The weather outside is not quite as frightful as it was last week, so if you don’t mind heading out into a Winter Wonderland, here’s PopCult‘s weekly guide to things you can get into in and around Charleston, West Virginia.

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 or Twitter. I dont charge for this, so you might as well send me something if you have an event to promote.

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.

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.

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 burlesque.

The multitude of breweries and distilleries that have popped up in Charleston of late tend to bring in live musical acts as well.

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. 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. I 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.

For cutting-edge indepent 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…

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We are two weeks into 2025 and we have a new three hour show for you!  Tuesday is once again “New Show Day” on The AIR.  As such, we have a new episode of  Radio Free Charleston 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.

This week RFC brings you three hours of cool stuff, starting with the latest single by Matt Berry. It’s the title track of his new album, filled with early-70s-style California funkiness, and it’s due out next week.  After that we have new stuff from Todd Burge, Shining Glass, The Polkamaniacs, Franz Ferdinand, Ringo Starr, SPACE FREQ, and more,

I also dive into the archives for a lot of local tracks, plus some of my patented programming non-sequitors. It’s a fun show.

And speaking of diving into the archives, I actually had a longtime listener contact me and ask if I could play the 1973 Columia Records sampler, The Guitars That Destroyed The World.

I didn’t have the album. I really didn’t get into music heavily until the late 70s, but I remember seeing the ads for this in The National Lampoon. The Underground Comix art style used on the sleeve really caught my attention.

It turns out not to be too hard to track down. Columbia/SONY kept this in print, and it eventually made it out on CD.  It’s a pretty killer collection of guitar virtuosos who were signed to Columbia at the time. I don’t have links for these artists in the playlist below, but they aren’t too hard to track down using a Google machine. It was fun to reassemble this, and hear the compilation in full after more than half a century of wondering what was behind this cover.

It’s not a long album, so I filled up the rest of our third hour with the work of three of our local guitar gods.

The links in the playlist will take you to the pages for the artists in this week’s show except for the compilation recreation…

RFC V5 210

hour one
Matt Berry  “Wedding Photo Stranger”
Todd Burge “Snow”
Shining Glass “Drawing Fire”
The Polkamaniacs “Stealing From Work (Death Deluxe Remix)”
Eurythmics “Caveman Head”
SPACE FREQ “Submerge”
Dinosaur Burps “Perversions of Nature”
Franz Ferdinand “Hooked”
Red Audio “Robotomy”
DEVO “Monsterman”
Ultravox “All Stood Still”
Clownhole “Get A Grip”
David Synn “Poseidon”
Fabulous Head  “C U Move”
Tonto’s Expanding Headband “Timewhys”

hour two
Kate Fagan “Go Faster”
Ringo Starr “Rosetta”
Blue Million “No Man’s Land”
Deni Bonet  “Red Dog”
Raymond Scott “Powerhouse”
The Bible Beaters “Can’t Get To Heaven”
Ghoulbox “Rats In The Morgue”
Bad Keys of the Mountain “I’ll Get By”
Brian Diller“Sooner or Later”
Matt Deal “Our Front Porch”
Emmalea Deal & The Hot Mess “Kira”
The Boatmen “Heartbreak Hangover”
The Settlement “Bertha”
The Cure “Warsong”

hour three
Dr. Curmudgeon “My Deamon Math Metal Tune Just Ate Your Artsy-Folksy Americana Song…Sorry!”

The Guitars That Destroyed The World
Carlos Santana and Buddy Miles “Marbles”
Jhnny Winter and Rick Derringer “Rock And Roll Hoochie Koo”
Mahavishnu Orchestra with John McLaughlin “The Dance of Maya”
West, Bruce and Laing “Pleasure”
Blue Oyster Cult “Buck’s Boogie”
Mountain “Don’t Look Around”
Santana “Waves Within”
Edgar Winter’s White Trash “Keep Playin’ That Rock ‘N’ Roll”
Spirit “Dark Eyed Woman”

Byzantine  “Vile Maxim”
4 OHM MONO ‘The Death and Resurrection of a Salesman”

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.

