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The PopCulteer
December 26, 2025

Boxing Day On The AIR FRIDAY!

It may be the day after Christmas, and a lot of folks may be sweaty and lethargic following a day of Yuletide cheer, but Friday afternoon both of our Friday music specialty shows devote themselves to special themes to close out this Godforsaken year. Mel Larch’s MIRRORBALL and Sydney Fileen’s Sydney’s Big Electric Cat return with new episodes.  The AIR is PopCult‘s sister radio station. You can hear our shows on The AIR website, or just click on the embedded player found elsewhere on this page.

At 2 PM we present a brand-new edition of Mel larch’s Disco Music Showcase/.  For the first time since  the fourteenth edition of MIRRORBALL, we devote a show to the music of Chic. Our second one-hour salute to one of the biggest-selling and most-influential Disco bands of all time is well-deserved because. It’s been five years since we’ve bowed down at the altar of new York’s Disco Magicians. This episode salutes the brilliance of Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards and their band Chic, with the following tunes…

MIRRORBALL 122

CHIC

“Everybody Dance”
“Chic Cheer”
“At Last I Am Free”
“Savoir Faire”
“My Feet Keep Dancing”
“Real People”
“Stage Fright”
“Chic Mystique”
“Flash Back”
“Hangin'”
“I Want Your Love”

You can hear MIRRORBALL every Friday at 2 PM, with replays Sunday night at 11 PM and throughout the following week Monday at 9 AM and Tuesday at 1 PM plus there’s a mini-marathon that includes the latest episode Saturday nights at 9 PM

At 3 PM, Sydney Fileen graces us with a new episode of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat that salutes Dave Ball, the instrumentalist half of the seminal New Wave Band, Soft Cell, who passed away in October.

Sydney opens her show with the song, “Floatation” by The Grid, the band that Ball formed with Richard Norris and Sascha Souter during a hiatus from Soft Cell.

For the remainder of her program, Sydney pays tribute to Dave Ball with the music he created with vocalist Marc Almond in Soft Cell. Together, they created a sound that some say was definitive of the New Wave era.

This is a mixtape presentation so you can resort to the songlist below.

Check out the playlist..

BEC 134

The Grid “Floatation”
Soft Cell “Tainted Love/Where Did Our Love Go”
“Memorobilia”
“Say Hello Wave Goodbye”
“Sex Dwarf”
“Torch”
“Baby Doll”
“Heat”
“Martin”
“Kitchen Sink Drama”
“Forever The Same”
“Where The Heart Is”
“Hendrix Medley”
“Numbers”
“Soul Inside”
“The Art of Falling Apart”
“Down In The Subway”

Sydney’s Big Electric Cat is produced at Haversham Recording Institute in London, and can be heard every Friday at 3 PM, with replays  Monday at 7 AM, Tuesday at 8 PM, Wednesday at Noon and Thursday at 10 AM, exclusively on The AIR. Classic episodes can be heard Overnight late Monday/early Tuesday.

Your PopCulteer and his wife had a peaceful, quiet and relaxing holiday at home, which was much-needed following a year that, to put it in rather tame terms, sucked ass. Check PopCult every day for fresh content and all our regular features.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and whatever good tidings fill your bill from PopCult and the Larch-Panucci household.

2025 has been a year best left on the trash heap of history.  We began the year writing obituaries for good people, and we ended it writing obituaries for good people. I’d really like to take a year off from doing that.  We’ll try to stay positive while running our traditional holiday greeting. What really sucks is that I just copied and pasted that from last year’s Christmas Day post, and things got even worse on that front this year.

As is our tradition on Christmas Day, we bring you Melanie Larch singing “Ave Maria” from the very first Christmas episode of Radio Free Charleston. This is the twentieth consecutive Christmas that we’ve brought you this clip. It never gets old.

