PopCult

Gimme Dat

The PopCulteer
June 13, 2025

Okay, so by all rights, I should’ve posted these pictures well over a week ago. I mean, they were taken two weeks ago tomorrow, but the hustle and bustle of being a PopCulteer on the go meant that something had to give, and in this case it was timeliness.

Two weeks ago Saturday we were in Louisville for WonderFest USA. It’s a great show, filled with amazing guests, well-stocked vendors and tons of exquisite model kits built by hobbyists from around the world. This was our fifth time going, and it may well have been the most fun.

But we had to leave in a hurry because the next day we had to hop the Amtrak to Chicago for yet another wonderful experience, this time with nearly a week of perfect weather, grand theatre, quirky gastronomic adventures and just plain fun.

And you’ll be reading about that next week (and likely beyond). The return trip left us exhausted, and a mere four days after our return, we are hitting the road once again, this time to attend the Marx Toy Show in Wheeling that I told you about Wednesday.

So today you get a pretty gigantic photo essay from WonderFest, and at some point very soon, I will tell you all about our other travels. We should have a blog that’s jam-packed with content over the next few weeks as I play catch-up before we start heading out for more toy show adventures in July.

Below, with some sparse captions, you will see the people, the cool toys and the amazing models we saw at WonderFest. So let’s dive in because I need to finish getting packed for Wheeling…

The People

Dennis Prince, Greg Nicotero and Joe Alves, jawing about JAWS.

The Masked Director, Sam Irvin

Master Model Maker, Nick Tate, of Space: 1999 fame

The man, the myth, THE Rocko Jerome! Go look for his new Kickstarter campaign for GHOST Agents

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Father’s Day is Sunday, and if your father is still living and you don’t know what to get him, here’s a few cool things you can can find this weekend if you’re looking for STUFF TO DO with him in and around Charleston, West Virginia. Imma be in Wheeling for The Marx Toy Show.

As always, 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, 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. Note that some links look like they shouldn’t work because they have lines through them, but that’s just a WordPress glitch, so click on them anyway. They should still work.

We are also 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.

You can find live music in and around town every night of the week. You just have to know where to look.

Most Fridays and Saturdays you can find live music at Taylor Books. There is no cover charge, and shows start at 7:30 PM. This weekend they don’t have anybody listed for Friday, but Saturday it’s a big deal as The Carpenter Ants will be Tayloring it all up.

You can find live music every night at The World Famous Empty Glass Cafe. Mondays feature open mic night. The first Tuesday of every month sees the legendary Spurgie Hankins Band perform. There’s both Happy Hour music and local or touring bands on Thursday and Friday, and live bands Saturday nights. On Sundays when there’s a new Mountain Stage, musicians from the legendary WV Public Radio show migrate to The Glass for the Post-Mountain Stage jam. I hear that last week’s jam was epic.

Live at The Shop in Dunbar hosts local and touring bands on most weekends, and is a nice break away from the downtown bar scene.

Louie’s, at Mardi Gras Casino & Resort, regularly brings in local bands on weekends.

In Huntington, local institution, The Loud (formerly The V Club), brings in great touring and local acts three or four nights a week.

The Wandering Wind Meadery holds several events each week, from live piano karaoke to bands to comedy to burlesque.

The multitude of breweries and distilleries that have popped up in Charleston of late bring in live musical acts as well. I tend to miss a lot of these because, being a non-drinker, they fly under my radar.

Clendenin Brewing Co is a microbrewery with 4 themed lodging rooms in a 1920s bank building on Main St Clendenin, WV. They’ve been host a lot of musical acts lately.

Roger Rablais hosts Songwriter’s stage at different venues around the area, often at 813 Penn, next door to Fret ‘n’ Fiddle in Saint Albans and also at The Empty Glass many Tuesday evenings. You might also find cool musical events at Route 60 Music in Barboursville and 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.This Saturday at 8 PM you can hear The Awesome Lady D, as well as The Mark Price Band.

