Month: August 2016 (Page 3 of 4)

It’s that time of the week again when we take a look at all the nifty misadventure into which we can take part over the coming weekend. As is now the norm, you can listen to an audio version of this news right in this neat little player/link HERE. In this week’s show, which premiered yesterday on The AIR, your PopCulteer and his wife, Mel Larch, tell you about all the STUFF TO DO this weekend, and bring you samples of music by Ron Sowell, The Laser Beams, Embracer and Groove Heavy.

One event that came to light too late to make it into our audio show is a benefit for flood victims that will be held this Sunday at 1 PM at The Moose Lodge in Charleston.

“Love Hope Rebuild”  is a benefit to raise money for those affected by the floods in West Virginia.

There will be seven bands performing:  Blues Crossing; 5$Red; Mike Pushkin; Huntington Blues Society All Stars; The Charleston Rogues; Jeremy Walters Band; and Creek Don’t Rise. All proceeds will go to Mountain Mission. A minimum $5.00 donation for the show. There will be raffles and food vendors. For more information, visit http://lovehoperebuild.com/

Check out that event and our audio show above, and/or read on for words and pictures and such…

Thursday, August 11

The WVIFF Summer Garden Party (with live music by Mark Cline Bates) happens from 6 PM to 9 PM at Cavendish Hall, 207 52nd St. SE, in Kanawha City. This is the big annual party for film buffs to hear all about the upcoming film festivals and other events, plus you get great music and lots of food.  Tickets are available at Taylor Books and the WVIFF website.  A ticket Donation is $30 in advance, or $35 at the door. The tell us that a “Very Special Announcement” will be made at the party.

Heiner’s Concert Series at Pullman Square in Huntington continues with The Carpenter Ants, starting at 7PM. Stroll, shop and enjoy the sounds of Pullman Square. Great shops, restaurants and FREE concerts to ease into those relaxing summer evening.

Joseph, Mother of Jesus: Book 3, an original play by Daniel Kehde will debut Thursday night. The  Contemporary Youth Arts Company (CYAC) produces this show Thurs-Sat, Aug 11-13 and 18-20 at 8 PM at the WVSU Capitol Center Theater on Summers Street in Charleston. Tickets are $15 for Adults, $8 for Students. Call 304-342-6522 for more information.

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It’s time for yet another Wednesday filled with great programming on The AIR. Listen at the website or on this swell little radio widget…

At 11 AM, it’s The Lynn Browder Show about Autism. In 2015 Lynn Browder began producing a show for Voices of Appalachia chronicling her son’s diagnosis with autism and the adjustments that she’s made in her life. In a few weeks Lynn will resume production of her program, bringing us up to date with Owen’s progress and sharing their personal journey. Today we bring you the seventh and eighth episodes of Lynn’s original Autism Discussion show. Lynn’s show will replay on Friday morning and Sunday afternoon.

Our programs today also include an encore editions of On The Road With Mel at 1 PM,  Curtain Call, at 3 PM and The Swing Shift at 4 PM. Your PopCulteer produces all three of these shows, and wanted to take some time off in advance of  his birthday this weekend. Rest assured, that if you tune in, you will be mightily entertained and informed. Our reruns are better than everybody else’s brand-new stuff, honest!

At 1:30 PM, we do have an all new STUFF TO DO.  Your hosts Rudy Panucci and Mel Larch tell you all about the weekend’s activities including Live on The Levee, The Charleston Light Opera Guild Production of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast at The Clay center, great bands playing in our area’s top music venues and more.  This week, you’ll also hear music from Ron Sowell, The Laser Beams, Embracer and Groove Heavy. STUFF TO DO repeats at 6:30 PM and will be posted in PopCult Thursday.

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It’s an all new Tuesday on The AIR, with Radio Free Charleston, Radio Coolsville, Six Degrees of Separation featuring Johnny Compton, and Radio Free Charleston International.

