Month: August 2025 (Page 3 of 4)

Tuesday is once again “New Show Day” on The AIR  but with only a new episode of Radio Free Charleston.  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.

This week  Radio Free Charleston is loaded with an hour of great new music from old friends and new favorites, two hours of a never-repeated episode of Radio Free Charleston Volume Three, from over ten years ago, when we were part of Voices of Appalachia/New Appalachian Radio.

Our first hour opens with a brand-new tune from the one-man band extraordinaire, J Marinelli. Then we have new music from Novelty Island, Erik Woods, The Settlement, David Byrne and Lindsey Stirling.

We’ve also got some great tracks making their RFC debut, including a classic cut from Fletcher’s Grove, who’s Groovin’ in the Grove 8 happens this weekend, with music from several RFC favorites.

Our second and third hours are a local and regional music time capsule from early 2015, with everything from Avant-Pop to Blues to Horror Punk, Americana, Lounge, Alternative, Metal and more. We do produce a diverse lot of music here in the state of mountains.

Even though I forgot to mention it in the show again  this week, links in the first hour below will take you to a website for the artist, where available.

Check out this impressive playlist…

RFC V5 237

hour one
J Marinelli “Eat The Gatekeepers”
Novelty Island “Rainy (Harmonium Version)”
A Tale of Two “The Canyon”
Corduroy Brown“Doin’ My Best (live)”
June Swoon “One Two”
Erik Woods “Do You Ever?
Fletcher’s Grove “Ride”
The Settlement “Searching”
Gilad Atzmon and The Orient House Ensemble “Gaza Mon Amour”
Tymon Dogg “Once You Know”
David Byrne “Everybody Laugh”
Lindsey Stirling “Untamed

hour two
QiET “Yes, I Want It All”
Quick And Dirty “Super Ninja”
Ann Magnuson “Man With No Face”
The Big Bad “Maniac Mansion”
Diablo Blues Band “Price of a Broken Heart”
Underdog Blues Revue “Back Door Blues”
The Horse Traders “Nothing At All”
The Ruinz “Used To Be Friends”
The Velvet Brothers “Savannah Moon”
Whistlepunk 2.0 “The Good”
Pepper Fandango “Wayward Girls”
The Buttonflies “Lil’ Birdie”
Go Van Gogh “I Can’t Sleep At Night”
Hellblinki “Bella Ciao”

hour three
David Synn “Space Gun”
Karma To Burn “Forty”
Dog Soldier “Christmas Song”
Time And Distance “Hell To Pay”
The Jasons “Camp Arawak”
The Nanker Phelge “21st Century”
Casi Null “Blue Haze”
Punk Jazz “Little Star”
Option 22 “Soul Song”
Carpenter Ants “Blessing”
Bob Clay “Fuel For The Fire”
Todd Burge “Hey, Little Christian Girl”
Frank Panucci “Flying Car”

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  While we wait to bring you a new episode next week, you can expect The Swing Shift to be encores of some classic episodes into the timeslot today.

 You can hear The Swing Shift Tuesday at 3 PM, with replays Wednesday at 8 AM, Thursday at 9 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 Thursdays and Sundays.

This week’s art is a pastel study for a possible large-scale painting later.

It’s my interpretation of a photo I took a little more than a week ago in Cinncinnati’s Union Terminal, the historical Art Deco Mecca, formerly a train station and now containing several museums, an OmniMax theater and an underused Amtrak station. This building was the inspiration for The Hall of Justice on the Super Friends cartoon, and will likely inspire several more pieces of Monday Morning Art over the next few weeks.

This was me looking up at the ceiling in the lobby. It’s almost abstract because so many random angles  in this place are just dripping with artistic sensibilities. I’m still processing the awesomeness of this place, and you will be seeing actual photos and more in the next couple of weeks.

This view, with the sun peeking in through a cutaway window around noon, echoes the sun and solar system with its concentric circles struck me as something I’d want to try to capture in art. It’s nice to have working fingers again.

If you want to see this image larger, click HERE.

Meanwhile, 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 a classic episode of The Comedy Vault devoted to the raunchy music of Rusty Warren.

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

It’s been nearly a month since the big Kentuckiana GI Joe Toy Expo in Louisville.  and our final blast from the show is the video you see above.

