Author: Rudy Panucci (Page 190 of 581)

Due to a lingering post-vacation cough The AIR is still mostly in re-runs this week.  Your PopCulteer still has a voice that is somewhere between sounding like a diesel motor that won’t turn over and Marge Simpson, on top of that a deadline crunch is tying me up elsewhere.  A new episode of Life Speaks to Michele Zirkle will light up your Wednesday, while we pull another classic episode of Radio Free Charleston International out of the archives for you on Thursday.

You can visit the The AIR website, or listen in on this embedded radio player…

Tuesday morning, starting at 9 AM, we’ll bring you five hours of Classic Radio Free Charleston, followed by the rest of our music programming. We hope to return to new episodes of all of our shows next week.

Wednesday at 1:30 PM, you can expect a brand-new episode of Life Speaks to Michele Zirkle, which I will tell you about tomorrow, since I’m editing it right after I write this post. You can hear Life Speaks to Michele Zirkle Wednesday at 1:30 PM and 7 PM, with a replay Friday morning at 9:30 AM.

Thursday we replay our recent dip into the RFC archives with Blue Million on Radio Free Charleston at 2 PM, and follow that with the first broadcast in over a year of another classic episode of Radio Free Charleston International  that hasn’t been heard in almost two years.

Next week we plan to have all-new music shows every afternoon, and we will be announcing a change in Prognosis, which airs on Mondays at 3 PM.

You can keep track of the full schedule right here…

It’s been a while since I’ve posted any of my geometric abstract art. In fact, it’s been a while since I’ve done any. What you see above is the first piece in that style that I’ve attempted on the new computer, since my old reliable Compac gave up the ghost last month. I have a few new toys (and I’m still missing a few old favorites) but this was just a quick doodle done while I was coughing my head off on a Sunday afternoon.

I named it after I finished it. You can come up with a better name, if you want. Click to see it larger, and don’t be surprised if I don’t quite post as much extra stuff this week. Deadlines and this nagging cold are drawing me away from PopCulting a bit, but we’ll still have at least one post per day.

Crack The Sky are probably the best band you never heard of. Formed in Weirton over 45 years ago, they moved to the Baltimore area soon after and attained a cult status that they have never quite managed to outgrow.

It’s not due to a lack of musical quality. Crack The Sky ranks among the greatest American progressive rock bands, and they’re still performing occasionally in around Baltimore, where they have remained local favorites for four decades.

John Palumbo is the band’s lead singer and primary songwriter, and his musical vision has carried the band close to the fifty year mark.

Tonight we present a rare concert, which was original simulcast on WBAL TV and WIYY 98 Rock FM back in 1982. This is the band at their peak of their second incarnation (they’re on their forth incarnation now). This was a wild and rare moment from back in the days when local TV stations would occasionally break their formula and try something innovative.

So check out a cool band that you probably never heard of before.

Up top, direct from the last day of May 2011, you see episode 131 of Radio Free Charleston. “Thenewno2 Shirt”  was a special episode of RFC that was devoted to promoting a great triple bill of live, original music held on Saturday, June 4 of that year featuring local favorites Tofujitsu and Mother Nang and Washington DC’s, Wiley Sonic.

Wiley Sonic was the then-new band fronted by Joe Vallina (right), who has a long history with Radio Free Charleston, having appeared as the one of the first in-studio guests on the radio version of RFC back in 1989.  Back then, Joe was half of the punk duo Blind Blue Leper Society.  The other half of that duo was local bartending and jam band legend, Washboard Dave.  More recently I’ve played tracks from Joe’s current band, The Heavy Editors, on the RFC radio show on The AIR.

Joe provided the music video for Wiley Sonic, and we had video in our archives of then-recent performances by Mother Nang (recorded at The Blue Parrot) and Tofujitsu (live at The Empty Glass). Animation is by Frank Panuci with music by yours truly. Host segments were recorded at the Grove City Outlet Mall, about an hour North of Pittsburgh for reasons I have totally forgotten. The show’s namesake shirt featured the band, thenewno2, which was the musical vehicle being used by Dhani Harrison. Dhani was an early supporter of RFC back in the MySpace days. And for some reason, there are planets running alongside the credits in this episode.

You can find the original production notes HERE.

The PopCulteer
March 23, 2018

Quite A Week

It’s time for this week’s PopCulteer, and since I haven’t done it for a while, this one’s going to be a stream-of-consciousness, multi-topic ramble.

