Month: April 2023 (Page 3 of 3)

As opposed to last week’s bit of imaginary and slightly abstract imagery of a hooman, this week I did a detailed, almost architectural, drawing of some buildings.

Actually, it wasn’t just this week. I started working on this last December, and did it in fits and starts when my MG-afflicted fingers would allow.  Based on a couple of blurry photos taken in Chicago on an overcast day last December, through a dirty window, no less, this began life as a pencil sketch.  But I wasn’t really happy with my loose rendering, so I put the original sketch on a lightbox and re-inked it in cheap marker pens (back in stock at Five Below), using straight-edges along the way to make up for my original unsteadiness.

After scanning the marker drawing, I cropped out some sloppiness, and erased a smudge near the middle that was driving me nuts. The end result is a drawing of buildings. So there you go.

To see it bigger try clicking HERE

Over in radioland, Monday at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you a classic episode of Psychedelic Shack, and then at 3 PM a classic 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 elsewhere on this page.

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. 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.

At 8 PM you can hear an hour of classic 1970’s conecptual comedy from National Lampoon on an encore episode of Comedy Vault.

Tonight at 9 PM the Monday Marathon presents ten classic episodes of Beatles Blast.

As I may have mentioned about fifty weeks ago in this space, hardly anybody is going to read the blog today due to it being Easter. So I’m just going to drop a fifty-plus-year-old Rankin-Bass stop-motion animated special here for you. “Here Comes Peter Cottontail” is based on a song that was written by Keyser native, and WVMHOF Class of 2011 indutee, Jack Rollins.  This is the third year in a row that I’m doing this. Traditionally Easter Sunday is the least-viewed day of this blog, and has been for a long time. It’s like people think they have more important things to do or something. So if you did come here today, thanks.

Enjoy, and Happy Easter!

The previously-announced video for this spot will show up next week, in large part because I was too lazy to finish editing it.

This is the nineteenth episode of Radio Free Charleston, “Ian Rotten Shirt,” from May 2007, with music from Go Van Gogh and The Ghosts Of Now, plus a Pentagram Flowerbox cartoon, which has been restored to its original place in the show.

The Mystery camera person who shot the original footage of Go Van Gogh turned out to be none other than Melissa Beezley (now Melissa Beezely Johnson) who has been a friend of RFC since the broadcast radio days.

This show is not 100% as it was when first posted, though. The original version included a commercial parody created by someone who later turned out to be, well, let’s just say “a criminal.” You can read more about my misadvetures with this person HERE. On top of that drama, the clip was very poorly done and not very funny. Newly-created animation takes its place, and is much, much better, despite being slapped together in less than ten minutes.

You can read the original production notes here.

The PopCulteer
April 7, 2023

This week’s PopCulteer is dedicated to trying to catch up after back-to-back excursions over the last couple of weeks, so bear with me.

Pacific Overtures At Signature

To start off, we’ll go in reverse order and talk about where I was eight days ago. Your humble blogger and his lovely wife hopped the Amtrak Cardinal to the Washington DC area (Arlington, to be precise) to see Signature Theater‘s production of the rarely-staged Stephen Sondheim musical, Pacific Overtures.

I’m not going to write a full-blown review here because this production wraps up in a couple of days and all remaining performances are completely sold out, but I do want to acknowledge what an amazing production this was.

I had deliberately kept myself in the dark about what this musical was even about. I knew it was set in Japan, and from what I’d heard from Larry Hama (the legendary comic book creator, GI Joe: A Real American Hero developer and an original cast member of the Broadway production in 1976), I knew it was set in Edo-period Japan and had a large Asian cast.

The book, by frequent Sondheim collaborator, John Weidman, tells of the end of Japan’s isolationist era when Admiral Perry used a show of force to convince the country’s leadership to open up two ports and establish relations with the international community after 250 years of a strictly-enforced ban on interacting with other countries.

