It’s recycling time in PopCult today as we bring you the second of our 12 Posts of Christmas.

Last year I made three (and a half) holiday videos for readers of this blog.

My main motivation for making three of them was to give you some fresh video content to watch while I was in Chicago for Mel’s annual birthday trip.  After we got back I made a really short video to go with our Christmas Tree photo essay (this year’s is coming later this week).

As part of this half-baked idea I had of posting 12 days worth of Holiday content, today we bring you three of those four videos in this post, for your enjoyment. The other one was re-used as a Sunday Evening Video right before we left for Chicago this year.

Our first video is a return visit to Sir Troy’s Toy Kingdom, in Canton, Ohio, with music by Clownhole…

Next up, we have our look at Charleston’s Light The Night light show at Go Mart Park.  The music on this one is Mel Larch and Mark Scarpelli taking on a Vince Guaraldi classic…

And for the heck of it, here’s another look at PopCult’s Disco Christmas Tree!  Merry Christmas, folks!

And since you made it this far, it’s only fair to reward you with the news that Christmas programming will begin running on The AIR Monday at 3 PM, and continuing all week long.  You can hear these shows on The AIR website, or just click on the embedded player found elsewhere on this page.

This week’s art is a small acrylic painting on illustration board that was inspired by a photo I took out the window of the Amtrak Cardinal in Indiana the week before last on my way to Chicago.

I made several tries before I got the giant windmills lined up just right against the dawn sky.

They looked so serene, yet majestic…towering over the snow-covered landscape like eternal watchmen, making sure that everybody was safe.

I mean, who doesn’t love seeing these windmills? Only a complete idiot would hold some kind of Bizarro-world grudge against them.  I hate to think about such a pathetic Donald Quixote being a real person.  I mean, what kind of loser would dislike free energy that doesn’t pollute.

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 a classic episode of Psychedelic Shack, and then at 3 PM we kick off our Christmas programming 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.

Replacing The Radio Free Charleston Daily show at 5 PM is even more of our Holiday shows from prior years. It’ll be like that until Boxing Day, when our presentation of RFC volume Five will resume.

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.

Above you see 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.

This is the first post of our “12 Posts of Christmas” this year, where the idea is that we will 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).  You can expect videos, photo essays, word essays and flashbacks to previous years, all leading up to the big day.

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 just scratches 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.

I’m pretty sure we’re going to be going back in the future. They have a pretty huge toy department, plus a selection of regional candy and some interesting sodas, and to be honest, we were caught off-guard by the size and scope when we went, and didn’t really get enough time to soak it all in. Plus ,I’m really curious about what the store is like in the off-season.

The music you hear in the background is from The December People. The December People is a group of veteran musicians led by Robert Berry, who perform traditional holiday tunes in the styles of Progressive and Classic Rock bands. I’ve been a big fan of Robert Berry since he teamed with Keith Emerson and Carl Palmer in the group, 3, back in the 1980s, and he’s still making great music, currently with his band, Six by Six.

And if you want to buy some of his music, merch and related stuff, go HERE.

The music I chose for this video is from the first December People album, and it’s “The Carol of the Bells,” performed in the style of one of my favorite bands, YES.

This is our quick and sloppy, shot on the phone,  non-monetized, holiday music video.  In the next week we’ll be posting a large photo essay from our visit. You can expect more Christmas-y stuff every day for the next eleven days, here in PopCult.

This week we go back to August, 2012 for a special episode of the show that, in reality, takes us all the way back to December, 1989. At the time I called it “my most self-indulgent episode of Radio Free Charleston.” “Wild Adventure Shirt” broke our usual format and used a skit to set up vintage footage of a 1989 concert at the legendary and now demolished Charleston Playhouse by the band Clownhole.

Clownhole was a punk trio consisting of drummer Randy Brown, bassist Chris (Flair) Canfield, and Defectors veteran John (Sham Voodoo) Estep. This concert was held during the Christmas season in 1989 and fell into my lap when Randy got in touch with me and put a copy of it in my hands. In recent years, Clownhole have reconvened, and warmed your humble blogger’s aging  heart by recording some of their classics from back in the day. You can search for them over in the Search Window for this blog and catch up.

I even used some of this video to create an intentionally low-quality video for their re-recorded rendition of “Deck The Halls.”

This was pure nostalgic glee for me. The Charleston Playhouse, which I’ve written about here in PopCult almost since day one, was a very important place in my life. I met many lifelong friends there and even met the love of my life, “Mrs. PopCulteer,” Melanie Larch, about two weeks after this concert took place.

This episode of the show was a blast, and was made even more fun by the silly improvised host segments featuring me, Mel and my imaginary daughter, Kitty Killton. You can read more about this episode at the original production notes HERE.

