Aging Your Best Until You Stop: What To Expect And What To Do
by Danny Kuhn
Favoritetrainers.com
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1737295341
$16.95

The first pick today in The 2024 PopCult Gift Guide is a new book by an author familiar to the readers of this blog, Danny Kuhn.

His new book, Aging Your Best Until You Stop: What To Expect And What To Do is a departure from his books that have been in previous PopCult Gift Guides. This time he writes about getting older, hopefully gracefully.

Ken Bays, former editor, Blues Revue magazine offers up the following assessment:

It’s not an option: you will age until you stop. Learn all you can about the process and plan to make the time you have left as good as it can possibly be. Based on solid academic research but written in a personal and conversational style, Danny Kuhn tells it like it is and doesn’t avoid uncomfortable topics. What is likely to happen to our bodies and minds? Are we doomed to have fewer and less satisfying relationships as we age? Is sex “still on the table?” What about our stuff?

Diseases, medications, drinking, recreational drugs, exercise, social contacts, and estate planning are all discussed, plus a thorough treatment of that great unknown: what is it really like to die? Many of the answers are personal and individual, but this extensive information from credible academic and medical sources can help you set realistic expectations and bend the rules in your favor. “You’re going to die, but there are things you can do to make the time you have left better. Danny Kuhn repeats those words throughout “Aging Your Best Until You Stop” like a mantra, and your reaction to that hard truth could be an indicator of whether or not this book will be up your alley. If that sort of reminder inspires you to take action, you’ll get excellent guidance here for living out your days with gusto and courage as well as clarity and realistic expectations.

If thinking about your mortality frightens you, then you might have a harder time making it through some of the latter chapters — though Kuhn’s disarming sense of humor goes a long way toward making readers comfortable with even the most difficult subjects, like terminal disease and hospice. (He loves puns; at one point he writes, “Since one of the complaints older people have is that they sometimes feel listless, I am giving you a list.”) This is light reading about a heavy subject, and Kuhn uses stories from his own life, anecdotes from friends and acquaintances, and reputable scientific literature to illustrate useful advice about everything from sex as you age to exercise to avoiding common regrets.

The chapter titled “Old Rules” is alone worth the price of admission; it’s where Kuhn provides the aforementioned “list,” an inventory of eight guidelines for staying happy as you age, the first of which is “never turn down the good because it isn’t perfect.” It’s wisdom like this — common sense ideas that perhaps aren’t so common in practice — that makes this book so valuable

To be honest, the reason I’m quoting Ken here is because I haven’t had time to sit down and read Danny’s book yet. Aside from writing The 2024 PopCult Gift Guide, Your humble blogger has been dealing with some of the very issues discussed in this book. I will say that I’ve skimmed it, and it strikes me as a great instruction manual for making the most of your later days.

Highly recommended as a gift for anyone on your shopping list who would enjoy some helpful suggestions on how to enjoy life to the fullest with grace and dignity. You should be able to order it from any bookseller using the ISBN code, or you could just get it from Amazon.

Zerostreet, featuring the art of Robert Jimenez

Our second pick for The 2024 PopCult Gift Guide is actually a whole store full of cool stuff featuring art by a PopCult favorite.

Robert’s work has appeared on album covers, in publications such as THE THING: ARTBOOK, VISIONS FROM THE UPSIDE DOWN: STRANGER THINGS ARTBOOK, Tiki Magazine and Pinstriping & Kustom Graphics Magazine, and has shown in galleries including Disneyland’s Wonderground, Harold Golen, M Modern, Creature Features, and Bear & Bird among others.

You can also see Robert’s work in trading card sets for Topps, Cryptozoic, and Upper Deck on licenses such as Garbage Pail Kids, Wacky Packages, Mars Attacks, Star Wars, DC Comics, Marvel Comics, Rick And Morty, Ghostbusters, Adventure Time and more. Robert also releases his own highly entertaining trading cards, many of them centered around his original concept, FEARSOME WEIRDOS.

