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 AND a new edition of The Swing Shift, too! 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 the best local aind independent music that we can get our grubby little fingers on, and then we present two episodes of Radio Free Charleston Voume Four from exactly a decade ago.

But back to that first hour…we open with brand-new music from Samuel S.C. and continue with the exclusive premiere of “Body,” a new song by Bobby Miller and John Radcliff, formerly of the legendary band, Feast of Stephen. We also have a track from Hardy Mums, the new collaborative project of noted producer, Eddie Ashworth.  Not content with that, our first hour is loaded with new tunes from Emmalea Deal & The Hot Mess, Deep Purple, Stitch Jones & His Bionic Marines, The Pretty Reckless, J. Marinelli, Magic Sands and The Matt Berry Trio, along with a few gems and stylistic diversions.

Hours two and three, both from July, 2016, bring you local and regional music back from when we were all-local, and only an hour long. We brought you these two shows several months ago, but I brought them back again because tomorrow marks the tenth anniversary of The AIR, and these shows are exactly ten years old this week and next.

A special note: One of our Chicago pipeline bands, Kerosene Stars, is crowdfunding their next album. The campaign has 23 days left, but due to a technical SNAFU on my end, I didn’t have access to their songs in the RFC library to include one in this week’s show. I will open our show in two weeks with one of their tunes, but by that point, there will only be nine days left in the campaign, so…go check out their music now HERE, and if you like what you hear, go support the campaign HERE.  Next week’s RFC will be a special anniversary show, or else I’d include them in that show. Go give ’em a listen, they’re great!

In fact, you can here them twice in this great 2022 episode of RFC right here.

Check out this playlist, with links to the artist’s page (note that all the links work, even the ones with lines through them. WordPress is being a dick)…

RFC V5 275

hour one
Samuel S.C. “I Need A Moment”
John Radcliff and Bobby Miller “Body”
Hardy Mums “Green Boots”
Deep Purple “Guilt Trippin'”
The Pretty Reckless “Dear God”
GRPPLNG “Hovering”
Emmalea Deal & The Hot Mess “Unraveling”
J. Marinelli “Cubby & The Argonauts”
Stitch Jones & His Bionic Marines “Van Man Band”
Magic Sands “Night In The Medina”
Matt Berry Trio “Everything’s Peachy Part 3”
The Charleston Rogues “Cooley’s Reel”
Logical Fleadh “Muirland Measure-Hoop Her and Gird Her”
The Paranoid Style “Tearing The Ticket”
Golden “Gotta Let It Go”

hour two
Superfetch “Popcorn Time (Live)”
Jeff Ellis and 40 Days “South Charleston City Beat Blues”
Jonathan Mason “Ohio Is Killing Me”
Hybrid Soul Project “Hate On Me”
Radarhill & Nick Weckman “Spider Respects Nothing”
HARRAH “Pay The Piper”
Farnsworth “Everything Must Go”
Under Surveillance “99 Reasons”
Todd Burge “Jesus Night Light (Live)”
Michael Cerveris “Tenth Grade”
Larry Groce “When The Mist Clears Away”
The Company Stores “Dear Universe”

hour three
Jonathan Mason  “We Can’t Fix This”
Jeff Ellis and 40 Days  “Nightshift”
Todd Burge  “The Longer”
Radarhill and Nick Weckman  “Petitions”
Mother Nang  “Land of the Free”
Radio Cult   “Hungry Like The Wolf”
William  Matheny  “Don’t Feel Guilty”
Crack The Sky  “Animal Skins”
Scooter Scudieri  “Mother of God”
The Renfields  “Last Man On Earth”
The Big Bad  “Possession”
The Jasons  “Stalk and Slash Summer”
The Nanker Phelge  “Scream”
Qiet “Brush Brush”

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 first of two patriotic episodes of The Swing Shift brings you rare V Disc recordings of Sam Donahue and The Navy Dance Band. V Discs were special recordings made exclusively to be sent to our servicemen overseas during WWII.  The Musicians Unions banned studio recording in the early 1940s over royalty payments and the possibility of live musicians being replaced by recordings (sound familiar?). An exception was made for these recordings which were never intended to be sold domestically.

