Month: June 2022 (Page 3 of 4)

Even with my Myasthenia Gravis in full-bloom, I forced myself to produce three full hours of RFC Tuesday on The AIR , Despite the heat, and with the help of much air conditioning, your humble blogger and radio show host was able to crank out a three-hour, new full-length Radio Free Charleston. 

Three full hours of great local, new and independent music is nothing to sniff at. To hear all this cool music you simply have to point 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.

At 10 AM and 10 PM you can hear 180 minutes of great music, some new, some old, some from all around the world and some of it local, exclusively on The AIR.

The three hours of RFC contain some all-new goodness filled with newly-released local stuff from  Bane Star, Brian Diller, Sierra Ferrell and more, plus we dig into the archives for some pretty bizarre stuff from all around the world.

It’s about the juxtapozin’,  ya know?

This week we’re just dropping in links for the local artists. Your host is not exactly at 100% yet. But this is one cool show. One minor corrrection here, in the show I say the new pre-order LP from The Paranoid Style is on colored vinyl, but I was mistaken. It’s still way cool, though.

Check out the playlist:

RFC V5 091

hour one
Brian Diller & The Ride “Understanding Jane”
The Paranoid Style “Barney Bubbles”
Elvis Costello, Rusty “Surrender To The Rhythm”
Slate Dump “Jaw Crusher”
Corduroy Brown “To My Younger Self”
Neneh Cherry “Buffalo Stance (2022)”
Aaron Fisher “Drive”
The Bob Thompson Band   “You Are The Traveler”
Jazz Sabbath “Iron Man”
David Synn with Matthew Fitzwater “Tattoo”
Spencer ElliottSE3 “Torque”
The Dream Syndicate “Beyond Control”
Julian Lennon “Freedom”

hour two
Bane Star “The Astral”
J. Marinelli “Cilium Plank”
Sex Pistols “Pretty Vacant”
Tony Sheridan & The Beatles “My Bonnie”
The Jasons “Kill A Commie For Mommy”
Unmanned “Strike One”
Rockwell’s Ghost “Molemen (Demo)”
Baked Shrimp “Old Man In The Desert”
Ann Magnuson “Gone Tomorrow (from The Jobriath Medley)”
Jobriath “Space Clown”
Mel Larch “Siren Song of the Catfish”
Liquid Canvas “Spirit Molecule”
Renaissance “The Other Woman”
Procol Harum “A Whiter Shade of Pale (live)”

hour three
Sierra Ferrell  “Give It Time (Alternate Version)”
The Nanker Phelge “Killer Took A Holiday”
Liam Gallhager “Joker”
Billy Thorpe & The Aztecs “Rock ‘N’ Roll City”
Time And Distance  “There Is Nothing I Hate More Than The DMV”
Bay City Rollers “Turn On The Radio”
Joseph Hale  “Body Builder”
Emmalea Deal “All My Boyfriends”
69 Fingers “Stumbles”
The Science Fair Explosion “Coinslot”
Reedemon “Purpose”
Tape Girl “Half Pipe”
Millington “Millington”
Divine “You Think You’re A Man”

You can hear this episode of Radio Free Charleston Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM on The AIR, with replays Wednesday at 9 AM,  Thursday at 3 PM, Friday at 9 AM, Saturday at Noon and Midnight,  and  Monday at 11 AM, exclusively on The AIR. Now you can also hear a different episode of RFC every weekday at 5 PM, and we bring you a marathon all night long Saturday night/Sunday morning.

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

After RFC, stick around for encores of MIRRORBALL at 1 PM, and Ska Madness at 2 PM. At 3 PM we have two recent episodes of The Swing Shift.  If all goes according to plan, we’ll have new episodes of Curtain Call, The Comedy Vault and Beatles Blast Wednesday, and a new edition of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat at the end of the week.

This week our art is a doodle I did while on hold on the phone. I used a brush pen on paper for pens, and it came out looking like a robot lady, so I’m going to pretend that’s what it was supposed to be all along.

To see it bigger try clicking HERE.

Meanwhile, Monday at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you a recent episode of  Psychedelic Shack, followed at 3 PM by a recent edition of Herman Linte’s weekly showcase of the Progressive Rock of the past half-century, Prognosis.  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.

Psychedelic Shack can be heard every Monday at 2 PM, with replays Tuesday at 9 AM, Wednesday at 10 PM, Friday at 1 PM,  and Saturday at 9 AM. Classic episodes can be heard Sunday at 9 AM as part of our Sunday Haversham Recording Institute collection.