Let’s follow that up with the 2014 Christmas treat that saw Melanie backed by the late and much-loved and missed, Mark Scarpelli…

And we’ll continue with Mel’s 2009 Christmas song with Diablo Blues Band…

Let’s go back to Chicago, in 2019, for one more…

Wishing you and yours the best-

Rudy Panucci and Melanie Larch

Ten days ago we brought you PopCult’s 2025 Holiday Video that brings you sights from a visit we made last month to Kraynak’s Santa’s Christmasland in Hermitage, Pennsylvania. You’ll get to see it again at the bottom of this post.

That was the first post of our “12 Posts of Christmas” this year, where the idea was that we’d bring you on Holiday post every day to help get you into the proper mood to enjoy the Christmas season (or whatever particular Yuletide celebration you wish).  For the penultimate entry this year, we are going full circle and bringing you a giant photo essay from Kraynak’s, with all photos shot by my beautiful wife, Mel Larch, while I was shooting my shaky-cam video on my phone.

Mel’s photos will let you take a closer look at the fine detail and intricately-designed trees than you get in the video. There were dozens of trees and animatronic figures, and this gives you a better sample of how awesome and immersive the experience is.

Kryanak’s is a Western Pennsylvania institution, located roughly an hour Northwest of Pittsburgh. For most of the year it’s a a huge store filled with floral supplies, seasonal items and toys and general retail items of a particularly cool nature. At Christmas and Easter, a 300 foot long corridor on the side of the building is transformed into a holiday wonderland, filled with lights, trees, decorations and animatronics. You can visit Santa’s Christmasland until December 31.

Let me quote from their website:

Kraynak’s was established 1949 in Hermitage, Pa. There are three divisions of the Kraynak business. The first is the main retail store which is the home of Santa’s Christmasland and Easter Bunny Lane. These walk through displays have become a tradition for many families. This location sells Christmas and Easter decorations, toys, gifts, potted plants from the greenhouse and fresh cut flowers from the floral department.

The second division is the Kraynak’s Lawn and Garden center, located 1000ft behind the original store. At this location you may purchase trees, shrubs, garden supplies, and outdoor furniture.

The third division comprises of six nurseries where trees and shrubs are grown for retail and wholesale sales.

Kraynak’s is a family owned business that promotes fair pricing and quality products. Many families over the years have made Kraynak’s their store for all seasons.

That humble description does not do justice to the elaborate psychotronic and delightfully bizarre holiday displays, which are fully dismantled each year, with completely-new attractions designed and built the next year.  To be honest, our video and photos just scratch the surface of how wild and exciting the Christmas display is. We showed up on a Sunday in November, and if you can go on a weekday, that is probably a much wiser choice. The place was packed, with the line snaking its way through their impressive toy department.

You can see videos of their displays from this year and many previous years HERE.

Here are Mel’s photos, presented without captions so you can just take in the wonderful visuals (and I can get this thing posted because I’m working on it on Christmas Eve Morning)…

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Today’s entry in The 12 Posts of Christmas is a photo essay (with a bonus video that I decided to do on the spur of the moment) of the PopCult Christmas Trees.

Yeah…”Trees.”  Plural.  Mrs. PopCulteer has bought so many ornaments over the years that we ran out of space on the one tree long ago and had to start rotating them. Couple that with us finding the flaming red tree that we missed out on buying last year, and me having the feeling that, if we do two, why not three, and we wound up with three trees crowded into our cozy living room.

And even with that…we probably left more than two-thirds of the ornaments in the closet this year.

Now that we  have set the dangerous precedent of having multiple trees, things might even get more bizarre next year.

When I made my annual incursion into the attic here at Stately Radio Free Charleston Manor, I took inventory…and and there are half a dozen other trees up there.

God help us.

Anyway, we will kick off this year’s photo essay (in lieu of sending Christmas cards) with the smallest tree, a pre-lit four-footer that dates back to the time when your PopCulteer was not yet married to the love of his life, and just wanted something low-maintenance. I brought this one down to be the host of our tiny ornaments. Just so you don’t think we’re being extravagant here, the topper was a Dollar Tree find.

