Month: January 2021 (Page 3 of 4)

I’m taking a moment away from my normal routine of telling you about cool things like toys, books, comics, music and whatnot to tell you about an important thing.

Beth McCarthy, the daughter of longtime PopCult/RFC friend Tony Slack, is in need of her second double-lung transplant, and Tony has a GoFundMe page up to help with the expenses.  Beth was born with a rare medical condition and battled respiratory issues her whole life. Eventually it became apparent that this young mother of twins would need a lung transplant in order to survive.

Tony put on a variety of fundraising events under the banner of “A Beth of Fresh Air,” including improv shows with his group, The Mighty Schmucks, and they banked enough money to help the family get through the crisis, which involved Beth relocating to Pittsburgh with her mother for the surgery and a recovery period, and medical bills that stagger the imagination. I wrote about one of these in October, 2018.

Beth was on the transplant list. The family had to wait for a pair of lungs to become available.

The call came in April of 2020, and by July, Beth was back home, hopefully settling into a normal life.

But it was not to be. As Tony explains in the GoFundMe listing…

Beth received her new lungs this past April.  Unfortunately in the tradition of 2020, things have took an unexpected turn.  Beth is now hospitalized due to a series of ailments, and is facing a second double-lung transplant at UPMC.  That means more medical bills, several months of living in Pittsburgh, and all of the expenses involved with living away from home.

Beth is a real, live miracle.  After receiving her 1st transplant she got married, rode bikes with her children, and went hiking.  Lets do what we can to make sure she gets back to where she belongs again.  Which is raising her beautiful babies and growing old with the man of her dreams, Tim.

In addition to the need for a 2nd lung transplant,  Beth’s mother April has decided to become her primary care giver.  This involves April putting her own job aside to give Beth the care she needs up until,  and after the transplant.  Due to this April will also be in need of financial assistance to help cover her own bills and expenses.

Let’s show 2020 that we are stronger than anything it can throw at Beth!  And more than anything, let’s pray for this beautiful and strong young woman.

Once again, we only offer up one new episode of our speciality music shows Tuesday on The AIR with a fresh edition of Psychedelic Shack. RFC and The Swing Shift are taking the week off because plans changed and your PopCulteer got hit with a big last-minute rush job. We’ll be back next week at full strength.

Meanwhile, you may point your cursor over and tune in at the website, or you could just stay on this page, and  listen to that happy little embedded radio player over in the right column of the blog.

Tuesday on The AIR at 10 AM you can tune in for an encore of Radio Free Charleston V5 Episode 26, which you can read about HERE. This edition of the show opens with a very relevant tune by John Ellison, and offers up three full hours of great local and international music. We will return next week with a brand-new show that will open with an exciting new local metal band.

At 1 PM we encore last week’s episode of Curtain Call, which is split between being a tribute to the late Rebecca Luker and a showcase for the Ratatouille Musical on Tik Tok.

2 PM sees a brand-new episode of Psychedelic Shack. Nigel Pye blows our mind with a full hour of trippy-hippy brain-expanding music from the golden era of musical experimentation.

Check out the playlist….

Psychedelic Shack 038

Speed, Glue and Shrinki “Stoned Out of My Mind”Silbrerbart “God”
Wishbone Ash “The Pilgrim”
REO Speedwagon “Dead At Last”
Farm “Jungle Song”
The Mads “Fly Away”
Mother Sunday “Midnight Graveyard”
Blood Sweat and Tears “Go Down Gamblin'”

Psychedelic Shack alternates weeks with NOISE BRIGADE Tuesdays at 2 PM, with replays Wednesday at 10 PM, Thursday at 9 AM, Friday at 1 PM, Saturday at 10 AM, Sunday at 9 AM and Monday at 7 PM.

At 3 PM, The Swing Shift brings you three encore episodes. Our Swing showcase will return with new episodes next week. 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.

