PopCult

Broadcasting from the Arctic Tundra of Dunbar Tuesday on The AIR  we manage to carve a partly-new episode of Radio Free Charleston from the ice. 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.

Radio Free Charleston kicks off with an hour loaded with great local and independent stuff, and the final two hours bring you the first part of a Beatles Tribute from Radio Free Charleston International that hasn’t been heard in more than nine years.

We open our show this week with Tyler Childers and the song that, just last Sunday night, won the Grammy Award for Best Country Song of 2025.  “Bitin’ List” is a remarkable choice, and is such a great tune that I’m opening the show with it, even though I already played it last year when it came out. It’s that damned good.

And it’s so surreal to realize that this is the guy I ran out to shoot video of in a bowling alley in Dunbar a dozen years ago.

The rest of our first hour is loaded with local and new music, including a couple of tracks featuing the late Lee Harrah. There will be a tribute show for Lee Saturday night at The Blue Parrot, and I will tell you all about that tomorrow in our STUFF TO DO post. We also bring you BRAND-NEW Music from June Swoon, The settlement, Moron Police, 4D Man, Kula Shaker as well as two new tracks from classic punk bands that mark their 50TH (!) anniversaries this year, The Damned and Buzzcocks.

Our second and third hours revive episode five of Radio Free Charleston International, from March, 2016. This was the first of two shows devoted to The Beatles, and it led to the creation of Beatles Blast, my show devoted to the Fab Four. While chunks of this show were recycled into the first four episodes of Beatles Blast, it has not been heard intact in more than nine years. It is loaded with rarities and curiosities from the Beatles canon, as well as some unusual covers.

The second part of the two-episode RFCI Beatles tribute will run the week after next. Next week we’re going to have a Valentine-appropriate show for you.

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

RFC V5 257

hour one
Tyler Childers “Bitin’ List”
HARRAH “Pay The Piper”
CHUM “Headhunter”
Emmalea Deal & The Hot Mess “Thankful”
The Settlement “Do It For You”
Moron Police “Nothing Breaks (A Port of Call)”
The 4D Man  “Revenge of the Gamma People”
June Swoon “Denver”
Heavy Set Paw Paws “Somebody Better (It’s OK)”
Kula Shaker “Lucky Number”
The Damned “Summer In The City”
Payback’s A Bitch “Burnin’ Love”
Buzzcocks “Seeing Daylight”
The Ghosts of Now “Needleface”

hour two
The Beatles “You Know My Name (Look Up The Number)”
John Lennon “Serve Yourself”
Paul McCartney “Return To Pepperland”
George Harrison “When We Was Fab”
Ringo Starr “I Don’t Believe You”
The Wedding Present with Amelia Fletcher “Getting Better”
Sonic Youth “Within You Without You”
Michelle Shocked “Lovely Rita”
The Fall “A Day In The Life”
Tina Turner “Help”
Phil Collins “Tomorrow Mever Knows”
Annie Lennox “Don’t Let Me Down”
The Rutles “Get Up And Go”

hour three
The Beatles “What’s The New Mary Jane”
Mash Up “Only of a Lonely USSR”
Men Without Hats “I Am The Walrus”
New Musik “All You Need Is Love”
Paul Weller “Sexy Sadie”
Adrian Belew “Blackbird”
Kansas “Eleanor Rigby”
Alan Holdsworth “Michelle”

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  The Swing Shift is an encore of two recent episodes of our Swing Music extravaganza.

 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.

Today’s art is another small color rough of a possible high-detail painting I may do as a high-detail Hopperesque piece later. This time it’s from the same hotel that inspired last week’s view, but it’s looking out the hotel window at the parking lot and buildings behind Lexington Green, the retail/hotel complex where our Embassy Suites was located. I actually snapped the photo that inspired a week ago this last Friday night, expecting to wake up to a snow-covered hellscape so I could do a “before/after” thing, but when we woke up, there wasn’t a flake of snow to be seen.

