Category: Uncategorized (Page 110 of 757)

The PopCulteer
June 23, 2023

Suddenly and without warning, we have to start The PopCulteer with a STUFF TO DO update:  Friday night at Live on The Levee, at Haddad Riverfront Park in Charleston, the headliner has been changed. Celisse has dropped out and has been replaced with RFC faves and old buddies of PopCult, The Velvet Brothers!  New Old Souls are still opening at 6:30 PM, but now The Velvet Brothers will play on into the night, which is really cool. All proper citizens should march down to Haddad to see The Velvets!  This news just broke around 9 PM Thursday night, after this post was already been prepared.  We now return you to your regularly-scheduled PopCulteer...

Your PopCulteer is neck-deep in editing video from last weekend’s Marx Toy & Train Show so I can post it this Sunday. Luckily, instead of writing a long essay that would take me away from those duties, a lovely lady has come to my rescue. Mel Larch returns Friday with a new episode of MIRRORBALL devoted to summertime Disco Hits from the golden age of dance music.

Friday at 2 PM on The AIR, Mel Larch devotes a full hour to dance classics that managed to heat up the dance floor when the air conditioners were running full blast anyway.  The AIR is PopCult‘s sister radio station. You can hear these shows on The AIR website, or just click on the embedded player found elsewhere on this page.

Rather than bring you another theme show, Mel returns to her roots and mixes things up. In this hour you will hear timeless Disco classics mixed with underground club hits and a track or two that managed to heat things up in Europe or New York without spreading their boogie fever to the Hot 100. One thing you can be sure of, they’re all eminently danceable.

Check out the playlist…

MIRRORBALL 078

Shalamar “Take That To The Bank”
Chic “My Forbidden Lover”
Bee Gees “Tragedy”
Alan Sorrenti “Try To Imagine”
Grace Jones “I Need A Man”
Rick James “Ghetto Life”
Stephanie Mills “What Cha Gonna Do With My Lovin'”
Junior “Mama Used To Say”
Gene Chandler “Get Down”
The Whispers “And The Beat Goes On”
Gary’s Gang “Keep On Dancin'”
Gloria Gaynor “Walk On By”
Edwin Starr “Contact”

You can hear MIRRORBALL every Friday at 2 PM, with replays throughout the following week Monday at 9 AM and Tuesday at 1 PM and a mini-marathon Saturday nights at 9 PM

At 3 PM we bring you an encore of the very first episode of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat from July, 2016.  This is the show that launched Sydney Fileen’s backward glance at the brave new tomorrow that never really came.  Since we had a shortened week due to holiday marathons, I just dropped in the debut episodes of most of our shows this week, and now that Sydney’s been around almost seven years, with more than a hundred episodes, here’s a fun chance to go back and hear how it all began.

Sydney’s Big Electric Cat is produced at Haversham Recording Institute in London, and can be heard every Friday at 3 PM, with replays Saturday afternoon, Monday at 7 AM, Tuesday at 8 PM, Wednesday at Noon and Thursday at 10 AM, exclusively on The AIR. Two classic episodes can also be heard every Sunday, starting at 10 AM.

And that is this week’s PopCulteer. Check back every day for fresh content.

The PopCult Comix Bookshelf

Murky World
by Richard Corben
Dark Horse Books
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1506734743
$39.99

I’ve been a fan of Richard Corben’s work, probably, since I was eight years old. My older brother bought Warren’s Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella comics magazines, and I fell in love with Corben’s art. Nobody drew like him, with a unique mix of cartoon dynamism and ultra-realistic rendering.

Dakr Horse is collecting Corben’s work in a series of deluxe hardcovers, and this first release, Murky World, collects, for the first time, stories that were originally published by Dark Horse and in Heavy Metal Magazine over the last ten year’s of Corben’s life.

It is remarkable that in his long career, he never lost a step. This work is as rich and vital as the first stories I saw by him, over fifty years ago.

In addition to Corben’s entire Murky World series, this book features never-before-seen sketch material, the Dark Horse Presents one-shot, and an introduction by Hellboy creator Mike Mignola, all presented in a gorgeous hardcover with a dust jacket.

The story is in the spirit of Corben’s Den and Mutant World sagas, sword-and-sorcery epics with sci-fi overtones, set in a surreal barren wasteland and populated with grotesque mutants and hyper-muscular heroes. We take a quick detour for the publisher’s blurb…

In Murky World, Tugat the warrior wakes from a strange dream only to find himself in a bizarre land populated by hungry deadlings, cruel necromancers, buxom cyclopes, evil cults, and more as he sets off on a dangerous journey with his beloved horse Frix.

