Month: September 2016 (Page 3 of 4)

We have a killer line-up of great programming once again today on The AIR. All-new episodes of Life Speaks with Michele Zirkle Marcum, Curtain Call and The Swing Shift are joined by new-to-The-AIR editions of Lynn Browder’s Autism Discussion, and The Goon Show. We are also re-presenting, by popular demand, the On The Road with Mel about West Virginia Football and later tonight you can hear the latest episode of The Gibby Hunters.

Wednesday is loaded with great talk, comedy and music. Listen at the website or on this sweet little radio widget…

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At 1:30 PM, Life Speaks brings you tales of paranormal happenings in real life, and this week a spider comes into play. At 3 PM Curtain Call presents an hour of terrific showtunes from The Point, Aladdin, Tomfollerly, Hamilton, Fela and more. The Swing Shift starts at 4 PM, and this week the show, hosted by your PopCulteer, brings you an hour of “newish” swing. This week it’s all from 1978 or later, and you’ll hear The Brian Setzer Orchestra, Paul McCartney, Tom Jones, Lady Gaga, Big Bad Vodoo Daddy and more.

Here’s the full line-up of all of today’s great programming on The AIR:

11 AM  The Lynn Browder Show About Autism NEW
Noon Curtain Call with Mel Larch Episode 008
1 PM On The Road With Mel West Virginia Football
1:30 PM Life Speaks with Michele Zirkle Marcum NEW
2 PM The Real with Mark Wolfe with Albert Perrone and Douglas Imbrogno
3 PM Curtain Call with Mel Larch Episode 009 NEW
4 PM The Swing Shift Episode 008 NEW
6 PM The Goon Show NEW (now one full hour!)
7 PM The Best of Word Association with Lee and Rudy
8 PM Booster Pack
9 PM The Real with Mark Wolfe  with Lynne Sandy
10 PM The Gibby Hunters NEW!
11 PM The Comedy Vault

It’s time yet again for the Tuesday line-up on The AIR, with a fresh installment of Radio Free Charleston as well as encore episodes of  Radio Coolsville and  Six Degrees of Separation featuring Chris Ojeda of Byzantine, plus we have an encore of last week’s Radio Free Charleston International which has moved to its new timeslot, Thursdays at 3 PM.

As is always the case, 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, opening with a new tune from Crazy Jane, and continuing with an impressive line-up of fantastic local music. We have a replay at 10 PM, so you can listen a second time! Just check out the playlist:

RFCv4024

Crazy Jane  “Amazing”
Jeff Ellis and 40 Days  “Night Shift”
Under Surveillance  “99 Reasons”
M & Chuck Biel  “Percussionista”

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This week kicks off with a quick little digital doodle of the Starship Enterprise, from the iconic science fiction televison show Star Trek. Last week saw the fiftieth anniversary of the debut of Star Trek on NBC.  The current stewards of the property didn’t do much to acknowledge this milestone anniversary, so I don’t feel too bad that I forgot about it too. Still, I took the time to bang out this quick little piece of digital art. You can hear me talk more about the importance of Star Trek at the very first panel at ShockaCon this year, where Mark Wolfe, Lee Harrah and Tim Arnott will join me to talk about fifty years of Star Trek toys. That happens on September 30 at 5 PM..

As for this art, click to enlarge.

Marty Feldman was a wonderful and distinctive comedy presence. You probably know him from Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein and Silent Movie, or his many other film roles or television appearances. Watch this show to learn all sorts of things about him that you probably didn’t know. It covers his beginnings in British radio through his work on TV with some of the folks who went on to become part of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and then his work in film before his premature death in the 1980s. This British TV documentary runs a bit less than a hour. Enjoy!

This week we take you back to 2007, via 2010. Radio Free Charleston’s 13th episode, “World Without Fear Shirt” was sort of unlucky. It had great music and animation in it, but the episode was lost in a hard drive crash and couldn’t be recovered from back-up discs. In 2010, I discovered a file that contained all the elements of the show and was able to reconstruct it with a new introduction. This show feaures Martyranny’s Collective Pulse, The Concept and animation and a short film from Frank Panucci.

The main reason for the new intro was to explain what had happened, but also to correct the horrible mispronounciation of Martyranny’s Collective Pulse, which I butchered throughout the original episode. “Marty-Ranny” remains to this day the worst botched intro in the history of Radio Free Charleston.

You can read the original production notes here, and the reassembled notes here.

Tune in to The AIR today for a brand-new episode of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat at 3 PM. Today, Sydney Fileen is presenting a special “gimmick” show to mark ten editions of her New Wave Music program. Tune in for New Wave covers of other artist’s songs.