You can also visit Coal River Coffee in Saint Albans for live music in an alcohol-free environment. This Friday at 7 PM  Coal River Coffee features Minor SwingI am looking to expand this list, so please contact me through the social media sites above if you know about more alcohol-free performance venues. The Huntington Music Collective has recently started hosting all ages shows at Event Horizon.

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 illlnesses 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.

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 that I was able to scrounge up online…

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Your humble blogger is still not quite recovered from his week in Chicago (and day in Louisville right before that), and it’s already time to hit the road again. The Marx Toy and Train Collector’s Show is happening again this year, and the dates are this Friday and Saturday at  The Kruger Street Toy & Train Museum in Wheeling.  Your PopCulteer is thrilled to be going back to this toy show, which is one of the most enjoyable in the country and something your humble blogger and his lovely wife look forward to every year.

This year, we’re planning on sticking around for both days of the show, and then meandering back home in some as-yet-undecided manner on Sunday.

I’ve been covering the Marx Toy Convention for fifteen years, and you can find an index to most of that coverage HERE. You can see our coverage of2021’s show HERE and HERE. 2022’s coverage was spread across a few posts, HERE, HER E, HERE, and HERE. Likewise, our 2023 coverage can be found HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE.

You can expect a lot of photos and video from this yea’rs show next week in PopCult. We are also playing catch-up with other stuff, so the plan is to bring you our regular guide to STUFF TO DO tomorrow, then hit you with a massive WonderFest photo essay on Friday. Chicago photos are coming next week, too.

Anybody who grew up with Marx Toys, or anybody interested in West Virginia industries, or just folks who love toys, should make it a point to go to this show and check out the wonders of The Kruger Street Toy & Train Museum. It’s a real gem.

Here’s the video from last year’s show…

We are back from a trip that caused us to miss bringing you a new episode last week, and to make up for that, we created three hours of brand-new Radio Free Charleston  that can hear today on The AIR.  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.

It’s a free-format extravaganza as we open this week’s show with a new track from The M.F.B. We also have brand-new tunes from Matt Berry with Project Gemini, AJ Rosales (his new single coming out on June 20), The Settlement, The Heavy Editors, J. Marinelli, Corduroy Brown, Bono, Skunk Anansie, Sparks anhd more.

Within our show we also have sets of The Blues, New Wave-ish music and vintage local gems from the late 1980s/early 1990s.

Throughout the show, you can hear a little bit about my wonderful vacation and the less-than-wonderful return trip home.

The emotional scars of the Indianapolis Amtrak station will take some time to heal.

The links in the playlist will take you to the pages for the artists who have websites.

RFC V5 227

hour one
The M.F.B “Funky Bunz”
Matt Berry/Project Gemini “Stay On The Ground (Get-Down Version)”
Skyflake “Luminescent”
Ghoulbox “Kick The Can”
Toyah  “Echo Beach (Surf Mix)”
John Cale “Baby, What You Want Me To Do”
AJ Rosales “Phosphene”
Garbage“There’s No Future In Optimism”
Messer Chups“Beware of Sentimentality”
The Settlement “Be Yourself (live)”
The Heavy Editors“Paininaneck”
Los Grainders “Sharp Stone”
Corey Taylor “London Calling”
Brian Diller “Crying, Waiting, Hoping”

hour two
J. Marinelli  “The Preacher and The Slave”
Corduroy Brown “Familiar Faces (Rodburn Hollow Sessions)”
Bono “Desire (Stories of Surrender Version)”
Skunk Anansie “Fell In Love With A Girl”
Flo and Eddie “Another Pop Star’s Life”
SPACE FREQ “Spacetripper”
Ann Magnuson “This Nothing Life”
Velez Manifesto “Dressed In Light”
The Defectors “Hesitation”
Feast of Stephen “Mystery Hole”
Mother Nang  “Fuggin'”
Strawfyssh “Netted Fish”
Three Bodies “Shingles and Tar”
Go Van Gogh “Stripes With Stains”

