From April, 2012 comes Radio Free Charleston 156, “Warning Trioxin Shirt,.” This week we featured music from The Renfields and The Tom McGees, plus we brought you a terrific short docu-drama by Stephen Schmidt.

Charleston’s Ska kings, The Tom McGees perform a song called “Enemy Spy Plane Inbound,”which I mistakenly called by two or three different titles during the show. We also had Three-fifths of The Renfields on this show, to promote the then-in-the-future Zombie Prom at the old Kanawha Players theater. You’ll get to hear our favorite monster cereal band performing “From Beyond” and “Ramones Zombie Massacre.”

Sandwiched in between our musical guests we presented a wonderful short film by Stephen Schmidt. “Give Up The Fuzz, a few words with Clarence Fuzzy Haskins” In this film, Stephen combined an interview with Fuzzy Haskins, with dramatic recreations of some of the events starring such notable local performers as Newman Jackson, Philip Washington and Billy Hambleton. Fuzzy Haskins, who passed away back in 2023,  was a founding member of Parliment-Funkadelic, and the interview with him was conducted at a West Virginia Music Hall of Fame event. I want to thank Stephen for letting me share his wonderful film with the RFC audience. It really classed up the joint.

You can read the original production notes HERE.

The PopCulteer
October 10, 2025

I hate getting calls from telemarketers. I have made no secret of this fact.

Eleven-and-a-half years ago, I came up with a fun way to mess with the folks who cold call you and pester you at all hours.

I’ve also warned you about telemarketer scams.

And I’ve taken my battle to stop being interrupted to my front door.

Lately, it’s gotten worse…so much worse. One day, a couple of weeks ago, I counted over 30 telemarketing calls. It got so bad that I was just grabbing the phone and screaming “WHAT DO YOU WANT?” at the top of my lungs.

Startled the hell out of my sister.

I have explained in the past that years of being responsible for the health of various relatives put me in the hard-to-break habit of always answering my landline on the first ring. Even when I no longer had caregiver duties to worry about, my life as a freelancer meant that I couldn’t really afford to miss a call.

This latest round of over-aggressive telemarketers broke me. I finally did something that I should have done years ago. Something that I had foolishly resisted for far too long.

I moved my Caller ID unit from across the room to a spot on my desk that is right in my line-of-sight.

I realize that anybody else would have done this a decade or two ago.

I should also mention that I also have a cellphone. I don’t use it much because Myasthenia Gravis does not play well with a touchscreen. Late last year I dumped AT&T, moved to Mint Moble (with zero regrets) and got new phones for my beautiful wife and myself.

I’m now paying one-sixth what I had been, and get much, much better service.

But I still don’t text. It’s just too hard for me. I use the phone when we travel, mostly as a camera, and sometimes to navigate, but I just don’t text, much to the irritation of many of my friends.

Since I got my new phone, I have not taken it off airplane mode. It does not ring. If it ever made the noise it would make if I got a text, I wouldn’t recognize it anyway. I’d just wander around the house like The Beverly Hillbillies trying to figure out why the music was playing every time somebody rang their doorbell.

Spam calls on my cellphone are not an issue. When I mention over 30 calls in a day, that’s just on my landline. I mainly keep this number because it’s been in my family longer than I have, and I keep it as a landline mainly due to a combination of laziness and inertia.

So…I finally decided to partake in the technology that’s been around more than thirty years and stop answering every call that comes in. Unless it’s someone I know, when the damned thing rings, rather than ignore it, I just lift the handset an inch or so and put it back down without saying anything. I know I should just not pick it up at all, but then it rings and rings, and sometimes they leave crap on the voicemail, and by then my concentration is thoroughly destroyed, so this is quicker and easier, if less efficient in warding off robocaller mojo.

With my new normal, I have learned a few things.

First of all, almost every bogus Medicare robocall lists as its origin some quaint little town in West Virginia which I have heard of, but have never been to, like Follansbee or Iaeger. I guess they’re gambling that I might know somebody there and pick up the phone expecting to hear from Uncle Horatio or Aunt Flamphart.

My favorite calls are the ones that proudly introduce themselves as “Possible Spam.” Thank you for the warning. Click.

I’ve only had one so far that was listed as “Pakistan.” I guess somebody at the office forgot to turn on the phone number spoofer that day.

While I still startle way to easy when I’m in deep concentration, I have found that the quick hang-up lets me get past the interruption without being totally thrown off my train of thought.

Maybe someday, when the volume of calls drops from dozens per day to one or two a week, I may revive my old hobby of playing mind games with the instrusive disembodied voices with thick accents on the other end of the line, but for now, I shall simply wish them to the cornfield, like I do with internet trolls on social media.