Robert is also the author and illustrator of the books LAST CALL AT TIKILANDIA, STRANGEWISE NO.9, CHIMPS & TIKIS AND RAVEN-HAIRED BEAUTIES: AN ADULT COLORING BOOK, NOSFERATU’S CHRISTMAS IN NEW YORK and WEIRD-ASS FACES VOL.1, SOPHISTICATES AND WEIRDOS and the trading card set FEARSOME WEIRDOS.

At Robert’s store you can find his art on prints, apparel, Tiki Mugs, metal signs, books, trading cards and more. You may very well find the perfect wearable, readable, collectible or displayable gift for the fan of Tiki Art, sick humor, parody and just great art at his site. You’ll find links to his books, cards, T Shirts, Metal Signs, original art and additional shops at Amazon, Threadless and more.

Broadway Poster Art : 1945–1969
By Nicholas van Hoogstraten
Schiffer Publishing
ISBN: 9780764367519
$59.99

Our first pick today in The 2024 PopCult Gift Guide is a lovely coffee table book dedicated to vintage Broadway posters. It’s a great gift for fans of Broadway and fans of mid-century commercial art.

Broadway Poster Art : 1945–1969 is a visual bonanza that shines the spotlight on 750 striking advertising posters for the musicals and plays of Broadway’s golden age and shares untold behind-the-scenes stories.

Fans of the theatre will be thrilled to discover the original posters for hundreds of Broadway’s (and off-Broadway’s) biggest and most beloved hits, including My Fair Lady, The Fantasticks, Hello, Dolly!, Fiddler on the Roof, Death of a Salesman, A Raisin in the Sun, and A Streetcar Named Desire—plus rare and striking designs that tried in vain to sell some of the era’s epic flops.

In addition to being an important resource, this book is a fun read thanks to the inclusion of previously untold stories of the men and women behind the shows and the art. Book highlights include:

Readers will encounter a treasure trove of masterpieces by the theatreʼs best illustrators, designers, photographers, and graphic artists, including Charles Addams, Peter Arno, Saul Bass, Eileen Darby, Whitney Darrow Jr., Hap Hadley, Al Hirschfeld, and David Klein

There are also never-before-seen artist progressions from conception to completion, as well as alternate and rejected designs. There’s a section filled with facts and legends about the productions, and a look at how the posters were used around the city.

This is a wonderful coffee table book sized package, at 9 x 12″, with over 300 pages and 700 photographs.

Broadway Poster Art : 1945–1969 is the deepest dive ever into this colorful corner of American show business, this opus boasts an appeal that goes far beyond just poster fans. Broadway Poster Art: 1945–1969 is a must-have for anyone with a love of the performing arts, graphic design, entertainment history, and Broadway’s golden age.

You can order it from any bookseller using the ISBN code, directly from The Publisher, or at a slight discount from Amazon.

New Prehistoric Scenes Saber Tooth Tiger and Cave Bear
by Atlantis Models
Around $30 each, or discounted from some online retailers.

Keeping with the prehistoric theme, today’s second pick in The 2024 PopCult Gift Guide is actually two picks, reissues of two classic Aurora Prehistoric Scenes model kits that have not been sold since the early 1970s, The Saber Tooth Tiger and The Cave Bear!

Again, the perfect gift for fans of prehistoric beasts of any age, these snap-together, slightly articulated model kits help you bring the lumbering and fearsome animals of bygone days back to life without the use of DNA technology or any of the related mayhem involved with that. Both kits are 1/13 scale, and are compatible with all of the classic Aurora Prehistoric Scenes mini-dioramas.

The Prehistoric Scenes Saber Tooth Tiger once assembled, measures 6.5 inches tall with a base width of 8.5 inches. He can be painted and customized, or left unpainted. There are 24 parts and the snap-together assembly is simple and quick.

This kit was last seen on store shelves in the early 1970’s. The Atlantis version comes with both bases and is molded in Saber Tooth Yellow. It also comes with a nameplate and movable extra set of legs and arms for different poses.