hour three
Sparks “Lord Have Mercy”
Marc Ribot “Sometimes Jailhouse Blues”
Blue Million “Lazy Bones”
Amazing Delores “ “Coal”
Gary Moore “Still Got The Blues (live)”
Boogie Beasts “Sunday Morning Soul”
Tucker Riggleman & The Cheap Dates  “The Blues”
Lene Lovich “Sister Video”
Red Audio“Holograms”
Orchestral Maneuvers In The Dark “Anthropocene”
Rupesh Cartel “Rewards”

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 the most recent episodes of  MIRRORBALL at 1 PM and Curtain Call at 2 PM.

At 3 PM we give you an encore of two recent episodes of The Swing Shift.

 You can hear The Swing Shift Tuesday at 3 PM, with replays Wednesday at 8 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 Thursday and Sunday evenings.

This week’s art is a photo, pure and simple. No filters, no paint apps, nothing more than lighting and composition.

The full title is “Still Life With MechaGodzilla, Security Camera and Other Stuff.” I didn’t want to cram all that into the headline.

Basically that is my old phone, dialed into my old security camera, which I now have pointed out the window because it no longer works with the wifi and has to be close enough to the router to be hooked up via ethernet cable. I have to use the old phone because the app that controls this camera is no longer available. Standing by you see a metallic red MechaGodzilla, as well as another Godzilly-type finger puppet, and in the background you can see part of a loopy light I got from Temu.

This is what lives on top of my old PC at the moment, while I keep procrastinating about hooking up the new one. However, I felt that the photo was appropriately artsy, and just a little fartsy enough to share here.

To see it bigger, click HERE.

You can find out about today’s programming on The AIR in a separate post today, since it’s the end of our special marathon week. PopCult should returnn to normal Tuesday with a new Radio Free Charleston. Your humble blogger has been in Chicago for the past week, and we have tons of content to share with you from that and from WonderFest before that, but travel adventures on the trip home required an extended recovery period. You’ll hear about those too.  We had planned to run a special Sunday Evening Video yesterday, but I decided to bump it to Wednesday, so I can do it up right.

Today we wrap up our eight days of marathons of The AIR‘s music specialty programming. Beginning at 7 AM today you will be able to immerse yourself in a solid day, that’s twenty-four hours, of one particular program. 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.

Today we bring you the third of our programs produced by Haversham Recording Institute in London, with Nigel Pye’s Psychedelic Shack.  Nigel is the lead engineer at Haversham and had never presented a radio show before he jumped in to share his love of mind-expanding music with The AIR’s listeners. Not confined to one era, Nigel mines the weirdest and most psychedelic music he can get his hands on.

You can hear Psychedelic Shack every Monday at 2 PM, with replays throughout the week, and a couple of classic episodes Sundays in the early evening.

All this week  have brought you marathons of The AIR‘s music specialty programming. Beginning at 7 AM today you will be able to immerse yourself in a solid day, that’s twenty-four hours, of one particular program. 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.

Beatles Blast is another show hosted by yours truly. I am a true Beatles fanatic, and putting together an hour of music by The Beatles, together and solo, along with cover tunes, songs by their relatives and music on which they guested is a complete labor of love for me.

Today’s marathon will be a bit shorter, only 17 hours, because we run The Swing Shift every Sunday at midnight. To make up for that, we’ll bring you ten more hours of Beatles Blast a week from tomorrow in The Monday Marathon. You can hear Beatles Blast every Wednesday at 2 PM, with replays throughout the following week and a mini-marathon Sunday afternoons.

All this week we are going to treat you to marathons of The AIR‘s music specialty programming. Beginning at 7 AM today you will be able to immerse yourself in a solid day, that’s twenty-four hours, of one particular program. 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. 