And that is this week’s PopCulteer. Check back for all our regular features and fresh content every day.

This is one of those weekends that comes along every so often where IT’S COMPLETELY IMPOSSIBLE TO EVEN ATTEMPT TO ATTEND EVERY COOL EVENT HAPPENING IN THE AREA! Seriously, there is so much STUFF TO DO that my brain hurts even thinking about it.

As always, you should remember that THIS IS NOT A COMPLETE LIST OF EVENTS.  It’s just a starting point, so don’t expect anything comprehensive, and if you feel strongly about me leaving anything out, feel free to mention it in the comments. Also, if you have a show that you’d like to plug in the future, contact me via Social Media at Facebook, BlueSky , Spoutible, Instagram or possibly Elon’s beast, if it should ever choose to forgive me.  I dont charge for this, so you might as well send me something if you have an event to promote. Note that some links look like they shouldn’t work because they have lines through them, but that’s just a WordPress glitch, so click on them anyway. They should still work.

As featured on Radio Free Charleston this week, SettleFest 2025 is coming to the Mountaintop Pavilion at ACE Adventure Resort on October 10 and 11. It’s shaping up to be an unforgettable weekend of incredible music, scenic views, and good vibes! Hosted by none other than one of the most popular bands on RFC, The Settlement, this two-day festival will bring together fans for an epic celebration of live music and outdoor adventure.

And it is, indeed, a two-day festival. That was a detail I sorta stumbled over while recording RFC this week. That makes two weeks in a row that I forgot to mention a two-day event actually lasts two days. Sorry about that.

The Settlement will headline the weekend, delivering their signature high-energy blend of funk, rock, and soul. Plus you can enjoy amazing performances from a stacked lineup including Yarn, Into The Fog, John Inghram Band, Jeremy Short, and more regional favorites.

Its a Breathtaking Venue where you can experience incredible live music surrounded by the vibrant colors of West Virginia’s fall foliage at the Mountaintop Pavilion, overlooking the stunning New River Gorge.

With onsite camping available, you can make it a full weekend escape. Explore ACE’s trails, tackle the outdoor adventure playground, or simply relax and soak in the views. For more details, check out the Facebook Event Page and for ticket info, go HERE.

Also, this weekend (actually beginning last night), Charleston becomes a work of art again as it’s time for FestiFall. Thursday’s ArtWalk is included this year, and you can find graphics for an event or two below, but for the full schedule, go HERE.

As if that weren’t enough, TsubasaCon happens this weekend, October 10,11, and 12 at The Charleston Coliseum & Convention Center. This is the big show for fans of Anime, Gaming, and Cosplay, and this year the theme is Yokai…I’m more of a Kaiju guy myself, but whatever floats your boat, more power to you. For full details and ticket information, go HERE.

This Saturday, October 11, WVU professor/author Sarah Morris will host a reading and discussion about her new book titled “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” The book begins with a discussion of the most well known song about The Mountain State – and continues to explore the music of West Virginia through the stories and anecdotes of WV musicians.

Sarah Rudy, Ron Sowell, and The Carpenter Ants will perform songs about West Virginia – as well as versions of “Country Roads” It begins at 2 PM at The WV Museum of Music located in The Charleston Town Center.

And now is the part of our program where we boilerplate…

Those are the two big shows, but there’s always more than just two things going on around here.

We are very happy to remind you that Cristen Michael has created an interactive calendar that is way more comprehensive than this list of STUFF TO DO, and you can find it HERE. Just click on the day and the event and you’ll be whisked away to a page with more details about loads of area events.

You can find live music in and around town every night of the week. You just have to know where to look.

Most weekends you can find live music at Taylor Books. There is no cover charge, and Friday and Saturday shows start at 7:30 PM. This weekend they have Zach Elmore on Friday, and Steve Himes on Saturday. Sunday afternoon at 2 PM, stop by for Ray + Jon.

You can find live music every night at The World Famous Empty Glass Cafe. Mondays feature open mic night. The first Tuesday of every month sees the legendary Spurgie Hankins Band perform. There’s both Happy Hour music and local or touring bands on Thursday and Friday, and live bands Saturday nights.  On Sundays when there’s a new Mountain Stage, musicians from the legendary WV Public Radio show migrate to The Glass for the Post-Mountain Stage jam.

Live at The Shop in Dunbar hosts local and touring bands on most weekends, and is a nice break away from the downtown bar scene.

Louie’s, at Mardi Gras Casino & Resort, regularly brings in local bands on weekends.

In Huntington, local institution, The Loud (formerly The V Club), brings in great touring and local acts three or four nights a week.

The Wandering Wind Meadery holds several events each week, from live piano karaoke to bands to comedy to burlesque.

