Month: March 2025 (Page 2 of 4)

The PopCulteer
March 21, 2025

Okay, so the migrating from one PC to another that I told you about yesterday is not going as quickly as I had planned.

The original idea was to have the desk cleared off, the new PC booted up, and the KVM installed so I could load it up with the appropriate software while still using the old reliable computer to update the blog.

The trouble was that clearing off the desk is taking longer than expected. Ten hours of steady work, and I can now see the surface of the desk (which badly needs dusting), but I still have long way to go before I can reposition everything and relocate the power cables so that I can put everything where it’s supposed to go.

I’m also going to relocate a couple of nice shadowboxed GI Joe sets that look like they’re about plunge off the wall any second now.

Still, I have to produce a PopCulteer column today, so how about we run down the top ten things I found while cleaning off the desk? Be warned that these things are dusty, and more dust was whipped up while cleaning, and since I just grabbed my camera and shot with a macro setting real quick and forgot to dust them off, they look even dustier than they are.

Top Ten Desk Treasures

10  Coming in at number ten, it’s a miniature Suffering Bastard Tiki Mug that I don’t remember buying.

I’m pretty sure he came from Trader Vic’s, but I don’t remember buying one when I went on a Tiki Mug buying spree a few years ago.

Maybe he just decided to show up and suffer independently.

This little guy is about four inches tall, which means he still holds more alcohol than I’ve ever had to drink in my life.

9  Number nine was a “Welcome To Charter Broadband” pamphlet with a CD ROM that I got twenty years ago when I made the late leap from dial-up. After waiting nearly five months to get hooked up by Verizon, only to finally be told that their service didn’t quite reach my address, I called Charter and was hooked up in two hours.

Since then, Verizon sold out to Frontier, while Charter sold out to Suddenlink, which got bought by a German company who changed the name to Optimum. My internet is still flowing through the same wires that brought me Capitol Cablevision in 1972.

8  Number eight was Volume III of the Warner Brothers Records Sampler Series “Just Say Yes.”  This will likely turn up as the third hour of Radio Free Charleston in a week or three.

Back during the original broadcast incarnation of RFC, this was one of my go-to samplers that allowed me to play the alternative hits of the day without lugging around a briefcase of thirty or forty CDs.

I mean, I still did lug around a briefcase full of CDs, but most of them were samplers like this one.

7  Number seven was a container of multi-colored rubber bands.  The fact that these have atrophied to the point that they crumble when you stretch them tells me they’ve been there more than a decade.

6  Number six was one of my high school sketchbooks.

5  Number five was a halfway-decent drawing of a very muscular Pete Townshend in that sketchbook.

4  Number four was my E Bow. I’d wondered where that had gotten off to.

3  Number three was a Chinese knockoff toy Volkswagon painted like The George Barris Batmobile, that must have been an eBay purchase because the box was crushed as though it had been sent in an envelope. Apparently this is based on a gag from one of those LEGO superhero movies. For some reason, the fact that it’s based on a LEGO movie, instead of just being a goofy knockoff, makes it less fun to me.

2  Number two is a tiny orange fishnet bag with little plastic toys and a couple of thumbdrives that I got at the International Toy Fair in New York just over ten years ago.

1  And finally, number one is Luigi!  Luigi is a kitchen timer, and was the co-star and timekeeper on Word Association With Lee and Rudy, the half-hour talk show I used to do on The AIR with Lee Harrah. We keep threatening to revive it, and now that I found Luigi, that’s a tiny bit more likely.

And this hastily-scrawled list is this week’s PopCulteer. Check back every day for fresh content, even when things aren’t going too smoothly.

Posting is going to be a bit light here for a couple of days while I move my virtual office from my loyal but nearly obsolete HP computer running Windows 7 to a more modern Dell. I generally have to be dragged kicking and screaming to updating an operating system. I wait until I get a huge, blinking red pop-up that says something like “After March 21 Smoke Signals will NOT be supported, and there will be no further updates.” That day has come, so my hand was forced.

