The shattered ruins of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building Mark Hancock Seventeen years ago, a truck bomb ripped through the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. Six years later, the federal government executed Timothy McVeigh for the crime that killed 168 people and injured more than 500 others. But the federal […]
Phil Bacharach
Posted inMusic
Turnpike Troubadours — Goodbye Normal Street
The 11 tracks traverse complex and emotionally rich terrain — Robert Earl Keen would approve — and so vividly that you can almost smell, as the first song coins it, “cheap perfume and gin and smoke and lies.” A definite honky-tonk sensibility is at work here, from Kyle Nix’s raggedly effective fiddle work to Evan […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Sooner seen
Oklahoma’s long and abiding love affair with the movies dates back nearly to the dawn of cinema itself. Will Rogers was the biggest movie star of his day, and fellow Oklahomans like Tom Mix and Gene Autry weren’t far behind. Cimarron, which depicted the 1889 Land Run, was one of the earliest Oscar winners for […]
Posted inNews
Reflections of Shadid
Oklahoma City National Memorial The family of two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent Anthony Shadid will accept the 2012 Reflections of Hope Award at a Thursday luncheon, an honor bestowed annually by the Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum. Shadid, an Oklahoma City native who died of an asthma attack in February while on assignment in […]
Posted inNews
Junk it
• East Oak Landfill, 3201 Mosley; • Oklahoma City Landfill, 7001 S. Bryant; • Oklahoma Landfill, 7600 S.W. 15th; and• Northeast Landfill, 2601 N. Midwest Blvd., Spencer (construction and demolition materials only). Residents can drop off one load in a car or truck, up to a 1-ton and one trailer. No commercial waste haulers are […]
Posted inMusic
Anger management
Mike Ness has been guilty of many things — more than he’d like to remember, or even can remember — but holding back on his emotions isn’t one of them. As the singer, guitarist and all-around force behind the three-decades-strong punk band Social Distortion, the man has summoned plenty of personal demons in hard-charging, college-radio […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Crime time
The gun was on the couch, smoke still wafting from its muzzle. Stretched out on the marble floor: a poor sap, now just fodder for the city morgue. The woman stood beside him, her face as cold and impenetrable as a cheap waxwork. “It wasn’t me,” she purred. “I swear.” I lit a cigarette, took […]
Posted inNews
Bully pulpit
Ty Field-Smalley On the morning of May 13, 2010, he and a friend were hanging out on gym bleachers before school when they were approached by a boy who’d been harassing Ty. A fight ensued. Eleven-year-old Ty went home, suspended. Later that morning, his parents said, the sixth-grader pointed a .22-caliber gun to his head […]
Posted inNews
Wills’ way
With the help of a $200,000 donation from the Grammy Foundation, the Oklahoma Historical Society is preserving an estimated 600 hours of Western swing that the famed musician recorded in the 1940s. The project evolved after the Wills family donated his entire archives to the OHS after being housed in Turkey, Texas, for more than […]
Posted inNews
Off the air
That storied career abruptly ended today when Clear Channel Communications let the veteran newsman go, in what appears to be continued downsizing. Bohnen is an inductee into the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame. His honors have included the Investigative Reporter and Editors Award and The Edward R. Murrow Award. His dismissal first was reported on […]