Author: Rudy Panucci (Page 133 of 581)

The PopCulteer
July 5, 2019

Late in the afternoon on the day before the Fourth of July holiday, word broke that Mad Magazine was going to come to an end…of sorts.

Beginning with issue ten (the book relaunched with new numbering last year), the sixty-seven year old magazine will leave the newsstands, and will be distributed only to the direct market (comic book stores) and subscribers. With the following issue, Mad Magazine will go all-reprint, mining its vast archives to present classic material under a new cover every two months. They still plan to do a new “year in review” issue every year, since those still sell pretty well.

This is very sad for those of us who grew up on Mad Magazine. There’s no denying that Mad helped foster a healthy sense of cynicism and satire that shaped every generation since the 1950s. The cultural impact of Mad cannot be denied, and it will be missed, even if it had been largely irrelevant since the 1970s.  It is apparently the only magazine that the president reads, even if he has to have the jokes explained to him.

The magazine is not completely dead, since it will live on as a reprint title, but for a largely topical humor magazine, that’s as close as you can get to a death sentence without actually taking it behind the barn and shooting it.

The reasons for this change are simple…magazines are not selling well at all anymore. The entire industry has been dealing with plummetting sales for decades. Prices are going up. Frequency of publication is dropping (Entertainment Weekly only comes out once a month now). Long-running publications are shutting down left and right. There is a bit more to it than that, however.

The reason that Mad Magazine is not just being killed completely is pretty complex. First of all, the magazine still has a loyal subscriber base. It’s not large enough to justify the printing of new material, but it’s still sizable enough for Warner Media to want to avoid paying out refunds for unfinished subs. There is also a lot of value in the name. Mad-themed reprint volumes (like the one seen at left) still do well in the bookstore market, and there have been three different TV shows based on the magazine over the years.

There is, however, a more foreboding reason for the actions of Warner Global Entertainment and Experience Brands (the current name of DC Comics’ parent division) this week.

Earlier this year, the future of Mad Magazine was thrown into doubt when it was revealed that Bill Morrison, the high-profile new editor of the magazine, was laid off, along with several other well-respected DC Comics executives (DC has been in charge of Mad since the death of the magazine’s founder, William M. Gaines, in 1992–before that they were sister companies, both owned by Time-Warner).

Since the acquisition of Warner Communications by AT&T last year, the entire company has been placed under the scrutiny of corporate bean-counters. The heads of several of Warner’s divisions, many of them long-serving folks with incredible track records, have been forced out of the company by the new owners. The heads of HBO and Turner Broadcasting left in March. Diane Nelson, who had been running DC Entertainment and Warner Interactive, bailed out last year in advance of the AT&T deal. She’d been the person who shepherded the Harry Potter franchise before that.

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Check out what’s on The AIR, as Friday sees a brand-new episode of  Sydney’s Big Electric Cat. Sydney Fileen presents two hours of New Wave Music gone Hollywood! You can listen at the website, or on this embedded radio player…

We have tinkered with the schedule a bit this week, but Friday at 3 PM you will still get your two-hour dose of crunchy New Wave goodness. This week we bring you New Wave classics that found their way to the big and small screen. You’ll hear hit songs that were used in movies like The Breakfast Club, Rumblefish, Pretty In Pink, Times Square, The Last American Virgin and more, plus you’ll get to relive New Wave moments from TV shows like CPO Sharkey, Teenage Kicks, Cavegirl and Square Pegs.

Some of the songs you’ll hear were only available on soundtrack albums or singles for most of the 1980s. This is a great way to hear some hard-to-find tunes, along with some massive hit songs.