The story moves briskly, filled with Corben’s trademark humor, sexuality and action and the presentation is just beautiful, with Corben’s art fully restored and remastered and impeccably printed.

Murky World has been selling briskly in the few weeks since its release. It’s long-overdue for Rich Corben to get his proper recognition. His career has been amazing, starting out at a Kansas City commercial film house before breaking into professional comics at the age of 30. He retained ownership of his characters until he branched out to work for DC, Vertigo and Marvel in his 60s. Along the way he painted the cover of Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell album and had a large segment based (poorly) on his Den comics in the Heavy Metal movie.

His comics work ranks among the best ever produced, and while it sucks that we lost him at the age of 80 in late 2020, it’s great that his work will live on in a series of deluxe hardcover collections. I’s telling that, among the complimentary blurbs on the back of the book, two of the come from Alan Moore and Moebius.

Murky World can be ordered from any bookseller and select comic book shops by using the ISBN code. It’s currently sold out at Amazon, but may be restocked soon.

Okay, it’s time once again for your guide to things you can do in and around Charleston and the Mountain state as we are now officially, legally and legitimately into what some people call “Summer.” In this week’s edition of STUFF TO DO, we’re going going to do our best to tell you about a wide variety of events happening all over our local region.

Live Music is back at Taylor Books. There is no cover charge, and shows start at 7:30 PM.  Friday it’s Neil Curry. Saturday Sean Richardson & David McGuire with Brooke A. Brown entertain the crowd at Charleston’s beloved Bookstore/Coffee Shop/Art Gallery.

The World Famous Empty Glass Cafe has some great stuff through the week to tell you about.  Thursday at 10 PM, it’s Buddy’s Birthday Bash with Rodney & The Cressels. Friday Tim Courts plays during happy hour.  Sunday the post-Mountain Stage Jam happens around 10 PM.  Next Monday It’s time for the Empty Glass Open Mic, with both Unmanned and Eric Robbins listed as hosts. Check the graphics below for other cool shows at the Glass.

Please remember that the pandemic is not over yet. It’s still a going concern. And now there are seasonal allergies, the flu, global climate castrophes, alien invasions, reanimated roadkill, disgraced former presidents and other damned good reasons to be careful. 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.

If you’re up for going out, here are a few suggestions for coming weekend, roughly in order…

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Your PopCulteer is back from a trip that included a day at the Marx Toy and Train Collector’s Show , which is held each year at The Kruger Street Toy & Train Museum in Wheeling. Your humble blogger and his wife had a great time at the show, and I brought you a small batch of photos yesterday, but today we’ve got a couple dozen more, and you can probably expect even more pictures, plus video, later in the week.

I want to take a moment to thank the folks at The Kruger Street Toy & Train Museum for putting on such a cool toy show each year. Mel and I are planning to return there next month for an exciting new addition to the museum that ought to bring more folks to this gem of a toy and pop culture mecca, tucked away in Northern West Virginia.

I do have to confess to something that I was keeping quiet at the show: I was not at 100% for this year’s show. It’s been hotter than usual over the past week, and that heat instigated one of the worst Myasthenia Gravis flare-ups that I’ve had in some time. I had to miss most of a really amazing Show and Tell at the hotel Friday night because the extra meds I had to take made me fade pretty fast. Next year I plan to try to videotape that meeting, if they have one.

On top of that, a couple of months ago my left knee got into a serious disagreement with gravity and a car door, and as such, was pretty much held together by Salonpas and Kinesiology tape. I’m fine if I can stay off my feet…which isn’t going to happen at such a cool toy show.

Despite that, I had a great time catching up with old friends, meeting new ones and buying really cool toys that I don’t have room for in the house. In a few day’s I’ll show off what I got (with one preview below) but today we’re going to look at some of the people I saw and a few of the cool toys for sale.

On Saturday we bypassed the second day of the show to do a little retail adventuring around Canton, Ohio.  I will tell you about this later in the week, but I don’t have a lot of photos to share from that part of the trip. I decided to do most of it as a civilian. However, I made a discovery there that will likely neccessiate a return trip with cameras rolling later in the year.

For now, while I’m still recovering from the trip, here’s a batch of photos from last Friday at The Marx Toy & Train Show, devided into two catagores…

PEOPLE

Super-Johnny West Collector, Terry Ryder, shooting me her “If you take my picture I will kill you” glance, at the table behind some of her awesome “bronzed” Johnny West figures.

Mark Hegeman, who always has tons of cool vintage toys for sale…more than we could fit in our car.