Sunday afternoon I decided that I had enough of the news, so I turned on some loud music and cranked out a purely-digital abstract painting. This is the kind of thing I can do in my sleep. I laid colored boxes over one another, then colored the areas they overlapped with different hues, then warped it up a bit, did concentric negative patterns, unwarped it and slopped some digital paint over it.

It was more productive than scrolling through Twitter to see the latest outrage. I’m not finished being outraged, but I needed to take a break.

If you want to see it bigger, just click on the image.

Meanwhile, Monday at 9 AM on The AIR, we bring you six episodes of Steven Allen Adams’ NOISE BRIGADE. Steven will be sucked into the vortex of the legislature soon, so new episodes of our Ska/Punk showcase might be in scarce supply for a couple of months, but we don’t want you to think we forgot about him.  Then you can tune into an encore of a recent episode of  Prognosis at 3 PM. This week Herman Linte brings us a selection of progessive rock tunes recorded before a live audience (back in the days when there were such things). It kicks off with Steve Hackett.

You can listen to The AIR at the website, or on the embedded radio player at the top of the right-hand column of this blog.

On the fifth anniversary of his passing, we bring you a full concert by David Bowie, taken from his Glass Spider Tour, in 1987.

List of songs:
1.Up The Hill Backwards
2.Glass Spider
3.Day-In Day-Out
4.Bang Bang
5.Absolute Beginners
6.Loving The Alien
7.China Girl
8.Rebel Rebel
9.Fashion
10.Never Let Me Down
11.Heroes
12.Sons Of The Silent Age
13.Young Americans
14.The Jean Genie
15.Let’s Dance
16.Time
17.Fame
18.Blue Jean
19.I Wanna Be Your Dog
20.White Light / White Heat
21.Modern Love

Tour band:
David Bowie – vocals, guitar
Peter Frampton – guitar, vocals
Carlos Alomar – guitar
Carmine Rojas – bass guitar
Alan Childs – drums
Erdal Kizilcay – keyboards, trumpet, congas, violin
Richard Cottle – keyboards, saxophone

Tour dancers:
Melissa Hurley
Constance Marie
Spazz Attack (Craig Allen Rothwell)
Viktor Manoel
Stephen Nichols
Toni Basil (choreography)

This week we go back to 2014 and the late, much-lamented Dunbar Bowling Alley  for a couple of tunes from our old friends, Under The Radar.

This week’s RFC MINI SHOW was recorded Halloween night 2014 at The Bowling Alley-Dunbar. The RFC crew captured the reunion of Under The Radar, who hadn’t played a show together in over six years. Under The Radar was Rusty Marx, Bill Robinson and Mark Lanham, and they had a blast getting back together for a night of classic rock tunes.

Under The Radar first appeared on the fourth episode of Radio Free Charleston, back in 2006, and it was great to see them back in action.

The PopCulteer
January 8, 2021

I have worn out the adage about “Interesting Times,” so I can’t really use it here, but damn, folks. This week certainly did not go as expected.

Wednesday started out as a truly joyous day as the fine people of Georgia elected two Democratic senators, thus tipping control of The Senate to the Democrats, and handing Mitch McConnell his political balls in a tiny Dixie cup.  We should have been celebrating the coming period of prosperity and sound leadership that we can only get when the Republicans are out of power.

But before we could savor that moment, the pro-Trump terrorist rally began, and an unprecedented attack on our government took place. Not since 9 11 has our Democracy been so assaulted by radicalized hate-mongering terrorists. There is no reason that the people caught on video and in photos shouldn’t be rounded up and shipped off to Gitmo, to await a military trial that might happen sometime in the next five years.

This has nothing to do with today’s post, but it looks really cool and I wanted to put it here.

As I said yesterday, it didn’t really seem right to do an article about farting plush or Batman or the type of distractional content that I usually provide here in PopCult.