This piece is acrylic on illustration board, and it’s a little larger than last week’s art. Plus I had a little more control over my fingers this week, though the cold has not been very kind to them.

I have a feeling I’ll like this more once I have time to transfer it to canvas and spend more time on it with working digits. As it is, it captures the color and composition, but the rendering is rough.

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. New shows are on the way this month. 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 9 PM we bring you our Monday night line-up featuring two hours each of Curtain Call and Beatles Blast, plus six hours overnight with an assortment of our programming from Haversham Recording Institute. The Haversham stuff starts at 1 AM and tonight it’s a mix of all three of our shows from our friends in the UK.

Okay, so the original plan was more elaborate than this.

Above you see a music video featuring scenes from the Friday session of the weather-truncated Kentuckiana GI Joe Toy Show Winterfest.  This show happened last weekend, back when our new ice age was just beginning.

This is just a short video, set to music from the YouTube production library.

Originally I planned to bring you a video of all the raw footage as well, along with another short photo essay, but intermittant power outages here at Stately Radio Free Charleston Manor have disrupted my rendering and computer time.

So all we have for now is the music video, and our feature image of the amazing Ace Allgood posing in front of his booth.

The new plan is to bring you the raw footage and the photo essay next Sunday.  For now, consider this just a taste of what’s coming. To see our first photo essay from the event, click HERE.

This week we go back to October, 2012, for an episode of Radio Free Charleston devoted to the very first ShockaCon, Charleston’s first horror and sci-fi convention. Our musical guests are The Tom McGees, The Nanker Phelge, and The Renfields. Plus, we have a short film by convention guest, Appalachian horror author Frank Larnerd. The first ShockaCon was a free, one-day event that happened around The Mound in South Charleston.

We open the show with footage of the Monster Parade, shot by our late friend and trusty production assistant, Lee Harrah. At different points in the show, you will see more Shocka-Con footage, some of it captured by our Resident Diva, Melanie Larch. Yours truly joined in as all three of us manned cameras for the band sequences.

During our end credits, you will hear snippets of The Dead Ringers, rumored to be the re-animated corpses of members of The Kanawha Kordsmen and Sweet Adelines, plus “Do The Necronomicon,” performed by the cast of Kanawha Players “Evil Dead: The Musical.”

You can read the original production notes HERE.

The PopCulteer
January 30, 2026

I had planned to write a long essay today about Artificial Intelligience.

But the crappy weather this week meant that I had to drive my beautiful wife to work, and then go pick her up, and that meant going out in the cold, which aggravates my Myasthenia Gravis, and also wears me out a bit physically.

It also cuts my workday from about ten hours to about five.

So I didn’t have the spoons to crank out a long, coherent essay. Instead, you’re getting an off-the-top-of-my-head ramble.

In short, the point I planned to make was that, AI in and of itself is not evil. There are applications in science and medicine that are truly exciting and hopeful. A good friend of mine is using ChatGPT in place of therapy because the health system she’s forced to use does such a poor job dealing with mental health. It’s doing a much better job for her than what she was getting from her provider, which ranged from nothing to downright malpractice.

It’s use in the arts is more problematic.

See…most of the popular AI art and music programs “scrape” the internet for their techniques and actually swipe huge chunks of works. Most AI art and music at the moment is just where people feed prompts into a machine, which spits out a conglomeration of plagarized works. Plagarism, in case you didn’t know, is theft…and it sucks.

And right now it’s still in the “toy” phase. People who never had the patience to create real art are just typing sentences into a program and adoring whatever it spits out. Aside from instances where it clearly steals somebody else’s art, it’s relatively harmless. It’s also really, really ugly and annoying most of the time.  To someone like me, who’s been doing digital art for decades, it’s as visually grating as the overuse of autotune is aurally.

It’s also not as much fun to see as it is to do, most of the time.