We’ve already covered the people, dioramas this year’s music video and the Bulletman tribute, and Friday we had a massive photo essay of the toys we saw at the show (some of them, anyway).

Today, for the completists among you, we bring you just about every scrap of video we shot (all of it videographed by my lovely wife, Mel Larch). The only thing not in here is a short clip of Ace Allgood talking about the custom set he created of his dad, working in the Medical Corp in Korea. You got to see and hear that in the “People” post we did a couple of weeks ago.

The audio here has been removed because we don’t want to accidentally publish anybody’s disparaging comments, dirty jokes or plans for world domination.  Instead you will get to hear the soothing sounds of Frank Zappa and Emerson Lake and Palmer, because that’s what I was in the mood to hear when I put this video together.

Enjoy!

From late November, 2011, this week’s RFC Flashaback is “Red Popeye Shirt,” episode 148 of Radio Free Charleston. This edition of our show was hosted from a very soggy Veteran’s Memorial in Nitro, and presented music from the rock opera, “MARY” and Frenchy and the Punk.

This episode contains three songs filmed during the rehearsals for the Charleston institution, “Mary.” This was the fifteenth production of “Mary” the Scarpelli/Kehde rock opera from The Contemporary Youth Arts Company. We also had a great music video from our friends, Frenchy and the Punk, plus animation by yours truly, and we also have more confusing superhero action from Turkey, in honor of Thanksgiving.

You can read the full production notes HERE.

The PopCulteer
August 15, 2025

It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly a month since the big Kentuckiana GI Joe Toy Expo in Louisville. This summer has been a bit of a blur with near-constant travel punctuated by a few medical misadventures, and it’s taking me way too long to get stuff posted.

To make up for that, and since we’ve already covered the people, dioramas this year’s music video and the Bulletman tribute, this week I’m going to drop a ton of photos of toys…nothing but toys…any people captured in this pictures were purely coincidental.

And a lot of these are not going to have captions. for the most part, what you see will be obvious. I will point out a few things here and there, but I’m trying to get this posted ASAP.

Sunday night I’ll be posting the raw video footage we shot at Kentuckiana, with music replacing the audio because I don’t want to accidentally publish anybody’s private conversations.

Next week you can expect more toy content as The PopCult Toybox returns, and the week after that, this blog turns 20 years old and there will be special posts and new material to commemorate that.

But today we have a bunch of photos that, despite numbering over forty, just scratch the surface of this cool toy show, which has become one of the largest and best action figure shows in the country.

Now, let’s look at some toys, shall we?

The 12″ GI Joe

He’s my main interest in the hobby, and he was very well-represented at this show. We’re going to start with the original action figure…

How to wear crocs

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So, I gotta be honest with you. I didn’t really plan out much of a post for today.

I know that I promise you fresh content every day, and that we have regular features here in this blog and everything…but yesterday was my birthday.  I had a wonderful birthday. Mel took the day off and we just ran about and did fun stuff and overindulged in pizza and cake and ice cream. Over three hundred people sent me birthday wishes on social media. I felt loved, appreciated and grateful for my life.

And lazy…I also felt lazy. Aside from sharing links to yesterday’s post here in the blog, I didn’t do anything resembling work. I took the day off.

I’m old. I’m allowed to do that.

But I don’t want to cheat my readers, and I actually have more stuff planned for PopCult than I usually do. So you’re getting this post today.

You see, two weeks from today marks the 20th anniversary of PopCult.  To mark the occasion, the next two weeks will see the return of The PopCult Toybox and The PopCult Bookshelf, plus several photo essays from my recent travels. As we get closer to the big day you can also expect some retrospectives of past posts here, plus some tie-ins with our internet radio station, The AIR.

Tomorrow you can expect a huge photo essay of the toys for sale at The Kentuckiana GI Joe Toy Expo, and Sunday we’ll bring you the raw footage that we shot, so you can see everything without the quick edits and jump cuts.

But for now, it’s past noon and I’m sitting here writing this post while drinking Zero Sugar Ale 8 and eating macadamia nuts.

And I figure you guys at least deserve some photos to let you know part of what you can expect in the next two weeks.

I still have more photos to share from WonderFest, over two months ago.

You can also expect a quick look at some of the new exhibits at The Kruger Street Toy & Train Museum.