This week our subject is still the Chicago skyline, but unlike last week, it’s not even trying to be realistic. I wanted to do something with a more cartoony, subtly surrealistic aspect to it.

I did use a photo for reference, but instead of gridding it out, I roughed it out in pencil on illustration board, making judicious use of a new set of flexible curves I just got, so that I could distort the image before painting over it.

The exaggeration was to try to convey how small the buildings in question make you feel.  This is a view of the Chicago Skyline, looking North from our hotel in the River North district. It’s a big skyline, so there’s a lot you can do with it.

After doing the pencil rough, I painted over it mostly with acrylics, but I used some Winsor Newton inks on the sky. I tried to employ some Hopperesque shadow techniques without going for the stark realism of many of his paintings.

The plan is to eventually recreate this as a larger scale canvas, but when I do I’ll probably change the color of the skyscraper on the far left to something less realistic, but more of a contrast with the sky.  I like the artificial height (it’s not the tallest building here, but it looks it from this angle), but it gets lost in the sky.

To see it bigger try clicking HERE. Chances are, if you look at it on a computer screen, you’re probably seeing it larger than it was painted.

Over in radioland, Monday beginning at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you a recent episode of Psychedelic Shack, and then at 3 PM an also recent 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 Lenny Bruce on an encore of a recent episode of The Comedy Vault.

Tonight at 9 PM for the Monday Marathon we bring you ten hours of covers of songs by The Fab Four on Beatles Blast (with one crossover episode of Psychedelic Shack thrown in near the end).

I love slot car racing. I have a pretty huge collection of American 1:64 scale slot cars and sets made by folks like Aurora, Round 2, Tyco and others.  However,  I have been fascinated of late with the 1:32 scale slot car sets made by Sclalextric, based in the UK and Carerra, based in Germany.  I have a couple of beautiful Scalextric cars (A 1966 Batmobile and a Blues Brothers Bluesmobile with loudspeaker), and I’ve been wondering if the two brands of this larger scale (essentially the same scale as the smaller Green Army Men), are compatible, and if so, which one is better?

The above video by Slatcarzers answers those questions. It’s a bit dry, but it’s packed with information and is extremely useful. If you enjoy this video, go subscribe to their YouTube channel. I know I did. You can lose hurs watching slot car videos, if you are so inclined.

This week we go back to January, 2011, and begin a run of episodes of Radio Free Charleston that may be a little bittersweet. This episode and the next two all prominently feature the music of Mark Scarpelli, the beloved, musican, composer and music educator who passed away early in 2022..

This week we have Mark’s Beatles tribute band, Rubber Soul, as they prepare for a performance of The White Album at The Alban Arts Center, which was a benefit for The Ronald McDonald House.

This edition of the show was a “fly on the wall” preview, showing rehearsals for that benefit show, recorded just days before this show premiered, which was just days before the concert itself.

Mark was always very generous in letting me come in and record his musical projects “in progress” so I could get them posted here in time to promote the actual events.

You’ll get to see three complete songs in this episode of RFC: “Back in the USSR,” with lead vocals by Chris Conard; “Dear Prudence,” sung by Michelle Melton; and “Yer Blues,” sung by Joey Collier. You’ll also see snippets of other White Album classics, with vocal turns by Rubber Soul’s leader, Mark Scarpelli and drummer, Brian Holstine.

Other featured instrumentalists seen in the show are Jamie Skeen on bass, Alasha Al-Qudwah on viola, Jeremy Severn on Trumpet and Kathy Coyle on woodwinds.

Because of the nature of how we filmed the band, the audio isn’t up to our usual standards. I felt it was a decent trade-off so that we could get it online quick enough to help promote what turned out to be a sold-out show.

