Month: September 2023 (Page 2 of 4)

It’s beginning to seem a lot like Autumn, and there are loads and loads of cool things happening all over the area this weekend, icluding a whole lot of beer stuff about which your humble blogger is blissfully ignorant, so this is probably a good time to remind you that THIS IS NOT A COMPLETE LIST OF EVENTS.  It’s just a starting point, so don’t expect anything comprehensive, and if you feel strongly about me leaving anything out, feel free to mention it in the comments.

A last-minute addition here is Charleston’s ArtWalk, which I nearly forgot to mention. It happens Thursday from 5 PM to 8 PM at all the Downtown Charleston galleries and art spaces that you’ve come to know and love.

Live Music is back at Taylor Books. There is no cover charge, and shows start at 7:30 PM.  Friday RFC faves, Verdeant, take the stage. Saturday That High Copuntry Revival brings theirold time music to the beloved bookstore/cafe/art gallery.

The World Famous Empty Glass Cafe has some great stuff this week  to tell you about.  Wednesday Talent On Tap with Damienne Dibble happens from 6 PM until  9 PM and the details are in the graphics below.  At 9 PM Joe’s Cousin One Man Band puts on a Rockabilly/Honky Tonk show. Thursday at 5:30 PM, Swingstein and Robin return with Swing for a good cause. Later Thursday, it’s Justin’s Birthday Bash (graphic below).  Friday Tim Courts plays during happy hour.  Later on Friday at 9 PM, Razorblade and guests take over (graphic below). Saturday check out the graphic below for The East End Ghouls. Sunday, at 8 PM it’s time for The Bo Show, then at 10 PM it’s Empty Glass Got Talent. Next Monday it’s Open Mic Night at 9 PM.

Please remember that the pandemic is not over yet. It’s still a going concern with the ‘rona surging again. And now there are seasonal allergies, the flu, missing fighter jets, horny congresswomen, distraught victims of Gordon Gee and other damned good reasons to be careful. 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.

Keep in mind that all shows are subject to change or be cancelled at the last minute.

If you’re up for going out, here are a few suggestions for the weekend, roughly in order…

Tuesday afternoon happens again this week, and on The AIR that means it’s time for a new  Radio Free Charleston. 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.  

You can hear Radio Free Charleston Tuesdays at 10 AM and 10 PM, with tons of replays throughout the week.  This week we have one all-new hour, and two hours of a 2019 episode of RFC International that hasn’t been heard since the week it originally aired.

Kicking off this cool edition of our show is a new song from Astrodot, which is the musical brainchild of an old friend, Stephen Schmidt. I ran into Stephen Sunday night at the premiere of Douglas Imbrogno’s A House In The Clouds documentary about the artist, Robert Singleton (and you’ll read more about that later this week), and he told me that he’d been releasing music through Bandcamp, so I rushed to get it to bring to you. It does indeed, kick the ass.

Also leaving asses kicked is Sgt. Van and the Highway Dogs, a musical project from Chuck Van Voorhis, a buddy from the GI Joe collecting community.  He was going for an 80s vibe with this track, and I think he pretty much nailed it.

The remainder of our first hour is filled with killer stuff like new music from The Pretenders, Buni Muni, William Matheny and Jerks, plus a mini set of strange cover tunes and other goodies.  In the set of cover tunes, I mistakenly say that the group, Pink Turtle, are Italian. They are actually French. I’m sorry. I have a cold.

Our second and third hours go back to early 2017 for an episode Radio Free Charleston International that runs the free-format gamut from Chuck Berry to DEVO, with stops at Prog, Blues, Swing and even The Beatles along the way. It is cool to have such a vast library of old shows that have been offline for years to dip back into, since it’s not always easy to find the time to do a three-hour show every week.

Check out the playlist below to see all the goodies we have in store. Where possible in the first hour, live links will take you to the artist’s pages so you can find out more about them, buy their music and find out where to see them perform live…

