Month: March 2020 (Page 3 of 4)

Since we can’t travel for real now, how about we continue our virtual trip to Chicago via art? Our month of Chicago-inspired art continues with one of my hyper-realistic digital paintings, this time of the Grand Plaza, a fancy-schmancy Apartment and Condo building, which was right across the street from, and considerably taller than, our hotel. Sunday morning Mel and I made the rather obvious decision not to go through with our trip to Georgia this week, since ToyLanta was canceled, and there’s a good chance that restaurants and possibly businesses might be shut down by the time we’d get there.

Since I had several hours set aside to prepare for trip that were suddenly free, I dove in and made this painting. I had six or seven blurry photos for reference, so it took quite a bit of work to make it look like this. It’s a handsome building, and very, very tall.

You can click the image if you want to see a bigger version.

Meanwhile, over in radio-land, Monday on The AIR, our Monday Marathon runs from 7 AM to 11 PM, and brings you yet another all-day overdose of Prognosis. You can tune in all day long to hear Herman Linte and yours truly bring you the best prog-rock from the last half-century. Herman tells us that Haversham Recording Institute should be able to start cranking out new episodes of our music specialty shows very soon–probably by the end of this week. With the travel restrictions and curfews, Haversham has free time for the first time in months.

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

As you may know by now if you’ve been reading PopCult, ToyLanta 2020 has fallen victim to the Coronavirus and will not be happening next weekend. Rescheduling for later in the year was not possible, so the convention will skip 2020 and go on as planned in its new location in 2021 and beyond. This decision was not made lightly, and the delay in making it official was due to the tremendous amount of thought and preparation that had to go into figuring out how best to proceed. ToyLanta is the only fundraising event for the non-profit Cody Lane Memorial Toy & Diorama Museum, and this unavoidable cancelation is a major disruption in the progress of that project.

However, one thing that was planned for this year’s convention was the annual ToyLanta Film Festival, as compiled by Tim Weedn. Tim has been kind enough to provide me with his list of films, and that’s what we’re presenting in this post. So a little bit of ToyLanta is happening right here, and a “Virtual ToyLanta” is in the process of being created. I’ll tell you more about that in a separate post.

We aren’t posting these films in the same order as Tim had them programmed, since the big finish is always an epic adventure by Tim and his wife, Lisa’s Studio Joe. That makes sense when you’re showing this to a live audience, but since we are just a humble blog and know that you’re going to skip ahead to it anyway, we’re going to post that one first, because it’s brand-new and hilarious and handy. And here it is, The Adventure Team Rides Again…

Continue reading

This week we go back to June, 2014, for an RFC MINI SHOW starring Time And Distance, live at The Empty Glass.

These tracks were recorded in May, 2014, at the same time as the song you saw last week in Radio Free Charleston 198. Time And Distance is one of Charleston’s most reliable and successful bands, and maybe we’ll get some new music from Greg McGowan and company soon.

The PopCulteer
March 13, 2020

This has been one of the strangest PopCulteer essays I’ve ever had to write.

As everyone knows, we are most definitely living in interesting times at the moment. The original plan for today’s column was to tell you all about ToyLanta, the big toy convention that I go to every year now. It’s supposed to start next Friday, and as I write this, it has not yet been canceled or postponed. I will tell you more about that in a bit, but first we have to address the sick elephant in the room.

The last few days have taught us not to count on things remaining stable. As I sit here in my office on a stormy Thursday night, the whole country is joining together to make a sacrifice for the good of the weakest of us. Sporting events, concerts, plays, film festivals, pop culture conventions and any other imaginable gathering have been canceled so that we can hopefully “flatten the curve” and stem the proliferation of Covid-19, which is a pretty lethal virus. I think we can all agree now that this is not a hoax or a political stunt, and all serious-minded people need to work together to stem the tide of this horrible disease.

Update…11 AM: Demonstrating the fluidity of the situation, we have a statement from ToyLanta…

We understand your concerns and our priority as always is for everyone to have a safe and happy experience. We are meeting multiple times each day when we have new information. Buddy, one of our board members, has met with the Cobb County Board of Commissioners to seek their counsel. We commit to you that we will advise you of any change as soon as we have any update.

Update…5 PM: Larry Hama, creator of the “Real American Hero” GI Joe, has pulled out of the event due to concern over Covid-19. He will attend virtually, and take sketch requests, if the event goes on.

