It’s November first and that means it’s time to start the most anticipated series of posts in PopCult, our annual Gift Guide.
Because of some unusual circumstances (I have a magazine deadline falling in the middle of the month, and at the same time I’m aiding my lovely wife in her recovery from major surgery) we’re changing the ground rules this year.
Each weekday you can expect two posts. One will offer up a single gift suggestion, while the second may contain multiple gift ideas (or it may not). Since the readership for this blog fairly well plummets on weekends, I won’t be running the Gift Guide on those days. Our regular features will continue on their regular days, so we will still have fresh content every day.
The last day for The 2024 PopCult Gift Guide will be November 29. The master list will be in The PopCulteer on the following Friday.
As for what you can expect…look for one more post later today, our first day will be a toy, as always, and our second day will see two posts on Monday. Beyond that you can expect the usual mix of comics, toys, music, video, trinketry, art and apparel. You’ll just have to check every day to see what pops up.
This is always a little overwhelming for your humble blogger, but it’s also something that people ask about all year long, so this first entry will serve as today’s PopCulteer column and then I’m off to write the first post.
Check PopCult often for new entries in The 2024 PopCult Gift Guide and all our regular features and notes on our programming on The AIR.
It seems appropriate on Halloween to bring you a song about one of the scariest things facing us…the possibility of the worst president in history getting re-elected next week and carrying out his plan to destroy the country. Join us in a little whistling past the graveyard as we hope for the best.
A few weeks ago I told you about a new Substack project by Douglas Imbrogno, and old friend and key player in the creation of this blog. Allow me to repeat myself, in case you missed it.
Doug’s new Substack is called Notes Before You Vote, hosted by AMP Media, and it’s a bit of an outlet for him to express overtly political thoughts and musings without intruding on his other projects like WestVirginiaVille and TheStoryIsTheThing.
Here’s what Doug told me about this project…
At the DNC, Michelle Obama exhorted us to “do something,” while Tim Walz urges us “to get in the game,” with under 60 days to the election. Here’s my doing something.
Notes Before You Vote is a collection of short videos compiled and created by Doug that are filled with pertinent, thought-provoking tidbits of information in an easy-to-digest bite-sized form, perfect for sharing on social media. As the home page says, these are “Some important things to consider before you cast your vote for the future direction of America in the Nov. 5 Presidential Election.”
Today we’re bringing you a music video (seen at the top of this post) that Doug created for his old friend (and mine), Paul Calicoat. Doug writes extensively about Paul’s song HERE. About Paul, Doug writes…
Paul Callicoat is a fabulous West Virginia singer-songwriter and one of the state’s finest lyricists and turners-of-musical-phrases. Paul’s soulfulness and heart is all over his music.
This is just one of the many songs and videos you can find at Notes Before You Vote . Just Tuesday he posted am excellent song by Chris Haddox, and you might as well subscribe so you don’t miss any of the new entries, which will be coming fast and furious in the coming days. Visit Notes Before You Vote for thoughtful, truthful and common sense infotainment about the most consequential election of our lifetimes.
Your humble blogger is still in caregiver mode, while also trying to get a head start on The PopCult Gift Guide (which starts this Friday), so we are onced again resorting to a stripped-down, graphic-heavy indicator of cool events happening all over the Charleston and adjacent areas.
Mrs. PopCulteer is recovering nicely, but yours truly is still a bit distracted.
Not too distracted to remind you that clocks “fall back” an hour this weekend, Sunday at 2 AM, to be exact.
Because of real life happenings, this week we’re still skipping the boilerplates, Easter eggs, running gags and all that jazz, and just giving you graphics for those shows whose organizers were wise or kind enough to create images with the important info within them, and then leave those images where I might find them. So here’s a selection of STUFF TO DO , including Halloween night, All Saints Day and the ensuing weekend, roughly in order…
Really, it’s not a big deal. I mean, this is the second time we’ve hit episode 200, and if you add up all the previous incarnations of the show and toss in The RFC MINI SHOW and RFC International, we’ve done around 775 episodes.
Still, a new week brings a new RFC on The AIR. And this week Radio Free Charleston presents three hours of listening enjoyment for you. 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.
To show you how much this isn’t really a big deal, the cool graphics accompanying our post this week are just recycled from episode 200 of our video show. Waste not, want not, you know.