This is a huge undertaking, not so much because of the installing software and networking computers stuff, but because of the large portion of my desk which hasn’t seen daylight since the arrival of the HP thirteen years ago. There’s like a four-foot high pile of books, magazines, toys and Kickstarter rewards that has accumulated, and that has to be moved to make way for the new baby.

So today might be a good day for looking back at PopCult.

Five years ago today…uh…the world was going to hell because we elected an insane dolt to run the country and he shut down the agencies that were supposed to protect us from a pandemic. Good thing that’ll never happen again!

Ten years ago today we told you about cool things that were happening in Charleston, and shared a video from JoeLanta, 2015 of Larry Hama discussing the GI Joe “Silent Interlude” story, plus we had Gypsy Rythm on The RFC MINI SHOW and photos from our trip to JoeLanta. This year, we are not making the trek down South to what is now ToyLanta, but it is coming up and I’ll point you to some info about it next week.

Fifteen years ago today, we didn’t have a post. I wasn’t able to crank out a post every day back then as my life was consumed with caregiver duties for a relative. However, the day before that date, I did a follow-up on a controversial post about a matter that has since been mostly forgotten, and also had a nice photo essay on Art Walk (and I believe Art Walk returns tonight in Charleston. Go HERE and look). As a bonus, there are also a few photos from an IWA East Coast wrestling show.

Nineteen years ago today (we haven’t been around for twenty years yet), I took aim at the awful movie adaptation of V For Vendetta. The passage of time has not dampened my contempt for this act of literary vandalism.

And that is today’s post.  I’ll have something in this space tomorrow, but I’m not sure which computer I will be using to compose it. I need to go find some boxes for all this cool stuff on my desk now.

It’s that time of year when the thermostats get a workout, as we have temperatures in the 80s one day, and below freezing with snow warnings the next. So before you head out, check which way the wind is blowing and dress accordingly. With that bit of useless advise out of the way, let’s proceed to our a quick list of STUFF TO DO in and around Charleston, WV, this coming weekend.

As always, you should remember 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. Also, if you have a show that you’d like to plug in the future, contact me via Social Media at Facebook, BlueSky or Twitter. I dont charge for this, so you might as well send me something if you have an event to promote. Note that some links look like they shouldn’t work because they have lines through them, but that’s just a WordPress glitch, so click on them anyway. They should still work.

We are also very happy to announce that Cristen Michael has created an interactive calendar that is way more comprehensive than this list of STUFF TO DO, and you can find it HERE. Just click on the day and the event and you’ll be whisked away to a page with more details about loads of area events.

Also, just hours after hosting what I hear was an incredible show over the weekend, the Blue Parrot suffered a tremoundous amount of storm damage. If you want to help rebuild the Parrot, go to this Fundraiser page.

You can find live music in and around town every night of the week. You just have to know where to look.

Most Fridays and Saturdays you can find live music at Taylor Books. There is no cover charge, and shows start at 7:30 PM. Friday’s musical act is Bugsworrrld.  Saturday the music flows forth from Ronald & The RayGunz.

You can find live music every night at The World Famous Empty Glass Cafe. Mondays feature open mic night. The first Tuesday of every month sees the legendary Spurgie Hankins Band perform. There’s both Happy Hour music and local or touring bands on Thursday and Friday, and live bands Saturday nights. On Sundays when there’s a new Mountain Stage, musicians from the legendary WV Public Radio show migrate to The Glass for the Post-Mountain Stage jam.

Live at The Shop in Dunbar hosts local and touring bands on most weekends, and is a nice break away from the downtown bar scene.

Louie’s, at Mardi Gras Casino & Resort, regularly brings in local bands on weekends.

In Huntington, local institution, The Loud (formerly The V Club), brings in great touring and local acts three or four nights a week.

The Wandering Wind Meadery holds several events each week, from live piano karaoke to bands to comedy to burlesque.