As a bonus, the night before this episode went live, I posted a NSFW preview using footage that we left out of this show. You can see Johnny Mac and Sham Voodoo hamming it up on stage below.

The PopCulteer
December 12, 2025

Your PopCulteer is back from his annual trip to Chicago to celebrate his beautiful wife’s birthday. Even though she absolutely hates having her picture taken, I’m including a couple of shots of her in this post because she’s the reason we went in the first place. That’s us at right, back at the place where we got married in 2014.

We had a great trip, actually including two different shows at Steppenwolf, plus visits to other cool places, all crammed into a too-short visit.

Actually, we got back Wednesday morning, but we’re still sort of exhausted. I had a few fires to put out when we got home, plus we needed to get the trees (yes, plural) up, and recover from having our Amtrak tickets downgraded both ways, which really messed with our ability to sleep and then function the next day.

What this means for you is, it’s time for a short PHOTO ESSAY!

So here’s some of the images from our trip. I’ll write more about it later, when I’m more awake.

On the way there, we were stuck on the tracks for close to an hour while the engine was downloading new navigation software, but we got to pass the time watching this cool little device go on and off the rails, towing and pushing train cars out of the snow on a side-rail. Now I want one for the train layout I swear I’m going to build one day.

Closer to our destination, here’s where the White Sox play, at “I’m not going to bother learning the mile-long, stupid-sounding corporate name” Park.

Our first stop after checking into the hotel was across the street at Nordstrom’s, which had a pop-up JellyCat boutique. We went on a weekday when you could walk right in to buy some lovely plush. On the weekends, they had crowd control barriers and it was like the Black Hole of Calcutta.

The adjoining mall, The Shops at Northbridge, had its own pop-up, several areas of the mall had been done up in the style of Chicago’s 2D restaurant, where everything looks like a 2D line drawing.

The effect is striking, and very appealing to a graphic designer, like yours truly.

The furniture was functional, and the selfie opportunities were boundless.

It would’ve been cool if the snacks in the snack shop were also in 2D, but the expense couldn’t justify the effort.

The piano in the background was working. Mel actually played a little on it.

After we were there for a while, I started hearing “Take On Me” very faintly in the background. I looked down and my watch had changed. We got the hell out of there before it spread.

Because I’ve done so many photo essays on Christkindl Market, I planned to skip taking any pictures there, but I did want you guys to see the bondage ornaments–a long-standing German tradition!

Saturday night we went to see John C. Reilly as Mister Romantic. I will tell you more about this great show next week.

A quick side-trip saw us back in Giddings Plaza, where Mel went to Enjoy, one of her favorite stores, and I took a photo of the tree…again.

We found the place where they designed the top bunks in Amtrak’s sleeper roomettes.

We hotel-hopped to end our stay at The Wit, in the Loop. This is what we saw out the window.

After droppiing our bags at The Wit on Sunday, we rode the L out to the Fulton Market district to procure Mel’s birthday slice of Rainbow Cake from The Goddess and the Grocer.

Post-cake, we returned to Steppenwolf to watch an amazing matinee performance of Amadeus. Review coming next week.

While checking out the gym at The Wit we found this strange Kubrick corridor, with weird lighting and some funged-up shui.

We leave you with that same photo, color-corrected, cropped and fuzzy as hell.

And that is this week’s PopCulteer. Check back every day for fresh content and all of our regular features. With any luck, we’ll be back to writing form by next week.  And yes, I wore the Fedora and the Picasso shirt to the gym.

So your humble blogger is back from Chicago, still somewhat worn out from all the epic fun, but since yesterday’s STUFF TO DO was so skimpy, how about we do a bonus round today?

Keep in mind that Winter weather may make going out a very poor life choice, so be careful out there.

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. Especially this week when I have been very seriously half-assing this collection of things you can get into, if you are so inclined.

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 Steve Himes on Friday, and The String Chiefs on Saturday.

Now let’s go check out the stuff I didn’t cover yesterday…

Continue reading

I’m writing this a week before you’ll see it, so, after a two-week absence due to The 2025 PopCult Gift Guide, today we’re going to give you a scaled down version of STUFF TO DO, without the lengthy boilerplate (you can find an example HERE). Thursday I’ll post an extra STUFF TO DO, to get all the stuff that I didn’t know about when I wrote this. Next week we’ll try to be back to some kind of normal.

Until we get back to normal in December, more than ever, 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.

We very happily 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.  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 couple of weeks that I was able to scrounge up online…

Where were we before we were so tragically interrupted?

