PopCult

Rudy Panucci On Pop Culture

Monday Morning Art: Rest Area

This week’s art is actually new. I painted it Saturday night and Sunday morning.

Saturday, your humble blogger had a few things planned, but they were things to which my knees were not up. So I decided to take it easy. However, it was a beautiful day and I knew that my beautiful wife would like to go to Flatwoods to buy some beautiful FiestaWare. And I could relax in the car while she drove.

Not being the driver meant that I could grab a few photos on my camera, and what you see above is a composite of a couple of those, painted in acrylic on illustration board, with some experimental stippling courtesy of some cheap markers. Because it was essentially a day of rest for me, I included the rest area sign. What started out as a simple attempt to cheer up a friend who’s going through a lot became a source of inspiration for this piece.

Capturing that blue in the sky was the key to this. It almost looks as cool as it did in real life.  Actually, I think mixing the paint was more than half the battle with this one.

It came out pretty damned nice considering that my MG was acting up too. The stippling looks great, but after an hour of that my arms felt like I’d been lifting heavy weights for a week.

Better the artist should suffer for his art than the people looking at it. I may take this to canvas at some point.

To see this week’s art bigger try clicking HERE.

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 an also classic edition of 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.

At 8 PM you can hear the Simpsons sing on a classic episode of The Comedy Vault.

Tonight at 9 PM for the Monday Marathon we bring you ten hours of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat, focusing on a few special theme episodes.

Sunday Evening Video: Happy Mothra Day!

In honor of Mothra Day, PopCult presents a video adventure of Mothra, dubbbed into English. Happy Mothra Day, everybody!

I know I did this gag six years ago, but that time the video was taken down by YouTube about five minutes after I put it up. This time I’m trying something different.

The RFC Flashback: Episode One Hundred Thirty-Four

For the next few weeks The RFC Flashback is going back to the most ambitious series 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.

Above you see our second episode of Radio Free Charleston’s FestivALL 2011 coverage. This was originally posted one day after the show we brought you last week.  This episode of RFC shined a spotlight on FestivALL’s theatrical offerings, with clips from “St. Stephen’s Dream,” CYAC’s “Easier Than The Truth,” The No Pants Players and CLOG’s “Thoroughly Modern Millie.” We also have music from WATT 4 and Bare Bones.

Next week we’ll bring you our third nearly-daily episode from FestivALL 2011. You can see episode 133, the beginning of our FestivALL coverage HERE.

Life Support on the Levee

The PopCulteer
MAY 9, 2025

So, yesterday the 2025 Live on the Levee line up was announced, and a lot of folks aren’t happy.

This isn’t exactly a new thing. There are always people who feel left out, that their favorite type of music, or favorite local band isn’t included. Or they hate the styles of music that is included. But this year it’s different.

This year Live on the Levee has been dramatically scaled back. There will only be six of the free concerts at Haddad Riverfront Park, and three of those are incorporated into other events, which means that there will already be a ton of people crammed onto Kanawha Boulevard, so it’ll be doubly hard to find a place to park.

I’m not going to complain about the selection of musical acts. Some are pretty hip and ambitious. I do question the idea of having The Reverand Horton Heat, an amazing Rockabilly act and easily the biggest name they have on the schedule, starting at 5 PM, which doesn’t give people the chance to get off work, go home, get ready and head back out. But since that show is tied to some kind of bicycle event, parking is likely to already be a nightmare from hell, so despite it being a great act, it’s an easy pass for me.

I was also impressed that they brought in the No BS Brass Band, because they’re practically avante-garde for an outdoor show in Charleston. They sound sort of like John Phillips Sousa playing Prog-rock with elements of Funk and Rap. It’s tied to the sadly-waning FestivALL, so crowds might not be so bad.

Fans of Heavy Metal are not at all happy, and they make a good point about classism affecting the decision-making process for choosing bands, but it’s harder to argue for inclusion when theres so much less in which to be included.

The major beef with Live on the Levee this year is that it’s not being done weekly. And I understand the reasons for that. It’s very unfortunate that cutting back so dramatically on the number of shows means that local bands are getting so many fewer opportunities to play in front of a decent crowd.

It All Comes Down To Money

The problem is that Charleston brought back The Sternwheel Regatta, and that has pretty much sucked up the vast majority of available sponsor money. Combined with the cessation of any federal arts grants, and the state taking money away from every cutural program so that they can funnel it to private religious schools, and you can see that something had to give.