It occurs to me that some folks might be more interested in the cool stuff in the background than they are in the tree. That’s just rude. Don’t you be lookin’ at our stuff!

This tree was ideal for our tiny, nearly weightless, ornaments.

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Today in The 12 Posts of Christmas, rather than show you a fun video or cool picture, we’re going to take a day to look at the real meaning of the holiday.

Christmas is about giving. It’s about sharing. It’s about making a genuine and generous connection with your fellow humans.

Gift-giving is one way, but there is the selfish element of giving something to someone because of the joy you get out of seeing them receive it. There’s nothing at all wrong with that. It’s a way of expressing love, and we certainly need all the love we can get in this world, especially now.

But I’m talking about giving in a way that seriously improves the quality of life for everybody. It can be through a donation to Manna Meal or Hospice, or it can just be making dinner for a friend who’s down on their luck.

Today I’m going to take this space to plug a couple of GoFundMe pages for friends of mine who could use a helping hand. One has suffered a serious injury from an accident, while the other is working to bring his ailing mother home, so that she can have a better chance at recovering from illness and accidents.

First up we have Brian Diller. Brian is an old friend, dating back to the RFC broadcast radio days in the late 1980s. If you were around then you probably remember him as one of the top musical acts in town. He was “Charleston’s Bruce Springsteen” in many people’s eyes.

Brian is still making and releasing music, which isn’t a shock to regular listeners of Radio Free Charleston. I’ve been playing his new releases regularly and he’s been enjoying life with his wife Eliska in the Pittsburgh area. Brian’s been battling some health issues recently (some of which we discussed in an interview you can read HERE).

A couple of weeks ago he encountered a new health challenge when he fell down a flight of stairs. He broke his foot in four places and fractured his fibula. He nearly tore his foot off.

Of course, health insurance will not cover the entire costs of his recovery. He’ll need special equipment and therapy, plus other expenses relating to the accident as well as every day living expenses for the 4 to 6 months that he will be out of work.

You can read the full story of what happened and how you can help at a GoFundMe page set up by his wife on his behalf.

Another old friend from the original RFC days is Jon Raider, who played with Strawfyssh and other bands. Jon’s mother is battling several issues, the latest of which is a broken hip and shoulder, and he would like to bring her home because he feels that she would not do well in a nursing home enviroment.

I was in exactly the same boat with my mother back in 1997, so I know what he’s going through. This is a major commitment and a huge undertaking, and he could use all the financial help he can get.

Like I said, I know exactly what he’s dealing with here. Back when my mother suffered a major stroke that left her bedridden, I knew she would never be able to survive in a nursing home. She needed to be home, so I put my career on hold and became a full-time caregiver. we had her for more than eight years. I know that she wouldn’t have lasted more than a couple of months in a nursing home.

I don’t regret it one bit, and I had a lot of help. There were more resources available back then, and it was still a struggle. Today it’s even harder as home healthcare programs have been scaled back or eliminated outright so that “job creators” can pay lower taxes while shipping more jobs overseas.

But I’m getting a little off-topic here.

Back to Jon and his mother, you can read about his situation and donate at his GoFundMe page.

These are just two worthwhile causes. There is a whole world of them out there. I hope that, if you know Brian or Jon, or enjoyed hearing their music on Radio Free Charleston, you consider making a donation, in the true spirit of Christmas.

Getting into the holiday spirit, this week’s art is a quick and sloppy watercolor of the tree they put up in Giddings Plaza in Chicago. I think I may have done a painting of this tree years ago, but this is new, and while I ran a photo of this a couple of weeks ago, I did this without looking at it for reference. I’ve seen it enough times, and they seem to have the same tree every year, so it wasn’t that much of an artistic feat.

I also used watercolor on textured paper for the first time in months. Even though we stayed a block away from Blick Arts on our recent trip to the Windy City, I didn’t get a chance to duck in and replenish my acrylics, so I’ll have to order some online after the holidays.

