Author: Rudy Panucci (Page 39 of 581)

STUFF TO DO

I know I’m starting to sound like a broken record, but aside from what I’m posting below, there are tons of things in and around Charleston to keep you busy this late-summer weekend.  I am still considering suspending this feature during the surge in the pandemic. I have really mixed feelings about this. At the moment, I do not feel safe going out anywhere. That’s just me. I’m immunocompromised, and I’ve been pushing my luck recently, so I’m personally going back into hermit mode for the time being.

However, there are some really cool things happening in Charleston. Foremost is the Charleston Ghost Tour, which is a wonderful thing to have in the city, even if I can’t even consider doing a walking tour until the temps drop about twenty degrees around here. That doesn’t mean that those of you who are made of heartier stock shouldn’t partake, so check out their website, or look them up on social media for more details than you get in this neat graphic…

If you are interested in The Charleston Ghost Tour, check with them quick. The available spots are filling up very fast.

As for the rest of the weekend, you should know the drill by now. The pandemic is still not over.  In fact, it’s beengetting  way worse again. If you are fully vaccinated and ready to do your best to stay safe, you should go check this stuff out. Outdoor shows might be okay for vaccinated folks to go maskless, but maybe not at the moment. Indoor shows leave you at the mercy of your fellow patrons, and with the Delta variant surging, why risk any exposure? I know there are folks who hate the idea of wearing masks, even if they’re not vaccinated. Those people are why you should wear a mask.

If anybody gives you grief over wearing a mask…get the hell out of there. It’s not safe. Nobody wants to be the last person to die of COVID.

So use your common sense and stay safe…and support the local scene. Here are a few select shows happening in Charleston this weekend…

Wednesday afternoon The AIR brings you a brand-new episode of Curtain Call!  You can tune in at the website, or or you could just stay on this page, and  listen to the convenient embedded radio player lurking over in the right-hand column of this blog.

At 3 PM on Curtain Call, Mel Larch offers up an early Halloween present. It’s a special concert performance of songs from The Rocky Horror Show by Dallas-based choral symphonic pop band, Polyphonic Spree. This was recorded in London, back in 2012, (you can download it on Bandcamp), and we decided to slip it into the schedule a month early so that we could take the opportunity to plug the second weekend of  Mountain Root Company’s production of The Rocky Horror Show, which you can catch Friday and Saturday at their theater in Belle.

Details are in the graphic below, and you can find more information at their website.

Since the Polyphonic Spree concert didn’t flll up the whole hour, the rest of this week’s Curtain Call treats you to a couple of perfomances from the recent PBS presentation of Wicked, in Concert. You will hear “The Wizard and I,” performed by Rita Morena and Arianna DeBose, and after that Mario Cantone, performs The Wizard’s song, “Wonderful.”

 Curtain Call can be heard on The AIR Wednesday at 3 PM, with replays Thursday at 8 AM, Friday at 10 AM, Saturday afternoon and Monday at 9 AM. A six-hour marathon of classic episodes can be heard Sunday evening starting at 6 PM, and an all-night marathon of Curtain Call episodes can be heard Wednesday nights, beginning at Midnight.

Tuesday on The AIR  we wrap up our marathon of  Radio Free Charleston Volume 5 with a brand-new three hour episode filled with tons of great music, local and otherwise.   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.

We have our new Radio Free Charleston at 10 AM and 10 PM Tuesday.  This will be surrounded by the remaining episodes of RFC V5 to fill out the marathon of shows that’s been pouring out all over The AIR for the last week.  This new show is a full-three-hour blast of great music, with a few throwbacks to the early days of RFC, back in 1989, and a lot of new stuff to prove that we’re still going strong.

Check out the playlist to see all the goodies we have in store (live links will take you to the artist’s music pages)…

