Author: Rudy Panucci (Page 107 of 581)

Because your PopCulteer is in the middle of a Myasthenia Gravis flare-up, and was not able to produce any physical art this week, I made the decision to offer up a couple of unrelated digital works, one new, and one of them a variation on and older work of mine.

Above you see “Livewire” a re-working of an old piece I did called “Warpscape” back in 2011. Below you’ll find a digitial painting over a photograph of the old  Kanawha County Courthouse, also known as the place you have to go to pay your property taxes. “Livewire” is purely digital, and the courthouse thing is basically just a digitally-assaulted photograph, like I used to do in the early days of this blog.

You can click them both if, for some strange reason, you want to see them bigger.

Meanwhile, over in radio-land, Monday on The AIR, our Monday Marathon runs from 7 AM to 3 PM, and extends the Sunday night marathon of The Swing Shift with eight more hours of recent episodes of our Swing Music showcase, which you can also hear every Tuesday at 3 PM, with plenty of replays and an additional overnight marathon every Thursday at Midnight. , At 3 PM, we will present an encore of a recent edition of Prognosis, because show’s host, Herman Linte and all our collegues at Haversham Recording Institute are all still tied up providing stringer coverage to international new agencies covering the Brexit mess.

You can listen to The AIR at the website, or on the embedded player elsewhere on this page.

We go back to a full-length episode of Radio Free Charleston from April, 2014. This show features musical artists that we’d featured on RFC MINI SHOWs plus first-time contributors, animation and a promo clip for a local theater production.

Radio Free Charleston 197, “Jake The Dog Shirt” is a diverse collection of great music, cool animation plus a neat theater preview. Our music is from Donnie Smith, The Big Bad, The Terra Firma Ensemble and Jordan Searls. Animation comes to us from Jake Fertig and we also have a preview for the Alban Arts Center production of “Antigone.”

Donnie Smith was our first musical guest on this show. He’s seen here recorded at the same edition of Rock N Roll theater that gave us his recent RFC MINI SHOW. This time around Donnie treats us to his original song, “Mixed Message. Our animation was by Jake Fertig. It was the latest “Deep Space Microsode” of his series, “The Flocking.” We were lucky enough to catch The Big Bad earlier in April 2014, and from that night we brought you the band doing their song, “Babe We Own This Town.”

The centerpiece of this episode was our recording of The Terra Firma Ensemble performing the world premiere of Jim Lange’s compostion, “Brambles and Briers.”You saw the entire concert last week in this space, as we brought you a special double feature RFC Flashback. Playing us out, for the second episode in a row, was Jordan Searls with his song, “Naturally Easy.”

You can read the full production notes HERE.

The PopCulteer
January 31, 2020

This week The PopCulteer is once again roaming in the wilds of randomosity as we bring you a one news item about WWE, and some leftover photos from last month, showing off part of the awesome train layout at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry.

WWE’s Financial Beatdown

Yesterday WWE announced that the company’s Co-Presidents, George Barrios and Michelle Wilson (seen left), have exited the company, effective immediately. Barrios and Wilson were also dismissed from WWE’s Board of Directors. After years of serving in senior positions, they’d been named co-presidents in 2017 and presided over the recent massive TV deals and other major initiatives.

Vince McMahon is quoted in the press release as saying, “I would like to thank George and Michelle for their 10+ years of service and contributions to the organization. I am grateful for all that was accomplished during their tenure, but the Board and I decided a change was necessary as we have different views on how best to achieve our strategic priorities moving forward.”

Frank A. Riddick III, who has served as a member of WWE’s Board of Directors for more than 11 years, has been named interim Chief Financial Officer, reporting to WWE Chairman & CEO Vince McMahon. WWE has begun a search for both a permanent Chief Financial Officer and Chief Revenue Officer.

WWE has an investors conference call next week to report it’s 4th Quarter and full year 2019 financial results to it’s investment community. This will be the first quarter since the beginning of their new and very lucrative television contracts, but it’s not clear if the first payments for those contracts was made in this quarter, or if those are still yet to come.