You can hear Prognosis on The AIR Monday at 3 PM, with replays Tuesday at 7 AM, Wednesday at 8 PM, Thursday at Noon, and Saturday at 10 AM. You can hear two classic episodes of the show Sunday at 2 PM.

Tonight at 8 PM you can hear an hour of great comedy from Gilda Radner on The Comedy Vault. Wednesday evening at 10 PM, we’ll have another new episode of The Comedy Vault.

Then, at 9 PM we bring you an overnight marathon of Sydney Fileen’s New Wave showcase, Sydney’s Big Electric Cat, to get you ready for a new episode this coming Friday.

With Charleston’s FestivALL kicking off today, we decided to revisit some of the glory days when PopCult and Radio Free Charleston were the only outlets providing in-depth video coverage of the event. You can find a full list of FestivALL 2022 events HERE.

Back in 2011 we bought you eight episodes of Radio Free Charleston devoted to FestivALL. We did this all in twelve days. The episodes ranged from seventeen to thirty-three minutes long, with a total running time of two hours and fifty minutes. You can watch all eight of these shows, each one crammed full of God-knows-what, right there at the top of this post. Or you could be out enjoying FestivALL 2022. I will leave the choice in your hands even though there’s no reason you can’t do both.

The shows embeded in the handy video playlist above run the gamut, fill with cool stuff like music from Holy Cow, The Boatmen,  Miss Behavin’, Sasha Colette, The Velvet Nomads, Comparsa, The Voodoo Katz, Sierra Ferrell, Don Baker, John Radcliff, John Lilly, The Kingfish Five, Kathleen Coffee, Joseph Hale, WATT 4, Christopher Nelson, Albert Perrone, 600 lbs of SIn, Uncle Eddy and Robyn, Todd Burge, Andy Park. and more.

Intercut with the musical performances you will find scenes from The Art Parade, The Art Fair, The Antique Fair, Dizzy Doc’s Balloon Sculpture, Eamon Hardiman’s silent film, The Peer to Pier project and a few other surprises.

Plus we mix some of the music with dance by Capitol High School Dance Company, Mandy Petry, Brian Roller, Kevin Pauley, and Jeff Bukovinsky of the No Pants Players, Jenna Brooke Swanson and Raqs Shakti, Professor Danger, Kathleen Coffee, the Trillium Performance Art Company, and Some Guy In Davis Park

Plus we have short samples of theatrical events like Douglas Imbrogno’s magnum opus, “Saint Stephen’s Dream: A Space Opera,” which was staged by WestVirginiaVille.com; CYAC’s “Easier Than The Truth”; The No Pants Players; and CLOG’s “Thoroughly Modern Millie.”

RFC 102 "FestivAll 2010 Pt. One" from Rudy Panucci on Vimeo.

Back in 2010 Radio Free Charleston made a six-episode voyage into Cinéma vérité coverage of FestivAll. This week, to get you all in the mood for FestivAll, coming up later this month, we’re going to re-present, in one handy post, all six of our FestivAll 2010 shows. Above you see RFC 102, with The Nanker Phelge, Spurgie Hankins Band, The Kanawha Kordsmen and Bob Thompson.

After the jump, you’ll find the remaining five episodes (for a total of over two hours of RFC at FestivAll) with music from Brian Diller, The VooDoo Katz, Comparsa, The Velvet Gypsies, Miss Behavin’, Option 22, Alasha Al-Qudwah, Mark Scarpelli, The Sweet Adelines, Actual Rhinocerous, Bare Bones, T.J. King and many more. You’ll also see lots of the art, parades, theater and film that permeated the city.

Continue reading

The PopCulteer
June 10, 2022

This week The AIR dives headfirst into the FUNK! Mel Larch funks it up bigtime Friday afternoon on The AIR.  The AIR is PopCult’s sister radio station. You can hear our shows on The AIR website, or just click on the embedded player found elsewhere on this page.

At 2 PM, Mel Larch uncorks a new MIRRORBALL! The AIR’s showcase of classic Disco music presents a funk-heavy collection of classic Disco tracks from the classic era of rhythmic aerobic soical interaction.. This week Mel brings you some of the funkier dance tunes from the classic Disco era with tracks from the funky soul meccas of Philedelphia and Southern California and many funky points between.

For one hour you can go back to the Golden Age of Disco, where the sideburns were long, the skirts were short and the dancing was endless.