Your PopCulteer has been under the weather for a few weeks now. Right before I left for my annual trek to Senoia, Georgia and then on to ToyLanta, I realized that my Myasthenia Gravis was flaring up for the first time since I’d been diagnosed and began treatment. I still have a ridiculously mild case, and for that I am eternally grateful, but I had a few days where my hands did not want to work as well as they have been, and a more severe side effect was my double vision worsening.

Still, this all really minor compared to people I know who struggle with severe Myasthenia Gravis, and I have to admit that I haven’t been more vocal about having this disease because I don’t feel like it’s hit me hard enough for me to complain about it.

However, being down a bit from the MG and venturing into a land where the Pear Trees decided to bloom early and fill the air with pollen meant that by the time we returned from the South (where we managed to have a wonderful time despite the various challenges), I was primed for any kind of seasonal allergic/sinus affliction, and have basically been coughing my head off for the past two weeks.

If you’ve been wondering why my shows on The AIR are still in reruns, that’s why. I have no voice at the moment.

Anyway, I do appear to be on the mend. I’m really hoping to get this cough tamed so that I can make it out to see Wolf’s Head: A Tale of Robin Hood and The Sheriff this weekend. I really want to see this show, but I also don’t relish the idea of disrupting a performance with my barking pumpkin impression.

In the meantime, I am still able to write, and there’s plenty of stuff going on at the moment.

The Toys R Us Mess

Compounding the sadness and confusion of yesterday, I had to re-write this post eight times in three hours as new information came to light, Charles Lazarus (right), the 94-year-old founder of Toys R Us, passed away. It was sad, and touching, and totally unrelated in any way to the fate of the company he founded 70 years ago. He cashed out and retired in 1994, and had nothing to do with the current management of the company.

As I write this (early Friday morning) the Toys R Us liquidation sales are supposed to start today. That may change, but it appears that the hold up may not have been the potential rescue of some of the stores, as I theorized yesterday, but instead may be related to the bankruptcy filing on Wednesday of the Toys R Us real estate arm, which carries nearly $900 million in debt, and which will likely be combined with the Toys R Us bankruptcy and cause a shuffling of prioritized creditors.

Since the court is not exactly making all such decisions public yet, this is all supposition.

Isaac Larian, the founder of MGA who is trying to raise enough money to save approximately half of the US stores from going under, has turned to crowdfunding in an attempt to raise an additional $800 million, in addition to the $200 million of his own money that he’s put up.

Call me cynical, but this has all the earmarks of a publicity stunt that isn’t really expected to succeed. I can’t see somebody financing a billion-dollar business takeover via GoFundMe.

Meanwhile it’s looking like the pending revival of the KB Toys brand might turn out to just be a case of slapping the KB Toys name on one of those seasonal stores that sells calendars, games and toys, like we’ve had in the Charleston Town Center for the last few years at Christmas time.

While this isn’t as exciting or exotic as return to the KayBee Toys of the past, it’s at least a viable proposition, if underwhelming in the grand scheme of things.

What Happened to Stuff To Do

I’ve had a few (very few) readers notice that I am not cranking out a weekly run down of everything happening in Charleston any longer. It’s true. I’ve pushed “Stuff To Do” into semi-retirement. It had reached a point of diminishing returns.

I realized a couple of years ago that, while many people have tried to create comprehensive arts calendars and entertainment guides for Charleston as a response to complaints that there’s nothing to do in town, or at least any way to find out about it, the harsh reality is that there aren’t enough people who care what’s going on to make such an endeavor worth the effort.

Back in the early days of The AIR, I hosted a weekly audio show with my wife, Mel Larch, called “Stuff To Do,” named after the regular column here in PopCult. After ten weeks of putting a lot of work into the show so that we could have a fresh episode not only on The AIR, but also available for download on Wednesday mornings, we discovered that nobody was listening–not to the station when it aired, and not a single download. And that show took about twenty hours of research, writing and recording each week.

Likewise, I was spending a tremendous amount of time each week compiling Stuff To Do for PopCult.
Several hours would go into looking up schedules and searching Facebook for events to which I had not yet been invited, and in many cases creating graphics for concerts–and hardly anybody read those posts.

Of late I have found that I attract more readers by focussing on a single event than I do by attempting to tell everybody about every single thing happening in Charleston. So I’ve become more selective about what I plug here in the blog.

For instance, in the last two weeks I’ve written posts about two local events, Wolf’s Head: A Tale of Robin Hood and The Sheriff, and the Cabernet and Clay sculpting event at Rad FX Atelier. Those posts have been read hundreds of times. To contrast that, the last time I did a comprehensive “Stuff To Do” post, it was read twelve times. That post took over five hours to compile.