Update: 7:20 PM: The show has been canceled.

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT
With an ache in our heart, we announce that after an extremely difficult deliberation, meetings with the hotel, and meetings with local officials, we regretfully have come to the conclusion that we need to cancel Toylanta/Joelanta this year.  We are working on plans for refunds and we have already booked the dates for ’21 and ’22 and will be announcing those shortly. Please forgive us. It is with a heavy heart that we arrived at this decision but we believe it is the best decision because we love you all and want to keep you safe. We will be announcing some details shortly. Please bear with us in the interim.

About eight hours ago (as I write this), I posted a review of the play, Bug, which is running at Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. Or rather, it was. All remaining performances of Bug have been canceled, along with every other play at a major theater in Chicago, as well as Broadway and off-Broadway, and just about every other large event in the country. All that stuff I said about making sure you don’t miss it?  Nevermind.

Wednesday I posted a long “Stuff To Do” column, plugging local events, and to be honest, I’m wondering now if it was a good idea to even do that. I don’t know how many of those shows are going to happen as planned. There’s certainly a strong argument to be made for postponing everything scheduled for this weekend. It seems like the whole world is changing every five minutes or so, so maybe the best advice I can give anyone is that this is a good weekend to watch Netflix and chill. We don’t really need to be out gathering in large crowds.

The reason for this is to keep the Covid-19 virus from spreading and killing the eldery, sick, young or immuno-supressed among us. This is not panic. It’s common sense, and after spending way too much time trying to explain it to way too many people today, I just don’t have the energy to do it again without getting insulting.

Instead, let me remind my longtime readers and inform any new readers that I suffer from Myasthenia Gravis. MG is an auto-immune disorder that causes your muscles to not respond to the signals your brain sends to them, and leaves you with paralysis. The more you use those muscles, the weaker they get. I am lucky enough to have a mild case, but I still take some pretty heavy-duty meds to allow me to do things like see straight and use my fingers.

I am immuno-suppressed. My immune system was attacking my body, and I have to weaken it in order to function. I’m one of those people for whom events are being canceled. I take a medicine that is normally used for organ transplant patients so that they don’t reject their new body part.

Yet, I still hope to attend ToyLanta. This is a show that’s so special to me that I am literally willing to risk my life to go there. As I write this, the show’s organizers are gung-ho that it’s going to go on as planned. It’s the 20th anniversary year for the show, which began as “JoeLanta,” and it’s their first time in an exciting new location. I hope to be sitting in that new hotel a week from now, trading toys and shooting video and having fun.

This could all change in an instant, so keep checking PopCult for updates.

I will not be shocked if a number of guests and vendors make the decision not to attend this year. This is a most unusual situation. I’m sort of prepared for it because the water crisis in West Virginia back in 2014 was a bit of a dry run for coping with previously unthinkable dystopian conditions, but this is quite different. I don’t blame anyone who decides to change their plans, and if the organizers decide not to have the show next weekend, I absolutely understand.

Melanie and I are still going to Georgia next weekend. I need a road trip (Chicago was a train trip–it’s a different thing completely). If ToyLanta doesn’t happen, we’ll find plenty of things to get into down there, and we plan to take a day to run to Senoia for Walking Dead fun for Mel regardless. We don’t have to stop living. We just have to stop living all in the same place at the same time.

If ToyLanta does happen as planned, I will be there, taking precautions, video camera in tow. I will not be doing interviews with anyone this year. Thanks to the NBA, we now know that microphones can pose a risk of transmission. We’ll steer clear of physical contact, eat our meals in our room and maybe keep to ourselves more than we normally would, just to be on the safe side. It’s not because I’m anti-social. It’s so I can stay alive.

And licking fuzzy-headed GI Joes to check the quality of the hair is right out. We’ll have none of that.

It’s going to be a fun show, if it happens. It always is.

As the event page says, “Join us for our big 20th Anniversary Celebration at our NEW LARGER LOCATION! 2 Floors of TOYS of all kinds, including GI Joe, STAR WARS, MOTU, TMNT, Captain Action, Hot Wheels, Monster Toys,MEGO, Transformers, Marx Playsets, Marvel Legends, Anime, Games, Comics, Records and much more! Plus Special Guests, Custom Figure and Diorama Contests, Cosplay Contest, Exhibits, Demonstrations, Workshops, Film Festival, Musical Guests and more!”