Live on the Levee has five major sponsors with logos on the graphics they’ve released. There are dozens more sponsors listed, but those are probably people doing in-kind contributions or just being media partners for individual shows.

It comes down to the city having to decide where to best allocate their resources. With sponsors offering less money, Charleston had to weigh the costs–which includes pay for the musical acts, ASCAP licensing, prep time, closing streets, overtime for city workers, overtime for police, any added security, clean up after the shows, the actual production of the shows (sound systems and lighting) and any riders that need to be added to their liability insurance–against the benefits of bringing people into Charleston to support the local businesses.

Most of us have probably seen the big numbers that Charleston rolls out to tout the “Economic Impact” of citywide events. And let me be clear, I am not singling out Charleston. Every city that holds some type of event, whether it’s shutting down Chicago’s East Loop to hold a NASCAR race, or Las Vegas paying over eight million dollars in cash and tax credits to woo WWE to hold Wrestlemania there, releases an economic impact report that totally justifies the expense and shows how successful the event was.

It’s good for folks to know that this is all pure public relations hokum. All these reports amount to is a tally of exaggerated gross revenues of every possible business that was operational during the event, without deducting any of the expenses of putting on the event, or any of the revenue that would have normally been generated anyway.

If you really want to know if an event was successful, wait to see if they do it again.

It’s clear that Charleston, when looking at the real numbers, had to make the tough decision to scale back Live on the Levee. It looks like they struggled to find a way to at least keep some of it, but barring the influx of a few new deep-pocketed sponsors, Live on the Levee is on life support.

Some Of This Is On Us

It’s a shame that Charleston has such a nice venue as Haddad Riverfront Park, and another now at Slack Plaza, but can’t justify the expense of putting on a full weekly concert series. It’s not the fault of the city. People living in and around Charleston are notoriously fickle when it comes to free or cheap entertainment. Some of the fault lay with the people programming the shows, but we have an audience that is too easily dissuaded from attending cool live events.

And before anybody calls me on it, I am as guilty of this as anybody. I have Myasthenia Gravis, and being outside in the heat for long periods can knock me off my game for a week afterward. I’m not as young and strong as I used to be, and it’s really easy for me to decide to stay home on a Friday night to watch Smackdown instead of fighting a crowd, finding a place to park, and then getting home late.

When I’m not being overly-lazy, I like to travel. I’m going to be out of town for at least three of the Live on the Levee shows. The early start time for the good Rev knocks me out of that show as well. If the weather is absoutely perfect and my MG is not flaring up, I’ll consider the other two shows, but those are big “If’s.”

Charleston, sadly has an aging population, and we have more great art and music than we have audience to consume it now. It’s getting harder and harder to get people to come out to hear live music.

It’s something I’ve been writing about for more than a decade.

The Sad Decline Of FestivALL

The same issues that have caused Live on the Levee to contract in size are affecting FestivALL. I am currently running a series of episodes of Radio Free Charleston that I filmed during the 2011 FestivALL in PopCult‘s RFC Flashback posts every Saturday. Back then, FestivALL had just expanded to two weekends, and was new and exciting with a fresh approach to the arts and loads of enthusiastic supporters.

That can’t really be said now. FestivALL has been in a bit of a rut for almost a decade. Nothing new has really been added and some of the most fun events associated with it have fallen by the wayside, or become tarnished. The Streetworks art auction never recovered from the “Let’s burn some art” debacle, which pretty much convinced me to end my association with Streetworks, and the re-introduction of the Regatta, which was moved to just a week after FestivALL wrapped, grabbed almost all of the spotlight away from what was hoped to become West Virginia’s version of the Spoleto Festival in that other Charleston.

This year FestivALL finds itself shrunk back down to a single weekend and bumped from the spot on the calendar that it held for its entire existence, adjacent to West Virginia Day, and is instead happening at the end of May/beginning of June.

Which is when I’ll be in Louisville, Kentucky, for WonderFest USA.

I think maybe the current leadership of FestivALL, rathering than ushering it into a brave new era, are instead shuffling it off to hospice care. I hope I’m wrong on that, but the fact is that, after an exciting first decade, FestivALL has failed to evolve, and has lost it’s “must-attend” status.

So Now What?

As usual, local artists and musicians wind up getting the short end of the stick. I could talk a mean game about how we need people to organize and promote a new series of free concerts devoted entirely to local bands of all different genre. But it’d be intellectually dishonest for me to be the one to do that.

The fact is, it takes a lot of dedicated people to work for cheap or free to put on and promote free concerts, and those of us who were happy to do that fifteen years ago are fifteen years older now…at least those of us who are still alive.

