Author: Rudy Panucci (Page 15 of 581)

The PopCulteer
April 8, 2022

Time flies, and it does so even faster when you get to be the age your humble blogger has reached.

Thirteen years ago this week, in what was originally just an attempt to inject some discipline into my writing habits, I began a new regular feature here in PopCult (which began in August, 2005, for those of you scoring at home).  I didn’t want to fall into the typical blogger rut of only posting one or even fewer items each week, so early on I started adding regular posts to my schedule. I didn’t want PopCult to whither and die with a whimper like so many other blogs have done.

Monday Morning Art was easy, and was the first regular feature, added on the first anniversary of PopCult. Later I added Sunday Evening Video, just to make sure there was something posted over the weekend. Radio Free Charleston video notes made regular appearances too. It wasn’t until I was free of my caregiver duties that I decided to try to post at least one item every day. I’ve been plucking away at that, with just a handfull of missed days, since August, 2013.

Before that happened,  I started The PopCulteer. The name was a tribute to Charleston Gazette legend, Jim Dent, and his weekly “Gazetteer” column, which ran in the paper every Friday for about thirty years. The rules I laid down for myself were loose and simple: Each week I would post SOMETHING of some kind of substance. It could be a lengthy essay; a photo essay; lots of small items; news on what was happening in town; book, music or toy reviews; or even video. Of late, a lot of PopCulteers have simply been descriptions of what was airing that day on our sister internet station, The AIR. The idea was that every week there’d be something new for my loyal readers to take in. If you go back in the archives and look at the early years of this blog, there were some weeks where PopCult only had one or two posts. I didn’t like the way that looked, so this was an attempt to beef things up a bit.

The first edition of The PopCulteer kicked off with a lengthy, snarky essay about our state legislature, and their proclivity toward trading their votes for junk food.  The shame of this story is that, not only did these folks not all get booted out of office, some of them have moved on to higher offices, and this incident was simply a harbinger for how West Virginia would operate under Koch Brother-funded rule. We’re still paying the price for having cheaply-bought politicians, but it has to reach a breaking point. I mean, they can’t keep getting worse…can they?

Beginning The PopCulteer certainly worked in terms of honing my writing skills. In thirteen years, I have only missed one column, and that was due to illness. Two other columns were taken down after an insane millionaire threatened to sue me and the Gazette for telling the truth about a counterfeit Batmobile scheme of his that I exposed. We never retracted or apologized for telling the truth, but in the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t a battle over which it was worth losing my house to pay the legal fees, so we deleted two PopCulteers. I think those posts lived on at the Wayback Machine until a couple of years ago.

Anyway, in honor of our lucky thirteenth anniversary, here are a few more random observations and mini-essays and bonus content for you to chew upon…

Auction House and Prarie Curios

Does anybody else get a serious “Tex and Edna Boil” vibe off of those Joe R. Pyle Auction commercials?

Internet Follies

Suddenlink, the Charleston area’s longtime monopoly broadband provider is changing their name.  By the end of the year they’ll be “Optimum.”  Soon they will have competiton from CAS Fiber Internet, and I guess they wanted a new name to hide the fact that they’re, well…Suddenlink.

To be fair, aside from their rates continually going up for no reason (like they did this month for me), service has been pretty good since I switched to a business account eight years ago. However, the possiblity of once again having to change my email address is a major pain in the ass.

However, Suddenlink’s Cable service was so bad and so overpriced that they drove me to DirecTV, which can try my patience, but is insanely reliable. In eight years with DirecTV, I’ve never had an outage last more than half an hour. With Suddenlink before that, hours or days-long outages were a monthly or weekly occurence.

So, good luck with the new name. Isn’t it Ironic, doncha think?

Current Affairs

There is a war going on in the world, and I don’t intend to make light of it or play it down in any way.  However I do not write about it here in PopCult. I’m far from an expert, and my opinions are no more informed than any intelligent person who knows which news sources to trust on the internet. While the atrocities in Ukraine are heart-breaking and stomach-turning, my job is to offer a respite from that. I’m the dancing clown waving around the toys and comics and fun stuff to take your mind off of the horrors of reality.