As a reporter, I’m a bit conflicted about how to tell you about the show. There are all kinds of great guests and panelists scheduled, but things are changing so rapidly that I could write about them tonight and before this post goes live, things could have changed completely. I don’t like that my review of Bug ran after what turned out to be the final performance. I don’t want to feel like I’m wasting your time here. Things can change at a moment’s notice, and the city, county or state could declare that the show not go on despite the best intentions of the good folk who produce ToyLanta.

So I’m going to be lazy and post some graphics below. I believe these are largely the work of Bambi Lynn, from Radio Cult and Buddy Finethy (correct me if I’m wrong, guys), and this way if a guest cancels at the last minute I can just edit that graphic out to avoid confusion. Stay tuned for further updates.

Update…Saturday morning: The show has been called off, so I’m removing the graphics and replacing them with this…

So there you have a whole slew of cool stuff that I really really hope we get to experience next week. I will be telling you more about ToyLanta up until the show, so if there are any changes you can read about them here. Sunday we’ll bring you more videos from back in the JoeLanta days, and we’ll also have all our regular features. That’s it for this week’s PopCulteer.

PopCult Theatre Review

First, apologies are in order. Things got busy here and I didn’t get a chance to write and post this review until now. We were able to see this production of Bug two weeks ago.

Be advised, if you are in the Chicago area, you only have a few more chances to catch this play. Its extended run ends Sunday, March 15.

Bug is an early work by award-winning playwright Tracy Letts, and it’s a pretty stark, memorable piece. The action all takes place in a seedy motel room in Oklahoma, and two main characters carry the bulk of the play.

This is either a love story filled with madness, or just a tale of madness with the veneer of love stretched over it. There is drug use, self-harm, murder and full-frontal nudity on stage, and it is all in service to the plot.

Agnes, a forty-something cocktail waitress who has survived multiple traumas is cooped up in the motel, hiding out from her abusive ex, who has just been released from prison. She passes her spare time mostly alone, drinking and smoking crack.

Through one of her waitressing buddies, she meets Peter, a conspiracy-minded Gulf War veteran who may be AWOL, and who shows signs of various mental issues. They bond over lonliness, and Agnes falls into Peter’s paranoid schizophrenic fantasies.

The two become convinced that their room is infested with bugs.

Written at a time when conspiracy theories were just beginning to take hold in mainstream America, when the militias were on the rise in the wake of the Murrah Building bombing and the internet was in its infancy. Letts’ play demonstrates the influence that conspiracy theories can have on the minds of the mentally vulnerable. Even in his early work, his ear for dialogue is amazing, and all his characters come across as strikingly real.

This production is stunning. Carrie Coon as Agnes and Namir Smallwood as Peter deliver performances that rank among the finest I have ever witnessed. They make their characters real and credible. Unless you have been blessed to live a very sheltered life, you’ve probably met people like Agnes and Peter.

Both actors (seen left and below) are powerful and unafraid to depict the descent into insanity that these characters suffer. Fully nude for a significant portion of the play, their tenderness toward each other as they isolate themselves from the real world and ultimately destroy themselves is stunning. The audience can’t help but root for Agnes and Peter until it becomes absolutely clear that they are doomed by their own actions.

When the play was over, there were parts where I wasn’t sure if I was seeing a depiction of what really happened, or if what happened on the stage was, in part, the delusions of Agnes and Peter being acted out. It’s a powerful play that can mess with your perceptions that way. Bug is a black comedy, but it’s more provocative than many dramas.

Coon and Smallwood play their characters as real people. They do not look down on them or turn them into cartoons. You leave the play convinced that you’ve met real people.

Acclaimed director David Cromer (The Band’s Visit) creates what becomes the entire universe for these two characters in one small hotel room. The Scenic design by Takeshi Kata deserves no small amount of the credit, as the room almost becomes an additional character in the play. Lighting and sound effects add to the atmosphere.

This production of Bug is an amazing, once-in-a-lifetime theatrical happening. I can’t imagine anyone topping it, but I can also see that performing this would have to be emotionally and physically draining. There is a film based on this play, directed by William Friedkin, and it’s good, but it’s nowhere near this production in terms of performance or power. This production is as perfect as live theater gets. If you have a chance to see one of the remaining performances, don’t miss it.