The multitude of breweries and distilleries that have popped up in Charleston of late bring in live musical acts as well. I tend to miss a lot of these because, being a non-drinker, they fly under my radar.

Roger Rablais hosts Songwriter’s stage at different venues around the area, often at 813 Penn, next door to Fret ‘n’ Fiddle in Saint Albans and also at The Empty Glass. You might also find cool musical events at Route 60 Music in Barboursville and Folklore Music Exchange in Charleston.

To hear music in an alcohol-free enviroment, see what’s happening at Pumzi’s, on Charleston’s West Side. You can also visit Coal River Coffee in Saint Albans for live music in an alcohol-free environment. I am looking to expand this list, so please contact me through the social media sites above if you know about more alcohol-free performance venues. The Huntington Music Collective has recently started hosting all ages shows at Event Horizon.

For cutting-edge independent art films, downstairs from Taylor Books you’ll find the Floralee Hark Cohen Cinema by WVIFF. Each week they program several amazing movies in their intimate viewing room that you aren’t likely to see anywhere else.

Please remember that viral illlnesses are still a going concern and 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. And if you’re at an outdoor event, please remember that it’s awfully inconsiderate to smoke or vape around people who become ill when exposed to that stuff.

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

Here we go, roughly in order, it’s graphics for local events that I was able to scrounge up online…

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We’ve got another huge episode of Radio Free Charleston for you today on The AIR.  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 boatloads of replays throughout the week.

The week we bring you another three full hours of our free-format blend of local, independent, alternative, weird and whatever else I feel like playing music. And this week we throw in a few mini-themes for you.  Our second hour includes two epically long prog rock tunes, both just released, and our third hour has some pseudo-Reggae, Police-sounding tunes in one set, and songs that share their names with paintings in another.

We open the show with a tune from The M.F.B. and then, over the course of our three hours, we bring you new tunes from Ghoulbox, J. Marinelli, The Heavy Editors, Skyflake, The Settlement, David Synn and more.

It’s a free-format free-for-all that may very well thrill and/or delight you.

The links in the playlist will take you to the pages for the artists in this week’s show where possible.

RFC V5 218

hour one
The M.F.B “Big Booty Judy”
Ghoulbox“Dead, White and Gloom”
J. Marinelli “Blank Narcissus”
Falling Stars “Every Day”
The Heavy Editors “Time Travel”
Kate Hudson “Lying To Myself”
Superfetch “Shenanigans”
Skyflake “Luminescent”
The Settlement “Snake Farm”
Patrick Leonard “Bishops of Fright”
Regina Spekto “Lacrimosa”
David Synn “Queen of Wands”
Astral Bazaar “Fractions’

hour two
Justin Hayward & Mike Batt “Life In A Northern Town”
Jon Anderson “Gates of Delirium (live)”
Steven Wilson  “Objects Outlive Us”
SPACE FREQ “Spacetripper”

hour three
John Bunkley “Fugitive Tone”
Novo Combo “Hard To Say Goodbye”
City Boy “The Blind Leading The Blind”
Save Ferris “Lies”
Elvis Costello “Watching The Detectives”
Massing “Dayblind”
Marianne Faithfull “Brain Drain”
Men Without Hats “Christina’s World”
Keith Emerson “Nighthawks”
The Nanker Phelge “Scream”
Neal Morse “The Last Supper”
Magenta “Guernica”
XTC “Garden of Earthly Delights”

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, Sunday at 8 PM 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 give you an encore of two classic 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.

My Myasthenia Gravis has abated enough that for the first time in about six weeks I’m back to sharing some new, physical art.

Inspired by photos I took from our hotel window on a recent trip to Lexington, this is a small acrylic painting of Joseph-Beth Booksellers, in Lexington Green, as seen at night, with the very noisy Nicholasville Road in the background.  The hotel and book store overlook a little lake, which is stocked with many lovely and ill-tempered fowl, like Geese, Ducks and Swans.

