This week we bring you another smallish acrylic painting on illustration board.

It’s inspired a little bit by an old digital design I did years ago, but didn’t actually use here in Monday Morning Art.

It started out looking a bit like a war mask, but after I settled on that name, I kept painting, and it wound up looking a bit more like a Mardi Gras mask at Carnival. This was basically an exercise in limbering up my fingers because I haven’t spent enough time painting over the last few weeks.

To see this week’s art bigger try clicking HERE.

For an update on today’s new radio shows on The AIR, check back before noon. One of our shows is hitting a milestone, and it gets its own post this week.

Educational standards in this country are shockingly disappointing. Hardly any kids are taught the history of Godzilla these days.

Test scores and intelligence levels have dropped since they took Godzilla out of our schools.

The above video should help remedy that, just a little. Please, gather up your children and make them watch this one-hour-plus condensed history of the King of the Kaiju, Godzilly, himself.

Do it, in the name of Godzilla!

Do it for…the children!

At the top of the post you will find Radio Free Charleston number 132 from June, 2011. This was our last episode before we launched into our extensive coverage of FestivALL, which you will see unfold in this space over the next two months or so. This special pre-FestivALL episode included music from Wiley Sonic, The Voodoo Katz, and The Poor Taters, plus belly dancing from Jennifer Brooke Swanson, and animation by yours truly.

Host segments were shot on a sunny Sunday morning on Charleston’s historic East End in front of Glen Brogan’s then-new mural on the side of the Bluegrass Kitchen.

Jennifer was recorded on Capitol Street during a previous FestivALL. We caught up with Wiley Sonic at The Empty Glass, and recorded The VooDoo Katz at Haddad Riverfront Park. Finally the Poor Taters showed up courtesy of our old and much-missed buddy, Jerry Fugate, recorded on a back porch somewhere in Putnam County, if I recall correctly.

You can find the original production notes HERE.

The PopCulteer
April 25, 2025

Music helps you feel alive on The AIR Friday afternoon as 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.

Rejoice and prepare to feel four or five decades younger (where applicable).

Friday at 2 PM on The AIR, we have a new episode of MIRRORBALL where Mel Larch once again presents a selection of the best and brightest of the classic Disco era.

Don’t believe us? Check out the playlist. It’s got filled to the rim with Disco…

MIRRORBALL 114

Tina Turner “Love Explosion”
Miami “Disco Weekend”
Stargard “You’re The One”
The Natural Four “Try To Smile”
Blue Magic “Welcome To The Club”
The Meters “Disco Is The Thing Today”
Norma Jean Wright “Sorcerer”
The Undisputed Truth “Let’s Go Down To The Disco”
Eloise Lewis “1,000 Laughs”
Curtis Mayfield “Move On Up”
Tasha Thomas “Shoot Me (With Your Love)
Gene Page “Wild Cherry”

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 brings you an all-star LIVE IN CONCERT mixtape of the greatest hits of the New Wave era performed in front of actual, living hoomin beans.

Most of these are vintage performances, recorded during the New Wave era, but Sydney has slipped in a few recently-recorded ringers, and being the sly fox she is, she isn’t saying which tracks are old and which are newish. You’ll just have to figure it out for yourself. Rest assured, all of the songs are indeed recorded live in concert. She swears it.

Check out this killer playlist…

BEC 127
Live Mixtape

Thompson Twins “Hold Me Now”
The Tubes “Talk To Ya Later”
Human League “Don’t You Want Me”
DEVO “Somewhere With DEVO Medley”
Blondie “Rip Her To Shreds”
Shriekback “My Spine Is The Baseline”
Talking Heads “Psycho Killer”
Ramones “Pinhead”
The Cars “You’re All I’ve Got Tonight”
Elvis Costello “Radio Radio”
The Police “Can’t Stand Losing You”
Cyndi Lauper/Blue Angel “Can’t Blame Me”
Joan Jett “Bad Reputation”
Joe Jackson “Friday”
The Alarm “Sixty Eight Guns”
ABC “How To Be A Millionaire”
Camoflage “Computerliebe”
The Teardrop Explodes “Ha Ha I’m Drowning”
Annie Lennox “Here Comes The Rain Again”
Heaven 17 “Temptation”
Lene Lovich “Lucky Number”
The Dickies “You Drive Me Ape”
Gang of Four “At Home He’s A Tourist”

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 we sneak one town over to see a musical.

The PopCult Bookshelf

Aurora Plastic Models Catalogs: Volume 1 – The 1960’s
compiled by Anthony Taylor
APT Publishing
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 979-8312227680
Paperback $35.99
Hardback $64.99

This book, the first of two volumes, is manna from heaven for fans of Aurora Model kits. A huge, mainstream hobby from the 1950s into the 1970s, and still a popular pastime today, one of the most creative companies making these assemble-it-yourself kits was Aurora Plastics.  I’m reviewing the first of two volumes here because it was a gift from Mrs. PopCulteer for Easter. I’ll be getting the second volume in a few weeks.

In this book, after a brief intro by Anthony Taylor, you get over 320 pages of pure gold–ten years worth of retailer sales catalogs from Aurora from the 1960s.