The multitude of breweries and distilleries that have popped up in Charleston of late bring in live musical acts as well. I tend to miss a lot of these because, being a non-drinker, they fly under my radar.

Roger Rablais hosts Songwriter’s stage at different venues around the area, often at 813 Penn, next door to Fret ‘n’ Fiddle in Saint Albans, or at The Cavern on Charleston’s West Side, and also at The Empty Glass many Tuesday evenings or Sunday afternoons.

You might also find cool musical events at Route 60 Music in Barboursville and Folklore Music Exchange in Charleston.

To hear music in an alcohol-free enviroment, see what’s happening at Pumzi’s, on Charleston’s West Side. Pumzi’s looks to be beefing up their offerings in the coming weeks and months, so be sure to check that link in case we miss something.

You can also visit Coal River Coffee in Saint Albans for live music in an alcohol-free environment.  I am looking to expand this list, so please contact me through the social media sites above if you know about more alcohol-free performance venues. The Huntington Music Collective has recently started hosting all ages shows at Event Horizon and those look to be incredible.

For cutting-edge independent art films, downstairs from Taylor Books you’ll find the Floralee Hark Cohen Cinema by WVIFF. Each week they program several amazing movies in their intimate viewing room that you aren’t likely to see anywhere else.

Please remember that viral illnesses are still a going concern and many people who have very good reasons are still wearing masks, and many of us, understandably, are still nervous about being in crowds, masked or not. Be kind and understanding  while you’re out. And if you’re at an outdoor event, please remember that it’s awfully inconsiderate to smoke or vape around people who become ill when exposed to that stuff. If somebody asks you to refrain, please respect their weishes and don’t be a jerk about it.

Keep in mind that all shows are subject to change or be cancelled at the last minute.

Here we go, roughly in order, it’s graphics for local events happening over the next several days that I was able to scrounge up online…

Continue reading

The PopCult Cereal Bowl

TINY FRUITY CUTIES
Sweetened Corn & Oat Cereal
sold exclusively at Trader Joe’s
$3.99 for a 16 Oz. box

So I’ve been writing PopCult for 20 years now, and this is the first entry in “The PopCult Cereal Bowl.”

I have written about breakfast cereal in the past. I am known to wax rhapsodic about the recently-discontinued Quisp (AKA: The food of the gods), and earlier this year I wrote about a limited edition orange-cream flavored Captain Crunch. I’m sure that I probably mentioned the monster cereals at some point over the last two decades, but this is the first time I’ve sat down with a bowl of cereal intent on writing a review.

How did we get here? In this week’s Monday Morning Art, I posted a pencil drawing of my friend, Pixie, who lives in Liverpool, England (currently). When Mel and I travel, we send Pixie photos of cool and/or funny stuff. Pixie’s dealing with a lot of heavy issues in her life, and we figure that, if we can give her a smile or a little diversion, then at least we’re doing something to help our friend.  At some point I’ll probably run a photo essay of Mel’s “Travelling Squidward (and Plankton)” series of photos we’ve sent Pixie in recent months.

But for the rest of the story, I have to go back to our June trip to Chicago. Now, we love going to Chicago, and only an evil and insane fool would think that it’s some kind of battleground. We had a wonderful trip and stayed at a new hotel (for us), The Hotel Versey, which was really cool and fun.

Seriously, the weather was perfect. We both felt like walking a lot and we had an L stop less than half a mile away. Also, across the street there was a Trader Joe’s.

You may know Trader Joe’s as that grocery store that we’ll never get in Charleston. Other people know it as “Aldi for rich people.” We decided to go poke around and see what they had.

To be fair, they had a lot of cool stuff, and it wasn’t as insanely expensive as we had been led to believe.

But I grabbed a photo of a silly box of cereal because the name was goofy and I sent it to Pixie.

And she responded with “Oh my god! You have to buy a box and write a review!”

And since it seemed like a really good idea, we went back and picked up a box.

And that box sat in Mel’s luggage from June until Tuesday morning, when I remembered it was there while trying to decide what to write about in PopCult for Wednesday.

You can probably guess where this is going.

So…how is it?

First of all, the expiration date isn’t until next January, so it was still plenty fresh enough to eat.

The cereal itself probably qualifies as what some boring people dismiss as “candy cereal.” I have to be honest and admit that it’s the only kind of cereal I’ll eat.  My favorite breakfast food is warmed-up whatever I had for dinner the previous night so I don’t make a big deal out of buying cereal.  If a cereal is bland and flavorless, like pretty much any cereal that doesn’t have a cartoon mascot or a brightly-colored box, then I have no use for it.