The PopCulteer
January 10, 2025

It’s been a long week.

Weather, MG flare-ups, outside deadlines, and snow-clearing (which sucks so much I’m separating it from the sucky weather) have conspired to leave your humble blogger without a plan for this week’s PopCulteer.

Luckily, I can always pull a bunch of random images out of my ass and make a column out of them, so guess where we’re going today.

Our feature image is a sarcophagus that we saw in at The Art Institute of Chicago last month when we went to the City of Wind for Mel’s birthday. I thought it was sorta cool, but Mel was a bit freaked out by it, so we didn’t linger.  You’ll see a few more photos from that trip below, and also in the upper right, as I treat you to my self-portrait, taken at the Sephora on Michigan Avenue. I was in the husband-check section, proudly wearing my Mitch O’Connell “I’m a Monster Kid” shirt.

Let’s get to the random images so I can go to bed…

After yesterday’s post about finding old posts that I thought were lost at The Wayback Machine, I had a couple of folks ask if I could show what PopCult used to look like back in the day. Here’s a screen-grab from December, 2007. If you want to read the lead post, go HERE.

This is how you know you’re staying in a really fancy hotel.

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The story behind today’s post, which revives a post from the old “NewSounds” Blog at The Charleston Gazette, is a bit convoluted. So prepare yourself for a long-winded preface.

First of all, I want to send my condolences to the wife and family of Vic Burkhammer, a longtime news editor for The Charleston Gazette, and also an advocate for poetry, and someone who was very kind and supportive of my efforts in the early days of this blog, back when I could count on one hand the number of folks at the newspaper who understood what we were trying to do. Vic passed away on the last day of last year, and he will be missed.

A much better recollection of the life and work of Vic has been written by Douglas Imbrogno, and can be found at his WestVirginiaVille website.  Doug, as longtime readers know, is the Godfather of PopCult, who hired me to write this blog and even bestowed upon it the name you all know and love.  The sad event of Vic’s passing actually tipped over the first domino that resulted in this post.

Doug clued me in on the fact that, while researching his piece on Vic, he discovered that some of our earlier efforts at The GazzBlogs had been captured and preserved by The Wayback Machine at Archive.org. He found some prime examples of Vic’s poetry blog, and he discovered some vestiges of most of the other blogs.

This meant that I might possibly be able to retrieve some of the CD reviews I contributed to the NewSounds blog, which otherwise would probably have wound up in PopCult.  I’ve been whining about these reviews being lost thanks to the ineptitude of Charleston Newspapers and their sad attempts at archive management since at least 2012, and I’d previously restored and reposted one of them here when I found the finished version backed up on a random hard drive.

See, originally PopCult was part of a suite of blogs at The GazzBlogs.  It was a collection of blogs covering different topics. Some, like PopCult and Vic’s Mountain Word, were single-author blogs. Others, like NewSounds, had several different contributors. Aside from me, you might find CD reviews by Amy Robinson, Nick Harrah, Morgan Kelly, Bill Lynch, Michael Lipton and others.

If you had asked me, I would’ve said that I contributed five or six reviews to NewSounds. Once I dove into the Wayback Machine, I discovered that I’d actually written over 20, and those were just the ones that I was able to retrieve. There are two I know of that did not get archived there, so there might have been even more than that in total.  Most of these reviews also wound up in print in The Gazz section of The Charleston Gazette (and maybe one or two showed up in the Sunday paper). Now I have them back in my hands, and I’m damned near giddy over it.

The plan is to insert my reviews into the PopCult blog, time-stamped to match the day they were posted in NewSounds, which means that these will wind up in my archives as posts from 2005 to 2008. I don’t know how quickly I will get to this.  Back when I left The Gazette-Mail and took PopCult independent, I thought it would take me a year to fix broken links and restore graphics.  Over four years later I’m maybe one-fourth of the way through that process. When these do get restored, I’ll include links in a new post so you can hunt them down and read them if you get bored enough to do that.

