We are back in Chicago this week for a small acrylic painting on illustration board that depicts what is probably the worst view of the famed Willis Tower, once the tallest building in the world (and once known as The Sears Tower, back when Sears was a thing).

This is my first color piece in a few weeks, and I’m fairly sure I’ve painted Willis Tower from this angle before, but this time I left out other buildings, lamp posts and traffic signals, and just used some of my photos from last July to reference the reflections on the side of the building. I honestly can’t recall if any of my prior paintings from this angle made it into this feature in PopCult.

This was an exercise in getting the fingers working with brushes and color again, and also trying to justify standing across the street from Willis Tower pointing my camera almost straight up to get reference photos.

To see it bigger try clicking HERE.

Over in radioland, Monday at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you encores of a classic episode of Psychedelic Shack, and then at 3 PM a 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 Neil’s Heavy Concept Album, a Young Ones side project starring Nigel Planer on a classic episode of The Comedy Vault.

Tonight at 9 PM for the Monday Marathon We begin a 35-hour marathon of Radio Free Charleston, which will include the regularly-scheduled airings of a new episode because Tuesday is the 35th anniversary of Charleston’s longest-running local music showcase. I’m working on some surprises from the archives for our new episode this week.

I don’t like to repeat the videos I post here in Sunday Evening Video very often, but this one has become an annual tradition and hardly anybody reads the blog on Labor Day weekend anyway, so here goes.

If you are of a certain age, Labor Day seems synonymous with The Jerry Lewis Labor Day MDA Telethon, which the famed comedian hosted for almost sixty years.

The telethon is gone, as is Jerry, but MDA (the Muscular Dystrophy Association) maintains a YouTube page where they still post highlights from the vaults.

Above you see a playlist with over a hundred videos of musical legends like Frank Sinatra, Aretha Franklin, Smokey Robinson, B.B. King, Diana Ross, Ray Charles, Elton John, Paul McCartney, Tony Bennett, Little Richard, Johnny Cash, Toni Basil and many others. Best of all, you can watch these clips without sitting through four hours of corporate spokespeople droning on in a monotone about how much they care about the kids. I mean, no offense to the guy from 7 11, but I’m pretty sure they play those parts on an endless loop in hell. Above you see the good stuff, the cream of the crop.

Seriously, there are some gems in there like Duran Duran, MC Hammer and Charo. There’s lots of Charo. Lots of MC Hammer, too, now that I think about it.

Enjoy!

This week The RFC Flashback goes to April, 2010, for Radio Free Charleston 98, “Marilyn Monroe Shirt,” featuring music by The Diablo Blues Band, David Synn and Captain Crash and The Beauty Queen. We also had animation by Frank Panucci, and a look at the then-new GI Joe Adventure Team.

You can read the original production notes HERE.

The PopCulteer
August 30, 2024

We have a couple of new projects from old friends of PopCult to tell you about this week. First up, we have a new Kickstarter campaign for a new comic book from Anthony Stokes. As has become the norm when I plug a Kickstarter campaign, some browsers will show a line struck through the links, as though they don’t work, but rest assured, they do. It’s some kind of conflict with the blog template I use here and certain browers.

I’ve been telling you about comic books written by Anthony Stokes for almost two years now, and his last campaign just wrapped up successfully last month. This exciting young writer has become so proflic that he has an entirely different new comic ready to launch.  In fact, just a couple of days in, it’s already funded.

My Girlfriend Is A Cyborg Assassin is a pretty self-explanatory title.  It’s a bit of Cyberpunk Noir that tells the story of a private detective at some point in the future by the name of Ralph.

Ralph hates machines.

Charisma is a machine…a Cyborg Assassin, in fact.

They’ll have to learn to work together to solve the mystery of his ex-partner’s murder.

Inspired by Blade Runner and odd-couple buddy cop stories like Who Framed Roger Rabbit, this is a comic book that fans of Cyberpunk 2077 and Akira will enjoy.