We finally visited The American Sign Museum in Cinncinnati. Look for photos the week after next.

While in Cincy, we encourntered a life-sized reproduction of part of the first Barbie Dream House.

That Barbie exhibit was downstairs at The Hall of Justice, seen here disguised as a mild-mannered Train Station/Museum

You can also expect photos from The Lucky Cat Museum

If you’re good, you might get to see more of the adventures of Traveling Squidward…something Mel and I do to amuse our friend, Pixie, in Liverpool.

That’s just a preview of what you can expect in PopCult.

So you can get all excited now while I start work on tomorrow’s PopCulteer.

I still can’t wrap my brain around the idea that, here in the middle of August, kids are going bakc to school. Even with that sad event, we still have cool stuff happening this week.  Summerfest returns in South Charleston, and you can read about it HERE. And there are all sorts of other mini-festivals and fairs and outdoor events all around the state. We also have other cool things happening, so let’s go for a quick tour of STUFF TO DO around the state and beyond, shall we?

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 , Spoutible, Instagram or possibly Elon’s beast, if it should ever choose to forgive me.  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 remind you 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.

City Center Live at Slack Plaza in Charleston has announced their schedule for the summer.  You can find their schedule HERE.

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. This weekend they have Josh Runyon  on Friday, and Ar Lewi on Saturday.

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 many Tuesday evenings. 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. Pumzi’s looks to be beefing up their offerings in the coming weeks and months, so be sure to check that link in case we miss something. This week they have Tucker Riggleman & The Cheap Dates and Sea Scout celebrating their first anniversary. See the graphic below…

You can also visit Coal River Coffee in Saint Albans for live music in an alcohol-free environment. This Friday at 7 PM  Coal River Coffee features Minor SwingI 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. If somebody asks you to refrain, don’t be a jerk about it.

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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Both of The AIR Music Specialty programs will be brand-new Tuesday, which is once again “New Show Day” on The AIR.  Things are a little different but we still have new episodes of  Radio Free Charleston and The Swing Shift for you. 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.

This week Radio Free Charleston combines a mixtape of recent new tunes with a newly-exhumed episode of Radio Free Charleston International from 2017 and the result is three hours of musical excellenitude.

Allow me to explain something first.  Our first hour mixtape is…me being lazy. It’s my birthday tomorrow, and I wanted to celebrate Slack and The Church of The SubGenius by paying tribute to “Bob” Dobbs, himself, and half-assing the show this week.

Normally I produce shows that are completely-assed.

But this week, since I had to perform reconstructive surgery on The Swing Shift that was supposed to debut last week, and I am, as they say, “plumb tuckered out” after a pre-birthday trip to Cinncinnati (you’ll have to wait a couple of weeks for photos, but you’ll get a tease on Thursday),  I decided to just do a mixtape for the first hour, and revive an old RFCI for hours two and three, and further cementing my laziness, this week there are no links to the artists.

You can find links to their websites by searching this website for their names, and finding previous episodes of the show on which they appear.

The reason for this?  Most weeks, inserting the links into the playlists takes twice as long as writing the accompanying post, and I’d sorta like to get this done before dinner.

Like I said…Hail “Bob” and pass the slack.

Check out this impressive playlist what’s got no links in it…

RFC V5 236

hour one
Byzantine “Kobayashi Maru”
The Settlement “Days Go By”
The M.F.B. “Big Booty Judy”
June Swoon “Play Something I Know”
Chuck Biel “Ripstaver”
J. Marinelli “Hillbilly Effigy”
Vinto Van Go “Hot Pants Boots”
Novelty Island “Foam Animals”
Golden “Gotta Let It Go”
Emmalea Deal & The Hot Mess “Sour”
Novo Combo “Don’t Throw Your Love Away”
Hello June “Sometimes”
Aliza Hava “Let It Roar”
Tucker Riggleman & The Cheap Dates “Bucket and the Boot”
Buni Muni “Last Call”