But today we’re going to re-post one of the reviews of which I was most proud. I had built my freelance career largely writing about really cool, but admittedly juvenile stuff like toys,  non-sport trading cards, comic books, animation and quirky rock-and-roll.  One of the things I enjoyed about NewSounds was getting the chance to broaden my reach a bit, and cover musical genres that folks might not think typical of me.

So reviewing an opera, a true opera, even though it was written by a rock star, struck a few folks as a bit of a stretch. People knew I liked goofy stuff. They didn’t realize that I also liked classical music, jazz, foreign films, philosphical tomes…the kind of stuff that would be considered to be more in the wheelhouse of folks who work at NPR, or maybe Squidward.

After this review hit print and had time for the “clip service” to get a copy to the folks in New York, I had an email from one of the folks at The Gazette.  We didn’t have any contact info printed with the piece, so they wanted my permission to pass along my email address to a publicist at Sony Classical, the label that had released this record.

Of course I told them to do so, and in a few hours I had an amusingly brief email from Sony:  “While, as a policy, Mr. Waters does not comment on reviews of his work, he wanted us to let you know that he appreciated what you wrote, and thank you for getting it.”

Writing reviews is generally a thankless task, so that was like manna from heaven.

Here’s the review, as originally published in NewSounds on November 28, 2005, and in The Charleston Gazette three days later…

Well Beyond Pink Floyd: Roger Waters tackles opera in “Ca Ira”

The artist: Roger Waters
The CD: “Ca Ira (There Is Hope): An Opera In Three Acts” (Sony Classical)

Anyone who has listened to “The Trial,” the finale of Pink Floyd’s classic album “The Wall,” knows that Roger Waters is capable of writing classically styled music sung by characters with distinct voices. It should come as no surprise that he has taken his music in a more intellectually challenging direction. Ca Ira tells the story of the French Revolution, and unlike many contemporary composers who merely dip their toes into classical forms, Waters dives deep into Grand Opera, and surfaces with an impressive work that has much more in common with Verdi and Rossini than it does with Philip Glass or Andrew Lloyd Webber. This is a real opera. It’s sung in English, but it’s not a glorified Broadway musical.

Ca Ira has had an elephantine gestation. Begun in 1989 to commemorate the bicentennial of the French Revolution, this work has seen the death of Waters’ collaborators, Etienne and Nadine Roda-Gil. Etienne Roda-Gil is a respected French librettist, and with his wife Nadine, he conceived the opera. Nadine provided illustrations that endowed the project with a powerful visual hook. Sadly, Nadine passed away shortly after the work began, and it sat on the shelf until 1997, when Waters began working on an English version of the text. With Etienne’s blessing, Waters fleshed out elements of the story and made it more relevant to the current political climate.

The result is a work that stands separate musically from Waters’ long-form efforts with his former band, Pink Floyd. There are the occasional hints of Waters’ previous work, but for the most part, musically, this could have been written in the first half of the nineteenth century, when opera was at its peak as an art form. This is not a “rock opera” or an overblown musical. If you aren’t used to listening to opera, it may take a while to acclimate yourself to this work. This is not a collection of catchy pop tunes, but a powerful story told with serious music. It’s unlikely that you’ll come away from Ca Ira humming any of the songs.

Lyrically, this is pure Roger Waters. The villains are the same that he’s always written about, and it’s the “bleeding hearts and the artists” who are the real heroes and hope for the future. Even in his most dark and personal works, Waters has been an optimist at heart, and the title of this opera is proof. There is hope.

The vocals are handled by a world-class cast of opera stars. Bryn Terfel lends his distinctive bass-baritone to three roles, and anchors the cast. Internationally-acclaimed soprano, Ying Huang, is superb as his counter, also assaying multiple roles and breathing life into the spirit of liberty. Paul Groves and Ismael Lo are major supporting players. I could go out on a limb and attempt to dissect the technical aspects of their performances, but I’d really be out of my depth. Essentially, they all sound really good. That’s all you need to know.