RFC V5 146

hour one
Astrodot “The Victor”
Sgt. Van and the Highway Dogs “Nothing Can Hold Me Down”
The Pretenders “Domestic Silence”
Spurgy Hankins Band “Nature’s Rhythm”
Brian Diller “To Win Her”
Buni Muni “Wild Boys”
William Matheny “Grand Old Feeling”
The Cleverlys “Blue (Da Ba Dee)”
Pink Turtle “Don’t Stop”
Me First and the Gimme Gimmes “Natural Woman”
Big Daddy “Addicted To Love”
Jerks “Nowhere”
Rasta Rafiki “Mistaken Man”

hour two
Chuck Berry “Big Boys”
Bob Dylan “Stardust”
Jamiroquai “Dr. Buzz”
Mastadon “Roots Remain”
Body Count “This Is Why We Ride”
Blink 182 “Misery”
Goldfrapp “Everything Is Never Enough”
The Blues Swingers “By Friday”
Aimee Mann “Good For Me”
Postmodern Jukebox “Roxanne”
The Jesus and Mary Chain “Los Feliz (Blue and Green)
Depeche Mode “Going Backwards”

hour three
UK “Carry The Cross”
The Beatles “I’m Only Sleeping (Mono)”
The Beach Boys “God Only Knows”
Ruby Dee and The Snakehandlers “Who Do You Think I Am”
Delta 88 “Boppin’ Little Witch”
Mike Oldfield “Return To Ommadawn part one”
Todd Rundgren “Bang On The Drum All Day”
The B-52s “Party Out of Bounds”
DEVO “Mechanical 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 2 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 classic 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 last week’s episodes of  MIRRORBALL at 1 PM and Curtain Call at 2 PM.

At 3 PM we offer up two recent episodes of The Swing Shift.  You can hear The Swing Shift Tuesday at 3 PM, with replays Wednesday at 8 AM, Friday at 10 AM and 8 PM and Saturday afternoon, only on The AIR . You can also hear all-night marathons, seven hours each, starting at Midnight Thursday and Sunday evenings.

This week’s art is a detail from an attempted sketch of a buiding in Chicago that I abandoned part-way through. Most of what was cropped out was blank.  I did this with wax pencil on paper for pens, and wasn’t happy with it so I just stopped. A few weeks later I scanned it anyway and cropped it to the point where I was happy enough with it to share here.

I don’t think I’ll revisit it or do anything in color like it. Sometimes you have false starts, and it’s a good economy of time to recognize them and move on.

I sort of like it this way, but it’s not one of my favorites.

To see it bigger try clicking HERE.

Over in radioland, Monday at 2 PM on The AIR, we were hoping to have new Haversham shows this week, but our friends overseas are buried under paying work, so instead we are going to offer up the most recent episode of Psychedelic Shack, and then at 3 PM we do the same with 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.

We are anticipating new episodes of Prognosis, Psychedelic Shack and Sydney’s Big Electric Cat next week.

At 8 PM you can hear an hour of classic Stand Up Comedy by Richard Pryor on The Comedy Vault.

Tonight at 9 PM the Monday Marathon presents ten hours of Disco-era dance classic with Mel Larch’s MIRRORBALL.

Above you see an exceedingly fun new short film created under the direction of our local Maestro, Chuck Biel. It’s called, “Armadillo In The Neighborhood” and it’s actually fairly self explanatory.

Well, except that the Armadillo plays bass, and by most objective measures, is particularly funky. Chuck describes it as “A silly video about a Bass Playing Armadillo and how he found love in the burbs!”

It was written and directed by Chuck and features new music by the man, himself.  His co-producer and director of photography was Sam Myers, and there are a host of local actors involved. Stick around for the cute ending after the credits.

We will get back to catching up with leftover video projects from our summer toy convention travels next week.

This week, from June, 2008, comes Radio Free Charleston episode 44, “Social Distortion Shirt,” the second of two episodes that I hosted without wearing a hat.

This episode features music from Lady D and Quick and Dirty, plus footage from the Pandora’s Toy Box custom toy exhibit. Of special interest in this episode is our exclusive apology to the people of West Virginia from the then-Vice President of these United States, dick Cheney.

Host segments were shot at Good News Mountaineer Gallery, which later moved to the West Side. The bittersweet part of this show is that it marks the debut of Quick and Dirty and the band’s bassist and lead singer, Randy Lee Walden, who would die of a drug overdose less than three weeks after this show debuted. It was a terrible waste of a talented life. You can get just a hint of what we’re missing by watching this show.

Original production notes are here.

The PopCulteer
September 15, 2023

Your PopCulteer is busy finishing up a magazine assignement, so this week’s PopCulteer column runs the risk of seeming a bit light. Luckily, instead of writing a long essay that would take me away from those duties, My lovely wife has come to my rescue. Mel Larch returns Friday with a new episode of MIRRORBALL devoted to “Disco Mixes” of Disco tunes.