RFCV5 060

hour one
The Lickerish Quartet “Do You Feel Better”
Hasil Adkins “Big Red Satellite”
Brian Setzer “Smash Up On Highway One”
Frank Zappa “You Are What You Is”
Mother Nang “Knee Deep In Wine”
Toyah “Thunder In The Mountains”
Static Fur “Take My Ashes”
Go Van Gogh “Shut Up, I Love You”
The Rolling Stones “Heart of Stone”
Joe Valiina “Suzy Said So”
Marcie Bullock “Maybe Just Crazy”
The Turtles “She’s My Girl”
Bernie Marsden “Key To The Highway”
Whitechapel District “How Heavy Is Thy Crown”
Ovada “The Church of Paranoia

hour two
Tautologic “Fat, Dumb and Happy”
Guitarmy of One “Coronets for Clouseau and Columbo”
The Renfields “Transylvania Fight Song”
Velvet Insane “Riding The Skyways”
Stiff Little Fingers “Barbed Wire Love (live)”
The Big Bad “The Signal”
Kick The Cat “Ow, My Eye”
Time And Distance “Little Disaster”
Stupid Einstein “My Friend”
Psychic Hit “Left For Dead”
Farnsworth “Let’s Play Nice”
Joe Strummer “Trash City”
Cheap Trick “Quit Waking Me Up”
Three Bodies “The Trax”
Chuck Biel “A Line of Fools”

hour three
Emmalea Deal “Rosie”
Swivel Rockers “Fall”
Josh Homme “Lavatory Lil”
Rude City Riot “World Weighs A Ton”
69 Fingers “Faster and stronger”
Ringo Starr “Monkey See, Monkey Do”
Ann Magnuson “I Met An Astronaut”
Red Audio “Money Tree”
Oingo Boingo “Grey Matter”
Mad Scientist Club “Save The Whales”
John Lennon “God”
Joseph Hale “Time”

You can hear this episode of Radio Free Charleston Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM on The AIR, with replays Thursday at 3 PM, Friday at 9 AM and 7 PM, Saturday at Noon and Midnight,  and  Monday at 11 AM, exclusively on The AIR. You can hear a different episode of RFC every weekday at 5 PM, starting Wednesday, and 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.

We kick off this week with a piece of art that finds your humble blogger mixing a few different styles. What you see up there started out as a Sharpie doodle on copy paper, which I then painted over using a light box. My weapons of choice were watercolor brushes, and a few colored pencils and markers.

Basically, I did a sloppy, Picasso-esque line drawing of a reclining female figure and painted over it in an impressionistic manner. This was not a piece that was conceived as a clear vision. This was basically just improv. I was happy with it, although I did crop the image and tweak the colors a little after I scanned it.

If you want to see it bigger, just click on the image.

Meanwhile, Monday on The AIR, our week-long marathon of Radio Free Charleston enters the home stretch. The plan is to cruise into tomorrow, where we will present a new episode at 10 AM and 10 PM, and finish up the rest of the marathon in style.  Wednesday we are adjusting the schedule so that you’ll be able to hear one full episode of RFC every afternoon at 5 PM.   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.

I don’t like to repeat the videos I post here in Sunday Evening Video very often, but this year I had so many requests to post what I did last year, that I decided to make this a tradition, for at least another year.

If you are of a certain age, Labor Day seems synonymous with The Jerry Lewis Labor Day MDA Telethon, which the famed comedian hosted for almost sixty years.

The telethon is gone, as is Jerry, but MDA (the Muscular Dystrophy Association) maintains a YouTube page where they still post highlights from the vaults.

Above you see a playlist with 104 videos of musical legends like Frank Sinatra, Aretha Franklin, Smokey Robinson, B.B. King, Diana Ross, Ray Charles, Elton John, Paul McCartney, Tony Bennett, Little Richard, Johnny Cash, Toni Basil and many others. Best of all, you can watch these clips without sitting through four hours of corporate spokespeople droning on in a monotone about how much they care about the kids. I mean, no offense to the guy from 7 11, but I’m pretty sure they play those parts on an endless loop in hell. Above you see the good stuff, the cream of the crop.

Seriously, there are some gems in there like Duran Duran, MC Hammer and Charo. There’s lots of Charo. Lots of MC Hammer, too, now that I think about it.

Enjoy!

This week we go back six years to a special show intended to promote the 2015 ShockaCon, which was due to happen a couple of weeks later.

This show starred The Renfields, Transylvania’s hottest punk band. We captured the band in a bit of a state of flux, as they were in the process of changing around their line-up. Barging in on them performing at The Empty Glass, we managed to capture three songs, “Burning Revenge,” “Killer Klowns From Outer Space” and “The Invisible Man.”

The PopCulteer
September 3, 2021

We have very sad news to kick off this week’s PopCulteer.

Former WCW and TNA wrestler, Daffney Unger (real name Shannon Spruill), took her own life Wednesday night after years of physical ailments and concussion-related depression.