While this scene is ripe for applying Hoppersque technique to it, I did not do so consciously. That’s likely to change should I decide to recreate this on a larger canvas. It won’t take that much effort.

This was basically just an attempt to make anything cohesive with my fingers.  It’s acrylic on illustration board, with a bit of Winsor Newton ink used to stretch out some of the darker colors.

To see this week’s art bigger try clicking HERE.

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

At 8 PM you can hear music from Flight of the Conchords on a classic episode of The Comedy Vault.

Tonight at 9 PM for the Monday Marathon we bring you ten hours of the best early episodes of Mel Larch’s Disco showcase, MIRRORBALL.

This is a short video that I originally ran in this space almost exactly fifteen years ago. It was recently brought to my attention that the link and embed code has been dead for probably fourteen of those years. So here it is again, with a rewritten explanation below.

You may have already seen this, but it’s pretty darned funny and very clever. It’s the opening sequence from the 1980s Watchmen cartoon, which never really existed. Produced by Happy Harry Productions, I thought the PopCult crowd might enjoy it, plus it gave me an excuse to briefly share my thoughts on the movie, now with those thoughts updated some fifteen years later. 

When I finally got around to seeing “The Watchmen” I was both disappointed and impressed. I felt that it was nearly the best they could possibly do in turning the comic book into a movie. It’s still far inferior to the experience of reading the comic, but at the time I thought they did an admirable, if seriously flawed, job. I had my mind blown by the comic book when it was published in 1986, so this was something I looked to with a mixture of anticipation and trepidation. That’s what I thought back then, anyway. Subsequent attempts at re-watching it over the years have greatly diminished my opinion.  I thought the art direction was great, but the movie direction is sort of brainless and plodding. The director, Zack Snyder, went on to wrong-headedly mishandle the DC universe, and with hindsight, you can see how ill-suited he was for that job when you watch this movie.

The casting, with one exception, was amazing. Most of the actors looked exactly like Dave Gibbons’ drawings come to life. And the dialogue was almost all directly lifted from Alan Moore’s original script.  It takes more than that to create a good movie.

They had to cut big chunks out of the comic book series to keep the movie from running six hours.  As it is, it still clocks in at over two-and-a-half hours.  At first, I thought that one major change–the ending–worked better for film than the original ending would have, but I have since come to the conclusion that changing it the way they did just proved that it never should have been adapted in the first place.

The denouement seemed tacked on and confusing and further reinforces my opinion that the director lost his footing and was in over his head.  In the comic book, the scheme by the character Ozymandias to achieve world peace through fear involves a fake alien invasion and a giant monster cloned from the brain of a dead psychic.  That would take too long to set up in a movie, so they changed it to a fake attack by Dr. Manhattan, the blue atomic-powered superhero. This sort of torpedoed the complex relationships between the characters in the comic and lowers the IQ of the finished film dramatically.

The real problem is the scene after that, where Silk Spectre II and Owlman go to see her mother, the original Silk Spectre, in the comic, they are in disguise, in hiding after the manufactured crisis.  In the movie, they just barge in with no attempt to hide who they are, which is even more bizarre because the dialogue is lifted straight from the comic, and doesn’t really make sense in this new context. In retrospect, much of the movie is pretty senseless.

Another problem with the movie is the casting and general treatment of the character Ozymandias. In the comic book this character is a big, brawny super-hero Adonis-type, who seems above suspicion, so it’s a shock when it turns out that he’s the one behind the killings and the outrageous plot at the end. In the comic, it’s a major twist. In the movie, it’s obvious from the first moment you see him that he’s the villain.  The casting here was off the mark, too. In the book, he’s a muscle-man. In the movie, they hired an actor who looks remarkably like Macauley Culkin.  About as menacing, too. That they cut the back story of Ozymandias to the bone doesn’t help either.