I miss the all-day metal shows at the bandshell at Coonskin Park, but I am in no position to help organize one. I’ll cover it as much as possible in PopCult and on The AIR, but I’m just one person. I can’t do the heavy lifting anymore. I did that for three hundred video episodes of Radio Free Charleston and The RFC MINI SHOW, and over 500 radio episodes (and counting), but it’s going to take younger, stronger people with more time and money than I can spare.

And sadly, that is the only solution I can offer for this. You guys need to go do more stuff. Tell me when it’s ready. I’ll help spead the word.

And that is this week’s PopCulteer. Check back for a fresh post every day, and several exciting regular features.

 

Ten Years Ago In PopCult: Videos and Photos

Confession time, folks: Your humble blogger had to deal with an entire universe and a half of technical and internet issues yesterday, and had no time to write anything new. 

So…we’re going to take advantage of the rich history of this blog and bring you a PopCulteer column that was originally published ten years ago today. Remember the PopCult motto: Fresh Content Every Day, Even When It’s Half-assed! 

Ironically, this particular post was also half-assed due to technical issues happening at our old stomping grounds, The Charleston Gazette, back in the day. And if it was half-assed then, and half-assed now, that means that, together, this is now a completely-assed post! 

The PopCulteer
May 8, 2015

Hey, you know that underground explosion in Charleston Thursday evening? Well, it seemed to have knocked the Gazette’s blogs askew on treadle, so I didn’t even bother writing a PopCulteer last night.

I wasn’t forsaking you. Reports were that the power wouldn’t be restored until the weekend, so putting together a “Stuff To Do” seemed pointless. I wasn’t happy with the thought that my streak of consecutive days posting to PopCult would be interrupted at 627, but as I awoke on Friday morning, the news is that power should be restored to the Charleston Newspapers Building by noon.

And I don’t have a PopCulteer written. And I have stuff to do this morning. So, you’re getting a short column filled with videos and pictures. At least the streak continues. Enjoy!

The RFC MINI SHOW starring Tape Age.

Read about it HERE.

Continue reading

Gimme That Old-time STUFF TO DO

Hey, this week I’ve got too many things going to even come up with a clever opening paragraph.  Evidently it’s Mother’s Day weekend, so if you are so inclined, you might want to incorporate that into your plans. There are also yard sale events taking place in Charleston’s East End and also in the Teeming Metropolis of Dunbar.  Anyway…here’s our weekly guide to STUFF TO DO in and around Charleston and beyond for the next several days.

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. Friday you can hear Steve Himes, and Saturday it’s the Hot Club Paris Jazz of Minor Swing!

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. 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…

Continue reading

New Music in the First Hour of Radio Free Charleston Tuesday!

It’s a mix of new music and a storm-induced throwback to 2016 on a partly-new Radio Free Charleston for you 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.

We open this week’s show with a new track from The Heavy Hitters Band. We also preview upcoming singles from Chicago-connected musicians, Ascendant and AJ Rosales, and offer up new tracks from David Synn, Suzanne Vega, Novelty Island, Ghoulbox, Messer Chups, Propagandhi and The Settlement.

Our second and third hours bring a couple of episodes of Radio Free Charleston Volume Four out of cold storage because a storm whipped up while I was putting the show together, and I was afraid I wouldn’t have time to get a three-hour show assembled before the power went out. I’m actually still racing that while I write this post, which is why we have recycled graphics this week.

Both of these shows are from August, 2016, and they have not been heard by anyone for more than eight years. I’m not including links for those hours because this is a bit of a race for me.

The links in the playlist will take you to the pages for the artists in the first hour of this week’s show…

RFC V5 224

hour one
The Heavy Hitters Band “Voicemail (Tiny Desk version)”
Ascendant “Love Saved My Life”
David Synn “Sea of Tranquility”
Novelty Island “Blood Pressure Music”
Suzanne Vega “Witch”
Jennifer Lynn & The Groove Revival “Soul Saver”
AJ Rosales “Lietmotif”
Ghoulbox “Dead, White, & Gloom”
Messer Chups “Big Foot’s Shadow”
Sting & The Radioactors “Nuclear Waste”
The Dollyrots“Still Holding On”
Massing “Million To One”
Propagandhi “At Peace”
The Settlement “Wagon”