Back in 2008, at one of Gary Damron’s ASW Wrestling shows, we met Daffney and she agreed to appear on episode 42 of Radio Free Charleston. She did our animation intro. It only took a minute to record, and was only on the show for a few seconds, but she took the time to email me later and thank me for having her on the show.  She later sent nice emails about subsequent episodes of RFC, and was very positive and supportive of what we were doing.

It was a simple, kind gesture, but it’s more than most of the bands we’ve had on the show have done, and it meant a lot to me, and showed me what a sweet, caring person Daffney was.

I was alarmed Thursday morning when I saw the drama unfolding on Twitter.  Daffney had posted several disturbing and obviously suicidal videos on Instagram Live, and her family and authorities had been notified. Thursday afternoon it was confirmed that they did not get to her in time, and she was gone. This was just tragic and so sad. I wanted to share my brief connection with Daffney because I know that she treated everyone in such a kind and generous manner, and I think that is how we should remember her.

PopCult offers our condolences to her family, friends, loved ones and many fans.

If you’re in crisis, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-TALK (8255) or use the Crisis Text Line by texting “NAMI” to 741471

STUFF TO DO

Aside from what I’m posting below, there are tons of things in and around Charleston to keep you busy this late-summer weekend.  To be honest, I am seriously considering suspending this feature during the surge in the pandemic. I have really mixed feelings about this. At the moment, I do not feel safe going out anywhere. That’s just me. I’m immunocompromised, and I’ve been pushing my luck recently, so I’m personally going back into hermit mode for the time being.

However, there are some cool things happening in and near Charleston. So since it’s Labor Day Weekend, I’m going to do a rundown of Stuff To Do this week.

You should know the drill by now. The pandemic is still not over.  In fact, it’s getting  way worse again. If you are fully vaccinated and ready to do your best to stay safe, you should go check this stuff out. Outdoor shows were okay for vaccinated folks to go maskless, but maybe not at the moment. Indoor shows leave you at the mercy of your fellow patrons, and with the Delta variant surging, why risk any exposure? I know there are folks who hate the idea of wearing masks, even if they’re not vaccinated. Those people are why you should wear a mask.

If anybody gives you grief over wearing a mask…get the hell out of there. It’s not safe. Nobody wants to be the last person to die of COVID.

So use your common sense and stay safe…and support the local scene.

That is this week’s PopCulteer. Stay safe, be good to one another, check this blog for fresh content every day, and don’t set off fireworks this weekend. Only careless, self-centered idiots do that.

The PopCult Bookshelf

Queen of the Ring: Wrestling Drawings by Jaime Hernandez 1980-2020
by Jaime Hernandez
edited by Katie Skelly
Fantagraphics
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1683964452
$24.99

I have been a fan of Jaime Hernandez (and his brother, Gilbert) for well over 40 years. I first saw his spot illustrations in The Comics Journal, and I’ve been reading Love and Rockets since its first issue in 1982.

Queen of the Ring is a very different book, but it is spectacular in its own right.

Queen of the Ring is a collection of drawings of Women Wrestlers of the 1960s and 70s that Hernandez has done over the course of forty years. These drawings were done for his own amusement, and were not intended for publication. He drew them on copy paper, with cheap markers and colored pencil, and are a body of work that is more personal and more intimate than his comic book work.

Interspersed throughout this collection of drawings are Hernandez’s own words, taken from an interview (with the book’s editor, Katie Skelly), and these quotes, set alongside the drawings, give a real insight into the creative process of Jaime Hernandez.

Hernandez has always been a master of drawing the female form in a realistic and appealing manner, and he he does this throughout this book, showing the beauty, rage, glory, dispair and power of women who look like truck stop waitresses who could kick your ass.

Queen of the Ring is not a graphic novel. There is no narrative here, aside from the story of Hernandez and his fascination with drawing strong women with a variety of realistic body types. Hernandez has told stories with characters like these women in the graphic novella, Whoa, Nelly!, which really ought to be re-issued soon as a tie-in with this book.

Queen of the Ring, however, stands alone as an impressive artistic statement.

His linework, as always, is pure eye candy, while his composition and emotional punch are sharp as ever. The editing brings it all together with a near-perfect juxtaposition of Henandez’s art and words.

Reading this book, you will learn about Women’s wrestling in a bygone era, but you’ll also learn about the thought process and technique behind the work of Jaime Hernandez, and that is a very good thing, indeed.