At first blush, it seemed like a decent adaptation, but it does not hold up at all.  About 65% of the original comic book is in there. Melanie told me me it was confusing to someone who hasn’t read the book, and it dragged in places for her, but considering how bad the adaptation of Moore’s “V For Vendetta” was, this was as much as we could expect. I think my initial, more favorable, reaction was due to “V For Vedetta” being so awful. I was grading on a curve.

Still, this little parody is funny.

From April, 2011, we bring you Radio Free Charleston 126, “Purple Batman shirt.” This episode featured music from WhiteChapel District, the duo of Chad Foss and Sean Sydnor, and a trailer for “Zombie Babies,” Eamon Hardiman’s legendary motion picture. This was our first show uploaded in Hi-Def, which seemed like a big deal at the time.

Host segments were shot on a beautiful Sunday morning in front of Jeff Pierson’s East End mural, which can be found right across Greenbrier Street, on the back of the Mini Mart. Our first musical guest for this show was WhiteChapel District. recorded on New Year’s Eve, at Tomahawk’s Smokehouse and Saloon, which spent a few years as Grumpys, and is currently Cozumel. It was a wild, high-energy night. These guys open and close the show.

Next up we had a trailer for Eamon Hardiman’s movie, “Zombie Babies.” This touching family drama told all about about what happens when a zombie infestation happens at a discount abortion clinic.

The musical guest sandwiched between the two WCD songs was the duo of Chad Foss and Sean Sydnor. Sean was on the show way back in our early days as a member of Professor Mike and has since gone on to fame as the bassist for Byzantine. Chad needs to be singing again.

You can read the original production notes HERE.

The PopCulteer
March 14, 2025

This week in The PopCulteer I’m going to go back and reunite (writing-wise) with my lovely wife, Mel Larch.

From 1991 to 2005, we collaborated on Animated Discussions for The Charleston Gazette. This was back when writing for The Gazette was actually a respectable gig, and we were proud to write the only regular animation column for a major daily newspaper.

We covered the Ren & Stimpy controversy, the birth of Adult Swim, the creation of many notable TV cartoons like Powerpuff Girls, Dexter’s Laboratory and Rugrats, and we reviewed dozens of animated features, including gems like The Lion King, The SpongeBob Squarepants Movie and Wallace and Gromit.

We stopped writing for The Gazette when they slashed their freelancer budget and I started on PopCult, but we did continue to include Animated Discussions in PopCult as an occasional feature in the early days, but this week, for the first time since December, 2006 I welcome my partner-in-life and crime, Mel, back to the blog as we review a couple of animated movies in…

Animated Discussions
by Rudy Panucci and Mel Larch

The Day The Earth Blew Up
A Looney Tunes Movie
directed by Peter Browngardt

It’s hard to believe, but The Day The Earth Blew Up is the first ever, honest to God, Looney Tunes feature film. We don’t count the compilation movies like Bugs Bunny Superstar, and we don’t count the Space Jam movies (because they are essentially a blasphemy against Looney Tunes), but this movie is the first time that Daffy Duck and Porky Pig have been trusted to carry a feature film.

Fortunately, Earth was created by the same team who produced the brilliant Looney Tunes Cartoons for HBO Max back in 2020 – 2023.  Led by Peter Browngardt (Uncle Grandpa), this crew for the first time since the 1940’s captured the brilliant animation and madcap, screwball gags of the original Looney Tunes cartoons.

The Day The Earth Blew Up manages to take that inspired lunacy and build a feature length story that balances enough elements of drama, pathos, romance, and action to keep from burning out the audience completely. Ninety minutes of Daffy on a rampage might just be a little too tiring for most audiences.

In The Day The Earth Blew Up, we see the origin of Porky and Daffy in a delightfully surreal and bizzare sequence where they are taken in by Farmer Jim, who is drawn and animated as though he just walked out of a WPA-era industrial cartoon. Keeping the movie visually interesting, aside from the bulk of it looking like the best of  Bob Clampett and Tex Avery’ classic cartoons, there are also sequences that look like Soviet propaganda posters come to life, straight sci-fi adventure, and mutant horror zombie movies.