It’s not like the old Gazette days, when I had to walk on eggshells to avoid making the Widder Chilton clutch her pearls and fire everyone in the features department, but still, I want to focus on fun stuff, even when reality intrudes and takes a huge dump in pop culture like it did Wednesday.

Heck, with so many people glued to the news, the ratings for AEW and NXT took a pretty major hit, despite both shows delivering killer episodes. The wrestling folks can’t want until we get normal adult leaders in place and the news becomes boring enough to not siphon off their audience like it has for the last four years.

Today we must soldier on and hope that we can get through the next couple of weeks with a minimum of chaos and despotic hijinks from the nutjob in chief. So we’re going to look forward and preview what PopCult has on the agenda in the coming weeks.

First, we have a radio note to share: Over on The AIR, our sister internet radio station (listen to it at the website or on the player in the right column), we are promoting Mel Larch’s Disco Music showcase, MIRRORBALL to weekly status…sort of. Starting today at 2 PM, you can tune in to relive the Disco era every Friday.

Mel is still going to do new episodes of the show every other week, but now we have enough episodes in the library to alternate repeats with the fresh shows, and keep the beat going on a regular basis. The AIR Music Special will disappear for a few weeks while we re-tool our station and extend some invitations for new hosts to come to The AIR.

The plan is to shake things up a bit in February, and add some new sounds to the station.

To mark the new weekly status, Friday we’ll replay Mel’s first episode of MIRRORBALL, and just for the heck of it, we’ll follow it at 3 PM with the very first episode of our New Wave Music showcase, Sydney’s Big Electric Cat, which will return with a new episode next week.

I want to get back to writng about cool toys.

Meanwhile in PopCult I have a stack of new stuff to tell you about. We have a new action figure line to review, as well as cool new albums from some old friends, and there are a bunch of exciting books and comics in the queue. It’s everything from pulp fiction to trading cards to Italian Sex and Horror comics (seriously, that’s the title).

I’ll also be showcasing a few websites that you might enjoy.

On top of that, just yesterday, I finally added HBO Max and Peacock (the free version) to my Roku, and you’ll be getting in-depth reviews, probably a month from now. I want to take my time to assess these new streaming beasts.

I really want to get back to thinking about cool toys and comics and stuff, and be done with worrying about the horrors of the last four years of the American nightmare.

So please do check back at PopCult every day for fresh content, and all of our regular features. I’ll still be here, even if the mood is…concerned.

I started writing PopCult in August, 2005. That means I was not putting this blog together when 9 11 happened. I did not have to force myself into “PopCult” mode the day after a national tragedy–a terror attack by radicalized lunatics under the direction of a madman.

So, this is my first time faced with that particular problem.

What happened yesterday was an assault on Democracy by radicalized terrorists who adhere to an insane ethos that has no basis in reality.

How am I supposed to write about comics books, toys, music or movies when this actually happened in my country?

I suppose I can try to filter my understanding of this through the filter of pop culture. What we saw yesterday was the end result of more than a century of anti-Democracy forces warping the minds of impressionable Americans through the use of popular culture. The 2020 election was not stolen, and only idiots are convinced that it was. However, there is a whole multi-billion dollar industry devoted to convincing idiots of stuff like that. It’s been around for a long time.

The American Civil War was fought over the issue of slavery. Very clearly and objectively, the North was the good side, and the South was evil. Evil was soundly defeated, or so we thought, and the country was supposed to heal.

However, popular culture was used to subvert the public perception of that attack on America. In the decades that followed the North’s victory, books and movies romanticized the “lost cause” and portrayed the Southerners as poor victims of a tyrannical North. The term “The War of Northern Aggression,” which was originally mocking sarcasm of the “lost cause” mythos became a phrase that was seriously employed without any sense of sarcasm or irony.

There have been forces in this country that have always resented Democracy. Groups of power-hungry despots who hate the idea of all men being created equal, and think that they should be above the law. They have used pop culture to brainwash the masses into voting certain ways to block ideas and concepts that these forces find offensive, like equality, freedom, fairness and worker’s rights.