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Your PopCulteer is still on the road followiing a fun visit at the Kruger Street Toy & Train Museum for the annual Marx Toy & Train Show.

However, even though I’m not home yet, I am breaking in my new mobile office, so I can share just a few photos from the show.

You can expect several dozen more photos and even some video in the following days, but for now I’m just bringing you some random images to give you a taste of how much fun this awesome toy convention is.

Expect a bigger photo essay on Tuesday, while we’re in the midst of a Radio Free Charleston marathon over on The AIR. Right now, from an undisclosed location somewheres in Ohio, here’s the first post made from PopCult‘s new mobile headquarters, which is a work in progress. The plan is to eventually have things set up to post video from the road.

But now, on with the photos…

It occured to me that I haven’t posted a full-on shot of the Kruger Street Toy & Train Museum for a while.

A crowd shot of the playset-heavy main room.

Wheeling and dealing in the world of plastic.

A quick look at Professor Jim Fuller’s table. There will be more to see in the coming days.

As usual, Dave Roth had the full sprectrum of rare Johnny West figures.

You never know what might turn up at this show. If I’d been looking for these, nobody would’ve had them.

James Wozniak had a cool assortment of stuff, and even had some goodies from Brad Curry’s Bee-Active Toys.

And finally, your humble blogger poses with the legend, Big Loo.

Your humble artist/blogger is still in a New York state of mind this week as our art is a pencil rendition of the Manhattan Skyline, as seen from our hotel window a few weeks ago, nestled firmly within the Times Square region.

To be honest, this one is unfinished. I started out trying to do a detailed pencil drawing, using my trusty Blackwing Palamino plus a cheap mechanical pencil for cross-hatching and a little bit of charcoal pencil for thick lines.  As you can probably tell, MG made my hands crap out during the first wave of cross-hatching (I was also using a ruler), and I just sort of gave up and declared it done.

This was done using photo reference, on paper for pens.

After scanning it, I eliminated a lot of smudges in the sky. With Myasthenia Gravis, you have good days and you have bad days, and sometimes you have to recognize a bad day for what it is and quit while you’re ahead. If I do go back and revisit this piece, I’ll probably try painting over it or something.

To see it bigger try clicking HERE.

Over on The AIR, we are celebrating Juneteenth with a 24-hour marathon of our musical specialty shows that are devoted to African-American artists. You’ll be able to hear episodes of MIRRORBALL, The Swing Shift, Curtain Call, Psychedelic Shack, The Comedy Vault and more.  It starts at 7 AM, Monday, and runs until 7 AM Tuesday.

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

Tuesday we’ll have a 24-hour marathon of the eight most-recent episodes of Radio Free Charleston because A) Hardly anybody reads PopCult on a holiday, and Tuesday is West Virginia Day and B) Your PopCulteer will have spent the weekend running around at cool places like The Marx Toy & Train Show and points West, so I’ll probably take it easy and just post a few photos from the trip or something.

Above you see Animated Star Trek Levity, with Joe Jackson, Pulp And The Soothing Crooning of Mr. William Shatner. This was an installment of Sunday Evening Video almost exactly fifteen years ago. In fact, it was among the first videos in this long-running regular PopCult feature. It’s a video of William Shatner performing the Pulp song, “Common People,” produced and accompanied by Joe Jackson.

In the intervening years since that first post, the embed code for this video changed, and no longer worked, so the original post just has a big empty white space with a bit of code where the video should be.

I have fixed that with this post.

As for why I ever posted it in the first place, I have no freaking clue. It must have seemed funny at the time.

Catchy tune, though.

This week we go back to November, 2007, for a show that featured the Radio Free Charleston debut of Mark Bates, who has recently become a full-time member of The Carpenter Ants. In this classic show, he’s heard solo, recorded at the old Unity Church, during one of Ron Sowell’s open mic nights. This is one of the shows that I just got around to remastering a few months ago, after it had been offline for way too long.

Our other musical guests were most of The Voo Doo Katz, recorded live at the La Belle Theater in South Charleston, and RFC regular John Radcliff, performing in the kitchen at LiveMix Studio. We also feature animation and the first installment of “The Android Family.”

You can read the original production notes, bum links and all,  for this episode right HERE.

The PopCulteer
June 16, 2023

The above headline does not indicate that your humble blogger has been harboring some secret identity or non-de-plume and is finally set to reveal his true self to the world.

That’s a topic for another column. Today I’m talking about how, finally, after three years and three months, I feel comfortable going without a mask in public. Sometimes. I’ll still keep one on my arm in case it gets crowded or folks start coughing or sneezing around me.