Just check out this epic playlist that Sydney has compiled for you…

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Simple MInds “Don’t You Forget About Me”
The Knack “My Sharona”
Wang Chung “To Live And Die In L.A.”
Bow Wow Wow “Go Wild In The Country”
“The Undertones “Teenage Kicks”
Psychedelic Furs “Pretty In Pink”
New Order “Shell Shock”
Echo and The Bunnymen “Bring On The Dancing Horses”
OMD “If You Leave”
Stan Rideway and Stewart Copeland “Don’t Box Me In”
Oingo Boingo “Weird Science”
The Art of Noise “Dragnet”
The Dickies “Hideous”
DEVO “Peek A Boo”
The Waitresses “Square Pegs”
Elvis Costello and The Attractions “Accidents Will Happen”
Pretenders “Talk of The Town”
Joe Jackson “Pretty Boys”
XTC “Take This Town”
The Ramones “I Wanna Be Sedated”
The Cure “Grinding Halt”
Gary Numan “Down In The Park”
The Human League “Love Action”
The Cars “Since You’ve Gone”
U2 “I Will Follow”
The Gleaming Spires “Are You Ready For The Sex Girls”
Blondie “Call Me”
Frankie Goes To Hollywood “Relax”

Sydney’s Big Electric Cat is produced at Haversham Recording Institute in London, and can be heard every Friday at 3 PM, with replays Saturday afternoon, Tuesday at 7 AM, Wednesday at 8 PM and Thursday at Noon, exclusively on The AIR. Every Monday at 3 PM, we bring you four classic episodes of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat, just so you can be all New Wave-y when you get home from work.

Look for a new PopCulteer later this afternoon.

On this day when we celebrate our independence as a nation, we also celebrate the return of Radio Free Charleston International to its original 3 PM Thursday timeslot on The AIR.  After a year away from Thursdays, RFCI couldn’t help but come back to where it all started. You can listen at the website, or on this embedded radio player…

With our shaken and stired new schedule, we now have a replay of this week’s Radio Free Charleston at 2 PM, followed by a brand-new episode of Radio Free Charleston International at 3 PM. For you old-timers who remember the original broadcast incarnation of RFC, this combination comes close to recreating the original experience, with your PopCulteer unleashed to play whatever he felt like playing, mixed with a generous helping of great local music.

For this week’s RFC playlist, plus a link for a download, check out this post.

Radio Free Charleston International is the two-hour weekly show where Rudy Panucci (that’s me, by the way) gets to play whatever he wants. It’s our way of revisiting the golden age of free-format radio, which is sort of what inspired us to go into this medium in the first place.

As for this particular episode of Radio Free Charleston International, well, unfortunately your humble host has become afflicted with a nasty summer cold. This meant that I needed to minimize my announcing on this show so that I didn’t completely blow out my voice. My ailment is your gain, however, as I put together a show filled with ridiculously long songs. I even managed to throw in a couple of brand-new tunes from The Aristrocrats and The Pornadoes. Check out this very short playlist…

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The Aristocrats “The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde”
Frank Zappa “The Adventures of Gregory Peccary”
Brian May “Blues Breaker”
YES “Perpetual Change (live)”
The Pornadoes “Trouble’s Gonna Find You”
ELP “Tarkus (live)”
Genesis “Supper’s Ready (live)”

You can tune in to RFC International every Thursday at 3 PM on The AIR. If you miss it, you have plenty of chances to catch a replay: Fridays at 1 PM and 10 PM, Saturdays at 1 PM, Sundays at 1 AM and 2 PM, Mondays at 9 PM, and Tuesdays at 11 PM, exclusively on The AIR.

This Wednesday afternoon, on the eve of a midweek holiday, The AIR, presents new episodes of Beatles Blast and Curtain Call.  You can listen at the website, or on this embedded radio player…

At 2 PM on Beatles Blast, yours truly hosts the fifth of a ten-part look at rare and unreleased music by The Beatles. For most of the summer, Beatles Blast will follow this format and bring you The Lost Beatles Project. This will be a treat for the die-hard fans as we mine the best of the recently-released archive projects by the band, and mix in rare releases and wild remixes from their band and solo years. We won’t be posting playlists for these shows because the whole point is that each of these programs will be a revelatory surprise.

