Tuesday brings a new three-hour episode of Radio Free CharlestonThe AIR! You may point your cursor over and tune in at the website, or you could just stay on this page, and listen to this happy little embedded radio player…
We have yet another new three-hour Radio Free Charleston at 10 AM and 10 PM Tuesday. This week it’s another show jam-packed with great music from Charleston and the whole world. Leadinf off the show we have brand-new music by Huntington’s 4OHM MONO. This week brings you tons of great new music, with a heaping helping of classic tunes, deep album cuts and the best local music from our archives. Check out the playlist…
RFCv5004
hour one
4OHM MONO “Dead Air”
Church of the Cosmic Skull “The Hunt”
Offramp “Turbulence”
Holden Caufiled “Let It Go”
Stone Ka Tet “Adam’s Song”
Barclay James Harvest “Alone In The Night”
Lower Case Blues “No Good Reason”
Nektar “Love Is _ The Other Side”
hour two
Karen Allen “Here We Are Now”
Missing Words “Breathe In”
Model Kaos “Heroes”
Ptolemy “Wax Knoll”
Nina Hagen “Geburt (Extended Mix)”
Tarja “Tears In The Rain”
Bobaflex “Long Time Coming”
Hawthorne Heights “VANDEMONIUM”
Emmalea Deal “Ghost”
Time And Distance “Sell”
Fontaines DC “Boys In The Better Land”
The Revillos “Can I Have Some? (Demo)”
hour three
Adrian Tabacuro “Lucifer”
Ovada “Blood of the Sun”
David Cross Peter Banks “Plasma”
Qiet “Pet Driftwood”
Miniature Giant “Wendigo”
Jack Griffith “Alone With You”
Psychedelanaut “Saturnine Serpent”
Midge Ure “Vienna”
Toyah “It’s A Mystery”
The Stranglers “Bless You”
Radio Free Charleston can be heard Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM, with replays Thursday at 2 PM, Friday at 9 AM and 7 PM, Saturday at 11 AM and Midnight, Sunday at 1 PM and the next Monday at 8 PM, exclusively on The AIR.
The remainder of Tuesday will see hand-picked encore editions of our programming. You can keep up with the schedule right here…
Your PopCulteer is still working in pencil again this week. Armed with my trusty Blackwing Palamino, a tissue for smudging and a sharpener and a ruler (well, an Architect’s Scale, to be precise), I sat in front of my computer screen and dashed off a quick outline of this drawing of the famous 1937 prototype steam engine, the PRR S1, duplex steam locmotive engine AKA “The Big Engine” sporting an Art Deco shell designed by Raymond Loewy. Even though only one of these was ever built, and it wasn’t put into full production because it was too long to navigate the curves on the Pennsylvania Railroad, it remains one of the coolest-looking Art Deco behemoths every created, so I wanted to try to do justice to it in pencil form.
Once I got the outline where I wanted it, a few hours of rendering and shading happened on the kitchen table. I have to confess to a little bit of digital smudge and fingerprint removal, after I scanned it into the PC.
This is yet another one of my practice pieces as I teach myself how to make physical art again. It was my first time using pencils on Pentalic Paper For Pens ultrasmooth finish paper (thank you Blick Art Supplies).
If you wish, you can click this image to see it bigger.
Meanwhile, over in radio-land, Monday on The AIR, our Monday Marathon runs from 7 AM to 3 PM, and brings you four episodes of Radio Free Charleston International, which will soon be saying goodbye to our servers, as RFC International and Radio Free Charleston are now combined into Radio Free Charleston Volume Five. At 3 PM, we will present an encore of a recent edition of Prognosis, because show’s host, Herman Linte, is still tied up with other work.
You can listen to The AIR at the website, or on this embedded radio player…
Winsor McCay (1866-1934) was a pioneering cartoonist and animator, and you can read all about his life HERE. This week we’re going to look at some of his surviving bits of animation, which range from almost a hundred years old to over 110 years old. These include animated versions of his comic strips, Little Nemo and Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend.
While McCay’s claims of “inventing” animation might be a little overstated, it’s clear that the man was decades ahead of his time when it came to the art of animation.It was decades before anybody came close to mastering his abilities in creating fluid animation.