Check out the playlist…

MIRRORBALL 053

MFSB “The Zip”
WAR “You Got The Power”
Gwen McCrae “Poyson”
Jimmy “Bo” Horne “Is It In”
Peter Brown “Do Ya Wanna Get Funky”
Chic “Stage Fright”
Jenny Burton “Nobody Can Tell Me (He Don’t Love Me)”
Slave “Just A Touch of Love”
Shalamar “A Night To Remember”
Phreek “Weekend”
Narada Michael Walden “I Shoula Loved Ya”
First Choice “Let No Man Put Asunder”
Double Exposure “My Love Is Free”
The O’Jays “Put Your Hands Together”

You can hear MIRRORBALL every Friday at 2 PM, with replays Saturday at  9 PM (kicking off a mini-marathon), Sunday at 11 PM, Monday at 9 AM, and Tuesday at 1 PM  exclusively on The AIR.

At 3 PM, we’ll be replaying Sydney Fileen’s special mixtape show devoted to New Wave in 1981. You can find the playlist and background info HERE, once you scroll past one of my rants.

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, Monday at 7 AM, Tuesday at 8 PM, Wednesday at Noon and Thursday at 10 AM, exclusively on The AIR.

Friday at 9 PM you can tune in for a 12-hour marathon of Curtain Call, presenting Mel Larch’s showcase of musical theatre. This marathon will kick off with Mel’s 2022 Tony Nominations show, to get you ready for the Tony Awards show Sunday night on CBS and Paramount+. Also, because of the Tony’s broadcast, we are moving Mel’s regular Sunday night Curtain Call marathon to Sunday, daytime, so you don’t have to choose between the Mel and Broadway. Sunday night The AIR will bring you six episodes of Bealtes Blast.

That’s what’s on The AIR Friday and this weekend, and that is this week’s PopCulteer. Check back every day for fresh content and loads of our regular features.

As we slide into the beginning of FestivALL in Charleston we shall take one more quick look at just a few of the cool things going on in and around town this weekend. You can find a full list of FestivALL events HERE.

Live Music is back at Taylor Books. There is no cover charge, and shows start at 7:30 PM. Friday it’s Megan Bee. Saturday sees Brenna Dugan at Charleston’s Bookstore/coffeehouse/art gallery institution.

Our lead item again this week is Fairview, the Pulitzer Award-winning play that wraps up its run this weekend at The Alban Arts Center and runs through next weekend. If you read my review yesterday, you know that I very much recommend you go to see this play.

Fairview was written by Jackie Sibblies Drury, and is described as  “a biting, comedic look at a middle-class Black family whose birthday celebration takes a dark twist and challenges the gaze of race and the very structures we hold so close.”

Be warned that the performance includes adult language and themes. Directed by Stuart Frazier, “Fairview” will be presented at 8 PM Friday and Saturday; 2 PM Sunday. Tickets are $17 for adults, and $12 for seniors and students. To order tickets, call 304-721-8896 or got to the Alban Arts Center website.

As far as I know, there are no vaccination or mask mandates for any of the events listed this week. However, we all need to remember that the pandemic is not over yet, and now only the stupidest of people are going without vaccinations. Many people who have very good reasons are still wearing masks, and many of us, understandably, are still nervous about being in crowds, masked or not. Be kind and understanding  while you’re out.

In the meantime, if you’re up for going out, here are some suggestions from folks who were kind enough to provide graphics and make my job easier…

FRIDAY

SATURDAY

SUNDAY

A PopCult Theatre Review

You have three more chances to see The Alban Arts Center production of Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Pulitzer-award-winning play, Fairview. By all means, if you can attend a performance this weekend, you should.

The cast is amazing. Christen Wesley, Norman Branch, Tasha Harris and Rhonda Rogombe take on the challenging roles of The Frasier Family, a normal middle-class Black family preparing to celebrate their matriarch’s birthday. I’ll get into what’s so challenging about these roles below, after a spoiler warning, but every member of the cast does such a terrific job that I could spend the whole review just praising them.

As “The Watchers” we have stunning performances by Kim Waybright, Justin Clark, Clayton Strohmenger and Laura Michele Diener.

I can’t recommend this production of Fairview enough. The Director, Stuart Frazier, has assembled an amazing cast and brought this play to life at The Alban. He’s done a remarkable job with every element of the technical and blocking aspects of this play. Everything, including the set design and costuming is top-level.