Life is too short to eat a cereal with a taste that’s indistinguishable from the box it comes in. If you like bran or flakes or granola…you may have my share. I’ll pass.

I’m happy to report that Tiny Fruity Cuties is quite tasty. It is naturally flavored and colored with vegetable-based dyes, so parents can pretend it’s somewhat healthy. It’s actually a little higher in sugar and much lower in dietary fiber than Kellogg’s (American) Froot Loops.

None of this is as important as how it tastes. Nobody should eat candy cereal as part of a regular diet. It’s only good as an occasional treat. If you try to live on this stuff you have more problems than reading a cereal review can solve.

As soon as I cracked it open, I noticed the very nice and somewhat nostalgic waft of fruity goodness coming out of the bag. It reminded me of the way Froot Loops or Trix cereals smelled when I was a kid. Nowadays they smell more like some kind of chemical cocktail to me. This was a nice surprise.

As I said, Tiny Fruity Cuties is quite tasty. It’s got a natural fruit flavor–sort of a blend, like a fruit punch or something. There are discernable notes of grape and cherry, and just a hint of lemon.

The texture is crunchy, but not the type of crunchy that shreds the roof of your mouth like Captain Crunch does. The cereal has two shapes–sort of a banana and sort of a raspberry cluster.

There is no hint of banana flavor, as far as I can tell. The banana-shaped pieces are colored yellow and orange, and the cluster pieces are purple and a reddish-magenta.

I have no idea how it behaves in milk because I haven’t eaten milk with cereal since I was maybe four years old.

It was $3.99 for a 16 ounce box when we bought it. That’s comparable to, or maybe even a little less than your typical brand-name candy cereal.

It is a little carb-heavy, but you’re not going to eat this stuff as health food.

I find myself wondering how it would work crushed, mixed with butter, and used as the crust for a cheesecake.

All-in-all, Trader Joe’s Tiny Fruity Cuties is a nice, fruity treat of a cereal. It’s not super-healthy, but it tastes great and can scratch that nostalgic itch you might have for the kind of cereal you liked when you were a kid.

Of course, it’d be a hundred times better if it came with some kind of plastic toy or other small prize.

Tuesday is always a great day to tune into The AIR  with a new episode of Radio Free Charleston to lighten your mood and make you forget the real world.  To listen to The AIR, you simply have to point your cursor over and tune in at the website, or you could just stay here, and  listen to the cool embedded player found elsewhere on this page.  

You can hear Radio Free Charleston Tuesdays at 10 AM and 10 PM, with boatloads of replays throughout the week.

Radio Free Charleston is all-new this week and we open with a track from The Settlement, just to remind you that this Friday and Saturday, SettleFest happens in Oak Hill, WV.   Please ignore the fact that in the show I only say it happens on Saturday. I ad-libbed the announcing with no script this week (as usual) and didn’t realize that it’s a two-day event until I started writing these notes.

In fact, our entire first half-hour showcases bands that will perform at Settlefest. Listen to the music, then head to the Ace Adventure Resort website for ticket info and a schedule.  You can also find details on the Facebook event page.  This looks like a wonderful event, and if there were even a remote chance that I would ever consider going camping, this might be the event I’d choose.

If only they didn’t have all these outdoor festivals outdoors.  Remember…it’s FRIDAY AND SATURDAY!

Anyway, the rest of our show is pretty loaded too, even though our third hour is irresponsibly self-indulgent.

We have new music from Novelty Island, Aliza Hava, Guitarmy of One, Sirius Bluray with David Synn and a new remix from Frenchy and The Punk.

Our third hour begins with Byzantine covering a tune by The Cars, and then it gets weirder. I bring you a mixtape with eleven covers of The Beatles’ “I Am The Walrus.”

Because I can.

By the way, RFC will not be new next week. Yours truly needs a week off. I think it’s the first week off from the show I’ve had since early June.

Check out this playlist, with links to the artist’s page, where available…

RFC V5 244

hour one
The Settlement  “Lift”
John Inghram Band “Palisades”
Sahsa Colette & The Magnolias “Kiss And Make Up”
Jeremy Short“Happy Trees”
Kindred Valley “Bones”
Dark Moon Hollow “Georgia Rose”
Into The Fog “Appalachian Girl”
Novelty Island “Jigsaw Causeway”
Aliza Hava  “The Only Way Out Is Through”
Simple Minds ‘Hunter And The Hunted”
Guitarmy of One “The Ghoul With Periscope Eyes”
The M.F.B. “What Is The Cheat Code (To Your Heart)”
Rasta Rafiki “Congregation”

hour two
Vinto Van Go “Nights Come Free”
The Settlement“Rainbow”
The Clash “The Call Up”
SPACE FREQ “Tonight”
Mike Keneally “The Carousel of Progress”
Kate Bush “Nocturn”
Sirius Bluray and David Synn “The Oak Tree (Dance Mix)”
Frenchy & The Punk “Dark Carnivale (Hi Fi Hilary Remix)

hour three
Byzantine “Moving In Stereo”
“I Am The Walrus” performed by..
Go Van Gogh
Oingo Boingo
Richard Cheese
Men Without Hats
Arms of The Sun
Spooky Tooth
Yellow Matter Custard
Amsterdam/Eminen
Frank Zappa
XTC
The Swingle Singers