Set in a cyberpunk landscape where people regularly get cybernetic enhancements to their bodies, Cyborg Assassin at its core is a story about the walls technology can put up between people.

My Girlfriend Is A Cyborg Assassin features 26 pages of incredible full-color artwork, illustrated By Jack Dunne and colored By Maximo. There are a variety of rewards available in digital and print form, with variant covers and “risque” covers, if you’re into that sort of thing. You can also get just about all of Anthony’s previous works as add-ons, in case you’re coming to this game late.

The campaign is fully-funded, so you can be sure that you’ll get to read this in December, if not earlier, and it looks like another sure winner from the creative mind of Anthony Stokes. You have just under three weeks to Kick-in and make sure you get a copy. Check out some of the great artwork…

SKYFLAKE Firmament Shirt

SKYFLAKE is the musical project of William Mull, whom readers of PopCult will remember from his Forbidden Gallery comic book.  I’ve also been playing his band’s music on Radio Free Charleston, and in fact I opened an episode just a couple of months ago with his song “Firmament.”

Now, William has created a cool shirt to go along with the song. I’ll let him tell you about it…

We thought we’d create a very limited-release t-shirt to commemorate SKYFLAKE‘s new song and video, FIRMAMENT — we’re ordering some for ourselves, and would like to offer it to YOU as well!

In order to get your hands on one of these nifty T-shirts, all you have to do is go HERE, and do it quick because it’ll only be available for less than two more weeks. In addition to the cool design on the front, the back also sports the band’s cool logo.

And if you wonder what the tune sounds like, check out this cool new video…

Any funds raised from the sale of this shirt will go back into creating more SKYFLAKE musical projects.

And with that, we wrap up this week’s anniversary travel-truncated PopCulteer. Check back every single damn day for fresh content and our many regular features.

It’s rather hot, in case you hadn’t noticed.  Still, there’s lots of STUFF TO DO this Labor Day Weekend.   Even though I’m still somewhat hibernating until the next COVID booster shot is ready. That doesn’t mean you guys have to stay in. I’m immuno-compromised.

Remember, if you are attending an outdoor event, stay hydrated and please don’t smoke or vape around any humans who might find the associated stank to be offensive. Be mindful of your health and of those near you. Look for and offer to aid people who might seem frail, look like they’re about to pass out, or have melted into the pavement.  With that bit of a caveat, let me tell you about plenty of STUFF TO DO in Charleston and all over the Mountain State and well beyond as we trade-in the dog days of August for the spider-monkey days of September.

As I have been copying and pasting for some time now, this a good time to remind you 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. I won’t be offended if you volunteer to do the work I was too busy staying inside to do.

The big event this weekend has already started over over in the left side of the State. The Huntington Music & Arts Festival is underway and many RFC-favorite acts are performing, like Emmalea Deal & The Hot Mess, Tucker Riggleman & The Cheap Dates, Buni Muni, Ginger Wixx, Massing and many other great musical and comedy acts that I haven’t had a chance to hear yet.

You can find out everything you need to know about HMAF HERE.  And check out the schedule below…

Live Music is on tap at Taylor Books. There is no cover charge, and shows start at 7:30 PM.  This week we still gots no idea who will be performing, but it’s bound to be great, and you can’t beat the price.

The World Famous Empty Glass Cafe has some great stuff this week  to tell you about.   Thursday at 5:30 PM Swingstein and Robin return with music for a cause.  Friday Tim Courts holds down the forts for Happy Hour, and then at 10 PM, Pepper Fandango and the Bombshelters with special guests KC Shingleton, Travis Echols and Todd White AND  SzechWan Kenobi entertain the Empty Glass audience. Saturday, acoustic/folk duo Lazy & Justified with Wilma and Ed perform at 10 PM.  Sunday evening at 9 PM,trouring Punk band Squirt Vile, arrive from South Carolina.

