Month: May 2020 (Page 3 of 4)

This week we start our Monday with art that is a study of detail of the old Kanawha Courthouse, drawn last weekend with oil pastels on paper for pens while ye artist was looking at old reference photos that date from sometime around 2008. It was an experiment in using paper that wasn’t really intended for the medium, and it took a bit of practice to get the oil crayons to behave the way I wanted, but I’m happy with the end result. Sort of.

I have to confess to cropping the image and boosting the saturation a bit after I got it scanned. I also had to clean the scanner afterward because those oil pastels can make quite a mess when you use slick paper.

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

Meanwhile, over in radio-land, Monday on The AIR, our Monday Marathon runs from 7 AM to 3 PM , and brings you eight hours of Psychedelic Shack, presented by Nigel Pye. Then 3 PM sees a brand-new episode of Prognosis with Herman Linte. Herman’s got an interesting theme and a bit of a chip on his shoulder this week. With this episode of Prognosis, Herman is determined to put the lie to the idea that punk rock killed off prog rock. He does this by presenting two hours of top-notch, killer progressive tunes that were all released between 1976 and 1978, the heyday of British punk.

Tune in to see if he makes his point. Here’s the playlist to give you the heads up…

Prognosis 058

YES “On The Silent Wings Of Freedom”
Emerson, Lake and Palmer “Pirates”
Genesis “The Lady Lies”
Gentle Giant “Memories of Old Days”
Jean Michael Jarre “Equinoxe Pt. 7”
Jethro Tull “Pibroch (Cap In Hand)”
Kansas “Hopelessly Human”
UK “Nevermore”
Procol Harum “The Worm & The Tree”
Kate Bush “In The Warm Room”
Steve Hackett “Icarus Ascending”
Renaissance “The Sisters”
Utopia “Hiroshima”
Triumverat “Vesuvius 79 A.D.”
ELP “Tiger In The Spotlight”

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

Last week we brought you Hardware Wars, so this week we’re going to treat you to a companion piece (done by a totally different collection of people), Closet Cases of the Nerd Kind. These were released together on a VHS cassette along with several other parody shorts back in the days of movie rentals.

This short parody from 1980 should be familiar to anybody who had HBO in the early 1980s. They used it for filler between movies for several years. Closet Cases was written and produced by Rick Harper and Bob Rogers,

In the film, sewage worker Roy Dreary and a number of unusual characters meet up with strange extraterrestrials traveling to earth in a giant pie in the sky. Dreary develops an obsession with mashed potatoes, whipped cream, and maraschino cherries. He encounters singing mailboxes, truck radios that spout bubbles and bubble music, and one pie in the face after another, before finally finding himself at the Sara Loo pie factory-and his close encounter of the nerd kind.

Of the filmmakers, Bob Rogers went on to have a legendary career as a design engineer and producer for Disney, and has produced and directed Oscar-nominated short films. Rick Harper directed two documentary shorts before vanishing from the world of movie-making in 1984.

Be prepared for the music at the end to stick in your head for forty years.  It did with me.

From September, 2008. This edition of the show features music by Brain Trauma and The Underdog Blues Revue, plus a Kitty Killton movie trailer and the debut of the Astonishing Finger Man! Just one show after our fiftieth, Radio Free Charleston kicked out the jams with Brain Trauma’s Horrorcore Rap and hot blues from Chuck Biel’s Underdog Blues Revue.

We first met Kyle and Toxik Flow from Brain Trauma at an IWA East Coast show way back in the early days of the PopCult blog. It took a couple of years for our schedules to jibe so we could have them on the show, but it was worth the wait. Using footage we shot at The Empty Glass in August, 2008, we created a music video for the song “Rock It.”  Rounding out the show this time is an amazing performance by The Underdog Blues Revue. This was recorded in July 2008, at the last show UBR gave before going on hiatus.

You can read the original production notes HERE.

The PopCult Toybox

The Marx Toy Convention, which was scheduled to take place at The Kruger Toy & Train Museum in Wheeling over Father’s Day weekend in June, has been canceled. This is no real shock, since the Coronavirus Pandemic is still a very real threat, and while state goverments are giving permission for some businesses to open prematurely, it is highly unlikely that gatherings of more than 25 people will be allowed in time for this show to happen.

It’s also common sense that older toy collectors probably shouldn’t risk exposure to the virus while it’s still actively spreading throughout the country.

While this is disappointing and sad, it’s made even more bittersweet by the fact that, this year, there was going to be a very limited-edition Marx Toy Convention exclusive figure of Kit Carson, assembled by Scott Stewart of Stewart’s Attic fame, Douglas Nelson and The Kruger Street Toy & Train Museum.

