Month: October 2016 (Page 2 of 4)

Not the Grateful Dead. We’re talking about The Walking Dead, which returns to begin its seventh season tonight on AMC. Last year your PopCulteer and his lovely wife, Melanie Larch, traveled to Senoia Georgia, where they film much of the hit AMC series, The Walking Dead. Mel directed this brief look at the town and its Official Walking Dead store, The Woodbury Shoppe.

Since the show begins a new season tnight, and we’ll finally find out which regular cast member gets knocked out of the park by new series bad guy, Negan and Lucille (his barbed-wire-wrapped bat) AND since this video is getting close to the 2,000-view mark, we’re going to bring it to you again.

Fans of The AIR might note that it was this clip that inspired Melanie to begin her radio show about travel, On The Road With Mel, which can be heard on The AIR Wednesday and Sunday Afternoons at 1PM, and Mondays at 12:30 PM..

This is the nineteenth episode of Radio Free Charleston, “Ian Rotten Shirt,” from May 2007, with music from Go Van Gogh and The Ghosts Of Now, plus a Pentagram Flowerbox cartoon, which has been restored to its original place in the show.

This show marks the RFC debut of Lee Harrah, who is still a frequent guest and a valued production team member in addition to being my co-star in Word Association with Lee and Rudy, which can be heard Wednesdays at 7:30 PM, with replays throughout the week, on The AIR.

You can tune in to The AIR and hear all kinds of cool stuff, like our new addition, The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, at the website or in this neat little embedded player…

The Mystery camera person who shot the original footage of Go Van Gogh turned out to be none other than Melissa Beezley (now Melissa Beezely Johnson) who has been a friend of RFC since the radio days.

You can read the original production notes here.

Sydney Fileen hits a macabre milestone this week as Sydney’s Big Electric Cat marks thirteen episodes and devotes two hours to New Wave Music by “People Who Died,” beginning with The Jim Carroll Band.

You can hear Sydney’s Big Electric Cat at 3 PM on The AIR at the website on on this scary little embedded player…

Jim Carroll, the author of “The Basketball Diaries” did indeed front a New Wave band that had one hit with “People Who Died” in 1979.  Since Mr. Carroll has since joined those ranks, BEC host, Sydney Fileen, decided to make deceased New Wavers the theme for her 13th show. Other notable departed musicians you will hear include Joe Strummer, The Ramones, Wendy O. Williams of The Plasmatics, Ian Dury, Lemmy of Motorhead, Ian Curtis of Joy Division and a whole hearseload of other late greats.

Sure, it’s a dark topic, but Halloween is coming up, so why not roll with it?

The playlist:

Jim Carroll Band  “People Who Died”
The Clash  “London Calling” (Joe Strummer)
The Cars  “Just What I Needed” (Benjamin Orr)
The Ramones  “Beat On The Brat” (Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee, Marky)
The Plasmatics  “Butcher Baby” (Wendy O. Williams)
Ian Dury and The Blockheads  “Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick”
Motorhead  “White Line Fever” (Lemmy)
The Divinyls  “I Touch Myself” (Christine Amphlett)
INXS  “Suicide Blonde” (Michael Hutchence)
Suicide  “Ghost Rider” (Alan Vega)
The Cramps  “Human Fly” (Lux Interior)
Klaus Nomi  “You Don’t Own Me”
Mink Deville “Spanish Stroll” (Willy Deville)
Dead Boys  “Sonic Reducer” (Stiv Bators)
Joy Division  “New Dawn Fades” (Ian Curtis)
Baltimora  “Tarzan Boy” (Jimmy McShane)
David Bowie  “Cat People (Putting Out Fire)”
X Ray Spex  “Oh bondage, Up Yours” (Poly Styrene)
B 52s  “Rock Lobster” (Ricky Wilson)
Pretenders  “Space Invader” (James Honeyman-Scott, Pete Farndon)
Kirsty MacColl  “They Don’t Know”
Divine  “Kick Your Butt”
Robert Palmer  “Looking For Clues”
The Slits  “Typical Girls” (Ari Up)
Falco “Rock Me Amadeus”
Visage  “Fade To Grey” (Steve Strange)
Big Country “In A Big Country” (Stuart Adamson)
The Knack  “Good Girls Don’t”(Doug Feiger, Bruce Gary)

Sydney’s Big Electric Cat replays throughout the week, with a prime-time airing next Tuesday at 8 PM.