Culture has always been used to shape public opinion. It’s why the Egyptian Pharaohs built giant statues of themselves, why kings commissioned portraits, why countries have national anthems and why some books and plays have altered our perception of reality.

Shakespeare’s Richard III is basically propaganda designed to pump up the legacy of the Tudors. That’s just one example.

What we saw yesterday was the result of decades of anti-American propaganda which has taken root in this country by proclaiming itself to be “patriotic.” You can draw a straight line from The John Birch Society, which arose from the ashes of McCarthyism, to Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” through to Reaganism’s deregulation of broadcasting, and the subsequent rise of Rush Limbaugh’s daily hate-speech program to FOX News and to Donald Trump.

Combine that with a cult base of sick human beings who think the wrong side won the Civil War, and you have a dangerous recipe for disaster.

The end result is a mob of thousands of people, claiming to support “law and order” and to respect the police and our country, manipulated by a con man into attacking the US Capitol Building, assaulting police officers and delaying the peaceful transfer of power.

It was like watching “Attack of the 200-pound Lemmings,” and it was a horror show.

A lot of folks in this country derisively use the term “woke” to denote wimpy political correctness. It actually means that you become enlightened, and begin to try to be a better person. It’s an admission that you were wrong or mislead and now you know better. “Woke” is pretty much what Jesus wanted us to be. That the term is spat out as an insult by folks who have somehow convinced themselves that they’re true Christians is almost comedically hypocritical.

I would imagine that yesterday, a lot of Trump’s base “woke up” to the fact that they have been lied to, and have placed their faith in the wrong person. I know that many of them are too stubborn to ever admit that they are gullible idiots who got fleeced by a con man, but I also know that the sight of thugs looting the US Capitol ought to be enough to shake a good number of them out of their fog.

At least I hope so. At the moment, the idea of radical terrorists dedicated to destroying the very basis of our Democracy is more than a little terrifying.

I have a stack of cool books, music, comics and toys to write about, but at the moment, I just can’t get into the mood. Apologies for that. I will try to PopCult again tomorrow.

Before anybody points it out, yes, I realize that I just wrote an 800-word essay called “At A Loss For Words.”

Wednesday afternoon The AIR brings you special brand-new episodes of Beatles Blast and Curtain Call!  You can tune in at the website, or or you could just stay on this page, and  listen to the convenient embedded radio player lurking over in the right-hand column of this blog.

At 2 PM, your truly returns to host a  Beatles Blast mixtape salute to Sir Paul McCartney, who just released a brand-new album, recorded solo, during the lockdown (or “rockdown” as he calls it). We bring you the highlights of his post-Beatles musical career ranging from his early singles through album tracks from every decade since the 1970s. Along the way, we include at least one track each from McCartney (1970), McCartney II (1980) and his latest, McCartney III (2020).

Beatles Blast can be heard every Wednesday at 2 PM, with replays Thursday at 10 PM, Friday at 1 PM, Saturday afternoon, and the following Tuesday at 9 AM.

At 3 PM on Curtain Call, Mel Larch  spends half of her show paying tribute to Rebecca Luker, who passed away late last year. This Tony-nominated Broadway Veteran, who starred in such shows as Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music, The Phantom of The Opera and Fun Home, among many others, left a legacy of grand works, the last of which we will hear highlights from in this show.

All The Girls was a 2018 revue that celebrated the friendship of Luker and Sally Wilfert and the many facets of womanhood. Drawing inspiration from the American Songbook, pop and rock as well as their own experiences as women in musical theater, this revue featured songs from Hamilton and by Stephen Sondheim, Peter Allen, Stephen Schwartz, and more.

The second half of Curtain Call this week is a special surprise that we won’t tell you about here. You’ll just have to tune in for a joyous musical theatre happening. It really gets 2021 off to a great start.