I’m not suggesting that you avoid reality and heaviness. But if you need a break, that’s what I’m here for.

I also try to stay away from politics because I have several readers who are so radicalized into Anti-Democracy right-wing hate-think that, even if I just suggest that President Biden is competent, they fly into a petulant rage and make asses of themselves on the internet. I guess four years of seeing their ideal Republican candidate fail at every aspect of governing has left them easily triggered. So I’ll try not to rub their noses in the fact that Republicans don’t know how to govern.

The Slap

Never have I cared less about a major pop culture happening than I have the incident at The OSCARs.  I’ve never been a fan of Will Smith. I found the Fresh Prince of Bel Air to be a run-of-the-mill crappy sitcom with formula writing, and an obnoxious laugh-track. I found him tolerable in the first Men In Black movie, but never thought he was more than tolerabe in anything else, and was often a good enough reason not to watch a movie. If he was ever really good in anything I probably didn’t see it.

I do find Chris Rock to be intermittantly hilarious. He seems more sedate and less edgy now, and that joke, referencing a 25-year-old movie that was a flop when it came out, was about as cutting edge as a Bob Hope one-liner about John Wayne’s horse.

The fact that it was a lame joke was far more offensive than making fun of someone’s handicap. For one thing, I have friends with Alopecia, and I don’t think any of them consider it to be that big of a handicap. For another thing, maybe he didn’t even know about it and thought Smith’s wife was just wearing short hair for a fashion statement. It was not common knowledge among people who don’t give half a crap about Will Smith and his wife. It was a bad joke, but not anything worth getting slapped over.

Either way, who really gives a crap?

Wrestling

It’s truly a golden time to be a fan of professional wrestling. There’s quality wrestling shows on almost every night of the week. WWE is humming along after a very fun Wrestlemania weekend.  AEW is soaring to new heights on a regular basis. NXT is a fun and entertaining  alternative, Impact is putting on decent shows every week. Ring of Honor is newly-acquired by AEW’s owner, and will get a big boost from them. New Japan Pro Wrestling is back on AXS TV.  Women of Wrestling will return in the fall.  Fans can truly get drunk on wrestling and never sober up.

And people on the internet can fill every second of every minute of every day by bitching and complaining about it all!

Puzzles

I can see the appeal of doing word puzzles like Wordle and Dordle, but for the life of me I can’t understand why people feel the need to share their scores every day.

And with that, let’s wrap up this week’s PopCulteer and get ready for the weekend. Check back for all our regular features.

Every year Fernando Coda creates a massive Star Wars Diorama for ToyLanta, and this year was no different. He uses the 1/18th scale figures and vehicles and builds sprawling sets to recreate scenes from the movies.

This year, almost every time I went to take photos, there was a crowd around, admiring Fernando’s work.  I was able to grab some close-ups, which you see here, but I never did manage to get that one long shot that shows off the size and scope of Ferndando’s creation. I’m still COVID-shy, and navigating crowds was not in the books for me this year.

Still, I hope these photos can give you a hint of how epic Fernando Coda’s work was.  I didn’t write any captions for these because I have forgotten more about Star Wars than I remember, and I don’t want to get any of the details wrong.

Continue reading

Today we’re looking at the figures, vehicles and a couple of smaller dioramas that were on display in the custom figure contest room last month at ToyLanta, 2022. Many thanks to Dave Matteson for helping identify some of the creators.  While there were fewer entires than I was used to seeing this year, the level of quality was astounding.

Let’s dive in, shall we?

All four entires in the vehicle contest came from the same guy, and sadly I did not get his name. If anybody knows who did this work, please leave a comment. This was 1/6 scale pop culture Nirvana.

Continue reading

First of all, apologies for taking so long to post these photo essays. Your PopCulteer has been working his way through a large assortment of non-PopCult paying gigs, and something had to go on the back burner. The plan is to post one or two photo essays tomorrow, and maybe some video over the weekend.