This is NOT today’s 12 Posts of Christmas post. That’s coming later.  This is just an exercise in color and finger-loosening on a lazyish Sunday before Christmas.

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

Meanwhile, over in radioland,we are  going into Christmas mode on The AIR, Until Midnight, Christmas evening.  You can listen to The AIR at the website, or on the embedded radio player elsewhere on this page.

You can expect wall-to-wall holiday specials with music, comedy, drama and holiday gems from the vault. RFC will be new a week from Tuesday, with our final show of 2025, and if all goes well, Boxing Day will hold a couple of surprises, too.

From 2006 to 2015, I produced ten Christmas episodes (or specials/treats) of the Radio Free Charleston video show. A couple of years ago I compiled them all in a handy playlist to embed in this blog so you can watch them all together. Last year it seemed like a good idea to turn this into an annual tradition, so here we are.

We didn’t do a full-blown holiday episode every year. In 2008 I totaled my car on black ice early in December, and only managed to post a “half-episode” featuring music from the CYAC production of MARY: A Rock Opera from that year.  I don’t remember the exact reason, but in 2011 all we did was a short video of Johnny Compton and Prank Monkey.

But that’s all in here, and in order.  The 2006 show features Clownhole and Mel Larch. In 2007 we had The Mountain Laurel Ensemble, 69 Fingers and The Android Family. 2009 saw an extra-long show with music from Molly Means, Joseph Hale, Todd Burge, and Melanie Larch with The Diablo Blues Band. In 2010 we presented the talented crew from The Contemporary Youth Arts Company singing Christmas Carols and songs from Mary: A Rock Opera.

2012 saw us back to full-length with a show that features music from the Charleston Gay Mens Chorale, a duet from Lee Harrah and Pepper Fandango, a special “double trio” from the cast of “MARY: A Rock Opera,” and Prank Monkey. Also in this episode, we have the Ghost of Animation Past, a holiday message from Razor Sharp Studios and Burt Flemming, and a quick musical tour of The Marx Toy Museum in Moundsville, WV.  “Hasa Diga Shirt,” was our 2013 Christmas spectacular, with music from The Bob Thompson Unit and Frenchy and The Punk, plus a message from Santa, and animation from Jake Fertig.

Some of these shows are more than a little bittersweet, as they feature contributions from Lee Harrah and Brian Young, both of whom we lost in the last month.

In 2014 there’s more of the bittersweet as we had quite a bit of help from the late Mark Scarpelli. Melanie Larch and Mark performed “Christmas Time Is Here,” the classic tune from “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” This was our “all female voices” Christmas show as the other musical acts include: Marium Bria performing the Jody Herndon song, “Naughty Christmas.” Lady D — aka Doris Fields — took on the Donny Hathaway classic, “This Christmas.” The Laser Beams wrapped up the show with a rendition of “Up on the Rooftop.”  Also in this episode is the short film “Incomprehensible Words From Santa Claus,” as well as “Death Train,” a charming holiday cartoon about the real War on Christmas, created and animated by Jacob Fertig.

The final show in this playlist is both our least and most Christmas-y one of the batch. Our Christmas show for 2015 captures songs from a benefit show put on at The Empty Glass on December 12 of that year. The Logan-area band, let The Guilty Hang, lost all their equipment, merchandise, instruments and equipment cases in a fire in October. To help raise money for the band, Jeff Ellis, Sheldon Vance, Aaron Fisher, Speedsuit and Farnsworth all performed, with all the proceeds going to help this band get back on their feet. This was the true spirit of the season. Musicians came together, giving their gift of music to help raise money for fellow musicians down on their luck. When I first heard about this concert, I felt that it would make for a Christmas show more appropriate for the season than anything that I could contrive with a holiday theme.