While the show is off, the figure is still on, and in fact Scott made these available over the weekend and I have mine in hand already. That means it’s time for a brief photo essay!

As seen above, the box is a nicely-conceived piece of art depicting Kit Carson, a Western pioneer and hero of the Mexican-American and Civil Wars. The sturdily-constructed box includes plenty of historical background material, as well as a list of contents and the logo for Kruger Street.

The whole package is impressive. The figure itself, as you can see at the left, is a Johnny West head mounted on a vintage Geronimo body.

Soft accessories are CXR “Mountain Man” accessories, as are some of the hard accessories.These were produced by the late Noah Coop, a pioneer himself when it came to reviving Marx Action Figures, and his wife, Terri Coop. I believe that this is the first Marx Toy Museum exclusive since the CXR accessory sets produced around ten years ago.

I also believe the flintlock rifle may be 3D printed by Scott.

Also included are an instruction sheet, a Challenge Coin and a Trading Card. These are high-quality items. The instruction sheet evokes the original Marx instruction sheets, while the trading card has great illustration on the front, and info on Kit Carson on the back.

The Challenge Coin is a really nice piece, an impressive silver-dollar-sized coin that has the heft and feel of brass.

The box is in the style of a vintage Marx 12″ figure box, but it’s made of sturdier stock, and includes an extra flap inside where you can stow some of the equipment. This flap also is also printed with information on Kit Carson and holds the Challenge Coin.

Let’s take a closer look, with some bigger photos..

The box is “coffin style” with a lid that lifts off. The top of the box is printed in full color, on all five panels. You can see the side and top flaps above.

Once you lift the lid, you can see how deluxe this package is.

The figure, being made of vintage parts, has the full range of motion of a regular vintage Marx figure, and the body of the one I have seems almost brand-new, with tight joints and no visible flaws.

Above you see the figure and accessories out of the box.

Here’s a closer look at some of what you get.

The trading card is really nice, and comes in a hard protective sleeve.

I don’t know if the photo does justice to this cool Challenge Coin. This is a really great addition to this set.

The bittersweet detail on the box.

This is a great set and would have been a real treat for convention-goers if the show had gone on as planned. As a very-limited edition figure, it’s not cheap. When you consider all the work that went into this set, with a mix of vinage pieces, custom-made items and the deluxe full-color box, $130 plus shipping is practically a bargain.

Since the show was canceled this figure was sold online only. There are still a few of these left (I believe it’s half a dozen). If you are interested you can find them at Stewart’s Attic, and get a piece of history that didn’t get to happen.

The PopCulteer
May 8, 2020

We have a very brief PopCulteer for you today.  Later on Friday we have a new PopCult Toybox, and we still have to photograph and write that, so for now, it’s just this one item.

Friday afternoon The AIR brings you the fifth installment of Rudy & Mel’s Shut-in Show plus an encore episode of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat.  It all starts at 2 PM, and you can listen at The AIR website, or just hit the “play” button on this nifty virtual player…

At 2 PM you can hear the newest episode of The Rudy & Mel Shut-In Show. This is one hour of your PopCulteer and his wife talking–often in a not safe for work manner–about whatever pops into our heads. It’s unrehearsed, unplanned, spontaneous talk, presented with minimal editing.

This week we start off talking about the success of MIRRORBALL, the music special that Mel hosted in this timeslot last week, and which was so well-received that it will indeed return on an irregular basis in the future. From there we talk about Disco movies, comfort television, the underrated acting chops of Jimmy Walker, planning for trips that we don’t know when we can take and more pandemic-related issues.

Extra effort was made this time to keep from veering off into angry rants about all the things in the world that make a sane person justifiably angry, so this is a happier-sounding edition of the show. You can hear replays of The Rudy & Mel Shut-In Show Friday at 10 PM, and a few more times over the next few days on The AIR.

At 3 PM we re-present a profile of Duran Duran on Sydney’s Big Electric Cat, with the entire show devoted to the best-dressed band in New Wave. Sydney’s Big Electric Cat is produced at Haversham Recording Institute in London, and can be heard every Friday at 3 PM, with replays Saturday afternoon, Tuesday at 7 AM, Wednesday at 8 PM and Thursday at Noon, exclusively on The AIR.

And that is this short and snappy PopCulteer. Later today we’ll be back with a photo-review of a very limited edition action figure.