Today we’re looking at a big chunk of what I acquired at ToyLanta this year. In a week or two I’ll take a closer look and show you what the figures and playsets look like unboxed, but for now, I’m just running these pics. The truth is, we’ve been back more than two weeks, but I just had time to unpack over the weekend. Things have been hectic around stately Radio Free Charleston Manor since we got back.

My main goal this year was to score a boxed, complete GI Joe Adventure Team Capture Copter. As you can see, that mission was accomplished (Thank you, Steve Stovall). I’ll describe the rest of what you see in the captions, and we’ll take an even closer look later.

A quick reminder: You can scroll down the page, or check the lists of recent posts in our right column (if you’re not reading this on your phone) to see our previous coverage of ToyLanta 2022, and our trip there and back.

A radio note: Tonight at 11 PM on The AIR, The Comedy Vault will present an hour of the songs of Tom Lehrer. It’s a new episode, our eighth in a row!

The Group Shot. Full disclosure: the mini HESS Trucks came from Full Circle Toys in Newnan, Georgia. Everything else came from ToyLanta.

Continue reading

We have three full hours of RFC Tuesday on The AIR  your blogger and radio show host was able to squeak out a three-hour, new full-length Radio Free Charleston,  but real world intrusions forced me to put off finishing The Swing Shift until next week.

However, three full hours of great local, new and independent music is nothing to sniff at. To hear all this cool music you simply have to point your cursor over and tune in at the website, or you could just stay on this page, and  listen to the cool embedded player over at the top of the right column.

At 10 AM and 10 PM you can hear three full hours of great music, much of it local, exclusively on The AIR.

The first hour of RFC is all-new goodness filled with new local stuff from The Heavy Set Paw Paws, Bane Star, Brian Diller and more, plus great indie stuff from our Chicago pipeline, and new music from The Red Hot Chili Peppers and Andy Prieboy.

Our second hour is more mellow, and opens and closes with two great female singer/songwriters, Catherine Campbell and Annie Neely, while the creamy filling is provided by a mix of mellow and relaxing music from Jim Lange, David Synn, Neostra Music, Fripp & Eno and more. I even tossed a Tango in there.

Hour three is much less mellow, with a definite metal edge, including new tracks from Byzantine, Cassius At Best, Voivod, Korn, Hawkwind and more. It’s a pretty wild and eclectic assortment of stuff to keep your ears all happy and interested. Links in the playlist will take you to the band’s websites.

Check out the playlist:

RFCv5 084

Heavy Set Paw-Paws “Sangean Radio”
Bane Star “All Things Material”
Red Hot Chili Peppers “Aquatic Mouth Dance”
Scott Helland “Never End The Rocket Century”
Hello June “Dance”
The Bishops “Hold You Up”
Brian Diller “The Secret Chord”
Michael Lyzenga “Ruin”
Andy Prieboy “Everybody’s Got Something”
Feast of Stephen “Bankrobber”
69 Fingers “Pick It Up”
Mark Beckner “Win, Place Or Show”
The Thin Cherries “Weird World”
The Knickerbockers “Stick With Me”
The Standells “Riot On Sunset Strip”

hour two
Catherine Campbell “Wild and Free”
Jim Lange“Every Time”
David Synn with Matthew Fitzwater “No One”
Neostra Music “Light Movment”
Fripp & Eno “Evening Star (live)”
Spencer Elliott “Viking Lullaby”
Trio Con Abbandano “Los Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas”
Joseph Hale “Black and Blue”
David & David “Swimming In The Ocean”
Jordan Andrew Jefferson “When The Sun Goes Down”
Annie Neely “Big Ole Moon”

hour three
Andy Prieboy “A Long Life For Gwen”
Byzantine “Ancestry of the Antichrist”
Cassius At Best “Chimera”
We Broke The Weather “Niceberg”
6 Feet Under “What Would You Do”
Lost Decades “Chase Me”
Hawkwind “Assassins of Allah (live)”
Voivod “Paranormalium”
Payback’s A Bitch “Punk As Hell”
4OHMMONO “Entertain Me”
Korn “Disconnect”