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 2 PM, Friday at 9 AM, Saturday at Noon and Midnight, Sunday at 8 PM and  Monday at 11 AM, exclusively on The AIR. Now you can also hear a different classic 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 last week’s episodes of  MIRRORBALL at 1 PM and Curtain Call at 2 PM.

At 3 PM  The Swing Shift is an encore of two recent episodes.

 You can hear The Swing Shift Tuesday at 3 PM, with replays Wednesday at 8 AM, Thursday at 9 AM,  Friday at 10 AM and 8 PM and Saturday afternoon, only on The AIR . You can also hear all-night marathons, seven hours each, starting at Midnight Thursdays and Sundays.

This week’s art is a straight portrait of my friend Pixie Vannucci, who currently lives in Liverpool, England. This is based on a selfie she posted to social media a couple of weeks ago, and it’s a case of yours truly doing a simple grid transfer pencil portrait on paper for pens, using my trusty Blackwing Palamino as well as a charcoal pencil.

Originally I’d planned to present a more cartoonish drawing of Pixie, based on a strange dream I had where we were fighting Joe Manchin in an abandoned automatic car wash, but a weird quirk of having Myasthenia Gravis and having worked digitally for more than a decade is that it’s way, way easier for me do a photo-realistic drawing than it is to revert to my old cartoonist style.  I was able to knock out this drawing in less than an hour. The cartoony version is going to take a lot more trial and error.

You will see the fierce cartoon Pixie, hopefully in a week or four, once I get my cartooning chops back.

Although this is the first time you’ve actually seen her here, Pixie has been mentioned more than a few times in PopCult over the past three years. Even though it’s currently on hiatus, you can read chapters from her compelling life story on her blog HERE.

If you want to see this image larger, click HERE.

Meanwhile, over in radioland, Monday beginning at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you an encore of a classic episode of Psychedelic Shack, and then at 3 PM we do the same with 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 elsewhere on this page.

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. 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.

At 8 PM you can hear a classic episode of The Comedy Vault that delivers the poetry and music of Shel Silverstein.

Tonight at 9 PM we bring you our newish Monday night line-up featuring two hours each of Curtain Call and Beatles Blast, plus six hours overnight with an assortment of our programming from Haversham Recording Institute: Psychedelic Shack, Sydney’s Big Electric Cat and Prognosis.

All this month Sunday Evening Video will be some sort of nod to the spooky season, and we begin with a relatively new Halloween month tradition here in PopCult.

This is the fourth time I’m running this video here in our weekly video spotlight, and oddly enough, not only are people not sick of it, many have requested that I run it again because they’re too lazy to use the search function at this site.  With some minor re-writing, here’s the story of how this video came to be…

In the video above, you see me basically scratching a 40-plus-year itch.

Back in the early 1980s, when I was a communications major at what was then West Virginia State College, I was taking a film appreciation class called “Horror and Fantasy in Film.”

One night early in the semester, we were to watch the silent horror classsic, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. It was being shown from a silent, 16mm print (that I have since learned was more than a tad butchered).  Since there was no sound, the professor asked if anybody had any appropriate music handy (this was in the days before the internet, wifi and Spotify).  I remembered that I had a recently-released album by The Stranglers “The Sountrack To The Gospel According To The Meninblack,” on a home-made cassette in my car. A quick run to the Wallace Hall parking lot, and I retrieved the C-90 with the full album on it.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a very influential 1920 German silent horror film, directed by Robert Wiene and written by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer. Considered the quintessential work of German Expressionist cinema, it tells the story of an insane hypnotist (Werner Krauss) who uses a somnambulist (Conrad Veidt) to commit murders. The film features a dark and twisted visual style, with sharp-pointed forms, oblique and curving lines, structures and landscapes that lean and twist in unusual angles, and shadows and streaks of light painted directly onto the sets. Some folks consider it a zombie movie, but it really isn’t. It is dripping with style and without this movie, we likely would not have had Nosferatu, Dracula, Frankenstein, Freaks, or any of the other major works of cinematic horror. You can see visual cues swiped from this film in everything from Forbidden Zone to Edward Scissorhands.