The PopCult Comix Bookshelf

THE SPIRIT: AN 80TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION
by Will Eisner
Clover Press, LLC
ISBN-13: 978-1951038052
$12.99

Will Eisner’s The Spirit is one of the most important comic book features ever, due to the influence it’s had on comics since it debuted in 1940. Eisner’s mastery of short-form storytelling, combined with his innovation in building much of the language of graphic storytelling and the comic book continues to influence comic book artists many decades after the publication of new stories of The Spirit ended. Eisner was not only a master of laying out a story and panel composition, but his finished art (some of it completed by assistants under his direction) still stands out as some of the best comics has ever seen.

It is a testament to Eisner’s talents that The Spirit has remained relevant and has been kept in print for such a long time. I first discovered The Spirit in the 1970s, when Jim Warren brought the character back to newsstands in a magazine-sized reprint series.

My first impression of the character was in black-and-white, with tones added, so even forty-five years later, it’s still a little jarring for me to see the character in color.

But The Spirit was originally published in color, as a comic book/comic strip hybrid. The Spirit Section was a weekly tabloid-sized comic book, distributed as a Sunday Newspaper insert, and at its peak in the 1940s, was delivered to over five million households.

The Spirit was the masked vigilante identity of Denny Colt, a Central City police detective gunned down in the line of duty who fakes his death so that he can continue to fight crime outside of the boundaries of the law, with the approval of the city’s police commissioner.

While that might lead you to think that The Spirit is a gritty, noiresque crime drama, you’d only be partly correct. In addition to being the finest comics noir ever created, The Spirit also offered up light-hearted character studies, poignant urban fables and regularly mixed in elements of romance, comedy, horror and adventure with the not-so-standard detective stories.

THE SPIRIT: AN 80TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION is a delightful sampler, with nine vintage stories (five of them with new color by award winning colorists Laura Martin and Jeromy Cox), each with a brief introduction by a selection of comics professionals and historians, including Denis Kitchen, Paul Levitz, Craig Yoe and Kenova’s own, Beau Smith.

My only nit-picky criticism of the introductions is that they don’t all give the original date of publication of the story. Chalk that up to me being a comics nerd who was spoiled by reading reprint comics curated by E. Nelson Bridwell while I was growing up.

The intros are short and filled with great information, and the selection of stories is top-notch, avoiding the “Classics” that have already been reprinted a million times before in favor of lesser-seen, but still amazing works that show off Eisner’s range as a storyteller. We get to see The Spirit in different settings, a Western, a monster movie, a broad parody, a radio drama, a nuclear spy story and more. This volume also includes his “origin” tale, as re-told in 1946.

All of this demonstrates Eisner’s timeless quality as a writer and artist. These stories still stand head and shoulders above most of the comics produced before or since. Eisner’s work does not seem like “Golden Age” comics work, but it is. However, it fit right in with the Warren Magazines when I discovered it in the 70s, and it still stands out compared to the best of today’s comics.

If you were to compare Eisner to a filmmaker (which is easy to do because he was a pioneer when it came to bringing a cinematic style to comics). you couldn’t just compare him to one director. Eisner’s work is like the best of Orson Welles, Frank Capra, Sam Fuller and Stanley Kubrick, all rolled into one.

THE SPIRIT: AN 80TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION is a great introduction to Eisner’s work. The Spirit has been collected many times before (notably with the entire run collected as part of DC Comics’ Archives Series), but in this nicely-bound, slim but ample collection, at a low price, it’s affordable and easy to hold and read. This is in the “Graphic Novella” format, which is a softcover book with hardcover binding and trim, and only around a hundred pages or so.

THE SPIRIT: AN 80TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION is highly-recommended for any fan of comics, and can be ordered from any bookseller using the ISBN code. I’m hoping Clover Press publishes more collections of The Spirit in this format. It really presents the work well.

Mel Larch’s MIRRORBALL, a Disco Music special which debuted last Friday on The AIR turned out to be so popular that it will return as a series of AIR Music Specials over the next few months. To celebrate, we are scheduling an encore today at 3 PM on The AIR, which you can listen to at The AIR website, or on this shiny and sexy embedded radio player…

Because of the MIRRORBALL encore, Mel’s other show, Curtain Call, is skipping a week in it’s series of tribute episodes to Stephen Sondheim. That will be back next week.

Also new on The AIR this week, you can expect another edition of Rudy & Mel’s Shut-in Show, plus classic episodes of our other programming. I would tell you what’s on the Shut-in Show, but we don’t record those until hours before they air, so there’s no telling what we’ll be talking about.

