Photographs by Douglas Imbrogno. Click to enlarge.

One side of the Matz Hotel, standing since 1911 in Bluefield, W.Va., simply collapsed just before 9 a.m. on Friday, Feb. 27. I happened to be in town, working on a Web audio slideshow for the Charleston Gazette on Gary Bowling’s House of Art on Bland Street.  As that slideshow notes, Bluefield’s economic blues are pretty bad, especially when you have buildings swooning onto public streets. So the House of Art is doubly worth noting. Open for a year now, it is a crazily artistic oasis that will test the Create West Virginia hope that such creative, artistic enterprises can be a seed to revitalize down-on-their-luck (and literally down-on-their-sidewalk) cities like Bluefield. I had some emotional investment in the scene depicted above as those bricks would have clobbered my car had I gotten to town just a few hours earlier. That was the way to the House of Art.

I’m at work this week on an article and Web slideshow on Gary Bowling’s House of Art in Bluefield, W.Va., one of the trippiest art havens in all of West Virginia. The shot above is actually from a third floor workshop and not a public viewing space. Yet everywhere you turn, public or private, something artistic, odd, wonderful or eye-catching catches your attention. And since Bowling and crew spend most of their waking hours there, tinkering, altering and updating, the place never looks the same way twice if you go back a couple weeks later. A highly recommended art odyssey if you are ever within striking distance of Bluefield.

A “Third Place” refers to a gathering place in the community that is separate from our two usual social environments of the home and workplace. The Squire Tobacco Unlimited Shop in downtown Charleston, W.Va., is just such a place and I profiled the vibe there in a recent Charleston Gazette audio slideshow.

The gregarious man who runs it, Charlie Morgan, used to be a Union Carbide engineer, then traveled to places like Saudi Arabia  to create data centers. Illness led to retirement and a return home to Charleston. He got turned on to cigars in the late ’90s. Now, he’s something of a smokey guru to cigar and pipe smokers in the area. His shop stocks more than 600 boxes of cigars, all hand-made and hand-rolled, plus pipes, tobaccos and lighters galore.

It’s a cozy place with stuffed sofas, a communal vibe and clouds of aromatic smoke hanging in the air. (Though if your sensibilities are easily bruised by Vargas-girl photography and politically incorrect portraiture — for us pinko-liberal types, that is — you may not wish to linger over the wall of photos in the back. “That’s my Wall of Shame,” says Charlie, who lets another fellow hang the photos. “I don’t go back there.”) (more…)

The view from Interstate 64, looking to the hills in the southwest, one Monday evening in Kanawha County.

Some people dis the shape. But West Virginia is sorely lacking in distinctive architecture and Tamarack is one of  the few belles of the ball anywhere in the Mountain State, design-wise. Commentary and division continues on the op-ed pages surrounding Gov. Joe Manchin’s decision to move the arts and crafts showcase to the state Commerce Department and possibly to farm it out to a private company.

Anything that would diminish the center’s survivability would be a bonehead move. Yes, it has needed subsidies to survive, but there’s absolutely no other place like it in West Virginia. I am certainly biased as I’ve sold a music CD of my own from its racks and have performed on the center’s small, but very nice stage and will again later this year.

But Tamarack’s wide reach and range in showcasing West Virginia’s arts and culture has spurred a flowering of creativity in this state that has often made the difference in artists being able to survive here.  If the Create West Virginia folks are correct -  that the arts pave the way to economic vitality in a digital age in which people can work anywhere and hence a place’s quality of life is all-important - then Tamarack is part of the state’s current and future well-being. Plus, no building looks cooler in the golden light of a winter West Virginia sunset.

Nothing could be finer than to be in Carolina… Oh, wait, I mean West Virginia with the sun aflame over the snowy fields of Mercer County in the January dusk.

In the podcast, article and slideshow links below, Budget Tapes and Records’ John Nelson dishes on some of Charleston greatest/most notorious rock concerts.
VIEW “MY WEST VIRGINIA, No. 5: “Still Havin’ Fun” audio slideshow on John Nelson, manager and music buyer at Budget Tapes and Records: (4 min).

……………………..
LISTEN TO MP3 interview featuring “My Rock Concert History of Charleston” by John Nelson (10 minutes). Listen or download mp3 (right click this text and choose ‘Save Link As’ )

…………………….
READ COMPANION ARTICLE on Nelson in the Dec. 21, 2008 Sunday Gazette-Mail (reprinted in the gazz section)

– By Douglas Imbrogno

Empty, gaunt buildings are always a fascination. The many ghosts of a building’s past lives flutter about in the wind-whipped spaces. This old Carbide building in South Charleston has been stripped to the bricks before its upcoming demolition later this month.  Meanwhile, a visitor can get several angles on the building’s last stand in its final days.

A line of lights that line the main road through Snowshoe Resort recede into a far longer line of the West Virginia hills in Pocahontas County. The view from atop Snowshoe Mountain is surely one of the grandest vistas in the state.

The puzzle pieces of the new interstate 64 bridge near Dunbar have not yet been locked together yet. The result, seen at night from below, looks like some deep-sea monster about to gobble the gibbous moon for a snack. And if you think you have a tough job with lots of responsibility, imagine the project manager and crew responsible for: 1) making sure these monstrous pieces of concrete fit together seamlessly once they reach each other; and 2) stand up for decades carrying you and yours — and tens of thousands of other cars and trucks –  across the cold waters of the Kanawha River far below.