The voice work, with Eric Bauza portraying both Daffy and Porky, Candi Milo as Petunia Pig, and Peter McNicol as an alien overlord, is on par with the work of Mel Blanc and June Foray. The score is a brilliant homage to Carl Stalling and Raymond Scott, and the use of recognizable pop songs adds a hint of familiarity but is also perfectly married to the sequences in which they are used.

There is a major plot twist that we’re not going to spoil here, but it should be noted that this plot twist makes the movie perfectly suitable for children of all ages. Adults who appreciate humor and classic animation will also find a lot to love about The Day The Earth Blew Up.

The Day The Earth Blew Up opens in theaters in wide release today and you should make a point to see it as soon as possible, because Warner Brothers, in their latest in a series of inexplicable business moves, sold off the distribution rights to a tiny company that can’t afford much of a promotional budget.  However, we should be grateful that it got released at all, considering how many quality animated projects WBD has buried to get the tax write-off recently.

Plankton:The Movie
Directed by Dave Needham

Plankton: The Movie is not a theatrical release, but is currently streaming on Netflix as part of a deal with Paramount to create spin-offs of the Spongebob Squarepants franchise. True fans of Spongebob Squarepants should love this movie.

We say “true fans” because there seems to be a vocal community of spurned former Spongebob fans who rush to the internet to condemn and complain about any Spongebob project created after 2004.

Luckily, those people don’t matter. Plankton: The Movie is the tour de force that the little green copepod has deserved for the last quarter century. Voiced by Mr. Lawrence (who also co-wrote the script with Kaz and Chris Viscardi), this shows off the more human side of the vindictive single-celled organism who’s hell bent on world domination.

We should also point out that Plankton: The Movie is also a tour de force for Jill Talley, who voices Plankton’s long neglected computer wife, Karen. she really gets to cut loose here.

In this movie, Plankton once again fails to steal the Krabby Patty secret formula, only this time, Karen has had enough of being belittled by him and decides to dump him and dominate the world by herself, magnetizing the Chum Bucket and transforming into a three headed, super destructive giant robot. It’s up to Plankton to stop her plan, restore her empathy, and win back her love.

Most of Plankton: The Movie is 3D CGI, which serves the story fairly well, but is also a bit of a barrier for fans of the original 2D animation of Spongebob Squarepants. Several flashback segments are animated in 2D and brilliantly mimic other animation styles to help set the tone. We’re treated to rubber hose animation, 60’s Saturday morning animation, 80’s Transformer like animation, and weird 1990’s indy animation.

Plankton: The Movie is also…a musical with very entertaining songs, some written by the teams of Bret McKenzie (Flight of the Concords) and hitmaker Linda Perry, and others written by Mark and Bob Mothersbaugh of DEVO fame.  DEVO fans should be advised you can spot their songs a mile away.

Ultimately, Plankton: The Movie is solidly entertaining, with moments of great animation and terrific gags, plus plenty of Easter eggs for longtime fans of the Spongebob Squarepants TV shows and movies. It’s well worth watching.

And that is the return of Animated Discussions, and is also this week’s PopCulteer. Check back every day for fresh content.

We are sliding into the middle of the month of the wind, and aside from celebrating the stabbing of tyrannical leaders day, we are also going to have a slew of observations of Saint Patrick’s Day, which actually happens next Monday.  Even though your humble blogger is half Irish, I do not drink, so this holiday is not high on my list of thing to get excited about. I’m long past the days of wearing green to avoid physical harrassment, and I sort of lean more toward the Italian side of my heritage (flawed holiday and all). So, if you’re into drinking green beer, and/or vomiting that stuff back up, you should probably look elsewhere,  Aside from that, here’s a quick list of STUFF TO DO in and around Charleston, WV, this coming weekend.

