This week our art is an acrylic painting, inspired by a series of photos I took last month when we made a visit to the Cinncinnati/Dayton area.
For reasons I can’t quite recall, I haven’t gotten around to even telling you folks about one of the main reasons for our trip. We went to visit the new Buc-ee’s at Huber Heights in Dayton. It is a wonderful place, just like the other Buc-ee’s we’ve been to in Kentucky and Georgia. And this new location is about the same distance from Charleston as the one in Richmond, Kentucky.
While wonderful, it’s not really vastly different from the other Buc-ee’s we’ve visited. It’s a blast, and it was the first stop on our trip that also took us to The Toy Department and Jungle Jim’s, but I didn’t really see the need to do a photo essay on Buc-ee’s again, since I’ve done so many in recent years.
However, the photos I snapped while we were looping around the exit that takes you right to this new place amused me enough to do a painting based on them. And that’s it above, in acrylics on a small cheap canvas. It’s more of a color rough, but with extra detail.
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. PsychedelicShack 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.
Next weekend your humble blogger and his lovely wife will be making our way to The Kruger Street Toy & Train Museum in Wheeling for The Marx Toy Show. To preview that event, we’re presenting a video look back at the two previous years, plus we’ll give you a guide to our videos and photo essays from the last sixteen years via some links.
Above you see the shortened by technical issues wrap-up video from last year’s event. You can find the full post, along with photos HERE. More of last year’s coverage can be found HERE.
I’ve been covering the Marx Toy Convention for a long time in PopCult, and you can find an index to most of that coverage HERE. You can see our coverage of 2021’s show HERE and HERE. 2022’s coverage was spread across a few posts, HERE, HER E, HERE, and HERE. Photo essays on The 2023 Marx Toy & Train Show can be seen HERE and HERE. Coverage from 2024 can be found HERE, HERE and HERE.
You can see our video look at the 2024 show right here…
This week The RFC Flashback acts like Cracker Barrel..and brings you Halloween in June!
Radio Free Charleston 191, from October, 2013, was the first of a two-part Halloween special that we recorded at ShockaCon the previous month. What makes this show unusual is that I included interviews, mixed in among the musical performances. We also brought you the sights and sounds of Charleston’s original horror convention.
The music we featured was by ShockaCon guests HarraH, The Renfields, The Big Bad and The McGees. You will also see interviews with Jeremy Ambler, Eamon Hardiman, Danny Hicks and The Fiend,
The show also includes the promo clip I assembled for Kanawha Players’ live stage production of “Night of the Living Dead.” Most of this clip uses the audio from the original movie trailer, cut to scenes we shot at a dress rehearsal.
You can find the original production notes HERE. Next week we’ll bring you the second part of this Halloween special.
FLEISCHER CARTOONS GREATEST HITS VOL 1
Blu Ray release
Approved and authorized by Fleischer Studios
Available in various packages from Rockin Pins
$27.99 – $34.99
I have been a fan of, and enthralled by, the animation produced by Max Fleischer since before I could walk. The incredible and innovative technical quality of the animation, combined with the boldly surreal sense of fun danger mixed with whimsy have stuck with me for my entire life, and played a big part in shaping my artistic sensibilities.
A little less than four years ago, The Alban Arts Center brought in The Fabulous Fleischer Cartoons Restored touring package of newly-restored Max Fleischer classics, and this was where I learned about the extensive restoration project that’s been going on for a few years now, where The Fleischer family and their renewed Fleischer Studios have teamed up with Rockin’ Pins to find and restore the best quality prints of these classic cartoons and bring them to a new audience.
It’s seriously mind-blowing that many of the dozens of cartoons that they’ve restored are over 100 years old. They hold up amazingly well. The cartoons blend influences as disparate as Harlem Jazz and Swing, European Dada and Surrealism, classic Screwball comic strips, Vaudeville, dance and post-industrial age science and engineering. The resulting cartoons are like nothing ever seen before or since.
Of course, Fleischer also brought Betty Boop, Popeye, Superman and Koko and Bimbo to the big screen.
After years of touring with collections of these beautifully-restored cartoons, Fleischer Studios has finally made them available to the buying public. For the first time on home video comes 20 restored cartoons from legendary animation pioneer Max Fleischer in Fleischer Cartoons – Greatest Hits, Volume 1.
