Month: February 2020 (Page 4 of 4)

Because your PopCulteer is in the middle of a Myasthenia Gravis flare-up, and was not able to produce any physical art this week, I made the decision to offer up a couple of unrelated digital works, one new, and one of them a variation on and older work of mine.

Above you see “Livewire” a re-working of an old piece I did called “Warpscape” back in 2011. Below you’ll find a digitial painting over a photograph of the old  Kanawha County Courthouse, also known as the place you have to go to pay your property taxes. “Livewire” is purely digital, and the courthouse thing is basically just a digitally-assaulted photograph, like I used to do in the early days of this blog.

You can click them both if, for some strange reason, you want to see them bigger.

Meanwhile, over in radio-land, Monday on The AIR, our Monday Marathon runs from 7 AM to 3 PM, and extends the Sunday night marathon of The Swing Shift with eight more hours of recent episodes of our Swing Music showcase, which you can also hear every Tuesday at 3 PM, with plenty of replays and an additional overnight marathon every Thursday at Midnight. , At 3 PM, we will present an encore of a recent edition of Prognosis, because show’s host, Herman Linte and all our collegues at Haversham Recording Institute are all still tied up providing stringer coverage to international new agencies covering the Brexit mess.

You can listen to The AIR at the website, or on this embedded radio player…

Super Bowl Sunday is traditionally one of the days where PopCult gets fewer views than any other day of the year (with the possible exception of Christmas).

That means I can pretty much post anything I want here and nobody will notice.

So today I’m posting a video from the KanaChan TV YouTube Channel.  WWE Superstar Asuka (real name: Urai Kanako), a former women’s champion and current women’s tag team champ, is a fierce warrior in the ring. At one point she’d gone undefeated for nearly two years, and of late she has added the deadly “Green Mist” to her arsenal. She is an intimidating figure in the ring.

However, Asuka is also a sort of “YouTube Influencer” in her native Japan, where she is still known by her Japanese wrestling name, Kana. On her KanaChan channel she treats viewers to cooking, gaming and toy videos, in a cute bilingual and cleverly edited (by Asuka, herself) manner. The clips are cute, funny, slightly incomprehensible and are a lot of fun to watch. In the above video, posted just a few days ago, she “operates” on an animated plush Kirby doll to bring it to life. The pixelation of the battery compartment is just one example of the hilarious cross-cultural detail she goes into with these videos.

We go back to a full-length episode of Radio Free Charleston from April, 2014. This show features musical artists that we’d featured on RFC MINI SHOWs plus first-time contributors, animation and a promo clip for a local theater production.

Radio Free Charleston 197, “Jake The Dog Shirt” is a diverse collection of great music, cool animation plus a neat theater preview. Our music is from Donnie Smith, The Big Bad, The Terra Firma Ensemble and Jordan Searls. Animation comes to us from Jake Fertig and we also have a preview for the Alban Arts Center production of “Antigone.”

Donnie Smith was our first musical guest on this show. He’s seen here recorded at the same edition of Rock N Roll theater that gave us his recent RFC MINI SHOW. This time around Donnie treats us to his original song, “Mixed Message. Our animation was by Jake Fertig. It was the latest “Deep Space Microsode” of his series, “The Flocking.” We were lucky enough to catch The Big Bad earlier in April 2014, and from that night we brought you the band doing their song, “Babe We Own This Town.”

The centerpiece of this episode was our recording of The Terra Firma Ensemble performing the world premiere of Jim Lange’s compostion, “Brambles and Briers.”You saw the entire concert last week in this space, as we brought you a special double feature RFC Flashback. Playing us out, for the second episode in a row, was Jordan Searls with his song, “Naturally Easy.”

You can read the full production notes HERE.