Saturday at 10 AM.

Tonight at 8 PM, tune in for a classic edition of The Comedy Vault. That’s followed by two-hour blocks of Curtain Call and Beatles Blast at 9 PM and 11 PM, and then an overnight assortment of our Haversham Recording Institute programs at 1 AM.

Above you see a short music video shot at last weekend’s WonderFest in Louisville.  It’s low-fi because I used two very cheap cameras.

Thursday I ran some preview photos, and to our right you see an encore of one of them. The creator of the Swole Labubu is Kayt Robarts, and you can find her misfit toy creations at her Etsy store.  Tell her PopCult sent you.

I’d not really intended to shoot any video at the show. I told you about the show and brought you more than two dozen photos on Friday. However, I did have two cheap cameras that I wanted to try out.  So I shot about twenty minutes of video, and out of that, I was barely able to scrap up enough semi-usable shots make an under-five-minute-long music video.

The music is “Dancing Midget Spider-man Fantasia” as originally heard about twenty years ago on the second video episode of Radio Free Charleston. It’s a collaboration of Frank Panucci and his little brother, who played all the guitars.

Below, sort of to make up for the poor quality of the video, we have a few more photos from the show…

Mel got this killer shot of a model of Jubilee, from The X Men

Twp Six Million Dollar Man kits (that’s twelve million bucks, folks) and the really cool Lost in Space Chariot kit.

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From September, 2013 we have a loaded edition of Radio Free Charleston called “Shark Shirt.” This show featured music from The Renfields, Decomposing in Paris, The Dread Crew of Oddwood and Snakebox. There was also a new Prelinger film by Frank Panucci. Our host segments were designed to plug the then-upcoming second year of ShockaCon.

Speaking of ShockaCon, that year the musical headliners on Saturday were The Renfields. This episode of RFC just happens to have then-previously-unseen footage of The Renfields from the previous year’s ShockaCon. The band that occupies that special Venn Diagram where The Ramones overlap with The Groovie Ghoulies were represented here with their original song, “Killer Klowns From Outer Space.”

Decomposing In Paris was a band from Ireland that found their way to The Empty Glass via Kentucky. Their music is ethereal, trippy and it has a beat. It was unlike anything we’ve had on the show before. Two Irish natives and one fairy-winged expatriate from Ashland, Kentucky, then living in Belfast, made up this band.

The show then took time out for a dance break, which included famed pin-up model, Bettie Page. This is from Frank Panucci’s clip compilation, “Dance, Dance, Prelinger” It’s made of public domain video, set to Frank’s music. It’s also part of this complete breakfast!

The Dread Crew of Oddwood is a band of pirates from San Diego who sing of their adventures on the high seas using their own style of music that they call “Heavy Mahogany.” The RFC crew recorded The Dread Crew of Oddwood as they plundered The Empty Glass and in this show you’ll hear them performing “Meat, Bread and Wine.”

Playing over the end credits this week was Snakebox, who returned after their debut in the previous episode of Radio Free Charleston.

You can find the original production notes for this episode HERE.

The PopCulteer
June 5, 2026

I have a confession to make.

We hadn’t originally planned to go to WonderFest USA in Louisville last week.

Don’t get me wrong…it’s an incredibly fun show and we’ve had a great time every time we’ve gone in the past, but when we worked out our travel plans for the year, we did not originally include WonderFest.

Again, it is a fantastic show. It combines horror, science fiction and fantasy fandom with the amazing hobby of model kit building and a loving appreciation of the craft of special effects for movies and TV. It’s even where they present the annual Rondo awards.

I should stop here for a second and talk about how Mel and I plan our trips. We are each other’s favorite travel partner, by far. I can’t think of anything more miserable than having to go on a trip without Mel, and I think she pretty much feels the same way about me. This does not mean that our interests overlap entirely. Many of the trips that we take can be classified as “Mel Trips,” or “Rudy Trips.”

A “Rudy Trip” would be when we venture out to a toy show (or a toy store) or go someplace that’s just sort of bizarrely weird (Jungle Jim’s, we’re talking about you). A “Mel Trip” is a trip out of town to see a theatrical performance, or a trip the FiestaWare factory or to the studio where they shot The Walking Dead.  Usually we find a way to combine our trips, so that we both get to see something we really want, but even if that doesn’t happen, we enjoy seeing each other happy so much, that we always have a great time. Over the years, the criteria for our trips have merged and melded together, so much of the time we both get to claim a trip (Last year, for my birthday trip, we went to Cinncinnati to see The American Sign Museum, but we also visited The Lucky Cat Museum, and a Barbie Exhibit at the Cinncinnati Museum Center and got in tons of shopping).