Our newest Music Specialty Program, and one of the most well-received, Mel Larch’s MIRRORBALL celebrates the classic era of Disco music from the mid 1970s into the early 1980s. If it seems like we’re going to dance to the end of the world, why not do it while you’re shaking your booty?

MIRRORBALL can be heard every Friday at 2 PM with replays throughout the following week. In addition there is a weekly mini-marathon which will be changing nights in the near future,  but for now can be heard Saturday nights at 9 PM.

For the last several and next couple of weeks The RFC Flashback is going back to the most ambitious run of episodes in Radio Free Charleston history.  In June, 2011 I decided to try and do something sort of crazy. I’d managed to crank out Radio Free Charleston on a weekly basis before, which was no mean feat since the show was basically produced by me alone, with camera help from my now-wife Mel Larch and occasional help from other friends. For FestivALL 2011, I managed to produce eight episodes of Radio Free Charleston in under two weeks.

FestivALL 2011 had wrapped, but it still lived on here in the PopCult blog with part six of our exhaustive coverage.  In this week’s installment we revisit “Saint Stephen’s Dream: A Space Opera,” which was staged by WestVirginiaVille.com at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation last weekend. That is Douglas Imbrogno in the photo accompanying this post.

We bring you a bit of the beginning of Douglas Imbrogno’s magnum opus, and we mix in Austin Susman’s entry in the Silent Film Competition.  The show wraps up with Kentucky chanteuse Sasha Colette, performing in Davis Park. Our march through these eight FestivALL 2011 episodes of RFC continues next week as this year’s FestivALL is already a fond memory, having delighted audiences last weekend.

The PopCulteer
June 6, 2025

The reason this is not “What I Did On My Summer Vacation” is because I’m still doing it.

If you’ve been wondering where our regular features, like a new RFC or STUFF TO DO have been this week, well…I’m writing this in Chicago. Last Saturday we were in Louisville, for WonderFest. The original plan was to go to Lexington for shopping after WonderFest and then drive home Sunday.

However, Mel got invited to attend a tech rehearsal at Steppenwolf Theater the following Tuesday…in Chicago, so plans were changed. I cranked out ten days worth of PopCult posts and scheduled marathons on The AIR, and had them all done by May 29th.

Saturday we got to see Greg Nicotero and Joe Alves talk about a little project that Alves was in charge of fifty years ago…building Bruce The Shark, from JAWS,, and then we high-tailed it straight home Saturday night, hopped the Amtrak Cardinal to Chicago Sunday evening, and we are still enjoying the holy heck out of the City of Wind.

Tuesday night we got to see part of a very complicated tech rehearsal for a play called You Will Get Sick, starring one of Mel’s acting heroes, Amy Morton.

In fact, we were to go back to Steppenwolf Thursday night to see the first preview performance of You Will Get Sick, but it was postponed, so we will see it Friday night, and because I now have time to blog from the road, you fine folks are getting a PopCulteer this week.  The tech rehearsal was only for part of the show, so I only have a tiny idea of what to expect. I’m sure it’ll be incredible, and I’ll likely write a little abouut it next week, but since it’s a preview performance, I won’t be doing a full review.

I will be sharing some photo essays over the next week, in addition to our regular features (including a new Radio Free Charleston, loaded with new music).

And speaking of photos…how about we share a few of them from the trip so far?

Expect a bunch of photos of cool people and custom models from WonderFest

Dennis Prince, Greg Nicotero and Joe Alves, jawing about JAWS.

Meanwhile….in Chicago.

We finally made it back to Rotofugi, and you can expect a photo essay of the wonders of designer toy coolness.

We leave you with some of the booty I scored at Rotofugi and Laurie’s Planet of Sound. You could probably guess my age from this picture.

And that is this week’s PopCulteer. We’re back in town Sunday and back to normal Monday. Check back for all our regular features.