Queen of the Ring is a gem of a book, a must-have for any fan of Love and Rockets, but with a lot of mainstream appeal, too. You should be able to order it from any bookseller, using the ISBN code, or find it discounted at Amazon.

To be honest, these came in while your PopCulteer was running around Staunton, Virginia celebrating his anniversary with his wife. It took me a few days to find the time to open them.

About a month ago, I told you about the Kickstarter campaign for Fearsome Weirdos: Harvest of Horrors by  Robert Jiminez. I had told you about the first series of Fearsome Weirdos in The PopCult Gift Guide a couple of years ago. The campaign was already fully-funded by the time I wrote about it, but I wanted to give you an update that, less than a month later a nifty little package (seen above) was in my mailbox, and I thought I’d let you see what I got.

The set included 10 Petrifying Product Parodies, 5 Alarming Authors (one of whom is hiding behind another card in one of my photos), 1 Wrapper Card/Checklist., plus 2 Bonus Cards and a neat little plastic case to hold it all. Also included was a bonus Metal Card, featuring H.P. Hovercraft and a Taco Hell sticker.

The card backs feature the pencilled roughs for the designs on the front of the cards.

All-in-all, it’s a great little set, and it helps set the mood for the Halloween season, which is upon us (at least if you check Big Lots or the Spirit Halloween Stores). Robert’s art is just spectacular and the horror-host level humor is dead-on.

Robert’s work has appeared on album covers, in publications such as THE THING: ARTBOOK, VISIONS FROM THE UPSIDE DOWN: STRANGER THINGS ARTBOOK, Tiki Magazine and Pinstriping & Kustom Graphics Magazine, and has shown in galleries including Disneyland’s Wonderground, Harold Golen, M Modern, Creature Features, and Bear & Bird among others.

You can also see Robert’s work in trading card sets for Topps, Cryptozoic, and Upper Deck on licenses such as Garbage Pail Kids, Wacky Packages, Mars Attacks, Star Wars, DC Comics, Marvel Comics, Rick And Morty, Ghostbusters, Adventure Time and more. Most notably, Robert worked on 8 paintings for the Upper Deck trading card set FIREFLY THE ‘VERSE and 9 paintings for WACKY PACKAGES GO TO THE MOVIES by Topps.

Robert is also the author and illustrator of the books LAST CALL AT TIKILANDIA, STRANGEWISE NO.9, CHIMPS & TIKIS AND RAVEN-HAIRED BEAUTIES: AN ADULT COLORING BOOK, NOSFERATU’S CHRISTMAS IN NEW YORK and WEIRD-ASS FACES VOL.1, SOPHISTICATES AND WEIRDOS and the trading card set FEARSOME WEIRDOS.

Once Robert is done shipping out all the Kickstarter rewards and sketch cards, he will put Fearsome Weirdos: Harvest of Horrors up for sale in his webstore (and likely on eBay and at Amazon), so in a few days or so, you might want to check those out if you want a set of your own.

The headline is correct. For the next seven and a half days, The AIR will play every episode of Radio Free Charleston Volume 5 so far, culminating in a brand-new episode, next Tuesday night.  To hear all of this coolness you simply have to click on the link and  tune in at the website, or, if you’re reading PopCult on a desktop or laptop, you could just stay on this page, and  listen to the cool embedded player over at the top of the right column.

In order to explain why we’re having such a massive marathon, I have to tell you a story (largely copied from earlier posts in this blog).

Over Labor Day weekend, in 1989, the first episode of the first version of Radio Free Charleston aired on WVNS FM, 96.1.

The show was a sort of my reward for working 100 days straight, often two or three shifts, with no day off while the station was beset with serious staffing problems.  One week I made more in overtime than the new Station Managergot paid.  My loyalty was rewarded not with a higher hourly rate, but instead a psuedo promotion.

I was given a promotion (in lieu of a raise) to assistant program director. With the title came the responsibility for scheduling the part-time talent to work on the weekends. I couldn’t get anybody reliable to handle the midnight to 6 AM shift Saturday night/Sunday morning, so I went to my boss with the idea of plugging a part-timer into my Friday night, 7 PM to Midnight shift, which was all syndicated crap programming anyway, and I would take the desolate shift that nobody wanted…IF I could have the freedom to play what I wanted.

My boss agreed to it and thus, Radio Free Charleston was born. I was allowed to go on the air at 2 AM on Sunday morning, and play anything I wanted (within reason) for four hours each week.