Friday at 2 PM on The AIR, Mel Larch devotes a full hour to extended mixes of classics of the Disco era.  The AIR is PopCult‘s sister radio station. You can hear these shows on The AIR website, or just click on the embedded player found elsewhere on this page.

One of the most creative things to come out of the Disco-era club scene was the extended 12″ Disco Mix of songs, so that the folks enjoying the joyful noise could stay on the dance floor just a little longer, and the DJ’s could have more time between spinning the records.

This week we are going to bring you Disco Mixes of Disco Classics. It’s Disco squared on a full hour that goes twelve inches to heaven on this epic and eminently danceble music specialty program. Mel will likely revisit this topic soon.

Check out the playlist…

MIRRORBALL 082

D-Train “You’re The One For Me”
The Crusaders featuring Randy Crawford “Street Life”
Gloria Gaynor “I Will Survive”
Real Thing “Can You Feel The Force”
Shalamar “Uptown Festival Medley”
Anita Ward “Ring My Bell”
Chic “Everybody Dance”

You can hear MIRRORBALL every Friday at 2 PM, with replays throughout the following week Monday at 9 AM and Tuesday at 1 PM and a mini-marathon Saturday nights at 9 PM

At 3 PM we bring you an encore of the seventh episode of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat from August, 2016.  This is an early episode of the show that presents Sydney Fileen’s backward glance at the brave new tomorrow that never really came.

This was when Sydney was just beginning to mine the rich vein of New Wave Music that she’s still bringing you today.

Rather than just post a link, here’s the playlist for this one…

Sydney’s Big Electric Cat 007

Ultravox  “Dancing With Tears In My Eyes”
Souixsie and the Banshees  “Hong Kong Garden”
Gleaming Spires  “Art Together”
Comateens  “Overseas”
Video Sex  “Mojo Mama”
The GoGos  “You Can’t Walk In Your Sleep (If You Can’t Sleep)”
Stan Ridgeway  “The Big Heat”
The Living Daylights  “Sugar Days”
T-4-2  “Outside Your Window”
Talk Talk  “Talk Talk”
The Flirts  “Danger”
Robert Marlow  “Calling All Destroyers”
A Flock Of Seagulls  “Messages”
Split Enz  “Six Months In A Leaky Boat”
UK Viva  “Radio Saviour”
Lene Lovich  “New Toy”
The Fallout Club  “Wonderlust”
Re-Flex  “Keep In Touch”
OMD  “Secret”
DEVO  “Planet Earth”
Naked Eyes  “Emotion in Motion”
Small Affairs  “Back To China”
Sherrie Actor  “Forbidden Fruit”
Ian Dury and The Blockheads  “Reasons To Be Cheerful Pt. 3”
The Stranglers  “No More Heroes”
The Damned  “Neat, Neat, Neat”
Tenpole Tudor  “Swords of a Thousand Men”
Jona Lewie “You’ll Always Find Me In The Kitchen At Parties”
The Slits  “I Heard It Through The Grapevine”
Background and close music is Giorgio Morodor’s  “Chase”

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. Two classic episodes can also be heard every Sunday, starting at 10 AM.

And that is this week’s PopCulteer. Check back every day for fresh content. Things may be back to normal next week.

Longtime readers of PopCult are probably familiar with Robert Jiménez by now.  I’ve been talking about his Fearsome Weirdos trading cards and books for years now. Now Robert has a new project up on Kickstarter, and it’s already fully-funded almost four times over after just a day and there’s still just under three weeks go go.

Polynesian Pulp: The Tiki Art Of Robert Jiménez is a book and a trading card set, and instead of showcasing his monster or wacky parody art, the book and card set collect some of his awesome Tiki Art from the past decade.

You probably know the drill by now…this is where I quote liberally from the Kickstarter campaign page:

Polynesian Pulp is a collection of the Tiki Art of Robert Jiménez. It will be printed as a 50 card set as well as a signed 90 page 8.5 x 11 inch perfect bound hardcover book and will showcase traditional and digital art from the past decade. Included are Tikis, an assortment of Sophisticated Apes, Mermaids, Sea Creatures and more!

The 50 card set will come in a tuck box, along with a promo card and a sticker.

Also, there will be sketch cards by Robert Jiménez available to add on to your set, along with a VERY limited selection of sketch cards by Claudette Barjoud, BigToe, El Gato Gomez, Ken Ruzic and Sheryl Schroeder!