You can listen at The AIR website, or right on this neat little embedded player…

This two-hour blast of New Wave cover tunes airs today at 3 PM, with replays Saturday afternoon and Monday morning on The AIR.

The playlist:

Missing Persons  “Hello I Love You”
Joe Jackson  “The Harder They Fall”
The Ramones  “Surfin’ Bird”
The Clash  “Police On My Back”
The B 52s  “Downtown”
Erasure  “River Deep, Mountain High”
The Creatures  “Wild Thing”
DEVO  “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction”
Flying Lizards  “Summertime Blues”
Elvis Costello  “I Can’t Stand Up For Falling Down”
Lene Lovich  “I Think We’re Alone Now”
Klaus Nomi  “You Don’t Own Me”
Rockpile  “When Will I Be Loved”
Thompson Twins  “Revolution”
Robert Palmer  “Not A Second Time”
Souixsie and The Banshees  “Dear Prudence”
New Musik  “All You Need Is Love”
Soft Cell  “Tainted Love/Where Did Our Love Go”
The Stranglers  “Walk On By”
Dave Stewart and Colin Blunstone  “What Becomes of the Broken Hearted”
Eurythmics with Green from Scritti Politti  “Wrap It Up”
The Beat  “Can’t Get Used To Losing You”
Frankie Goes To Hollywood  “Born To Run”
The Bangles  “Hazy Shade of Winter”
Marianne Faithfull  “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan”
Pretenders  “Stop Your Sobbing”
Oingo Boingo  “You Really Got Me”
The Stranglers  “All Day and All of The Night”
Art of Noise  “Peter Gunn”
The Dickies  “Knights In White Satin”
Echo and The Bunnymen  “People Are Strange”

The PopCulteer
September 9, 2016

On The Outside

As The Gazette-Mail’s resident pop culture blogger, I occasionally need to acknowlege my failings as an observer of all things pop culture. There are many, but today I’m just going to run down a few things that place me well outside the mainstream.

I don’t feel that these things disqualify from covering pop culture, rather, they allow me to distance myself from the midst of all that is happening and make objective calls about some things. There are three things that seem to dominate the local pop-culture scene of late which I cannot lay claim to having any interest in whatsoever: Beer, Bacon and Country Music.

Let me address these one by one.

Beer, of course, is an alcoholic beverage. I don’t drink anything with alcohol. I have never wanted to. It’s a matter of taste. I find all alcoholic beverages to be vile-tasting, mediciny concoctions. Add to that the recent discovery that my skin is so alcohol-sensitive that mouthwash can raise a welt, and you can see that I simply have no use for the stuff.

This is not an “I’m better than you” thing with me. It’s simply a matter of taste. The side benefits from this is that I have never been intoxicated in my life. I have no idea what it’s like to be drunk or hungover. From what I hear, I’m not missing much in that regard.

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The PopCult Bookshelf

Cynical Rhymes and Lullabies
by David Synn
with illustrations by Sharon Lyn Stackpole
Empty Glass Records
ISBN-13: 978-0692614860
$14.95

First of all, a disclaimer: David Synn has been a friend, and occasional collaborator of mine for years. That is bound to influence my opinion of his work, but I will try not to let it color my review too much.

Cynical Rhymes and Lullabies is a collection of poems by area musician/poet David Synn, and it shows quite a progression from his earlier poetry (Art of Disilusionment, collected HERE), with a broader spectrum of poems that explore topics ranging from love to social media to lonliness, the future and even hints of speculative fiction.

This collection of thirty-three short poems is filled with David’s keen insights, unique analysis, clever observations and thoughtful philosophies, all distilled into brief, lyrical essays. More optimistic than his previous collection, Cynical Rhymes and Lullabies still brims with David’s seasoned worldview that makes the title particularly apt. He proves that you can be hopeful without forgetting the life lessons you’ve learned.

Aiding David in this endeavor is another friend of mine, Sharon Lyn Stackpole, who provides the cover art and spot illustrations throughout. She does a great job capturing the spirit of David’s poems and her work enhances his already strong material.

Cynical Rhymes and Lullabies is a short book, but one that bears repeated readings. David’s wordplay is inventive and evocative and stands up well to different intepretations.

David is returning to music, his first love, so it may be a while before we get another book of poetry from him, however the chance of his foray into poetry affecting his music and lyrics in the future leaves us hopeful that we will continue to hear more from this unique voice.

Cynical Rhymes and Lullabies can be ordered directly from Amazon, where it can also be purchased for the Kindle.