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 a new hour of great musical theater on Curtain Call.  This week Mel brings you recordings from the cast album of the 2019 Tony winner for Best Revival of a Musical, Oklahoma. You’ll hear new performances with new arrangements of all the classic songs from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s legendary show, including Tony winner Ali Stroker’s rendition of “I Cain’t Say No.”

After the new hour of Curtain Call, stick around for two additional episodes from the Curtain Call archives. 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 6 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..

Thursday, aside from being the Fourth of July, will see the return of new episodes of Radio Free Charleston International to the 3 PM timeslot. This week should be interesting indeed because in addition to knowing that listenership will be very low due to the holiday, your PopCulteer (and RFCI host) is battling a narsty Summer cold, and will probably throw together a show consisting of the longest songs that he hasn’t played yet, just so he can talk less and conserve his voice. Check PopCult tomorrow to see what I come up with.

Celebrating three years as PopCult’s adjunct radio station, we have an afternoon of all-new-programming Tuesday on The AIR as we deliver new episodes of Radio Free Charleston, Psychedelic Shack and The Swing Shift to our loyal listeners. Zip on over and tune in at the website, or be a lazy bum and listen to this embedded radio player…

It all kicks off at 10 AM (with a replay at 10 PM– all times EDT) with a brand-new edition of Radio Free Charleston. This week’s show is once-again loaded with great local music by some of the Charleston area’s finest bands (and a few who were just passing through).

I’m also still experimenting with something new this week. If my experiment works (UPDATE: It should, now), you will be able to click on the episode number above the playlist that follows, and go to a page where you can download a low-res version of this week’s show.  I’m trying this to see if it’s feasible to do every week. We may have to take them down after a while to conserve server space or there may be technical issues since this is new thing. Give it a shot if you don’t have time to tune in to our live stream, why don’cha? So far it seems to be working.

Check out the playlist:

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Mediogres “Zombie Activist”
The Jasons “Mommy Got Beheaded By A Bimbo”
Kevin Scarbrough “Unsatisfied Animal”
The Heavy Editors “Meltdown”
Time And Distance “Hell To Pay”
Frenchy & The Punk “She Was A Flapper”
Geronimo “Not Just Stand There”
Todd Burge “That Damned Disguise”
Speedsuit “Upside”
Karen Allen “On and Off”
Byzantine “Moving In Stereo”
David Synn “Anesthesia”
Science of the Mind “Rat”
Feast of Steven “Tired of Sinkin'”
The Amazing Delores “Rats In My Trailer”
Fabulolus Head “Dopamine Phone”

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 8PM, exclusively on The AIR.

At 2 PM on Psychedelic Shack Nigel Pye checks in from Haversham Recording Institute with a 60-minute mixtape of groovy Psychedelic Rock. For the second week in a row, our friend, the Hippie Gnome, Nigel Pye, has cheerfully decided to provide us with a playlist for this new episodem so tune in turn on and check out the playlist…

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Todd Rundgren “Strawberry Fields Forever”
Donovan “There Is A Mountain”
The Turtles “Glitter and Gold”
Love Sculpture “I Believe To My Soul”
Frijid Pink “Sing A Song For Freedom”
Material Issue “Out Right Now”
Iron Butterfly “In A Gadda Da Vida”
Janis Joplin “Mercedes Benz”
Deep Purple “Flight Of The Rat”
The Flaming Lips “Do You Remember”
Captain Beefheart and The Magic Band “Trust Us”
Syd Barrett “Octopus”

Psychedelic Shack can be heard Tuesday’s at 2 PM, with replays Wednesday at 11 AM, Thursday at 5 PM, Friday at Noon, Saturday at 9 AM and Sunday at 4 PM.