This week we bring you an hour of Sam Donahue and The Navy Dance Band. Next week will see a collection of V Disc recordings by Captain Glenn Miller and The Army Air Forces Training Command Orchestra.

 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.

Just like last week, this week our art is an acrylic painting that started out as a digital abstract. I had fun working on last week’s piece, so I’m going to be working in this mode for the next week or so.

This time I began with a photo of photographer, David Seymour, taking a photo of Sophia Loren in Rome in 1955.  I did some digital manipulation, mirroring, distorting and colorizing the image, and then, like last week, I painted that image in acrylics…this time on a smallish piece of cheap canvas board.

You can see the original photo at the right.

The result, for some reason, looked sort of Victorian-era to me, hence the title.

Like last week, even though the finished painting is all acrylic-painting, I still consider this a mixed media piece due to it being based on a digitally-created image.

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 this year’s PopCult video for The Marx Toy Show.  This is a brisk romp through the show, running just under six minutes, that I hope conveys the sense of fun and comraderie that we have at the show.  Next week I will bring you nearly half an hour of the raw footage shot that we shot, with background music so that we don’t accidentally publish anyone’s private conversations.

The Marx Toy & Train Show, a great collector’s convetion held every year at the The Kruger Street Toy & Train Museum in Wheeling, West Virginia, has become a tradition for PopCult for more than fifteen years.

Videography is by your humble blogger, along with Mrs. PopCulteer, Mel Larch. I handled the editing and narration.

We don’t have any bonus photos this year, but you can see nearly fifty pictures from the show in our posts from Thursday and Friday last week.

As I mentioned Friday, we will most likely have to skip next year because of a planned trip that will see your PopCulteer on the road for two weeks…and blogging from the road during a trip that will take us to many insanely interesting and fun places.

But we definitely plan to be back for the Marx Toy Show in 2028.  And we’ll be back at Kruger Street in just a few weeks for KrugerFest.

From November, 2013, this week we go back to an episode of Radio Free Charleston largely recorded at the much-missed Third Eye Cabaret, in their original location in a now-defunct bar on Capitol Street in Charleston.

This edition of Radio Free Charleston, “Snowshoe Shirt” comes to us from Third Eye Cabaret, a then weekly night of label-defying performers who brought a daring Bohemian spirit to Charleston every Thursday night at The Cellar, 8 Capitol Street. Sadly,  neither the Cabaret nor The Cellar are with us any longer.

Our music this week is by The BrotherSisters, Jamie Skeen, Louis Argento and Snakebox, and we kick things off with animation by Jacob Fertig.

You can find the original production notes for this episode, with information on all the contributors, HERE.

The PopCulteer
June 26, 2026

As I told you yesterday, last weekend was the big Marx Toy Show in Wheeling (at The Kruger Street Toy & Train Museum,) we brought you a few photos as a preview, and today we bring you around three dozen more.

You probably notice that there’s no video to go with these pics.  That will have to wait until Sunday. There was just not enough time to get the video edited in time to include it here.

Yesterday I mentioned Matt Burnett, who brought a large herd of 3D-printed animals, perfectly-scaled to Johnny West. He’s in our feature image today, and you’re going to see a lot of photos of his work below. That’s the Grizzly I got from him  right above this text.

The Marx Toy Show is always a great time.  Mel and I get to see friends, there are always cool toys to buy, and even more cool toys that we’d buy if we had enough room for them. It’s one of the most fun toy shows we go to because it’s so specialized and focused, yet so laid back and comfortable.

We’ve gone every year for, I think, the last fifteen years (not counting during COVID, and even then something unofficial might have happened). Next year I may not make it to the Marx show because a once-in-a-lifetime trip will likely take me further West than I’ve ever been and tie us up for a couple of weeks in June, but we will be chomping at the bit to return in 2028.

