Month: July 2017 (Page 3 of 5)

Charleston’s Bakery, a 100-plus year-old building on the West Side that is home to several bands and artistic and creative endeavors, is in trouble. One of their largest tenants is moving out, the building needs some major repairs, and the owner is considering writing it off and turning it over to the bank for foreclosure.

Located in the original Purity Maid Bread Factory, the building currently houses the rehearsal space for Byzantine, Farnsworth, Time And Distance, Beggars Clan and all of John Poole’s musical projects.

It’s also home to the Hole in the Wall Studio, Greg Hunt’s Recording Studio, Limelight Theatre Troupe, HepCatz Design International and Dawghouse Boxxing and MMA Gym.

But there are more than 20 Vacancies. The roof needs repair and the HVAC system has some serious needs as well.

The owner, Phil Shafer, has put his neck on the line providing space for creative people in Charleston, but without tenants, he can only do so much. Without some sign that more people will come in and rent space, he will have no choice but to get out from under the financial burden. The monthly operating costs for such a huge building are enormous, and without renters, almost impossible to maintain.

Chris Ojeda, of Byzantine, has been spearheading this effort to raise awareness of the plight of this incredible work space. He sees potential in the building as an all-ages venue, with plenty of other uses for the rooms in this massive facility.

When Byzantine returns from their US tour with Sacred Reich in October, the plan is to stage a donations-only concert in the loading dock area.

Unfortunately, the Bakery may not make it to October without some immediate action.

Chris has started a Facebook Group, Charleston Music & Art Collective, which you have to ask to join, to raise awareness and brainstorm ways to rescue this building from the fate of the Quarrier Building. In case you don’t remember, the Quarrier Building was home to LiveMix Studio and rehearsal spaces for bands, art studios, martial arts dojos and all sort of creative projects before Sacred Heart got their hands on it in 2010, and booted out all the tenants and let the building sit unused for more than five years.

It was a major blow to the local arts and music scene, and forced Radio Free Charleston to start recording bands on location instead of in a controlled studio environment.

I would hate to see history repeat itself with the Bakery.

If you have a band or need studio space, or instructional space, or just a place to store equipment, contact the number in the graphic below. If you know anyone who needs incubator space for a business, or a place for small-scale manufacturing, please turn them on to this gem on Charleston’s West Side.  And ask to join the Facebook Group so you can keep up with future developments.

PopCult Note: The photo at the top of this post is taken from Jerry Water’s excellent My Home West Virginia website. The rest of the images are taken from Chris Ojeda’s Facebook posts.

It’s Monday and, as usual, we have fine programming on our internet radio station, The AIR. You can listen at the website, or on this embedded radio player…

Our monday schedule is in a bit of a holding pattern. We are awaiting new episodes of Harrah’s Hard & Heavy and Herman Linte’s Prognosis, but they aren’t here yet. Also, in August we’re expecting the return of The Real with Mark Wolfe, but it’s not here yet.

We do expect to bring you a new episode of Marking Out today at 5 PM.  Our professional wrestling program will be hosted by Betty Rock and a rotating cast of tag-team partners, taking over since Matt BelVillain has been “future endeavored.” Tune in each week for a run-down of last week’s wrestling news and storylines, presented just in time for you to listen, grab dinner, and then sit down to watch Monday Night RAW.

Following Marking Out at 6 PM, we have The New Music Show, our nightly music rotation, freshly-loaded with a ton of great local and non-local tracks. Tonight is completely local. That’s followed by The (BS) Crazy Show, which sort of defies explanation.

Our talk line-up begins at 7 PM, with That Conversation with Patrick Felton, followed by The Best of The Real with Mark Wolfe and Six Degrees of Separation.

At Midnight, settle in for an all-night marathon of Curtain Call, hosted by Mel Larch. This show presents the best of musical theater.

Every Monday in July, the artistic start to PopCult’s week will be a new version of one of the 600 or so pieces of digital art that I’ve created for this blog over the last dozen years. What happened was that I found a stash of old images, and decided to revisit them, adding minor or major twists along the way.