I actually got my copy almost a month ago, but I was saving it until Mel and I had a free night to set aside to sit in a dark room and immerse ourselves in the delightful insanity of the Fleischer classics.
While we only get 20 of the restored cartoons (so far), there’s so much fantastic stuff here that I’d be glad to subscribe to future volumes in advance, just to make sure I get them. I know that several cartoons that were screened in Saint Albans are not on this disc. The 20 cartoons included are all gems.
This is a goldmine of the best animation that Hollywood ever produced. We get the first two (and the fourth) appearance of Betty Boop, along with three of her later cartoons. Plus we get several Out of the Inkwell cartoons with Koko The Clown, including the spectacularly disturbing “Koko’s Earth Control.”
Also included are one cartoon each starring Popeye and Superman, and the collection wraps up with Bimbo in “Swing You Sinners,” which is often in my personal top five of the greatest artistic achievements in the history of man.
Many of these cartoons are in the public domain, or will be in a year or two, and you can see heavily-edited really bad prints of some of them on YouTube, but this Blu Ray presents them fully restored in 4K, largely from the original studio negatives
Fleischer Cartoons – Greatest Hits, Volume 1 is a must-have for any true animation fan. Part of the proceeds will go to fund further restorations of these pioneering feats of animation.
The cartoons included on this disc are:
• Barnacle Bill (1930)
• Betty Boop and Grampy (1935)
• Betty Boop’s Crazy Inventions (1933)
• Betty in Blunderland (1934)
• Cartoon Factory (1924)
• Christmas Comes But Once a Year (1936)
• Dinah (1933)
• Dizzy Dishes (1930)
• The Fortune Teller (1923)
• Hot Dog (1930)
• Ko-Ko at the Circus (1926)
• Ko-Ko’s Earth Control (1928)
• Ko-Ko’s Haunted House (1928)
• A Language All My Own (1935)
• The Mechanical Monsters (1941)
• Mysterious Mose (1930)
• Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba’s Forty Thieves (1937)
• Small Fry (1939)
• Somewhere In Dreamland (1936)
• Swing You Sinners! (1930)
Bonus material includes audio commentary by a roundtable of Fleischer experts: Paul Dini, Will Friedwald, Bob Jaques, Charlie Judkins, Mark Kausler, Thad Komorowski, Leonard Maltin, Ray Pointer and Rob Waldman.
“Christmas Comes But Once a Year,” part of which turned up (from a beat-up print) in the first RFC Christmas show in 2006
Longtime fans of PopCult and Radio Free Charleston are probably aware of my intense respect and admiration for these cartoons. Brief clips from at least two of the cartoons in this collection were seen in the RFC video show.
You should go buy your copy now. Remember, physical media is forever, but streaming can always dry up. You can get it at THIS LINK!
Check out this short documentary on the restoration process…
And that is this week’s PopCulteer. Check back for fresh content every day, and all our regular features.
Gil Cohen: Inside/OutArchive Collection Covers and Illustrations From Vintage Men’s Adventure Magazines
Art by Gil Cohen
edited by Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle
New Texture
ISBN-13 : 978-1943444731
$45.95
Gil Cohen: Inside/Out is an unexpected treat. It’s a treasure trove of the work that celebrated Aviation Artist, Gil Cohen, created from the 1950s to the 1970s when he was a freelance artist working for several of the top Men’s Adventure Magazines.
The Men’s Adventure Magazines were something that probably has to be explained to most folks younger than fifty. These sucessors to the vaunted “Pulp” magazines of the 1930s and 40s were magazines aimed at men, but they weren’t quite porn. In hindsight, they seem raunchy and innocent at the same time. Most of the time they told testosterone-fueled stories of big, strapping men fighting against all odds, much of the time accompanied by a dame in a bikini or her underwear.
They were soaked with a type of salaciousness that, by today’s standards, seems almost wholesome. This much over-the-top masculinity, which wasn’t quite as toxic as what we see today, is sort of charming. Aside from the more lurid stories, there was a lot of WWII adventures, and fighting wild animals. It’s fun stuff if you don’t mind the total lack of political correctness and the delightfully dated references.