We try to keep things normal in our first hour. We open with a new live track from Tucker Riggleman & The Cheap Dates. Then we bring you new tracks by Kate Fagan, Corduroy Brown, Skafish, The Surfrajettes and Paul Calicoat. You’ll read more about Paul’s new song, and see a video and link to the cool place from whence it originated on Thursday.
We also sneak in alternate versions of songs by Sierra Ferrell and King Crimson (back-to-back, no less!). And then we dive into the archives for our video shows.
I had the idea to bring you the songs from the 200th video episode of the show, and once I started, I decided to keep going, filling up the second and third hour with songs recorded for several subsequent episodes, and taking up most of the third hour this week with a documentary about the band 4TET, which expanded to nine members so they could do a mini tour playing the classic Bitches Brew album by Miles Davis.
I feel it sort of shows off the variety of music that we’ve brought you over the last three and a half decades.
Check out the playlist below. Where possible, live links will take you to the artist’s pages.
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 we continue our special Halloween Programming until 8 PM, then we pick it up again Wednesday afternoon.
This week’s art started life as a small study on cheap canvas board, based on a photo I took on the Brown Line last summer in Chicago. Just like last week, if you were paying attention.
However, this one seemed less promising, so I set it aside less than one-third finished.
Last week I found it in the slush pile and decided to go at it with a darker, spookier color palette because I didn’t really have anything else remotely Halloween-y to run this week. The end result is what you see above. This was done with thick acrylics, white-out and a little bit of ink, using brushes, foam brushes, flexible curves, straight-edges and a small assortment of palette and X-Acto knives.
It’s a tiny painting. Chances are, if you’re looking at it on a computer monitor, you’re seeing in larger than actual size.
Over in radioland, Monday beginning at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you a classic episode of Psychedelic Shack, and then at 3 PM we start our Halloween programming with a Goblin-centric edition of 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.
PsychedelicShack 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 5 PM our Halloween programming begins in earnest with an early Monday Marathon. You’ll be able to listen to large blocks of Halloween specials and spooky editions of our regular programs in large blocks of airtime all week long on The AIR. In addition to our musical specialty shows, you’ll also get treats like the Orson Welles adaptation of War of the Worlds, and Oingo Boingo’s Farewell Concert, along with other scary audio delights.
Above you see a compilation of (almost) every Halloween episode of Radio Free Charleston’s video show, plus a few other holiday-appropriate clips. You can see the episode we left out of this playlist compilation just below. For the second year in a row we decided to save all this for one last big Halloween video surprise.
Special Halloween programming will begin Monday at 9 PM and will run all week on The AIR!
And as an extra Halloween treat, here’s a long-lost documentary about The Braxton County Monster, made by half of the RFC big shots eleven years before the Radio Free Charleston video show. You can read more about it HERE.
From July, 2010, we have the fith part of our coverage of FestivALL 2010. This was Episode 106 of Radio Free Charleston and was the next-to-last of our six-episode look at FestivAll 2010. Cranking out these shows was the equivalent of producing a two-hour documentary–filming, editing, and posting online–in the span of three weeks.
This episode of RFC includes music from a Velvet Brothers offshoot, The Velvet Gypsies, Actual Rhinocerous and Comparsa, plus theatre, art, and dance from FestivALL.
We don’t want you to forget that Sydney Fileen returns with a new episode devoted the band, Simple Minds, Friday on The AIR. 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.
Friday at 2 PM on The AIR, we have an encore of a special episode of MIRRORBALL where Mel Larch devoted her hour of Disco to the keepers of the flame. Departing from her usual classic Disco-era vintage tunes, she brought you Disco-styled music from Pet Shop Boys, Kylie Minogue and Jimmy Somerville. You can read the original notes and playlist HERE.
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, it’s Big Electric Cat time as Sydney Fileen delivers a special NEW mixtape edition of her show that pays tribute to the pride of Glasgow, the band Simple Minds. Simple Minds took the world by storm and became Scotland’s biggest musical act of the 1980s, and this week Sydney brings you a mixtape primer of their new wave era hits, covering almost a decade of excellent and sophisticated New Wave Music.
Sydney explores the unlikely evolution of the punk band Johnny and the Self Abusers into the slick and sophisticated band known as Simple Minds. With a distinctive sound and massive hits on both sides of the Atlantic, this band was a showcase for Jim Kerr’s powerful voice and. according to Sydney, “provided a delightfull bombastic soundtrack that bridged the gap between New Wave and Progressive Rock.”