Curtain Call can be heard on The AIR Wednesday at 3 PM, with replays Thursday at 8 AM and 9 PM, and Saturday at 8 PM. A six-hour marathon of classic episodes can be heard Sunday evening starting at 6 PM, and an all-night marathon of Curtain Call episodes can be heard Wednesday nights, beginning at Midnight.

Tuesday on The AIR we deliver brand-new episodes of Radio Free Charleston, Psychedelic Shack and The Swing Shift. While you recover from the extended holiday season, you can still support the local scene (and the stoner scene and the Swing scene) here on The AIR.  You simply have to move your cursor over and tune in at the website, or you could just stay on this page, and  listen to the cool embedded player over at the top of the right column.

We have a special Radio Free Charleston at 10 AM and 10 PM Tuesday.  This week we open with the new single from Tautologic who appeared on our most recent RFC video show. We play their new single, “That’s What I Hear,” which is for sale at Bandcamp, with half the proceeds going to the ACLU.

We also show off new tunes from Lady D, Todd Burge, Rockwell’s Ghost, Neostra Music, Jim Lange, Rob Fetters and more, and you can find more info about those artists by clicking on their names in this very paragraph.

That’s all in the first hour of RFC, because the second hour revives an old Radio Free Charleston International from 2017, which hasn’t been heard by human ears in more than three years. I implore you to use your human ears to give it a listen. The second and third hours are packed with killer semi-obscure, yet very cool music.

Check out the playlist to see all the goodies we bring you this week…

RFCv5039

hour one
Tautologic “That’s What I Hear”
Lady D “Karma Is A Bitch”
Todd Burge “I Got Drunk Again Last Night (live)”
Rockwell’s Ghost “Teabonix”
Crystal Bright and the Silver Hands “Jockey Full of Bourbon”
The Bounty “Go To Pieces”
Paul McCartney “Lavatory Lil”
Neostra Music “Gathering Fields”
Jim Lange “Elegy”
Rob Fetters “Turn This Ship Around”
Dreamcar “All Of The Dead Girls”
Jay Parade “Timeout”
Jerks “Blabbermouth”
Time And Distance “33 1/3”

hours two and three
Magna Carta Cartel “Sway”
Buckingham/McVie “Carnival Begin”
Yes “Future Times”
Avenged Sevenfold “Malagueña Salerosa (La Malagueña)”
Samurai of Prog “The Perfect Black”
The Stranglers “Dutchess”
Duncan MacKay and Georg Voros “The One With The Child In Her Eyes”
Paul McCartney “Oue est le Soleil”
Emerson Lake and Palmer “Taste of My Love”
Nad Sylvan “The Quartermaster”
Rita Ora “Your Song”
Brain May Kerry Ellis “Roll With You”
Chuck Berry “Dutchman”
The Surfaris “Wipe Out”
Crazy World of Arthur Brown “Fire”
Hughes-Turner Project “Death Alley Driver”
Strangers “Money Is Just Paper”
Cheap Trick “Gonna Raise Hell”
Raygun Cowboys “It’s Coming Down”
The Naturals “I Don’t Need A Car”
Todd Rundgren with Daryl Hall “Chance For Us”
Muse “Dig Down”
Gong “Oily Way”
Mew “Ay Ay Ay”

You can hear this episode of Radio Free Charleston Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM on The AIR, with replays Thursday at 3 PM, Friday at 9 AM and 7 PM, Saturday at 11 AM and Midnight, Sunday at 11 AM and the next Monday at 8 PM, exclusively on The AIR.

I’m also going to attempt to embed a low-fi, mono version of this show right in this post, right here so you can listen on demand. Let’s see if it works.

Son of a bitch! It worked!

Looks like we’ll be doing this moving forward. The audio quality is close to AM radio, but at least you can listen at will.  After 2008, I could never get embedded music to work in the Gazette-Mail version of PopCult.

I’m digging the new freedom, man.