hour two
Under Surveillance “Pushed Me Too Far”
Time And Distance “Live A Lie”
Westerberg High “Walking With A Ghost”
Hellblinki “Rust”
Charlie West All Stars “Frankenstein”
Charlie West All Stars “Snortin’ Whiskey”
Unknown Hinson “Peace Love and Hard Liquor”
The Nanker Phelge “Killer Took A Holiday”
Joe Vallina “Haven’t Got Enough”
QiET “Hirundieans”
Mike Morningstar and Rick Roberts “East End Bar”
Swivels “Chemical City”
The Company Stores “Rollin’ In”
J Marinelli “Acceptable Faces”
Bobaflex “You Don’t Wanna Know”
The Renfields “Forbidden Planet”

hour three
The Irreplaceables “PC Paradise”
Mark Beckner “Ain’t It Hard”
Amon’s Horn “Bookworm”
Justin Johnson “Trail of Tears”
Treasure Cat “Queen of Spades”
John Lancaster “A Burning Farewell”
Chum “Live In A Circle”
Axis Everything “Beat Cop”
Calendars and Kerosene “I’m Over You”
What Now “Not In Glenville”
600 lbs of Sin “Tidal Wave”
The Horse Traders “Nothing At All”
Sheldon Vance “Watch It Burn”

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 we give you an encore of two classic 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.

Monday Morning Art: Lake Study

This week’s art is a leftover from a batch of small studies I did last year.  This is an acrylic on cheap canvas board study, really just an attempt to capture the color and set the composition, for a view of Lake Cove, in Caryville,  Tennessee.

I’ve given thought to trying to apply some of my lessons learned studying and imitating Edward Hopper to a more finished version of this, but you don’t see any of that technique here. This barely hints at the atmospheric perspective or the fog.

It’s basically just rough…sort of like last week,  which is why I’m digging into the slush pile again this week.

To see this week’s art bigger try clicking HERE.

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 an also classic edition of 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.

At 8 PM you can hear the third installment of Viv Stanshall’s Rawlinson’s End on last week’s new episode of The Comedy Vault.

Tonight at 9 PM for the Monday Marathon we bring you ten bonus hours of The Swing Shift, my weekly (ish) show devoted to Swing Music. This batch of ten shows is here to make up for ceding last week’s regular Thursday night marathon to MIRRORBALL for it’s fifth anniversary.

Sunday Evening Video: Go Fourth And Prosper

Today is the day that devout fans of late-1970s sci-fi celebrate their favorite outer-space adventure, Space Trek. To honor that, we present the debut episode of the related show, Spaceteen 99.

Enjoy the thrills as Darth Khan hurls the moon through space trying to hit Captain Kirkwalker and the crew of the Starship Falcon.

Because I’m so sick of that “May the Fourth” crap that I’m just trolling you now.

The RFC Flashback: Episode One Hundred Thirty-Three

For the next couple of months The RFC Flashback will go back to the most ambitious series 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. Since I somehow managed to pull that off (with an undiagnosed case of Myasthenia Gravis, no less), I wanted to do something completely insane. Taking advantage of the wealth of local events happening during FestivALL, I hatched a crazy scheme.

I wanted to see how close I could get to producing the show daily.

I came close enough for honors. Starting on June 20, with the show you see posted above, I delivered four episodes in four days, with a total running time of 88 minutes. The next week I delivered three more shows on consecutive days, then I skipped a day and posted the final 33-minute installement on July 1. If that wasn’t crazy enough, five days after that I dropped our fifth-anniversary show, which ran more than an hour. That was more than four hours of multi-camera performances by local artists that I shot, mixed the audio, edited and stitched together into shows in less than three weeks.

This was back near the peak of FestivALL. It’s still scheduled to happen this year, but it’s been shrunk down to a single weekend, and moved to the end May/early June. I guess the more cerebral art-oriented bent of FestiVal got overwhelmed by the beer-centric bent of The newly-revived Sternwheel Regatta.

Still, I’m very proud of what I was able to pull off back in the day, and we’re going to bring you the 2011 FestivAll episodes of Radio Free Charleston for the next couple of months, as a sort of countdown to this year’s big ole mess of a city becoming a work of art. In the middle of this run of RFC Flashbacks, FestivALL 2025 will take place.

On this episode our featured performers were The Boatmen (seen at the top of this post), recorded at Live On The Levee, the Charleston Light Opera Guild, recorded at the Charleston Civic Center Little Theater, and two great performances from the Songwriter Invitational at the late, lamented Capitol Roasters by Todd Burge (seen at left, and hey, that’s my car in the background!) and Andy Park.  You can find he original production notes HERE.

« Older posts

© 2025 PopCult

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