Author: Rudy Panucci (Page 120 of 581)

So this week I’m trying out new pens.

I wanted to do an ersatz Cubist work to see if that much ink would curl the paper (it didn’t), and I chose to copy a pose from one of Alfred Cheny Johnston‘s infamous nude photos of girls from the Ziegfield Follies.

It’s Cubism, so you can’t really make out any of the good parts. This was basically an exercise in hand stamina and pen control, as I slowly get used to making real world 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 presents eight hours of Psychedeclic Shack starting at 7 AM. At 3 PM we are expecting to bring you a brand-new episode of Prognosis. Herman Linte promises us a new two-hour thrill ride of great progressive music, but as we write this we do not yet have the show in our hands, nor do we have a playlist. We do however, have faith than Herman will come through for us.

You can listen to The AIR at the website, or on this embedded radio player…

Also, some time after noon today you can expect the first entry in The 2019 PopCult Gift Guide. We’ll be making a big deal out of that for most of the month.

Over the past two or three years I’ve become a huge fan of British Actor/Writer/Musician Matt Berry. I discovered his show, “Toast of London” on Netflix, then caught up with his work on “The IT Crowd,” which was one of the shows in my “get around to watching because I know it’s really good but don’t have the time” pile.

Since becomeing a fan Berry has had star turns in “What We Do In The Shadows” on FX, and “Year of the Rabbit,” which has aired on Channel 4 in the UK, and will debut on IFC at some yet-unspecified date in the future. The above clip is a probably NSFW sampling of clips from several of Berry’s appearances in a variety of shows, including what we’ve mentioned and other shows like “Snuff Box, “Garth Merenghi’s Dark Place” and more.

This week we have the episode of The RFC MINI SHOW where I realized that I had accidentally numbered two episodes as “seven.” That meant that this episode would be episode 12, if I stuck with the mistaken numbering, or episode 13, if I fixed the mistake. Because I didn’t really want to give the unlucky thirteenth number to anyone, I left the number off of this edition of the show. The next episode, which you will see next week, is numbered “fourteen.”

This edtion of The RFC MINI SHOW featured Chad Foss and Sean Sydnor of Professor Mike fame, captured live at The Blue Parrot during an open mic night in 2011, three years before this MINI SHOW debuted. Chad and Sean take on Tom Petty’s “Don’t Fade On Me” and Keb Mo’s “Professional Blues Machine” in this great archival footage.

The PopCulteer
November 1, 2019

Your PopCulteer is dodging power outages as he writes this week’s column, so it’s not going to be a long one.

Basically, we’re doing some special programming stunts on The AIR over the weekend, so that we can tear down the Halloween stuff and get ready for the new month. So Friday all day you can listen to Radio Free Charleston International. Saturday it’s Radio Free Charleston. And Sunday we’ll bring you Beatles Blast from 9 AM to 6 PM, before we launch into our regularly-scheduled marathons for Curtain Call and The Swing Shift.

Then on Monday we’ll have Psychedelic Shack until 3 PM, when we hope we have new episode of Prognosis for you.

You can listen to The AIR at the website, or on this handy-dandy embedded radio player…

Also on Monday we plan to begin The 2019 PopCult Gift Guide. This will be our fifteenth go-around with the gift guide, and as usual we’re going to try a whole new format. This year the plan is to run the Gift Guide from November 4 to Thanksgiving, with between four to six suggestions every day.

Some of our suggestions will be presented as detailed reviews (the plan is for one of those each day) and some will see three or four gift ideas combined into a single post. Since this is our fifteenth year, we’ll also be sprinkling in a few “Gift Guide Flashbacks” where we go back and revisit a gift idea from a previous year.

As always, our gift ideas will be pop culture oriented. You can expect this year’s gift guide to have a lot of books, comics and music.

And with that, and our flickery power, we’re going to call it a PopCulteer. Check back for our regular features and get ready for lots of great stuff next week.

To celebrate Halloween Thursday, we’re going to look back at five videos that we made of the first four HallowEast Zombie Walks, plus one extra Zombie Walk from the Charleston Town Center. HallowEast abandoned the Zombie Walks when they couldn’t figure out how to use the event to sell beer, but it was fun while it lasted, as you can see here. Happy Halloween, folks!

We interrupt this week for a special Stuff To Do because an expected torrential downpour has caused Trick-or-Treat night to be moved from Thursday to Saturday in most cities and counties around Charleston.