These catalogs were available in most hobby shops so kids (and adults) could make wishlists and see the full product line. A special treat for collectors of today is the presence of the original suggested retail prices, which are hilariously low. Back then you could get a top-notch model kit for less than what you pay for a candy bar today.

The catalogs are reproduced in full color, close to their original size, and they trace the evolution of the hobby over the course of the 1960s. The early years see the catalogs dominated by airplanes and cars, with just a few historical figures in the mix.

As the years progress, we see a virtual explosion of pop culture topics, as Aurora’s selection reflects the passions of the day, from the space program to James Bond and spies, to superheroes, Batmania, hit TV shows and movies and even “original equity” creations designed to cash in on the burgeoning counter culture.

And we can’t leave out the monsters. “Monster Kids” loved model kits, and one of the major forces driving the hobby was the Universal Monsters, with additional kits featuring Godzilla, literary horror and other scary subjects. At one point they even combined the monsters with hot rods. The package art shown here is incredible and the product descriptions priceless.

Aurora Plastic Models Catalogs: Volume 1 – The 1960’s is a brilliant time capsule of a hobby that is still going strong. In fact, at the end of May I’ll be going to WonderFest USA, the countries biggest convention devoted to model kit building and horror, and I intend to hook up with Anthony there to buy the second volume, which is devoted to the 1970s.

That means it’ll have Prehistoric Scenes, Monsters Scenes and other model kits that I grew up attempting to assemble.

Aurora Plastic Models Catalogs: Volume 1 – The 1960′s is a must-have for any model kit collector, and will be of great interest to anybody interested in pop culture from the 1960s, and one of the most creative ways to ever play with toys…building models.

You can order the book from Amazon, through Anthony Taylor’s website, or track him down at one of the many conventions he’ll be attending and/or organizing this summer.

We find ourselves rapidly approaching the one-third mark in 2025, and as this year flies by, both too fast and also not nearly fast enough, there is a ridiculous amount of STUFF TO DO in and around Charleston, WV, this coming weekend and beyond, so let’s jump and maybe beef up the boilerplate a bit.

This weekend there is a lot of stuff happening in Huntington.  Wednesday, Marshall’s production of of The SpongeBob Squarepants Musical begins its run. The Appalachain Film Festival happens at the Foundry Theater starting Friday with  showing of Danny Boyd’s Invasion of the Space Preachers (with the director and cast members on hand), and also on Friday, some RFC faves appear at The Loud. You’ll find graphics for all these events below.

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 Twitter.  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.

We are also 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 Fridays and Saturdays you can find live music at Taylor Books. There is no cover charge, and shows start at 7:30 PM. This weekend’s shows are not yet known to our intelligence sources.

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. I hear that last week’s jam was epic.

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.

Clendenin Browing Co is a microbrewery with 4 themed lodging rooms in a 1920s bank building on Main St Clendenin, WV. They’ve been host a lot of musical acts lately.

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 and also at The Empty Glass many Tuesday evenings. 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. You can also visit Coal River Coffee in Saint Albans for live music in an alcohol-free environment. This Friday at 7 PM  Coal River Coffee features Minor SwingI 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.

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 illlnesses 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.

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 that I was able to scrounge up online…

Continue reading

We have exciting premieres, great tunes from the past and a special hour-long mixtape of weird covers on an all-new Radio Free Charleston for you 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.

We open this week’s show with the premiere of “Floating Chrystanthema,” the lead single from Byzantine’s upcoming album, Harbingers, which is due out June 13. You can pre-order the album now HERE, or save that link and order it on May 2, when you can get it on Bandcamp Friday, the day when Bandcamp doesn’t take a cut, and the artists get most of the money. Pre-orders get the lead single now, with the rest coming on the day of release.

We also have new tracks from Matt Berry/New Street Adventure, Nellie McKay, Julian Lennon, The Settlement, the Heavy Editors, Hawkwind and more.

Our third hour, largely based on a 2002 album called “When Pigs Fly,” is a mixtape of weird and offbeat covers. Some are masterpieces, like DEVO covering Neil Young’s “Ohio.”  Other tracks feature more questionable choices, like Lesley Gore covering AC/DC or Don Ho covering Peter Gabriel. All of them are at least interesting. I’ll leave it up to you to decide if they’re interesting in a fun and exciting way, or if they’re interesting in a Chinese curse way. Tracks from that album are supplemented with additional oddities from my collection.

