The PopCulteer
September 10, 2010

The Doctor Is IN!

If you saw our Sunday Evening Video last weekend, you saw the debut of Doctor Curmudgeon, the latest musical experiment to escape from the laboratory of the mad maestro, Chuck Biel.  This progressive metal trio, which also includes Vince Biel and Zack Shawkins,  pours forth some of the most exciting music my ears have heard–and my ears have heard a lot of fantastic music.

The official debut of Doctor Curmudgeon will be October 31 at The Empty Glass, sharing the bill with The Scrap Iron Pickers and John Lancaster. If you didn’t get enough of The Doctor last Sunday, after the jump you will find a SECOND “bootleg” video from last Friday’s preview show.

I could write volumes about how great this band is, but my words pale next to the music. Check out their website, and watch the video below the jump in today’s Popculteer.

Vince Biel on drums, Zack Shawkins on bass, Chuck Biel on guitar

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A Little History Before Our Main Course

“The Higher United Nations Defense Enforcement Reserves”

This is the story of a comic book that I was almost involved with back in the 1980s. It’s a cool story, but first, you need some history.

Back in the mid-1960s, a small start-up comic book company, Tower Comics, launched a line of comic books that allowed some veteran creators the chance to work with more creative freedom than they’d been previously allowed. The most memorable titles to come out of this experiment were the ones featuring the superhero/secret agent hybrid, “The T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents,” a team of special agents working as a special unit of The United Nations. Most of the agents got their powers from the inventions of Dr. Emil Jennings, whom they are trying to rescue in their first adventure.

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This week’s artistic jump-start is a digitally-assaulted photograph that has been so manipulated that you probably couldn’t tell what it was to begin with.  The end result is an exercise in symmetry, atmosphere and color composition.  Click it to see a bigger version.

I was lucky enough to get to attend an exclusive musical debut last Friday.  Chuck Biel’s new band, Doctor Curmudgeon, featuring Vince Biel, Zack Shawkins and Chuck Bielski, invited a small group of Charleston’s enlightened musical afficianados to listen in on their latest musical experiement.You can see some of this concentrated musical energy in the video clip at the top of this post.

It was a stunning debut.  Doctor Curmudgeon unleashed a progressive metal onslaught complete with complex baselines, insane time signatures and guitar solos that could probably be classified as controlled substances.

Even though the room was kept dark to preserve the cutting edge atmosphere, I whipped out the handy Zi8 and recorded most of the show.  From that, comes the above clip, for the tune,  “My Demon Math Metal Tune Just Ate Your Artsy-Folksy Americana Song…Sorry” The video is very dark. You can’t really see the pole-mounted power drill that Chuck uses on his guitar during the solos.

The music was so fantastic that I just had to share it ASAP.  In the future, we will have the band on Radio Free Charleston in all their fully-lit glory.  In next friday’s PopCulteer I’ll have a more detailed review of last Friday’s show, with more video.  In the meantime, check their website for more samples of this awesome music1

The PopCulteer
September 3, 2010

Charleston’s Coin Job

This week’s PopCulteer is a rant. It’s not a calm opinion piece, or a well-researched hard news story. This is, hopefully, a semi-articulate hissy fit.

Parking in downtown Charleston sucks. There is no better way to say it.

There aren’t enough handy places to park. The parking meters are stingy with their time. The Meter Maids are overly agressive. It’s almost like the city doesn’t want to be bothered with us puny humans.

There is so much cool stuff downtown, but it’s becoming more and more of a hassle to get to it. I don’t know how Charleston expects to attract new businesses when established businesses are seeing their customers driven away by a lack of decent parking. (more…)

We kick off this week with a digital painting that revisits FestivAll, from last June.  Specifically, this is a shot of the crowd dancing to The VooDoo Katz at the Live On The Levee show where we recorded the band for Radio Free Charleston.I decided to go a little Fauvist on the image.

You can see the band’s performance on RFC 104, and keep reading PopCult for news of their next live shows.  Click the image to see it larger.

An entire generation has grown up with the internet as a major presence in their lives. That means that the time is ripe for INTERNET NOSTALGIA! Below you will find a series of video clips of such classic internet fads as The Numa Numa Guy, Salad Fingers, The Hampster Dance, Banana Phone, Diet Coke and Mentos, Xiao Xiao, Domo, The Star Wars Kid, Dramatic Chipmunk and kicking it off, The Creepy Dancing Baby animation….

The PopCulteer
August 27, 2010

Horn Self-tootery

Five years ago, the very first post went up in PopCult. The first couple of
weeks were just test messages, little goofy posts, but in early September, The Gazz Online officially announced PopCult, and we’ve been here ever since. I think we may be the longest-running blog here at The Charleston Gazette.

There have been a lot of cool things that have happened to this blog over the last five years, and today we’re going to get all introspective and look back, and update, some of the mre notorious stories from the last half-decade. We’ll look at some controversies, some triumphs, some weirdness, and the occasional trainwreck.

The last five years have seen some cool regular features pop up here in PopCult, like the return of Radio Free Charleston, Sunday Evening Videos, Monday Morning Art and The PopCulteer.

After the jump, you’ll get to see the highlights of this still-unterminated experimental foray into the internets courtesy of The Charleston Gazette and your PopCulteer, Rudy Panucci. (more…)

At the head of this post you see the latest episode of Radio Free Charleston.  This is our third “show without words,” where we showcase instrumental music and films and animation without dialogue.

Our music this time comes from David Synn and D.T. Stephenson, who coincidentally teamed up to form the band after they agreed to became part of this show.  You can look for thier new join project, Frequency Down, playing at local venues soon, and on RFC in the future.  We also have RFC faves, Blue Million, ripping through an instrumental blues jam during a sound check at Bruno’s last May.

Our animation comes courtesy of Frank Panucci and we also feature the oldest surviving Plant Ro Duction Mini Movie. We also get a quick, photographic tour of LiveMix Studio, our longtime production partner.

Host segments are presented in the style of a comic book.  This way I was able to not speak on this episode.  This little experiment in graphics worked pretty well, except for one intro where the lettering might have been too small. We’ll correct that below.

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Today’s bit of artwork is a digitally-assaulted photograph of my RFC 100 co-host, and imaginary daughter, Chelsea Cook.  If you’ve been reading regularly, you may remember that I’ve posted some of my artistic takes on Chelsea before here in PopCult. We’re currently at work on a special project for the RFC Halloween show.

This piece is based on a photo swiped from Chelsea’s Facebook page, and it was basically just me messing around with an image and some filters while I was waiting on a phone call.  It’s a digital doodle, I guess.  The final product came out looking cool enough for me to use here.  Click it to see a larger version.