Weidman worked with Signature to edit and update the original show, bringing it in at a still-meaty two hours and twenty minutes, and bringing the closing song up to date with new information. As it is now, Pacific Overtures is a briskly-paced, yet still substantial, tale of the internal struggles of Japan as they ended their isolation and the early signs of their eventual Westernization and industrialization.

The story is told with some of Sondheim’s lovliest songs, and also with a wicked sense of humor and political satire. This production also incorporates elements of Noh and Kabuki, which works splendidly with the deceptively minimalist set.

The cast is simply amazing. Led by Jason Ma as “the Reciter,” the eight men and two women of the cast take on over thirty roles, and show an astonishing versatility as they tackle the challenging points in the score with ease, then find themselves indulging in moments of slapstick comedy, Kabuki, puppetry, Noh and enough cross-dressing to emotionally scar a Republican legislator.

The necessity of a large Asian cast is what keeps Pacific Overtures from being staged more often, and that is a real shame because now that I’ve seen it, this has become one of my favorite Sondheim shows. It’s also one that simply wouldn’t work with a diverse cast. Signature has assembled an incredibly talented ensemble for Pacific Overtures, and that is just part of what made this such an impressive production.

Even though we’ve been visiting the DC area and staying at a hotel virtually across the street from Signature Theater for over twelve years, prior to Pacific Overtures we had only been there once to see a cabaret show by a friend of Mel’s.  We are definitely going to be seeing more shows there in the future. It’s a great space and they stage a very classy repertoire

Comic Books at Lexington’s Comic & Toy Con

We jumped on that train last week just a couple of days after we returned from a drive to Lexington, Kentucky for the Lexington Comic and Toy Show. Our main reason for going there was so that Mrs. PopCulteer could meet Tom Kenny, the voice of SpongeBob Squarepants. However, they had a rather impressive line-up of comic book creators, and today we’re going to show you some of the comic-book-centric photos from the convention. These were all taken at the Thursday evening comics preview night, which is why the crowds aren’t so insane.  We still have more photos and videos from the Lexington trip to share next week.

But now…the comics stuff from Lexington…

While the convention was loaded with tons of Anime, Star Wars and movie vendors, there were also a healthy number of comic book dealers on hand.

Coincidentally, we got to catch up with Larry Hama, who we met at JoeLanta many years ago, and he seemed delighted when we told him that we were going to see Pacific Overtures the following week. In addition to creating GI Joe: RAH and many other great comics, Larry was in the original Broadway cast of the show back in 1976. You can hear Larry talk about that experience HERE.

In the middle of this photo you see Jim Starlin posing with a fan. Starlin notably created Thanos for Marvel Comics, and had memorable runs on Adam Warlock, Captain Marvel, Dreadstar and tons of other great cosmic comics, in addition to a memorable stint writing Batman.

Mike Grell, creator of Warlord, Starslayer and Jon Sable: Freelance, hard at work on a sketch.

I got to catch up with Ceredo’s Beau Smith, an old buddy from my own days in the comics biz and the creator of Wynonna Earp, but forgot to get a decent photo of him. If you squint, you can see him in the above photo glancing at his phone while he talks to the mad scientist who was in front of the silver and red R2 droid. Also, the guy in the red shirt talking to Bill Morrison…five minutes later he was crushed to death by an avalanche of plush Pokemon characters. Poor wardrobe choice on his part.

Legendary Marvel Comics artist and cover designer, Bob Hall, who like yours truly, was in Lexington, while the poster of his cover for Super Joe Unlimited #1. from Power Comics, was making its debut at ToyLanta.

It was really cool to meet Bill Morrison, who did amazing work on The Simpson’s Comics for years, and more recently did a killer graphic novel version of The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine. I bought that Yellow Submarine print you see behind him in the upper left.

Another comics dealer, proud of the multiple copies of key Marvel Comics he had.

And finally, we lucked into meeting Dave Aikins, a Columbus-based illustrator who’s done tons of childrens books based on licensed properties like SpongeBob and Dora. We bought a bit of stuff from him, including a SpongeBob/Captain Marvel mash-up.