Armed with this information, you would expect that WonderFest would be a “Rudy Trip.”  You’d be wrong, sort of. I love going to WonderFest, but prior to this year, our main reason for going has been that Greg Nicotero, makeup artist extraordinaire and an executive producer of The Walking Dead and Creepshow, has been a guest and appeared on panels.  Mel is a huge fan of TWD and Nicotero, so up to this year, WonderFest has been a “Mel Trip.”  I always had a great time, don’t get me wrong. I’ve met one of my artistic heroes, William Stout, several times, and I get to see friends like Steve Stovall, Rocko Jerome and Anthony Taylor, but our main reason for attending the show has always been for Mel.

Mr. Zilly was well-represented

This year was different.  Greg was not an announced guest, but I really wanted to go. I am really excited about the revival of the Aurora Monster Scenes and Prehistoric Scenes model kit series, currently underway from DennCom and Atlantis Models, and I wanted to go to the show to find out what might be next, and maybe buy some of the compatible sets being made by smaller companies.

You’ll be reading about those in the coming weeks.

But this year I was the one who really, really wanted to go.

Mel’s enthusiasm wasn’t as high, but she was still game for the trip.  Ironically, the day after she made our hotel reservations, it was announced that Nicotero would be attending the show, but when we got there we saw that he’d had to cancel due to a schedule conflict. It didn’t really ruin the trip.  He hadn’t been scheduled for any panels or anything.

Because this was a “Rudy Trip,” and I didn’t really want to spend all my time documenting the event, and instead enjoy the show as a civilian, I didn’t take nearly as many photos, and shot very little video.  However, I did want to try out a couple of really cheap new cameras (which I will be writing about in the coming weeks) so I do have about 25 images for you today, drawing from Mel’s phone camera, and the three different cameras I had on hand. We have a decent photo essay for you, and if I can work out some technical bugs, I should have a short video this Sunday, along with another dozen or so photos.

About those experimental cameras…one of them is the Kodak Charmera. It’s a working digital camera about the size of my thumb. They’re sold as a blind-box item, so you don’t know what style you’ll get, and the digital image quality, for photos and video, is about state-of-the-art for 25 years ago. I noticed that they don’t handle bright lights very well, as you will see in some of the photos below. You also feel sort of ridiculous using them in public, because people will stop and ask if it’s a real camera.

I felt like Agent Smart, shooting microfilm when I was using this thing. I also got a little tired of people asking, “Is that a REAL camera?”  No, Einstein, I’m just running around like a freaking idiot pretending to take pictures with a toy camera. Aside from that, it’s actually pretty cool, and I’ll be writing about it in PopCult.

Because I wasn’t really planning much in advance, the vast majority of today’s photos are from the Model Kit contest, while most of the video that you may see Sunday was shot in the Vendor’s room. That still needs to be sorted out and edited because I’m working with file formats that I typically don’t.

But enough explanationing, here are a bunch of photos from WonderFest USA, 2026…

I was able to catch up with Anthony Taylor and buy his two new books, which you will be reading about in PopCult in the near future.

Rocko Jerome, of G.H.OS.T. Agents fame, and Steve Stovall of Kentuckiana GI Joe Toy Expo and Adventure Commando fame, shared a table with a cool, very limited action figure collaboration set.

Photo by Mel. A pretty epic diorama kit, I think based on “Supernatural,” a show I unfortunately never watched.

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Your PopCulteer has been back from WonderFest for several days now, but it’s been a really hectic week, so you’ll have to wait until tomorrow for our big photo essay (which isn’t as big as usual because I wanted to enjoy this year’s show mostly in civilian mode), and Sunday for what I hope will be a short video.

It’s been a bit crazy around Stately Radio Free Charleston Manor, and yesterday, when I was supposed to be working on the photos, your humble blogger and his wife got to enjoy some unscheduled traffic adventures as yesterday seemed to be national drive with your feet day, and every place we went sprouted a massive, interstate-closing, accident of some sort.

Running out to grab a sandwich shouldn’t really take five hours.

But anyway, WonderFest was a blast. I was able to buy some cool model kits and books, which I will tell you about next week, and Mel and I were blown away, as usual, by the entries in the model-building contests.

I even got to see some friends, hang out with robots and stuff, and traded a few nice words with Judy Robinson, from Lost In Space.

Here’s a look at a few of the models and one pic of some custom Labubery from the vendor’s room…

Part of the Superhero models on display, along with part of the crowd. It’s always funny how, if somebody sees that you’re carefully pointing a camera and composing your shot, they’ll make sure to jump in your way and just stand there.