At 3 PM your PopCulteer returns to host a new hour of The Swing Shift as we continue to bring you the best Swing Music of the last century. This week we take bring you a broad assortment of new Swing, Retro Swing and vintage original Swing, and even a couple of swing covers of unlikely rock tunes. See if you can hear where your host absolutely blanks on the name of the band, Was (Not Was).  Pop your peepers at this list of hep cats…

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Louis Prima “Pennies From Heaven”
Squirrel Nut Zippers “Karnival Joe (From Kokomo)”
Jack’s Cats “Return of The Romantics”
Tony Pastor “Dance With A Dolly”
Sassy Swingers “Satan Your Kingdom Must Come Down”
Bill Elliott Orchestra “White Heat Stomp”
Joe Stilgoe “Walk The Dinosaur”
Swing Ninjas “Salad Days”
The Sazerac Swingers “Brown Eyed Devil”
Megan and her Goody Goodies “I Wanna Be Loved By You”
Tommy Dorsey “On The Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe”
The Speakeasies’ Swing Band “Gypsy Curse”
Brian Setzer Orchestra “Jumpin’ East of Java”
Sugarpie and The Candymen “Highway Star”
Royal Crown Revue “Trapped (In The Web of Love)”

You can hear The Swing Shift Tuesday at 3 PM, with replays Wednesday at 7 AM and 6 PM, Thursday at 7 PM and Saturday at 5 PM, only on The AIR. You can also hear all-night marathons, seven hours each, starting at Midnight Thursday and Sunday evenings.

Remember, you can tune in to The AIR at all hours of the day and night for a variety and quality of programming that you will not find anywhere else. Check PopCult regularly for details on our new episodes.

Still mining the inspiration of New York City, this week finds your PopCulteer digging out some musty old oil pastels and a small canvas board to knock out a quick study of buildings and light and shadow and stuff. I spent a lot of time looking up back in May when we went to The Big Apple, and this one was done without photographic reference.

I warned you that I’d be doing New York-themed art up into July. Turns out I may even make it into August with this latest batch of work. In the future, art scholars will look at this work as my “New York Period.” Or perhaps they’ll call it a “rut.” More likely, no art scholars will be talking about this at all, but a guy can dream, can’t he?

You can click the image to see it bigger.

Meanwhile, Monday on The AIR, this week we bring you a Monday Marathon of Nigel Pye’s Psychedelic Shack. That starts at 7 AM. At 3 PM Herman Linte’s show, Prognosis, moves back to Mondays, followed by a classic episode at 5 PM, and replays of last week’s Radio Free Charleston and RFC International.  Then at 11 PM we kick it back over to Prognosis, with an eight hour marathon of great progressive rock.

July 1 marks three years since OnTheAIRadio morphed into The AIR, and became the internet radio arm of PopCult. To mark this milestone, we’re tinkering with the schedule and offering brand-new episodes of our afternoon music programming–hopefully for the whole month of July. We’ll tell you about our changes every day this week.

Our internet radio story goes all the way back to November, 2014, when I launched RFC volume three on Voices of Appalachia Radio.

VOA was a grand experiment at providing diverse viewpoints and elements, gathered around Charleston. Unfortunately, VOA was plagued by technical issues that hit just as an on-air station was launching, and most of our programs were courted by said station, and left for the actual airwaves.  You couldn’t really blame them because we were offline at the time.

No offers were ever extended to Radio Free Charleston to make that transition, so I stuck with VOA, and helped relaunch it as OnTheAIRadio. When it became apparent that the new station was going to primarily be my responsibility, I took sole ownership and rebranded it, and that’s where we are now, with The AIR. That’s the remixed logo graphic we ran at the time, updated to keep the URL current.

I’m having loads of fun, and we have somehow cultivated a small, but loyal, worldwide audience. We’re hoping to add some new shows to the schedule soon, too. It’s a good time to be a fan of The AIR. Just breathe it in, and enjoy.

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

We just have a short video this week, but it’s pretty striking. It’s also pretty disturbing and may well permanently scar the psyche of all but the most hardened of humans.