Working on his own he created some of the most impressive animation in history. I used much of his Sinking of the Lusitania cartoon, which was finished in 1917, for the music video for the song “Swamp Thing” by The Scrap Iron Pickers. That’s at the head of this post. Below you’ll see a few more of his animated shorts, all of which were created in 1921, or earlier.
These cartoons are filled with McCay’s trademark impeccable draftsmanship combined with surreal humor and bizarre situations.
There is an urban legend…supportedt by geographical facts…that McCay, in his later years living in Brooklyn, gave drawing lessons to a poor, young neighborhood child named Jacob Kurtzberg. If this is true, then it might explain who it was that encouraged the young cartoonist who would become more famous under the name “Jack Kirby” when he grew up.
This week we go back to April, 204, for a special RFC MINI SHOW featuring The Terra Firma Ensemble, plus a bonus video featuring the entire concert we recorded and excerpted for this show and for the episode of Radio Free Charleston that you’ll see in this space next week.
This video presents The Terra Firma Ensemble, recorded at The Kanawha Forum at Kanawha United Presbyterian Church on Quarrier Street. The Terra Firma Ensemble is Jim Lange, David Porter, J. Scott Milam, Lisa Peery, John Inghram and Ryan Kennedy. The Kanawha Forum offered up free half-hour lunch concerts at the church.
At this particular edition of The Kanawha Forum, The Terra Firma Ensemble performed three pieces: “Innocente,” by Robert Towner and Gary Burton; “Eye of the Needle,” by Robert Fripp and the world premiere of “Brambles and Briers,” a piece composed by Jim Lange. You will see Jim Lange’s composition next week on the full-length Radio Free Charleston number 197. This RFC MINI SHOW features “Innocente.”
As a bonus this week in the RFC Flashback, below we will bring you the entire program from The Terra Firma Ensemble’s Kanawha Forum peformance, with all three pieces presented in the order which they were performed.
It was a real treat to get to record this group. Jim Lange has been a friend of RFC dating back to our broadcast radio days, when he appeared live, on the air, with The Velvet Brothers. His guitar work is legendary. David Porter brings his virtuosity on the EWI wind-controlled synth to the ensemble. Lisa Peery contributes acoustic flute. Scott Milam brought percussion and the malletKAT to the table. And eagle-eyed viewers of RFC may recognize Ryan Kennedy (guitar) and John Inghram (fretless bass) from The Bob Thompson Unit, who appeared on our 2013 Christmas show and their own RFC MINI SHOW.
This is an amazing collection of musicians who include three current or former members of The West Virginia Symphony Orchestra among their ranks, alongside musicians with lists of credits that would take up several paragraphs. It was truly an honor to record them for the show.
Fans of 1/6 scale action figures were surprised with quite a few cool treats, mostly at Walmart, at the beginning of the year.
Walmart licensed the rights to Robbie The Robot, from Forbidden Planet, and The Iron Giant from Warner Media, and hired one of their toymaking partners, Goldking, to create 14″ walking robots, with light and sound features. Robbie is perfectly in scale with the original GI Joes, while The Iron Giant is not, but could be customized.
A 1/6 scale Iron Giant would be around seven feet tall, but this version of him could easily be customized into another kind of 1/6 robot.
The best part is that these are very well-made, but only cost twenty bucks each. That is a fantastic price for such large and cool toys. Collectors haven’t been this excited by anything in this scale at a mass-market retailer for a long, long time.
These started showing up a couple of weeks ago, with lots of them flooding eBay with outrageous prices. It took about a week, but they finally hit all of our local stores, with each store getting four of each robot. I have been told that these will be restocked many times over the next several months.
With such a low retail price, some corners might have been cut. It appears that the box copy for Robbie was swiped, word-for-word, from the 1999 10″ Trendmasters Robbie, which had a wired remote control. That’s the Trendmasters box at left.
The reference to “Trendmasters Technology” on the block of copy on the back of the box is a dead giveaway. Trendmasters went out of business eighteen years ago. The box also promises a space pistol that is not included in this set. It’s like somebody handed the factory a vintage Trendmasters box and told them to make the new packaging look just like it, then didn’t bother to proofread it to see how accurately the toymakers followed their directions.
The boxes look remarkably alike, except that the bathing suit on the girl being carried by Robbie has been changed from green to gold.
Aside from that very minor and somewhat amusing packaging quibble, this is a perfect toy. Just check out how cool both of these look in the box….