This drew my attention pretty quick.

I was really impressed by the unique paint scheme on this great bust of a certain Bride.

I’m going to run this photo again tomorrow, along with a link to the Etsy store where you can buy these wonderfully disturbing creations.

We leave this quick preview with a look at some cool spaceships. There were several intergalactic armadas worth of spacecraft on display.

It’s not yet Summer, even though it’s sure going to feel like it this weekend, so here’s our cursory list STUFF TO DO, around the Mountain State for this first weekend in June. Remember to hydrate and use sunscreen, folks.

As always, I’m just scratching the surface here. Please don’t think this is all we have to offer.

The big show this week is Weird Al Yankovic, who is playing the Charleston Colisseum on Saturday, with Puddles Pity Party opening up. I don’t need a graphic for this one. It’s one of the coolest things to hit town in a long time and everybody already knows about it.

There are also tons of Pride events happening, not all of which have nice graphics for me to swipe for this post, so if you want to participate, check social media because more events are popping up all over.  Plus Symphony Sunday will let you spend a peaceful day at the University of Charleston lawn relaxing to the music of Sousa.

You should remember that THIS IS NOT A COMPLETE LIST OF EVENTS.  It’s just a starting point, so don’t expect anything comprehensive, and if you feel strongly about me leaving anything out, feel free to mention it in the comments.  Also, if you have a show that you’d like to plug in the future, even if your promotional graphic uses cruddy AI slop art, contact me via Social Media at Facebook, BlueSky, Spoutible, Instagram or Twitter.  I dont charge for this, so you might as well send me something if you have an event to promote.

We are very happy to remind you that Cristen Michael has created an interactive calendar that is way more comprehensive than this list of STUFF TO DO, and you can find it HERE. Just click on the day and the event and you’ll be whisked away to a page with more details about loads of area events.

Most weekends you can find live music at Taylor Books. There is no cover charge, and Friday and Saturday shows start at 7:30 PM.  Many Sunday afternoons at 2 PM they also have live music. This weekend they have music from Rob McNurlin on Friday and Jaylyn Shirt on Saturday. Sunday afternoon stop in for Jordan Dyer.

You can find live music in and around town every night of the week. You just have to know where to look.  Keep in mind that all shows are subject to change or be cancelled at the last minute.

Among the notable music venues in town are The World Famous Empty Glass Cafe, Live at The Shop in Dunbar, Louie’s, at Mardi Gras Casino & Resort, In Huntington, there’s local institution, The Loud (formerly The V Club),  The Wandering Wind Meadery is on Charleston’s West Side, Plus there’s music in Charleston at The Blue Parrot, Sam’s Uptown Cafe and Fife Street Brewing.

You might also find cool musical events at Folklore Music Exchange in Charleston.

To hear music in an alcohol-free enviroment, see what’s happening at Pumzi’s, on Charleston’s West Side.  Friday at 7:30 PM, Hot Jazz of Charleston takes the stage.

For cutting-edge independent art films, downstairs from Taylor Books you’ll find the Floralee Hark Cohen Cinema by WVIFF. Each week they program several amazing movies in their intimate viewing room that you aren’t likely to see anywhere else.

Please remember that viral illnesses are still a going concern and many people who have very good reasons are still wearing masks, and many of us, understandably, are still nervous about being in crowds, masked or not. Be kind and understanding  while you’re out. And if you’re at an outdoor event, please remember that it’s awfully inconsiderate to smoke or vape around people who become ill when exposed to that stuff. If somebody asks you to refrain, please respect their weishes and don’t be a jerk about it.

Keep in mind that all shows are subject to change or be cancelled at the last minute.

Here we go, roughly in order, it’s graphics for local events happening over the next several days that I was able to scrounge up online…

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Tuesday is always a great day to tune into The AIR  and today we prove it with a new episode of Radio Free Charleston that was recorded very late in the day of one of the Mondayest Mondays in recent memory.  To listen to The AIR, you simply have to point your cursor over and tune in at the website, or you could just stay here, and  listen to the cool embedded player found elsewhere on this page.  

You can hear Radio Free Charleston Tuesdays at 10 AM and 10 PM, with boatloads of replays throughout the week.

 This week we open with a full hour of brand-new local, independent and cult-following music, and that is followed by an extremely rare episode of Radio Free Charleston Voume Three that hasn’t been heard since February, 2015.