Please remember that the pandemic is still not entirely over yet. It’s a going concern with the ‘rona still lurking about all robust and reinvigorated and with a chip on its shoulder. And now there are drought-fueled nasty seasonal allergies, temperatures in the melting points, roving bands of Taser Lemurs, debate-dodgers and other damned good reasons to be careful. 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.

Keep in mind that all shows are subject to change or be cancelled at the last minute.

Here we go, roughly in order…

THURSDAY

FRIDAY

SATURDAY

SUNDAY

I’ve mentioned in previous years that August is a minefield of anniversaries for me.

A couple of weeks ago, it was my birthday. This past Monday was my tenth wedding anniversary. We are rapidly coming up on the 35th anniversary of Radio Free Charleston.

And on this day nineteen years ago, the first two posts appeared in PopCult.

The first was a silly little bit of wordplay about buying an eBow on eBay.  The second was a short plea for tips on where to find good Won Ton (or crab rangoon, to some folks) in Charleston. Notable in this post is a reference to Krabby Patties, which marks the first allusion to SpongeBob Squarepants in this blog.

These were just test posts, really. I wasn’t sure exactly what this blog was supposed to be (sometimes I still wonder about that), but they do mark the humble beginnings of a blog that is closing in on seven thousand posts and has lasted many years past the typical lifespan of a blog.

Also, I didn’t even realize it at the time, but August 28 is the birthday of Jack Kirby, the man who co-created Captain America, and created the bedrock of the modern Marvel Comics universe. it was 12 days and 21 posts before I got around to mentioning Jack Kirby in PopCult. I’ve mentioned him over a hundred times more since then.

One post before that, on the same day, was the first Beatles reference in PopCult. My first art post was on August 31, six posts in, and the first toy-related post was the next post, published on the next day.  Other posts in the first month of this blog mentioned such now-familiar topics as professional wrestling;  music;  comic books;  GI Joe, Captain Action and action figures in general; and the late, now-demolished, Charleston Playhouse.

Gazette Photo by Chip Ellis

That actually isn’t too bad when you consider that, until 2013, I didn’t post fresh content every day.  For those of you new to PopCult, this blog started out as part of The Gazz, an online version of the entertainment section of The Charleston Gazette. It bounced around the various web versions of the Gazette and Gazette-Mail until I exited stage right from that sinking ship four years ago, dragging all my previous posts along with me (save for most of the images from the first year or so, which had been lost during one of the many Gazette-content portings).  And I always have to pause and thank Douglas Imbrogno for hiring me to write this blog in the first place, and giving it the name it has now.

In a post where I sort of introduced myself I wrote…

So, that’s about it. I may tee off on comic books, toys, movies, animation, health care, food, television, or anything else that strikes my fancy. I’ll also share some of the artwork, photography, and music that I’ve been working on these last few years. Maybe along the way I can reconnect with some of my old Radio Free Charleston co-conspirators.

I’d say I’ve lived up to that, and a bit more.

We now have our sister internet radio station, The AIR, as well as our regular weekly features: Monday Morning Art, STUFF TO DO, The PopCulteer, The RFC Flashback, and Sunday Evening Video.  I also run Kickstarter Alerts and review toys, comics, theatre, books, movies and TV shows, plus I babble about having Myasthenia Gravis a lot.  And every November I kill myself cranking out The PopCult Gift Guide.

I don’t want anyone to mistake this bit of self-reflection as a sign that I have any intention of stopping soon.  PopCult will be around as long as I am.  The truth is, I’m writing this early on the morning of August 28 because I just got back from an anniversary trip with my lovely wife, Mel Larch, yesterday. I was too tired to write last night and hadn’t prepared this post before I left. so I’m winging it.

About that trip, it was a bit of a spur of the moment thing.  We drove to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, so Mel and I could meet Rodger Bumpass, the voice of Squidward on SpongeBob Squarepants and someone who’s career I’ve followed since his days at The National Lampoon, and then we just meandered our way through Maryland, the Eastern Panhandle and Virginia before coming home.