PopCult Note: Last month I inteviewed David for The AIR. In this one-hour RFC Interview Special we talked about his music, his poetry and his artistic collaborators. You can listen to the interview on this embedded player/link HERE

Thursday has a new look on The AIR. We’re changing the schedule around a little bit based on feedback from our listeners, along with some other factors, and as of today, Radio Free Charleston International joins our afternoon music lineup and new episodes will premiere every Thursday at 3 PM.

You can listen to The AIR at the website or on this particularly ingenious and clever, if arrogant, little embedded radio player…

Previously as listeners of The AIR know, Thursday afternoons were filled with the “Thursday Fourplay” consisting of half hour shows, Beatles Blast, Psychedelic Shack, Ska Madness, and The Punk Club. We lost much of our British announcing crew to the Olympics for a few weeks and it didn’t make sense for me to keep producing new episodes of Beatles Blast while the other shows were in reruns.  So we’ve all been in reruns for the last month or so.

Following incidents in Brazil, Humphrey Hubert is no longer working with Haversham Recording Institute and so The Punk Club has shut its doors. We have made the decision to re-tool Beatles Blast, Ska Madness, and Psychedelic Shack as hour-long programs that will return to the schedule in new time slots in a few weeks.

Concurrently with this happening, several people expressed to your PopCulteer their frustration with the late time slot for Radio Free Charleston International, the show where I get to play whatever the hell I want.  So we have moved Radio Free Charleston International to the 3 PM time slot and it will be followed each week at 5 PM by a replay of that week’s Radio Free Charleston.

Radio Free Charleston International is an unpredictable, eclectic mix of all sorts of crazy types of music jammed together. Don’t believe me? Check out today’s playlist:

John Cale  “Changes Made”
They Might Be Giants  “Black Ops”
Dirty Heads  “Oxygen”
Green Day  “Bang Bang”
John Anderson  “Midnight Dancing”
Frank Zappa  “Uncle Remus (Mix Outtake)
Peter Garrett  “Homecoming”
DEVO  “I Love Ur Gun”
No Doubt  “Snakes”
Kate Pierson  “Guitars and Microphones”
Neil Young  “Vampire Blues”
Mi Sex  “Not Such A Bad Boy”
Sabaton  “Camouflage”
The Who  “Cook’s County”
A Day To Remember  “Bullfight”
DGM  “Animal”
Placebo  “Twenty Years”
Faith No More  “Why Do You Bother”
Paul McCartney  “Check My Machine”
Ultravox  “There Goes A Beautiful World”
Shakespeare’s Sister  “Catwoman”
Screamin” Jay Hawkins  “Frenzy”
King Grizzard and the Lizard Wizard  “Mr. Beat”
George Harrison  “Party Seacombe”
Kate Bush  “James And The Cold Gun”
The Temptations  “Ball Of Confusion”
Strawberry Alarm Clock  “Blues For A Young Girl Gone”
The Radio Department  “The Thing Was Bored”

The PopCult Toybox

SENTINEL 1 “True Heroes” 12″ Action figure
Made and sold by Toys R Us
$9.99

As I promised last week, today we take a close look at the new SENTINEL 1 action figure, which is an exclusive to Toys R Us.

There are four figures in this line, Bandit, Shadow, Wolf and Barracuda. They are not based on any licensed property, but look like they could fit into any number of paramilitary-themed video games. “True Heroes” and “SENTINEL1” are trademarks of Toys R Us, and the toys sold under these names are usually made by a variety of Chinese factories. Most of their smaller-scale figures and vehicles are made by Chap Mei, and it’s possible that these figures are as well, which would make them Chap Mei’s first forays into 1/6 scale action figures. However, it’s just as likely that they are made by another company. Toys R Us does not like to release information about who produces their store-brand products.

Whoever makes these has crafted a very impressive figure for the price. Even the packaging is well-done. For the purposes of this review we will focus on Bandit. All four figures have basically the same features and accessories, headgear, a removeable vest, a knife and a large gun with less-than-realistic styling.

This figure comes on the wave of low-priced, modestly-articulated 12″ figures that sell for ten dollars or less. As I wrote last week, this scale is currently popular with buyers, so everyone seems to be getting in on the act.

The best comparison for this figure would be GI Joe, which is ironic, since there are currently no GI Joes being sold in the mass market. Standing a full twelve inches tall, this figures is a bit taller than the standard 1/6 scale figure. He seems even bigger than that because he is broad. From elbow to elbow, this figure is about one-and-one-half times as wide as a standard military action figure.

Much of the reason for this is the molded-on clothing and gear, but he’s also sculpted to be much more muscular and stout than other figures.

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