This week’s art is an acrylic/marker abstract, painted on this weird treated Tyvek that I found in the basement, and based on a digital design I created on the computer. My fingers weren’t cooperating with my attempts to do more detailed work, so I resorted to this, and I’m pretty happy with the results.
I was also too lazy to mix paint, so these colors are straight out of the tubes. The “Spring” in the title comes from the cheery, spring-like colors. The “2024” comes from me having a nagging feeling that I’ve used the title before, so I wanted to distinguish it from any prior works.
The original design (seen right in a tiny version) was a simple digital gorp, the likes of which occupied this space for many years while I was impaired with MG. This time I created that design, printed it out, then popped it on the lightboard and painted on the Tyvek (which was nearly opacque) to come up with what you see above. As you can probably tell, I took many liberties with the original design.
It’s nice to know I can still go the digital abstract route when my fingers won’t let me emulate Hopper. It’s nicer to know that I can still create real-world art at the same time, even though this one is pretty small, coming in at eight inches, square.
Over in radioland, Monday at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you encores of 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.
PsychedelicShack 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. All times listed are Eastern, so if you’re in another timezone, adjust accordingly.
At 8 PM you can hear an hour of funny songs by Shel Silverstein, on a recent episode of TheComedy Vault.
Tonight at 9 PM the Monday Marathon and Herman Linte present ten hours of progressive rock masterpieces on Prognosis.
Sixty-five years ago today, Barbie, the famed fashion doll from Mattel, was introduced at the New York International Toy Fair. Generations of girls have grown up with the definitive fashion doll, and with the huge success of last year’s Barbie movie, she’s a bigger pop culture icon than ever.
So to observe the anniversary of her beginnings, we bring you two video of her history. Above you will see The HILARIOUS History of Barbie, by FunkyFrogBait. This is a more comprehensive history than some of the longer, dryer videos about the history of Barbie.
Below we have another concise history, courtesy of the respected scholar, Trixie Mattel.
We salute Barbie, without whom we never would have had GI Joe, Bratz Dolls, Monster High, Malibu Stacy, The Spice Girls, “outfits sold separately,” and many other pop culture mainstays.
Radio Free Charleston number 71, “Golden age Batman Shirt” was originally posted in May, 2009. This episode of Charleston’s local music, film, animation and weirdness program included new music from WATT4, vintage music from Hitchock Circus, a Plant Ro Duction Mini Movie, and a special appearance from IWA East Coast‘s Mad Man Pondo and a friend.
We concluded “Mark Beckner Month” with two songs from his Nashville band, Hitchcock Circus. This was a homecoming for Mark, who was a regular on the original RFC radio show as a member of Go Van Gogh and The Tunesmiths. Mark is still making excellent music with his band, Nixon Black.
WATT4 was recorded at The Blue Parrot. We were very lucky to score an appearance in this episode by the late Dave Brockie, also known as “Oderus Urungus” of the band, GWAR. Dave was nice enough to have recorded a couple of spots for Radio Free Charleston, and you can see them, presented in character as Oderus, in this episode of RFC. We were lucky enough to meet Dave, and he was a nice, funny and humble man who just wanted to entertain people. Big thanks to Bo Vance and Mad Man Pondo for helping make these videos happen.
Hooray, we have the playlist for today’s new episode of MIRRORBALL on The AIR, so let’s just jump into a radio-heavy end-of-the-week post, shall we?
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.
Friday at 2 PM on The AIR, Mel Larch devotes her hour of Disco to the legendary record label, Philadelphia International. Founded by the songwriting team, Gamble & Huff, and producer Thom Bell, this label was so influential that the string-laden style of classic Disco came to be known as “The Philadelphia Sound.”
With a roster than included MFSB, Patti Labelle, Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes, The Three Degrees, Teddy Pendergrass and many more, Philadelphia International ruled the charts for years in the 70s and early 80s.
Their sound was so sought after that Elton John imitated it on his single, “Philadelphia Freedom,” and David Bowie was so enamoured of their sound that he recorded much of his Young Americans album at Sigma Sound Studios, which was where most of the label’s Disco hits were created.