But back to that first hour…we open with brand-new music from Jeff Ellis, and fill the rest of our hour with new tunes from Sasha Colette & The Magnolias, William Matheny, Shakey Graves, Temp Wishes, The Jasons, Samuel S.C., Option 22, Paul McCartney, Gong and more.

Option 22  are the folks who created CultureFest and the Riff Raff Artist’s Collective in Princeton, West Virginia, making that area a hotbed of creativity in the state. I first recorded them for the video incarnation of RFC back during FestivALL in 2009, and it’s wonderful to have new music from these elcectic artists. The song you hear this week is the second of a trilogy of new releases from the band.  We’ll bring you the concluding song next week.

Josh Chicoine’s (The M’s, Cult Canyon) newest band is called Temp Wishes and they quietly released a single entitled “Flash Fantasy” a couple weeks back. The single is streaming via Spotify and they have an accompanying music video that was just premiered this past Friday via the blog Music Defined. Temp Wishes also features Edward Anderson (1900s, Mazes), Colby Starck (Mar Caribe, Bobby Conn), and Glenn Rischke (AM Slingers, Bora Bora, Arks) and the band’s first-ever show will be at the Hungry Brain in Chicago on Friday, June 5 as you can see HERE.

Dave Thomas, someone who isn’t Eric Thompson, and Joe Vallina, as they were on this radio show.

Our second and third hours bring you an episode of RFC Volume Three that hasn’t been available in any form since early 2015.  What’s really notable is that this particular episode of the show includes airchecks from a November, 1989 edition of the original broadcast version of RFC, and it was the first time we brought a band into the studio to perform live.  We unleashed The Blind Blue Leper Society on an unsuspecting planet.

Joe Vallina, Eric Thompson and Dave Thomas were the band, and Joe has gone on to an impressive musical career with Feast of Stephen, Wiley Sonic and terrific solo albums and is now the guiding light of The Heavy Editors. Dave Thomas sprouted an impressive beard/washboard combo and became a beloved fixture on the Charleston music scene as “Washboard Dave,” once the guiding light of The Boulevard Tavern. I’m still hoping that Dave or Joe will chime in on the comments and tell me what Eric has been up to.

Brian Diller, circa 1989

This episode of the show also featured a visit from Stephen Beckner, which is remarkable as he never really was much of a night owl, and he showed up around 3 AM.  You will hear a ton of local music circa 1989 and you’ll get an idea of the controlled anarchy that prevailed on the original  RFC.

Before that we offered up about 45 minutes  of the best local and regional music there was, kicking off the show with another gem that we dug out of the archives–Brian Diller, live and solo, performing in the commercial production room at WVNS/WCHS Radio. Brian came in to do his song, “Hey Mister Auctioneer” and we aired it about nine hours after it was recorded back in January, 1990.

Since then we’ve played it on RFC Volume Five a few times.

Check out this playlist, with links to the artist’s page, in the first hour…

RFC V5 271

hour one
Jeff Ellis “When We Meet Again As Strangers”
Sasha Colette “Sacred Places”
William Matheny “If I Were A River”
Shakey Graves “When The Love Is New”
The John Jorgenson Bluegrass Band w/David Lee Roth “Jump”
Cricketman “Awkward and Weird”
Temp Wishes “Flash Fantasy”
The Jasons “Blood In The Streets”
GRPPLNG “Hollowed”
Samuel S.C. “Mind Flies”
Option 22 “Cry For Freedom”
Paul McCartney “Never Know”
Gong “Relish The Possibility”
The Stickmen “Breathless”

hour two
Brian Diller “Hey Mister Auctioneer”
Jordan Searls “Any Kind of Wind”
Dina Hornbaker “Black Coffee”
Sheldon Vance “Birthright”
Hitchcock Circus “Dirty Girl”
Three Bodies “My Friend”
Blue Million “Don’t Leave”
The Bounty “Buffalos”
Science of the Mind “Son of Sam”
David Synn “Anesthesia”
Karm To Burn “Bobbi, Bobbi, Bobbi, I’m Not”
BobaFlex “Strangle You”

hour three
Studio chatter with Blind Blue Leper Society
Blind Blue Leper Society “Fogtown”
The Swivels “Timeclock of Love”
Cathouse Thursday “Born Under A Bad Sign”
The Hepcats “Shut Up I Love You”
Blind Blue Leper Society “White Riot”
Blind Blue Leper Society “Gimme Danger”
The heart-breaking Godzilla story
Blind Blue Leper Society “Mister High Test Man”
The band sends shout outs
Blind Blue Leper Society “Rockin’ In The Free World”
More studio chatter and goofing around and we are joined by Stephen Beckner in the studio.
Blind Blue Leper Society “Mrs. Brown”
Go Van Gogh “Kiss Me Goodbye”
Three Bodies “Gardens of Hope”
Blind Blue Leper Society “Kick Me In The Spine With Your Love”
Even more studio chatter
All Quiet “Part Time Criminal”
All Quiet “Talking Islands In Africa”
Blind Blue Leper Society “Red House”