Today we’re going back to 2005 for a reboot of another one of the earliest pieces of my art that was posted here in PopCult. A Starry Night Over The Southside Bridge was an attempt to mimic Van Gogh while depicting a scene of Charleston’s famed gateway to the rich folk, the Southside Bridge.

I decided to take another shot at it, painting over the original digitally while using higher-quality brushes and hoping that the dozen or so years’ experience I have working with these tools made for a better work. To be honest, I’m still not happy with it. Click to see a bigger version that makes all the flaws more glaringly obvious.

We’re on a bit of a sketch comedy kick in Sunday Evening Videos. Last week we brought you clips of The Kids In The Hall, and this week were’ going to present a few random, not safe for work, episodes of Mr. Show with Bob and David.

Mr. Show with Bob and David was the premiere showcase for the American alternative comedy movement of the 1990s. Produced and hosted by Bob Odenkirk and David Cross, the show featured performers and writers like Jack Black, Sarah Silverman, Paul F. Tompkins, Tom Kenny, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Brian Posehn, Jill Talley, Scott Aukerman, and Dino Stamatopoulos. That’s really just the tip of the iceberg.

For four seasons on HBO Mr. Show introduced America to many of the performers who would go on to help define comedy for the next twenty years. Odenkirk went on to major stardom in Breaking Bad and its spin-off, Better Call Saul. Cross has appeared in numerous mainstream and underground projects. The rest of the contributing writers and cast constitute a “Who’s Who” of American comedy. Writers and performers have gone on to such projects as Tenacious D, School of Rock, Moral Orel, Comedy Bang Bang, The Sarah Silverman Show and too many other comedy milestones to mention.

Mr. Show is irreverent, satirical, iconoclastic and hilarious. Netflix produced a “sort of” reunion a couple of years ago (HBO owns the name, so the new series of four episodes and a making of documentary was simply called with Bob and David). The team showed that they hadn’t missed a step and were able, twenty years after their debut, to produce material that was just as brilliantly funny as ever.

Above you see the very first episode. Below are a couple more from later in the run. Remember, these are NOT SAFE FOR WORK, and that makes them even funnier, really.

This week, the RFC flashback heads to February, 2009 for an episode devoted to the Contemporary Youth Arts Company production of the Dan Kehde/Mark Scarpelli opera, “Lincoln.” This production of the show featured performances by Dan Khede, Tonya Dillon-Page, Jonathan Tucker, Maddy Gourevitch, Alicia Renae Lewis and a large and talented ensemble.

This episode also contains some other Lincoln-centric entertainment as we bring you the musical montage, “Funky Lincoln” and a President’s Day rebuttal by George Washington, animated by RFC Big Shot Brian Young and voiced by our host, Rudy Panucci. An additional honor for our 16th president is that this episode is named “Pittsburgh Steelers Shirt,” after his favorite NFL team. Original production notes can be found here.

Also, I did not intentionally try to dress like Dick Tracy. Sometimes these things just happen.

The PopCulteer
July 14 , 2017

So this is going to be one of those PopCulteers with lots of short items crammed in without regard to any kind of sensible order.

Basically, there’s a lot of stuff to tell you about, but the power keeps flickering on and off, so I’m sort of speed-writing to get it done on time. Please pardon any omissions or spelling or grammatical errors. Rest assured, that if there are any, they were done purely in haste.

Coming Up In PopCult

In the coming weeks you will see the return of some of our regular features that have fallen by the wayside, plus you’ll see reviews of CDs, DVDs and more notes on other cool things. I’ve been slacking off a bit for the last few months due to health issues, but it’s time to quit making excuses, and start making more PopCult. Next week we’ll have posts about Charlton Comics, Tiki Magazine, GLOW, plus all kinds of other cool things. And you can expect video and art and endless plugging of The AIR, just like normal.

Tonight in Saint Albans

Main Street Masquerade is a fund-raiser for Arti-Gras, and you’ll get the chance to mingle, hear music and buy art from cool people like Mark Wolfe, Dave Frazier and William Scott Gambil. Check out the graphic below. All the Swanky kids are going!