Other add-ons available will include original art, coloring books and past Zerostreet card sets.

This set is really exciting for me because I’m a huge fan of Robert’s Tiki art. I even wore one of his shirts on the latest video edition of Radio Free Charleston. I am also on record as being a fan of Tiki culture, even if I’m just a Tiki Poser at the end of the day.

The Polynesian Pulp Art book is a hardbound book measuring 8.5 x 11 inches. It collects the entire card set along with an extra 40 images and comes signed. Completists, like yours truly, will opt for the combination book and card set. I love non-sport trading cards (hell, I’ve been writing about them professionally for more than 25 years), but seeing Robert’s art printed in a larger size is a special treat for my aging eyes. There are several different rewards with this Kickstarter campaign, and among the many add-ons are sketch cards, original art and all of Robert’s previous trading card sets at discounted prices.

The project is way beyond funded and Robert fulfills his campaigns quicker than anybody else on Kickstarter, so you can be confident that you’ll get the reward you choose. And ths art is just absolutely gorgeous.

Robert’s work has appeared on album covers for Gold Dust Lounge and Stolen Idols and in magazines such as Exotica Moderne, Tiki Magazine, PKD Otaku, Gnarly and Pinstriping & Kustom Graphics. His work is also featured in the books, THE THING:ARTBOOK, VISIONS FROM THE UPSIDE DOWN: STRANGER THINGS ARTBOOK, GHOSTBUSTERS: ARTBOOK and has shown in galleries including Disneyland’s Wonderground, Harold Golen, M Modern, Creature Features, and Bear & Bird among others.

You can also see Robert’s work in trading card sets for licenses such as Garbage Pail Kids, Wacky Packages, Mars Attacks, Star Wars, DC Comics, Firefly, Ghostbusters, Adventure Time and more. Most notably Robert has recently illustrated cards for the Star Wars Trading Card App.

Check out the trailer for Polynesian Pulp, and kick in today…

As usual, there are loads and loads of cool things happening all over the area this weekend, and yours truly is pre-occupied with a magazine deadline, so this is probably a good time to remind you that THIS IS NOT A COMPLETE LIST OF EVENTS.  It’s just a starting point, so don’t expect anything complete.

Sunday from 6 PM to 9 PM we have the world premiere of a very cool documentary at The Clay Center.  HOUSE IN THE CLOUDS: The Artistic Life of Robert Singleton, will be shown on the Clay Center main stage in Charleston W.Va., on Sunday, Sept. 17, 2023. The West Virginia International Film Festival presents the AmpMediaProject documentary by Douglas John Imbrogno and Bobby Lee Messer, tracing the life and times, not all of them easy ones, of notable American artist Robert Singleton, now 85, who has lived and worked on a remote West Virginia hilltop since 1978 in a house he built.

The premiere is at 7 PM, with filmgoers seated on the Clay Center main stage, in homage to the role classical music and creativity played in Robert’s tumultuous, often traumatic upbringing. The screening is preceded by a 6 PM reception in the Clay Center’s Juliet Art Museum, to view the current exhibit “The Possible Dream,” featuring one of his paintings. A Q-and-A on-stage with Robert follows the premiere. Order tickets HERE or call the box office during business hours at: 304-561-3570.

The soundtrack features a host of West Virginia-based musicians, including Spencer Elliott; dulcimer explorer Jim Probst; classical pianist Barbara Nissman (recently inducted into the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame; National Flatpick Champion Robin Kessinger and others.

For more on Singleton’s engrossing life and work—and to support the cost of completing and distributing House in the Clouds via an upcoming SEEDandSPARK crowdfunding campaign feel free to subscribe to the documentary website.

Live Music is back at Taylor Books. There is no cover charge, and shows start at 7:30 PM.  Friday Sandy Sowell and Gerry Collyard take the stage. Saturday Minor Swing brings their Djangoesque melodies to the beloved bookstore/cafe/art gallery.

Wednesday from 7 PM to 9 PM The VB4 (AKA part of The Velvet Brothers) will play at Fife Street Brewing in Downtown Charleston.