But this book is not about those magazines, per se. The one feature that the Men’s Adventure Mags had that makes them so remarkable was that they featured spectacular painted covers and inner illustrations. This is where commercial art elevated itself to the level of fine art, and in the Men’s Adventure Mags, they did it without the pretentiousness or marketing savvy of the Pop Art movement, which was happening concurrently to the heyday of this type of adventure illustration.
This book is dedicated to one of the top Men’s Adventure Magazine illustrators, Gil Cohen, who went on to do several movie posters and over 100 paperback covers for the Mack Bolan: Executioner series, before turning his focuse to Military and Aviation Art, where he is considered a master, with several works hanging at the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, as well as at the Pentagon.
This book, the first in a projected series, is an overview of Cohen’s work in the Men’s Adventure field (there have been several collections of his other art), and it’s stunning.
This is work that was created under intense deadline pressure. Yet, Cohen’s artistic ability and professionalism shine through. He managed to take deliberately sensational stories, filled with lurid details and PG-rated prurient interests and illustrate them with beautifully-composed and expertly-deliniated flash.
Most of the time, the illustrations were much, much better than the stories they depicted.
Cohen is 94 years old, and I believe he’s still painting. He’s been interviewed extensively for future volumes in this series, which will present his work in chronological order, but this first entry is an incredibly generous sampler of his entire Men’s Adventure career.
We get to see how Cohen manages to tell a story in a single illustration that conveys more emotion and attracts more readers than the prose that accompanies it. This book opens the door to a whole world of amazing art that hasn’t been exposed to enough people.
Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle have curated a wonderful collection of Cohen’s art, and I’m really looking forward to see more entries in this series.
Fans of fine illustration, great art and retro pop culture will love this book.
You can order Gil Cohen: Inside/Out directly from the publisher (along with a vast array of other books devoted to Men’s Adventure Mags) or from Amazon, or try ordering it from your local bookseller using the ISBN code.
We’ll leave you with the publisher’s blurb:
Planes, combat, intrigue, action, and exotic adventure of every kind!
Archive Collection is the opening salvo in the Men’s Adventure Library’s most ambitious endeavor yet: Gil Cohen: Inside/Out, a multi-volume series collecting the men’s adventure magazine (aka MAM) work of legendary illustrator Gil Cohen.
Most famous for his aviation art masterpieces and cover paintings for Don Pendleton’s Mack Bolan / The Executioner series of action paperbacks, Cohen began his career as an illustrator working for the wildly popular men’s adventure magazines (aka MAMs) of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, where he cut his teeth illustrating some of the wildest and most explosive adventure fiction of the era.
The first installment in the Inside/Out series is the Archive Collection, is a deluxe hardcover packed with some of the most explosive work Cohen created for the magazines, spread across three decades of publication. All images are drawn from the famed MAM archive of the book’s co-editor, Robert Deis, and the book is printed using the finest paper and printing options available to us.
This big, beautiful 8.5″ x 11″, 148-page full color casewrap hardcover launches our Gil Cohen: Inside/Out series, with further deluxe volumes to follow.
It’s time for our weekly half-assed list of STUFF TO DO, around the Mountain State as we head deep into what the werewolf folk call, “The Junening.”
Actually, I just made that up, but it seemed mildy amusing and I can use it in the headline, too. Modifying the boilerplate to be nearly fresh ever week takes more work than you’d think, really.
But I do it to maintain my local roots with this internationally-read blog, and also to give myself a break from having to think too hard.
As always, I’m just scratching the surface here. Please don’t think this is all there is to do around these parts.
The big show this week is happening in Pittsburgh. You can read about it HERE, and check out this cool graphic. We wish we could go to this one, but our June is pretty heavily-booked with travel already.
There is also a huge wrestling show from Gary Damron’s ASW happening in Beckley this Saturday, Read more about it HERE.
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 Steve Himes on Friday and Jeffrey Vaughn & Company on Saturday. Sunday afternoon stop in for Ray + Jon.
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.
To hear music in an alcohol-free enviroment, see what’s happening at Pumzi’s, on Charleston’s West Side.
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…
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…
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.
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. PsychedelicShack 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.
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.
It’s time for our weekly half-assed list of STUFF TO DO, around the Mountain State as we head deep into what the werewolf folk call, “The Junening.”
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