You can order it directly from Atlantis Models.

The Prehistoric Scenes Cave Bear is another set that was never reissued like the Prehistoric Scenes dinosaur kits were. This figural kit measures 6.5 inches tall with a base width of 10 inches when assembled.

This kit was also last seen on store shelves in the early 1970’s. The Atlantis kit comes molded in Bear Brown with a cave scene including cave wall, nameplate and bear skulls. This model has a movable head, and front and rear legs. From the Original Aurora Tooling. And you can expect the same, easy, Snap-Together Assembly. It can be painted, or left as is.

You can order this kit directly from Atlantis Models, or from other hobby retailers.

Prehistoric Times Magazine
One-year Subscription: 4 issues $40

Our first pick today in The 2024 PopCult Gift Guide is Prehistoric Times, a wonderful print magazine for dinosaur enthusiasts and collectors of related merchandise. You are not likely to find this mag locally in WV. Books A Million no longer has the impressive magazine rack that they used to. I discovered this magazine (which has 30+ years of history) at Barnes & Noble on a trip earlier this year, and I fell in love with it.

Each full color, 50+ page issue includes reviews of the latest prehistoric animal model kits, toy figures, books and more, plus interviews with artists and scientists, artwork from the finest paleoartists in the world and the latest scientific discoveries in paleontology.

There’s also news and information about prehistoric life you won’t find anywhere else. This is some seriously fascinating and engrossing stuff for dinosaur fans, and the artwork on display every issue is amazing.

As a bonus, in addition to the tons of cool art in every issue, the magazine sports a logo by master dinosaur (and other cool stuff) illustrator, William Stout, a regular at WonderFest USA. Mel and I have several signed and inscribed books by William.

Prehistoric Times is the perfect gift for the dinosaur enthusiast of any age on your holiday shopping list. You can go to the website and subscribe and also order back issues so that you can put a pile of them under the tree. It’s also available digitially, but is much harder to wrap that way. And if you really love dinosaurs, you might want to join the magazine’s Facebook Group.

Tuesday on The AIR  we offer up yet another patchwork edition of Radio Free Charleston. A triple shot of unheard-since-August-2018 editions of Radio Free Charleston Volume Four make up a great all-local episode of RFC Volume Five. To hear this gem, you simply have to point your cursor over and tune in at the website, or you could just stay on this page, and  listen to the cool embedded player over at the top of the right column. Heck, you can even scroll down and listen to it on demand below.

At 10 AM and 10 PM you can hear this combination of RFC volume 4, episodes 86, 87 and 88. I do apologize for not providing any brand-new content for the show this week, but paying work combined with The 2024 PopCult Gift Guide means that something had to give. And for that same reason, we don’t have links to the artist’s pages this week. Search the blog and you’re sure to find most of them.

Check out this playlist.

RFC V5 202

hour one
Jeff Ellis “The Destroyer”
Shine “Dazed and Confused”
Stonebeard “Dreams Die Hard”
Blame The Day “Breathe”
In The Company of Wolves “Red Star Anthem”
Karma To Burn “Thirty-Three”
Science of the Mind “Sending You To Hell”
Ann Magnuson “Be A Satyr”
Rennaissance with Stephanie Adlington
The Company Stores “Love Me Again”
Emmalea Deal “Ghost”

hour two
Eddie Harris Trio “Dark Hollow”
Jay Parade “Crying Over Spilt Coffee”
Tom Rader “She Knows My Ghost”
Half Batch “Way Back”
Creek Don’t Rise “You Won’t Let Me Love You”
Feast of Stephen “Revolution”
Blame The Day “Stuck”
Hawthorne Heights “New Winter”
Stonebeard “Lethe’s Forgiveness”
Axis Evertyhing “Beat Cop”
Masterdong “Cocksmoker”
Seigfried “Wasp”
Socio Turmoil and the Dynamic Brain “Haunted Manor”
Holly and The Guy “Fix You”
Mark Beckner “Fragile”
Joe Vallina “Nowhere To Be Found”
Kerry Hughes “Worry Later”