Contraband Magazine

In case you missed it, yesterday I posted here about Charleston’s newest alternative media outlet, Contraband Magazine. Go back and read it, and subscribe already, ya mook.

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PopCult has always been supportive of local alternative media, and there is a new zine on the scene that fills a void that Charleston has had for some time. Ever since Grafitti was sold to Ogden Publishing (the folks who put out that Blue Phonebook, and the conservative rural newspaper, Grit), there hasn’t been a sustained alternative voice for the artistic and activist communities here in town. Now there is a new alternative magazine, Contraband, and you can support it and subscribe by visiting their IndieGoGo page.

PopCult, being part of the Charleston Gazette-Mail is not exactly “alternative,” and to be honest, your PopCulteer, being a straight old white guy, can not exactly present a “diverse” viewpoint. I mean, I try, but I simply come from a place that narrows my opinions on certain issues (Like beer for example. Why would anybody drink that crap?).

You can find Contraband for free all over Charleston, in the coolest locations (too many to name here), but chipping in on the IndieGoGo campaign lets you support the magazine financially, and if you choose to do that, you can stay at home and receive it courtesy of the United States Post Office. I’ve just kicked in for an annual subscription, and you might want to as well. I haven’t actually seen a physical copy of Contraband yet, but I’ve read some of it online and it looks to be an exciting and much-needed new voice in the valley.

Let me quote from their IndieGoGo page:

Contraband is Charleston, West Virginia’s new alternative magazine highlighting the opinions and interests of people in this area. We do our best to create an unbiased, wide reaching showcase of the things that should be reported and aren’t. We try to give news on what’s happening, give people a voice to express how they feel or what they’re proud of, and show people things about their city that they otherwise wouldn’t know.

Everything in our magazine is specifically local, small business related, progressive, healthy, or positive. We want someone to pick up an issue of Contraband and be reminded why this area is great. From local events to new music and ideas, we want to be the place you go to find out what you should be paying attention to.

Our content is created by locals. No article will be ignored. If you have something you want to say, chances are there is someone who either agrees with you, or would love to talk about it. We want to help spark that conversation. And have hella fun while doing it.

The magazine is always, and will always be, free. We want EVERYONE to be able to read our magazine. This means, however, that the way we pay for printing and merchandise is through subscriptions, advertising, and now this fundraiser. We need the support of our community to help get this project off the ground and become everything it can be!

So there you have it. I think it would be great if Charleston could support this cool new venue. I understand that they will have a presence at the WTSQ 88.1 Second Anniversary Party this Saturday at the Sculpture Garden at the Clay Center (Your PopCulteer will have to give this event a miss because he’s still taking medications for Myasthenia Gravis that make outdoor events unwise to attend). And you can kick in on the IndieGoGo, for a subscription, or if you can’t afford that, you can get a sticker for a mere three bucks. For more information you can also visit their webpage and their Facebook page.

Something interesting has been happening of late. The AIR, our little internet radio station, has had a surge in listenership.  We’ve gone from attracting maybe a dozen or two listeners each week, to a point where we now have well over 3,500 weekly listening sessions.  I’m not sure what’s causing this sudden interest, other than possibly the old adage, “If you build it, they will come,” but it’s gratifying to know that people are actually listening to our efforts. If you haven’t yet, you too can tune in and see what kind of audio shenanigans we’re up to on The AIR.

Tune in at the website, or on this swell embedded radio player…

Because we have so many new listeners, over the next few weeks your PopCulteer is occasionally going to be dragging out some of the early episodes of Radio Free Charleston International that we haven’t run on the station for almost a year now. This is entirely because our new listeners will enjoy being exposed to the formative episodes of one of our flagship shows, which breaks all the rules of radio programming, and is not at all because I was too lazy to do a new episode this week.