The band is still active, and is still making vital and important music, but Sydney brings you the best of Simple Minds from the late 1970s to the late 1980s, pretty much in line with the New Wave era.
The show includes their hits, a few live cuts and extended mixes, some deep album cuts, and of course it wraps up with that huge hit they had.
Check out this killer playlist…
Big Electric Cat 121
Simple Minds
“Glittering Prize”
“Life In A Day”
“Chelsea Girl”
“Changeling”
“I Travel”
“Celebrate”
“The American”
“Love Song”
“Sweat In Bullet”
“Theme For Great Cities”
“Promised You A Miracle”
“Someone Somewhere In Summertime”
“New Gold Dreams”
“Waterfront”
“Speed Your Love To Me”
“Up On The Catwalk”
“Alive and Kicking”
“Sanctify Yourself”
“All The Things She Said”
“Ghost Dancing”
“Belfast Child”
“Mandela Day”
“Soundtrack For Every Heaven”
“Sons and Fascination”
“Hunter and the Hunted”
“Don’t You Forget About Me”
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.
That’s it for this week’s PopCulteer, check back for all our regular feature, with fresh content, every day, even when the week includes hospital visits and caregiver duties.
Here’s the deal, folks. This is the weekend before Halloween, and there are TONS of cool events happening all over the Charleston and adjacent areas.
However, Mrs. PopCulteer had major surgery on Tuesday. Everything went as expected and we brought her home on Wednesday, but yours truly is still in caregiver mode and not blog-writer mode.
I did preview several of these events on this week’s episode of Radio Free Charleston, which you can hear Thursday afternoon at 2 PM and Friday morning at 9 AM on The AIR, or you can listen any time at THIS POST.
Because of real life happenings, this week we’re skipping the boilerplates, Easter eggs, running gags and all that jazz, and just giving you graphics for those shows whose organizers were wise or kind enough to create images with the important info within them, and then leave those images where I might find them. So here’s a selection of STUFF TO DO the weekend before Halloween, roughly in order…
This week Mel Larch brings you a new edition of Curtain Call devoted to remembering four recently-departed legends of the world of Musical Theatre.
At 3 PM, Wednesday afternoon’s Curtain Call on The AIR follows an encore of a recent edition of Beatles Blast (which airs at 2PM).
The last week of September was particularly cruel to fans of Theatre. Dame Maggie Smith passed away on the 27th, followed three days later by Ken Page and Gavin Creel. More recently, Mitzi Gaynor, who brought Musicals to life on the big screen, passed away at the age of 93.
This week on Curtain Call, Mel lets you sample some of the music of these legends, along with a tribute and brief bio.
In Curtain Call’s 151st episode you will hear:
“Medley We Don’t Want To Lose You” Maggie Smith, Penny Allen from Oh What A Lovely War
“One Perfect Moment” Maggie Smith from New Faces of ’56, a Broadway Revue
“What Do I Need With Love” Gavin Creel from Thoroughly Modern Millie
“Hair” by Gavin Creel and Tribe,from HAIR
“You” by Gavin Creel from Bounce (Road Show) by Stephen Sondheim
“Elegance” by Gavin Creel, Beanie Feldstein, Kate Baldwin, Taylor Tensch from the 2017 revival of Hello Dolly
“I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair” Mitzi Gaynor, from South Pacific soundtrack
“Anything Goes” and “You’re The Top” Mitzi Gaynor and Gaynor with Bing Crosby from the Anything Goes soundtrack
“Ooogie Boogie’s Song” Ken Page, from A Nightmare Before Christmas
“Your Feet’s Too Big,” “The Ladies Who Sing With The Band” and “Honeysuckle Rose” from Ain’t Misbehavin’
“The Moments of Happiness,” “The Ad-Dressing Of Cats” from Cats OBC
“Sit Down You’re Rockin’ The Boat” Ken Page from Guys and Dolls (1976 Revival Cast)
Curtain Call can be heard on The AIR Wednesday at 3 PM, with replays Thursday at 8 AM, Friday at 10 AM, Saturday at 8 PM, Monday at 9 AM and Tuesday at 2 PM. A marathon of classic episodes can be heard Sunday morning beginning at 9 AM, and an all-night marathon of Curtain Call episodes can be heard Wednesday nights, beginning at Midnight.
Tonight at 10 PM we bring you the comedic music of The Bonzo Dog Band on a classic episode of The Comedy Vault. You can hear this replayed Saturday at 6 PM and next Monday at 8 PM.
The PopCulteer
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