I didn’t realize that we weren’t supposed to take pictures, which is why the nice handler lady is glaring

You won’t be reading much about that convention. I might post a few photos, but after we were there for a while I realized how much fun I was having not taking pictures. I put the camera away. So we met Rodger and I met Michael Golden and Renee Witterstatter as civilians, and not as a blogger or reporter.

And I liked it.

And that comes to the one bit of news in this otherwise unremarkable post.  At the end of September, Mel and I are going to JoeLanta, the newly-revived GI Joe convention in Atlanta, Georgia.

And I’m not shooting any video. I might take a few photos, but I want to experience, for the first time in the fifteen years that I’ve been going to toy conventions, what it’s like to be on the floor of a convention without a camera. It looks like 80% of the announced guests for JoeLanta are “content creators” with their own YouTube channels, so any videos from me won’t be missed, and I might get to see the show in a whole new light.  I’m not retiring from shooting video and photos at conventions, but I’m going to try to enjoy them on a different level, and in the case of a show where there are dozens of other folks shooting video, I’ll take a pass.

Apologies to anyone who finds this to be underwhelming as far as marking my anniversary, but 19 years isn’t exactly a milestone.  Next year I need to put some effort into this.

Okay…one more convention pic…

We have to dig into the archives today on The AIR.  We have a new episode of  Radio Free Charleston, but it’s a almost all stuff you’ve heard before.  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 tons of replays throughout the week.

Normally I record Radio Free Charleston on Mondays.  However,  yesterday was my Tenth Wedding Annivesary, and our plans were so fluid that, as I write this, I have no freaking idea where we’ll be. We will be together, and that’s what counts, but when I realized that I wouldn’t be able to do the show at my usual time and also that we might be heading to where ever we’re heading as early as Friday afternoon, well, I sorta had to pull a show out of my ass.

And that’s exactly what I did!

However, my ass’s loss is your gain, as we kick off with a one-hour mixtape of true RFC gems, including two songs that have not yet been on the show. After that we go way back to the third episode of Radio Free Charleston Volume THREE. This one dates back to Voices of Appalachia internet radio damned nearly ten years ago. I’d only been married less than three months when I recorded this.

The second hour of this week’s show is pretty much a normal, all-local RFC, while the third hour is made up entirely of recordings made at The World Famous Empty Glass Cafe.

Which…was where Mel and I had our first kiss, way back in 1990.  Just to bring things back to a full circle.

There are no links in the playlist this week. A guy’s got to find time to sleep, you know. As it is, I’m hurridly writing this Thursday night, then I need to get up in the morning and write Sunday and Monday’s PopCult posts.

Check out the playlist.

RFC V5 191

hour one
Three Bodies “Three Bodies”
Government Cheese “Search and Destroy”
Clownhole “Aqua”
The Settlement “Take It In Stride (live)”
Frenchy & The Punk “Like In A Dream”
Mediogres “In The Waste”
Emmalea Deal & The Hot Mess “Does She Have You”
Massing “Moving Out (Anthony’s Song)”
Novo Combo “Don’t Throw Your Love Away”
Qiet “Pet Driftwood”
69 Fingers “Animosity”
Brian Diller “Hey Mister Auctioneer”
Three Bodies “Broken Vase”

hour two
The Big Bad “Shine The Signal”
Time And Distance “Little Disaster”
The Science Fair Explosion “Cosmic Girls”
Joe Vallina “Suzy Said So”
Marcie Bullock “Maybe Just Crazy”
Granny’s 12-Gauge “Dear Devil”
The Boatmen “Another New Year’s Alone”
Ouralias “Daydream”
Scooter Scudieri “Ancient Rituals”
Mother Nang “Fade”
John Radcliff “It’s Not The End”
69 Fingers “Faster and Stronger”
Sarah Schlies “Child, My Child”
Sasha Collete “You Had Me”
Crack The Sky “We Want Mine”