After this announcement, WWE stock plummetted, losing more than 20% of its value, which is bound to have an affect on the wrestlers, many of whom hold stock options as part of their contracts. WWE stock, as I write this, is hovering around $48 per share, after reaching a high of $101 mid-way through last year.

Observers speculate that Barrios and Wilson are scapegoats because the 4th Quarter results are going to be disappointing. Ticket sales to live events are way down and have been declining for years, and as a result T shirt sales and some merchandise sales are down. Last year WWE revamped the WWE Network, bringing the technical end of things in-house after the company that had been running it for them was purchased by Disney. Following the switch, the network was plagued with technical issues, and some reports are that they’ve lost 40% of their subscribers.

On a personal level, I subscribe to the network, and for most of the month of December it was unwatchable. The channel would shut down every thirty or forty seconds and hang up or reboot.

Customer service was horrible, no refunds were offered, and had they not ironed out their issues, I’d planned to drop the network after last weekend’s Royal Rumble. Luckily for them, they seem to have figured out their issues because during the entire seven-hour Royal Rumble special, I didn’t have a single streaming glitch.

So I can understand why the WWE Network has been losing so many subscribers. I think the low ticket sales and merch sales can be chalked up to viewer fatigue. WWE now has seven hours of live programming on the USA Network and the Fox Broadcast Network each week, and there’s no compelling reason for any fan to spend another three hours paying to watch a wrestling show where they are guaranteed that nothing important is going to happen in any of the storylines.

In the end, all this maneuvering is essentially meaningless. By the time the next quarter comes around, the bottom line will be boosted by the new TV deals. With hundreds of millions of dollars coming in from USA and Fox, plus the giant payment coming from the Saudi Crown Prince for the specials that they do twice a year in that country (he’s paying almost as much as one of the TV deals) WWE will eventually report record earnings, and will continue to do so for at least the next five years.

It may well turn out that there’s more than just simple scapegoating going on here. McMahon cited “different views” on the company’s priorities. There are many ways to interpret that. It might be related to McMahon’s re-launch of the XFL, which kicks off it’s first season the weekend after The Super Bowl (and just days after the investor conference). It could be dissatisfaction over the progress of WWE Network, or frustration over the drop in attendance at the live events.

There’s even a theory that the split was because Barrios and Wilson were pushing for WWE to revise their way of contracting talent, hoping to move WWE to a more equitable working relationship with their wrestlers before their current methods are legislated out of legality. Another rumor gaining ground is that Barrios and Wilson are both separately involved in controversial business dealings that WWE wanted to distance themselves from.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens when WWE reports their earnings next week. It’s expected that they will be below the projections, but I have a feeling that they won’t be as bad as it seems now, and I bet the stock rebounds a bit a week from now. It’s not likely that any of these off-screen developments will be reflected on the WWE TV shows.

Trains at MSI

Last month when your PopCulteer and his lovely wife visited Chicago, we made our first trip the Museum of Science and Industry, and somehow I have managed not to post a photo essay of their massive model train layout in their Transportation Wing.With The Kanwha Valley Railroad Association‘s Annual Model Train and Craft Show coming up February 22 and 23, I thought it might just be a good time to trot these out.

This massive layout includes scale models of Chicago’s skyline and Loop District, as well as suburbs, rural areas and small towns, and even part of Seattle. Check out the pics here…

Beyond the full size steam locomotive, underneath the hanging aircraft, lay a gigantic model train layout.

The Chicago Skyline. The layout periodically changes the lighting from night to day.

The riverfront in the loop district, with a CTA bridge for the “L.”

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STUFF TO DO

Evidently there’s some sort of big Sportsball event taking place on Sunday, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have fun leading up to the battle between two boring teams on the grandest stage (besides Wrestlemania).  So below, in our usual graphic manner, we tell you about some great shows happening in town this weekend.

I also want to remind you that you can tune in to The AIR all day, every day, for lots of cool music and talk programs.