To contrast it even further, when I write about toys, comics, movies or music, many thousands of people read those posts.

So I’ve made the decision that, to get more bang for my buck, in terms of where I focus my energies, I can do more good for the local scene by plugging one or two events per week, instead of trying to be all things to all people. The readers have spoken with their eyes, and there doesn’t seem to be any interest in me writing an aggregate guide to weekend events.

Facebook Follies

There has been much ado about Facebook’s data breach this week, and it’s resulted in a lot of folks deciding to give up using the service, or to at least take a day to protest it.

This is all rather silly. From day one I knew what Facebook was–a massive data-mining operation, and I decided to use it and to protect myself as much as possible, since there are many benefits to using the service.

I have never volunteered my information to Facebook. I’ve never completely filled out my profile or given them my phone number. I’m sure they have all this information already by aggregating it with my personal profiles with other businesses, but I’ve never confirmed it with them.

I’ve also never used Facebook to sign into another service, and I’ve never taken a quiz that requires you to sign in to Facebook, or done any of those silly, innocuous things that require you to allow them access to your Facebook account. All of that is done so that they can create a profile of you that can be sold to other companies to target advertising to you, or as we saw last year, to influence your political views.

I also never allow myself to be tagged in a location. While I was on vacation Facebook somehow determined where I was using my laptop on the way down and tagged me automatically, and I had to manually remove all those tags.

I’m not shocked or surprised that the data has been misappropriated and used for evil purposes. That’s really the only logical endgame of such an enterprise that trades in YOUR preferences and personal details. The fact is, Facebook is Big Brother, and anyone who uses the service is working for the surveillance team.

Speaking of Personal Data

Yesterday afternoon I had some free time, was filled to the brim with cold medicine, and got aggravated by junk mail. Specifically, I was aggravated by junk mail from AARP.

AARP started sending me junk mail before I turned 40. It’s elaborate junk mail, sometimes with fake membership cards printed on thick plastic, usually with no visible signs on the outside of the envelope, so that you don’t just toss it straight into the trash, and it’s also voluminous. I usually get three to six pieces of junk mail from AARP each week. This is paid for by the membership fees of people who haved joined AARP thinking that they would actually do some good with their money.

It was yesterday, after being tricked once again into opening an envelope with no return address and a huge warning “CARDS ENCLOSED: DO NOT BEND,” that I remembered back to over a year ago when I called to complain and was told that I would be removed from their mailing list, but that it would take up to three months for the mailings to stop.

Let me interject here that there is no valid reason for this type of delay, and the people who came up with this policy are forcing their telephone representatives to lie to people every day about it.

Of course, since I was then expecting the junk mail to continue for three months, I didn’t really notice that it hadn’t stopped until more than a year had passed. So I dug out my email exchanges from last year and called again.

Keep in mind that I have NEVER been a customer of AARP.

When I called I got the same run-around about how it would take three months for the junk mail to stop. I pressed further, and the nice young lady informed me that she was surprised that I was still getting junk mail because on my profile, all the boxes were marked to “suppress” all contact.

She then read her script to me to tell me that the junk mail must be coming from third parties.

After explaining that there was nothing on the mail to indicate that it was from a third party–that it included their return address and urged me to send them money for a membership and a free backpack or something, it hit me.

Insert the sound of a record scratching here.

“My profile?” What profile? I’m not, nor have I ever been a member, customer or whatever of AARP. I started asking her questions about it. They have a profile on me? How can I get them to delete it? Would she delete it for me right now? She even put me on hold to ask her supervisor if such a thing were possible. Apparently it isn’t.

I even got a bit of shocked laughter from her when I asked if she could just mark me “deceased,” but then I remembered that my parents both got mail from AARP for years after they’d passed away.

In case you didn’t know, AARP keeps profiles on everyone they consider to be a potential member. Keep in mind that this is a political lobbying organization, and what they’re doing is at least as nefarious as what Cambridge Analytica did with the stolen Facebook data.

If you call AARP and ask them to delete your profile, they will refuse. Nobody you can reach on the phone even has the ability to respect your marketing preference.

All you can do is blog about it.

And that is this week’s PopCulteer. Check back for our regular features, cover your mouths when you cough or sneeze and remember to stay hydrated.

Thursday night we debut a new episode of The Real with Mark Wolfe at 10 PM on The AIR (or this embedded player).

Mark Wolfe returns with his fascinating interview series and this week his guest is Eliska Hahn, actress, figure skater, DJ and newly-minted resident of Charleston’s historic East End. Mark and Eliska discuss her career and how she wound up in the Daniel Boyd classic Troma Film, Invasion of the Space Preachers. Eliska also talks about her time as an educator, school counselor, skating coach and radio host.

