WestVirginiaVille

West Virginia metal sculptor, raconteur, environmentalist and unaccountably still curly-haired Official Citizen of WestVirginiaVille Mark Blumenstein, sends along this view from the top of Blumenstein Mountain.

If you’re wondering where the roving WestVirginiaVille home office on any given today might be, you might check out the new nameless coffeeshop at the corner of Lee and Morris streets which opened recently in Charleston, W.Va.

The point is to get to the point where you no longer feel the need to ask: ‘What’s the point?’ Yet the older I get, the more I think this misses the point.

Crossing west to east across the swooping West Virginia hills, a watery pilgrimage I always make is to stroll to the midst of the arching bridge at Seneca Rocks.

A few photos from around the world and some words from a connoisseur of Blue Rooms. The first I noticed were rooms turned blue where people went to hide in the sure glow of the TV talking.

Al Peery serves up two striking photographs of the capital city of West Virginia, one by day and one by night.

Being inside the historic Keith-Albee Theater in downtown Huntington is sometimes like being on drugs without the drugs. Photos of the interior on the way to seeing the unreleneting ‘Biutiful.’

In one neat panoramic glance, see the nearly 400 people who were up on the South Side Bridge in Charleston, W.Va., for the March 8 International Women’s Day event on bridges worldwide.

See how West Virginia rated in a map of ‘The United States of Shame.’ At least we’re not the porn capital of America like Utah. Plus, a low-rent fire alarm and Nellie the Wonder Horse.

A second musical slideshow of richly detailed portraits of long-gone West Virginians by Finley Taylor, shot between 1917 and 1949, and by the staff of the Richmond News Leader from the 1940s to 1960s.

It’s not often – maybe never – that more than a dozen bowling balls are re-purposed as yard art. It just doesn’t get any better than this on the backroads of WestVirginiaVille.

If a picture says a thousand words, then this musical slideshow of historic photos of mountain living in West Virginia speaks tens of thousands of them.

Today’s photo: Mark Blumenstein took this snowy moon shoot atop the mountain in southern West Virginia that he calls home.

Scenes of Urban Appalachia by Walker DeVille and contributors: What will the air be full of tonight?

WestVirginiaVille is already an odd enough place, thank you. But we welcome any visitations from the Odd Beyond. Like, say, the Mr. Peanut truck.