Let me pause here for a moment, and do something that I don’t do often in this blog. If you really want to see a spectacular piece of hilarious, thought-provoking experimental theatre, with a very meta edge to it and a very serious message buried within its hilarity, then don’t read this review much further. I deliberately kept myself in the dark about Fairview, and I think It enhanced my enjoyment of this amazing play.

There’s a reason that the preview video The Alban released for this play reminded me of the Adult Swim short, Too Many Cooks.

If my enthusiasm has already convinced you to make your way to The Alban Arts Center this coming weekend to see this play, stop reading now, and you will get the full experience. Tickets are $17 for adults, and $12 for seniors and students. To order tickets, call 304-721-8896 or got to the Alban Arts Center website.

If you need your arm twisted a bit more, read on…

Rogombe, Harris, Branch and Wesley as The Frasier Family

Fairview starts out seeming like a very familiar, if well-done, Black family TV show type of story. In the first act we meet the four main characters and they are all well-established for the audience, Beverly, the mother is preparing a birthday dinner for grandma. Her affectionate husband, Dayton, is trying to help and stay out of the way at the same time. Her gossipy sister, Jasmine, arrives and stirs the pot. Finally, Keisha, the teenaged daughter, appears and is the perfect teen combination of exuberance and exasperation.

At the end of the first act Beverly gets a little overwhelmed, and faints.

Act Two is where the play starts to mess with your mind. We see the cast repeat all the actions from the first act, only in silence. Meanwhile we hear the voices of people watching what’s going on, as if it were a TV show. Eventually four voices are heard, and it’s worth pointing out that all four voices belong to White people.

And they’re pretty vapid and cluless wypipo at that. We hear a lot of really stupid observations about what they think is going on in the play, tempered with an all-too-familiar unconscious level of racism.

We are hearing the voices of characters who could conceivably say, “I’m not racist, but…” We have the woman who swears she isn’t racist because she had a Black nanny when she was a child; The Joe Rogan type who doesn’t seem to care if he sounds racist; The very flamboyant gay guy who isn’t that concerned with much of anything besides himself; Finally we have the immigrant lady from Russia who finds the whole concept of race relations in America confusing.

Keep in mind that while you’re hearing this commentary, the actors on stage are essentially miming their way through the entire first act. While you’re hearing this bizarre commentary, you’re also wondering what is going to happen when the action on stage catches up to where it left off.

What happens is, it keeps going for about ten more minutes with the actors on stage remaining silent while acting out what comes next. Meanwhile, the commentary keeps going on, building a crescendo of obnoxiousness by the minute. At the point where you’re hoping that the disembodied voices will just shut the hell up so you can get back to the story, Act Two ends.

In Act Three, reality goes off the rails as the commentators from Act Two insert themselves into the narrative as the characters who were mentioned, but not seen, in Act One.  The story devolves into clowning and slapstick, and there’s even a food fight.  It’s completely surreal, absurd and hilarious…and by the end you realize the whole point of the play.

Fairview is about what happens when Black people are not allowed to tell their own stories without interference from White people. It’s about how the creative process gets perverted by folks who are clueless to the damage done by their pointless meddling. Hackneyed tropes and stereotypes get shoved into a story by folks who think they’re “improving it” or “making it more commercially viable” by twisting Black stories to fit White expectations. I have to wonder if Sibblies Drury ever spent time in a Hollywood “writer’s room.”

Fairview succeeds because it makes its point in an uproariously hilarious manner, with jokes and insights layered so thick that you really don’t get the full impact of the play until you’ve had a while to think about it and let it sink in.

There’s a killer sight gag about turbans that didn’t hit me until half an hour after I saw the play.

Be warned that there is some audience participation, so if you’d rather not wind up on stage, sit toward the back of the theater. The play ends with a serious point, but it’s one well worth making.

If you are in the Charleston/Huntington area, you really should make your way to see Fairview this weekend. This is the first local theatre production I’ve been to since the start of the pandemic, and it’s an absolutely incredible play, perfectly executed by a very talented director and cast.

…and to drive the point home, my body has decided to make absolutely sure that I’m still aware that I have Myasthenia Gravis. In fact, it’s hit me hard enough over the past two weeks that this week we have an encore episode of Radio Free Charleston in its normal timeslot on The AIR (you can read about this episode from about a month ago HERE).  I was just not up to recording a new show Monday.

Before I go any further, just in case some of you are new to PopCult, let me tell you a little bit about Myasthenia Gravis,.