Back to our film class story: With a cassette player set to go, the film was started and, in my memories and other people who were there, it synced up perfectly. Even the few songs with lyrics fit perfectly with the narrative.

The only problem was that, even in its butchered form, this print of the film ran nearly an hour, but The Strangler’s album, The Gospel According To The Men In Black, only ran about 42 minutes. At the very end of that side of the tape, with three minutes to fill, I’d dropped in a song from Joe Jackson’s Jumpin’ Jive album, which did not fit the mood of the movie at all.  It was actually pretty hilarious suddenly hearing “We The Boys Shall Hep Ya,” start up right inthe midle of the spooky movie.  A mad dash to the cassette player and a quick rewind, and we had our unexpectedly appropriate music back.

Flash forward to 1990.  Among my many friends made at the Charleston Playhouse was one John Estep (Sham Voodoo to his friends), who had been in both The Defectors and Clownhole, two legendary Charleston bands. We were hanging out one night, talking about horror movies, and Sham brought up Dr. Caligari.  He started telling me about this weird film class he was in that showed it, and that they’d set it to music by The Stranglers. It was at that point that we realized that, even though we first met in 1989, we had been in the same class together at State eight or nine years earlier.

Flash forward again, this time to the Friday before Halloween three years ago: I’d just gotten home from my guest stint with Ann Magnuson on Josh Gaffin’s Afternoon Show on Status Quo, and I had some time to kill before dinner, so I grabbed a copy of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari off of Archive.org, and pulled up a folder of Stranglers music, and slapped ’em together in my trusty video editing program. This was rendered very quickly and is pretty low-res and blocky, but that sort of adds to the charm.

This is not a perfect recreation of the experience that night in 1981 or 82.  The copy of the film I downloaded was painstakingly restored to its original length, and had color tints added to it to replicate the original film experience. That night so long ago that it lined up with The Stranglers’ album,  it was with a stark black-and-white print, and big chunks of it were missing.  So I supplemented this version with cuts from other Stranglers albums and repeated a few tracks. I also eliminated one song that didn’t work too well.  I’d been planning to do this since probably 2007, when I learned to edit digital video.

While at first blush this may seem a little elaborate and obsessive, I only spent about half an hour on it, so don’t expect a freaking masterpiece. If you haven’t seen The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari yet, it’s probably not a good idea to make this the first version you watch.  Think of this one as a bizarre fan edit that will only be truly appreciated by one or two living people.

From April, 2012 we find Radio Free Charleston 155, “Love Robot Shirt,” featuring music is from The Amorous, Godmode Broadway and Dual Core, plus the return of Stark Charleston. Host segments were shot in the parking lot of the WV Division of Tourism in South Charleston.

Our first musical guest on this week’s show was Clarksburg’s The Amorous. An indie-pop band with spiritual leaning.s We recorded the band live during Charcon in 2011, and assembled this video using audio enhanced with a studio recording.

Godmode Broadway was an exciting band that was hard to pigeonhole, musically. They jumped between progressive rock, metal, reggae, surf and any other style they felt like playing–sometimes during a single song. The band was made up of Billy Freedom on vocls, Will Smoot on guitar, Steve Walker on bass, Ben Lamb on drums and our old friend, Synth-master,David Synn. Sadly, this band burned brightly, then went their separate ways, but it was great while it lasted, and making this video with them was a high point of RFC.

Playing us out this week we went back to Charcon, or more specifically to Hack3rcon, for nerdcore rapper, DualCore, with “This One’s For You.” This was also a fun shoot, and broadened the musical scope of the show a bit. You can read the original production notes for this episode HERE.

The PopCulteer
October 3, 2025

This week we’re going to talk a little bit about Kickstarter and it’s use to fund comic book projects. Before I get deep on that, let me tell you about a very cool upcoming project that collects, colors and updates a book I first reviewed in this blog over sixteen years ago.

I’m going to recycle bits of my original post because I did a pretty good job explaining the concept back then.

Brian Bolland’s The Actress and the Bishop Coming Back In Print In Color

You can go HERE to pre-save the Kickstarter campaign and be notified for a newly-colored collection of Brian Bolland’s classic comic strip.

Bolland is veteran British comic book artist, best known for illustrating “Batman: The Killing Joke” (written by the legendary Alan Moore), and the ground-breaking maxi-series “Camelot 3000.” He’s spent most of his career as a cover artist, applying his meticulous pen to such characters as Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Judge Dredd and The Invisibles, among others.

Created originally as one plate of a limited-edition art portfolio, Bolland’s strip “The Actress And The Bishop,” ran as three-page installments in the first two issues of the anthology comic, A1 in the late 1980s. The third strip, a 17-page epic, was drawn in the early 1990s, but remained unpublished until a collection of Bolland’s work was released as a hardcover nearly twenty years ago.