I haven’t been able to track down any box-copy shenanigans with the Iron Giant yet, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any. I haven’t even had time to crack open The Iron Giant yet, but I did pop Robbie out of his box for a quick photo shoot using the 12″ Dr. Evil, from the Captain Action line, so you can see how well they mesh.
I would also imagine that The Iron Giant is probably compatible with O Scale model railroads, just in case anybody wants to add some spice to their train layout.
Aside from these two robots, Walmart also licensed the movie Aliens and farmed out the license to Lanard, who have released some brightly-colored versions of the movie monster.
Of note for 1/6 scale enthusiasts is the Alien Queen, who stands 12″ tall, and her inexplicable purple hue fits right in with the brightly-colored aliens that Hasbro released with their Adventure Team “Secret of the Planet Xenome” set back in 2003, as seen at right.
So collectors of cool 1/6 scale figures can now add Robbie the Robot, and an Alien Queen to their space adventures, and they can come up with ways to paint The Iron Giant so that he can be turned into a friend or foe. And it won’t break the bank, either.
After years of a 1/6 scale famine, when it comes to cool, cheap stuff, it’s nice to have some things to look forward to.
Both of the robots and The Alien Queen can all be found at Walmart right now. They’re each just under twenty bucks, and they are going to be well-stocked nationwide, so you don’t need to pay scalper’s prices on eBay.
This is a great way to get psyched up for ToyLanta in March!
I attempted to shoot some video of Robbie in action, but I did the photo shoot for this post and shot the video in the corner of my living room, which is carpeted. So Robbie didn’t really walk…he just sort of danced as Dr. Evil looked on. It wasn’t really a great video to show off his walking and talking ability so I turned the results into this video, with music by my brother, Frank…
Later today we’re going to have a long and detailed PopCult Toybox, but first we need to tell you, in a graphic manner, 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…
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
And that is this week’s PopCulteer, but check back later Friday for a long article about 1/6 scale action figure goodness.
Terry Jones, a member of the Monty Python troupe passed away after years of suffering from a degenerative brain disease and dementia. It was not a shock because Jones and his family had been quite open with his diagnosis since 2016, but still it’s very sad.
Of late, it’s been very trendy for internet comentators to villify and attack the members of Monty Python, essentially because the group was not somehow retroactively diverse enough, and were pretty vocally unapologetic about that fact. The mob decrying them for criticizing the concept of mob mentality is quite Pythonesque. The fact is that they brought joy to millions of people over the last fifty years and changed the face of comedy.
The Pythons have been called “The Beatles of comedy” and it’s a fair label. They took the conventions of the form and reinvented them into something new, special and memorable.
Jones was the renaissance man of the troupe. With his writing partner, Michael Palin, he managed to contribute material to the group that was both gentle and vicious, and always hysterical. Aside from writing and acting in Python, he also directed or co-directed their feature films, wrote children’s books, political commentary, scholarly literary works and hosted television programs about history.
In Monty Python he was the Naked Man at the organ, the Pepperpot, one of the Spanish Inquistion, Arthur “Two Shed” Jackson, Mr. Creosote and dozens of other hilarious characters.
Outside of Python, he directed Jabberwocky, Erik The Viking and other movies, and co-wrote the script for the Jim Henson movie, Labyrinth. Plus he was the only member of Monty Python to appear in The Young Ones, the British cult hit that carried groundbreaking comedy into the next generation. With Palin, Jones also created Ripping Yarns, an anthology series of very British comedic adventure tales.
His passing was long expected, so it wasn’t as shocking as the sudden death of Python associate Neil Innes just a few weeks ago, or the early death of fellow Python Graham Chapman, who died of cancer over thirty years ago. It still hits pretty hard.
I try not to focus on obituaries here in PopCult. I’ve reached an age where the death of any famous person who isn’t younger than I am isn’t really that much of a shock. Jones was 77, and Python began over 50 years ago.
However, I couldn’t let the death of Terry Jones go without a mention. Monty Python is one of the major influences in my life, and it’s safe to say that I would probably have taken a different course had it not been for the work of Jones and the other Pythons.
The fact is that the comedy of Monty Python is timeless, and it will outlive all of the members of the troupe, and also those of us who have been devout fans for the past five decades.
