Rudy Panucci On Pop Culture

Month: September 2010 (Page 2 of 2)

Sunday Evening Videos: New Wave Explosion

They say the best music in the world is whatever you’re listening to during your late teens. At the risk of showing my age, the above embedded playlist is a collection of some of the best music in the world.  During the heyday of New Wave music, skinny ties, primitive sythesizers, effects-laden guitars and quirky vocals broke through into the mainstream, introducing the world to some bold new sounds…and a few old ones that sounded new to inexperienced ears.

Up above you will see and hear performers like Elvis Costello, Kate Bush, XTC, Lene Lovich, Joe Jackson, The Buggles, Klaus Nomi, The Jam, Mike Batt, Pearl Harbor and The Explosions, The Humans, and more. Sit back and travel to a time before the world lost its innocence and had to face the horror of Hair Metal.

More From Doctor Curmudgeon, Fie on FYE and My Rant May Be Taken Seriously

The PopCulteer
September 10, 2010

The Doctor Is IN!

If you saw our Sunday Evening Video last weekend, you saw the debut of Doctor Curmudgeon, the latest musical experiment to escape from the laboratory of the mad maestro, Chuck Biel.  This progressive metal trio, which also includes Vince Biel and Zack Shawkins,  pours forth some of the most exciting music my ears have heard–and my ears have heard a lot of fantastic music.

The official debut of Doctor Curmudgeon will be October 31 at The Empty Glass, sharing the bill with The Scrap Iron Pickers and John Lancaster. If you didn’t get enough of The Doctor last Sunday, after the jump you will find a SECOND “bootleg” video from last Friday’s preview show.

I could write volumes about how great this band is, but my words pale next to the music. Check out their website, and watch the video below the jump in today’s Popculteer.

Vince Biel on drums, Zack Shawkins on bass, Chuck Biel on guitar

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T.H.U.N.D.E.R.Struck-The Comic That Never Was

A Little History Before Our Main Course

“The Higher United Nations Defense Enforcement Reserves”

This is the story of a comic book that I was almost involved with back in the 1980s. It’s a cool story, but first, you need some history.

Back in the mid-1960s, a small start-up comic book company, Tower Comics, launched a line of comic books that allowed some veteran creators the chance to work with more creative freedom than they’d been previously allowed. The most memorable titles to come out of this experiment were the ones featuring the superhero/secret agent hybrid, “The T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents,” a team of special agents working as a special unit of The United Nations. Most of the agents got their powers from the inventions of Dr. Emil Jennings, whom they are trying to rescue in their first adventure.

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Monday Morning Art: Cory Door

This week’s artistic jump-start is a digitally-assaulted photograph that has been so manipulated that you probably couldn’t tell what it was to begin with.  The end result is an exercise in symmetry, atmosphere and color composition.  Click it to see a bigger version.

Sunday Evening Video: Doctor Curmudgeon’s Pre-Admission Testing

Doctor Curmudgeon Bootleg Video Leak from Rudy Panucci on Vimeo.

I was lucky enough to get to attend an exclusive musical debut last Friday.  Chuck Biel’s new band, Doctor Curmudgeon, featuring Vince Biel, Zack Shawkins and Chuck Bielski, invited a small group of Charleston’s enlightened musical afficianados to listen in on their latest musical experiement.You can see some of this concentrated musical energy in the video clip at the top of this post.

It was a stunning debut.  Doctor Curmudgeon unleashed a progressive metal onslaught complete with complex baselines, insane time signatures and guitar solos that could probably be classified as controlled substances.

Even though the room was kept dark to preserve the cutting edge atmosphere, I whipped out the handy Zi8 and recorded most of the show.  From that, comes the above clip, for the tune,  “My Demon Math Metal Tune Just Ate Your Artsy-Folksy Americana Song…Sorry” The video is very dark. You can’t really see the pole-mounted power drill that Chuck uses on his guitar during the solos.

The music was so fantastic that I just had to share it ASAP.  In the future, we will have the band on Radio Free Charleston in all their fully-lit glory.  In next friday’s PopCulteer I’ll have a more detailed review of last Friday’s show, with more video.  In the meantime, check their website for more samples of this awesome music1

Let’s All Drive Downtown, Then Leave Without Finding A Place To Park!

The PopCulteer
September 3, 2010

Charleston’s Coin Job

This week’s PopCulteer is a rant. It’s not a calm opinion piece, or a well-researched hard news story. This is, hopefully, a semi-articulate hissy fit.

Parking in downtown Charleston sucks. There is no better way to say it.

There aren’t enough handy places to park. The parking meters are stingy with their time. The Meter Maids are overly agressive. It’s almost like the city doesn’t want to be bothered with us puny humans.

There is so much cool stuff downtown, but it’s becoming more and more of a hassle to get to it. I don’t know how Charleston expects to attract new businesses when established businesses are seeing their customers driven away by a lack of decent parking. Continue reading

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