Thursday afternoon we will be running the latest Radio Free Charleston, which is a nostalgic throwback to an original broadcast episode of the show from just over thirty years ago. You can read about that HERE.

You can also listen to that show, along with many of our recent programs on-demand at the “Podcast” section of The AIR website.

Next week we are planning to bring you new episodes of all of our music specialty programs. This week The Haversham Recording Institute in London is being deep-cleaned, and Herman Linte, Sydney Fileen, Nigel Pye and the Haversham crew will all be returning to their studio in a day or so, rather than working from their homes. We’re hoping Steven Allen Adams will be able to give us a new NOISE BRIGADE, and we’ll also bring you fresh editions of our other shows.

We are trying to be here for you, helping to fill the time while you’re staying safe at home during the pandemic.

We offer up a special not-quite brand new episode of Radio Free Charleston Tueday on The AIR. There’s also a new episode of The Swing Shift. You can leap over and tune in at the website, or you could just stay on this page, and listen to this swell little embedded radio player…

At 10 AM and 10 PM you can hear a rebroadcast of most of an original episode of Radio Free Charleston, as broadcast on WVNS Radio on April 13, 1990. We bring you the first three hours of the program, bailing out before the final hour, which this week was actually a bootleg Beatle album that I was sneaking onto the station. You might notice that, even back then, we were flying our freeform radio flag high, with a playlist that’s all over the damn map.

Before we get into the rebroadcast, I play a song by The Stranglers and give a quick tribute to David Greenfield, the keyboard player for the punk/prog band, who passed away Sunday night of complications from Covid-19. Greenfield appears in the original broadcast as well, as a member of The Stranglers and The Purple Helmets.

RFC debuted on Labor Day Weekend, 1989, and by the following spring had become so successful that station management had to kill it. We didn’t last a month beyond this episode, but this was pretty epic. Remember that the show began at 2 AM Saturday night/Sunday morning, yet we had live, in-studio performances from Strawfyssh, (who were then a trio consisting of Todd Jackson, Keith Walters and I think Jon Raider), and they were joined by Brian Young of Three Bodies, and after they left the studio, Johnny Rock, Tom Hilliard and Sam Spade turned up after 4 AM.

It was pretty epic, and we spend a lot of the show talking about the then-upcoming Earth Day 20 celebration that Radio Free Charleston put on at West Virginia State College. This episode has a ton of surreal audio comedy bits that had been improvised by yours truly, in cahoots with Brian Young and America’s Test Kitchen‘s own Bridget Lancaster. You’ll even get to hear some interesting commercials presented for historical and hysterical value. That’s all heard between me spinning an insanely eclectic playlist that runs from YES to John Prine to Frank Zappa to Shawn Colvin, with a bunch of local tunes mixed in as well.

Check out this playlist…

RFCV5 016

The Stranglers “Nice ‘N’ Sleazy”
Disclaimer
RFC Theme
Clownhole “Heads On Fire”
Crack The Sky “Love Me Like A Terrorist”
Strawfyssh “If Only If”
Strawfyssh “Sacred Pommegranite”
They Might Be Giants “She Was A Hotel Detective”
Earth Day promo
Stark Raven “Irrational People”
The Purple Helmets “I Can’t Explain”
Fishbone “Slow Bus Movin'”
Strawfyssh “Choppin’ Broccoli”
Marc Jordan “Can We Still Be Friends”
Figures On A Beach “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet”
Brian Young with Keith Walters “Swinging Man”
Skinny Puppy “The Omen 1”
Government Cheese “Camping On Acid”
Psychedelic Furs “Pulse”

hour two
Brian & Rudy “Elvis ID”
Frank Zappa “Ride My Face To Chicago”
The Nude Kids On The Block “The Right Muff (live)”
Peter Frampton “Show Me The Way”
Gentlemen Without Weapons “Unconditional Love”
Suicide Hotline
The Dead Milkmen “My Many Smells”
The Clash “Rudie Can’t Fail”
Nude Kids On The Block “Happy Birthday Mo-chelle”
Shocking Interview
Smoking commercial
Pere Ubu “Waiting For Mary”
Joaquin Liévano “The Art of Bowing”
Bauhaus “Bela Lugosi’s Dead”
The Strangeloves “I Want Candy”
Messages from Strawfyssh
Don McClean “American Pie”
Full Body Slam
The Dickies “Monster Island”
Hyper Station ID
The Stranglers “Mean To Me”
John Wesley Harding “Here Comes The Groom”

hour three
The Beloved “Don’t You Worry”
Three Bodies “Treehouse”
Meandering rant
YES “Tempus Fugit”
Sexy Coughing
Syd Barrett “Dollyrocker”
David Friesen “Festival Dance”
Some Forgotten Color “Restrain”
Johnny Rock, and Tom Hilliard and Sam Spade in the studio
West Virginia Tourism Jingle
Cranky Old Men
John Prine “Illegal Smiles”
Daivd Bowie “Fashion”
Shawn Colvin “Cry Like An Angel”
Studio chatter
Dirty waiter talk
John Prine “Sam Stone”
Stephen Beckner “Blind Tomorrow”
The Sugarcubes “Regina”
Studio chatter to the end of the show

Radio Free Charleston can be heard Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM, with replays Thursday at 3 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.