“Myasthenia Gravis” is Latin/Greek for “Grave Muscle Weakness.” MG is an auto-immune disorder where antibodies attack the membranes around your nerve cells, blocking the signals from getting from your brain to your muscles. I have apparently had it since at least 2005, when it first manifested itself when my eyes crossed.  It took eleven years to get a proper diagnosis, due to the mildness of my case and my lack of health insurance at the time.

Once diagnosed, Myasthenia Gravis is fairly easily treated with medications. It’s often called “The Snowflake Disease” because the symptoms vary so much from patient to patient. I am very fortunate that my case is extremely mild. In my case, it mainly effects my eyes and fingers. Some people get hit so hard by it that they have to go on disability because they have trouble walking, talking or breathing.

Please note that this goofy graphic was prepared years before COVID-19 was a thing. As far as I know, MG doesn’t really have anything to do with spike proteins.

IIn my case it only affects my eyes and fingers, and as recently as three months ago, I thought there was a chance that I might be in remission. I was diagnosed and have been under treatment since 2016, but I’ve had it since at least 2005. My neurologist believes that it should start fading after time. There are good days and bad days, and really from November of last year to Mid-March of this year, I had a long string of really good days.

But things change. Temperatures change. High temps are my Kryptonite, and the last few of weeks have been rough. Now, I still consider myself very lucky. A “bad day” for me might be an incredibly good day for someone else with MG. When I’m having a bad day, aside from some double vision and finger weakness, I just have a general lack of energy, a bit of a physical depression, as it were. Mentally I’m fine, but it’s just a slog to get started doing things.

Even typing this with a few wonky fingers on my right hand is a bit of an annoyance.

However, it’s still good that my “bad days” only require me to take it easy and avoid stress. So that’s why RFC is taking a week off.

Since June is Myasthenia Gravis Awareness Month, and this year I have this big reminder, I’ll just repeat some of things I’ve written about it in the past, in case you’re considering acquiring a chronic disease with a long and hard to spell name for yourself some day.

With MG, the antibodies in your bloodstream seek out and destroy the very part of your body that is used to transmit nerve signals. It’s not known why this happens, nor is it known why it targets every patient in a different manner.

We do know, as shown in the diagram to the left, that some of the antibodies look like tiny Scrubbing Bubbles.

Living with Myasthenia Gravis has caused me to make some major changes in my life. Before I started taking a large amount of medicine each day to curtail the disease, I had some pretty remarkable sleep habits. I could stay awake, and be productive and function at my top level for twenty hours, and then get fully-rested with four or five hours of sleep.

Those days are over. Now that I’m taking over a dozen pills a day for various reasons I find that I start to peter out after being awake twelve or fourteen hours, and I need at least eight hours of sleep. I have been reduced to having the sleep cycle of a normal human, and it’s not fun. I can’t stay up into the wee hours and work anymore. I also can’t go out and support local bands three or four times a week like I used to. I’m lucky to make it out three or four times a year now.

It is fun having the use of my hands again. But it’s been very difficult to find a way to bring back the Radio Free Charleston video show, since we record so many bands on location in local bars, and the bands tend not to start early enough for me to stay awake.  It looks like, for the foreseeable future, Radio Free Charleston will remain a radio show with an annual video episode.

It’s not a good idea for me to shoot outdoor shows in the daytime. Extreme heat exacerbates the symptoms of MG, so a couple of hours in the heat leaves me with crossed eyes and flippers for hands (Actually it’s not that bad anymore. Now time spent in the heat just saps my energy for the next few days). I did record some band outdoors last year, but I paid for it. Lucky for fans of the show, I am probably stupid enough to try it again, but maybe not in the summer.

The most insidious thing about Myasthenia Gravis is the way it hits you. It makes your body work the opposite of how it does with exercise in a normal person. The more you use a muscle, with MG, the weaker it gets.

One other major drawback is that the treatment for MG is to medically suppress your immune system, which is no fun in the middle of a pandemic. That’s why I’m still wearing a mask in public and being very, very selective where I go and where Mel and I travel. It’s also why, when I hear people whining about mask and vaccine mandates,  I can’t help but think what selfish jerkoffs they are.

For me, at the moment, I just have some bad days in the summer. Heat sucks, and when I’m in it too long, my energy is drained. I’m still extremely lucky that my case is so mild. This week’s Monday Morning Art is a pencil drawing that, six years ago, I would not have been able to produce. I could not hold a pencil. Even with that, it was a bit of a compromise. The reason it’s a pencil drawing is that I’m taking some time away from painting because I’m not happy with my lack of brush control.