In this hour, Mel slows down the beats per minute and cranks up the sweet soul grooves of the classic Philadelphia International sound. Check out the playlist…
MIRRORBALL 093
MFSB and The Three Degrees “T.S.O.P.”
The Intruders “I’ll Always Love My Mama”
Dexter Wanzel “Stargazer”
The Futures “Party Time Man”
The Jones Girls “Let’s Celebrate (Sittin’ on Top of the World)”
Teddy Pendergrass “If You Know Like I Know”
Dee Dee Sharp Gamble “Easy Money”
McFadden & Whitehead “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now”
Lou Rawls “You’ll Never Find Another Love Like Mine”
Billy Paul “Your Song”
The O’Jays “Love Train”
Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes Feat. Teddy Pendergrass “The Love I Lost”
The Three Degrees “Year Of Decision”
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 whip out an encore of the 2022 April Fool’s episode of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat. That was the year that Sydney Fileen decided to throw us a curveball. On realizing that this episode of her show would debut on April Fool’s Day, she also decided to bend the rules and present two hours of the goofiest New Wave music ever, in a mixtape form. Sydney opens the show with Weird Al and Barnes & Barnes, and proceeds to present genuine New Wave novelties mixed with offbeat covers, and a few parodies, recreations and ringers in the mix.
It’s all in the spirit of fun, so check out this playlist…
BEC 088
Weird Al Yankovic “Dare To Be Stupid”
Barnes & Barnes “Fish Heads”
The Vandals “National Brotherhood Week”
The Units “Bugboy”
Captain Sensible “Wot”
Cyndi Lauper “He’s So Unusual”
DEVO “Speed Racer”
Divine “You Think You’re A Man”
Tim Finn “I See Red”
Big Daddy “Once In A Lifetime”
Julie Brown “Homecoming Queen’s Got A Gun”
Big Daddy “Safety Dance”
Weird Al “You Make Me”
Neil “Hole In My Shoe”
Hazel O’Connor “EE-I-ADDIO”
Martini Ranch “How Does The Laboring Man…”
Mystery Music
Wall of Voodoo “Exercise”
Violent Femmes/The Dickeies “Eep Op Ork Ah Ah”
Lene Lovich “I Think We’re Alone Now”
Laibach “Sympathy For The Devil”
Little Nell “Beauty Queen”
Neil “Lentil Nightmare”
Nina Hagen Band “TV Glotzer”
Robert Fripp “You Burn Me Up”
The Stranglers “Old Codger”
Celia & The Mutations “Mean To Me”
The Bad Shepards “White Riot”
Big Daddy “Whip It”
The Dickies “If Stuart Could Talk”
Oingo Boing “Goodbye Goodbye”
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. Classic episodes can be heard Sunday morning at 10 AM.
That’s what’s new on The AIR Friday, and that is this week’s PopCulteer. Check back for our regular features every day.
When your PopCulteer gets buried under outside deadlines and commitments, it’s handy to have nearly eighteen year’s worth of blog archives to plunder. Today is one of the days when I need to do that. We’re going back ten years, to a post that included a preview of the JoeLanta toy convention that Mel and I were heading to that year. It was only our second time there, but in the years since we’ve made it to most of them, and when JoeLanta became ToyLanta, we went to that when we could make our schedules work.
We’re missing ToyLanta this year, but it happens in just a couple of weeks, so if you can make it to Atlanta on the weekend of March 22, head on over for one of the biggest toy conventions in the country. You can find all the details at their website.
But now, go back in time ten years with me, as we relive edited highlights of a post from March 7, 2014…
The PopCulteer March 7, 2014
Next week your PopCulteer is going on a big road trip, so this week we’re going to clear the decks and drop in a whole bunch of short, random items.