hour three
Andy Park “Mothman”
The Bible Beaters “Praise Jesus”
The Living Deads “Right Behind You, Baby”
The Big Bad “Babe We Own This Town”
Scrap Iron Pickers “Spy vs. Spy”
Snakebox “Party on the Roof”
Andrew Hellblinki “Bodies”
Tyler Childers “Charleston Girl”
Crystal Bright and the Silver Hands “Little Name”
Mike Pushkin “Wrecking Ball”
Little Nomad “Take Me Down To The Riverside”
The Nanker Phelge “That’s What She Said”
Elephant in the Room “Ghost Town”
Ovada “Church of Paranoia”
The Company Stores “No Middle Name

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,  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 recent episodes of The Swing Shift, because I couldn’t record a new one of these on Monday, either.

 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’s art started out as a detailed line drawing, like I’ve been doing a bit lately, but I wasn’t really happy with it and set it aside. I’d been using straight-edges for cross-hatching and my hand control was slipping a bit, especially when I switched to a brush for the thicker lines, so I figured I’d go back to it later.

This is detail from the view from one of our hotel rooms from our July trip to Chicago, by the way. I think it’s the Wrigley Building, with other tall buildings in the background, but I’m not certain. I don’t do boats, so we haven’t taken the architectural tour.

Anyway, when I went back to this piece, I decided to bust out a couple of grayscale markers I picked up (coincidentally enough) at Blick Art in Chicago almost two years ago. I was very pleased to discover how smoothly and flat they went on the paper for pens I was using. I even applied them over some of the cross-hatching, which usually looks like hell, but worked out okay here. So now you get to see it.

To see it bigger try clicking HERE.

Over in radioland, Monday at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you encores of a classic episode of Psychedelic Shack, and then at 3 PM a 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 more classic stand up comedy from Lenny Bruce on last week’s NEW episode of The Comedy Vault.

Tonight at 9 PM for the Monday Marathon We bring you ten hours of Live and Local because that show may just be going on hiatus for a while, at least until I can beef up the roster a bit.

Above you see the very first animated cartoon starring Popeye from 1933. This is technically a Betty Boop cartoon with Popeye as a guest, but Betty Boop is only onscreen for a short, but memorable, hula dance with the Sailor Man. This is a classic from the Max Fleischer Studio, directed by Dave Fleischer.

You might also notice that Olive Oyl’s voice is different than what we’re used to hearing. Most of the time both Olive and Betty were voiced by Mae Questal.  Here both of them are voiced by Bonnie Poe because Questal was out on maternity leave. You may also notice that Bluto seems a bit more rapey than in later appearances.

And yes, this is a recycled Sunday Evening Video from eleven years ago. I’m off on an anniversary trip and I figured this might be a good time to re-run this and to plug the folks restoring the classic Fleischer cartoons, whom you can find HERE, HERE and HERE.  The above cartoon is NOT restored by them…yet, but it sure will look great when they do get around to it.

This week we celebrate April Fool’s Day in August. Both months begin with the letter “A,” so it’s good enough for gubmint work.

From April, 2010, this was the Radio Free Charleston April Fool’s Day show for that year. This time I decided to do an entire show in the style of the “Fake Rudy” jokes that end almost every episode of Radio Free Charleston. The kindly old schoolteacher who was mouthing my words was the host of “Ding Dong School,” a kid’s program from the 1950s. Many thanks to The Emergency, Simply Sadi and especially Jeff Ellis, who were all very good sports and let me cut music videos using old cartoons with their music for the show. Big thanks also go out to Scott Elkins and Murfmeef for letting me use their short films for the show.

Over the end credits, that is indeed RFC’s resident diva, Melanie Larch, joining WATT4 for their version of the Police classic, “Message In A Bottle.”

This was the show that, I feel, most lived up to our promise of “mind-hurting weirdness.” You can read the Kayfabe production notes HERE.