FestivALL Charleston has loaded up downtown venues with art where you don’t normally find it, as in this window beside the entrance to TSG Consulting at 118 Capitol St. Photo by Douglas Imbrogno. Click to enlarge

West Virginia State University student Ashley White’s digitally enhanced oil painting is one of the many original artworks passerby encounter in storefronts and window displays as part of the citywide FestivALL Charleston. White’s work can also be seen hanging out in alleys, as part of FestivALL’s “Drive Thru Art Show.” To be specific, in the alley between Capital and Hale streets on Thursday through Sunday, June 26-29.

Photos by Douglas Imbrogno. Click to enlarge.

By Douglas Imbrogno

You can read reviewer Bob Schwarz’ take on the Saturday, June 21 performance of “Charleston: The Opera,” by Squonk Opera of Pittsburgh right here. He kinda liked this one-day-only production on the stage of the Cultural Center at the state Capitol Complex. So, did I but with some caveats. This was a production that was often visually spectacular, but was greater in its boffo parts than in the sum of them.

First, under the International Conventions on Rightful Newspaper Reviewing, this can’t be a proper review since I arrived at about 15 minutes before the intermission (I plead last-minute preparations for an exit stage right this Thursday for the land of my forefathers, Italy). Yet judging from what I saw from that point out, I can’t see how the minutes I missed would have changed anything.

As someone who has staged amateur multimedia theater before (and may again, gawd help me) , I could only salivate and yearn to utilize the sophisticated tech wizardy and production values of this show and its musically well-armed and multi-talented crew. The star of the show happened to be a non-human– six banks of Venetian blind video screens. This allowed for dazzling effects. The screens depicted rapid-fire Charleston scenes, crayon-drawings of personal maps of the city by Piedmont Elementary students, trippy washes of color and offbeat imagery like an anatomical cutaway of sinus and esophagus passages (which, confusingly, appeared as young River City Youth Ballet dancers in black leotards marched around with colored flags.) (more…)

Photographs by Douglas Imbrogno. Click to enlarge

I commute to Charleston from Cabell County, heading east up Interstate 64, and this is the second year in a row I have found myself shadowing the serpentine procession of hundreds of motorycles in the Run for the Wall. This time, I was armed with camera at the ready (Kids! Don’t try this in your car!). The event takes place May 14 to 25 nationwide as cyclists head to the Veterans’ Memorial in Washington, D.C., in ordered droves. Onlookers waved miniature flags in knots alongside the road as the cyclists raised the leathered arms in greeting. From the Mission Statement page at rftw.org:

“(The goal of Run for the Wall is…) To promote healing among ALL veterans and their families and friends, to call for an accounting of all Prisoners of War and those Missing in Action (POW/MIA), to honor the memory of those Killed in Action (KIA) from all wars, and to support our military personnel all over the world.

Photo by Douglas Imbrogno. Click to enlarge.

West Virginia sends more than its fair share of young male and female warriors into the fray. We certainly need someone else other than the current guys in that big white house to choose which fray to get us into — and out of. But good gracious, West Virginia, a blowout for a senator who voted for the current war that’s chewing up and spitting out young people’s lives and the country’s treasure by the second? Like the last two presidential elections in West Virginia, let’s not get this one wrong, too, come Nov. 2.

One thing, he learned from the evening, remarked Ron Sowell, once he finally got to don a guitar on Saturday, was this: “I’m never going to trust my friends again.” | Photos by Douglas Imbrogno

It was quite the surprise. For the past couple months, Ron Sowell, one of Charleston’s most prominent musicians, expected to be the headline act this past Saturday at the Clay Center’s Walker Theater, to close out the year-long Woody Hawley singer-songwriter series. Sowell, who founded the series, normally hosts it. But the Mountain Stage band leader was to be featured for his own accomplished musicianship and body of songs. He’d rehearsed for weeks with musical mates. He was pleased to see how well the tickets sold — more than 100! — one of the highest advance ticket sales ever for the series.

Little did he know that the whole evening had been hijacked. Patricia Ansley, who works with Sowell on the Hawley Series, secretly planned for more than six months an alternate event: ‘Ron Fest.’ The evening was to be instead a musical roast and homage to Sowell’s decades of performing, his benefit work, his musical mentoring and inspiration to a host of singer-songwriters and young folk in Charleston and around the state. Family and friends came from as far afield as his homelands of rural Texas and — yes, it’s true — land of aliens, Roswell, New Mexico.

Mira Stanley, Sowell’s daughter, and Jon Wikstrom, one of his writing partners, share a tune at ‘Ron Fest’ at the Walker Theater.

Sowell was honored, toasted and roasted in several ways. A few among many:

• Bob Noone, the singing satirical attorney with a band called the Well Hung Jury, stepped onto the stage in a striped zoot suit. He gave ample evidence to the jury that — in the words of Sowell’s infamous tune he proceeded to sing — “White Boys Just Can’t Dance.”

(more…)

Click to enlarge. Photos by Douglas Imbrogno

I don’t know what kind of spiritual padre Father Sadie is at the Sacred Heart Co-Cathedral, being a retired Roman Catholic. But he’s one heckuva real estate developer of spiritual property zones. First, props to the flower-filled, double fountain space (click thumbnail photo at right) on the church’s side plaza at the corner of Virginia and Leon Sullivan Way. This is one of Charleston’s most lovely public grottoes (when the gates are unlocked, which they often are). It’s especially peaceful with the white noise of the very cool fountains going and the smell of fresh flowers wafting in the air. (more…)

Photo by Douglas Imbrogno. Click to enlarge

What’s your favorite old building in Charleston that should not, at all costs, be demolished or allowed to fade away until its too costly to save? Here’s mine. What are the plans for this Art Deco landmark once — if? — the new library plans come to fruition in this section of downtown Charleston? How about the Quarrier Diner Coffeeshop?

Photo by Douglas Imbrogno. Click to enlarge

For those online readers who live in temperate climes where you only get a hint of Spring or none at all, Charleston’s Spring is just about one second away past its peak, meaning it’s still pretty fine as this view down Virginia Street toward the Catholic Co-Cathedral illustrates. Click here to view Gazette photographer Lawrence Pierce’s slideshow homage to West Virginia Springtime.

Photo by Douglas Imbrogno. Click to enlarge

It’s not often you get to showcase the above phrase in a socially responsible way. Living in a household with two teenagers, I usually hear the phrase in its socially un-responsible incarnation, usually when one of them seeks control of the computer keyboard from the other. Someone has tacked these flyers up in a corner window of the building on Quarrier Street across the alley from Gallery 11.

Click photos to enlarge.

Those of us who patronize the place have had many a fine evening’s entertainment at the Clay Center. Yet the place has had its problem finding its stride in the years it has been open. A chief conceptual design flaw was the decision, at least initially, to not place any available parking or gathering spaces in the expanse of lawn, asphalt and sidewalk that fronts the citadel of culture. (You have to wonder whether this was partly so the moneyed classes would have an easier drop-off point at the front door through which to swish and rattle their jewelry. Yes, school buses, do, as well, but still…) (more…)