Joelanta
The main part of the aforementioned road trip sees us heading to Atlanta where for the second year in a row, I will be one of the many guests at the Joelanta convention, a gathering for fans of the original GI Joe, who turns fifty this year. I made a pretty big deal out of it last year, when I got to attend for the first time. New for 2014 is the simultaneous Great Atlanta Toy Convention, which will be happening at the same time and location March 15 & 16 at Marriott Century City right off Interstate 85 in Atlanta.
I’m really looking forward to this since it’s my second trip to a big GI Joe convention and this year, if our technology holds up, we will be sort of live blogging from Atlanta.
That will also include telling you about “The Walking Dead” day trip that we’re taking to the city where they filmed the Woodbury sequences. If all goes as planned, we will at least have a photo essay of that in next week’s PopCulteer. And if everything goes perfectly, I will return from Atlanta with a Bulletman action figure. That’s him at the left.
You can expect an overload of coverage of our Atlanta trip in PopCult over the next two weeks. I have cobbled together a Frankensteined laptop that should give me full access to PopCult and social media while we’re down there. If all goes well, we will be bringing you video of panels, photo essays, highlights of the dealer’s tables and dioramas and music from the band, Radio Cult.
Radio Free Charleston
Don’t let all this toy talk give you the idea that we are neglecting Radio Free Charleston. We will deliver episode 197 on Monday and we have an epic lineup of musicians in store. The plan is to bring you Dina Hornbaker, recorded at Third Eye Cabaret, plus Project Biscotti and Jordan Searls, recorded at the rock and roll theater at Kanawha Players last week. We don’t want to jinx it, but if all goes well Friday night we will also be bringing you the return of two musical acts who haven’t been on Radio Free Charleston for more than five years.
Direct TV Diaries, Part 3
It’s been two months since I broke loose from the shackles of Suddenlink and switched to DirectTV. I am still paying seventy dollars less per month. I am still getting a much superior high-definition signal and many, many, many more channels.
However, I have to be honest. I have had two outages due to snow. Each one was resolved in five minutes after the snow was knocked off the satellite dish. Meanwhile, my friends who still have Suddenlink have reported multiple outages that lasted several hours.
I sort of hate that I’m sounding so much like a shill for DirectTV. To be honest, I’m sort of angry at myself for not making the switch years ago when Suddenlink started slipping in hefty price hikes at least twice a year. I now get every channel on every television. I don’t have to pay a huge amount of money for extra high definition receivers and I don’t have to see those godawful locally produced cable commercials.
This honeymoon shows no sign of ending.
That’s it for this week’s PopCulteer. Check back over the weekend and all next week for all our regular features, plus a bunch of reports from the road.
Updates for this post: JoeLanta became ToyLanta (which as mentioned above is just a couple of weeks away), but a couple of years ago, JoeLanta was spun off into a separate show, which will happen in October this year. Radio Cult still plays at both shows. Radio Free Charleston jumped back to radio on The AIR, and can be heard every Tuesday, with links right here in PopCult. I am still with DirecTV, and am happy with the service, but may switch at some point if a less expensive option presents itself. Suddenlink has become Optimum, but they show no signs of ever being a less expensive option.
I‘m digging into the big infotainment pile early this week for a new batch of STUFF TO DO in and around the Charleston/Huntington WV area (and beyond) this weekend.
As I have been copying and pasting of late, this 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.
Live Music is back at Taylor Books. There is no cover charge, and shows start at 7:30 PM. Unfortunately, I’m writing this early and they’re posting who’s playing late, so you’ll just have to go find out for yourself who they got this week.
The World Famous Empty Glass Cafe has some great stuff this week to tell you about. Nolan Collins will be playing every Wednesday in March at 9 PM. Thursday at 5:30 PM the Helping Hour with Swingstein & Robin makes the world a better place with music. Friday Tim Courts plays during happy hour. Sunday at 10 PM it’s the always-hapnin’ Post Mountain Stage Jam, hosted by The Carpenter Ants. You can check below for the graphics for other cool weekend shows at The Empty Glass.