“The Actress And The Bishop,” taking it’s title from an obscure (to the US) bit of British slang, tells, in rhyming couplets, the story of the unlikely pairing of an elderly Anglican Bishop, and his beautiful lady of the evening (“Actress” is a very polite British euphemism for prostitute).

The rhymes and stories are clever, but the real star is Bolland’s ultra-detailed art. This is eye candy so good you can actually gain weight looking at it. The level of detail is just amazing. The fact that Bolland draws some of the most beautiful women in comics is a bonus. You don’t get to be the cover artist for Wonder Woman by drawing ugly women.

“The Actress And The Bishop” is a unique, very British, work of art. It’s poetry. It’s comics. It’s drawing. It’s entertaining, charming and engaging. I heavily recommended it back in the summer of 2009, and now that Bolland is coloring it and adding a more recent installment, I’m pretty much on board instantly.

Let me quote form the campaign:

Brian Bolland’s amazing The Actress and the Bishop in a Deluxe Collectors form -gathering all the strips in FULL COLOUR FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER plus prose and illustrations. Available with a companion black and white volume, showcasing Brian’s incredible linework.

A beautiful Hardback with gold foil accentuated dust jacket, printed endpapers, coloured head and tail bands, ribbon and signed – this is the ultimate collection of Brian Bolland’s Actress and the Bishop.

Featuring the strips The Actress and the Bishop Go Boating, The Actress and the Bishop Throw a Party (originally printed in A1), The Actress and the Bishop and the Thing in the Shed (from Bolland Strips!) and finally The Actress and the Bishop Go to the Seaside (printed in Shift Anthology volume 2 issue 5).

Also rounded off with two prose stories with spot illustrations from Brian – The Actress and the Bishop Go Shopping and The Actress and the Bishop Take Up Sport, plus pin ups, covers, preliminary art and an interview.

Brian is colouring the strips over the coming months, for an estimated delivery in November.

The collection I wrote about is long out of print and commanding collector prices. This is a great chance to get an exquisitely beautiful collection of comics from one of the finest illustrators of the last century.

About that black and white linework available in the companion volume, I originally wrote, “It’s in black-and-white, which shows off Bolland’s artwork in sparkling clarity.”

The Actress and The Bishop is definitely not for kids. The Actress spends much of the comic book sans clothing. That’s not really a negative. Any fan of offbeat comics and fantastic art should seek this out. Go HERE to be notified the day that the campaign goes live, which should be any day now.

Speaking of Comics On Kickstarter

You may have noticed that I haven’t been plugging too many comic book projects over on Kickstarter (or other crowdfunding sites) lately. There are a few reasons for that.

I’m still supporting a few of my favorite creators, folks like Anthony Stokes, Austin Hough, Karl Kesel and Jason Pell, and I’ve been keeping up with a few reprints of Golden Age classics, but I have almost completely stopped supporting campaigns by folks who aren’t known to me.

For a while there, I was taking more chances, snapping up books by more unknown talents and looking for fun, new kinds of work.

But it got to be too costly. See, I hate to read comics digitally. I literally will only do it if I’m writing a review and that’s the absolute only way to read a comic. If this makes me sound like I’m older than sin and out of touch…well, you may have a point.

But I remain defiantly within my old fartedom to the point where I will never pay money for a digital comic book again. I have Myasthenia Gravis. Trying to work a touchscreen is torture for me. I look like a bear trying to solve a Rubik’s cube.

And reading on a computer screen is what I do for work all day. It’s not relaxing to me. If I’m reading a comic book…something I’ve been doing for going on sixty years, I want to hold it in my hands.

So I have to go with print versions of the comics I support, and the prices on those have skyrocketed, along with the postage. I understand and accept that it costs more to make physical comics now, but the cost has gone up so much that I have to be pickier about what I support.

Most of the time, a single comic book, after the postage is added in, will set me back more than twenty bucks on Kickstarter. And I can’t just gamble that on an unknown quantity.

With the creators I support, I have no problem paying enough to cover the shipping costs, printing costs and a decent wage to the creative team. But if I’ve never heard of the artist or writer, and the concept is sorta stupid and you’re asking me to cough up over twenty bucks for a print copy…I’ll take a pass.

What’s worse is when you somehow get on somebody’s email list and get inundated with plugs for campaigns where, in many cases, they don’t even bother listing the names of the writer or artist.

Another reason I’ve stopped gambling on new comic book projects is that my bets haven’t all come in. Some show up and just aren’t very good. Others take their sweet damn time showing up.