Thursday at 3 PM, with replays over the next week, you can hear the second episode of RFC International, the show where I play whatever the hell I want. This show opens with an obscure Oingo Boingo B-Side that was only released in Japan, and includes uncensored music from the likes of Can, Marianne Faithful (yes, THAT song, uncensored), Captain Beefheart, Weezer and more. I’ll put the playlist at the bottom of this post, below the jump.

The rest of the day we have replays of this week’s episodes of Curtain Call, The Swing Shift and Radio Free Charleston, sample episodes of Radio Coolsville and Beatles Blast as well as an all-new episode of The New Music Show, our beyond-cool music rotation show, which this week saw new tracks added by Pale Nova, The Company Stores, Liam Gallagher, Membrane Cell, Fitz and the Tantrums and more.

At 10 PM we present Spurgie Hankins and others, recorded Live at the Empty Glass. At 1 AM it’s an all-night marathon of The Swing Shift, which is gaining popularity in France and Germany.

I’ve been plugging away at The AIR hard for over a year now. It’s cool to see it finally find an audience.

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Wednesday always brings cool stuff to The AIR. We have new episodes of our afternoon music show, and just yesterday we set records for listenership. Thousands of people worldwide are tuning in and you can here why at the website, or on this nifty embedded radio machine doohickey…

This week our mid-day, mid-week talk shows are going strong, with On The Road with Mel at 1 PM, and Life Speaks to Michele Zirkle Marcum with a new episode at 1:30 PM.

In this week’s Life Speaks, the question is, how hungry are you to live your dream? Michele’s hungry enough to eat pickled beets! Hey, at least she’s off the peanut butter.

Then at 2 PM it’s time for a new edition of Beatles Blast, as yours truly brings you cool and obscure Beatles and solo tunes, plus this week a special live concert tribute performance.

3 PM sees a brand-new episode of Curtain Call. Mel Larch presents songs from The Book of Mormon, A Little Night Music, Groundhog Day, Phantom of the Opera, The Comet and more. The playlist is below, so check out all the show tune magic you’ll have to look forward to.

Check out the schedule below, and tune in to see what all the fuss is about.

Curtain Call 027

Book of Mormon  “All American Prophet”
Billy Elliott (original cast)  “Born To Boogie”
The King And I  (Gertrude Lawrence)  “Getting To Know You”
Phantom of the Opera (Brightman and Steve Barton)  “Think Of Me”
Sister Act (Patina Miller, Debbie Kurup & Amy Booth Steel) “Take Me”
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (Jason Donovan)  “Any Dream Will Do”
Miss Saigon (original cast)  “I Still Believe”
Groundhog Day  “There Will Be Sun”
Gene Kelly  “Singin’ In The Rain”
In Transit  “Saturday Night Obsession”
The Great Comet  “Sunday Morning”
A Little Night Music  “Weekend In The Country”
Crazy For You  “I Got Rhythm”

Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM, The AIR will present the fiftieth episode of Radio Free Charleston! You can tune in at the website, or on this cool little embedded player…

Charleston’s longest-running local music program celebrates half-a-hundred episodes of its latest incarnation.

The thing is, this milestone is not really that big a deal. This is the fiftieth episode of Radio Free Charleston produced for The AIR. Technically it’s “RFC Volume Four.” The original RFC ran around thirty episodes. The video incarnation clocks in at over 200 shows (and counting), with more than 70 “RFC MINI SHOWs in the mix, and the previous internet radio version of our local music extravaganza came in with around forty episodes.  So all told, we’re probably somewhere around number 400.

But who’s counting.

To mark this semi-milestone, we did what we always do…we put together a show with a lot of great local music that you probably haven’t heard yet. We open with Membrane Cell, and fill the rest of the hour with new-to-RFC songs by The Carpenter Ants, Time And Distance, Pale Nova, Kerry Hughes and more. As a special bonus, we’re running replays of recent episodes of RFC until 2 PM, so you can play catch-up, if you’re late to the game.

Also Tuesday, we have a new episode of The Swing Shift at 3 PM, and a cool line-up of all our other shows. Just check this stuff out, and then follow the jump for the playlists for RFC 50 and The Swing Shift 28.

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