Month: July 2008 (Page 2 of 2)

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Y’know, I had a stellar weekend. Friday night we shot host segments for Radio Free Charleston 46 at the Hansford Art House Exhibit, then we recorded Mark Bates and The Vacancies at The Blue Parrot and The Diablo Blues Band at The Empty Glass for RFC number 48.  Saturday saw Melanie and I sitting in the front yard at Stephen and Amee Beckner’s house in Elkview watching a barrage of cool clips that Stephen had compiled featuring gunplay, chases, fight scenes and sexual tension.  We capped the evening by watching an absolutely horrible Turkish Superman movie (my contribution, I’m afraid).

So in honor of my beautiful weekend, tonight’s video clip is DEVO’s classic, “Beautiful World.” 

Photos plus a recap of the PopCult weekend follow, after the jump.

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For more details read Bill Lynch’s article in The Gazz right here.

July 11, Mark Bates and his band, The Vacancies bring their Earthy Alternative sound to The Blue Parrot.  As a special preview, PopCult presents a preview song right here for your listening pleasure.  “Spiral Down,” is a wonderful mid-tempo ballad that sounds for all the world like a lost track from rock legends, The Band.  This tasty slice of Americana ought to be enough to entice you to come out Friday night.  The band starts playing at 10 PM. The cover is a mere five bucks, and if all goes according to plan, the RFC crew will be on hand to record a couple of numbers for upcoming shows.

Until then, listen to this great song,

“Spiral Down” by Mark Bates and The Vacancies

“Sprial Down” by Mark Bates and The Vacancies.

Above, Mark Bates (center) and The Vacancies.

We jump into the post-holiday-hangover week with “Urban Landing,” a digital painting over a digitally-assaulted photograph.  It’ll be later Monday before this post gets updated with the clickable links to larger images and the Cafepress stores, so in the meantime, be sure to scroll down and check the last several posts.   We had a huge Fourth of July announcement, which nobody has seen yet, because it was a holiday or something.  Plus there’s the second of our Sunday evening YouTube clips.  It’s a new feature I forgot to mention I was starting.  Go read the heck out of ’em!

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Swiped from Suicide Kyd over at the Crowza.com message boards.  I really needed this after some of the somber events of the last week.

Two years ago today The Gazz and PopCult relaunched Radio Free Charleston, the web’s most popular videocast featuring music, film and comedy from West Virginia.  The new video incarnation of my old radio show has just reached its 45th episode, and we’re going stronger than ever.  Unfortunately, we’ve been so prolific that we filled up the servers at The Charleston Gazette.  For some reason the higher-ups here seem to think that “news” and “sports” are more important than RFC.  So our first 26 episodes are missing in action.

Until today.  We are proud to announce the launch of the RFC TV Archives, which will re-present our classic episodes, one every Friday, with expanded production notes and updates on the performers who contribute to the show.  You can visit the RFC TV Archive page at MySpace, or just follow this link to where we’ve posted the first show and its accompanying notes. 

In addition, next week, if we can work the bugs out, the RFC TV Archive page will also present audio-only versions of our most current shows, for those of you who want to download the show and listen to it in the car or where ever.  I’ll have more details when that function is up and running.  So, if you’re sitting in front of the computer on this national holiday, surf on over and go all the way back to the year 2006.  You can dig on the great music and funny comedy, or just make fun of the fashions we were wearing so long ago.

There was people arting all over the place during FestivAll last week. Not just the visual arts, but also crafts, dancing, mime-ishness, magic and tons of other stuff.  With a minimum of comment, we’re going to present a boatload of images.  To the left, you see Jude Binder, all dolled up, Victorian Kabuki-style.

After the jump we’ll take you under the Allied Artists tent, starting with a closer look at Mandy Petry’s Bagatelle-styled wall hangings.

Check PopCult tomorrow for a HUGE announcement about the Radio Free Charleston Archives! 

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Okay, we’re going to do this in two parts.  Today I’m posting photos of some of the folks I ran into during FestivAll last week.  Tomorrow I’ll post some of the art. 

To the right, you see Casi Null performing with Punk Jazz.  You’ll see more pictures of Punk Jazz below, and you’ll see them on a future episode of RFC or two.  But if you want to see them live, you only have one more chance on July 17 at The Empty Glass.  I’ll tell you more about that as the day approaches.

After the jump there are tons of pictures of folks we saw last week, enjoy! You may even be one of them.

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We were shocked and saddened today to learn of the sudden death of Randy Walden, the lead singer/bass player for the band Quick And Dirty.  Quick And Dirty just appeared on episode 44 of Radio Free Charleston.  In the short time that we knew Randy we were impressed with his talent and dedication, and we feel that the Charleston music scene has lost one of of it’s brightest up-and-coming stars.   He was an incredible musician and one hell of a nice guy. Our condolences go out to his family and his bandmates.  A tribute to Randy will appear on a future episode of Radio Free Charleston.