As always, you should remember 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. Also, if you have a show that you’d like to plug in the future, contact me via Social Media at Facebook, BlueSky or Twitter. I dont charge for this, so you might as well send me something if you have an event to promote. Note that some links look like they shouldn’t work because they have lines through them, but that’s just a WordPress glitch, so click on them anyway. They should still work.

You can find live music in and around town every night of the week. You just have to know where to look.

Most Fridays and Saturdays you can find live music at Taylor Books. There is no cover charge, and shows start at 7:30 PM. Friday’s musical act is Nolan Collins.  Saturday the music flows forth from Maddie Staqrcher & Riley Imlay.

You can find live music every night at The World Famous Empty Glass Cafe. Mondays feature open mic night. The first Tuesday of every month sees the legendary Spurgie Hankins Band perform. There’s both Happy Hour music and local or touring bands on Thursday and Friday, and live bands Saturday nights. On Sundays when there’s a new Mountain Stage, musicians from the legendary WV Public Radio show migrate to The Glass for the Post-Mountain Stage jam.

Live at The Shop in Dunbar hosts local and touring bands on most weekends, and is a nice break away from the downtown bar scene.

Louie’s, at Mardi Gras Casino & Resort, regularly brings in local bands on weekends.

In Huntington, local institution, The Loud (formerly The V Club), brings in great touring and local acts three or four nights a week.

The Wandering Wind Meadery holds several events each week, from live piano karaoke to bands to comedy to burlesque.

The multitude of breweries and distilleries that have popped up in Charleston of late tend to bring in live musical acts as well. I tend to miss a lot of these because, being a non-drinker, they fly under my radar.

Roger Rablais hosts Songwriter’s stage at different venues around the area, often at 813 Penn, next door to Fret ‘n’ Fiddle in Saint Albans and also at The Empty Glass. You might also find cool musical events at Route 60 Music in Barboursville and Folklore Music Exchange in Charleston.

To hear music in an alcohol-free enviroment, see what’s happening at Pumzi’s, on Charleston’s West Side. You can also visit Coal River Coffee in Saint Albans for live music in an alcohol-free environment. I am looking to expand this list, so please contact me through the social media sites above if you know about more alcohol-free performance venues. The Huntington Music Collective has recently started hosting all ages shows at Event Horizon. See below for this weekend’s big show.

For cutting-edge independent art films, downstairs from Taylor Books you’ll find the Floralee Hark Cohen Cinema by WVIFF. Each week they program several amazing movies in their intimate viewing room that you aren’t likely to see anywhere else.

Please remember that viral illlnesses are still a going concern and 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. And if you’re at an outdoor event, please remember that it’s awfully inconsiderate to smoke or vape around people who become ill when exposed to that stuff.

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

Here we go, roughly in order, it’s graphics for local events that I was able to scrounge up online…

Continue reading

Longtime readers of PopCult might recognize most of this post from when it first ran, back in December, 2023.

However, since Boop!, which your humble blogger and his wife got to see in Chicago on a trail run has made it to previews on the Great White Way ( just last night) I thought it might be time to revisit this, with a little updating to reflect the current run.

Boop! opened in previews last night at The Broadhurst Theatre, at 235 W 44th St. (just around the corner from Schubert Alley).  Since it’s in previews, the big-time reviewers are not supposed to review the show yet, but since I’m just reheating my take on it from the Chicago run, I can get away with it.  One reason I’m doing this is that the original post has been getting tons of traffic lately, so I figured it’d be good to make it a little easier to find and update the theater information.

It is, as you may have guessed, a stage musical featuring the iconic Fleischer animation heroine, Betty Boop. Melanie and I got to see the World Premiere, out-of-town run before the show moved to Broadway.

Producers do out-of-town runs so they can sort of workshop a new musical and make changes based on a live audience reaction.  By the time a show moves to Broadway, it might be substantially different.