You can tune in at The AIR website or on this special little embedded radio player widget…

It all kicks off at 10 AM with a brand new Radio Free Charleston, featuring new music from The Irreplaceables and tons of other great local bands. Don’t believe us? Check out the playlist right here:

The Irreplaceables  “PC Paradise”
Mark Beckner  “Ain’t It Hard”
Amon’s Horn  “Bookworm”
Justin Johnson  “Trail of Tears”
Treasure Cat  “Queen of Spades”
Ghosts of Now  “Gold Man Rising”
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 Radio Free Charleston at 10 AM and 10 PM Tuesday on The AIR.

At 11 AM and 7 PM, check out the replay of the RFC Interview with David Synn, just in case you weren’t paying attention when we told you about its debut yesterday.

At 3 PM, DJ Betty Rock regales us with another two hour blast of the coolest music on the planet, as Radio Coolsville comes to The AIR via WMUL in Huntington.

Jumping to 8 PM, it’s Six Degrees of Separation, hosted by Tim Dorsey and Jason “Roadblock” Robinson from the Empty Glass. This week, they spend more than an hour talking to local guitar legend, Johnny Compton (seen right). This is followed by a collection of tunes hand picked by Johnny himself.

At 11 PM, Radio Free Charleston International is all over the map, bringing you new music from classic artists, newer music from unknown artists, unknown music from world famous artists, and an assortment of relevatory sonic bombshells.

This week, RFC International brings you all that and even includes a special set of music made by various offspring of The Beatles. Radio Free Charleston International will be replayed Friday night at 10 PM, Saturday morning at 11 AM and Sunday night at 10 PM

Monday is busting out all over on The AIR. This evening, our plucky little internet radio station will intrigue and beguile you with interviews with local artistic heroes David Synn, RJ Haddy and Chase Henderson. We’ll also have Lee Harrah’s musical explanation of how he came to be the person he is. You can listen at The AIR website or on this technologically confounding embedded little radio player…

The excitement begins at 3PM with a brand new episode of Prognosis. Your presenter, Herman Linte, will blow your mind with two hours of complex and phenomenal progressive rock.

The interviewing excitement begins at 7PM with our lineup of great Monday night talk shows. At 7 PM, you can hear That Conversation with Patrick Felton, as Patrick talks to Chase Henderson, the man behind Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School and Gorillafoot Productions.

At 8 PM, it’s a special debut time for the second RFC Interview. This time, Radio Free Charleston‘s Rudy Panucci sits down to talk with David Synn in a career spanning interview. David has just returned to the musical scene after a hiatus during which he sold most of his instruments and began writing poetry. In this one hour special,

David talks about his entire career as a rock and roll keyboardist, beginning with his earliest band, covering his solo work, his time with Godmode Broadway and Stytch N Tyme, his poetry, and his upcoming project Membrane Cell, with Kenneth Booth.

You’ll hear samples of David’s music and poetry as he talks about his collaborations with people like Johnny Compton, Sharon Lyn Stackpole, Lee Harrah, and JC Bravo. The RFC Interview with David Synn will be repeated Tuesday at 11 AM and 7 PM and Thursday at 10 AM, with more replays throughout the following week. (Thanks to Rafeal Barker for the photo of David in his Pope Poet gear)

At 9 PM, The Best of The Real With Mark Wolfe presents Mark’s in-depth interview with RJ Haddy, F/X makeup artist extraordinaire and a multi-time contestant on the SyFy Network’s competition show, Face Off.

At 10 PM, on Harrah’s Hard and Heavy, Lee Harrah presents Part Two of his collections of songs “that made me me.” This week, Lee gets heavy with metal classics from Slayer, Motorhead, and Black Sabbath. As a special treat, at 11 PM The AIR will replay Part One of Lee’s epic soul baring self expose.

It’s been over ten years now that I’ve been regularly posting Monday Morning Art here in PopCult. Except for a couple of guest artists and some late postings on Tuesday, there has been fresh digital art every Monday in PopCult since at least August, 2006.

To commemorate this I am returning to one of the first pieces I did for PopCult, one for which I have created countless hundreds of completely unneccesary variations over the last decade or more. Here is one more. This is “Scape 2016.” Click to enlarge, if you are so inclined.

It’s hard to believe, but this short film I made six years ago somehow never made it into PopCult before (part of it was on an episode of Radio Free Charleston, but this is the whole thing).