The two also talk about the recent festivities surrounding the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame induction ceremony and Eliska’s return to Charleston after twenty years away.

The Real with Mark Wolfe can be heard Thursday at 10 PMwith replays Friday at 10 AM, Sunday at 6 PM and Tuesday at 7 PM on The AIR, and you can also find it on iTunes and at The Real with Mark Wolfe website.

UPDATED: Today was the day that the Toys R Us liquidation sales were to begin at most locations. I don’t mean to beat a dead horse with this story, but Toys R Us is a huge pop culture icon, and their demise is a pretty big, still-developing story. In a breaking development, many stores have posted signs saying that the liquidation sale has been postponed. We don’t know what this means. Reports are surfacing that they could begin at all locations by Friday, but even that isn’t certain.

Apparently this delay is due the fact that some interested parties want to purchase as many as 400 stores and keep them in operation. Most states have laws on the books that force a business to file a “going out of business” plan, and stick to it. This way consumers are protected from unscrupulous retailers who try to run perpetual going out of business sales simply as an advertising tease. In this case, since some TRU stores may remain open, they have to weigh all their options before starting such a sale.

When the sales do begin I wouldn’t expect any steals in the first week of the liquidation. All the toys will be marked up to their full retail price (or beyond) and initial discounts may only be enough to bring them down to what they were yesterday. In a couple of weeks, when the advertised discounts hit 30% or more, you’ll start to see real bargains.

There are still several bidders that want to rescue part of the chain. Isaac Larian, the CEO of MGA Toys (Bratz, LOL Surprise) is trying to buy the Canadian arm of the business along with as many as 400 of the US stores. That amount seems to be a best-case scenario, but it’s possible that, if his bid is successful, some stores might just halt their liquidation sales in April and attempt to get back to normal operations. That appears to be the hold-up in starting the liquidation sales, and the fact that the sales didn’t start on time is an indication that the court is at least taking these offers seriously.

The other major player that is known in this game is Strategic Marks Inc., who have been getting tons of press since they announced that they have “acquired” the trademarks to KB Toys. I’m still using quotes there because there are so many conflicting reports about how they picked up the trademarks, and there’s a lot of suspicion that their claims of ownership are shaky, or at least shaky enough to draw the scrutiny of the bankruptcy court.

However, it seems they can prove that they legitimately own the KB Toys name since they’ve already announced how they will bring the stores back in time for the holiday shopping season. They plan to partner with a seasonal retailer like Spirit Halloween or one of the many other stores who “pop up” for a couple of months (Party City and Spencers have divisions that handle this sort of temporary store) and open as many as a thousand KB Toy Stores in time for Christmas.

While this sounds exciting to folks who are nostalgic for KB Toys, the reality is that these stores will have higher prices and less selection, and will only share their name with the former national toy chain, which went defunct in 2009. There are conflicting reports about whether or not Toys R Us, who purchased the KayBee Toys intellectual property out of liquidation, really did allow the trademark to slip into the public domain. If they did, then somebody at the company screwed up big time, which at this point would be par for the course. The URLs for the trademark names have expired and no longer point to the Toys R Us website.

Assuming that, since Strategic Marks is a very successful company, their plan is on the level, I hope they put more effort into their pop-up stores than the typical seasonal retailer does. We’ll have to take a wait-and-see approach with this, but it’s looking a lot like we’ll have temporary stores in our local malls in time for the holidays. At least we can be sure that they’ll have plenty of spaces available for them at the Charleston Town Center.

Speaking of Charleston, while it is indeed very sad to Toys R Us go, in the likely event that the Charleston store is not one of the top performers that might be saved, we have to be honest here. Charlestonians over the age of 35 were never “Toys R Us Kids.” We didn’t get our local store until about 22 years ago, and the Barboursville store only opened in the mid-1980s after Children’s Palace shut down at the Huntington Mall.

We had KayBee Stores since the early 1980s, with two locations in the Charleston Town Center, and one in the Kanawha Mall. Those stores and Kid Country Toys made up most of our local toy-shopping world post 1980.

Back to where we stand: many Toys R Us stores could begin liquidation sales this week or next. Should the court accept any of the bids to buy some of the US stores out of banktupcy, it’s not clear how those stores would proceed. They may have to go ahead and liquidate, then close so they can restock those stores and then reopen a week or four later, of they may not be allowed to liquidate at all. KB Toys is preparing to open up to a thousand pop-up stores in time for Christmas, but it remains to be seen how well-stocked those stores will be, since the period for ordering holiday toys is nearly over.