ZOOP! is a competitor to Kickstarter. They run campaigns for larger collections for books, with deluxe features and first-rate production and printing. Often their books are in support of a great cause like supporting victims of war and wildfires and such. When you support a ZOOP! project, you feel like you’re donating to a charitable cause.

The main reason for that is that you’re lucky if your book shows up within two years.

I have supported three books via Zoop! The first one showed up 26 months after the campaign closed. The latest one is closing in on the two-year mark with no publication date in site. It was supposed to have been delivered in April, 2024.  The one in the middle showed up about a month ago. It was a shock to me because it had been so long since the campaign ended that I totally forgot I had ordered it.

In fact, I still don’t remember ordering it. When it did finally appear in my mailbox, it seemed like the first time I’d ever heard of it.

There are other things that bug me about crowdfunded comics. I realize that this next one is a bit of a necessary evil, and without it the creators would be leaving money on the table, but I personally despise variant covers.

And I find it pathetic that so many of the variant covers are “naughty” with gratuitous nudity. I’m not a prude by any means. I wouldn’t have plugged The Actress and the Bishop if I were. Don’t get me wrong…I’m a huge fan of gratuitous nudity, but living in a world where real women are naked all over the internet for free, it’s beyond my understanding why somebody would pay ten or twenty dollars extra for a comic book just because it’s got a poorly-drawn tit on the cover.

Some of these artists draw like they’ve never seen a naked woman in real life. it’s weird as hell to me. Some of these girls don’t even look human. What manner of meat-beatery be this? I mean…how hard up are the people buying these things?

But I can’t blame the folks making the comics for indulging in a little softpore cornography if it puts more money in their pockets. This is more just me being cranky in my old age…and really embarrassed for the younger generation.

It strikes me as weird that, in a time where raw boobage is abundant and universally free to anybody with a smartphone, folks will still plunk down money for a crudely-draw nude chick on a comic book cover.

Another annoyance is something that’s happened to me three times in the last two years.  I have Kickstarted books that became fully-funded, then changed their publishing plans and delivered books to comic book stores months before they were delivered to Kickstarter supporters. That might’ve been the biggest thing that soured me on crowdfunding.

Anyway, that’s my venting about Kickstarter and comics for now. I’ve get to get up early in the morning to go yell at some clouds.

Now, as far as using Kickstarter for other kinds of projects…the tariffs have pretty well killed off most crowdfunded action figures, but non-sport trading cards are still going strong, and I’ll be telling you about some of those in a week or two.

And that is this week’s PopCulteer. Check back for fresh content every day and all our regular features.

Earlier this week the news broke that this year the West Virginia International Film Festival would take place, in part, at the currently-shuttered Park Place Stadium Cinemas in Charleston. This is great news on a couple of fronts.

First, it means that the folks at WVIFF expect crowds that will be larger than the Floralee Hark Cohen micro Theater can hold. It’s a nice space, but it is tiny. Second, that means that Park Place is being kept in decent enough shape that it could be up and running in short order should a new owner be found. It’d be great to see that happen. It’d be even better if the new owners don’t try to turn it into some kind of “drafthouse” theater. Charleston needs to have at least one thing going on that doesn’t involve beer. 

You can find the full schedule and details about the Film Festival HERE.

Meanwhile, all this talk of movie theaters took me back to an early post in this blog, twenty years ago today, to be exact, where I was very enthusiastic about a then-new theater in the area. Happily it’s still in business, and it’s also the the movie theater where I saw two movies last year. Those were probably the only two movies I’d seen in a full-blown theater in about a decade. I’ll talk about that at the close, but for now, here’s the original PopCult post from October 2, 2005.

To give you the short background  story…from 1991 to 2005, Mel Larch and I, as part of the Animated Discussions column for The Charleston Gazette, reviewed animated movies. That Gazz link is long dead. 

We had some wonderful experiences seeing some fantastic films. Watching The Lion King after midnight in an otherwise-empty theater in Kanawha City the day before it opened is a fond memory.

However…reviewing movies at the Marquee Cinemas at Southridge made me hate seeing movies in a theater. I NEVER had a positive experience seeing a movie there. Even if the film itself was great, we had to endure lousy sound, audio bleeding from ther theaters due to the paper-thin walls, out-of-focus pictures, poorly-behaved fellow audience members and just a general malaise at having to watch movies in a glorified shoebox. Marquee destroyed any desire I had left in me to ever see a movie in a crowded theater again. 

In the twenty years since I first posted about what is now The Regal Cinemas in Nitro, I have not set foot in the Marquee…and I never intend to. The pandemic taught the world how wonderful it can be watching a movie at home, without the expense of going out or the forced interaction with other humans, who en masse tend to suck. If I do go out to see a movie, I still head to Regal.