The remainder of The AIR’s NEW schedule Friday goes like this:

5 PM  The Swing Shift
6 PM  Curtain Call
7 PM  The Mystery Hour
8 PM The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
9 PM  Laugh Appalachia
9:30 PM  Word Association with Lee & Rudy
10 PM  Radio Free Charleston International
Midnight  All-night Comedy

The PopCult Bookshelf

The Amazing Toys of Marvin Glass
by Joyce Grant
Schiffer Publishing Ltd.
ISBN-13: 978-0764351259
$24.99

The Amazing Toys of Marvin Glass is an absolute treasure. Pure eye candy, this book is a long overdue tribute to one of the most prolific toy inventors in American history. Joyce Grant has compiled an amazing archive of images of the toys designed by Marvin Glass and Associates.

Marvin Glass was a toy inventor of humble beginnings who formed his toy design and engineering firm in Chicago in 1941. MGA became the first independent design firm in the toy industry, placing their creations with different toy firms, eventually creating a stable of iconic toys that were manufactured by Hasbro, Mattel, Ideal, Milton Bradley, the Marx Toy Company, and dozens of other toymakers.

The roll call of toys invented by Marvin Glass and Associates includes such classics as Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots, the game Mousetrap, the game Operation, Mr. Machine, Lite Brite, SSP Cars, the Evel Knievel Stunt Cycle, Mystery Date, Inch Worm, and hundreds of other memorable toys. You will find photographs of well over a hundred of his inventions in this book.

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The PopCulteer
October 21, 2016

Your PopCulteer doesn’t write too much about food here in PopCult. Food is a huge part of popular culture, but since I don’t worship at the altar of beer or bacon, and don’t obsess over every gourmet detail, I don’t offer up much in the way of opinion. Other people can write authoritatively about such things. I just know what I like.

However, I do eat out a lot…too much, some would say. I’ve been noticing a disturbing trend for the last several years, and I feel it’s responsible for the recent lousy economic performance of many national restaurant chains.

Last week The Wall Street Journal published a piece by  Julie Jargon and Lillian Rizzo that covered the recent woes of chains like  Così.Don Pablo, Souplantation and Sweet Tomatoes, Bob Evans and Ruby Tuesday, which have entered bankruptcy or closed restaurants over the past few years.  The article posits that we are entering an industry shakeout that will see a huge drop in the number of restaurant locations over the next five or ten years.

Some people blame the economy, but the problem goes further than that, and the WSJ article addresses many reasons for this, like supply outstripping demand, the low price of groceries making eating at home more affordable than eating out and the rise of “To Go” restaurants crowding out sit-down establishments.

All of these reasons help to explain the recent downturn, but there’s another major factor that affects chain restaurants that the article doesn’t mention. For the last ten years or so, consultants to the foodservice industry have pushed a stock agenda that has been adopted by almost every major restaurant chain. These consultants have advised restaurants to eliminate items from their menus as a cost-cutting measure. Almost every major chain restaurant now offers 30-to-50 percent fewer menu items than they did a few years ago. On top of that, some of them have cheapened up some of the recipes that they have retained.

We are now seeing what happens when restaurants eliminate menu items or change things. Customers who liked those items go elsewhere. Loyal customers are lost forever. Once they are freed from the habit of going to the same place over and over, they start eating at other chains, or more often, locally-owned restaurants that offer bigger menus with fresher, better-tasting food. These are not customers that can be won back with a short-term promotion or a splashy ad campaign.