You may also notice quite  a bit of a difference in the photos, as I used a total of five different cameras, some of which were insanely tiny, and also very cheap. I’m trying them out so I can write about them in this blog later. That’s just a reminder in case you’re wondering why some photos look like they were shot in super high definition, and some look like they were shot on a ten-dollar digital camera.  Because in both cases, they were.

So, let’s see what all the fuss was about…

Picking up where we left off yesterday, this is the photo I was taking with a tiny camera, as seen in the last photo I ran yesterday.

This is the same view, sort of, taken with an even tinier camera, closer up.

When we got in Thursday, there was an impromptu show-and-tell around the fire pit. This UK Fighting Eagle with an unusal arm connector was one of the cool things we got to see.

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Last weekend was the big Marx Toy Show in Wheeling (at The Kruger Street Toy & Train Museum, of course) and your humble blogger took photos and video was shot by the lovely Mrs. PopCulteer and yours truly, and…you will see most of that cool stuff tomorrow.

So today you get a dozen pics from the show, just enough to whet your appetite for a large photo essay and (hopefully) video to hit tomorrow.  It’s possible that the video might be delayed until Sunday. It depends on how many more telemarketers decide to bombard me with calls today.

Today is just a hit-and-run post, but I do want to mention that the hit of the show this year was Matt Burnett, who brought a large herd of 3D-printed animals, perfectly-scaled to Johnny West. That’s Matt with Terry Ryder, in a photo I swiped from Facebook, over to the right.  While Johnny West was famous for having wonderful horses made to scale with him, when it came to other livestock, like cows or deer, he was out of luck.  There was a Buffalo, but it was hilariously tiny, and wasn’t really in scale with him at all. It was more of a Buffalette.

Matt corrected that oversight and printed Buffalo, Cattle, Moose, Hogs, Chickens, deer and other barnyard animal and fauna of the Old West, and his work is amazing. I came home with four of his critters (which you will see tomorrow). At some point Matt intends to open a website to sell his 3D printed livestock, and when he does, I will tell you about it here.

You may also notice a bit of a difference in the photos, as I used a total of five different cameras, some of which were insanely tiny, and also very cheap. I’m trying them out so I can write about them in this blog later.

Today, however, let’s look at a dozen images from The 2026 Marx Toy Show…

Each animal Matt brought was incredible, but seeing them all together was even more impressive.

I forogt to mention the dogs.

We got in Thursday, and there was an informal show-and-tell around the firepit at the hotel. Sadly, I didn’t make it to the official show-and-tell Friday night because the MG meds got the better of me.

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It’s time for our weekly half-assed list of STUFF TO DO, around the Mountain State, and there are tons of things for you to get into because this is the first weekend of summer and your humble blogger requires refrigeration, so it’s unlikely that you’ll see me at any outdoor events.

So let’s see how quickly I can knock this out, shall we? As always, I’m just scratching the surface here. Please don’t think this is all there is to do around these parts.

Our featured event this weekend happens in Beckley…

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.

I also need to point out (and I’ve been meaning to add this to the boilerplate for some time) that Mya Ross at Status Quo does a much better job of compiling a list of local events than I do, and you can find the WTSQ guide to events HERE. Toss ’em a donation while you’re over there.

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. Plus there are free concerts almost every weekend at Taylor Books.

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. Saturday at 7:30 PM they’re hosting a night of great singer/songwriters, Brooke A Brown, Julien Aklei, Annie Wolfe and head Pumzi, Sean Richardson, plus comedian Jacob Hall.

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 select local events happening over the next several days that I was able to scrounge up online…

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Almost every Tuesday is NEW RFC DAY on The AIR  and today is epic and legendary because once again we bring you a brand-new, three-hour episode of Radio Free Charleston to elevate your mood and quality of life. 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 new show with THREE FULL HOURS of newly-assembled free-format radio.  We have a bumper crop of new music by local, independent and cult artists, with some nice material from the archives thrown  in just to spice things up.