hour two
The Struts “My Machine”
Anderson/Ponty Band “Owner of a Lonely Heart”
Aphrodite’s Child “You Always Stand In My Way”
ELO “Mahattan Rumble”
Snakefinger “Trashing All The Loves of History”
Die Roten Rosen “Zwei Mдdchen Aus Germany”
Dweezil Zappa “Cosmik Debris”
The Beach Boys “Vega-Tables”
Shantih Shantih “Winter in September”
Forbidden Planet “Hands Around The Throat”
Gentle Giant “The River”
Neil “My White Bicycle”
Peter Gabriel “Down The Dolce Vita”
Kate Bush “Get Out Of My House”

hour three
Agent Orange “Tearing Me Apart”
Jellyfish “The Ghost at Number One”
Klaatu “Long Live Politzania”
Jean-Michael Jarre with John Carpenter “A Question of Blood”
John Foxx “Running Across Thin Ice”
Roger Daltrey “Bitter and Twisted”
Lemmy, Phil Campbell and Rocky George “The Trooper”
Killing Joke “Euphonia”
Screamin’ Jay Hawkins “Heart Attack and Vine”
Boomtown Rats “Rat Trap”
Tanita Tikarim “Gris Gris Tails”

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 offer up a new episode of The Swing Shift that was supposed to be here last week, but the project file got corrupted before it was rendered, so I had to rebuild it from scratch.

This episode opens with Grafton native, Stephanie Adlington, whom you heard last week as half of A Tale of Two on Radio Free Charleston, and inspired by her tune, I devoted the entire show to the intersection of Blues and Swing Music.

You wouldn’t have Swing without The Blues, and this collection of songs proves it.

And it Swings, big time. Check out the playlist…

The Swing Shift 173

Stephanie Adlington “Bootlegger’s Blues”
Glenn Miller “St. Louis Blues March”
Bob Crosby “Honky Tonk Train Blues”
The Pasedena Swing Orchestra “Vo Do Deo Blues”
Squirrel Nut Zippers “St. Louis Cemetary Blues”
Royal Crown Revue “The Walkin’ Blues”
Stan Kenton ” Gotta Right to Sing the Blues”
Jools Holland & His Rhythm & Blues Orchesta “Roll Out of This Hole”
Big Papa & The TCB “California Blues”
Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald “Learnin’ The Blues”
Swing Republic “Searchin’ The Desert For The Blues”
Big Bad Voodoo Daddy “Beggar’s Blues”
Lester Young “D.B. Blues”
Lady J And her Bada Bing Band “Believe Me When I Lie”

 You can hear The Swing Shift Tuesday at 3 PM, with replays Wednesday at 8 AM, Thursday at 9 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 Thursdays and Sundays.

This week’s art was hastily scratched out on typing paper with markers and the judicious use of straight-edges and flexible curves. It’s not huge, possibly smaller than it’s displayed on a computer monitor, and it’s…

…well, it’s the interior of a building I’ll likely be telling you a lot about later. I’m pretty sure it will inspire some more thoughtfully-conceived pieces than this one in the future.

However, this piece was done in less than an hour just last night after I watched the season finale of The Gilded Age.

A hint: I was in Cinncinnati over the weekend.

If you want to see this image larger, click HERE.

Meanwhile, 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 a classic episode of The Comedy Vault devoted to the twisted musical brilliance of Barnes & Barnes.

Tonight at 9 PM for the Monday Marathon we bring you ten hours of episodes of Psychedelic Shack. 

This week our Sunday Evening Video is a bit of a bonus shot of The RFC Flashback.  It’s not often that I get to drop one of our video features on the exact tenth anniversary of a really cool episode of the RFC video show, but that’s happened today. Exactly ten years ago today, I debuted an episode of Radio Free Charleston that is not slated to be re-presented in our chronological RFC Flashback order for over a year, so…since I needed something easy while I’m out of town, here we go. Let’s recap the original production notes, with a little annotation, shall we?

Radio Free Charleston‘s 210th episode, “Idaho Spud Shirt,” is a fun August treat, with a blend of different types of music and lots of our trademark mind-hurting weirdness. This week we have music from Time And Distance, Christopher Vincent from Qiet, American Murder and Chemical Lizards, plus we have animation and other stuff.

We open the show with Paul Calicoat and the crew from Route 60 Music performing a little jingle they wrote about their music shop, located in Barboursville. I would imagine that if area musicians shot video of themselves singing this jingle, and posting to the Route 60 Music Facebook page, it’d put a big smile on Paul’s face. Route 60 and Paul are still plugging away.

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