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 3 PM, Friday at 9 AM, Saturday at Noon and Midnight,  and  Monday at 11 AM, exclusively on The AIR. Now you can also hear a different 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 MIRRORBALL at 1 PM, and Ska Madness at 2 PM. At 3 PM we have two recent episodes of The Swing Shift.  Your humble blogger and radio host had the phone day from Hell on Monday, and was only able to record RFC this week. Let’s hope for less hectic times ahead.

Today’s art is a small acrylic and ink painting based on a sunset I saw while on our trip a few weeks back. This was the view from the porch that inspired last week’s Monday Morning Art. This one is a possible study for a larger piece, but I may do a totally different take on it by then.

If you want to see this painting/drawing larger, just click on it.

As a bonus, here’s a short film, a timelapse, of the same sunset. I just sat my camera down on a table and pointed it sunsetward. Take a look…

Meanwhile, Monday at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you a recent episode of  Psychedelic Shack, followed at 3 PM by a recent 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 at the top of the right-hand column of this blog.

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. Classic episodes can be heard Sunday at 9 AM as part of our Sunday Haversham Recording Institute collection.

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. You can hear two classic episodes of the show Sunday at 2 PM.

Tonight at 8 PM you can hear an hour of stand-up from Maria Bamford on The Comedy Vault. Wednesday evening at 10 PM, we’ll have another new episode of The Comedy Vault.

Then, at 9 PM we bring you an overnight marathon of Psychedelic Shack, providing you with ten classic early episodes of our Psychedelic Rock extravaganza, presented by Nigel Pye and The Haversham Recording Institute.

Between editing photos and video and trying to watch as much of Wrestlemania and its related shows as possible, your PopCulteer has been caught without any time to carefully choose a video for today. So, for the first time in over ten years, we present footage of a monkey washing a cat.

This week we are departing from our usual chronological re-presentation of our local music video showcse to jump ahead a few weeks for an obvious reason.  From April, 2010, this was the Radio Free Charleston April Fool’s Day show for that year. If we didn’t skip ahead and run this now, I’d be posting it here in the middle of May.

This time I decided to do an entire show with the “Fake Rudy” joke that ends almost every episode of Radio Free Charleston. The kindly old schoolteacher who was mouthing my words was the host of “Ding Dong School,” a kid’s program from the 1950s. Many thanks to The Emergency, Simply Sadi and especially Jeff Ellis, who were all very good sports and let me cut music videos using old cartoons with their music for the show. Big thanks also go out to Scott Elkins and Murfmeef for letting me use their short films for the show.

Over the end credits, that is indeed RFC’s resident diva, Melanie Larch, joining WATT4 for their version of the Police classic, “Message In A Bottle.”

This was the show that, I feel, most lived up to our promise of “mind-hurting weirdness.” You can read the Kayfabe production notes HERE.

Next week we’ll bring you episode 92, and continue in order from there.

Every year ToyLanta offers up at least one giant-sized 1/6 scale diorama, and this year did not disappoint.

Caleb Brown created a massive diorama that told the story of Nazi forces, in WWII, holed up inside a bombed out church, with a collection of ill-gotten treasures that they’ve looted, while the Allied Forces storm the church and stop the forces of evil.

I’m not going to try to describe it any further. This is just an amazing diorama with an astonishing amount of detail.  Just check out the pictures. The diorama tells the story.

Continue reading

The PopCulteer
April 1, 2022

It’s that one day of the year where fake news and absurdity run wild! Well, at least it used to be. Now that seems to be the norm for a lot of people every day.  Anyway, Friday we offer up shiny new episodes of MIRRORBALL and Sydney’s Big Electric Cat.  The AIR is PopCult’s sister radio station. You can hear these shows on The AIR website, or just click on the embedded player at the top right column of this blog.