hour three
Qiet “Yes I Want It All”
Jordan Andrews Jefferson “Blue”
Go Van Gogh “Shut Up I Love You”
The Laser Beams “Eden By The Fire Escape”
Ona “Killing Hymn”
Out of Nowhere “Thoughts Fade”
Boulevard Avenue “Mary Mary”
Radar Hill with Nick Wickman “Something’s”
Chuck Biel “Turtles All The Way”
Superfetch “Laydown (Live)”

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 MIRRORBALL at 1 PM, and NOISE BRIGADE at 2 PM. At 3 PM we have two recent episodes of The Swing Shift.

Remember The 2024 PopCult Gift Guide continues with two posts every weekday, all November long.

Svengoolie 45th Anniversary Collector’s Box
$99.79 from ME TV

If you know Svengoolie, you love Svengoolie. He is the current reigning horror movie host, celebrating 45 years of scary movie hosting, and he can be seen ever week on ME TV.

If you have a die-hard Svengoolie fan on your holiday shopping list, this is the perfect gift. it’s a little pricey, but it’s packed with value.

The Svengoolie 45th Anniversary Collector’s Box is filled with limited-edition items to honor 45 years of Svengoolie on TV. The assortment of products in this box were selected for Svengoolie’s fans by the official home of Svengoolie, MeTV. Only 2,000 boxes were made. So, if you have a Svengoolie fan in your life that you’d like to give this to for the holidays, order now.

Included in the box are:

• A Svengoolie 45th Anniversary trading card designed by famed horror artist, Mark Spears. One side of this card features Svengoolie, while the other side features his original incarnation as Son of Svengoolie from 1979. The two sides line up when side by side. This card is numbered 1-2,000 to show the rarity of this item. It comes in a protective, glow-in-the-dark case and includes a stand to make it easy to display.
• “The Svengoolie Stomp” 45 vinyl record, re-released in neon green. It’s a 45 to celebrate the 45th anniversary. One side is “The Svengoolie Stomp” by Freddy “Boom Boom” Cannon and the other side is a sing-along version.
• Attack of the Shrunken Sven Squad miniature figurine set featuring: Svengoolie, Nostalgiaferatoo, Gwengoolie, Imp (Ignatius Malvolio Prankenstein) and Kerwyn.
• A Svengoolie 30 oz stainless steel travel mug with a black top hat straw cover.
• “The Svengoolie Stomp” knit socks featuring Svengoolie on the front of the stocks and a hilarious squished rubber chicken on the bottom of the foot.
• The limited-edition Svengoolie 45th Anniversary enamel pin featuring an embossed Svengoolie 45th Anniversary logo on the back of the pin.
• A 3” embroidered Svengoolie logo iron-on patch
• A Svengoolie stylus pen perfect for writing jokes or playing “Too Drawn Out!”
• A Svengoolie air freshener to help cover up dungeon smells!
• A stretchy rubber chicken keychain

If you have a Svengoolie fan in your house, this collector’s box is the perfect one-stop-shopping experience. Order it directly from ME TV.

The Closest Thing to Crazy: My Life of Musical Adventures
by Mike Batt
Bonnier Books Ltd
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1785120848
$26.33 from Amazon or autographed directly from Mike Batt (ships from the UK)

Our first pick today in The 2024 PopCult Gift Guide is a bit of a cult item for those of us in the USA.

Mike Batt is undeservedly obscure in America, but he’s pretty famous in the UK and around the world. He’s had an amazing life, from being the man behind The Wombles to crafting a series of amazing progressive/orchestral/New Wave-ish albums, to collaborating with an arranging for some of the top names in musical theater and popular music and way more than I can mention in one sentence without rambling like a lunatic.