Point your ears toward the website, or listen to this embedded player right here…

Now check out a tiny sampling of the live music and cool things happening in and around Charleston…

Thursday

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The PopCult Comix Bookshelf

Jack Kirby’s Dingbat Love
by Jack Kirby and others
compiled by John Morrow
TwoMorrows Publishing
ISBN-13: 978-1605490915
$43.95 (discounted at Amazon)

This strangely, yet aptly, named book is a must-have for the Jack Kirby completist. It collects over 100 pages of stories written and drawn by Kirby that have never been compiled, or in most cases even published, before. Kirby’s DC-era work has been reprinted in multiple editions over the years, and almost everything he did for the company is in print. This book collects all the remaining work Kirby did for DC Comics in the 1970s, save for three missing pages from one story.

These are examples of Kirby stretching beyond the superhero genre in the early 1970s, when he was under contract with DC Comics. The text features in this collection (by John Morrow, Jerry Boyd, Steve Sherman and Mark Evanier) provide the context and set the stage for these comic book stories.

We get stories from two aborted romance titles, True Life Divorce and Soul Love, and two issues of Kirby’s Dingbats of Danger Street, which remained unpublished after the first issue ran in DC’s tryout title, First Issue Special. A special treat is a short story newly-inked by longtime Kirby collaborater, Mike Royer, over Kirby’s Xeroxed pencils.

The two Dingbats of Danger Street stories included here were part of the legendary Cancelled Comics Cavalcade Xeroxed publication that DC issued in 1978 to protect the copyright of dozens of unpublished works, but they appear here newly-colored and look great.

Kirby, with his 1940s partner Joe Simon, had created the romance and kid gang comics genres in the Golden Age, and it’s wild to see him returning to those forms twenty-five years later. Even though True Life Divorce never got beyond the pencil stage, the stories show a maturity that was not typical of comics of the day. These were definitely aimed at an adult audience.

With Soul Love we get to see a full-color, slick paper insert facsimile of what the first issue of Soul Love would have looked like, had it been published in the format that Kirby intended–complete with articles and mock-period advertisements. It even sports an Alex Ross painted cover, based on Kirby’s rough layout.

Dingbat Love is a very well-done presentation of this work. Some of the pages are presented in both pencilled and inked form (allowing us to see how badly inker Vince Colleta butchered Kirby’s work), and the new coloring, courtesy of Tom Zuiko and Glenn Whitmore, works perfectly with Kirby’s art. Aside from the slick magazine-style insert, the paper is thick, archival white, non-glossy stock, and looks terrific.

There are some stylistic choics in presentation that might confuse a newer comics reader. With the Dingbats material, some of the pages are presented in pencil form alternating with the same page fully-inked and in color. While this is great for comparing Kirby’s pencils to the finished art, it can keep the stories from flowing perfectly. That’s a minor quibble, and it’s worth noting that the reason for alternating the pages may have been to allow fold-out pages for the two-page spreads, which often don’t look right when the pages are bound into a hardcover book. They look fantastic here.

The essays build a pretty good “what if” scenario of what might have happened had DC had enough faith in Kirby’s ideas to fully finance the publication of True Life Divorce, along with Kirby’s other magazine titles Spirit World and In The Days of the Mob (both of which had their sole published issues previously reprinted by DC Comics along with previously unpublished material intended for their second issues) the way Kirby originally pitched them, as full-color slick magazines.

It’s another example of how Kirby was years ahead of his time. When he created the Marvel Universe (with some help from Stan Lee), Kirby knew that, someday, those concepts would be turned into major motion pictures. He knew that comics, as an artform, deserved a better presentation than being spit out on cheap newsprint, intended as disposable entertainment for kids.

Jack Kirby’s Dingbat Love showcases Kirby’s reach, and shows how he had to battle to try to realize his dreams.

This is not a great book for the Jack Kirby novice. It’s not his most mainstream comic book work, but it might just hook non-comics fans into exploring more of his work. Most of all, it’s important from an historical standpoint.

Plus the comics are by Jack Kirby. What more do you need to know? If you’re already a fan of Kirby, you want this.