That is this week’s PopCulteer. Check back for all our regular features, fresh content every day, and just maybe, video of Mel meeting Tom Kenny on Sunday.

It’s another rare RFC premiere on a Thursday on The AIR  as we deliver unto you a brand-new episode of Radio Free Charleston, which should have been ready two days ago for our normal timeslot, but wasn’t because of real-world stuff that kept happening.

However, having rectified and resolved all of that falderol, Thursday  at 2 PM and 8 PM you simply have to take your cursor over and point it at the website, or you could just stay right here and  listen to the cool embedded player found elsewhere on this page, and you get three full hours of Radio Free Charleston loaded with cool new local music and cool new independent music and some really interesting recycled material from April, 2018.

Our first hour (plus a few minutes extra) is almost all recently-released music, some of it less than a week old. We open with brand-new music from Matt Mullins & The Bringdowns, and heap on the new local stuff with fresh tracks from Corduroy Brown, Softeeth, Mediogres, Massing, Verdeant and Abandon The Ship (who will also supply the opening track for next Tuesday’s new RFC). The indies are represented by Audrey Smiley, Logical Fleadh and Novelty Island. We also have new music from The Zombies and Nashville’s Jonny Strykes, whose EP is slated for an April 14 release.

Our second and third hours resurrect two of our one-hour, all-local editions of Radio Free Charleston from April, 2018.  I was sick as hell that month, and whine about it through both shows, but since they’re packed with so much killer local music I decided to re-share them with you anyway.

I should warn you that over the course of our three hours we jump around many different musical genre and styles, because RFC is free-format radio, and we sorta do that by definition.

Check out the playlist below to see all the goodies we have in store (live links will take you to the artist’s pages where possible)…

RFC V5 125

hour one
Matt Mullins and The Bringdowns “Follow The Leader (Heath’s Theme)”
Massing “Daisies (Ska Version)”
Softeeth “Shingles (demo)”
Chloe Florence (Verdeant) “Reckless”
Mediogres “Chef’s Kiss”
Corduroy Brown “Secrets”
Novelty Island “GoGo”
Abandon The Ship “One More For The Road”
Audrey Smiley “Peppermint and Innocence”
Jonny Strykes “Painted Love”
Those Pretty Wrongs “Always The Rainbow”
The Zombies “Merry Go Round”
The MFB “WMVF”
Andy Prieboy “Home Ain’t Home”
Logical Fleadh “Coming Home”
Frenchy And The Punk “I’ll See You Again”

hour two
Poor Man’s Gravy “Leaving Today”
Brian Diller “Hey Mister Auctioneer”
Jordan Searls “Any Kind of Wind”
Dina Hornbaker “Black Coffee”
Sheldon Vance “Birthright”
Hitchcock Circus “Dirty Girl”
Three Bodies “My Friend”
Blue Million “Don’t Leave”
The Bounty “Buffalos”
Science of the Mind “Son of Sam”
David Synn “Anesthesia”
Karma To Burn “Bobbi, Bobbi, Bobbi, I’m Not”
BobaFlex “Strangle You”
Ptolemy “Event Horizon”

hour three
Speedsuit “Gwendoline”
John Inghram “Gospel”
Under Social “Away”
Tape Age “The Hanged Man”
Superfetch “Quirky Bubbles”
Bongwater “Schmoozedance”
Doktor Steamly “A Lab Near Arkham”
The BrotherSisters “Damn The Torpedoes”
Sasha Colette “Victory”
Total Meltdown “Wish You Were Here”
Sheldon Vance “Watch It Burn”
Feast of Stephen “Superfund”

You can hear this episode of Radio Free Charleston Thursday at 2 PM and 8 PM on The AIR, with replays Friday at 9 AM and 9 PM, 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 at the bottom of this post,  so you can listen on demand. We’ll be back to our normal schedule with our next episode next Tuesday.

Okay, it’s time once again for your guide to things you can do in and around Charleston as we get near the original day of the undead. In this week’s edition of STUFF TO DO, we’re going to start off with a radio note, and then suggest a very cool horror comic that you can Kickstart,  Decay.

