Month: July 2010 (Page 2 of 3)

Photo by Amos Perrine, digitally assaulted by Rudy

Last night at The Empty Glass, Ann Magnuson, backed by a band led by Chuck Biel, electrified a packed house with an evening of David Bowie’s greatest songs.  It was one of those magic nights that brings out everybody, and it was all to benefit Covenant House.

We were treated to a special performance by one of Charleston’s most treasured natives, performing songs by one of the world’s greatest songwriters, all for a truly worthy cause.

Covenant House works to prevent homelessness by offering various housing-related programs that combine helping people access affordable housing with services that help people sustain stability to keep the housing long-term.  Our target group are those who face the most complex challenges—individuals who are not only homeless or at risk of homelessness, but who also have very low incomes and serious, persistent issues that may include substance use, mental illness, and HIV/AIDS.

To help Covenant House in their mission, visit their website for details on how you can donate and volunteer.  You’ll find a few more photos from last night’s Glam Explosion follow the “read more” link. Continue reading

Last year I raved about The Scrap Iron Pickers debut CD, a double-EP filled with explosive progressive metal.  The Pickers are hard at work on their second release, and they’ve turned to Kickstarter.com to help finance it. This is a great new grass-roots way for creative people to find funding for their projects.  Previously, here in PopCult, I’ve written about successful Kickstarter efforts by Wolfgang Parker, for his graphic novel “1888” and Eamon Hardiman with Zombie Babies.

Now you get a chance to play record mogul.  If you kick in ten bucks, you get your choice of a CD or T Shirt.  Fifteen dollars gets you both. There are varying incentives at the higher donation levels, including a date with drummer, Matt Wolfe, a custom-made effects pedal from guitarist Johnny Sizemore (of Dirty Pedals fame) and if you kick in four hundred bucks, you even get a private show.

So why not check out the music and see if you want to support the band?  Up at the top of this post is a video I put together for one of their tunes.  The Kickstarter Widget is right below.

My fondness for Marx Toys’ Johnny West action figure line has been well-documented here before. That’s why it’s a real treat to announce that, for the first time in years, you can buy a brand-new Johnny West action figure.  Noah and Terri Coop’s New Marx Toy Company has just made “U.S. Marshall Johnny West” available to order.

You can order Marshall Johnny directly from the Magic Marxie website. The cost is $44.99, which gets you a high-quality action figure, molded in the familiar Johnny West caramel brown color (with a reconfigured plastic that will last much longer than the original figures) plus 18 accessories, instructions, a bonus Magic Marxie figure, and a surprise mail-in offer.  This all comes in a sturdy, 1974-style “Best Of The West” box.

You can check here for more cool deluxe Marx action figures.

The Zombie Babies, that is.  Eamon Hardiman is gearing up for his next cinematic magnum opus, “Zombie Babies.”  The recent Kickstarter.com fundraising effort was a success, but Razor Sharp Productions needs more cash in order to bring this lovely story to the big screen.  This time they’ve hooked up with Indie A Go Go to raise the extra moolah.  Check it out, and please give all you can, for the sake of the babies.

Today’s art is a digital abstract. Just an excerise in color composition and playing around with filters. Possibly inspired by satellite photos of the oil spil in the gulf.

Click the image to see it larger.

RFC 102 "FestivAll 2010 Pt. One" from Rudy Panucci on Vimeo.

Radio Free Charleston has completed our six-episode voyage into Cinéma vérité coverage of FestivAll 2010. I’ve not bid farewell to FestivAll yet, since I still need to finish the detailed production notes  for these shows (next week, for sure. I needed a day off yesterday). Today we’re going to re-present, in one handy post, all six of our FestivAll 2010 shows. Above you see RFC 102, with The Nanker Phelge, Spurgie Hankins Band, The Kanawha Kordsmen and Bob Thompson.