However, I’m thinking it’s not going to be that much different because, as it is, BOOP! was nearly perfect. The songs are catchy as hell. The story is fun. The stagecraft is amazing. And Jasmine Amy Rogers (seen left), who plays Betty Boop, will likely come out of this role as a major star. She really IS Betty Boop, come to life. Still, we’re thinking about going to see it this summer so we can see if they changed anything, and also because we had so much fun the first time.

As we saw it, the show was just about perfect. I’m sure the producers will tinker with the pacing and I heard that the composer, David Foster, has two new songs ready to plug into the production. At this point, it seems that this show doesn’t need much to become a major hit. I felt that one song we hear as a false climax would pack more punch if it were foreshadowed with a less-orchestrated verse much earlier in the show, but that’s a minor note.

So much of BOOP! is simply stellar. Bob Martin contributes a clever book that weaves romance, spectacle and interdimensional travel into a thrilling and delightful story. Susan Birkenhead’s lyrics and David Foster’s music manage the difficult feat of capturing the Golden Age Jazz sound of the original Betty Boop cartoons while still projecting a contemporary vibe.

Jerry Mitchell, who directed and choreographed this show has conducted a symphony of pop culture visuals and dance numbers that pay tribute to the original cartoons as well as remaining strikingly original.

Speaking of strikingly original, the scenic design by David Rockwell and the projection design by Finn Ross help immerse the audience in a world based on classic Fleischer animation in the beginning, and then a full-color astonishingly surreal New York City in the “real world.”

Grampy, Betty and Pudgy, before her trip to the real world.

The cast is amazing, and we have to once again note that Jasmine Amy Rogers shines brightly in what should be a career-defining role. She has the look, the voice, and the attitude of Betty Boop, and she also has the acting chops and emotional range to bring her into the real world. It’s telling that the entire key cast from Chicago made the move to New York.

DeRosa and Prince, with a sweet, second love story.

Stephen DeRosa is equally amazing as the real-life embodiment of Grampy. Pudgy the dog is onstage via the puppeteer, Philip Huber, and after his first appearance, you forget that there’s a man pulling the strings visible on stage.

Broadway vet, Faith Prince is a hoot as Grampy’s love interest, Valentina, and Ainsley Anthony Melham is great as Betty’s real-world love interest, Dwayne. It’s telling that the entire key cast from Chicago made the move to New York.

The story opens with Betty hard at work making the cartoons that we all know and love today. The set and costuming are monochromatic, looking like a Fleischer cartoon come to life.  After a long day on the set, Betty expresses her desire to take a vacation “Where nobody knows me.” Grampy tells her about the real world, and shows her a machine he’s made out of an overstuffed chair that can take her there. But he warns her not to use it because the real world is so dangerous and scary.

Of course, after Grampy dozes off, Betty uses the machine and arrives…at the New York Comic Con. Suddenly, everything is in bright, vibrant color. Betty encounters cosplayers dressed as DC Comics, Marvel and Hanna Barbera characters (and more), and experiences colors for the first time with the showstopper tune, “In Color.”

Now, I have to admit that, being a comic book nerd for over 55 years, a musical that includes interdimensional travel, classic animation references, Easter Eggs buried in the animated sets AND cameos by Superman, Cyclops, Velma Dinkley, Iron Man, Green Lantern, Chewbacca and more has pretty much punched all my buttons.

I don’t want to spoil the rest of the plot. Let’s just say that we get a couple of love stories, a city politics subplot, a little sexual harrassment, some inspiring feminism, plus a potentially world-ending crisis, all set to impeccably crafted tunes that will stick in your head for months.

I will be shocked if BOOP! The Musical does not go on to have a major run at The Broadhurst. I can see BOOP! very easily becoming a hot-ticket show like Book of Mormon or Hamilton. It’s that good.

I also see multiple Tony Awards in its future.

The Chicago run at the CIBC Theater is long done, but trust me, you’ll have plenty of chances to see it now that it’s moved to New York. I have a feeling BOOP! will be around for a long time.  You can visit the show’s website for links to full ticket information.