The World Famous Empty Glass Cafe has some great stuff this week  to tell you about.  Wednesday night Gabby’s Lo Fi Lounge happens at 9 PM. Thursday at 5:30 PM, Swingstein and Robin return with Swing for a good cause. Later Thursday, at 10 PM One Love Rising brings Reggae to The Glass (graphic below).  Friday Tim Courts plays during happy hour.  Later on Friday RFC faves Blue Twisted Steel play at 10 PM. Saturday we have a graphic, which you can see below. Sunday, at 7 PM Dan Spencer, Charbelle, and RFC faves Heavy Set Paw Paws play an early show, then at 10 PM it’s Empty Glass Got Talent. Next Monday it’s Open Mic Night at 9 PM.

In Dunbar, aside from the Fall Festival, at Live at The Shop, Wednesday night the musical duo Southerland takes off at 8 PM.  Thursday, at 8 PM The Dirty Grass Players with Chandler Beaverts stir things up.

Saturday The Mothman Festival happens in Point Pleasant, and all over the area, public libraries are observing Cryptid Day with special events. It’s also Batman Day, which will be celebrated at many area comic book and game shops. You can celebrate either of those days, or if you’re Kirk Langstrom, maybe both.

Please remember that the pandemic is not over yet. It’s still a going concern with the ‘rona surging again. And now there are seasonal allergies, the flu, unindicted co-conspirators, boys named Sue, miniature K-Pop musicians getting into everything and other damned good reasons to be careful. 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.

Keep in mind that all shows are subject to change or be cancelled at the last minute.

If you’re up for going out, here are a few suggestions for the weekend, roughly in order…

Radio Free Charleston replays the episode that debuted last week on The AIR  on Tuesday.  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 elsewhere on this page.

With a looming magazine deadline, and last week’s show debuting late due to the holiday last week, I set things up so that you can hear our latest show in its regular timeslot at 10 AM and 10 PM Tuesday. The show is loaded with lots of new music plus a classic episode of Radio Free Charleston International that hasn’t been heard in over five years. In case you missed it last week, let me re-present our notes for this show.

Kicking off this cool edition of our show is a newly remastered song from Mark Beckner’s Nashville band, Hitchcock Circus. Back in 1992 Mark recorded this tune with his then-new band, which included Lee Hendricks on Bass, Mark Mingrone on Keyboards, and Jeff Noland on Drums in addition to Mark on vocals, guitar and songwriting.  Mark’s been revitalizing his back catalog and archives (and the Go Van Gogh archives as well) and while we’re waiting on a new album from his current band, Nixon Black, I’m wondering if we’ll get a retrospective compilation.

I am in the mind to consider retropsective compilations because Brian Diller has just released a new collection of songs spanning his 45 years making music.  Dear Boy is available on CD and Vinyl, and I  interviewed Brian for The PopCulteer last Friday. I play a couple of tracks from Brian’s album in this show’s first hour.

I could have just coasted with that, but because I recorded this show later than usual, I had the honor of playing a new song by Hello June. “Honey I Promise” which is available now at Bandcamp and other streaming services, and it’s another preview track from the long -awaited new album, Artifacts. Artifacts is due out October 6 from 31 Tigers records.

We also had an advance single from Chicago’s Ron Lazzeretti.  “Count Down By Threes” will be on his album Fat Head, Sunday Paper, which is due out September 29.  He’ll be playing a record release show in Berwyn at Fitzgerald’s on September 30. That’s in Chicagoland, but if you’re a Svengoolie fan you already knew that.

Hour one is also loaded with great stuff from Buni Muni, William Matheny, Logical Fleadh, Test Subject 17, Guitarmy of One and more.

Our second and third hours bring back a legendary episode of Radio Free Charleston International from 2017 that treats listeners to a free-format playlist where every song has at least one thing in common with the song before it. It was pretty tricky making this idea work, especially with the last song leading back into the first, but it makes for some incredible listening, and you can even try to guess the connections along the way. I do spill the beans and connect the dots at the end of the show.

As I said at the time…

In a special show that took way too much time to program, your humble host and PopCulteer brings you two hours of music where every song has something to do with the song that comes after it. Your challenge is to figure out just exactly what that is. It might be that the two songs are written by the same person, or share a producer, or a member of one band produced the song by another. It might be a tenuous connection, like both musical artists appearing on the same television show, or it might be a rock-solid tie, like two groups that share members.

Some of the songs you’ll hear in Radio Free Charleston International this week are by cutting-edge underground artists, some of them are from ultra-hip cult artists, while other tunes are by high-profile artists and may have been major hit records. But every song has something in common with the next.