First a note on Wednesday afternoon’s Curtain Call on The AIR: This week Mel wanted to salute the classic musical, Oklahoma, just a few days after the 80th anniversary of its first production. She’d planned to present the entire musical, made up of tracks from several different productions over the decades. However, I realized that we’d already dedicated an entire show to Oklahoma four years ago, when the acclaimed and horny revival won the 2019 Tony Award for best revival of a musical.

So Wednesday at 3 PM, Curtain Call will re-present that episode of our musical theater showcase, so your humble blogger can focus on catching up and working on this week’s delayed episode of Radio Free Charleston. You can tune in at the website, or you could just stay right here and  listen to the convenient embedded radio player lurking elsewhere on this page.

Now, onto our Kickstarter recommendation for the final two issues of Decay:

I picked up the first three issues of this five-part series, written by Anthony D. Stokes, last year, and now the final two installments are live at Kickstarter.

In case you missed them, you can still get your hands on the first three parts as well, as physical comics, or in digital form. Anthony does a killer job fullfilling his pledges, so chances are you’ll have your books a week or two after the campaign closes.

Let me quote liberally from the Kickstarter page here…

Jess brings her brother DK back from the dead when he gets shot at a house party but after he starts a murderous rampage for revenge she may come to regret that decision.

Decay is a 5 issue comic book series written by me (Stokes), illustrated by Marc Oliver, and lettered by Es Kay. The funds for this campaign will be used on art, lettering, and printing physical copies. This campaign is essential to continuing the series to its conclusion.

Morality plays have been a part of stories since the beginning of time. Putting characters in no-win situations and watching the consequences of their actions is timeless and I’m excited to show my take on it. I’ve always been a fan of mature comics that felt adult but aren’t gratuitous. There’s no excessive nudity, cursing, or gore just an adult story with mature themes.

Decay is a gritty grimy revenge thriller set in New Orleans. It is inspired by Frankenstein and The Crow.

Decay is qualitystorytelling, with a fresh take on horror that is so compelling that your ever-forgetful blogger has been anxiously awaiting this Kickstarter campaign since I grabbed the first two issues last summer. Stokes is a very gifted storyteller and in Decay he’s woven familar elements into something really new and exciting. The campaign has just been live for a couple of days, and its already one-third funded.

Stokes is directing the action here, but the art by Marc Oliver and the lettering by Es Kay perfectly suit the story and the end result is, as they say, an action-packed thrill ride. Check out the video here…

If you’re a fan of horror and want to support a very creative new take from a young Black writer. then visit THIS PAGE and kick in. There’s just about two and a half weeks to get in on this, and trust me, it’s a hell of a ride.

And now, onto STUFF TO DO…

Live Music is back at Taylor Books. There is no cover charge, and shows start at 7:30 PM. Friday it’s Chet Lowther. Saturday Friendly Fire entertains the crowd at Charleston’s beloved Bookstore/Coffee Shop/Art Gallery.

The Empty Glass has some great stuff through the week to tell you about.  Thursday from 5:30 PM to 7:30 PM, Swingstein and Robin play fiddle and piano and sing swing and early jazz standards. Each week they donate their tips to a local nonprofit.  Later on Thursday, Kenny Booth hosts “Shred Night” so metallically-inclined peoples can come out and jam and not worry about upsetting the folk singers. Next week they’ll have an open mic Monday night, and Songwriter Showcase on Tuesday. Other shows that have graphics are listed among the images below.

Please remember that the pandemic is not over yet. It’s still a going concern. 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.

If you’re up for going out, here are a few suggestions for the rest of this week, roughly in order.

Your humble blogger got tied up with real world stuff and was not able to record a new episode of Radio Free Charleston on Monday, so instead, this week we will debut our free-format program on Thursday at 2 PM, on The AIR. Tuesday we’ll run a specially-selected encore edition of the show. Either way, you simply have to point your cursor over and tune in at the website, or you could just stay here, and  listen to the cool embedded player found elsewhere on this page.  