I still don’t feel that the pandemic is entirely over, but I think the risk is low enough that even someone like me can shed the mask as long as I’m up to date on my boosters and remain careful.

What I mean by “someone like me” is that I’m a high-risk person. I have Myasthenia Gravis, an auto-immune disorder, and the treatment is for me to take a heavy-duty immuno-suppressant. Also, I’m now past the age of 60, and dealing with a couple of other medical issues that are COVID warning flags.

I have been very careful, and I have not had COVID. In fact, since I started masking up and going out less, I’ve barely had a sniffle or sinus infection. Seasonal allergies got me this Spring, but aside from that, it’s been smooth sailing.

Like everyone else, I got tired of wearing the mask, but I had good reason to stay masked up: I don’t want to die.

When Mel and I went to the Lexington Toy & Comic Show back in March, I stayed masked up. was glad to see we were not the only folks there wearing masks.

Two months later when we went to New York to see Gavin Lee at Birdland, I was newly-boosted and felt comfortable going without my mask on the train and at the famed Jazz club. In the ensuing weeks, Mel and I both cut back on wearing masks everywhere we go. We still keep them nearby, just in case, but for the most part, if you see us out now, you’ll probably get to see our full faces.

Last Tuesday Mel and I ate in a restaurant in Charleston for the first time since March, 2020. I’m not going to name the restaurant because we were basically only there for a FestivALL event, and only ate because it was handy, but it was nice to dine out in our hometown again.

Not eating out so much has actually been very good for both of us, so I don’t expect to do this more than once a month or so, but it’s nice to have the option again.

Since the pandemic began, when I’ve run a STUFF TO DO column, I’ve included a disclaimer asking people to be kind to those of us wearing masks. This will not change. There never was any excuse to act like an asshole to people who are wearing masks. They’re obviously doing it because they feel the need, and they know way more about their personal situation than you do. That disclaimer will continue to run here in PopCult.

Passings

It’s been a rough week for culturally-important icons. Over the past few days the world has bid farewell to Cormac McCarthy, John Romita Sr, Treat Williams and Glenda Jackson.

I don’t have enough space here to properly eulogize these folks, so I’ll just briefly summarize their amazing lives and offer condolences all around:

Cormac McCarthy was, according to the NY Times, “a formidable and reclusive writer of Appalachia and the American Southwest, whose raggedly ornate early novels about misfits and grotesques gave way to the lush taciturnity of All the Pretty Horses and the apocalyptic minimalism of The Road” I have to admit that aside from the movies based on his work, I was most familiar with McCarthy due to his depiction as a Centaur in the cartoon, Mike Tyson Mysteries.

“Jazzy” John Romita was a legendary Marvel Comics artist who basically defined Marvel’s “house style” following the exits of Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby. He had a long career and was Stan Lee’s “go-to” artist from 1966 to his retirement in 1996. Many people think of Romita’s art when they think of Marvel Comics, post-Kirby.

Treat Williams was a gifted actor who went from being a leading man to establishing a long career as a versatile character actor who brought depth to every role he touched.

Glenda Jackson was a phenomenal actress who transitioned to politics in her fifties and then back to acting late in life. Mel and I were very lucky to see her on stage twice, in Three Tall Women and in King Lear, where she played Lear. Despite being a multiple OSCAR, BAFTA, Olivier and Tony award-winner, she remained down-to-Earth, and even insisted on getting a photo with Mel when we met her in New York back in 2019.

And that is it for this week’s PopCulteer. Check back for our regular features, plus notes on special programming on The AIR next Monday and Tuesday.

This blog will be running on autopilot for a few days because the Marx Toy and Train Collector’s Show is happening again this year, and the dates are this Friday and Saturday at  The Kruger Street Toy & Train Museum in Wheeling.  Your PopCulteer is thrilled to be going back to this toy show, which is one of the most enjoyable in the country and something your humble blogger and his lovely wife look forward to every year.

This year, we’re running up for the first day of the show (and the evening before), and then we’re bypassing the second day so we can go have some kind of retail misadventures in the wilds of Canton, Ohio.

I’ve been covering the Marx Toy Convention for more than a decade, and you can find an index to most of that coverage HERE. You can see our coverage of2021’s show HERE and HERE. Last year’s coverage was spread across a few posts, HERE, HER E, HERE, and HERE.

You can expect a lot of photos and video next week in PopCult.

Anybody who grew up with Marx Toys, or anybody interested in West Virginia industries, or just folks who love toys, should make it a point to go to this show and check out the wonders of The Kruger Street Toy & Train Museum. It’s a real gem.

Here’s the video from last year’s show…