YouTube guy, Look Mum No Computer, has created something that manages to be cute, creepy, hideous, enthralling and repugnant, all at the same time.

He has created a musical organ using 44 Furbys (I’m not quite sure about the pluralization here. It may be “Furbies” or it may be “Furby.” It could possibly even be “Furbatim”). You may remember Furbys from the late 1990s as a hot toy that looked a lot like a pre-conversion Gremlin, but had the unique feature of interactivity and a sort of speech.

The truth is that the little electronic critters sold spectacularly well, then flamed out as their inherent creepiness and great ability to annoy became apparent. For a few years now Hasbro has attempted to revive this toy, an effort which seems to have been met with a collective “HELL NO” by anyone who remembers the little battery-eating buggers from their first go-round. One Furby can drive a normal adult insane in less than 24 minutes. Imagine what an unholy chorus of 44 of the evil little robots can do.

Anyway, this video shows the guy yammering about his creation in some bizarre accent, then he fires up the hellish machine and plays some music as we see him assemble this obscene musical instrument, acting like some kind of cross between Dr. Frankenstein, Joseph Mengele and Nikola Tesla.  It is grotesquely beautiful, in its own horrifying way.

I suppose the weirdest thing about this video is that I found it while looking for videos on a completely different topic for today’s post. You might see those next week.

From September, 2013 we have a loaded edition of Radio Free Charleston called “Shark Shirt.” This show featured music from The Renfields, Decomposing in Paris, The Dread Crew of Oddwood and Snakebox. There was also a new Prelinger film by Frank Panucci. Our host sgements once again were designed to plug the then-upcoming second year of ShockaCon.

Speaking of ShockaCon, that year the musical headliners on Saturday were The Renfields. This episode of RFC just happens to have then-previously-unseen footage of The Renfields from the previous year’s ShockaCon. The band that occupies that special Venn Diagram where The Ramones overlap with The Groovie Ghoulies were represented here with their original song, “Killer Klowns From Outer Space.”

Decomposing In Paris was a band from Ireland that found their way to The Empty Glass via Kentucky. Their music is ethereal, trippy and it has a beat. It was unlike anything we’ve had on the show before. Two Irish natives and one fairy-winged expatriate from Ashland, Kentucky, currently living in Belfast, made up this band.

The show then took time out for a dance break, which included famed pin-up model, Bettie Page. This is from Frank Panucci’s clip compilation, “Dance, Dance, Prelinger” It’s made of public domain video, set to Frank’s music. It’s also part of this complete breakfast!

The Dread Crew of Oddwood is a band of pirates from San Diego who sing of their adventures on the high seas using their own style of music that they call “Heavy Mahogany.” The RFC crew recorded The Dread Crew of Oddwood as they plundered The Empty Glass and in this show you’ll hear them performing “Meat, Bread and Wine.”

You will be hearing more from The Dread Crew in the coming weeks in The RFC Flashback.

Playing over the end credits this week was Snakebox, who returned after their debut in the previous episode of Radio Free Charleston. This eclectic band performs lead singer, Kevin Crump’s, original song, “Dead Planet.”

The PopCulteer
June 28, 2019

A couple of weeks ago your PopCulteer was busy making the drive from Wheeling to Moundsville to Columbus for some serious toy business. Mrs. PopCulteer and myself had decided at one point to stop at the Ohio Valley Mall in Saint Clairsville Ohio where we discovered a new store that had just opened earlier this year. C.J. Bucket’s Candy Shop sells candy, ice cream and soda, and they have a pretty amazing selection all crammed into a pretty compact space right off of the food court. We stocked up on exotic regional candy and a six-pack of mixed sodas (buy five, get the sixth for free), and decided that we’d have to make a return visit.

We were so struck by the coolness of this store that we made a return visit the following week, since we were sort of up that way again for a family visit. This time I brought my camera. As luck would have it we happened by as the regional manager was doing inventory, and she explained that this was one of nine stores (some with different names) and that the flagship location, which brews its own sodas, is called “Grandpa Joe’s,” and is located in Pittsburgh’s Strip District. She even had photos on her phone, and told us that they offered a much, much bigger selection.

