This Land

After he slew his enemy— a warrior in another tribe who killed his brother and was, according to ritual, justly punished—the Jivaro Indian re- moved his victim’s head and then retreated into the seclusion of his hut to do his work.

After boiling the head so that its skin was…

Though alternative journalism traces its roots to the muckrakers of the early 1900s, the alternative newsweekly as we know it got its start in 1955, when Ed Fancher, Dan Wolf, and Norman Mailer printed their first Greenwich Village-focused news tabloid from a two-bedroom apartment in New York City.

The Village…

I’d heard murmurs of Uptown News for years. I wasn’t familiar with the publication, but folks would ask me about it, almost identically phrasing their questions: “Do you remember Uptown News? That was a great paper.” Or, “Do you remember Uptown News? I wish that paper were still around.”

I…

Joe Brainard made art the way some might obsess over a lover: in an all-consuming frenzy and for hours on end—sometimes all night. He once wrote of his amphetamine-fueled process in the summer of 1970 to his friend and fellow Tulsan, Ron Padgett.

“After oil painting all morning (I got…

One of Oklahoma’s great mysteries, either unknown to or ignored by most of its populace, is what became of a collection of nine murals created for Patti Adams Shriner’s Riverside Music Studio in Tulsa.

The designer of those murals, Olinka Hrdy, is another mystery altogether.

Famed architect Bruce Goff designed…

When he was 22—old enough to know better— Anton Von Ostendorf ran away with the circus.

A gymnast, ballet dancer, and platform diver in his youth, Von Ostendorf was a stuntman at Universal Studios in Florida when he discovered the flying trapeze. It was like a key turning in a…