To be honest, if I never see another short clip of action figures coming to life, it’ll be too soon, but if that’s how you get your jollies, go right ahead. That’s why we have the “snooze” button on social media.

And I have to admit that I’ve seen AI used impressively to restore and colorize old photos and films.  I’ve even seen a member of a WV band from the 1960s do some amazing work restoring old band photos, changing angles and working to make historically-accurate new images based on those old photos. That’s pretty cool, especially since they clearly label all the AI use.

Of course perverts are using it to take existing photos and strip the clothes off of people. That was inevitable. The desire to see boobs and dongs has pretty much been the engine that’s driven the adoption of every visual medium since the dawn of man.  From cave paintings to classical Greek statues to the Renaissance to the printing press, photography, motion pictures, cable television and the internet, the initial interest has been prurient.

That leaves us with ethical issues in terms of consent and people being violated, and that’s a subject for a whole series of more serious essays that I will write someday when I’m not burned out by bad weather. We also have the ethical issues of using a technology that plagarizes existing works.

Plus we have the fact that, when it comes to scraping facts, AI is pretty freaking unreliable. It’s so bad that now, whenever I use Google, I automatically type “-AI” at the end so I don’t have to see some useless half-baked summary that’s usually filled with wrong information.

I do not plan to use AI for my art, ever. I did use it for a music video once, but that was because I wanted the video to look deliberately bad in a cheesy way, and misusing AI was the way to get that effect.

You will not see AI used for Monday Morning Art. It just strikes me as pointless. I’ve created digital art in the past, but it was all created by me. Now that I’ve regained the use of my fingers enough to make real-world art, the idea of just typing prompts is a bit offensive to me. I may be lazy, but I’m not that lazy.

However…there is an exception.

If somebody sends me a graphic for an upcoming event that is clearly AI slop…I will go ahead and run it in PopCult’s STUFF TO DO feature. You won’t see me use AI in the feature images, but if I’m re-posting a graphic or flyer for a show, I’m not going to be too picky about it, no matter how freaking cringeworthy the AI use is.

The reason for this is, for years I have begged people to get me graphics for STUFF TO DO. I have repeatedly said, “Just give me an image that has the name of the artist, the venue, the time and the price, even if it’s just text on a white background, and I’ll run it.”

My standards for plugging a show in STD are very, very low. So if somebody takes the time to make a graphic, no matter how cheesy, generic, derivative or hackneyed it looks, I will consider it for STUFF TO DO.  In fact, there’s one coming up next week that sort of prompted this essay. I’m running it, but I’m not endorsing the use of AI in that manner.

All those altered images from the American Sign Museum that I’ve used for feature images in this blog were done using good, old-fashioned Paint Shop Pro.

It is somewhat hilarious that technology is moving so fast that digital graphics programs are now seen as archaic.

Back to the prurient interests, I’m sure we’re not far from the time when nobody will bother making real-life porn. AI will just generate anything a wanker wants to see, based on whatever they type into a little box.  By the end of the year we’ll probably see OnlyFans accounts that are entirely AI-generated. Facebook is already creating fake AI profiles so that they can “drive engagement” while padding their advertising clicks and paying less engagement money to real people.

Soon AI will be making content to be consumed by AI to use making more content. 90% of the electricity generated in the world will go to power this virtual snake eating its own tale.

Then they’ll put AI in charge of dealing with Climate Change, and that’s when it’ll send the robots to wipe out humanity.

At least that’s the plot of probably a third of the sci-fi novels and comics I read as a kid.

And on that cheerful note, we wrap up this week’s PopCulteer. Check back every day for fresh, handmade content, and all of our regular features.

So your humble blogger, against all advice, made the trip to Louisville last Friday for the first day of Kenuckiana’s GI Joe Winterfest, and despite the looming awful weather, we had a great time.