Rather than leave you hanging with nothing much else here in PopCult today, how about I share just a few photos from my recent trip to Lexington, Kentucky for the Lexington Comic Con and Toy Show?

There are more photos and video on the way, and this show actually took place almost two weeks ago, but back-to-back trips meant I couldn’t even look at the images until yesterday. So over the next week, expect a few surprises. We’ll preview some of the fun here, like my comic-book nerd convention shirt that you see up at the top of this post.

We got back from Lexington on a Sunday, then left on a train for Washington, DC the following Wednesday. I didn’t take any cameras with me on that trip, preferring to spend a couple of days as a civilian for a change, but we did see a killer production of Pacific Overtures at Signature Theater. I’ll tell you about that on Friday.

For now, here’s just a taste of Lexington…

We got there really early, and got this photo of a nearly-empty hall Friday morning.

Thusday night, the VIP passes got us into the vendor area early. Man, they had tons of crap there.

We also got a free shirt each.

As a toy collector, I was a little disappointed to discover that 99.9% of the toys were from after 1980, and I really don’t collect Star Wars stuff at all, but if that’s your deal, there was a ton of it.

These were either cosplayers or delegates to a GOP convention.

This full-size dragon thing from “Avatar: The Last Airebender” was impressive as hell, and probably would be even more impressive if I had thought to include a human in the photo so you could tell that this thing was probably12 or 15-feet tall.

Kentucky Ghostubusters with an impressive Ecto-One, which wasn’t theirs. They said some guy just left it and told them not to let anybody sit in it. And also it didn’t run. It looks cool, though.

The reason we went. Tom Kenny signs a SpongeBob print for Mel (in the foreground). Video coming Sunday.

Aside from the convention, we went to visit the real-life Cocaine Bear. Actually it’s the stuffed carcass of the real-life Cocaine Bear, since he didn’t really go on a rampage and instead dropped dead on the spot, but that’s him! We’ll have more photos from the Kentucky 4 Kentucky Fun Mall in a day or two.

Outside the fun mall.

Just around the corner from Cocaine Bear we found an Army Surplus store. We’ll probably do a photo essay on them, too.

This week’s artistic greeting is a simple, smallish, figure sketch, done very roughly with pastel crayons on Paper For Pens. I did this a few weeks ago, and set it aside to use now, since I was riding the rails last week and didn’t have any time to work on any art.

This was just an attempt to do a figure study with no reference. It’s sort of a collision of Impressionism and Expressionism, only not really because it’s just a product of my imagination. Maybe we ought to call it “Illusionism,” since I was just trying to make it look real when it wasn’t.

Or it might just be considered a crude drawing of a naked lady.  It was scanned with a layer of acetate protecting the scanner bed, and a little color-correction in the computer to compensate for that.

To see it bigger try clicking HERE

Over in radioland, Monday at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you a recent episode of Psychedelic Shack, and then at 3 PM 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 elsewhere on this page.

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. 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.

At 8 PM you can hear an hour of classic stand-up from Shelly Berman on an encore episode of Comedy Vault.

Tonight at 9 PM the Monday Marathon presents ten classic episodes of Psychedelic Shack.

Above you see the brand new video by our friends, Frenchy and The Punk.  “Church of Sound” is from their latest album, Zen Ghost, and to promote it, they’ll appear at The Empty Glass in Charleston on April 19.  I’ll give you plenty of reminders of that show over the next couple of weeks, and F&P are in heavy rotation on Radio Free Charleston, so you’ll have plenty of chances to find out more about this great band before they hit town again on the 19th.

Meanwhile, check out the video and go buy the album. It’s pretty epic stuff.

This vintage April 2007 episode of Radio Free Charleston features a road trip to Parkersburg, West Virginia. Shot at a “Songpull” event at John Radcliff’s house, this episode marked three appearances in a row by Rad, and also featured music from Don Baker, Deron Baker and Josh Buskirk, plus there’s a special rendition of the RFC theme song by John Radcliff and Jerry Fugate.

You can read the original production notes here.