After the jump, you’ll find the remaining five episodes (for a total of over two hours of RFC at FestivAll) with music from Brian Diller, The VooDoo Katz, Comparsa, The Velvet Gypsies, Miss Behavin’, Option 22, Alasha Al-Qudwah, Mark Scarpelli, The Sweet Adelines, Actual Rhinocerous, Bare Bones, T.J. King and many more.  You’ll also see lots of the art, parades, theater and film that permeated the city.

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One of Charleston’s most-anticipated new musical conglomerations makes their official debut Saturday night at The Empty Glass.   Beaverk Knievel is made of of equal parts of The Pistol Whippers and The Big Bad, two of the area’s most popular defunct bands.The end result is a powerhouse of Psychobilly Country-Punk madness!

If you can tolerate being a bar full of people who would actually pay to see Jesco White, you’ll be rewarded with the first “official” show by this new group.  However, if you were savvy enough to attend the fundraiser for Eamon Hardiman’s new movie, “Zombie Babies” Wednesday night, you got a sneak peek at the Beaver boys in action.

From two nights ago, you can see four songs by Beaver Knievel above. After the jump you get a bonus song that might not be safe for work. The Popculteer will return tonight.

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RFC 107 "FestivAll 2010 part six" from Rudy Panucci on Vimeo.

Above you see the final installment of Radio Free Charleston’s extensive coverage of FestivAll 2010.  Even though our coverage was extensive, we still barely scratched the surface of all the cool stuff that was going on during the time when our city becomes a work of art.

In RFC 107 you will see Option 22, Brian Diller, Bare Bones and The Velvet Gypsies. You’ll also get glimpses of Jude Binder, Kitty Killton and the Musical Easels project with Adrian DeQuiros.

With this episode of the show, which coincidentally goes online roughly on the fourth anniversary of Radio Free Charleston, we have managed to bring you over two hours of footage, shot entirely at FestivAll, in the span of seventeen days.  That’s just better than a new show every three days that we’ve posted.

A special PopCulteer with full production notes for these six episodes will be posted this weekend here in PopCult.  A totally unrelated-to-FestivAll bonus video will be posted here Friday, featuring a new band that will explode on the scene Saturday night.

RFC 106 "FestivAll 2010 part five" from Rudy Panucci on Vimeo.

Episode 106 of Radio Free Charleston is right there at the top of this post. This is the next-to-last of our six-episode look at FestivAll 2010.  For those of you keeping score at home, this has been the equivalent of producing a two-hour documentary–filming, editing, and posting online–in the span of three weeks.

This episode of RFC includes music from The Velvet Gypsies, Actual Rhinocerous and Comparsa, plus a sample of Patrick Felton’s play, “Waiting For Jennifer” and more scenes from ArtWalk and the Capitol Street Art Fair, featuring Jude Binder and the Crystal Tooth Gallery this time.

The current plan is for our final FestivAll installment to include music from Barebones, Option 22 and Brian Diller, and as much of the rest of the stuff I shot during FestivAll as possible. I want to have that one online by the end of the week.  If all goes well, I may cut these shows together into one feature-length film, and figure out where we can show it.

This week’s PopCulteer is supposed to be a full set of production notes for all six episodes complete with behind-the-scenes anecdotes and stories about how we filmed these suckers.  Considering the fact that I haven’t started on part six yet, those plans are subject to change.

RFC 108 is going to get us back to normal with InFormation and a cool video by Frank Panucci for the group, Volt 9000. Look for it a couple of weeks after we get FestivAll wrapped up.

Today’s Art to kick off the week is a digital watercolor of the faux-sternwheeler they brought in for FestivAll.  I’ve always felt that the whole “Charleston was a Sternwheeler River city” thing was contrived and bogus, but you can’t deny that the boats look cool.  This is based on a photograph I took from Haddad Riverfront Park right after Brian Diller played there (as seen on RFC 103 and soon on RFC 107).

You will see two more FestivAll-themed episodes of RFC this week, then we’ll get back to our normal abnormality with our webshow. PopCult will be back to our normal schedule this week. If you like this image, click it to see a bigger version.