Steve Stovall and the Winterfest crew adjusted the show to make it easier for people to attend in the face of the approaching winter storm. The Friday preview night was extended by two-an-a-half hours, and the early-bird admission was waived. No matter which day you attended, the admission was a mere ten bucks. Vendors were allowed to set up early, and if the weather hit on Saturday, they could also leave early.

It was the best way to salvage a toy show when unprecedented bad weather was on deck. Everything was handled in a reasonable and responsible manner.

And the show was tremendous fun, despite the weather. Several Vendors had to cancel, but there were still plenty of fantastic toys to be found. I didn’t buy as much stuff as I usually do, but I got to see friends and spend time chatting with Steve, Rocko Jerome and Derryl DePriest, and it was a nice change of pace, when we got home, to not have to make so many trips to unload the car.  We missed the Saturday session, but I’m sure it was also a lot of fun.

After careful consideration, Mel and I had changed our original plans, which would have had us staying in Louisville Friday night, then staying in Lexington Saturday night before coming home on Sunday. Instead, we left the show Friday and drove to Lexington Friday night, and on Saturday, which was still perfectly clear, we shopped a little, then drove to Ashland so that we wouldn’t be too far away come Sunday morning. We could have easily driven back home Saturday, but we wanted the Hilton points and Mel wanted some whirlpool tub time.

The drive home from Ashland was a bit of an adventure, but we did make it home. What would have normally been a one-hour drive was closer to two hours, and that little light on your dashboard that tells you the roads are slick got quite the workout. But we made it home, walked around the large tree branches that broke off in the storm, and stayed inside until Wednesday. After I moved the branches out of the walkway, anyway.

Now your PopCulteer is a wee bit behind schedule due to annoying power flickers, so the rest of this post will be filled with captionless photos from the show. The plan, weather and power lines permitting, is to have a music video of Winterfest ready by Sunday, along with more photos from the show. Today we’ll show you some of the toys, and Sunday you’ll see photos of actual humans.

But for now, with a focus on the toys,  it’s wordless photo time!

Continue reading

I cannot, in good conscience, recommend that anyone in the Charleston area, which is buried under ice with dangerously frigid temperatures, and more snow due this weekend, go anywhere to do anything this week.

So I’m calling a snow day. Your recommended STUFF TO DO this week is, stay home, stay safe, read a book, watch some TV, listen to a podcast, tune in to The AIR, go back and read over 20  years of this blog, dig into that stack of comic books, look at Namibian watering holes on YouTube, take down that tree that you haven’t put away yet, recycle a blog post from a year and twenty days ago, bake some cookies…anything that does not involve going out of doors in this horrible weather.

STUFF TO DO will hopefully return next week, when the wind chill factor isn’t supposed to be absolute zero.

If, for some reason, you must go outside, remember to dress warm, like this guy…

Forgive me for basically just re-printing a blog post from 2025. The power keeps flickering on and off, and your humble blogger still hasn’t quite recovered from making the drive home from Ashland, Kentucky Sunday morning.

THIS, I say, is hunkering weather, and hunker I shall.

With luck I’ll have video and/or photos from GI Joe Winterfest tomorrow.

Even when we are snowed in on The AIR  we manage to come through with a new episode of Radio Free Charleston that is packed with three hours of local, independent and really cool music. 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.

Radio Free Charleston brings you a brand-new show with the first two hours loaded with great local and independent stuff, and the final hour showcasing songs about snow, ice and storms.

We open our show this week with June Swoon, who just released a new EP last Friday.

We also load up our first two hours with great new tunes from Jim Lange, Tape Age, Samuel S.C., The Heavy Hitter’s Band, Cult Canyon, The Settlement, They Might Be Giants, Robbie Williams, Emmalea Deal & the Hot Mess, Gardenn and more. We also sprinkle in some recent and classic tracks from our local, independent and cult archives, and get you all warmed up for our third hour.