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Our week of tinkering with The AIR continues as we bring you a brand-new episode of Radio Free Charleston International and welcome The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy to the channel Thursday. You can tune in to The AIR website, or listen right on this little player thingamajig…

At 3 PM you can listen to a new edition of Radio Free Charleston International. It’s two full hours loaded with an insanely eclectic assortment of interesting music from all around the world. The full playlist appears at the bottom of this post. At 5 PM check out a replay of this week’s local showcase edition of Radio Free Charleston.

Then at 6 PM you can hear the debut of the BBC Radio production of Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a classic science fiction comedy radio series written by Douglas Adams (with some material in the first series provided by John Lloyd). It was originally broadcast in the United Kingdom by BBC Radio 4 in 1978. It was the success of the radio series that inspired the series of books.

The series follows the adventures of hapless Englishman Arthur Dent and his friend Ford Prefect, an alien who writes for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a pan-galactic encyclopedia and travel guide. After Earth is destroyed in the first episode, Arthur and Ford find themselves aboard a stolen spaceship piloted by a motley crew including Zaphod Beeblebrox (Ford’s semi-cousin and Galactic President), the depressed robot Marvin and Trillian, the only other human survivor of Earth’s destruction.

We are thrilled to bring you this series on The AIR, by special arrangement with the BBC. Each Thursday at 6 PM we will present two of the original episodes, giving you a full hour of Panic-free goodness. The show will repeat Friday at 10 AM and 8 PM, Sunday at 11 AM, Monday at 2 PM and occasionally in one of our late-night timeslots.

Following The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on Thursday evening, you can hear The Comedy Vault and Curtain Call, and cap the night off with Live From The Empty Glass.

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Wednesday is all bright and shiny with tons of great programming in a new line-up today on The AIR. All-new episodes of On The Road with Mel, Life Speaks with Michele Zirkle Marcum, Curtain Call m The Gibby Hunters and The Comedy Vault are joined by new-to-The-AIR editions of The Best of The Real with Mark Wolfe, and The Goon Show. We are also replaying Life Speaks and Prognosis tonight.

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

Kick off your day with a replay of yesterday’s episode of The Swing Shift at 7 AM. That’s followed at 9 AM by a replay of Radio Coolsville, and then a special treat for fans of Van Morrison at 11 AM. At Noon a replay of last week’s Curtain Call leads in to a special brand-new edition of On The Road with Mel at 1 PM that takes us on a musical tour around the country.

At 1:30 PM Michele Zirkle Marcum hosts a new Life Speaks that features part two of her interview with her mother. 2PM sees The Best of The Real with Mark Wolfe as we dig back into the archives for his third show, an interview with your PopCulteer.

At 3 PM Curtain Call expands to two hours, with Mel Larch hosting the best of musical theater. This is followed at 5 PM by an hour of random local music from The AIR archives. At 6 PM it’s an hour of The Goon Show. Life Speaks replays at 7 PM, followed at 7:3o by Word Association with Lee and Rudy.

Prime Time kicks off at 8 PM with a nighttime replay of Prognosis, hosted by Herman Linte. This week Herman brings you two hours of Emerson Lake and Palmer. We close the night with The Gibby Hunters at 10 PM and The Comedy Vault at 11 PM.

Midnight ushers in a full night of mysterious programming that will thrill, delight and mystify you.

We have made some changes to the  Tuesday line-up on The AIR this week.  Radio Free Charleston stays where it always has been, at 10 AM and 10 PM, but Radio Coolsville moves to 1 PM and The Swing Shift takes over the 3 PM spot as it expands to two hours.

As is always the case, you can tune in at The AIR website or on this special little embedded radio player widget…

After an encore of this week’s Prognosis at 7 AM (featuring the music of Emerson, Lake and Palmer) and an encore of Curtain Call at 9 AM, we have a fresh installment of Radio Free Charleston at 10 AM. This week the show is devoted to local bands that are no longer performing together. We start off with The Defectors and bring you music from Feast of Steven, Go Van Gogh, Whistlepunk, Strawfyssh and more. Check out the playlist at the end of this post.