The links in the playlist will take you to the pages for the artists in the first two hours of this week’s show where possible…

RFC V5 222

hour one
Byzantine “Floating Chrysanthema”
Matt Berry, New Street Adventure “Silver Rings”
Massing “Waffles & Pancakes”
The Heavy Hitters Band “90 Degrees (live)”
Nellie McKay “Queen Mary”
Saycouth “Phantom Love”
Julian Lennon “Love Don’t Let Me Down (Lo-fi)”
The Settlement “Work”
The Blues Brothers “Theme from Rawhide”
Ringo Starr “Come Back”
Tim OBrien and Jan Fabricius “Lonesome Armadillo”

hour two
The Heavy Editors “Be That Way”
David Synn “Infusion”
Hawkwind “Space Continues (Lifeform)”
Avamanyar “Did You Know”
James Whitely “Reaching Out”
Emmalea Deal & The Hot Mess “Sour”
Hello June“Dance (M Walker Remix)”
Siouxsie & The Banshees “This Wheel’s On Fire”
Sophie Ellis-Bextor “Relentless Love”
The Darkness “Rock and Roll Party Cowboy”

hour three covers mixtape
DEVO “Ohio”
Kon Kan “I Beg Your Pardon (I never Promised You A Rose Garden)”
The Box Tops “Call Me”
Nina Hagen “Personal Jesus”
The Fixx “These Boots Are Made For Walking”
Guided By Voices “I Think I Love You”
The Connell’s “Insane In The Brain”
Billy Preston “Girls On Film”
Andrew Gold “Ghostbusters”
The Oak Ridge Boys “Carry On My Wayward Son”
Herman’s Hermits “White Wedding”
T Rex “Sitting On The Dock of the Bay”
Lesley Gore “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap”
Ani DiFranco & Jackie Chan “Unforgettable
Don Ho “Shock The Monkey”

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 give you an encore of two classic episodes of The Swing Shift.

 You can hear The Swing Shift Tuesday at 3 PM, with replays Wednesday at 8 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 Thursday and Sunday evenings.

We are back to real-world physical art this week with this small acrylic-on-illustration board study inspired by your humble blogger looking at cars in the parking lot at a local big-box store earlier in the week whilst waiting for Mrs. PopCulteer to finish shopping (I’d left the store before her so I could rest my aging knee).

With this I tried to capture the reflections of reflections that you see when cars are parked close together. It actually creates some weird optical illusions when you stare at them long enough. In this case, without photographic reference (I was too lazy to retrieve my phone from my pants pocket), I tried to recreate this weird visual of a car reflected in one car (not shown), then that reflection being reflected in another car, so that you see what appears to be a funhouse mirror reflection of a car that’s actually behind the car it’s being reflected by multiple times. It’s all due to angles and curves.

It looked weird in a cool sort of way, so I tried to paint it.

Admittedly, this is more of a doodle than a study. I doubt I’ll actually get around to doing a huge canvas painting of this one, but it does look sort of nifty.

To see this week’s art bigger try clicking HERE.

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 an also classic 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.

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 the very first episode of The Comedy Vault.

Tonight at 9 PM for the Monday Marathon we bring you ten hours of The Swing Shift, my weekly (ish) show devoted to Swing Music. This batch of ten shows has a heavy emphasis on 90s revival Swing acts like The Brian Setzer Orchestra and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy.

We lost Jules Huffman ten years ago last week at the age of 91. The retired WSAZ weatherman was better known to generations of kids as “Mr. Cartoon,” the host of a daily (later weekly) cartoon show on WSAZ that for most of its run aired at 5 PM, right after school. I am recycling this Sunday Evening Video post from ten years ago because it’s Easter (and Wrestlemania) and a lot of folks will not be online…and also because Jules Huffman loved Easter.

The outstanding thing about Huffman was that he was a genuinely nice man. I met him a couple of times as an adult working in the television business, and he treated everyone, from a major TV executive to a lowly production assistant, with respect.  I’ve heard dirt on almost every local broadcaster, and he’s one of the few people that had no dirt to tell. He was just the same nice guy that you saw on TV.

Last year, thanks to a wonderful documentary produced by WVPB in conjunction with WSAZ-TV, Huffman finally got his flowers. You can see that documentary HERE.

Today we’re bringing you two video clips of the man in action. That’s a ten-minute excerpt up top, with a longer video below from the 1985 Charleston Regatta. He was the last of a generation of cartoon-show hosts, and a lot of “Cartooners” were really bummed out by his passing.

Up top, direct from the last day of May 2011, you see episode 131 of Radio Free Charleston. “Thenewno2 Shirt.”  This was a special episode of RFC that was devoted to promoting a great triple bill of live, original music held on Saturday, June 4 of that year featuring local favorites Tofujitsu and Mother Nang and Washington DC’s, Wiley Sonic.

Wiley Sonic was the then-new band fronted by Joe Vallina, who has a long history with Radio Free Charleston, having appeared as the one of the first in-studio guests on the radio version of RFC back in 1989.  Back then, Joe was half of the punk duo Blind Blue Leper Society.  The other half of that duo was local bartending and jam band legend, Washboard Dave.  More recently I’ve played tracks from Joe’s current band, The Heavy Editors, on the RFC radio show on The AIR.

Joe provided the music video for Wiley Sonic, and we had video in our archives of then-recent performances by Mother Nang (recorded at The Blue Parrot) and Tofujitsu (live at The Empty Glass). Animation is by Frank Panuci with music by yours truly. Host segments were recorded at the Grove City Outlet Mall, about an hour North of Pittsburgh for reasons I have totally forgotten. The show’s namesake shirt featured the band, thenewno2, which was the musical vehicle then being used by Dhani Harrison. Dhani was an early supporter of RFC back in the MySpace days. And for some reason, there are planets running alongside the credits in this episode.

You can find the original production notes HERE.