At 2 PM, Mel Larch uncorks a new MIRRORBALL! The AIR’s showcase of classic Disco music presents a wild collection of classic Disco tracks that all have the word “Dance,” or some version of it, in their titles.  It’s an all-star line-up of classic Disco artists, with a little bit of a bitterseet twist.

This week Mel bends her rules just a bit so she can include three tunes from the Foo Fighters “DeeGees” project, which was released last year. This EP saw the band doing very faithful covers of some of The Bee Gees’ top Disco hits.

In light of the recent death of Foo Fighter’s drummer, Taylor Hawkins, Mel thought this would be a good time to remind people of this fun detour the worlds reigning rock band took into the world of Disco. It’s part of a full hour of Disco delights.

Check out the playlist…

MB 048

Foo Fighters/DeeGees “You Should Be Dancing”
Baccara “Sorry I’m A Lady”
Gene Chandler “Get Down”
Esther Phillips “What A Difference A Day Makes”
Johnnie Taylor “Disco Lady”
New York City “I’m Doin’ Fine Now”
The O’Jays “I Love Music”
Tina Charles “I Love To Love”
Foo Fighters/DeeGees “Night Fever”
The Drifters “There Goes My First Love”
The Nolans “I’m In The Mood For Dancing”
Gladys Knight & The Pips “Come Back and Finish What You Started”
Brainstorm “Lovin’ Is Really My Game”
MFSB “TSOP”
Dan Hartman “This Is It”
Curtis Mayfield “Move On Up”
Foo Fighters/DeeGees “Shadow Dancing”

You can hear MIRRORBALL every Friday at 2 PM, with replays this Saturday at  9 PM (kicking off a mini-marathon), Sunday at 11 PM, Monday at 9 AM, and Tuesday at 1 PM  exclusively on The AIR.

At 3 PM, Sydney Fileen decided to throw us a curveball. On realizing that this episode of her show would debut on April Fool’s Day, she also decided to bend the rules and present two hours of the goofiest New Wave music ever, in a mixtape form. Sydney opens the show with Weird Al and Barnes & Barnes, and proceeds to present genuine New Wave novelties mixed with offbeat covers, and a few parodies, recreations and ringers in the mix.

It’s all in the spirit of fun, so check out this playlist…

BEC 088

Weird Al Yankovic “Dare To Be Stupid”
Barnes & Barnes “Fish Heads”
The Vandals “National Brotherhood Week”
The Units “Bugboy”
Captain Sensible “Wot”
Cyndi Lauper “He’s So Unusual”
DEVO “Speed Racer”
Divine “You Think You’re A Man”
Tim Finn “I See Red”
Big Daddy “Once In A Lifetime”
Julie Brown “Homecoming Queen’s Got A Gun”
Big Daddy “Safety Dance”
Weird Al “You Make Me”
Neil “Hole In My Shoe”
Hazel O’Connor “EE-I-ADDIO”
Martini Ranch “How Does The Laboring Man…”
Mystery Music
Wall of Voodoo “Exercise”
Violent Femmes/The Dickeies “Eep Op Ork Ah Ah”
Lene Lovich “I Think We’re Alone Now”
Laibach “Sympathy For The Devil”
Little Nell “Beauty Queen”
Neil “Lentil Nightmare”
Nina Hagen Band “TV Glotzer”
Robert Fripp “You Burn Me Up”
The Stranglers “Old Codger”
Celia & The Mutations “Mean To Me”
The Bad Shepards “White Riot”
Big Daddy “Whip It”
The Dickies “If Stuart Could Talk”
Oingo Boing “Goodbye Goodbye”

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, Monday at 7 AM, Tuesday at 8 PM, Wednesday at Noon and Thursday at 10 AM, exclusively on The AIR.

That’s what’s on The AIR Friday, and that is this week’s PopCulteer. Check back later Friday afternoon for a photo essay dedicated to a really impressive ToyLanta diorama. We’ll also have our regular weekend features and more ToyLanta coverage next week.