You can hear this episode of Radio Free Charleston Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM on The AIR, with replays Wednesday at 9 AM,  Thursday at 2 PM, Friday at 9 AM, Saturday at Noon and Midnight, Sunday at 8 PM and  Monday at 11 AM, exclusively on The AIR. Now you can also hear a different classic episode of RFC every weekday at 5 PM, and we bring you a marathon all night long Saturday night/Sunday morning.

I’m also going to  embed a low-fi, mono version of this show right in this post, right here so you can listen on demand.

After RFC, stick around for encores of last week’s episodes of  MIRRORBALL at 1 PM and Curtain Call at 2 PM.

At 3 PM get ready for two classic episodes of The Swing Shift, featuring the best Swing Music from the last century!

 You can hear The Swing Shift Tuesday at 3 PM, with replays Wednesday at 8 AM, Thursday at 9 AM,  Friday at 10 AM and 8 PM and Saturday afternoon, only on The AIR . You can also hear all-night marathons, seven hours each, starting at Midnight Thursdays and Sundays.

Like a couple of recent entries here, this week’s art is inspired by a series of photos I took with my phone while I was a passenger riding up Route 35 with my wife on our way to wonderful adventures last month.

Instead of the acrylic work I’ve been showing you, this is a pastel color rough, done on a small piece of illustration board. Normally I wouldn’t consider this worth sharing, but I sort of went overboard on the sky, and spent way too much time on it because I wanted to see if I could mimic the work of Van Gogh using pastel crayons. I sorta half-assed the road in the foreground.

I think it came out half-decent, even though this was really just me trying to get the colors nailed down for a larger work to be done later.

If you want to see this image larger, click HERE.

Meanwhile, over in radioland, Monday beginning at 2 PM on The AIR,  we bring you a classic episode of Psychedelic Shack, and then at 3 PM we do the same with Herman Linte’s weekly showcase of the Progressive Rock of the past half-century, Prognosis.  You can listen to The AIR at the website, or on the embedded radio player elsewhere on this page. Psychedelic Shack can be heard every Monday at 2 PM, with replays Tuesday at 9 AM, Wednesday at 10 PM, Friday at 1 PM,  and Saturday at 9 AM. You can hear Prognosis on The AIR Monday at 3 PM, with replays Tuesday at 7 AM, Wednesday at 8 PM, Thursday at Noon, and Saturday at 10 AM.

Tonight at 8 PM, tune in for a classic edition of The Comedy Vault. That’s followed by two-hour blocks of Curtain Call and Beatles Blast at 9 PM and 11 PM, and then an overnight assortment of our Haversham Recording Institute programs at 1 AM.

We are running this cool short film as an encore for the third or fourth time because we’re busy having fun at Wonderfest. We run this every five years or so because it’s so damned cool. 

One weekend after Memorial Day, I’ve always felt that one of the best ways to honor our fallen veterans is to do everything possible to avoid sending even more young people to their deaths. Our video tonight is an anti-war cartoon from the National Film Board of Canada that uses stop-motion animation and GI Joes to send an anti-war message. From 1966, Toys is a classic by animator Grant Munro that takes a dark look into the war toys often given to children at Christmas time. Starting off as harmless objects, the toys quickly take on the gestures of real soldiers, mimicking the actions and penalties of a real war. This critical commentary on war and glamorized violence creates a real and frightening battle.

Now, to be honest, it’s not really the anti-war message or loose connection to Memorial Day that earned this film a spot in PopCult.  It’s the beautiful, pristine footage of so many terrific vintage toys. Of course, my ulterior motive in presenting this film is that it’s really, really cool to see GI Joe animated so well, and I’m not talking about AI Slop. This is real, hand-made Stop-Motion animation.

I’m a long-time GI Joe collector (even though I concentrate on the Adventure Team era rather than the military stuff), and this is just really cool to watch. There are toys being used and abused in this film that would be worth hundreds or thousands of dollars today. In addition to seeing almost the full range of GI Joe product available in Canada in 1966, we also get to see some other cool toy planes and tanks, and even some vintage Barbie and Ken dolls.

I mean, you could see this as an anti-war film, or you could see it as a cautionary tale about giving children bad LSD. Etither way, just look at those cool toys!