At 1 PM today, we’ll replay last week’s Air Music Special, MIRRORBALL, hosted by Mel Larch. 2 PM sees an encore of a recent episode of Psychedelic Shack, as the entire Haversham Recording Institute crew has taken this week off.

Don’t despair, though, because we do have a new episode of The Swing Shift at 3 PM Tuesday. This week we spend the whole our jiving to the 90s Swing Revival, with bands like Cherry Poppin’ Daddies, Brian Setzer Orchestra, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy and Royal Crown Revue. Look at this setlist…

The Swing Shift 091

Cherry Poppin’ Daddies “Mr. White Keys”
Brian Setzer Orchestra “That Mellow Saxaphone”
Indigo Swing “Swing Lover”
Lily Wilde “Work Baby”
Big Bad Voodoo Daddy “Jump With Me Baby”
The Jive Aces “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate The Positive”
Lavy Smith and her Red Hot Skillet Lickers
-“Everybody’s Talking About Miss Thing”
Royal Crown Revue “Watts Local”
Big Time Operator “The Game”
Atomic Fireballs “Spanish Fly”
Louis Prima Jr. “A Sunday Kind Of Love”
Johnny Favourite “Black Dog”
Dem Brooklyn Bums “Wifebeata Boogie”
Joe Jackson’s Jumpin’ Jive “San Francisco Fran”

You can hear The Swing Shift Tuesday at 3 PM, with replays Wednesday at 7 AM and 6 PM, Thursday at 7 PM and Saturday at 5 PM, only on The AIR. You can also hear all-night marathons, seven hours each, starting at Midnight Thursday and Sunday evenings.

One of the things I do when I’m in the mood is to take a photo and so thoroughly mangle it by repeatedly feeding it through digital filters and manipulating the colors so much that the end result is completely unrecognizable.

While the image you see above looks like a semi-abstract floral painting of some sort, it is actually a super-manipulated take on a publicity photo of some actors from the 1970s. Because I do not know how litigious the original photographer might be, I will refrain from identifying the actors or posting the original image here. If you would like to try to figure it out for yourself, here’s a clue: It doesn’t look anything like the image above.

You can click the image if you want to inspect a bigger version and figure it all out.

Meanwhile, over in radio-land, Monday on The AIR, our Monday Marathon runs from 7 AM to 3 PM , and brings you eight episodes of Beatles Blast.  These are NOT the Lost Beatles Tapes episodes, and instead follow the show’s original format.Then 3 PM should see an encore of a recent episode of Prognosis with Herman Linte. Our friends at Haversham are busy on another project this week, but should be back with fresh programming next week.

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

Since tomorow is a day I dread, a day people have proclaimed “Star Wars Day” for no other reason than the tired and barely clever pun, “May The Fourth Be With You.”  Because of that, quite possibly the lamest joke ever created by nerds, one that should bring the harshest scorn and shame upon anyone who utters it, I decided to pick a short film that demonstrates that stupid humor based on Star Wars can exist without being completely insipid.

Hardware Wars is a 1978 short film parody of a teaser trailer for the science fiction film Star Wars. The thirteen-minute film, which was released almost 18 months after Star Wars, mainly consisted of inside jokes and visual puns that heavily depended upon audience familiarity with the original. The theme song is Richard Wagner’s famous “Ride of the Valkyries.”

This is the work of Ernie Fosselius, who has had an amazing career that includes being a founding member of The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, directing several short films for Sesame Street, sound design for several acclaimed motion pictures and providing the voices for The Rancor Keeper in Return of the Jedi, and the Martians in Mars Attacks.

Near misses in the career of Fosselius include turning down the chance to direct Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, and the authorship of several unproduced screenplays including one for Zippy The Pinhead.

He’s currently working with animatronic puppets in a gallery show, and has a few dozen other ideas floating around. Enjoy Hardware Wars, and please stop making that awful joke.

And yes, that is Paul Frees, doing the narration.