Oh yes.  Because of my work on The 2025 PopCult Gift Guide, which ran an extra week but is now in our rear-view mirror, I decided to tinker with the format for the episodes of Radio Free Charleston  that you heard two weeks ago, and can hear today on 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.  

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

Today’s show is the second of what will now be two “Best of 2025” episodes. I open the show with a new song from the Heavy Hitters Band, plus bring you a new set of four more new tunes, and then we go back to earlier this year for chunks of previous shows–the best chunks–I’m talking USDA Grade A chunks of internet radio–so you can revisit the vital and thriving local and independent music scene that our free-format show brings you each week. Last week’s show was turned into a memorial for Lee Harrah, and this week’s show is basically me covering my ass because I’m in Chicago for my lovely wife’s birthday, and won’t be back until tomorrow.

Our new music this week is from the aforementioned Heavy Hitters Band, Corduroy Brown (with a Charlie Brown Superstar remix), Gardenn, Moron Police and Jim And The Sea Dragons.

And then we check out some of the best segments from Radio Free Charleston from the middle of 2025. We don’t do the hourly breaks clean at the top of the hour, so the playlist is just one long stream.

Check out the playlist. Links will take you to pages for the artists…

RFC V5 251

The Heavy Hitters Band “No Mask”
Corduroy Brown “Doin’ My Best (EDM Remix by Charlie Brown Superstar)”
Gardenn “MailMan”
Moron Police “King Among Kittens”
Jim And The Sea Dragons “Happy Go Lucky”
Ligature “Breathe”
Masser Chups “Kiss of the Night”
Falling Stars “Do Your Thing”
The Heavy Editors “Bleed”
Massing “Stay Inside”
Lady Gaga “Killah”
AJ Rosales “Wait”
Tucker Riggleman & The Cheap Dates “Void”
Matt Mullins and The Bringdowns “Big Sky”
Sierra Ferrell “American Dreaming”
Hello June “Honey I Promise”
Catherine Campbell “Long Hair”
The Settlement “The One That Got Away”
Electric Pets “Kowtow”
Jim Lange “Departure”
SPACE FREQ “Strut”
Dark Entities “Undertow”
Djabe & Steve Hackett “A Storm Is Brewing”
Tori Amos “Insect Ballet”
ABC “Brighter Than The Sun”
A Tale of Two “Renegade”
Novelty Island “Northern Nowhere”
Matching Outfits “Everybody Drives”
Erik Woods “My Turtle”
Masser Chups “Insomnia of the Mummies”
Corduroy Brown “4th Avenue”
Speedsuit “Paroled”
Tyler Childers “Bitin’ List”
Joy Viver “Precious Stones”
June Swoon “What Ever After”
M Robin Scott “God Knows Why”
A Tale of Two “Once Upon A Summer’s Day”
Brian Diller “Drive”
Sheldon Vance “Tonight We Sing”
The M.F.B. “Karaoke Casualty”

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 quick ‘n’ sloppy acrylic painting I did of a tiny Christmas tree that I put up in the corner of my living room twelve or fifteen years ago. I found a bunch of old digital photos, most of them out of focus, and used them for inspiration.

One reason for this is because I needed a quick piece of art for this space because I’m working ahead on the blog. Your humble blogger is actually in Chicago at the moment, celebrating his lovely wife’s birthday. Also, this tiny tree came back out of the attic this year…to join two other trees in our festive forest of a living room. You’ll get to see what they look like decorated once we get back into town…and decorate them.

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 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.

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.

After taking yet another a year off, and for no reason other than I need to write more than a week’s worth of this blog because I’m going to Chicago for Mel’s birthday (which is today, Happy Birthday my love), we once again bring you a collection of Christmas-themed short films that are, shall we say, “less traditional” than those you might normally watch to get into the holiday spirit. Against all common sense this has become a new bi-annual tradition! Some of these you may have seen before here in PopCult, while some are new to our readers. All of them, are pretty messed up, in their own ways. These are our olive branch to those of us who have more of a “Bah, Humbug” attitude toward the holiday on this Christmas season.

Our opening video this year is a heartwarming cartoon about ways to die at Christmas…

Returning from 2020, it’s a music video by The Dollyrots, conveniently called “Messed Up Christmas,” and it was written using contest entries from their fans that asked “What messed up thing do you want for Christmas?”

We continue with a short film from 2017 called “Sleigh,” starring Matt Berry and Nigel Planer…

Next up we bring you a parody of the 30th Anniversary of “Do They Know It’s Christmas” by the comedy crew of 22 Minutes…

Finally we bring you Ken Russell’s heartwarming holiday classic, “A Kitten For Hitler”…

In the spirit of the holiday season, I say, “There, that oughtta hold the little buggers.”