That store may well be the topic of another PopCult photo essay someday.

Today we’re going to show you some photos of this treasure that you can find right off of Interstate 70, not far from the Ohio/West Virginia border. This was a real treat because I’ve been ordering weird regional candy bars for years. This was my first time seeing many of them in the wild.

They even had the Idaho Spud, which I wrote about four years ago here in PopCult, and they had several candy bars that I’d tried via mail-order over fifteen years ago. CJ Bucket’s also carries international candy bars, including the elusive Curly Wurly Bar from Britain (it’s pretty much what we used to call a Marathon Bar in the US), and they had Hershey’s Ice Cream and private chocolates as well.

It’s a really fun place to visit, unless you have blood sugar issues (actually it’s still fun then, but it can be dangerous). If you fid yourself up that way it’s well worth a visit. Plus it makes for a fun photo essay.

Check out their Facebook page, and feast your eyes on the following images.

When we walked into the mall looking for a quick lunch, we had no idea of the wonders that lay within.

They had us right when we set foot in the store. The first thing we saw was candy from around the world.

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Herman Linte bids farewell to Thursdays with a new episode of our Progressive Rock showcase, Prognosis Thursday at 3 PM on  The AIR. You can listen at the website, or on this embedded radio player…

Our Thursday morning  line up sees this week’s Psychedelic Shack replayed at 9 AM, followed by a replay of the previous week’s edition of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat at 10 AM and Radio Free Charleston International at Noon. Then at 2 PM we replay this week’s new Radio Free Charleston, before kicking into a brand-new Prognosis at 3 PM. Starting next week, Prognosis moves back to Monday at 3 PM, as we shake up our schedule again when The AIR hits it’s third anniversary as “The AIR.” Our trip down the internet radio rabbit hole actually began with a different station name back in November, 2014, but that’s a story for next week.

This week Herman Linte presents two hours of great progressive rock on Prognosis at 3 PM, with a new show featuring a small number of very long songs from the likes of Ad Infinitum, Big Big Train, Martin Barre, Neal Morse, Camel and more. The show opens with a new song by Jon Anderson, which features guitar work by Steve Howe, marking the first time these two YES stalwarts have collaborated on new music in over eighteen years. Then at 5 PM, for one last time on Thursday, we follow that with a classic episode of Prognosis, giving you four solid hours of challenging and progressive music.

This week’s episode sports this well-crafted playlist:

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John Anderson “Now and Again”
Ad Infinitum “Waterline”
Neal Morse “Jesus’ Temptation”
Big Big Train “Roman Stone”
Camel “Nimrodel/The Procsession/The White Rider”
Gil Steinbacher Project “Free As The Wind (Raindance)
King Crimson “FraKctured”
Utopia “Another Life (live)”
Cosmograf “A Million Choices”
The Dave Foster Band “Ghosts”
Martin Barre “Thick As A Brick (excerpt)”
Yes “Soon”

Starting next week Prognosis can be heard every Monday at 3 PM, with replays Tuesday at 7 AM and 8 PM, Wednesday at 10 PM, Thursday at 1 PM and Saturday at 10 AM, exclusively on The AIR. Also tune in Mondays at 11 PM for a weekly eight-hour marathon of the best of Prognosis. Keep your fingers crossed, because the plan is to have a brand-new episode of Prognosis next Monday, but if that becomes impossible, we’ll run this one in that spot. It never hurts to have a back-up plan.

Our Thursday evenings continues to let our listeners play catch-up with the week’s new episodes of The Swing Shift, Curtain Call, Beatles Blast and Psychedelic Shack, beginning at 7 PM. At 11 PM we bring you an hour of comedy, then we kick into the all-night marathon of The Swing Shift. That may all change next week. Check back to see.