Over the past eleven years, your humble blogger and his lovely wife have made many trips to Chicago in the Christmas season, and we always find the time to visit Chicago’s Christkindl Market, one of the biggest traditional German holiday festivals in the US. In the tradition of the German town fairs of the holiday season, this Christkindlmarket is set up in the historic Daley Plaza, in the shadow of the famous Picasso sculpture. This pop-up market runs from before Thanksgiving until Christmas Eve, every year.

For today’s entry in The 12 Posts of Christmas, we’re going to go back and bring you a batch of photos from our visits over the years.

Enjoy!

This is the main entrance. Pro-tip: Don’t wait in line for them to open this one. There are three other entrances and if you get there right when they open, it’s way quicker to go to one of those. At least it was that way until this year, when they decided to only have one entrance and limit how many people got in at a time.

The problem with running this photo is that now I really want a pretzel stuffed with spinach and feta, and I’ve never seen them for sale anywhere around here.

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This week we go back to late August, 2012, for the first of three shows devoted to “Tribute To The Troops II,” an outdoor show held at Saint Albans City Park, produced by Wood Boys Music.  Over the next few weeks we’ll look at some of the top bands of the day, who donated their work for a great cause.

This week we feature the late Lee Harrah and his band,  HARRAH, Everpulse and In The Company of Wolves. The show kicks off with Cadence Weaver singing the National Anthem.

In the next two weeks you will see performances from Breedlove, The Under Social, Remains Unnamed, Deck of Fools, Johnny Compton, and Point of Jerus.

You can read the original production notes HERE.

The PopCulteer
December 19, 2025

I’m not gonna lie, folks…it’s been a rough week.

So today I’m going to take it easy a bit. I’m making The PopCulteer one of our 12 Posts of Christmas.

Today on The AIR you can hear a very special new AIR XMAS MESS.  This one-hour show, hosted by my beautiful wife, Mel Larch, will run Friday at 10 AM, 1 PM, 5 PM and Midnight, with several additional airings over the next six days as we fold it into our collection of holiday programming on The AIR.  In fact, you can expect The AIR to be mostly Christmas and Holiday specials until the day after Christmas, one week from today. We’ll interrupt that with our marathons of The Swing Shift and MIRRORBALL, but otherwise, we are going into Christmas Spirit Overdrive.

It’s painfully easy to tune in to  The AIR.  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.  It’s not rocket science.

Today’s special is our only new Holiday programming this year (with the exception of parts of Radio Free Charleston). It’s been a bit of a struggle to maintain any Christmas spirit in the face of overwhelming loss and a bleak political landscape, but we are going to do our best.

It’s what Knute Rockne would’ve wanted.

What we decided to do is bring you Mel’s favorite Christmas album, 1987’s A Very Special Christmas, and since it’s less than an hour long, we’ve enhanced it with three more very special Christmas songs.

Here’s the playlist for this year’s AIR XMAS MESS…

A Very Special AIR XMAS MESS

“Santa Claus Is Coming To Town” The Pointer Sisters
“Winter Wonderland” Eurythmics
“Do You Hear What I Hear?” Whitney Houston
“Merry Christmas Baby” Bruce Springsteen And The E Street Band
“Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” The Pretenders
“I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” John Cougar Mellencamp
“Gabriel’s Message” Sting
“Christmas In Hollis” Run-D.M.C.
“Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” U2
“Santa Baby” Madonna
“The Little Drummer Boy” Bob Seger, The Silver Bullet Band
“Run Rudolph Run” Bryan Adams
“Back Door Santa: Bon Jovi
“The Coventry Carol” Alison Moyet
“Silent Night” Stevie Nicks
“Christmas Wrapping” The Waitresses
“Please Come Home For Christmas” Mel Larch & The Diablo Blues Band
“Christmas Carol” Tom Lehrer

That is it for this week’s PopCulteer. Check, back for fresh content every day, even when we don’t feel like it. We have six more days of our 12 Posts of Christmas, and with any luck, we will find our way back to some semblance of normality soon.