I’ve been a big fan since his conceptual ballet/operetta, Zero Zero, wound up on Night Flight in 1981, and I’ve followed his career since. I’ve even featured his music and his fantasy book, The Chronicles of Don’t Be So Ridiculous Valley, in previous editions of The PopCult Gift Guide, so I have no qualms about recommending his new book, which tells the story of his amazing life, even though I haven’t got my copy yet.

Because of that, I will turn this gift recommendation over to the publisher’s blurb…

Described variously as a ‘polymath’, a ‘renaissance man’ and ‘one of the most colourful characters in the music business’, Mike Batt has led an extraordinarily vibrant and challenging life that has been full of both glorious victories and bitter failures.

For better or for worse, he is a man who has always lived life on his own terms. Idiosyncratic but mainstream, complicated but compassionate, steadfastly maverick in spirit but avowedly commercial in outlook. He is a man of great contradictions, but even greater talent.

After starting out in the music business as a teenager, Batt shot to fame in the early 1970s for his part in the creation of the Wombles pop group. But this success proved to be just the beginning as he then went on to work with various artists as a songwriter, composer and producer, including Art Garfunkel, George Harrison, Cliff Richard, Andrew Lloyd-Webber and Katie Melua.

Featuring cameos from some of the biggest stars in the business from Paul McCartney to Prince, The Closest Thing to Crazy takes us not only on the rocky (and classical) journey of Mike Batt’s life but also on a tour around the inside of his mind.

I don’t want to wait to read this book, but because I am buried under work writing The 2024 PopCult Gift Guide, it’ll have to wait until next month. This is the perfect gift for the Anglophile music lover with impeccable taste on your holiday shopping list.

I wasn’t really in the mood to paint this week, but I decided to try.  What you see above is an acrylic painting inspired by the view from the Amtrak Cardinal while passing through Indiana on the way home from Chicago. I don’t really have a lot to say about it. It’s dark, like the immediate future.

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 an hour of conceptual random comedy a classic early episode of The Comedy Vault.

Tonight at 9 PM for the Monday Marathon we devote ten hours to five more episodes of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat.  For the time being we are back to alternating between Prognosis and Sydney’s Big Electric Cat, because we’re going to be pulling the early episodes of those shows from the server soon to make room for newer programs. After they’ve been offline for a year or so, we’ll bring them back into rotation but for now, you can hear them Monday evening into Tuesday morning, and then those episode will go on hiatus.

This week we are going back to fix a video that got yanked from YouTube shortly after we originally posted it back in early 2021. The post is identical. The video is a different upload of the same show, and some numbers below have been updated. 

This year marks the 53rd Anniversary of Jethro Tull’s breakthrough album, Aqualung, and as such, they were the cover feature of the February 2021 issue of Prog Magazine. I got my copy direct from the UK, and I’ve been reading about the band, so I figured it’d be cool to run one of their concerts here in PopCult.

The show you see above was recorded at The Capitol Center, in November, 1977. This was NOT the Aqualung tour, but they do play several tracks from that album here. In fact, I happen to have the setlist handy, but I’m not sure if every song here made it into the video…

1. Wond’ring Aloud
2. Skating Away On The Thin Ice Of The New Day
3. Jack-In-The-Green
4. Thick As A Brick
5. Songs From The Wood
6. Instrumental/ Drum Solo
7. To Cry You A Song
8. A New Day Yesterday
9. Flute Solo/God Rest Ye Gentlemen/Bouree/A New Day Yesterday
10. Living In The Past /A New Day Yesterday (reprise)
12. Velvet Green
13. Hunting Girl
14. Too Old To Rock ‘n’ Roll: Too Young To Die
15.Minstrel In The Gallery
16. Cross-Eyed Mary
17. Aqualung
18. Martin Barre Guitar Solo/Wind Up
19. Back Door Angels / Guitar Improvisation /Wind Up (reprise)
20. Locomotive Breath/Land Of Hope And Glory/ Back Door Angels (reprise)