Check out the playlist below to see all the goodies we have in store. Where possible in the first hour, live links will take you to the artist’s pages so you can find out more about them, buy their music and find out where to see them perform live…

RFC V5 145

Hitchcock Circus “Shakespeare’s Inspiration”
Brian Diller & The Ride “Don’t Stop At Anything”
Buni Muni “Don’t Look Back”
Sgt. Splendor “Heavy Be Thy Borrowed Crown”
Dave Gahan & The Soulsavers “I Held My Baby Last Night”
William Matheny “Heartless People”
Ron Lazzeretti “Count Down By Threes”
Logical Fleadh “The Pile”
Tony Kaye “Sweetest Dreams”
Test Subject 17  “Go Mortals”
Guitarmy of One “Jack Lord of the Sea”
Qiet “Pet Driftwood”
Miniature Giant “Dawn”
Hello June “Honey I Promise”
Brian Diller “Dear Boy”

hour two
Nu Tra “Superhuman”
The Aquabats “The Controller”
Oingo Boingo “Change”
Strawberry Alarm Clock “Dear Joy”
Surf Punks “Welcome To California”
Size 14 “Superbabe 2000”
Pink Floyd “In The Flesh”
Paul McCartney “On The Way”
The The “This Is The Day”
Rip Rig and Panic “Sunken Love”
Madness “The Liberty of Norton Folgate”

hour three
Suggs “I’m Only Sleeping”
Alice Cooper “Eleanor Rigby”
Hollywood Vampires “Come and Get It”
Badfinger “Baby Blue”
Todd Rundgren “Terra Firma”
XTC “Dear God”
Shriekback “Nemesis”
The Veils “Lavina”
Julie Cruse “Falling”
Sparks “I Predict”
FFS “Johnny Delusional”
Franz Ferdniand “Take Me Out”
The Cardigans and Tom Jones “Burning Down The House”
The Firm “Satisfaction Guaranteed”
DEVO “Communication Break Up”

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 2 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.

Then at 1 PM we have MIRRORBALL, followed at 2 PM by Curtain Call. At 3 PM two classic episodes of The Swing Shift arrive.

You can hear The Swing Shift Tuesday at 3 PM, with replays Wednesday at 8 AM, Thursday at 9 AM, Friday at 8 PM and Saturday afternoon, only on The AIR . You can also hear all-night marathons, seven hours each, starting at Midnight Thursday and Sunday evenings.

This week’s art is a small acrylic study that is here basically because it cracks me up.

It’s another of my attempts to emulate the technique of Edward Hopper, but it’s also a bit of an in-joke. You see, last July Mel and I made a quick trip to Chicago to see a couple of plays, and for part of our trip we stayed at the Canopy by Hilton in Chicago’s famed Loop district. We had a beautiful suite with multiple rooms and a really nice living room area as soon as we walked in.

Our room was situated in an odd corner of the building (a completely refurbished former railroad HQ) and our suite spanned the entire width of this part of the building. As a result, our bedroom had a large window that overlooked West Jackson Boulevard. Being in the middle of a city, it did not have an expansive view, but it was interesting enough to warrant a painting of its own, which you will see in a few weeks.

But the living room window, being pointed in the opposite direction, had a totally different view. This window offered a view of what can best be described as “a mysterious void.” I thought it was an alleyway of some sort, but looking at it via satellite images shows that it’s merely a blank space in between where three buildings don’t quite meet. I guess it would be considered a courtyard of sorts, but it’s not one that gets much in the way of sunlight, and from our room, you couldn’t even see the ground. I’m assuming that it must be accessible from the ground floor of at least one of the three buildings, but I know that, after walking around the block, there is no way to get there from the outer streets.

Still, it made for an amusing view, and was a good place to practice my Hoppering while my fingers were working. It’s acrylic on thick illustration board.

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 Neil’s Heavy Concept Album on last week’s episode of The Comedy Vault.

Tonight at 9 PM the Monday Marathon presents ten hours of purly random audio joy, taken from our vast collection of cool stuff.

Another radio note: Tuesday’s Radio Free Charleston will be an encore of the show we debuted last Thursday. Your PopCulteer is taking the week off from making radio so he can work on a magazine article. We do plan to return to newness with a new edition of Mel Larch’s MIRRORBALL on Friday.  Until then, we are going to showcase the seventh episode of each of our music specialty programs this week, except for RFC. The plan is to return with new episodes of everything, including our shows from the UK, next week.