Probably because I had to make a challenging two-hour drive from Ashland, Kentucky Sunday morning in far less than ideal driving conditions, I was inspired to assemble a mixtape filled with songs about snow, ice and storms. Hopefully it’s more fun to listen to than it was to make that drive through ice and snow on Sunday.

Check out this playlist, with links to the artist’s page where available in the first two hours…

RFC V5 256

hour one
June Swoon “Cactus Tree (Lightning Scorched Version)”
Jim Lange “Little Bird”
Tape Age “The Dossier”
Samuel S.C. “A Serious Sound”
Payback’s A Bitch “Only 17”
The Heavy Hitters Band “Folsum Prison Blues”
Cult Canyon “The Real Sublime”
The Settlement “Be Yourself”
The Myth of Logic “The Skeleton Flower”
They Might Be Giants “The Glamour of Rock”

hour two
Robbie Williams “Morrissey”
Simple Minds And The Stranglers “(Get A) Grip {On Yourself}”
Moron Police ” “Take Me To The City”
Emmalea Deal & The Hot Mess “Rhinoplasty”
Custard Flux“Superposition”
Byzantine “Dam That River”
HARRAH “Nothing Me”
Gardenn “Two Ways Too Late”
Switchblade Symphony “Night Shift”
Nothing To Protect “In Full Flower”
Buni Muni “Moringa”
Barnes & Barnes “Cemetery Girls”
White Magic For Lovers “A Riddle Without a Clue”
The Bad Shepherds“Friday Night, Saturday Morning”

hour three
Jay Parade “Let It Snow”
DEVO “Snowball”
Laurie Anderson & The Kronos Quartet “CNN Predicts A Monster Storm”
The Alarm “Where Were You Hiding When The Storm Broke”
Todd Burge “Snow”
The New Pornographers “Fireworks In the Falling Snow”
Nancy Sinatra “One Jump Ahead of the Storm”
MECO “The Battle In The Snow”
Steve Howe “Hail Storm”
Bill Wyman “Storm Warning”
Lindsey Sterling “Ice Storm”
Doc Severinson “Stormy Weather”
Annie Lenox “See Amid The Winter’s Snow”
YES “Into The Storm (Instrumental)”
Kate Bush “50 Words For Snow”

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  The Swing Shift is an encore of two early episodes from a decade ago.

 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.

Today’s art is a very quick and small color rough of a possible high-detail painting I may do as a high-detail Hopperesque piece later. It’s a view looking down from an upper floor at the restaurant in the Embassey Suites at Lexington Green, where your humble blogger stayed Friday night after a hit-and-run truncated visit to the GI Joe Winterfest in Louisville.

I’ll tell you about that later in the week.

But this piece is just me basically making notes with pastels and a little acrylic touch-up to get my composition and color nailed down, and it’s appearing here because my power is flickering on and off and I am racing to get this post finished.

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

Meanwhile, over in radioland, Monday beginning at 2 PM on The AIR, because the power outages are interfering with my downloads, 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.  The plan is to bring you the new shows that were intended for today next week, once I can actually get my hands on them.  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 9 PM we bring you our Monday night line-up featuring two hours each of Curtain Call and Beatles Blast, plus six hours overnight with an assortment of our programming from Haversham Recording Institute. The Haversham stuff starts at 1 AM and tonight it’s all Herman Linte and Prognosis.

Today we reach back into the PopCult archives and once again bring you an HBO documentary from the early 90s devoted to PopCulture icon, Groucho Marx. Narrated by David Steinberg, with interviews with Dick Cavett, Jack Lemmon, Richard Lewis, Marving Hamlisch and more, this is a nifty little overview of Groucho’s career, with a little psychoanalysis thrown in for good measure.

The best part of this documentary is the balance between people talking about Groucho, and actual footage of Groucho himself. Take a little less than an hour and bask in some comedy genius.

Its been a full decade since I last shared this video, and since your PopCulteer is crazy enough to attempt to drive into a blizzard to go to a toy show, I thought it might be a good idea to prepare some posts in advance.