Please remember that the pandemic is still not entirely over yet. It’s a going concern with the ‘rona surging again. And now there are seasonal allergies, the flu, previously-eradicated diseases coming back, lingering and rabid legislators, fearsome and sarcastic street bunnies 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 always means cool new stuff on The AIR. We have new episodes of Radio Free Charleston and The Swing Shift. To listen to The AIR, 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.
Our first hour is our usual collection of cool local, independent and brand-new music. We open with brand new music from Unmanned, from their latest album, “As The Beacon Stands Aflame,” which was just released a few days go.
The remainder of our first hour has new music from Dinosaur Burps, Disco Risque, Andy Prieboy, The Paranoid Style, James McCartney, Tucker Riggleman & The Cheap Dates and more cool tunes to which you may well groove.
Our second and third hours are also new, but they are also an extended tribute to Budget Tapes & Records, which just closed Sunday. These two hours consist entirely of music that I purchased at Budget over the years, beginning with a track from the very first album I bought there 51 years ago. It’s my personal playlist of music I bought at Budget.
In between, I talk about the records, who sold them to me, and which location of Budget I went to to purchase them (a long time ago they had three stores). The problem is, as I went along with assembling the show, I realized that it’s going to take more than two hours, so I’m doing this again next week. This little exercise stirred up an awful lot of wonderful memories.
I also want to recommend my post from Friday, and a great entry by Douglas Imbrogno at WestVirginiaVille that collects Doug’s memories of Budget, along with those of Stephen Schmidt, of Astrodot fame. For the unintiated, this is a good way to catch up on the history of Budget. Also, hiding behind a paywall, is a great article by Jason “Roadblock” Robinson at Coal Valley News.
The links in the first hour of the playlist will take you to the pages where you can learn more about each artist and buy their music or find out where to see them (where available)…
hour two
Monty Python “Spam”
Frank Zappa “Cosmik Debris”
The Beatles “I Am The Walrus”
YES “Heart of the Sunrise”
DEVO “Jocko Homo”
Kate Bush “Wuthering Heights”
XTC “Generals and Majors”
Lene Lovich “Wonderful One”
Split Enz “Nobody Takes Me Seriously”
Elvis Costello “Five Gears In Reverse”
The Clash “Something About England”
Siouxsie And The Banshees “Dear Prudence”
hour three
The Who “Music Must Change”
Pete Townshend “Empty Glass”
Marianne Faithful “Why’d Ya Do It”
Cheap Trick “Dream Police”
Kansas “People of the South Wind”
John Lennon “Starting Over”
Paul McCartney “On The Way”
George Harrison “Not Guilty”
Ringo Starr “Attention”
Yoko Ono “No No No”
The Stranglers “Just Like Nothing On Earth”
Joe Jackson’s Jumpin’ Jive “Jumpin’ With Symphony Sid”
Mark Davis “Water Come To Me Eye”
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 another new mixtape episode of The Swing Shift. This is the second of what has been expanded to become a four-week dive into Boogie Woogie and its essential contribution to the success of Swing Music. The reason for the expansion to four episodes is also the reason this is another mixtape edition. Yours truly wore his voice out recording this week’s RFC, and therefore will be recording The Swing Shift 155 early Tuesday morning, after this column goes live.
(UPDATE: 3-4-2024 10:10 AM EST: Here is the playlist for today’s new episode of The Swing Shift)
The Swing Shift 155
Lester Young “Boogie Woogie (I May Be Wrong)”
Hazel Scott Brown “Boogie Woogie”
The Rosenberg Trio “Guitar Boogie”
Steve Howe “Cactus Boogie”
Tyler Pedersen “T-Boneasuarus”
Jack’s Cats “Phil’s Boogie”
Louis Jordan “Choo Choo Ch-Boogie”
Quincy Jones “Boogie Stop Shuffle”
Earl “Fatha” Hines “Boogie Woogie On St. Louis Blues”
Count Basie & His Orchestra “One O’Clock Boogie”
Pete Ruggalo “Good Evening Friends Boogie”
Gene Krupa Orchestra “Boogie Blues”
Charlie Barnet & His Orchestra “Andy’s Boogie”
Woody Herman “Indian Boogie Woogie”
Nat King Cole “Windy City Boogie Woogie”
Sir Jay & His Orchestra “T-Bone Boogie”
Jean-Pierre Bertrand, Peter Muller, Dani Gugolz “Rhythm Boogie’
Harry James “Back Beat Boogie”
Mondo Exotica “Elephant Boogie”
National Radio Station “Plantation Boogie”
Big Bad Voodoo Daddy “The Boogie Jumper”
Cab Calloway “The Calloway Boogie”
Sadly, that means I don’t have a playlist to share, but rest assured, it’s going to Swing, not like the dickens, but more like the the Boogie Woogie Beat.