That’s the current update. As the bidding process moves through bankruptcy court, it’s probably going to be mid-April before we have any idea if any of the plans to save any Toys R Us stores will succeed.

This story has been revised more than half a dozen times since it was originally posted early on March 22. Any further updates will be made in additional posts.

Thursday evening there’s a really cool event happening on Charleston’s East End that any area sculptors might want to attend.

RJ Haddy’s Rad FX Atelier is hosting a fundraiser to help with the cost associated with replacing the building’s old HVAC system before other code upgrades can be completed. What he’s doing is holding a sort of sculpting version of Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art show, only without any models.

This event is not a structured class, this is a freestyle fun casual evening for folks to practice sculpture skills, chill out with good friends while making new ones, listening to some good music, enjoying some good wine (21+ only please B.Y.O.B.) all while making some good art.

A donation of $50 gets you in the door and all proceeds go towards replacing the HVAC system. In return, attendees get the following:
Entrance to the party
Cheese and fruit trays, along with other snacks
Soft drinks
ALSO…The first 25 (or so) people through the door will also get a small sculpture package of:
1.5 lbs of WED clay
1- sculpture base
1- package of wire

Doors open at 6:30 PM, so get there early otherwise, its B.Y.O.C (Bring Your Own Clay). Your use of Atelier sculpture tools and other supplies needed for the process will be made available for use during the event, plus Rj will be on hand sculpting his own project (and drinking) alongside you to answer any questions.

This sounds like a lot of fun, and if your PopCulteer can get over his obnoxious cough by then, I’m going to try to make it. I need to work on my 1/6 scale sculpting skills now that my fingers work again.

This week Life Speaks to Michele Zirkle looks at the concept of time, Wednesday at 1:30 PM and 7 PM on The AIR (or this embedded player).

Time keeps on ticking this week as Michele Zirkle looks at the relationship between the past, present and future, in an episode inspired in part by the movie, A Wrinkle In Time and in part by the death of Stephen Hawking.

How do you plan for the future when you don’t know all the variables that you’ll encounter on the way there?

Following up on last week’s show about movement, this week Life Speaks to Michele Zirkle looks into how we move through time. Can the past be changed, or at least the perceptions of the past, and is that as real as the present and potential future? Why would you even want to do that?

Michele examines these questions and tries to figure out the answers as she listens to life.

Life Speaks to Michele Zirkle replays on The AIR Friday at 9:30 AM and Monday at 12:30 PM. Check out our other cool programming on The AIR, with music every weekday at 2 PM. A new episode of The Real with Mark Wolfe can be heard Thursday at 10 PM. We’ll tell you more about that tomorrow.

Since it became clear last week that Toys R Us would likely be shutting down all stores (some locations are telling customers that they’ll be closed by May 14), speculation has run rampant, and one company has already capitalized on the situation with an interesting announcement over the weekend.

Strategic Marks Inc., a firm that specializes in reviving defunct brands, and one that has had some remarkable success, made a big splash Sunday with the announcement that they have “acquired” the trademark for “KB Toys.”

I use quotation marks there because they didn’t purchase the trademarks from Toys R Us. Another company tried to do that last year. Strategic Marks filed for a variant of the name that had escaped notice by TRU when they snapped up “KayBee,” “KB Toyworks” and “KBKids.” TRU also owns the websites associated with those names, although they all just redirect back to the Toys R Us website.

The Rockfather has a great explanation of this up at his site. If it weren’t for Strategic Marks’ previous success in reviving Leaf Brands and Hydrox cookies, this would just look like an attempt to cash in on the sudden interest in toy retailing. However, since this is a successful company with a strong track record, and they may well be able to purchase the complete set of KayBee trademarks out of liquidation and possibly even get a few stores in the process, it can’t be easily dismissed.

Reuters has a story up that details how the Toys R Us brand name is likely to survive liquidation. If the bid by the group led by Isaac Larian is successful, then we might see two or even three smaller toy retailers emerge from the post-liquidation rubble.

There is a hearing scheduled for today, and from that we are likely to learn more details about potential buyers of parts of the company and when liquidation sales will begin. Most vendors have stopped shipping new product to Toys R Us, and the fate of their previously-announced store exclusives is still unknown.

It’s anticipated that the top 200 stores will be liquidated last, to give them time to try and find a buyer for their best performers. Gift cards and rewards dollars are expected to become worthless by the middle of April.

We will keep you updated on this story, probably later this week.