Updated Caveat: You really shouldn’t go out to bars or anything right now. Many of the events listed below have been canceled or postponed. Next week and for the foreseeable future this column will be replaced with “Stuff To Watch” as we suggest everyone minimize public gatherings to prevent the spread of Covid-19.

Due to the violence of the calendar this year, Saint Patrick’s Day, which is the biggest drunken party holiday of the year in states this far North of Lousiana, falls on a Tuesday, which is not an evening conducive to imbibing to excess. So everybody is getting their Irish out this weekend, and there are a ridiculous number of things you can get into this weekend. Our selection this time is very music-heavy, so if that isn’t your scene, look around for other stuff.

Here are the lucky pre-St. Patty’s Day events for which I could slap together graphics, alongside some from those blessed people who create ready-made graphics to promote their events…

Wednesday

Continue reading

Great local music that you haven’t heard in years is on the agenda Tuesday on Radio Free Charleston on The AIR.

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

Last week due to a combination of outside assignments and yours truly having a very weak voice, I ran encore presentations of all of our specialty music shows on The AIR. This week my voice is still pretty shot, and I need to rest up before my annual ToyLanta excusion next week. I didn’t want to resort to reruns two weeks in a row, so I instead took to the archives and stitched together the first episode of RFC Volume Four, from July 2016, and the 28th episode, from October of that year to create a new show that will debut Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM. Both of these shows were bumped from the server and have been out of circulation for three years now.

There is some light editing, mainly to remove references to other shows that are no longer on The AIR, or plugs for events that already took place. To mind the gap created by this trimming, we inserted the band Luna Park, doing their cover of Til Tuesday’s “Voices Carry.” That’s at the end of our first hour.

From time to time the plan is to repackage previous incarnations of RFC into this new format, and that includes some of the original broadcast shows from 1989 and 90.

This is another three-hour show that’s almost entirely local music.  I slipped in a couple of regional ringers, and the mystery bonus cut at the end is sort of European, but this is still way more local than most of the new RFC V5 shows will be. I promise that next week will bring a mix of local and non-local artists, plus we’ll salute a great local artist who’s leaving town (but not the state).

But for this week, check out the playlist…

RFCv5009

hour one
Jordan Andrew Jefferson “White Light”
The Smoky Room “Pie Chart”
No Rain “Don’t Come Around”
Jack Griffith “Everything It Takes”
Dina “Pie Chart”
The Laser Beams “Eden By The Fire Escape”
Sheldon Vance “Don’t Walk Away”
Miss Mousie and The Rigamarole “Dumpsters and Divebars”
Neil Zaza “Take On Me”
Under Surveillance “Rachel”
The Nanker Phelge “Meerkat and Wombat”
Trielement “Ultra Violet”
The Company Stores “Pocket Change”
Wolfgang Parker “Ain’t That A Kick In The Head”
Luna Park “Voices Carry”

hour two
Superfetch “Suck My D*ck ISIS”
Mark Wolfe “Gypsy Rant”
The Heydays “Shady Grove”
Bud Carroll “Mistaken Identity”
Out of Nowhere “Rise Above”
Tape Age “Worst Night Of My Life”
J Marinelli “The Great Negation”
Joe Vallina “Humble Days”
Renaissance “So Blase”
Stark Raven “It Never Goes Away”
Clownhole “Old Man Jumping A Fence”
Under The Radar “All Along The Watchtower”
Bobaflex “Pray To The Devil”
Syphter “No Laughing Matter”

hour three
The Defectors “Nightlife in Tokyo”
Whistlepunk “Outshine”
Feast of Steven “Falling”
Ovada “Church of Paranoia”
Three Bodies “Shingles and Tar”
Mad Scientist Club “Save The Whales”
The Nanker Phelge “Making The Wheel To Turn”
69 Fingers “How To Get A New Life”
Ouralias “Daydream”
The Science Fair Explosion “Kornchipz”
Hellblinki “Sanjula’s Junk”
The Liquid Canvas “Spirit Molecule”
Mother Nang “Fade”
Strawfyssh “Graveyard Shift”
Go Van Gogh “Shut Up, I Love You”

plus a mystery bonus track

Radio Free Charleston can be heard Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM, with replays Thursday at 2 PM, Friday at 9 AM and 7 PM, Saturday at 11 AM and Midnight, Sunday at 1 PM and the next Monday at 8 PM, exclusively on The AIR.