Ca Ira casts the story of the French Revolution inside a circus ring, complete with a ringmaster, clowns and acrobats retelling the tale. This adds an element of theatricality that allows a further suspension of disbelief, while acting also as a metaphor for the political circus surrounding the revolution. I was reminded of Philip DeBroca’s 1966 film King Of Hearts, where a Scottish soldier during World War One wanders into a French village entirely populated by inmates of an insane asylum. King Of Hearts employs that dramatic device to both distance the audience from the action, and then draw them into it more deeply. I felt the same way with Ca Ira.

With 38 tracks spread across two CDs, it’s hard to single out individual songs for praise. The music works in service to the story, and as such, there isn’t any single standout song. The work is so cohesive that you really have to judge it as a whole. Clocking in at nearly one hour and fifty minutes, that may seem like quite a commitment, but it’s very rewarding. The music alternates between calm exposition and stirring action, punctuated by bird sounds and cannon shots. There are come contemporary musical touches, but they’re not overbearing.

While the music is grounded in the forms as set forth by the greats of 150 years ago, there are hints of some early-twentieth century styles evident, and there are some melodies clearly consistent with Waters’ previous works. He didn’t completely subjugate his compositional voice here. He merely immersed himself in a different musical form than he’s used in the past. I’d even say he mastered that form.

I don’t think anyone is expecting this album to break out and sell millions of copies. It’s a little too deep and out of the norm for that. Fans of Pink Floyd may find it too challenging, and fans of opera may dismiss it without giving it a fair chance. This is really an exciting and rewarding work that tells a powerful and important story with wonderful music.

There are two versions of Ca Ira available. You can buy a regular two-CD set, or a deluxe SACD version that comes with a bonus 60-page booklet and a DVD with a documentary about the making of the album. The documentary is fascinating, but unless you have an SACD-ready player, you may not want to spend the extra cash. I’m hoping that a companion book of Nadine Roga-Gil’s illustrations will be published.

Now, if we could only convince Waters that the Clay Center would be a fine venue to hold a public performance of Ca Ira.

— By Rudy Panucci

UPDATE: Ca Ira is still in print from Sony Classical. You can order the SACD version from Amazon, or find it on all the major streaming services. No companion book was ever published.

I cannot, in good conscience, recommend that anyone in the Charleston area, which is buried under snow and ice (with more coming) go anywhere to do anything this week.

So I’m calling a snow day. Your recommended STUFF TO DO this week is, stay home, stay safe, read a book, watch some TV, listen to a podcast, tune in to The AIR, go back and read 19 and a half years of this blog, dig into that stack of comic books, look at pandas on YouTube, take down that tree, bake some cookies…anything that does not involve going out of doors in this horrible weather.

If, for some reason, you must go outside, remember to dress warm, like this guy…

Well, the first hour of the show is new, anyway.

We start 2025 by doing one new show in in a row!  Tuesday is once again “New Show Day” on The AIR.  As such, we have a newish episode of  Radio Free Charleston 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.

This week RFC kicks off with one new hour of our regular RFC local/indie/alternative coolness, followed by a classic, mostly local, episode of Radio Free Charleston Volume Four, from April, 2016. It’s a gem that hasn’t been heard by anyone in over eight years. Admittedly, this is a compromise because I’m racing the clock producing this show. The power and/or internet could go out at any second due to the massive winter storm, so I revived an old show to make production go quicker.

The show kicks off with a brand-new punkish/New Wave tune by Kate Fagan.  Kate is a legend of the Chicago Punk/New Wave scene, but since she relocated to New Orleans a few years ago, she’s broadend her musical scope to include Swing and Pop. “Go Faster” is a return to her roots and what a return it is! It’s a great high energy start to the show. This single will be officially released January 17.