After Radio Free Charleston, tune in for an hour of Ska Madness, with Dexter Checkers at Noon. Ska Madness will return with new episodes in a new expanded timeslot very soon. 1 PM is the new time for Radio Coolsville, as DJ Betty Rock has put the show on hiatus at WMUL to focus on her studies. We’ll bring you new episodes as soon as production resumes.

At 3 PM, The AIR welcomes The Swing Shift to Tuesdays as the show expands to two hours each week (one new show, followed by one rerun). This is the show where your PopCulteer indulges in his love of Swing Music, bringing you the hottest big band tunes from the last century. This week we open the show with a Led Zepplin cover, done Swing style, and slap you upside your head with artists like Royal Crown Revue, Atomic Fireballs, Woody Herman, Brian Setzer Orchestra and more. Check out the full playlist at the bottom of this post. To get you acclimated to this modern new sound coming out of your internet, this week we bring you TWO EXTRA HOURS of The Swing Shift starting at 5 PM.

At 7 PM we shift gears, musically and present a special treat for fans of the band, DEVO. This is followed by the new prime-time replay of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat, our New Wave extravaganza which will now be heard every Tuesday at 8 PM, leading into the second airing of Radio Free Charleston at 10 PM.

Last week’s Radio Free Charleston International airs at 11 PM, and overnight you can hear a mini-marathon of That Conversation with Patrick Felton.This is all part of our efforts to make The AIR a unique listening experience.

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We are tinkering with the schedule a bit this week on The AIR. And if you didn’t know, The AIR is an internet radio station which is closely associated with this here blog. You can listen to The AIR at the website or on this embedded virtual radio thingy…

Let me tell you about the new stuff you can listen to Monday. As always, the day will kick off at 7 AM with a replay of the previous Friday’s episode of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat. Our 3 PM specialty music shows will always eoncore the following weekday at 7 AM.

From 9 AM to Noon, tune in for the best of local music as we bring you three encore episodes of Radio Free Charleston. At Noon, you can hear a replay of the previous week’s Laugh Appalachia, with Lee, Tiff, and Jay, followed by a replay of the previous week’s On The Road With Mel. At 1 PM, check out a full hour of Life Speaks with Michele Zirkle Marcum. At 2 PM, it’s the Independent Music Showcase on The AIR.

3 PM will see two hours of progressive rock with Prognosis, hosted by Herman Linte. This will be followed at 5 PM by Harrah’s Hard and Heavy, wherein Lee Harrah brings you an hour of hard and heavy music in a new, earlier time slot. At 6 PM, The Mystery Hour will surprise you every time.

At 7 PM we will continue to bring you the best of That Conversation with Patrick Felton and at 9 PM, we’ll bring you The Best of The Real With Mark Wolfe.As a special egomaniacal treat, both of those shows tonight feature interviews with yours truly. You can hear me blather on for three hours straight!

10 PM sees the return of Six Degrees of Separation, an interview show hosted by Tim Dorsey and Jason “Roadblock” Robinson and recorded at The Empty Glass.Tonight’s show is an interview with Mr. Lee Harrah, host of Harrah’s Hard & Heavy and my co-host on Word Association with Lee and Rudy.

At Midnight almost every night, The All-Nighter will present seven hours of unpredictable underground radio.You will heare a mix of encores of our other programming, along with special spoken-word and comedy programs and other surprises that you’ll just have to tune in to experience. The plan is to thrill and delight the insomniacs among our listeners. Check back every day this week for the revised programming line ups for The AIR.

We start this week iwth a digital painting that attempts to pay tribute to Jim Steranko and Russ Meyer at the same time. It’s called “Go Go.” You can click the image to make it bigger, and see if it’s a decent tribute to either man.