So long, Terry. Say “hi” to Graham and Neil for us, okay?
And quit pestering Chaucer. You’ll have plenty of time to talk to him.
Wednesday afternoon The AIR brings you a new episode of Beatles Blast and two special encore episodes of Curtain Call. You can tune in at the website, or on this embedded radio player…
At 2 PMBeatles Blast brings you yet another full hour of The Lost Beatles Project, which combines rare cuts, studio outtakes and musical rarities into a nearly-60 minute mixtape of little-heard Beatles gems.
Beatles Blast can be heard every Wednesday at 2 PM, with replays Thursday at 9 PM, Friday at 11 AM, Sunday at 5 PM and Tuesdays at 9 AM, exclusively on The AIR.
At 3 PM Mel Larch presents Two classic editions of Curtain Call, one devoted the show, Dear Evan Hansen, and the other devoted to Hadestown. Each of these episodes presents highlights of a particular show that is still running on Broadway, instead of the usual Curtain Call mix of new, classic and obscure musical theatre tunes.
Curtain Call can be heard Wednesday at 3 PM, with replays Thursday at 8 AM and 8 PM, Friday at 10 AM and Saturday at 5 PM. An all-night marathon of Curtain Call episodes can be heard Wednesday nights, beginning at Midnight, and an additional marathon can be heard Sunday evenings from 6 PM to midnight..
Also Tuesday on The AIR we deliver new episodes of Radio Free Charleston, NOISE BRIGADE and The Swing Shift to our loyal listeners. You may point your cursor over and tune in at the website, or you could just stay on this page, and listen to this happy little embedded radio player…
We have yet another new three-hour Radio Free Charleston at 10 AM and 10 PM Tuesday. This week it’s another show jam-packed with great music from Charleston and the whole world. This week is rich with the local music archives, but we pop in with one big set of brand-new music from legends of the past. Check out the playlist…
RFCv5003
hour one
Feast of Stephen “Needing Only Me”
Cannon Sodaro Band “Mountaineer”
Spencer Elliott “The Promise”
Peter Murphy “That Scarlett Thing In You”
The Animals “House of the Rising Sun”
Jon Anderson “Twice In A Lifetime”
Three Bodies “Gardens of Hope”
The Who “I’ll Be Back”
Jeff Lynne’s ELO “Down Came The Rain”
Sparks “Check Out Time 11 AM”
Howard Jones “Tin Man Song”
Van Morrison “Fame Will Eat The Soul”
hour two
Gypsy Rhythm “Missing”
Sweet “Tall Girls”
Mark Beckner “Sweet Addiction”
Joseph Hale “Time”
John Lennon “God (early version)”
Gary Numan “Down In The Park (outtake mix)”
Metronomy “Salted Caramel Ice Cream”
John Radcliff “Dreaming”
The Black Keys “Lo_Hi”
The Fools “The Runner”
Your PopCulteer is back to working in pencil again this week. Armed with my trusty Blackwing Palamino and a ruler (well, an Architect’s Scale, to be precise), I undertook a speed test to see what I could knock out in a half-hour on copy paper, using no reference material. I decided to try to depict the view of some of the buildings along the South side of Quarrier Street, as seen looking up from the middle of the street. In my imagination, I did not risk getting run over standing there. The unique perspective gave me the chance to show the buildings in a new way, while giving me plenty of room to fudge the details, like exactly how many buildings are on that street and what they look like.
I was able to eschew the use of reference materials because I spent a few years walking up that street to go to the much-missed LiveMix Studio, back in the early days of the video version of Radio Free Charleston.
This is another one of my practice pieces as I teach myself how to make physical art again.
If you wish, you can click this image to see it bigger.
Meanwhile, over in radio-land, Monday on The AIR, our Monday Marathon runs from 7 AM to 3 PM, and brings you eight recent episodes of Psychedelic Shack, hosted by Nigel Pye, our coleague from Haversham Recording Institute in London. At 3 PM, we will present an encore of a recent edition of Prognosis, because show’s host, Herman Linte, is still tied up with other work.
You can listen to The AIR at the website, or on this embedded radio player…
Tuesday brings a new three-hour episode of Radio Free Charleston The AIR! You may point your cursor over and tune in at the website, or you could just stay on this page, and listen to this happy little embedded radio player…
hour two
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