The rest of today’s programming on The AIR will be encore presentations, but you should still listen in because they’re pretty damned good. We intend to return to fighting trim next week, with a full line-up of all-new editions of all of our music speciality programs, including those from Haversham Recording Institute in London.  Herman Linte, Sydney Fileen, Nigel Pye and crew tell me that they’re looking forward to being quarantined in the studio so that they can return to their labors of love, the fruits of which we are glad to share on The AIR.

Our month of Chicago-inspired art continues with an actual watercolor of a look at the city, from within the city, as the day grows long and sun goes down. This is inspired by the view from our hotel window on our recent trip, where we finally managed to snag a room on the top floor of our beloved Hilton Garden Inn. This was done with watercolor pens and wash on slick paper, and I cropped it and boosted the saturation a bit after scanning it, because I’m picky that way.

You can click the image if you want to see a bigger version.

Meanwhile, over in radio-land, Monday on The AIR, our Monday Marathon runs from 7 AM to 11 PM, and brings you an all-day overdose of Prognosis. You can tune in all day long to hear Herman Linte bring you the best prog-rock from the last half-century. Herman tells us that Haversham Recording Institute should be able to start cranking out new episodes of our music specialty shows soon.

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

It’s hard to believe that 2020 is flying by so quickly, but we are already less than two weeks away from ToyLanta. Above you can see the highlight video I made last year at The South’s Greatest Toy Show, and below you’ll see last year’s diorama video and the 2018 wrap-up video. ToyLanta grew out of JoeLanta, the annual convention for GI Joe collectors which I have been privileged to attend since 2013. A few years ago they expanded to include all toys and continue their mission to raise funds for a toy diorama museum planned for the Atlanta area.

This year ToyLanta moves to a new location, the luxurious Hilton in Marietta, Georgia, with way more room for dealers and panels, and special guests like Marty Abrams and the MEGO crew, Larry Hama and several more artists and toy designers.

You can learn more about ToyLanta at their website, and stay tuned to PopCult because I’ll be telling you way more about the show as it gets closer. I’ll be previewing panels and events and bringing you more video packages from previous years here in this blog.

Billed as “An Alarmingly Activist Episode” and hailed as one of our best, we go back to May, 2014 for “Save Top O Rock Shirt,” a show jam-packed with cool stuff. Sadly, our title shirt turned out to be a lost cause, as one of the city’s most treasured landmarks fell to the wrecking ball, but sad as that is, this is still a great show.

Radio Free Charleston 198, “Save Top O Rock Shirt” was one of our most politically active episodes. We had music from Time & Distance, Little Nomad, The Living Deads and a special music video by The Laser Beams, plus there’s ten epic minutes of animation by Jake Fertig. But first, in this episode I actually talk about the shirt that gives this show its name.

Top O Rock was an architectural marvel in Charleston. It was the home and office of the late architect, Henry Elden. We shot our host segments for Episode 100 there in 2010, a couple of years after he passed away. Despite the best efforts of many people, the structure was demolished, and the land sits empty.

We jump into our show with the first of three parts of Jake Fertig‘s epic “The Flocking: Coal-Aid Freedomsodes,” which takes a pretty harsh and incisive look at some of the industrial special interests which control and afflict West Virginia. This cartoon was first screened (intact) a couple of weeks ago at the West Virginia International Film Festival, and we are proud to include it here on RFC. We split the cartoon into three parts, and you’ll see them throughout this episode of the show.

Our first musical guest this week was Time and Distance. We caught them on their first Charleston show after a nationwide tour, performing at The Empty Glass. Also at The Glass, we recorded The Living Deads, who had previously starred in an RFC MINI SHOW. In this show you’ll get to hear “All I Can Do Is Cry”

The Laser Beams formed out members of The Wayward Girls School of Burlesque, and were still members when we created this music video, where they salute West Virginia’s Attorney General, the sock puppet of big business, Patrick Morrisey. The song is still accurate and relevant, and this IS an election year, so it’d be really cool if, come November, this song becomes outdated.

We wrapped the show up with a performance by singer-songwriter Little Nomad, with whom we were mightily impressed. It sure would be cool if she started making music again.

You can read the full production notes for this show HERE.