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 watercolor/acrylic hybrid study, painted on paper for pens.
This piece, inspired by several photos I took on different platforms of Chicago’s “L” last December, is a baby step toward incorporating Edward Hopper-style light, shadow and composition into a painting with a more surreal theme and subtext. If I take this to canvas, I’ll probably make it even weirder. Hopefully a little less sloppy with the signage, too.
As it is, it’s a bit subtle in the mind-hurting weirdness, and maybe a little heavy on the Hopper.
Over in radioland, Monday at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you encores of 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.
PsychedelicShack 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. All times listed are Eastern, so if you’re in another timezone, adjust accordingly.
At 8 PM you can hear an hour of stand up from Lewis Black, on a recent episode of TheComedy Vault.
Tonight at 9 PM the Monday Marathon and Sydney Fileen present ten hours of New Wave Extended Dance Mixes on Sydney’s Big Electric Cat.
This week I thought it might be fun to revisit the video of a crazy trip I made just about half a year ago.
The reason for the recycled video is two-fold: First, I keep running into people who I know would have enjoyed it, but who, for whatever reason, missed it. Second, I had other stuff pop up this weekend, and it was easier to do this than to find or make a new video.
So…IN CASE YOU MISSED IT…above you see the video of the epic road trip your humble blogger took over his birthday weekend last August. In just under half an hour I take you from Dunbar to Caryville, Tennesee, to Calhoun, Georgia, into Atlanta for JoeLanta, back up to Richmond, Kentucky and then on to Columbus, Ohio for PowerCon and MEGO Meet.
You’ll get to see your PopCulteer go through several wardrobe changes (the trip took five days), a few different hats and glasses, and astute viewers ought to be able to see where my Myasthenia Gravis flared up and made me all squinty-eyed.
It was a fun trip, but we’ll never do another like it again. 1,200 miles on the road in five days is just too much. By the time we hit PowerCon we were basically DOA and only lasted a couple of hours. Cramming this much into one long weekend basically meant that everything was a blur and by the end, we weren’t sure what was real and what was hallucinated.
Although, hearing Television’s “Marquee Moon” playing in Buc-ee’s definitely did happen. I got it on video.
So if you have the time, watch as yours truly has fun with toys and gets into some interesting misadventures.
As we mentioned last week, May, 2009, was “Mark Beckner Month” on Radio Free Charleston. This edition of your local music, film, animation and art webcast was jam-packed with music and other short bits of coolness. The first tune is from Barebones, the accapella group who debuted on RFC just a few weeks before this episode, plus we continued “Mark Beckner Month” with a couple of performances that feature Mark: one solo, and one supporting his brother Stephen while jamming on an old Go Van Gogh tune.
It’s a little bittersweet because, in addition to Mark, and Alan and Brian Young, Kai Haynes, who we lost just a few weeks ago, plays bass on that end-credits song.
As if the music weren’t enough, we also had a 100-second art show, this time showcasing the work of Leia Bell, a promo clip for “Viva le Vaudeville,” and the debut of “A Plant Ro Duction Mini Movie.”
It was a magical show, and you can read the original production notes HERE.
The original design (seen right in a tiny version) was a simple digital gorp, the likes of which occupied this space for many years while I was impaired with MG. This time I created that design, printed it out, then popped it on the lightboard and painted on the Tyvek (which was nearly opacque) to come up with what you see above. As you can probably tell, I took many liberties with the original design.
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