That first show didn’t include any local music. To be honest, it was mainly me digging out the best stuff from our existing playlist and augmenting it with a few choice progressive rock and New Wave tracks from my collection. I also remember being really happy that I could play the extended mix of “Heading To The Light” by The Traveling Wilburys on the first show.  I think it was the third week of the show when I slipped in “Big Red Satellite” by Hasil Adkins, and some single recorded by the teenaged daughter of a local car dealer who was considering advertising on the station.

Two weeks after that, the floodgates had opened, I fell in with the local music scene, and for the remainder of the original broadcast radio run, Radio Free Charleston became a bit of a phenomenon, peaking at over ten-thousand listeners and being featured in The Charleston Gazette. This was with a mix of local music, alternative rock, prog-rock, New Wave, underground tracks and even comedy records.

After the show was strangled in its crib over station politics in the spring of 1990, I couldn’t get hired in local radio. I was told repeatedly that program directors were afraid that if they’d hire me, I’d have their job in six months. I consulted with stations in other towns. I couldn’t relocate because I was taking care of my ailing parents, but they still appreciated my expertise. I also sort of backed into writing and market research after working on local political ads. Along the way I began co-writing Animated Discussions with my now-wife, Mel Larch for the Charleston Gazette, and made a bit of a name for myself writing about toys and pop culture for several national magazines.

The whole time I was trying to find a way to revive Radio Free Charleston. I must have recorded a dozen pilot episodes for different stations, but it wasn’t until after I began writing PopCult that Brian Young came to me with the idea of reviving RFC as a video show, and Douglas Imbrogno let me incorporate it into The Gazz and PopCult.

With The AIR operating as the internet radio arm of this blog, and with my video work diminished quite a bit due to Myasthenia Gravis, I’ve kept Radio Free Charleston going as a radio program again since 2014.  For the first few years I was producing RFC as an all-local show, and RFC International as an “anything I feel like playing show.”

Back in January, 2020, I made a move that I had been contemplating for a while. I revamped RFC to make the show more like the original concept of RFC back in 1989, when it was on broadcast radio.  Since that time, instead of producing Radio Free Charleston as a one-hour weekly showcase of local music from Charleston and the surrounding areas, and RFC International, as a two-hour show where I played anything I want, I combined both shows into Radio Free Charleston Volume Five, a weekly three-hour show that mixes local music with the best indpendent, avant-garde and classic music from multiple genres.

The reason for this was to shake things up a bit and keep the shows interesting for me. When I started doing RFC on WVNS radio back in 1989, one of the most rewarding bits of feedback I got was when I would play a track by a local band, and follow it with a song by one of that band’s musical heroes. I felt then, and I feel now, that our local music scene produces high-quality artists whose work can stand side-by-side with any musicians from around the world.  While it was cool to produce a one-hour local showcase for so many years, it’s more fun this way.

Our local music is too good to segregate away from the rest of the world’s music. This is a bolder way to bring local music to the masses. This is the show that you will hear on The AIR for the next week-plus. It’s almost like I’m doing the same show I was back in 1989/90, only not in the middle of the night, and with a worldwide audience.

That very first RFC happened during Labor Day Weekend in 1989. Nobody knew then that the show would take on a life of its own as a beacon of obscurity. All the big shots in Charleston pretend not to know what RFC is, even if they’ve been on the show. I’m proud of the underground legacy I’ve built over the last three-plus decades, and I hope you enjoy soaking in it, because that’s all that you’ll hear on The AIR for several days.

Some of these shows will contain huge chunks of earlier versions of Radio Free Charleston. Select episodes bring you airchecks from the 1989-1990 run, while others bring you audio from our video run of almost 300 shows. We even have a few shows that revisit earlier internet radio incarnations from Voices of Appalachia and OnTheAIRadio. Plus you’ll get a few bonus editions with RFC International tossed into the mix.

The cohesive glue over the next seven-and-a-half days is yours truly, hosting every episode. I hope you tune in and hear me playing great music.

When this marathon is over, I’m going to shake up the schedule on The AIR a bit, so that you can hear RFC every day at 6 PM (not new episodes every day—what are you, HIGH?), and hopefully we’ll see some new shows joining our line up, along with all of our great music specialty shows.

Join us. It’s mind-boggling to think I’ve been doing this for 32 years.