the magazine of central oklahoma
SEPTEMBER 2012 VOLUME THREE ISSUE NINE
Fall Fashion 78
ARTISTIC IMPRESSIONS OF OUR HERITAGE 62 M.J. ALEXANDER HITS THE ROAD 70
WELCOME TO THE WEST
Bob Funk on Success, Sentiment and Wide-Open Spaces
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77
COUNTIES It is not so much the big things that stick. In years of covering thousands of miles and hundreds of Oklahomans, it is the little details I revisit again and again. By M.J. Alexander
Kiowa County
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Ellis County
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Pottawatomie County
Grady County
Things like the creaking and whirring of dozens of old-fashioned windmills, standing guard over Shattuck as night settles in. A nearly imperceptible nod from a dusty teen cowboy on a tired horse at the International Finals Youth Rodeo in Shawnee. The whiff of a smokehouse. The smell of smudge pot sage. The curve of the horizon as you head past Yukon and west on I-40. Balko’s proud line of weathered wooden buffalo, lashed to the school’s chain link fence with dates and details of hard-fought state championships. The long, knotted rope swing dancing over the Blue River, off Camping Area 5. The abandoned farmhouse past Lone Wolf, stripped by the elements down to silver-gray planks. Its tenacious shingles ruffle and ripple in the wind, each anchored to the decaying roof by a single rusty nail, pumping up and down like keys of a ghostly pipe organ. The shed’s remaining ribs inhale and exhale with each gust, breathing in and out, a great wooden fish beached on the plains of Kiowa County.
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Pontotoc County
Ottowa County
The tight clasp from the skeletal hand of an 108-year-old, and the lock of her gaze when words fail. Choruses of katydids. Cattle auctioneers’ cadences. Hymns sung in Musogee/Creek at the gathering in Okmulgee. The roar of trucks in the mud bog at Santa Fe Trail Daze in the Panhandle. The rosary recited in Vietnamese at Our Lady’s Cathedral in Oklahoma City. The Zombie Nation chant leading up to tipoff at Thunder home games. Together, they sing a song of Oklahoma. Not the great Broadwaybuilt anthem that is belted out on cue, but a nuanced, sometimes discordant, ever-changing riff.
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Caddo County
Harper County
Jackson County
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This new series of images and essays explores the people and places of Oklahoma that have stuck with me: the moving, the unexpected, the improvised, the ramshackle, the hopeful, the authentic. The name is simple: 77 Counties.
Oklahoma County
Cimarron County
McIntosh County
ABOUT M.J. ALEXANDER
M.J. Alexander brought two decades of
ing the vision of an artist with the skills of
work as a photographer, reporter and editor
a storyteller.�
with newspapers, magazines and The As-
Her words and images have been hon-
sociated Press when she moved to Oklaho-
ored by the Society of Professional Journal-
ma in 1998. She now documents the people
ists, featured on national magazine covers,
and places of the American West, with an
and published here and abroad. She is au-
emphasis on her new home state.
thor and illustrator of two books: Salt of the
Red Earth, a collection of portraits of and
Her portrayals of Oklahoma and Okla-
homans have inspired more than a dozen solo shows, in pri-
interviews with 100 Oklahoma centenarians, and PORTRAIT
vate galleries and venues including Brush Creek Foundation
OF A GENERATION: Children of Oklahoma - Sons and Daugh-
for the Arts in Wyoming, the Oklahoma City Museum of Art,
ters of the Red Earth, gold medal winner for Best Regional Non-
the Tulsa Historical Society, Oklahoma Heritage Association
Fiction at the Independent Publisher Book Awards and winner
and the Oklahoma State Capitol. She was the first Oklahoman
of a 2011 Oklahoma Book Award.
featured in a solo show in the Main Gallery of the Internation-
al Photography Hall of Fame, which described her as “combin-
Counties series, contact 77counties@gmail.com.
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To suggest a person or place for consideration in her new 77