Speaking of digging things, man, at 2 PM we offer up a new episode of Nigel Pye’s Psychedelic Shack, loaded with trippy music from the trippy era of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Nigel, ever the upright gentleman, has even sent along a playlist…

Psychedelic Shack 037

Atomic Rooster “Death Walks Behind You”
Electric Food “Andy’s Breakdown Plantation”
Smash “Fail Safe”
My Solid Ground “Dirty Yellow Dust/The Executioner”
Mick Abrahams “Awake”
Marmalade “I’ve Been Around Too Long”
Heaven “Number Two”

Psychedelic Shack alternates weeks with NOISE BRIGADE  Tuesdays at 2 PM, with replays Wednesday at 10 PM, Thursday at 9 AM, Friday at 1 PM, Saturday at 8 AM, Sunday at 9 AM and Monday at 7 PM. Let us try the embeddening thing again, shall we?

Yeah, that’s a game-changer.

We shall move on with today’s all-new episode of The Swing Shift at 3 PM. We are in a bit of a goofy Swing mood this week, tossing some bizarre surprises and novelty tunes into our usual mix of the greatest Swing Music of the last century. Who said you had to be serious to Swing?

Hell, it’s probably a detriment. Check out this playlist…

The Swing Shift 107

Tony Bennett with Count Basie’s Big Band “Are You Having Any Fun?”
Lady Linn and her Magnificent Seven “Always Shine”
Frank Sinatra “Everybody’s Twistin'”
Shirley Bassey “You Ain’t Heard Nothing Yet”
Al Hirt “Batman”
Harry James “Ciribiribin”
Paul Carrack “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”
Pink Turtle “You Really Got Me”
Richard Cheese “Need You Tonight”
Sophia Loren “Mambo Bacan”
The New Orleans Johnnys “This Story”
Pavlov Stelar “Purple Moon”
Spike Jones “You Always Hurt The One You Love”
Glenn Miller “In The Mood”
Louis Jordan “Knock Me A Kiss”
Cab Calloway “Special Delivery n’2”
Olivia Newton John and The Tubes “Dancin’ Round and Round”

You can hear The Swing Shift Tuesdays at 3 PM, with replays Wednesday at 7 AM and 6 PM, Thursday at 2 PM,  Saturday at 5 PM and Sunday at 10 AM, only on The AIR. You can also hear all-night marathons, seven hours each, starting at Midnight Thursday and Sunday evenings.

What the heck, let’s go for the trifecta…

Cool!

Those are Tuesday’s new shows on The AIR. Leave a comment and let us know what you think of the embedded programs in this post.

We begin 2021 with your PopCulteer still playing around with thick and unstable old acrylics, this time on an ancient piece of canvas board. I decided to challenge myself with making something with a warmer palette than last week, but picking a mostly-gray mechanical subject.

In this case, I based this on Zintar, one of the Zeroid robot toys, beloved from my childhood. About sixteen years ago I lucked into a bargain price and got a near-complete set of decent grade Zeroids off of a collector who had upgraded his collection to minty-mint robots. Zintar was the one I had as a kid, and he’s been the subject of Monday Morning Art in PopCult before.

Here Zintar is again, this time in real-world paint. He has enough color on him to make it worth the trouble of opening extra tubes of paint.

Halfway through, I decided to do a blankish background, rather than set him in a scene of some sort. I decided not to change the lighting and reflections I’d started because I like the surreal edge it lends to the piece.

If you want to see it bigger, just click on the image.

Meanwhile, Monday at 9 AM on The AIR, we bring you two recent episodes of Radio Free Charleston that will lead you to a brand-new episode of Prognosis at 3 PM. This week Herman Linte brings us a mixtape episode featuring highlights of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon Immersion boxset.  Following the entire album, you’ll hear alternate mixes, live tracks and demos of the classic prog-rock highmark.

You can listen to The AIR at the website, or on the embedded radio player at the top of the right-hand column of this blog.