We open with a track from a new live album by Corduroy Brown, and this week’s show also features brand-new tunes from Dinosaur Burps, Duck City Music, Sasha Colette & The Magnolias, Stick Men, Devin Townsend, The Alarm, Jeff Ellis, YES and more.

We also revisit a compilation album from fifteen years ago that supported Pick Up America, plus you get some nice Psychedelic/Proggy stuff in our third hour.

This was a tricky show to assemble due to storms in the area and possible power outages, but I managed to pull it all together.

Check out this playlist, with links to the artist’s page where possible…

RFC V5 274

hour one
Corduroy Brown “Getting Older (LIVE)”
Dinosaur Burps “Drifting”
Duck City Music “Beautiful Intro”
Stitch Jones and his Bionic Marines “Flying Space Adventure”
Cricketman “Power”
The Heavy Hitters “Vain”
Sasha Colette & The Magnolias “Kiss And Make Up”
NOIR “Breath and Taxes (Ed’s Car Mix)
Stick Men “Thief of the Dice”
Devin Townsend “The Big Snit”
David Synn Bombs and Scarecrows”
Divinities “Rebirth”
Harmony Bytes “Engines of Fate”
The Alarm “One In A Million”

hour two
Jeff Ellis “Summer’s End”
Option 22 “Pulse of the Universe”
Kathleen Coffee “Transcend”
Douglas Imbrogno “Green, Green Hills”
Lonely Are The Brave “Watershed”
Eclipse Movement “Tomorrow”
Ben Voigt “Pick Up America”
YES “Aurora”
The Settlement “Stars”
The Holler Hounds “Good Ol Frank”

hour three
Tunesmiths “For Your Love”
Mind Garage “Doctor John”
Cream “Sitting On Top Of The World”
Khadavra “Monument”
Custard Flux “The Floating Chamber”
Stratifaction Music, Sirius Blueray and David Synn “Inside The Tarot”
Byzantine “Consequentia/A Place We Cannot Go”

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 recent episodes of The Swing Shift.

 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 our art is an acrylic painting that started out as a digital abstract. I was beginning to feel like I was in a bit of a rut doing the landscapes in recent weeks, even though I’m quite happy with them. I felt like veering off in a totally different direction this week.

I began with a photo I took at the Embassy Suites hotel in Lexington, which has a great atrium for getting weird photos, and I messed with the image, running it through geometric distortion filters, adding and subtracting colors, changing the contrast and doing other stuff to it.  Then I used that digital image as the basis for an acrylic painting on illustration board.

So, even though the finished painting is all acrylic-on-board, I still consider this a mixed media piece.

It was something that I thought might look cool with minimal effort after I got back from The Marx Toy Show on Sunday afternoon.

The name mildly amused me, so it got stuck with it.

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

Meanwhile, over in radioland, Monday beginning at 10 AM on The AIR,  we’re giving you a chance to catch up with Radio Free Charleston as we bring you a twenty-four-hour marathon of the eight most recent episodes of our flagship show, and then when it ends, you get a Brand-New episode, Tuesday at 10 AM. Isn’t that nifty?

This week, in a post that we’ve just restored because the coding was broke and there were no videos it for a dozen years, we are bringing you a creation of Hoserlu,  “Star Trek: The MEGO Picture.”  We posted this as a bit of a tribute to MEGO Meet, and I hear that there may be news of the next MEGO Meet coming soon, but for now, have fun looking at these toys.

These were created after Robot Chicken started airing on Adult Swim, but they have a sightly different comedic sensibility, and try to remain Star Trek-centric.

This is probably not safe for work. Be sure to watch for The Beatles cameo.

Below, check out the sequel! In it, watch for a cameo by Zintar of The Zeroids!