PopCult Rudy Panucci on Pop Culture

Monday Morning Arts

This week in PopCult we’re revisiting a couple of my favorite digitally-assaulted photographs of Charleston from the past couple of years.  The big one above is a shot, looking up, at the Huntington Bank building taken from Hale Street.  I enhanced the color and played with the brightness and contrast bringing out details that weren’t immediately apparent in the original photo. This shot first shared the Monday Morning Art spot back in June 2006.

At the right you see my take on the State Capitol building, with a purple sky and loads of contrast-pushing.  I really like the way this one looks.  I first used it as Monday Morning Art back in November 2006.  I thought I’d give the clamoring masses yet another chance to buy this design on a T Shirt.

Both of these images are available in the Monday Morning Art Store, which is split between them this week.  Also, these images are going up without the PopCult logo this time, just to see if that makes any difference in the non-existent sales. 

As always, you can click the images to see a larger version.  And you can also buy this image in the newly revamped Monday Morning Art Store.  You still have a chance to be one of the first ten customers of the store!  This week the store is offering two different images, so there’s twice as much stuff for you not to order.  You can also follow these links to see my efforts in the PopCult store and the Radio Free Charleston store.

As a new adjunct to our weekly dose of Monday Morning Art, I’m going to start doing a weekend wrap up, following the jump.  This way we can look back at the cool things that I wrote about last weekend without clogging up the blog with loads of extra posts.

Friday night RFC Big Shot Melanie Larch and I headed out to The Historic La Belle Theater and took in a very enjoyable rock show by The Concept and Suburban Graffiti.  A sizable crowd, possibly getting clued in to the fact that The La Belle is a really cool venue, was treated to Charleston’s most entertaining punk trio, The Concept, who were near the top of their game delivering one crowd-pleaser after another.  Suburban Graffiti headlined, and although this is just the second time I’ve seen them, I remain incredibly impressed.  These guys are creating an intelligent brand of power pop with clever lyrics and tight arrangements.  This is one of the bright up-and-coming bands on the local scene, and I’m moving Heaven and Earth to get them on Radio Free Charleston as soon as possible.

Saturday night I was flying solo as I split my time between Taylor Books and Capitol Roasters.  First, at Taylor’s, I took in (and videotaped) the first hour of the show by The Clementines, Douglas Imbrogno and Casi Null, with special guest Bob Webb.   You’re going to be seeing the results of that taping on episode 37 of RFC in just a few weeks, so I’m not going to ruin the surprise by raving about them here.

After packing up my cameras, I trekked through Brawley Walkway to Capitol Roasters where I relaxed and listened to a set by Sean Richardson and Karen Allen before Whistlepunk (minus ailing bass player Dan Jordan-get well soon, Diggo!) took the stage.  If you read PopCult or watch RFC, you know how great Whistlepunk is, even when they’re not at full strength.  It was a fun night, and it was great to hang out a little bit with RFC guests Captain Crash and the Beauty Queen From Mars and Joe Slack, who will be at Roasters this Friday.  I also got to see Jas and Jason from The Synergy Collective, who took in the show. 

Sunday there was some sort of football thing going on.  Pittsburgh wasn’t involved, so Mel and I went shopping, where we made the unpleasant discovery that the Tuesday Morning store in Putnam Village has evaporated.  It’s not even listed on their website anymore. Bummer.  On the plus side, if you want to catch all the Super Bowl commercials without sitting through all that boring game stuff, visit the Super Bowl Commercial MySpace Page!

And that brings us to Monday Morning.  Enjoy the arts.