It’s Lee Harrah, backed by HARRAH, in his pre-Ghostbuster days, dressed as another person who stumbles over and encounters apparitions that aren’t really there, Ozzy Osbourne. Enjoy!

Also, be on the lookout for HARRAH’s new CD, available from Amazon, Budget Tapes & Records and other fine retail establishments. It’s particularly swell!

We march through the run of Radio Free Charleston with our first two-part episode, now combined into one video clip, the first Radio Free Charleston Halloween Special. In our first year we decided to do two episodes for Halloween, back-to-back on consecutive weeks (the first time we achieved that, by the way). At the end of the first show, your host (that’s me) gets killed. Part two is hosted by my ghost.

Music includes The Concept, half of The Pistol Whippers, Whistlepunk, Clownhole and Professor Mike.These shows also include Pentagram Flowerbox, animation by yours truly and Brian Young, short films by Frank Panucci and the first on-screen appearance of my now-wife, Mel Larch. This began the tradition of RFC taking on overly-ambitious ideas for our Halloween Shows, and with any luck, we may cook up some sort of harebrained scheme for this year.

We have some very cool programming today on The AIR. You can listen on the website, or in this particularly nice embedded radio player…

Friday afternoon at 3 PM (with replays Saturday at 2 PM and Monday at 7 AM) we have a very special episode of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat.

Host, Sydney Fileen, has assembled a tribute to the influential and beloved multi-artist New Wave concert film, URGH! A Music War.

In the summer of 1980, Director Derek Burbidge and producer Michael White staged a series of concerts in the United States and the UK, and filmed an amazing collection of the top emerging artists from the New Wave scene. A memorable soundtrack album was released in 1982, with the film following a year later. For many music lovers in small towns, this was their first exposure to artists like The Cramps, Pere Ubu, Klaus Nomi, Toyah, and UB40. The inclusion of The Police, along with other established acts like DEVO, Oingo Boingo, Gary Numan and XTC made this a must-have album for New Wave music fans.

Now, more than thirty-six years after the original concerts, Fileen has assembled a collection of the studio versions of many of the songs featured in the final URGH! film. Time restraints meant that she couldn’t include all 34 acts that were featured in the movie, and one song is actually presented in its live form from the original album because it was never recorded as a proper studio release, but this is still a fascinating time capsule and a tribute to one of the great artifacts of the New Wave era.

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The PopCulteer
August 5, 2016

This is a weird time for me to be writing about Pop Culture.

Part of it is my personal medical situation. I’m undergoing treatment for Myasthenia Gravis, which I’ve already written about here, and it’s sort of commanding a lot of my attention. I’m doing well with it, but there are some drawbacks to the medicine I’m taking and the recovery process.

Prednisone is a bit of a wonder drug, but it comes with a price. While it’s working to rebuild the muscles that have atrophied over the eleven or more years that my disease went undiagnosed (my own fault, by the way, you can’t be diagnosed if you don’t go to the doctor), the side effects have been a bit disruptive. I’m very easily irritated and controlling my appetite has become much more of a struggle than it had been. My attention span is not what it normally is.

But aside from that, this is just a strange point in history for Pop Culture.

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It’s once again time for the weekly quick-list of outstanding events, shows and other nifty shenanigans into which you can partake this weekend, and as is now the norm, we present a swell and much-admired audio version of STUFF TO DO that you can listen to as you decide how you’re going to spend your weekend in and around Charleston. We bring you news of whats going on and sample the music of The Company Stores, Hybrid Soul Project and Pepper Fandango. You can listen to that right at this nifty little link thingy HERE.

The big story this weekend is Multifest, the 27th annual multi-cultural celebration of art, music and diversity that happens Friday, Saturday and Sunday at Haddad Riverfront Park in Charleston. In the audio edition of STUFF TO DO, we devote a huge chunk of time telling you all about the cool acts and other things going on at Multifest.

There are other cool things happening this weekend. We have plenty of nightlife, with live music all over town. There is political theater at The WVSU Capitol Center Theater, courtesy of Contemporary Youth Arts Company. Plus there’s all kinds of other cool stuff going on. Listen to the show at the link above, and augment your reality by looking at the graphics that we have available at press time.

THURSDAY

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