We also have new tunes from Novo Combo, Shining Glass, Sierra Ferrell, Dinosaur Burps, Emmaline, The Polkamaniacs, SPACE FREQ and more.  Plus we dig into the archives and welcome The Bible Beaters back to RFC for the first time since they were on our video show almost sixteen years ago.

Our second and third hours revive a long-unheard episode of RFC from the early days of The AIR. This mosty-local showcase is a pretty cool time-capsule of the Charleston music scene circa a decade ago, with a couple of regional touring bands thrown in just for the hell of it.

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

RFC V5 209

hour one
Kate Fagan “Go Faster”
Novo Combo “E-Train Revisited”
Shining Glass “Three Died”
The Polkamaniacs “Dream Water Wheel (Death Deluxe Remix)”
Hellaphant “In Between Days”
SPACE FREQ  “Open Your Mind”
Lene Lovich “Cats Away”
Sierra Ferrell “The Garden (remix)”
Dinosaur Burps  “Mess a Wildcats”
The Heavy Hitters Band “Voicemail”
Emmaline  “Wrong Side of Midnight”
Believe “Shine”
Robert Ellis Orrall“Big Hook”
The Bible Beaters “Praise Jesus”

hour two
Trielement “Lemonade”
Possum Kingdom Ramblers “Land of the Lost”
Uncle Eddie and Robin “All Naked Women”
Stephen Beckner “Olive or Twist”
Pepper Fandango “Bad Scene”
The Silvers “Running Away”
Under Surveillance “Broken Lullaby”
The Jims “Masquerade”
Time And Distance “War”
From The Future “Hot Taco”
Doctor Curmudgeon “Lucabration”
Billy Matheny “Christless Streets”
The Big Bad “Out of the Morgue”
Wolfgang Parker “Among The Ash Heaps (and Millionaires)”
Ann Magnuson “Some Kind of Swinger”

hour three
A Place of Solace “Breakdown”
John Lancaster “Something To Fade Into”
Science of the Mind “Suffer”
Frauenfeld “Growing Up”
Bobaflex “School For Young Ladies”
Karma To Burn “Waltz of the Playboy Pallbearers”
Jordan Andrew Jefferson “Ghost By The Water”
Mark Wolfe “A Kinda Blues”
Superfetch “Sport’n A Chub”
Department of Crooks “New York City”
Linnfinity “Morning Heights”
Garagecow Ensemble “Rosie’s Lullaby”

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.

This week our subject is still Chicago, but our medium is one I haven’t used for quite a while. This is a view of the famed Chicago skyline, as seen from an elevated section of The Art Institute of Chicago.  It’s actually rather small, but I tried to do a high-detail drawing using nothing but Prismacolor colored pencils on paper for pens.

And I did this when the cold weather was playing hell with my Myasthenia Gravis. It took several sessions over three days to get this to where it is. I cropped out the sloppy borders. I also had to take lots of breaks due to hand cramps.

I might be going back to mixed media for a while.  That gives me the chance to switch to tools that are easier to hold.

Since it’s a view of the skyline from just across the street, it doesn’t really inclue the whole thing, which is why it’s an “excerpt.” It’s sort of a view within the skyline. This is looking out of a window in one of the galleries that’s located in the elevated bridge that goes over the Metra lines. The trees you see are on the fringe of Millenium Park.

This is a study for a possible Hopperesque painting sometime in the future.  I’ll probably have to lose some of the busy detail and signs of life before I try that. I’ll also use paint, and hope that the reds don’t smear as much.

To see it bigger try clicking HERE.

Over in radioland, Monday beginning at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you a recent episode of Psychedelic Shack, and then at 3 PM an also recent 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 National Lampoon on an encore of a classic episode of The Comedy Vault.

Tonight at 9 PM for the Monday Marathon we bring you ten hours of classic Disco with Mel Larch’s MIRRORBALL.