Anyway, that’s why RFC is a rerun this week. You should still expect fresh content every day here in PopCult. Wednesday the plan is to post my review of the Alban Arts Center production of Fairview, and we’ll have new radio later in the week on The AIR. I’ll be back with a full three-hour show next week.

This week’s art is a detailed pencil sketch, cranked out while I was watching an NXT Wrestling Premium Live Event Saturday night. Using my trusty Blackwing Palamino, plus a charcoal pencil for the heavy black areas, this is really just a glorified doodle of a mirrorball, based on a photo taken in the foyer at Studio 54 a few weeks ago. I drew it while looking at the photo on my phone. Basically I just wanted to see if I could capture the lights playing off the reflective surfaces with a pencil.

Drawn on paper for pens, with a few smudges plus some cropping done digitally after scanning.

To see it bigger try clicking HERE.

Meanwhile, Monday at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you a new episode of  Psychedelic Shack, followed at 3 PM by a new edition of Herman Linte’s weekly showcase of the Progressive Rock of the past half-century, Prognosis.  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.

Nigel Pye delivers a new episode of Psychedelic Shack Monday, loaded with some brand-new mind-expanding tunes, along with a couple of classics with long running times. Check out the playlist…

Psychedelic Shack 064

The Lickerish Quartet “In The Meantime”
Django Django “Zumm Zumm”
Gyasi “Godhead”
Liam Gallagher “C’mon You Know”
Flying Bear Medicine Show “Blues On The Moon”
Steve Hillage “Solar Music Suite”
Sting Driven Thing “Heartfeeder”
The Mads “If You Feel”

Psychedelic Shack can be heard every Monday at 2 PM, with replays Tuesday at 9 AM, Wednesday at 10 PM, Friday at 1 PM,  and Saturday at 9 AM. Classic episodes can be heard Sunday at 9 AM as part of our Sunday Haversham Recording Institute collection.

On Prognosis, for the second episode in a row, Herman Linte presents a two-hour mixtape devoted to a progressive rock legend who has passed away. This time it’s Alan White, the drummer for the band YES for nearly fifty years.  Herman brings us a selection of YES songs co-written by White, finishing up with YES and The Moody Blues’ John Lodge performing a live cover of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” a song that White played on prior to Joining YES.

Here’s the playlist…

Prognosis 092

YES/Alan White
“Ritual-Nous Sommes du Soleil”
“To Be Over”
“Turn Of The Century”
“Future Times”
“Release Release”
“Machine Messiah”
“Cinema”
“Hearts”
“Big Generator”
“Whitefish”
“That That Is, Is”
“Footprints”
“Imagine”

You can hear Prognosis on The AIR Monday at 3 PM, with replays Tuesday at 7 AM, Wednesday at 8 PM, Thursday at Noon, and Saturday at 10 AM. You can hear two classic episodes of the show Sunday at 2 PM.

Tonight at 8 PM you can hear an hour of novelty songs by Alan Sherman on The Comedy Vault. Wednesday evening at 10 PM, we’ll have another new episode of The Comedy Vault.

Then, at 9 PM we bring you an overnight marathon of Nigel Pye’s Psychedelic Shack.

In a couple of weeks Charleston’s FestivALL will be in full swing, and for a variety of reasons (Myasthenia Gravis the The Marx Toy Show among them) I don’t think I’ll be able to attend any of the cool events this year. However, anybody who is willing and able and enjoys art, music, dance and theatre should be taking part in the festivities. Most of the events are outdoors, and theoretically should be somewhat safer with our still-raging pandemic.

For several years, before it was a paying gig, I was one of the few people shooting and posting video of the events. Luckily, there are plenty of people in town now to record and post all the cool stuff I’ll miss, and if they let me, I’ll re-post their videos here.

This week we bring you episodes 161 and 162 of Radio Free Charleston, including music by Red Audio, The Bob Thompson Unit, Andy Park, Emily Burdette, Paul Calicoat, The Boatmen, Ritchie Collins and more. all recorded at FestivAll 2012. I thought it would be cool to go back ten years and see how cool things were. You’ll also see the Art Parade, RJ Haddy doing a make-up demo, Ian Bode, Jude Binder and all kinds of other cool stuff. Between both shows there’s over one hour and fifty minutes of fine FestivAll entertainment. So enjoy and expect more next week. Next Saturday The RFC Flashback will present six episodes that cover FestivALL 2010, and for the next couple of weeks after that we’ll share more of our video looks at the city becoming a work of art in this space.