There’s still lots of interesting things that you can get into in and around Charleston, if you’re willing to deal with a little rain (and that should be over by Friday), and we’re going to bring you some of the cool things for which the nice folks promoting them have bothered to provide graphics.

First, Wednesday afternoon, in advance of the big All Elite Wrestling show that will originate from Charleston, four of our local indie wrestling feds plan to put on a free wrestling expo just a short jaunt away from the Charleston Coliseum, in the part of The West Side that some people insist on calling “Elk City.”

It’s a fun way to check out some up-and-comers before going to see the TNT broadcast.

There’s some other cool stuff happening Wednesday night, and on into the weekend. Check out the graphics below and don’t forget to change your clocks this weekend, as Daylight Savings Time ends, and we get an extra hour of sleep!

Thursday

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We have gone all-in with Halloween this week on The AIR. All day Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday we bring you marathonx of classic Halloween programs, including episodes of Radio Free Charleston, Curtain Call, Word Association and the BS Crazy Show. Listeners can also tune in for radio presentations of Dracula, The Twilight Zone and works by H.P Lovecraft, plus classic radio dramas from Suspense and The Twilight Zone.  We’ll be steeped in the Halloween spirit for the next three days. All you have to do to listen is tune in at the website, or listen right here on this very scary embedded radio player…

The plan is to mix in a few new Halloween-themed shows over the next few days and also bring you our classic mix of radio drama and music shows dedicated to the season of the ghosts. Thursday we’ll have a post here in PopCult that will serve as your guide to what program is on when. Friday we’ll have a day-long marathon of Radio Free Charleston International, as we rotate out a bunch of our classic episodes of our free-format show, and then rotate in a new batch of them next week.

That is your guide to programming on The AIR for this week. Enjoy!

Now that your PopCulteers hands are working reliably again, he decided to acquire some fancy new pencils. I ordered a box of Blackwing Palaminos, and finally had time over the weekend to try them out. With no great inspiration striking me, I wound up doodling a tree in about half an hour. It’s nice to have regained the use of my hands to the point where the brand of pencil I’m using actually makes a difference. and I’m pretty happy with the result, which you see above.

If you wish, you can click this image to see it bigger.

Meanwhile, over in radio-land, Monday on The AIR, our Monday Marathon presents eight hours of Special Halloween music programming starting at 7 AM. This is part of our big Halloween marathon programming blitz, in which you are now soaking.   At 3 PM, we will present eight hours of Halloween radio drama, kicking off with the classic 1939 Orson Wells broad cast of War of The Worlds. It’s Halloween all week on The AIR, so get ready to enjoy it.

You can listen to The AIR at the website, or on this embedded radio player…

We are going to attempt to cram every Halloween episode of Radio Free Charleston into this one post, just to get you ready for the day of scaring and candy and stuff. In the clip above we go all the way back to our first Halloween special, in 2006. Orginally a two-parter, these shows have since been combined into one longer clip.

This was our first attempt to do something more ambitious than our normal video jukebox-type show, and in it you will see skits with me, Mel Larch and Brian Young, short films by Frank Panucci, Third Mind Incarnation and Brian Young, and music by Whistlepunk, The Concept, Professor Mike, Clownhole and half of The Pistol Whippers.

You’ll get to see me get killed and ressurected, plus there are ghosts and spirits and really cool posters for monster movies that they sold at Dollar Tree back when they carried really cool stuff. These were originally episodes 7 and 8 of Radio Free Charleston‘s video incarnation.

2007

Recorded at a Halloween Party at Capitol Roasters (RIP). Music from Big Money and Lil’ Guy.

This week we go back to the first week of February, 2014, for a show jam-packed with great music and cool stuff. Radio Free Charleston 195, “Powdered Toast Man Shirt,” was our first full-length show of 2014, and it’s fairly epic. We had music from Spencer Elliott, Cemeterry Schultz, Sign of The Fig, WATT 4 and Crystal Bright and The Silver Hands. We also featured two animated shorts by Jake Fertig, and a trailer for a screening of the classic movie, “Metropolis” at the Clay Center Electric Sky Theater.

Host segments were shot in front of The Clay Center, while our musical performances were recorded all over town, at Unity Church, Kanawha Players Theater, The Blue Parrot, The Empty Glass and also in an undisclosed Downtown Charleston alley.

You can find fully-detailed production notes HERE.